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The Books I Don't Like
I would like to express which kind of writing I dislike. I will belittle, but nevertheless stay civil. The reason I want to do so is this: It is generally difficult to upset me. Delayed trains, other drivers honking at me, mistakes made by myself at work necessitating I stay an hour longer, cannot but in extreme cases disturb my tranquility. However, when I am exposed to certain kinds of literature, through marketing or errouneously chosen book presents, I become, for a short time, the angriest person in the world. That is not a nice feeling. I once spent the better part of a weekend's leisure time wishing all of the world's uncured diseases upon Elena Ferrante for writing My Brilliant Friend. It is not even the worst book I ever read, just a pointless one. I do not want to waste my time with incantations of this kind any longer, so I will get it out now and then be done with it. Hopefully this post will serve as the basis for a fruitful contribution about how bad some books really are. I will not try to make any ubiquitous statements about characters, purpose, or writing style of books because no one cares, not even myself. To me, a book is just something that is either enjoyable or not, and that is it. Therefore I will now list the ones that upset me. You are more than welcome to elaborate on your own dislikes.
1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I read that one in full, perhaps this is why I hate it the most. If this person really spent their life writing then I am sorry for them. I don't speak Italian, but I think nothing was lost in translation here. There is a good story in there, but it could be expressed on 50 pages or less. The other 400 pages are a vicious attempt by the author, and more importantly by the publisher, who with an army of well-paid lectors should know by now that sentences void of information can simply be taken out of a manuscript, to defraud gullible and defenseless readers globally of their money and of their precious time. While this is nothing special, this book has been praised into the heavens. I read, multiple times, that people considered Elena Ferrante to be in contention for the Nobel Prize for Literature. After Jon Fosse won last year, I am starting to believe them.
2. Northern European Literature, such as Karl Ove Knausgard and the recent winner of the Nobel Prize, Jon Fosse. Borges said in an interview that he loves Norsk literature and culture. Now, here he was talking about very, very old writings. Nevertheless, it still breaks my heart that with all of their civilization, education, and quality of life, the people of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands are IN COMPLETE SHAMELESS DISREGARD of this compliment and produce worthless literature as if a writer as great as Borges had never said half a syllable about them. I could read two pages by Knausgard before I had to quit. His musings about death in the beginning of the first volume of My Struggle are so mundane that I felt myself getting duller with every word I read. A sense of guilt about my perhaps overhastily formed opinion of Mr Knausgard brought me back, and I tortured myself through another three-hundred (three-hundred! Ficciones has one-hundred! Sorrow Beyond Dreams has sixty! How does anyone justify that!) pages before being sufficiently reaffirmed in it. I now hold the opinion that the My Struggle series is an experimentation of a pyschopathic narcissist, Knausgard, who wants to tests how much suffering he can inflict on a readership before they unveil him as what he is: a mediocre writer. But now, let's interrupt this invective for an experiment of thought: Which of the two formulations do you consider superior?
*a) On Monday I robbed a bank.*
*b) On Monday, I woke up at eight in the morning and did not press snooze but deleted the alarm because I was already quite awake. I looked at the tapestry on the ceiling for a while; I had looked at it many times since I had slept in that same room ever since I was a child. When I was five years old, my dad had put it up. How young he had been back then. Now he was much older, but I was also older. It's almost like we aged at the same speed. And yet getting older for him had made that much more of a difference, since he now could barely walk from the TV to the frigde, and I could walk even better now than when I was young. Is it not funny how aging makes you older, but in different ways, depending on how old you are? At the end of twenty years, you could be 30 years old, or 40, or 50, or 60, or 70, or 80, or even 90, and it would make all the difference. I got up and brushed my teeth. In the mirror I saw myself, and when I was done I took the brush out of my mouth and spit the toothpaste out. Then I got dressed. Back as a kid I would have been much to small for the orange dungarees I was getting in now, but now they fit, no problem. Where was the gun now? I remembered that I had put it under the bed. I took it out and put it into my dungarees, but at an angle so that if there was a spontaneous discharge, I would not shoot myself. Then I went down the stairs, drank some orange juice and ate two, or maybe three, pieces of toast. Then I opened the door, went out,closed it behind me and went to the car. I put the key into the ignition thinking bla bla bla, and so on and so forth.*
If you like a), then the meaning of my text will most likely be clear to you. If you like b), I do not know what to tell you, except for that both a) and b) are better than anything Knausgard ever wrote because at least you know what somewhere down the line, there will be a bank robbery. In Knausgard, there would be nothing except a retelling of his boring life, which is not boring because it is happening to someone living in one of the richest countries on earth or whatever, but because it is told in a very boring way. I am sure that Mr Knausgards life included plenty of interesting things to talk about; I am just not sure they would take up more than twelve pages. It would be twelve GOOD pages, but since Mr Knausgard is a deranged villain, and since publishers earn more from long novels, you did not get twelve pages, but around three thousand (a guess, I did not care to count).
Jon Fosse is more of the same, and reading any line of his will swiftly demonstrate that. In the beginning of one of his books he tells you that he painted x small paintings and y big paintings. Then he tells you than a sausage is salty. Then he drives a car and thinks ROAD. Then, for half of a conditional clause, something interesting happens. Then, milk is white. Stunning! For anyone thinking that I am making this up or exaggerating, just read the book. I forgot the name but surely that part will be in the Amazon preview. I have not read all of his novels, and I hope to the high heavens that they are better, because that is just worthless. He said he likes Thomas Bernhard. I think it should be a criminal offense for people to justify long meaningless passages with Thomas Bernhard. Yes, he is the best German speaking writer since WW2. Yes, his phrases were very long and not a lot was happening. But they were not MEANINGLESS: his characters were psychopaths (a simplification) because he was a psychopath (even bigger simplification), and his novels are the spiteful ramblings of these CHARACTERS. That makes sense! And they are either violent or funny or disturbing. Milk being white, sausages being salty, driving being roads - that is not any of these things, except for disturbing, because it is disturbing how this book got past the draft state. Nobel Prize. t
#entertainment
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I would like to express which kind of writing I dislike. I will belittle, but nevertheless stay civil. The reason I want to do so is this: It is generally difficult to upset me. Delayed trains, other drivers honking at me, mistakes made by myself at work necessitating I stay an hour longer, cannot but in extreme cases disturb my tranquility. However, when I am exposed to certain kinds of literature, through marketing or errouneously chosen book presents, I become, for a short time, the angriest person in the world. That is not a nice feeling. I once spent the better part of a weekend's leisure time wishing all of the world's uncured diseases upon Elena Ferrante for writing My Brilliant Friend. It is not even the worst book I ever read, just a pointless one. I do not want to waste my time with incantations of this kind any longer, so I will get it out now and then be done with it. Hopefully this post will serve as the basis for a fruitful contribution about how bad some books really are. I will not try to make any ubiquitous statements about characters, purpose, or writing style of books because no one cares, not even myself. To me, a book is just something that is either enjoyable or not, and that is it. Therefore I will now list the ones that upset me. You are more than welcome to elaborate on your own dislikes.
1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I read that one in full, perhaps this is why I hate it the most. If this person really spent their life writing then I am sorry for them. I don't speak Italian, but I think nothing was lost in translation here. There is a good story in there, but it could be expressed on 50 pages or less. The other 400 pages are a vicious attempt by the author, and more importantly by the publisher, who with an army of well-paid lectors should know by now that sentences void of information can simply be taken out of a manuscript, to defraud gullible and defenseless readers globally of their money and of their precious time. While this is nothing special, this book has been praised into the heavens. I read, multiple times, that people considered Elena Ferrante to be in contention for the Nobel Prize for Literature. After Jon Fosse won last year, I am starting to believe them.
2. Northern European Literature, such as Karl Ove Knausgard and the recent winner of the Nobel Prize, Jon Fosse. Borges said in an interview that he loves Norsk literature and culture. Now, here he was talking about very, very old writings. Nevertheless, it still breaks my heart that with all of their civilization, education, and quality of life, the people of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands are IN COMPLETE SHAMELESS DISREGARD of this compliment and produce worthless literature as if a writer as great as Borges had never said half a syllable about them. I could read two pages by Knausgard before I had to quit. His musings about death in the beginning of the first volume of My Struggle are so mundane that I felt myself getting duller with every word I read. A sense of guilt about my perhaps overhastily formed opinion of Mr Knausgard brought me back, and I tortured myself through another three-hundred (three-hundred! Ficciones has one-hundred! Sorrow Beyond Dreams has sixty! How does anyone justify that!) pages before being sufficiently reaffirmed in it. I now hold the opinion that the My Struggle series is an experimentation of a pyschopathic narcissist, Knausgard, who wants to tests how much suffering he can inflict on a readership before they unveil him as what he is: a mediocre writer. But now, let's interrupt this invective for an experiment of thought: Which of the two formulations do you consider superior?
*a) On Monday I robbed a bank.*
*b) On Monday, I woke up at eight in the morning and did not press snooze but deleted the alarm because I was already quite awake. I looked at the tapestry on the ceiling for a while; I had looked at it many times since I had slept in that same room ever since I was a child. When I was five years old, my dad had put it up. How young he had been back then. Now he was much older, but I was also older. It's almost like we aged at the same speed. And yet getting older for him had made that much more of a difference, since he now could barely walk from the TV to the frigde, and I could walk even better now than when I was young. Is it not funny how aging makes you older, but in different ways, depending on how old you are? At the end of twenty years, you could be 30 years old, or 40, or 50, or 60, or 70, or 80, or even 90, and it would make all the difference. I got up and brushed my teeth. In the mirror I saw myself, and when I was done I took the brush out of my mouth and spit the toothpaste out. Then I got dressed. Back as a kid I would have been much to small for the orange dungarees I was getting in now, but now they fit, no problem. Where was the gun now? I remembered that I had put it under the bed. I took it out and put it into my dungarees, but at an angle so that if there was a spontaneous discharge, I would not shoot myself. Then I went down the stairs, drank some orange juice and ate two, or maybe three, pieces of toast. Then I opened the door, went out,closed it behind me and went to the car. I put the key into the ignition thinking bla bla bla, and so on and so forth.*
If you like a), then the meaning of my text will most likely be clear to you. If you like b), I do not know what to tell you, except for that both a) and b) are better than anything Knausgard ever wrote because at least you know what somewhere down the line, there will be a bank robbery. In Knausgard, there would be nothing except a retelling of his boring life, which is not boring because it is happening to someone living in one of the richest countries on earth or whatever, but because it is told in a very boring way. I am sure that Mr Knausgards life included plenty of interesting things to talk about; I am just not sure they would take up more than twelve pages. It would be twelve GOOD pages, but since Mr Knausgard is a deranged villain, and since publishers earn more from long novels, you did not get twelve pages, but around three thousand (a guess, I did not care to count).
Jon Fosse is more of the same, and reading any line of his will swiftly demonstrate that. In the beginning of one of his books he tells you that he painted x small paintings and y big paintings. Then he tells you than a sausage is salty. Then he drives a car and thinks ROAD. Then, for half of a conditional clause, something interesting happens. Then, milk is white. Stunning! For anyone thinking that I am making this up or exaggerating, just read the book. I forgot the name but surely that part will be in the Amazon preview. I have not read all of his novels, and I hope to the high heavens that they are better, because that is just worthless. He said he likes Thomas Bernhard. I think it should be a criminal offense for people to justify long meaningless passages with Thomas Bernhard. Yes, he is the best German speaking writer since WW2. Yes, his phrases were very long and not a lot was happening. But they were not MEANINGLESS: his characters were psychopaths (a simplification) because he was a psychopath (even bigger simplification), and his novels are the spiteful ramblings of these CHARACTERS. That makes sense! And they are either violent or funny or disturbing. Milk being white, sausages being salty, driving being roads - that is not any of these things, except for disturbing, because it is disturbing how this book got past the draft state. Nobel Prize. t
#entertainment
source
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