My triumphant return to reading
- Thread starter linebaugh
- Start date
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
2 chapters in, this is great, like a mixture of Ezra Pound and Hemingway but without the latter's occasionally cheesy dialogue.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
And macho posing. I read a farewell to arms fairly recently and enjoyed it but the dialogue between him and his girlfriend was really corny a lot of the time.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
That sounds horrible. Everyone in the US loves it here, no complaints.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
It's as if Pound was 20 years younger, British and actually went to war. Should be as well known as Wilfred Owen.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
cushy stage, billets still fresh, navigating new trench systems with their personal touches - leaving firewood for replacements, minutiae of detail - and maybe an evening at a local bar if lucky
footnote gleaming aside it’s a tough read, not many texts have wiped me out as fully emotionally, the Gododdin references are even more poignant if you translate Catraeth as “war fence” (rather than Catterick) but a theme of the ruin of Britain is always within reach of Jones’s roaming, hyper-vigilant senses
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Yeah I'm bracing myself for the full horrors to come, only 2 chapters in.
Jones is clearly an undersung genius though that much is clear.
I like the underlying Welsh epic stuff and all the other literary allusions, not that I can really understand all that stuff yet, but it gives it even more weight and depth. But that's not even necessary to appreciate it on first read, it's actually very accessible for a modernist text, much more than the waste land or the cantos (definitely reminds me of the pisan cantos a fair bit in style) for example - I guess cos it has more of a narrative and unified theme, but not just that, he's got his own thing going on too that's very immediate, not avant garde for its own sake but to serve a purpose.
Jones is clearly an undersung genius though that much is clear.
I like the underlying Welsh epic stuff and all the other literary allusions, not that I can really understand all that stuff yet, but it gives it even more weight and depth. But that's not even necessary to appreciate it on first read, it's actually very accessible for a modernist text, much more than the waste land or the cantos (definitely reminds me of the pisan cantos a fair bit in style) for example - I guess cos it has more of a narrative and unified theme, but not just that, he's got his own thing going on too that's very immediate, not avant garde for its own sake but to serve a purpose.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I wonder if Pound was aware of him? The pisan cantos obviously came out after the second world war, so maybe the influence was mutual. That's just me assuming Jones was directly influenced by Pound though, maybe he wasn't and it was just something in the air at the time, but the similarities in style are quite striking to me
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Brilliant how he gets across the alienating strangeness of the new technology these poor kids had to get to grips with, something that marked out the first world war from other wars before it, "the complex paraphernalia of their trade"
What have you been doing instead? I struggle with getting my reading back up to speed but have been managing the last few weeks. Reading a psychotherapy book by Nancy McWilliams which I was first intimidated by but right now can't put down.
This line is apposite for @IdleRich in his golden years