While I have great respect for him and remember enjoying 100 when I read it 20 years ago, my stumbling block with GGM is I'm never sure what the stories are "really" about, and it seems a close connection to the culture is required. My own fault, I know.

i know what you mean. american culture tends to be pretty insular, as are most of the dominant cultures in the world-- self-contained, self-producing and self-consuming. that's not your fault though.

the thing about being from latin america is that you know you're not the center of the world (the center of the world is in fact building a wall to keep you out), and you know that you nature is a mongrel nature (or maybe you try to ignore it but you can't escape it), and therefore you tend to embrace everything that comes handy-- from chinese poetry to german philosophy to santería to japanese anime to american fast food (but better seasoned, lol).

i think most colonized cultures tend to be this way-- always ready to steal and copy and mix new things. maybe this is why hiphop (i'm not a hiphop expert) is better at melding sounds than 100 years of dull cuntry music.

--

this is also why poe blew away the french btw

Like Andrei Platonov, or somebody of that sort.

thanks for making me google!



(that photo reminded me of this one)

tell us more? (something we can't find on wikipedia)

okay, i got the comparison

garcia marquez is like the latin american mark twain-- or walt whitman

you know how you go through the literary history of the united states and you say "yeah whatever" (save poe, who was from another planet) and suddenly there appears mark twain and it really is something that couldn't come from any other place and you say--this-- this is american literature?

like that.

but maybe it was melville who did it before him. i just haven't read him ha ha ha ha.

i should! uff. i should.

but no, see, twain.

Melville wrote about the BIG topics of life. Twain wrote about the experience of life. Two different masters.

Melville (Moby Dick) is my favorite novel, because it explores every aspect of life not explored in the other novels of the era (I hate those comedy of manners bullshit novels).

Twain was more like a distilled America, a funny one willing to look at itself critically and seeing the ugliness and beauty in the every day. Twain was a profoundly ANGRY man whose work covers that up with humor and ridicule. He ruled. He told royalty to go fuck off. he told the church to go fuck off. he told the government to go fuck off. he told people to their face to go fuck off.

Marquez is loved by my mom for that same reason you state !@#$%^. She sees him as the master that showed the world that Latin America had magic to share, as equally good as any of the european masters.

if the "best" is determined by the most widely disseminated, easiest to translate and still carry forward the writer's message and ideas, then I think Vonnegut and his spare prose could be considered among the greatest of 20th century.

If "best" means the best use of the English language, then Joyce would have to be right up there as the best. He created as much language as Shakespeare

It is hard to determine such a thing.

yeah which is why i'm asking for people's reasonings rather than declarations

"best" is going to be always subjective. but it's the reasoning (and the intersubjectivity) i'm interested in. not exactly asking for a sales pitch. rather... just to see perspectives.

i think demonyo was concise but very precise in his appreciations-- and putting both gatsby and the trial in the same "social insight" category was like gracián's agudeza-- bringing two dissimilar things under the same concept. brilliant really.

speaking of vonnegut, and social insight also, one of the speeches in mother night (or was it a letter? i forget) really blew my mind with its sharp understanding of the american mind.

it's the one that compares the behavior of british and american prisoners in the german camps. do you know the one i'm talking about?

Mother Night is one of my faves. I think it is a very spot on example of that human problem that vonnegut describes as "we are what we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be."

Much of human suffering comes from not understanding this simple statement.

from Mother Night

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."

Vonnegut is just barely above Stephen King. No need for toilet paper when books by either of those 2 around.

shit, son. Vonnegut describes the inherent despair and disillusion and pain of living in this ridiculous synthetic world we have created for ourselves with humor and cynicism, and deep honesty.

Stephen King writes straight salami. great salami, but he admits it is salami.

'Give the devil his due' but 99% of the language Joyce created has no significant life outside of his own writing, with almost none becoming 'household words', whereas Shakespeare ... well you see what I did there.

I bet if you had checked around 80 years after Shakepear that his "new language" took just as long to infiltrate the English world.

Well considering the pace at which things moved then, the extent of his influence on Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary, released a century after Shakespeare's death, means he probably had a greater impact than Joyce is ever likely to. Besides, wasn't it Joyce himself who said that, "After God, Shakespeare created most"?

you're a cruel man

yes but do you have that speech? the one about the americans acting like animals in the prison camp? i've been looking like that forever (i don't own the book)

Raymond Chandler probably deserves a mention, too, both as a literary stylist and for creating one of the most enduring and influential visions of early 20th Century urban America.

well, we're certainly on the downhill slope now. Vonnegut always struck me as high school intellectualism.
Robbe-Grillet created a couple of the most ominous and unsettling stories ever in the Voyeur and Jealousy.