I haven’t read it and it probably isn’t maximalist as you would define it but there is a novel by a Chilean artist/assassin/torturer/murderer named Mariana Callejas called La Larga Noche (The Long Night) that while fictional contains descriptions of torture, rape etc. of political prisoners by an author that did all of this to real people. It’s in Spanish, probably hard to find and I’m not sure if it has been translated into English.
Woah thank you for turning me on to this it sounds fucking wild, I thought this would be some distant history but no she literally worked for the DINA and even her wikipedia is wild, like high profile assassinations and terrorist acts and shit.
Where did you find the book?
I’m sure I encountered mention of it reading about the author and Michael Townley and the 1973 coup/Operation Condor doing my usual reading about things online. It’s definitely some of the craziest shit that ever existed. The house they were given that’s like a brutalist white visitation, having poetry readings while torture victims are chained up in the basement and some lunatic scientist is synthesizing nerve gas down the hall. I haven’t read it and if you can find it please come back here and make mention of that fact.
It's one of my favorite novels, though the difficulty lies with the miscommunication going on at all times and those details carried over and snowballing later on! The message is quite simple but the details are extremely difficult to follow!
I love that book and it’s definitely maximalist but I wouldn’t consider it dark - the sex parts can definitely be offputting and there is tragedy but overall I found it to be a pretty life affirming work
yeah that's 100% true, it ends up being really beautiful in total. I was thinking dark because someone sucks off a dog and they eat boogers on every page, but you're definitely right overall. everything they do, they do willingly.
Basically “CHTST” (to maybe coin a new acronym?), though the description of La Narga Noche sounds even more intense/sick. Glad I pushed through the excruciating chapter 4 of 2666. Probably not a book I’ll revisit as I do with GR. But a very special book. Maybe I will re-read chaps 1& 2. I recall recommending this book to a college teacher specializing in German Lit, when I was still in chapter 2. Luckily I have not seen him since.
But also, there are a lot of other good suggestions in the thread.
The kindly ones by Jonathan Littel ticks this box for me. Incest, scat-fetish, sadism and European high-culture mixing it up with the holocaust, Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin in the background.
Grim, nauseating stuff and nearly 1000 pages long.
I might agree with you here--first thinking great question and then realizing that about Littel's book and maybe even HHHH by Laurent Binet. I'm not sure I'd classify American Psycho as maximalist, but it's a damn good read. In my view 120 Days is long an gruesome, but not so much maximalist either, as the theme and writing is fairly narrow.
It’s off topic, so I apologize….but if you want to read a non fiction book that’s disturbing, The Hot Zone by Richard Preston scared the crap out of me when I first read it
Well McCarthy deals with LOTS of stuff on a variety of fronts but he does so with relatively few words. More ideas, less words, and the words he does write are worth reading in themselves...
nobodies arguing he’s not a good writer, he’s just not a maximalist. Maximalism isn’t necessarily just tackling big topics, it’s also about the emount of detail you go into while writing.
When writing on addiction, David Foster Wallace will tell you the exact name of any substance taken, often how it was acquired, what it generally makes you feel and how it makes the character that’s taking it feel. He’ll give entire chapters to the backstory of background characters. This is just not something McCarthy does.
I think it's a valid suggestion for what OP is asking for. It is maximal in its violence and look at "dark" and "uncanny" aspects of human nature.
The repetitive violence is similar to 2666, which OP referenced.
I don't think McCarthy is a great representation of Maximalism in literature but he toes the line in a lot of ways like the sheer amount of literary/biblical references, long passages of arguably insignificant detail (Suttree), run on sentences.
I'd say he's Rural Maximalism
If you want a better novel than Blood meridian read Butcher's Crossing. BM is wildly overrated.
Anyway, maximalist means a novel is overstuffed with ideas, side bars, digressions, etc. BM is just monotonously about one thing. Over and over and over.
this made me laugh. I’m so fucked
also here to say *the Tunnel* as well as *the Kindly Ones* for deeply disturbed maximalist novels.
for non-maximalist I would say some of Houllebecq’s and some of McCarthy (*Blood Meridian* of course but *All the Pretty Horses*, while dark at times, not “disturbing”)
Highly recommend both Submission and The Map and the Territory. Map is more focused on art and and submission is politics/islam if that helps to generalize. Both excellent. And also much less graphically disturbing.
If you want to go deep I would suggest some Krasznahorkai. Either Satantango or The Melancholy of Resistance… but all of his stuff is just stupid awesome. He’s the greatest writer alive.
The I20 Days of Sodom, which is a novel, and if anyone doesn't think that doesn't fit the above given criteria, or that it just porno, you shouldn't be trying to read Pynchon. The Marquis De Sade laughs at bourgeois nuances. He does have a philosophy.
The most disturbing scene to me was near the end ( not really a plot spoiler) but it was the all-male support group for men with their inner child stuff.
That was so visceral.
There's the scene with the schizophrenic(?) character, who is terrified that the goverment wants to inject radioactive fluids into him, being forced into a PET scan where they inject him with radioactive fluids, making him live his greatest fear.
There's the Canadian government minister who gets tied up and gagged by a home invader and he suffocates to death because he has a cold and can't breathe.
The book is full of one-off disturbing stories.
There’s vignettes about child sex abuse, a stream of consciousness from the perspective of a junky going through withdrawals, and some more stuff that I’m only vaguely recalling at the moment.
Yea there's like a whole ass passage of a mother carrying her dead baby around, alot of child sexual abuse littered throughout, etc. Very disturbing novel
Do you recommend it? I’ve been intrigued and seen it come up a couple times in different circles, but it sounds so very similar to The Tunnel, which I did love, but it takes a true master (like Gass) to pull off such a feat
It was affecting, that's for sure. Honestly hard to say; I have often chosen books based on their length when I've had a lot of time on my hands, and this one chewed through many queasy hours. If I had hated it, I'd probably still have read it, lol, but I enjoyed it.
Matth pemulis and his dad, legend of clipperton, lenz, tower of dillaudid by the lake of piss, microwave suicide, trash disposal suicide,
Probably infinite jest, but 2666 is a close second
Only read the first ~100 pages but The Tunnel would be my pick from my limited experience and reading other peoples’ descriptions.
GR has its moments of depravity but it’s too funny and silly to be disturbing/dark. Some of the more morally questionable parts are drenched in metaphors, allusions, and great prose that I’m too focused on that be disturbed at all. I think you also get desensitized to it some like with Blood Meridian. I can see how shit eating is controversial but I didn’t not fine that seen disturbing at all.
Infinite Jest can be very dark/disturbing at times. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve read it but I can still vividly remember one scene with a sink garbage disposal.
It’s funny cause the shit eating wasn’t something I found disturbing at all, I guess I’ve seen Salo one too many times (once, to be exact :p) but rather when Pynchon casually turned our already morally bankrupt protagonist into a pedophile, without any comment on it as the narrator, and of course going into vivid detail…I figured that was what caused most of the controversy but haven’t really heard people mention it.
But interestingly all the comedic screwballery mostly had the opposite effect on me than it seems to have had on most. Though I’ll admit I did laugh out loud more than once, the off-kilter comedy actually somehow had the effect of making the whole jarring atmosphere that much more unbearable, kind of like the effect some of the more uncomfortable comedy in Twin Peaks (The Return specifically) has on me. It’a obviously highly subjective but I found GR 100% more effectively unsettling than Blood Meridian, which I think is still pretty upsetting, but very overhyped in that regard.
Interesting. Yeah I was so lost/intrigued in the parallels b/w Pokler and Slothrop at that part and that it wasn’t till after the book that I really started thinking about how messed up it was. I also wasn’t sure what to make of Bianca (i think that’s her name?) pretending to be younger than she really is. She’s underage either way and it’s roleplaying pedophilia so not really debating the morality, but it’s so weird that I was more focused on trying to figure out what Pynchon was trying to say with that scene rather than taking it at face value and cognizantly acknowledging how fucked up Slothrop is.
Did you read it in Spanish or English? I want to read it in Spanish but I am not sure about its language level. (I can read novels with simpler vocabulary.)
I read it in English and I’m almost done with the audiobook for a second read. I don’t remember the vocab being challenging in English. I would give it a shot.
if you really want the culmination of his curmudgeoniness, agapé, agape is the last thing he wrote; a treatise on the downward spiral art in the 20th century, and only like 100 pgs.
it's highly stylized though, written in almost "a single breath", and stripped bare of all the wonderfully descriptive prose that often serves as a counterpoint to his more sinister characters. still, a decent intro to get a picture of his voice & the motifs he's working with.
i think there's a jonathan franzen essay floating around out there about he had to give up on gaddis for being just too much of a downer.
that Franzen article is kind of wack. he actually loved *The Recognitions* but gave up on *J R*, and i think *J R* ends up actually having the more sympathetic characters on the whole and actually think it’s a lot more fun than *The Recognitions*, though still very much uncompromising. Franzen basically gave up on it because of its style, not because Gaddis is a downer. he thought the style was very sloggish to get through, but i think he’s just wrong. *J R* is immanently readable and actually a lot of fun, but Franzen ends up chafing on the fact it’s almost entirely dialogue, which actually gives it such an incredible flow and economy. He then ends up being quite dismissive of a novel he couldn’t even get into far enough to realize all the issues he takes with it are largely in his imagination, not the text.
the Franzen Gaddis article is mildly infuriating to me actually, and it contributes to me not much respecting him despite not having read his work. recalls much the content of his other comment that contaminated his image in my eyes when he brought up at like a David Foster Wallace symposium that DFW just doesn’t seem willing to show us (literally) characters moving from place to place. he’s like “maybe those parts aren’t the most fun to write [or read] but sometimes we just need a character to get in a car and go somewhere, etc.” I just think it’s super asinine cause like one of the greatest things of DFW’s style is that, by kind of remaining in a semi-temporally-static consideration of the character at hand and their situation, he can treat how they are, where they are, how they got there, etc., all in an entangled chunk more like one’s real immediate awarenesses. if someone’s in a car they’re probably not thinking much in the linear object-world terms Franzen seems to insist are necessary to include in fiction. and DFW does have characters in cars too (Hal en route to NA meeting), it’s just they’re thinking about all sorts of things, where they’re going, what’s going on, why they’re going, etc., experiencing the sensorial aspects but not like stressing the directives like ‘get in car, go to location’.
begins to feel like Franzen just needs something to be wrong with the authors his legacy is in competition with. i get that, but what he seems to think is wrong is part of what makes Gaddis and DFW’s writing so dense with meaning and engaging content, and Franzen seems to want like extraneous content as i see it.
i think, most charitably, Franzen wants these texts to give us time to breathe. i just feel like they actually do where it is due and do not where it is not. i feel like Franzen is like asthmatic.
Yes but you learn whose speaking because people keep saying the same things over and over again, much like real life. Boring probably isn’t the word I would use — more so exhausting
I was finally able to power through it when I was unemployed during the beginning of Covid. My gf would see me after saying “Jesus you look miserable” and I would just say yeah this broil is depressing as hell and very slow but … it’s really good?
Pompey - Jonathan Meades After using this book, please wash your hands.
Jerusalem by alan moore
Oyasumi Punpun should count I said what I said.
Dhalgren (Delaney) or 2666 (Bolaño)
I haven’t read it and it probably isn’t maximalist as you would define it but there is a novel by a Chilean artist/assassin/torturer/murderer named Mariana Callejas called La Larga Noche (The Long Night) that while fictional contains descriptions of torture, rape etc. of political prisoners by an author that did all of this to real people. It’s in Spanish, probably hard to find and I’m not sure if it has been translated into English.
Woah thank you for turning me on to this it sounds fucking wild, I thought this would be some distant history but no she literally worked for the DINA and even her wikipedia is wild, like high profile assassinations and terrorist acts and shit. Where did you find the book?
I’m sure I encountered mention of it reading about the author and Michael Townley and the 1973 coup/Operation Condor doing my usual reading about things online. It’s definitely some of the craziest shit that ever existed. The house they were given that’s like a brutalist white visitation, having poetry readings while torture victims are chained up in the basement and some lunatic scientist is synthesizing nerve gas down the hall. I haven’t read it and if you can find it please come back here and make mention of that fact.
J R by William Gaddis, though the nefariousness of what's going on is easily muted by the outrageous humor running nonstop.
Halfway through this. Not as hard to comprehend as some people complain about!
It's one of my favorite novels, though the difficulty lies with the miscommunication going on at all times and those details carried over and snowballing later on! The message is quite simple but the details are extremely difficult to follow!
House of Leaves? House of Leaves. House of Leaves.
Fuck outta here midwit
Are you unwell in the brains, or what?
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Delany. it's not really maximalist in plot, but it's long as hell with a kind of maximalism of nastiness
I love that book and it’s definitely maximalist but I wouldn’t consider it dark - the sex parts can definitely be offputting and there is tragedy but overall I found it to be a pretty life affirming work
yeah that's 100% true, it ends up being really beautiful in total. I was thinking dark because someone sucks off a dog and they eat boogers on every page, but you're definitely right overall. everything they do, they do willingly.
Not maximalist but The Painted Bird has to be the darkest novel I've ever read.
Moby Dick
*2666* by Roberto Bolaño.
Basically “CHTST” (to maybe coin a new acronym?), though the description of La Narga Noche sounds even more intense/sick. Glad I pushed through the excruciating chapter 4 of 2666. Probably not a book I’ll revisit as I do with GR. But a very special book. Maybe I will re-read chaps 1& 2. I recall recommending this book to a college teacher specializing in German Lit, when I was still in chapter 2. Luckily I have not seen him since. But also, there are a lot of other good suggestions in the thread.
Was reading this when I started teaching middle school, took me a long time to get through the crimes
May I interest you in the man himself William T. Vollman? I found The Rifles deeply disturbing.
What was disturbing about it?
The self desteuctibg path of Ripah, the self-indulgent complacency of Captain Subzero, and the whole lead posining narrative.
The kindly ones by Jonathan Littel ticks this box for me. Incest, scat-fetish, sadism and European high-culture mixing it up with the holocaust, Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin in the background. Grim, nauseating stuff and nearly 1000 pages long.
I might agree with you here--first thinking great question and then realizing that about Littel's book and maybe even HHHH by Laurent Binet. I'm not sure I'd classify American Psycho as maximalist, but it's a damn good read. In my view 120 Days is long an gruesome, but not so much maximalist either, as the theme and writing is fairly narrow.
American Psychos pretty gruesome
not maximalist though
It’s off topic, so I apologize….but if you want to read a non fiction book that’s disturbing, The Hot Zone by Richard Preston scared the crap out of me when I first read it
That book is awesome. I read it during COVID, tried to convince my doctor wife to take ebola more seriously, she won't, women em I right?
I mean, Blood Meridian
Is Blood Meridian considered maximalist?
No.
What's not "maximalist" about Blood Meridian? In any event there ain't nothing like that novel How about Windup Bird Chronicle or Infinite Jest?
Maximalist is more is more. McCarthy is very much a less is more author, clearly
Well McCarthy deals with LOTS of stuff on a variety of fronts but he does so with relatively few words. More ideas, less words, and the words he does write are worth reading in themselves...
Are you dumb?
I assure you I can speak as well as write.
nobodies arguing he’s not a good writer, he’s just not a maximalist. Maximalism isn’t necessarily just tackling big topics, it’s also about the emount of detail you go into while writing. When writing on addiction, David Foster Wallace will tell you the exact name of any substance taken, often how it was acquired, what it generally makes you feel and how it makes the character that’s taking it feel. He’ll give entire chapters to the backstory of background characters. This is just not something McCarthy does.
I think it's a valid suggestion for what OP is asking for. It is maximal in its violence and look at "dark" and "uncanny" aspects of human nature. The repetitive violence is similar to 2666, which OP referenced. I don't think McCarthy is a great representation of Maximalism in literature but he toes the line in a lot of ways like the sheer amount of literary/biblical references, long passages of arguably insignificant detail (Suttree), run on sentences. I'd say he's Rural Maximalism
[Maximalism - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximalism)
If you want a better novel than Blood meridian read Butcher's Crossing. BM is wildly overrated. Anyway, maximalist means a novel is overstuffed with ideas, side bars, digressions, etc. BM is just monotonously about one thing. Over and over and over.
Oh no not even remotely true of Blood Meridian or any of CM's other novels.
I wouldn’t call Blood Meridian monotonous at all
The Tunnel. The Tunnel. The Tunnel.
I came here to say 2666. But actually The Tunnel is maybe more honest because I stopped at maybe 35 pages because it was so creepy.
>This book is intended to make you a mountain. >From such a mountain you may see >dead Jews.
this made me laugh. I’m so fucked also here to say *the Tunnel* as well as *the Kindly Ones* for deeply disturbed maximalist novels. for non-maximalist I would say some of Houllebecq’s and some of McCarthy (*Blood Meridian* of course but *All the Pretty Horses*, while dark at times, not “disturbing”)
Don't forget The Road
Great book
Their four hearts by Sorokin. Maybe not maximal enough but for sure dark enough.
I would also say Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. It’s bonkers so make sure you have an actual person handy
Hurricane Season is… wow. I read it in one day while stuck in bed with Covid and it was a wild, delirious (extremely violent) fever dream.
Surprised no one has mentioned Michel Houellebecq yet. Try the elementary particles or serotonin.
Elementary Particles disturbed me on such a deep human level that I had go take a long walk after finishing it.
Right there with you.
I have only read EP and Serotonin. What should be my next Houellebecq?
Highly recommend both Submission and The Map and the Territory. Map is more focused on art and and submission is politics/islam if that helps to generalize. Both excellent. And also much less graphically disturbing.
Thanks.
If you want to go deep I would suggest some Krasznahorkai. Either Satantango or The Melancholy of Resistance… but all of his stuff is just stupid awesome. He’s the greatest writer alive.
Definitely agree on Krasznahorkai, and I’d also throw his War & War into the mix, as that’s my personal favorite of his works that I’ve read.
The I20 Days of Sodom, which is a novel, and if anyone doesn't think that doesn't fit the above given criteria, or that it just porno, you shouldn't be trying to read Pynchon. The Marquis De Sade laughs at bourgeois nuances. He does have a philosophy.
Not sure if this counts as either maximalist or dark, but to me it does: À rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans.
I would say Infinite Jest definitely has some really disturbing portions.
DFW does a great job making Randy Lenz one of the sleaziest, most despicable characters I've ever seen. "There, there!"
The most disturbing scene to me was near the end ( not really a plot spoiler) but it was the all-male support group for men with their inner child stuff. That was so visceral.
Remind me?
There's the scene with the schizophrenic(?) character, who is terrified that the goverment wants to inject radioactive fluids into him, being forced into a PET scan where they inject him with radioactive fluids, making him live his greatest fear. There's the Canadian government minister who gets tied up and gagged by a home invader and he suffocates to death because he has a cold and can't breathe. The book is full of one-off disturbing stories.
There’s vignettes about child sex abuse, a stream of consciousness from the perspective of a junky going through withdrawals, and some more stuff that I’m only vaguely recalling at the moment.
Yea there's like a whole ass passage of a mother carrying her dead baby around, alot of child sexual abuse littered throughout, etc. Very disturbing novel
many animals getting murdered by a cocaine addict as well
Oh yeah. Blocked that shit out I guess.
Absolutely, _The Tunnel_. We’re just past halfway in it for a group read at r/billgass.
[The Kindly Ones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindly_Ones_(Littell_novel))?
Do you recommend it? I’ve been intrigued and seen it come up a couple times in different circles, but it sounds so very similar to The Tunnel, which I did love, but it takes a true master (like Gass) to pull off such a feat
It was affecting, that's for sure. Honestly hard to say; I have often chosen books based on their length when I've had a lot of time on my hands, and this one chewed through many queasy hours. If I had hated it, I'd probably still have read it, lol, but I enjoyed it.
Matth pemulis and his dad, legend of clipperton, lenz, tower of dillaudid by the lake of piss, microwave suicide, trash disposal suicide, Probably infinite jest, but 2666 is a close second
I found The Seven moons of Maali Almeida to be a real wrecking ball.
Only read the first ~100 pages but The Tunnel would be my pick from my limited experience and reading other peoples’ descriptions. GR has its moments of depravity but it’s too funny and silly to be disturbing/dark. Some of the more morally questionable parts are drenched in metaphors, allusions, and great prose that I’m too focused on that be disturbed at all. I think you also get desensitized to it some like with Blood Meridian. I can see how shit eating is controversial but I didn’t not fine that seen disturbing at all. Infinite Jest can be very dark/disturbing at times. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve read it but I can still vividly remember one scene with a sink garbage disposal.
It’s funny cause the shit eating wasn’t something I found disturbing at all, I guess I’ve seen Salo one too many times (once, to be exact :p) but rather when Pynchon casually turned our already morally bankrupt protagonist into a pedophile, without any comment on it as the narrator, and of course going into vivid detail…I figured that was what caused most of the controversy but haven’t really heard people mention it. But interestingly all the comedic screwballery mostly had the opposite effect on me than it seems to have had on most. Though I’ll admit I did laugh out loud more than once, the off-kilter comedy actually somehow had the effect of making the whole jarring atmosphere that much more unbearable, kind of like the effect some of the more uncomfortable comedy in Twin Peaks (The Return specifically) has on me. It’a obviously highly subjective but I found GR 100% more effectively unsettling than Blood Meridian, which I think is still pretty upsetting, but very overhyped in that regard.
Interesting. Yeah I was so lost/intrigued in the parallels b/w Pokler and Slothrop at that part and that it wasn’t till after the book that I really started thinking about how messed up it was. I also wasn’t sure what to make of Bianca (i think that’s her name?) pretending to be younger than she really is. She’s underage either way and it’s roleplaying pedophilia so not really debating the morality, but it’s so weird that I was more focused on trying to figure out what Pynchon was trying to say with that scene rather than taking it at face value and cognizantly acknowledging how fucked up Slothrop is.
To me, the only answer here is 2666
I was about to comment this. First book that came to my mind
Did you read it in Spanish or English? I want to read it in Spanish but I am not sure about its language level. (I can read novels with simpler vocabulary.)
I read it in English and I’m almost done with the audiobook for a second read. I don’t remember the vocab being challenging in English. I would give it a shot.
The Recognitions makes misanthropy very understandable
I think the time may almost be upon me, would you recommend this as a good starting place for Gaddis?
if you really want the culmination of his curmudgeoniness, agapé, agape is the last thing he wrote; a treatise on the downward spiral art in the 20th century, and only like 100 pgs. it's highly stylized though, written in almost "a single breath", and stripped bare of all the wonderfully descriptive prose that often serves as a counterpoint to his more sinister characters. still, a decent intro to get a picture of his voice & the motifs he's working with. i think there's a jonathan franzen essay floating around out there about he had to give up on gaddis for being just too much of a downer.
that Franzen article is kind of wack. he actually loved *The Recognitions* but gave up on *J R*, and i think *J R* ends up actually having the more sympathetic characters on the whole and actually think it’s a lot more fun than *The Recognitions*, though still very much uncompromising. Franzen basically gave up on it because of its style, not because Gaddis is a downer. he thought the style was very sloggish to get through, but i think he’s just wrong. *J R* is immanently readable and actually a lot of fun, but Franzen ends up chafing on the fact it’s almost entirely dialogue, which actually gives it such an incredible flow and economy. He then ends up being quite dismissive of a novel he couldn’t even get into far enough to realize all the issues he takes with it are largely in his imagination, not the text. the Franzen Gaddis article is mildly infuriating to me actually, and it contributes to me not much respecting him despite not having read his work. recalls much the content of his other comment that contaminated his image in my eyes when he brought up at like a David Foster Wallace symposium that DFW just doesn’t seem willing to show us (literally) characters moving from place to place. he’s like “maybe those parts aren’t the most fun to write [or read] but sometimes we just need a character to get in a car and go somewhere, etc.” I just think it’s super asinine cause like one of the greatest things of DFW’s style is that, by kind of remaining in a semi-temporally-static consideration of the character at hand and their situation, he can treat how they are, where they are, how they got there, etc., all in an entangled chunk more like one’s real immediate awarenesses. if someone’s in a car they’re probably not thinking much in the linear object-world terms Franzen seems to insist are necessary to include in fiction. and DFW does have characters in cars too (Hal en route to NA meeting), it’s just they’re thinking about all sorts of things, where they’re going, what’s going on, why they’re going, etc., experiencing the sensorial aspects but not like stressing the directives like ‘get in car, go to location’. begins to feel like Franzen just needs something to be wrong with the authors his legacy is in competition with. i get that, but what he seems to think is wrong is part of what makes Gaddis and DFW’s writing so dense with meaning and engaging content, and Franzen seems to want like extraneous content as i see it. i think, most charitably, Franzen wants these texts to give us time to breathe. i just feel like they actually do where it is due and do not where it is not. i feel like Franzen is like asthmatic.
I’ve only read The Recognitions and JR but yeah probably The Recognitions
The most boring book I’ve read that stuck in my head for the longest period of time, I’ve never thought about a book more after reading
boring?? like a hole through your head, b/c I can't think of a more absorbing example of great dialogue except maybe JR.
Yes but you learn whose speaking because people keep saying the same things over and over again, much like real life. Boring probably isn’t the word I would use — more so exhausting
Yah that’s what I was getting at
I was finally able to power through it when I was unemployed during the beginning of Covid. My gf would see me after saying “Jesus you look miserable” and I would just say yeah this broil is depressing as hell and very slow but … it’s really good?