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Originally Posted by dead_battery
i like delillo a lot but imo he wont be remembered as the best of our era. his stuff does not shine a particularly bright light on the present - its recognizable to us but it wont tell the future much about us.
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If he is remembered it'll be because he couldn't have come from any other time. I'd say his style and themes are very contemporary, but perhaps too self-consciously so. Reading him I always think he's trying a bit
too hard to nail the 'now'. He's all sleek surfaces and numb detachment, without the depth of insight of someone like say Ballard.
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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
borges and garcía márquez will definitely still be read, on a global scale, in 100 years, just like we still read kafka.
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Yes, absolutely.
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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
mccarthy is the one i think writes like nobody else--i can't read him and say "oh i've seen this shit before." he defeats me, repeatedly, but not from any sense of banality or irrelevancy. also, unlikely to age poorly.
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He's interesting cos on one level he's very derivative of that whole Southern Gothic thing but he takes it into weird territory that's entirely his own. Blood Meridian doesn't necessarily feel overly contemporary (in the way DeLillo always does, even when his subject isn't) but it does feel utterly unique. Although I think The Road will be the more studied, just because it's more accessible in its style and taps into more recognisable contemporary anxieties. Blood Meridian is one of the best things I've ever read, period, but it's almost impossible to put it into any really meaningful cultural category or context.