severino sometimes you focus on the oddest stuff. i mean that because this is a total tangent and not the point i was trying to make.
i don't know about you but i read demian and steppenwolf plus other things when i was 17/18/19. it was formative--or deformative (in a good way). it blew my mind of course at the time, but then he was derivative wasn't he? "illustrated jung". a lot of people don't take him seriously, criticize his way of writing, whatever. and yet-- he was great for me at that age. couldn't read him again at this point though.
also i could never get into the glass bead stuff. got too ponderous, i lost patience. but he had done his work already. many years later i read siddharta and it was "okay."
as for catcher in the rye-- it's very significant to a lot of people. i don't think it's a great book but it's a good one, and it's aimed at teenagers, no? i mean the original target audience were grownups, but the ones who took it to heart were the kids. and rightfully so. were there even teenagers before that book?
funny thing, i was talking with a friend about that book recently--independent of our conversations here. also saw it mentioned by woody allen not long ago.
anyway...
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Originally Posted by ilduclo
well an interesting discussion. I don't hear too much on this about Beckett, though, or M Brodsky. And, to me, without them, it's just a discussion of GOOD lit, not great lit.
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i don't know this brodsky-- only joseph.
so, beckett-- tell us what he does to you-- that's the interesting part. apparently he was the only one who understood joyce, or so joyce said.
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Originally Posted by demonrail666
I see Catcher in the Rye as more of a cult book than a great one, in the same bracket as something like Breakfast at Tiffany's or On the Road or L'Estranger, where reading them is almost a rite of passage for a lot of people. But then I haven't read it since I was a teenager, on the (maybe wrong) assumption that was the best and only time to do so.
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the stranger! holy shit. yes. it's another of those books 18 year olds talked about incessantly where i grew up. i eventually read it and i was "and...?" i guess my country was more way more absurd than what happens in that novel.
the trial is more like it
i mean, i know they're different, but-- the trial. holy shit. i'm never gonna be over THAT.