https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Difficult
https://adilegian.com/PDF/FranzenEssay.pdf
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Vgh, Gaddis, Cervantes and Melville are heckin' HARD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Difficult
https://adilegian.com/PDF/FranzenEssay.pdf
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It's easy to dunk on the exemplar of middlebrow fiction in defence of experimental high brow literature, but then I admire the bravery of someone willing to write an article admitting that a book was just intellectually beyond them. This willingness to admit that experimentation may come at the forfeit of enjoyment is too often forgotten by the tribe of pomo dickriders who think that the less they understand something the better.
I understand not getting the po-mo doorstoppers, they're usually made for a very specific audience, but not finishing Moby Dick is kinda weird.
It's just happens too often now that people are too polarized on the idea of challenging entertainment whether it is movies, videogames, books or even sports.
Moby Dick is filled with what is ultimately trivia and adds no real information about the characters, it is essentially world building and many have issues with that. I would expect that this is Franzen's issue with it, he is very much of the make every word and every sentence tell us something about the characters school of writing, exploit subtext either to reinforce what you are saying or to reveal truth. This would also make The Recognitions a difficult book for him.
>Reading for “Character Development”
>Reading for plot
You clearly read my post for plot, completely missed the point.
He couldn't finish it he was too busy apologizing to Oprah so she would let him on her show when he had another milquetoast novel to push.
What did he say against her show?
She nominated The Corrections for her book club and Franzen was made suddenly aware that his writing only appealed to middle-aged middle-class women who sought veneration for their fairly plain milquetoast existences and not the young white socially edgy men who would rather read David Foster Wallace. He expressed as much and caught flak for it.
I don’t know what he expected. He writes family dramas and not even the saga type or the epic type but the contemporary realist type. What a homosexual.
I don't think you have read Franzen, the banal middle class middle aged suburban existence is his stock in trade, he gave up being edgy before The Corrections. His press release regarding why he backed out is obviously PR and not the real reason, probably has more to do with the effect it would have on his career which is exactly what happened with Freedom, he will forever be measured against its Oprah inflated sales.
He was young and still rebelled against the fact he was an oprah-watching-mom level writer; got older, realized he cared more about the money than his dignity. can you blame him?
There’s a certain subsection of people who will never admit a book is difficult
Hijacking this thread: what is the most difficult book you’ve read? Preferably fiction
finnegans wake but I didn't really try hard just read some pages
I gave up on Finnegans Wake after 30 pages, so I'll vote for that.
McElroy is also more difficult than I thought he would be, I'm about halfway through Women and Men and sometimes I lose track of what's going. He's not a flowery writer, he's just dense.
See I have a somewhat different opinion of Woman and Men. I’ll agree that the writing is impossibly dense, but the important events of the novel (i.e., the Navajo mythology, Jim’s childhood) are repeated so many times it’s easy to get a sense of what’s going on. At a certain point, once I’d adjusted to his voice, the reading almost became meditative. Works like Gravity’s Raijbow are much harder in my opinion.
beckett's novels filter me
>The Recognitions
>The Corrections
I hate these type of titles. They insist upon themselves.