Also, most of his other books are even worse. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the only one that I keep around, but I haven’t tried to reread it in the years since.
I tried to read Master and Margarita, but didn’t get where he was getting at. The devil ? Get serious ! I love his book about Molière, though, but don’t know how it’s called in english.
The Moliere book I have not read, I’ll take a look at it. I first encountered M&M in the context of a class about the history of pacts with the devil in film, literature, and music, and since I was already used to filling in blanks from translations after a lot of quality time with Kafka in another class, I had no problem getting into it. I’m particularly fond of the Pilate substory, as the style was really nailed by the translator so it feels like what it is described as (a great manuscript by a master) as opposed to the chickenshit approach most books and movies take by not showing you the allegedly great product or showing you an improbable snippet here or there that doesn’t seem that great.
I guess it’s the reason my opinion is unpopular. To be totally frank I read Pale Fire a few year back, and don’t remember much about it except I didn’t find it all that great, while I loved Lolita.
Naw, Midsummer Nights Dream is pretty much golden. They shelve down pretty steeply from there, though. And there is nothing less funny than a shakespearian clown.
or gushing about Pynchon’s longer works as the standard opinions from non-retards on the subject, so I figured I’d throw that out there.
With Bulgakov he was introduced to me as someone nearly on the order of Dostoyevsky in the Russian canon where you would simply have a different way of appreciating his great works rather than being able to pigeonhole him as a one hit wonder. I mean, it’s a hell of a hit that everyone should read, and it may just be that none of his other books have been as well translated, but still. In retrospect, you’re probably right that I should have posted that in “awesome opinions everyone will agree with once they finish the book”.
As for Heinlein, I figured it remains controversial enough that it always draws impassioned attacks when mentioned, but I’d be happy if that were the mainstream opinion.
That’s pretty much the standard opinion in the books I’ve been reading (I’ve been studying The Iliad in depth for a while) – most seem to think that the Iliad is more controlled, the similes fresher, and so on.
That’s cool. I was always under the impression that, given the frequency with which The Odyssey is alluded to, allegorized, rewritten and recast, that it’s the more admired work.
Gaiman and Pratchett come up with great concepts that are fun to read but hard to tie together with a coherent ending.
Lolita is not, despite Vanity Fair’s protestations otherwise, the most romantic story ever told. And whether or not you, personally, “get” the fact that Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator (or that the whole book is an allegory and Lolita symbolizes America itself) does not help the fact that 99% of the people who read that book don’t get it. Whenever a guy tells me that Lolita is one of his favorite novels, I usually don’t feel too bad about assuming he’s a creep and a perv.
It’s been quite a while, so my memory of the works is a bit weak, but I think that if you were to take all the chapters, the best would be in the Odyssey, e.g. Nausicaa, and the worst would be in the Iliad, e.g. the Catalog of Ships. But I agree that overall the Iliad is a better story (though Diomedes is the only one on the Greek side I like at all, I really like his gumption in going up against Ares, even with divine assistance).
On the other hand, it may be hard to judge them properly if you’re not a Grecian.
I see, by the way, that Nausicaa was the inventor of the ball game, so she was apparently the first jock.
Poetry is the worst, least beneficial, and most worthless definable art form in existence. Below comic books. Below movie-poster art. Below riddles, puns, or knock-knock jokes. Below writing your name in the snow with urine. The only current practitioners are either hucksters looking for instututional cash or self-obsessed twits.
Despite having no idea how to end a book, John Grisham started his career writing readable and enjoyable thrillers. The more high-brow he tried to be, the worse (and more self-conscious) he got.
The Iliad is a tragedy; the whole thing is about the tragic consequences of Achilles’s and Agamemnon’s bad behavior to each other (It says so right at the start of the poem). So I don’t think you’re necessarily supposed to like them.
On the other hand, it may be hard to judge them properly if you’re not a Grecian.
Even the oldest sources we have are not unanimous on judging them. There’s one author (I forget who) who hates the Iliad because it makes the gods seem like men and the men seem like gods.
