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Originally Posted by demonrail666

The contemporary is always about sorting through. That's its problem and its excitement, depending on you. The past comes pre-filtered. Imagine how many crap novels Russians had to wade through in the 19th C before discovering a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky, or even a Turgenev or a Gogol. The past is settled for us, just as, I imagine, our contemporary will be for future generations. Lit studies will run their 'millennial fiction' courses (or whatever they decide to call our cultural age) and speak only about Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo and a handful of others, blissfully unaware (hopefully) of names like Michael Cunningham and all those other flash-in-the-pans that we've had to deal with.

the thing is though i enjoy some flashes in the pan. who here remembers "slaves of new york"? a hugely dated book of late-80s short stories but i liked some of them. haven't heard about tama janowitz since then-- she still writes though. i also semi-recently read arthur nersesian's "the fuckup" which is about a kid in the east village in the early 90s. nothing glorious, but a really fun read.

the problem is that the sorting is too laborious-- and if you think about it these are provincial examples i'm mentioning there. just because it's new york it doesn't mean it can't be provincial.

and that's what i meant to mention earlier. contemporary american writing is going to be overwhelmingly provincial until it's sorted and exported. and as an immigrant, i'm not fully culturally integrated to it. e.g., when i think of "classic" novels the first names in my mind are not dickens or hardy--i'd think of victor hugo or dumas or tolstoy first.

i don't come from an anglophone tradition, and latin america is a bit more eclectic because we know we're not the center of the world-- so we'll read the french and the russians and the germans and british and americans and everyone we can get our hands on ha ha ha. i suppose that is where i see the american scene as more provincial--more closed unto itself. most "big" national cultures are that way. the french for example quote themselves endlessly. same with the spanish, or the british. but latin americans will steal from everyone. vivan los clusterfucks!

this is not to say there is not a provincial latin american scene. of course there is. there are ongoing national and continental dialogues that have little to do with the rest of the world. questions of national identity and regional politics and even sheer local gossip. for example, there's this great chilean writer, pedro lemebel, brilliant and superfunny, which i wish i could recommend to everyone here, but i think he's not going to make it in translation. i like him a lot better than bolaño, for example. but there are too many in-group codes and local assumptions to make something like this translatable without extensive footnotes that would destroy the humor with explanations http://www.letras.s5.com/lemebel221102.htm

at the same time, i no longer live in latin america, so if i were to parachute into a bookstore in mexico city or buenos aires right now, i'd be overwhelmed by all the new names and ideological and literary disputes of which i'm not longer a part.

all this is to say-- i'm in a weird spot where i'm an outsider everywhere. and i have no real problem with that--that's the lot of all nomads. but when it comes to exploring the large mass of unsorted stuff, my ideal browsing bookstore would probably be like those markets where you can buy jamaican soda next to korean pepper paste right by the bags of injera along the swedish fishpastes in a tube-- not the latest features from the new york review of books.