it's harder than it looks to simply describe what we see ✦ Brian Dillon and Lauren Oyler on literary criticism ✦ character and nature in Olga Tokarczuk and Mircea Cărtărescu's novels ✦ consumer goods
"it’s hard to describe what a novel is about"---I think this is *the* biggest challenge. I was told, aged 16~, to read The Handmaid's Tale. I asked what it was: "Canadian, feminist, sci-fi." No thanks! Turns out, it's one of the best novels ever and you can say *so much* that isn't that... so many novels have this problem. I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right now and... no-one told me how much fun it is!
yes!! I don't know about you, but I almost feel upset when a novel was described to me in a way that felt unappealing and boring…and then I'd come across it years later and realize how GOOD it was!
this is why I feel very strongly about emphasizing how Proust's In Search of Lost Time is full of gossip (not just ponderous, impenetrable long sentences about Art and Literature and so on)
another writer that (for me) was unfairly characterized in this vein is Cormac McCarthy! I'd understood him as this tremendously violent, literature bro, Western fantasy kind of guy…and then I read Blood Meridian and was amazed by how purely beautiful and reverential his descriptions of the American West are; he is SO good at describing landscapes and the emotional hold that those landscapes have on the viewer
fully agree, I think there's something "low status" about saying such things, but they are integral to good criticism
though that said, I read a McCarthy novel this year ('No Country' I think) and it was... a bloody thriller---which I did not enjoy. In that case, I wondered why everyone told me he was so literary!
Loved reading this. It gave words to a vague hypothesis that I had never quite managed to articulate. The first time I felt that mere description isn't so "mere" was while reading another work of Perec's - An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris. While he does exhaustively describe the place, he is still making a choice with every sentence, and that draws attention to what he cannot describe. I tried copying that book line by line just to get a sense of what sitting in such a place and describing it would feel like. It helped me appreciate specific description in my future reading.
"it’s hard to describe what a novel is about"---I think this is *the* biggest challenge. I was told, aged 16~, to read The Handmaid's Tale. I asked what it was: "Canadian, feminist, sci-fi." No thanks! Turns out, it's one of the best novels ever and you can say *so much* that isn't that... so many novels have this problem. I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right now and... no-one told me how much fun it is!
yes!! I don't know about you, but I almost feel upset when a novel was described to me in a way that felt unappealing and boring…and then I'd come across it years later and realize how GOOD it was!
this is why I feel very strongly about emphasizing how Proust's In Search of Lost Time is full of gossip (not just ponderous, impenetrable long sentences about Art and Literature and so on)
another writer that (for me) was unfairly characterized in this vein is Cormac McCarthy! I'd understood him as this tremendously violent, literature bro, Western fantasy kind of guy…and then I read Blood Meridian and was amazed by how purely beautiful and reverential his descriptions of the American West are; he is SO good at describing landscapes and the emotional hold that those landscapes have on the viewer
fully agree, I think there's something "low status" about saying such things, but they are integral to good criticism
though that said, I read a McCarthy novel this year ('No Country' I think) and it was... a bloody thriller---which I did not enjoy. In that case, I wondered why everyone told me he was so literary!
i really loved reading this
thank you for reading and commenting!!
Loved reading this. It gave words to a vague hypothesis that I had never quite managed to articulate. The first time I felt that mere description isn't so "mere" was while reading another work of Perec's - An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris. While he does exhaustively describe the place, he is still making a choice with every sentence, and that draws attention to what he cannot describe. I tried copying that book line by line just to get a sense of what sitting in such a place and describing it would feel like. It helped me appreciate specific description in my future reading.