"I am too stupid to properly appreciate Wolfe, so I don't even bother to pick up the books."
"Properly" is a word that bothers me there.
I have an unparalleled record of missing foreshadowing, zeugma, poetic irony, poetic anything, references to the Aeneid, themes, motifs, rats-in-the-sewers. I pretty much read for story, ideas, character, and once in a while good prose.
But I must repeat that I liked these books. Good story, interesting characters, good background, and Wolfe's sentences work for me.
For a long time I enjoyed music on a purely naive basis. Brahms might be playing very tricky games with rhythm, Franck running through a set of unorthodox key changes, Shostakovitch satirizing the manifesto of the sixteenth party congress - I didn't care as long as I enjoyed the result.
I couldn't read "Ulysses" when it was an Icon of Western Literature. But then Anthony Burgess told me that it was comic, and intended to be comic. Joyce wanted his readers enjoying themselves, not making marginal notes every couple of lines. Reading it as a book, without preconceptions, I found it to be readable, very funny (and not always subtly, KMRIA, indeed), confusing in parts but enjoyable.
I read Wolfe in the same way. There's a clever reference to Stendhal? I missed it. This faction is based on the Old Catholics? Didn't notice. That character is based on St Axamagorus. Who? I think it's possible to enjoy a good writer without paying attention to these things - they're there if you want them, but you're not really required to eat until it gets painful at an "all you can eat" buffet, despite what the sign says.
no subject
"Properly" is a word that bothers me there.
I have an unparalleled record of missing foreshadowing, zeugma, poetic irony, poetic anything, references to the Aeneid, themes, motifs, rats-in-the-sewers. I pretty much read for story, ideas, character, and once in a while good prose.
But I must repeat that I liked these books. Good story, interesting characters, good background, and Wolfe's sentences work for me.
For a long time I enjoyed music on a purely naive basis. Brahms might be playing very tricky games with rhythm, Franck running through a set of unorthodox key changes, Shostakovitch satirizing the manifesto of the sixteenth party congress - I didn't care as long as I enjoyed the result.
I couldn't read "Ulysses" when it was an Icon of Western Literature. But then Anthony Burgess told me that it was comic, and intended to be comic. Joyce wanted his readers enjoying themselves, not making marginal notes every couple of lines. Reading it as a book, without preconceptions, I found it to be readable, very funny (and not always subtly, KMRIA, indeed), confusing in parts but enjoyable.
I read Wolfe in the same way. There's a clever reference to Stendhal? I missed it. This faction is based on the Old Catholics? Didn't notice. That character is based on St Axamagorus. Who? I think it's possible to enjoy a good writer without paying attention to these things - they're there if you want them, but you're not really required to eat until it gets painful at an "all you can eat" buffet, despite what the sign says.
Now there's an idea for Pohl's "Midas Plague".
William Hyde