Checking in...
Blindness was chillingly good; I highly recommend it. Now I am finishing up Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell before delving in to any new books (although I'm sure by the end of the day I will have started a new book anyways - maybe this is why it takes me so long to finish many books?) It is definitely an entertaining read, if not "great" literature. Here's a question - what makes literature "great" or "classic" or "for the ages?"
If anyone is interested in finding an author who has a truly unique voice unlike any I've read before, I'd recommend Thomas Wharton. He wrote Icefields and Salamander (and maybe others? Those are the two I've read.) His books have an air of fantasy about them, so if you prefer completely realistic books, these probably won't be for you, but if you're willing to suspend disbelief for a few hours, you may find them very enjoyable.
posted by Jennifer D. @ 6:40 AM
1 Comments:
Shoot! I didn't respond to the great-literature question, though I read your post last month. So let's see how long it takes you to see this...
Reading Lolita in Tehran sheds some light on what makes great literature, as I'm sure you're finding, and I may be repeating Nafisi. This is also a question we talk about a good bit over in Shakespeare studies, though, and something I wrote in a paper not long ago is that Shakespeare is "not of an age but for all time" (Ben Jonson) in part because he is so much of his age, or rather because he saw his age so clearly. I'm thinking and re-thinking this as I type, but what I mean is that though Jonson and Middleton wrote good plays that were steeped in contemporary London, they're so steeped that many of the jokes are lost on audiences today. Likewise, there's a lot of erudite stuff in Shakespeare that only the footnote-readers catch, but I want to say he never lost sight of the big-picture humor/pathos of it all (in the big picture they're sometimes hard to distinguish), while Jonson and Middleton tend to get caught up in the minutiae. That sounds like a simple trick (just keep your perspective, young grasshopper), but I think it's nearly impossible and might be part of what genius is. He's constantly making references to Elizabethan and Jacobean England, or at least what were heard as references at the time, while Troilus and Cressida was performed a lot during the Vietnam War because its message seemed to fit with the anti-war disgust that was so prevalent. A line will seem unmistakably about the French ambassador (though subtle enough to slip by the censor) and also incredibly reminiscent of your best friend's mother. Okay, maybe this is it: great literature is that which transports you (good old escapism) but also widens your view, so that you see farther, or more clearly, or more empathetically, than before (it's also a challenge).
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