111–120 of 166 posts
The Brocken is the highest peak in the Harz mountains of Germany and is where witches are said to gather on Walpurgis Night. So it was quite a subtle dig.
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Admittedly The Brothers Karamazov has a lot of characters, but, it does run linearly! And it's not so hard to refer to the Wikipedia article for a character list as necessary. I think the problem is some people expect to not have to do any work when reading literary novels.
I find that literature that requires work does not provide more food or insight into the human condition or a sense of wonder (or whichever benchmark you choose) than simpler and more accessible works. If complexity is not what makes the work valuable, what purpose does it serve? I posit that for some people complexity for the sake of complexity _is_ the appeal.
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I would disagree strongly with this. :) The e-reader UI is generally so much better than paper, if a book is not available for kindle, I'll usually find something else to read. Pale Fire is a special case book where you want two have bookmarks where you are currently working. I read Chuck Palahniuk's Diary on paper, and an e-reader would definitely have ruined it. Technical books with a lot of charts, diagrams, monos…
Yes, they are fine for books with no features but body text and no important formatting or layout, and that the reader progresses through entirely linearly. Those are the sorts of books they’re best-suited to.
Which is 98% of novels. e-Readers are even great for books with lots of end notes or foot notes. It's great for flipping between those. I had no problem reading Infinite Jest, for example.
I guess if my copy of Pale Fire had hyperlinked all the poem line mentions, I would have been fine. :)
Now I'm wondering if I could write a quick script to annotate mine thusly...
Seven years before Pale Fire came out, Nabokov was working on his translation of Eugene Onegin. Often, people argue that a translated novel should have no end/footnotes, because a "good translation" should read "naturally" to a reader. Nabokov disagreed, and wrote an article that included the phrase:
> "I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity." [1]
Quite a fun image, and one he took somewhat seriously, as his endnote commentary for Onegin is more than twice as long as the translation itself! [2]
So, for me personally, I can't imagine a world where he didn't reflect on his own zeal here, and realize "I think there's a novel idea in here somewhere!"
[1] "Problems in Translation: Onegin in English." Partisan Review 22, no. 4 (1955): 512.
[2] https://secondstorybooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/136717...
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I made no such universal statement. Some people enjoy hard things simply because they are hard. My claim is that this can also result in people thinking some literature is better than it is, because people draw satisfaction from the effort itself.
Okay, I got that. The point you might be missing is that some people might enjoy hard things not only because they are hard, but because only through their laborious efforts is the true brilliance of the work revealed.
(Edit: re-reading what I wrote earlier I can see how it can be read that way. My bad. )
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Off the top of my head, every book I can think of that provides deep insight into the human condition does require putting in some work. Let's take as an example "Night" by Elie Wiesel, a book that is written so simply it is typically assigned in middle school (that's when I read it). Well, it was assigned in school for a reason -- there's a lot of work to put in to learn more about the history of the Holocaust, conc…
Exactly - if a work really was so simple that it required no work to understand it, what insight could it possibly give into the human condition? Plenty of "simple" works are reliant on the reader already having done work to grasp it, from growing up in the right country/culture/subculture to learning the right things in school.
Tried it, couldn't get into it. And this was when I was unemployed and living with my now wife. So, I had time galore. It seems like a book you have to read cover to cover in one sitting to jam it all in your head. Now, from what I recall I did chuckle a couple times. But other than that it was a big shrug-fest to me. Just couldn't muster a care. I never thought I'd admit to such base and earthen attitude, nay vulgar…
I remember liking it at the time, but that's all. Now I'm going to go back and read it again. Must have missed something.
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The 'hook' of Pale Fire is this: ostensibly you're reading a long-form poem with a foreword and footnotes and editing by a friend of the poet (a poet of some eminence), but it soon becomes apparent that the editor is trying to jam his own life story into those footnotes. If you like that idea, I think you'd like the book.
ah, so the same genre as House of Leaves
"I am the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane I am the smudge of ashen fluff And I lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky" I am ashamed that I will never command my native language as well as a man for whom it was a second. I don't even know if whom is right there.
