I'm almost done with Gravity's Rainbow and I definitely reccomend it. I think you'd really like that one, and The Crying of Lot 49 is good too but much shorter (which leaves one somewhat unsatiated at the end). Gravity's Rainbow is much longer, and headier, and thus like a hearty meal for the brain. I think I may attempt to tackle Against the Day after this, all 1000 pages and several hundred characters of it...hm, any good books you can reccomend?
Well, hmm... Have you ever had a chance to get into the fiction works of Samuel Beckett? I realize that most people read at least one of his plays (usually Waiting for Godot), but he wrote some pretty far-out Postmodern fiction in the 50s. If you can find the 3-novel volume of Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, I'd recommend reading it cover-to-cover. You can really see how his writing evolved over the course of just a few years, and all 3 novels are excellent. They're all vaguely related, too, and often get referred to as a trilogy.
There's an interesting connection to James Joyce, too - Samuel Beckett was his assistant when he was writing Finnegans Wake, and actually served as a scribe to many of Joyce's dictations for the novel when he was too ill to write himself. You'll notice some pretty obvious similarities to Joyce in his work.
Excellent suggestion, and one I am going to follow up on, now that I'm nearing the end of this Pynchon tome. I've admittedly only read Waiting for Godot and found it quite intriguing, its a bizarre slab of postmodernism but I liked it, and it lends itself to alot of analysis, not to mention bad literary jokes with the few people I can talk literature with. Did you ever see that old British comedy The Young Ones? One of the creators of the show, Alexi Sayle, had another comedy show which featured a sketch where Sayle, playing the role of Godot, attempts to meet up with the two men waiting for him, but enduring a bunch of hilarious setbacks. At the end, he reaches Vladimir and Estragon, only to find out that another Godot has already gotten there. Good stuff.
I'll check out his fiction work though, Waiting for Godot wasn't my favorite play, (That honor belongs to Goethe, Aristophanes, Beaumarchais, Moliere, and Plautus, all of 'em!) but I loved the surreal aspect of it, and so I think I'd enjoy Beckett's novels too. Thanks alot for
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If you want to check out some more contemporary playwrights that have written some outstanding work, check into reading Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and especially Edward Albee. They are all quite good.
I've read some Stoppard, I think a play called The Real Thing and it was quite dark and clever. What else could you reccomend from him? And I shall check out the others, some contemporary theater gets to be a bit much for me but Stoppard was good, and I've heard praise for Pinter somewhere so I could probably get down with him too.
Well, the "standard" Stoppard plays are Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound. Both are very funny, and a little bizarre. Personally, I'm partial to Travesties due to its content. If you appreciate literature, you'll likely be able to appreciate the characters in the play.
As for Pinter, I don't have any specific recommendations. In a way, all of his plays are essentially the same - simple circumstances that involve just a few characters speaking rather mundane dialogue in a very usual way, but with a certain feeling of underlying profundity. He also has an affinity for long pauses that reveal more about the characters than any of the words they speak. He actually won the Nobel Prize in Literature a couple of years ago, and he's extremely well-known in the UK.
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Perhaps now is the time to do so...
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Have you ever had a chance to get into the fiction works of Samuel Beckett? I realize that most people read at least one of his plays (usually Waiting for Godot), but he wrote some pretty far-out Postmodern fiction in the 50s. If you can find the 3-novel volume of Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, I'd recommend reading it cover-to-cover. You can really see how his writing evolved over the course of just a few years, and all 3 novels are excellent. They're all vaguely related, too, and often get referred to as a trilogy.
There's an interesting connection to James Joyce, too - Samuel Beckett was his assistant when he was writing Finnegans Wake, and actually served as a scribe to many of Joyce's dictations for the novel when he was too ill to write himself. You'll notice some pretty obvious similarities to Joyce in his work.
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I'll check out his fiction work though, Waiting for Godot wasn't my favorite play, (That honor belongs to Goethe, Aristophanes, Beaumarchais, Moliere, and Plautus, all of 'em!) but I loved the surreal aspect of it, and so I think I'd enjoy Beckett's novels too. Thanks alot for ( ... )
Reply
If you want to check out some more contemporary playwrights that have written some outstanding work, check into reading Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and especially Edward Albee. They are all quite good.
Reply
Reply
As for Pinter, I don't have any specific recommendations. In a way, all of his plays are essentially the same - simple circumstances that involve just a few characters speaking rather mundane dialogue in a very usual way, but with a certain feeling of underlying profundity. He also has an affinity for long pauses that reveal more about the characters than any of the words they speak. He actually won the Nobel Prize in Literature a couple of years ago, and he's extremely well-known in the UK.
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