craner

Beast of Burden
Mature James sentences are so long, intricate and dilation* that they do become abstract. It's no surprise, really, that Hugh Kenner opens The Pound Era with a sketch of him.

I like the style but, for example, The Golden Bowl is hard work. The rewards for many not really worth the effort.
 
Last edited:

craner

Beast of Burden
On the other hand try Daisy Miller, it's snappier and one of his best.

Actually some of the best writing on James I've read, other than Kenner, was in Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a classic in its own right.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I am pro-James, to clarify. I'm mean, it's not like Cormac Mccarthy is any different really, and you all love Blood Meridian, right?
 

luka

Well-known member
I am pro-James, to clarify. I'm mean, it's not like Cormac Mccarthy is any different really, and you all love Blood Meridian, right?

the only mccarthy i looked at was so po-faced and cackhanded i couldn t take it seriously. seemed to have a very different relationship with the sentence though. i remember him trying to borrow a biblical gravitas in his phrasing and rhythms. it just ended up as kitsch.
 

luka

Well-known member
i dont remember a lot of clauses... but perhaps that one was an anomaly or perhaps ive misremembered it
 

craner

Beast of Burden
He over used the conjunction "and" to the point of self-parody, thus creating long unrolling rhythmical sentences that became dilatory and abstract. But yes, erring more towards the kitsch than James.
 

luka

Well-known member
Last edited:

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Blood Meridian blew me away. Must give it another go some time.

Finished Oedipus Rex. Fascinating, really. Hard to judge the language in an English translation, but Fagles translation has some great language in it, and it all reminds me of Yeats (whose biography by Ellmann I finished the other day).

One of the coolest things I've discovered about Greek tragedy is that they had annual tragedy battles (Euripides won 13 times).
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Still not familiar with Pound but reading Yeats's biography has given me an appreciation of how he helped pare down and purify Yeats of his stylistic eccentricities (or should that be conventionalities?).

Blood Meridian is McCarthy fully indulging his King James Melville and then No Country For Old Men is him stripping it back - or at least that's how I remember it.
 

droid

Well-known member
The Road is maybe his most minimalist. Big love for outer dark too. Must read child of god again, as it was the first of his I found and I think I missed a lot.
 

luka

Well-known member
the road is the one i read. i liked the time of the wolf film but i wasnt into that book.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Read Amis's book about Stalin again, because I'd watched 'Death of Stalin' and it was the only book on Stalin I had to hand, so I thought I'd skim through it and ended up reading it again. It's pretty good, almost reads like a blueprint for 'The Death of Stalin''s black comic take on Stalinism, with lots of stunning examples of Bolshevik cruelty and hypocrisy. Unbelievable, the suffering Russians (not to mention Ukranians, Poles, etc.) went through.

Not having read even half of what he's written, I'd still wage that PP. 206-207 are the two most embarrassing pages Amis ever had published. Although maybe he took even more of a nosedive with all his post 9/11 'horrorism' stuff.
 
Top