[ThirdTerm]

Winston S. Churchill's "Their Finest Hour". When I wrote a thesis on this subject in Britain, the lecturer corrected the word Russia and replaced it with the Soviet Union because he was a Soviet specialist. But I think both terms are acceptable in the literature and it saves space when we use a simpler term.

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Their Finest Hour enthrallingly recounts key events and battles from May to December 1940 as Britain stood isolated while Nazi Germany pursued its seemingly unconquerable war path - the fall of France, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, the horrors of the Blitz and Hitler's plans to invade and crush Russia, his sole ally in Europe.

[Wellsy]

Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited

[Reichstraten]

Anybody knows why American literature is so unimpressive?
Or am I missing something?
It's nothing compared to Russian literature.

[Potemkin]

Anybody knows why American literature is so unimpressive?
Or am I missing something?
It's nothing compared to Russian literature.

My guess is that it's due to the fundamental shallowness and materialism of American culture. They seem to have a certain... hostility towards any form of profundity. The only American novelist with any Dostoyevskian profundity to his work was Herman Melville, and he was so unsuccessful with the American reading public that he gave up writing novels for twenty years. Lol.

[Victoribus Spolia]

My guess is that it's due to the fundamental shallowness and materialism of American culture. They seem to have a certain... hostility towards any form of profundity.

Did somebody just rip into America? Motherfucker.

[Potemkin]

I rest my case.

[Heisenberg]

I haven't made a hell of a lot of progress with the Solzhenitsyn book. I just can't muster up the energy. I'm starting to think @Potemkin has a point about him.

In the meantime, I've been entertaining myself with Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology and Tom Holland's Persian Fire.

[Reichstraten]

Herman Melville is the only American writer I like.
And Elie Wiesel, but he wasn't even born in America.
Hemingway is considered the be one the best American writers, but he's highly overrated.

[Potemkin]

Hemingway is considered the be one the best American writers, but he's highly overrated.

I disagree. Hemingway's shtick about bullfighting and masculinity gets a bit wearisome, but his prose style more than makes up for it. For example....

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

That guy knew how to write good prose.

[Reichstraten]

Well, I´m not really into nature.
Thoreau is boring as hell too.

[Heisenberg]

I'm with you on Hemingway, @Reichstraten. I've forced myself through a few of his books and stories, and I just can't understand the hype. For starters, nothing fucking happens. There's only so much "And then we had a glass of brandy and looked over the horizon and thought about the women and the animals as the breeze ran through the bushes and trees and mountains and grass" that I can take before I want to turn a shotgun on myself.

[Potemkin]

Philistines!

[Heisenberg]

[Reichstraten]

Something completely different: I'm really into frame stories.
Most famous examples of this are The Canterbury Tales, Decamerone and Arabian Nights.
I've helped making a translation of the Arabian Nigths in Dutch.
Apparently Job, my favourite book from the bible, is a frame story as well.

[Drlee]

Anybody knows why American literature is so unimpressive?
Or am I missing something?
It's nothing compared to Russian literature.

Without granting your point I might point out that perhaps Americans are happier and unlike Russians do not look upon literature to relieve their pain. That said. Americans write the funniest books in the world. And screenplays.

By the way. On the last point. We make movies for catharsis.

[colliric]

Something completely different: I'm really into frame stories.
Most famous examples of this are The Canterbury Tales, Decamerone and Arabian Nights.
I've helped making a translation of the Arabian Nigths in Dutch.
Apparently Job, my favourite book from the bible, is a frame story as well.

Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew had a classic frame story too.

Also H.G Wells The Time Machine is told from the point of view of his friend who is writing it down into a book for us using The Time Traveler's own Journal.

And a classic 20th Century children's is found in Michael Ende's The Neverending Story which had a two layered frame story, in one frame Bastion is reading the story of Atreyu, slowing becoming part of it, while the second Frame breaks the fourth wall. The book indicates Bastion is made aware "Others are with you, they came with you from the beginning" in other words the Book itself is it's secondary frame. You are reading Bastion reading the story of Atreyu and the book frames things as such.

[colliric]

Double

[Reichstraten]

Without granting your point I might point out that perhaps Americans are happier and unlike Russians do not look upon literature to relieve their pain.

Yes, happy people are superficial.

"Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does."
-Nietzsche



@colliric
Thanks for the mentions, but I don't like fantasy or science fiction.

Now reading: Jeremias Gotthelf - The Black Spider

[Drlee]

Yes, happy people are superficial.

God grant a world full of happy people.

[Wellsy]

In the vein of American having a relative shallowness, I find interesting the association DFW seems to make with American culture and consumerism instilled in the American public.
Interview is in 2003