A horrid waste of paper

Tony, The Old Man and the Sea is the worst Hemingway book. Definitely try the short stories. And I agree about Lawrence. It has nothing to do with fashion. I don't like him for the same reasons as you. To be fair though the Sons part of Sons and Lovers is good. It is only the Lovers part that is awful.

Don't know about Lawrence, but I love Pais' post!

Yes, me too.. isnt it gorgeous? Always easy to spot a lit student eh pais? ;o)

*gulp* *hides thesis*

knew it. *smirks*

Sorry, can we go back a bit... 11,000 words! Eleven thousand words! I would write it in binary if I knew how. I'm going now to cry myself to sleep.

The whole point of chick lit for me (a male, and so not interested in shopping, shoes, or shagging tall dark strangers with stubble) is the wit (see Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella); without that, the genre is nothing. If we're talking worst books ever, though, let's aim higher. My nomination is "Metamorphosis and Other Stories" by Franz Kafka. (Maybe it was the translation, I don't know.) I too forced myself to the end. "In the Penal Colony": what a dog of a story that is! Right; I've probably upset someone now. d.beswetherick.

You can't knock Kafka. You just can't. Kafka ROCKS. Okay, the novels - The Trial, America, etc - are bleakly teenage in some respects but the short stories! Man, the short stories! Kafka's short stories are like the benchmark for what short stories should be . . . D.Beswetherick! Not so much upset as . . . disappointed!!

Kafka does indeed rock Peter. *Glares at Bes* Going back to chick lit, the thing that puts the buyer in so much danger, is that it covers such a wide area. Marian Keyes is brilliant (see onder the duvet for a fab collection of shorts - that doesnt sound right does it? never mind) and also India Knight. Both great, and FUNNY - that is definitely the key(es).

His short stories are splendid, but the Trial is very, very dull. You get the point of someone trapped in a nightmarish world of suspicion and bureacracy with no way out after fifty pages and then he just gets belabouring the point. Don't even get me started on Jane Austen... Not a huge fan of chick-lit myself, but I would concur - it is the humour and observation in the good ones that makes them worthwhile; the imitators just go for brand-dropping and self-pity and consumption and hope that'll do. Which it does, if sales are anything to go by.

You get the point of someone trapped in a nightmarish world of suspicion and bureacracy with no way out. I think thats the intention andrew :o)

Well, this is good: no one agrees with me. And, funnily enough, I rather like "The Castle", if only as a creepy story with some amusing cartoon characters in it that remind me of Durrenmatt. I admit that "Metamorphosis" is the best story in "Metamorphosis and Other Stories", if only because something actually happens in it, but I still think it's dreadful. Hasidic parables are all very well, but only if they fill no more than one paragraph. What's the point of the beetle story, please (now there's a challenge, Wildy), beyond the obvious? I can understand why Kafka's literary philosophy (life is crap and meaningless, and there's nothing you can do about it; people are crap; social life is crap; psychology is a waste of space; proper plots aren't worth bothering with; women - sod em) might appeal to the unhappy people and nihilists among us, but I'm not much interested in the anti-life stance myself; perhaps that's why I fail to see Kafka's merits beyond the Germanic doggedness of it, which in any case the lad inherited. * This is my favourite (what fun to discuss Marian Keyes and Kafka in the same post) bit from "Under the Duvet": "Women are divided into shoe women, bath-products women, or nice-underwear women. I'm definitely a shoe woman. Or an Imelda, as we like to call ourselves." It's not so much the content or humour of that which I like, but the parallelisms and cadences. The three elements of the list increase sweetly in length: shoe women bath-products women and nice underwear women then by placing her own position, cleverly the first I'm definitely a shoe woman where she does, Keyes echoes the first element and at the same time arrests the flow that she set in motion. The "snapper" Or an Imelda, as we like to call ourselves. unleashes an extra step after this caesura and clinches the sequence. Marian Keyes and more than a few other CL writers can actually write - and not just about frothy stuff, either. d.beswetherick. (Here feebly trying to make up with the above remarkably profound dissection of a mere chick-lit nugget for his regrettable blindness to the merits of that water-stuffed capon, the over-puffed bluffer of Prague.)

Kafka and me got loads in common.

well actually, thats a lie. Just the overpuffed bluffer bit.

yowza...kafka is great in his own way....for example, without kafka we wouldn't know what to call a kafka-esque story, now would we? It's a bit like criticizing Shakespeare for being full of cliches. Well, almost. One thing that helped me with Kafka was Thomas Mann's intro to The Castle. He described Kafka as a 'religious humorist.' The stories were not about political bureaucracies. They were about the impossibility of knowing God. Of course, it works either way. Evidently, Kafka thought his stuff was very funny. He would read it aloud to friends and crack up laughing so hard he couldn't finish reading the story. I guess some would call that an undisguised blessing. I like The Penal Colony. BE JUST, young man. Burroughs took off on that one with the following: As the one judge said to the other: Be just; and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.

Will Self a big Kafka fan too, no?

is that a recommendation (Will Self liking someone) ?

nope... but he loves to rip him off.

My girlfriend loves Marian Keyes. Chick lit in general for that matter. People love it to bits. I had a girl at work telling me 'oh, you just have to read Angels, it's soooo brilliant. The writer soooo understands relationships.....' I could feel myself turning into Mark Lawson from the Late Show, wanting a full on analysis of WHY and HOW and then I realised no, fair enough, it's a book, what the hell. Literature's a broad church. All sorts are welcome. If you want to fill your mind with tedious lies and fluff and wet paper then so be it (I stroke my chin and reach for Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling). I think Kafka is a very funny writer. It's death rattlle humour. He came home from working as a bean counter each day and took his revenge by dreaming up the most obscure and bleakest tales possible (i've never got the pleasure of reading his diary though. It's referred to as a must read but I've tried four or five times and it just seems like the diary of a bean counter who is too old to be living with his mum and dad and blatantly needs a shag). On another note, anyone read Valley of the Dolls? Julie Burchill was raving about it in The Guardian and she made it sound almost tempting....But then it's Burchill, and she's been mad for at least five years now...

Twenty-five years.

I first read Valley at about 13 years old, and loved it... I read it again recently,and it stands the test of time.. a great, tear jerking, horrifying and at times brilliantly observed, humorous, thumping, belter of a saga. Try it Marc.

I like Kafka. I'm glad people have brought attention to the idea of his being funny, because that's what I like about him. He's more Marx Brothers than '1984'. The trouble with any author famed for 'literariness' is that people go to them expecting mere profundity and depth. We had a seminar on Jonson's 'The Alchemist' recently, where people complained about how hard the language was to understand, completely oblivious (as I'm sure I would have been if I hadn't read the introductory notes,) to the fact that the characters are supposed to be bullsh.itting each other for comic effect. Once you're told this, the play's pretty damn funny.

Yeah, Hen, but Franz never did anything half as funny as the tootsy-fruitsy ice-cream routine, did he? I can see it now Gregor Samsa stretched out one morning in his bed and said, "Why Miss Lindsay, are you not married yet? You're liable to wind up an old maid. Bring her in and we can wind her up together" (Actually, there is something a bit Kafka about the tootsy-fruitsy routine. And also something a little akin to Lewis Carroll's Achilles and the Tortoise dialogue, in that every time Groucho buys a book from Chico, he finds out that he needs to buy another book to make sense of the last book and gets further and further away from the racing tip that he's looking for. There's a nice Borges essay on Kafka, discussing writers who could all be described as forerunners to Kafka but who would have nothing in common if it hadn't been for Kafka following and creating the notion of Kafka-eque)

I saw "The Alchemist" once, and found it very funny. Two things I remember: one of the gulls waxing lyrical about the effect of dolphin's milk, and a Spanish bloke who was locked in the privy at one juncture and emerged again towards the end after we'd all forgotten about him. Since then I've caught every Jonson play I can, though I've never actually read one. My impression is that you need a gifted comic cast who know how to get the best out of the language. "Dolphin's milk" can sound hilarious, for example, when pronounced in a certain way on stage. After a few minutes getting used to the language, you then start laughing at virtually everything.

Indirectly, he's a precursor of Marx brothers, Chaplin, Keaton. He writes brilliantly about childhood and naivity - innocence. He's writing about that sudden loss of innocence as a child when you become aware you'll die; a fall from grace, if you like, (waking up as an insect) , the so called curse of orginal sin...leaving that garden of Eden.... which is consciousness, self awareness (arbitrarily being sentenced to death). His diary is full of references to the Torah and Jewish mysticism. But he definitely saw the humour and absurdity in it all in his stories and novels, especially regarding god. It's the Wittgenstein (I think!) thing isn't it: If a Lion (or any animal for that matter) could speak perfect English, we still wouldn't have a clue what it was saying. He had fantastic logic and reason but dropped this into one of the greatest melting pot's of imagination a person has been lucky enough to have and been disciplined enough not to abuse. Personally, I think Kafka is the last place you find Kafkaesque - that's in writers like Arthur Koestler and Orwell and Huxley, who can be crushing to read.

Well, that elegant advocacy convinced me to give him another chance. I apologise for my bumptious dismissal of him earlier in the thread; the fault is mine, of course, and I'm never happy when I don't "get" a modern master.* I was rather high on Friday when I wrote my anti-Kafka posts, because I'd written 11000 words that day, a deliriously large amount for a normally slow writer. *Other modern classics I've foundered on: "Ulysses" (but I love "Portrait" and "Dubliners") "Malone Dies" and "Happy Days" (but I love "Waiting for Godot") Thomas Mann (but I enjoyed "Felix Krull") # If I had to nominate an alternative Jewish master to Kafka, it would be Ishaac Bashevis Singer - a truly accessible Nobel Prize winner. I've read everything of his I could get my hands on. "The Estate" and "The Manor" (essentially one book) comprise a great modern classic, in my opinion. d.beswetherick.

I'd hardly call you bumptious, mate. besides, you did me a favour, I've been dying to get that off my chest for years!

'I'd written 11000 words that day' OMG. I think that gives you carte blanche to denounce any writer you choose, Bes. Kafka's funny, but *eleven k*? Bet he never wrote that much in a day.

You CANNOT knock Kafka. I saw the most extraordinary adaptation of Metamorphosis by an all female troupe called Cunning Stunts at the Festival of Fools in Exeter in 1974 where the woman who metamorphosed was able throw her legs over her shoulders and crawl around just like a spider - quite magnificent in a field. Don't start on Jane Austen either - I had enough trouble with Emily Dubberley on that one. But if you want to start knocking literary bigwigs then let's get going on the appalling DH Lawrence or the boring Ernest Hemingway.

Tony, Tony, Tony . . . You can't knock Lawrence . . . For one thing: Sons and Lovers For another: Anybody who desired to give EM Forster a good drubbing . . . Come on . . .

The "BORING ERNEST HEMINGWAY"!!!!! (Reels and looks round for his high horse. Ah, here it is.) "If I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it. The Prado, looking like some big American college building, with sprinklers watering the grass early in the bright Madrid summer morning; the bare white mud hills looking across towards Carabanchel; days on the train in August with the blinds pulled down on the side against the sun and the wind blowing them; chaff blown against the car in the wind from the hard earthen threshing floors; the odour of grain and the stone windmills. It would have had the change when you leave the green country behind at Alsasua; it would have had Burgos far across the plain and eating the cheese later up in the room; it would have had the boy taking the wicker-bound jugs of wine on the train as samples...." (Death in the Afternoon.) "The first thing an Italian soldier should be told is to roll over on his face if he is hit and cannot keep moving. There is a man alive today who did not know that rule during the fighting of the last war in German East Africa. While he was unconscious the vultures got his eyes and he woke in the stabbing blinding pain with the stinking feathered shuffle over him and, beating at them, rolled onto his face in time to save half of it. They were pecking his clothing away to get at his kidneys wehen the stretcher bearers came up and drove them off. If you ever want to see how long it takes them to come to a live man, lie down under a tree, perfectly still, and watch them, first circling so high they look as small as specks, then coming, dropping in concentric circles, then plummeting down in a whish of rushing wings to deal with you. You sit up and the ring jumps back raising their wings. But what about if you could not sit up?" (An Ornithological Letter.) Boring, nooooooo-hoooo. d.beswetherick.

I love Hemingway - hate Lawrence - love Forster. I haven't read Kafka although I have been to his house. He wasn't in at the time. (If I was more like Joe Orton and he was more like TS Eliot I might have been happy to sit in his chair. But neither of us were.)

I like Ernest's early short stories. Fiesta The Sun Also Rises is one of my favorite books. But The Old Man and The Sea is absolute toilet, as is For Whom The Bell Tolls. I defy anyone to defend those books. Adverts on the tube are more fun to read. When he's good, there's no one to touch him, when he's bad, he is very, very bad.

Yeah Marc 'The Sun Also Rises' is fab; very strange sexual things going on there. But I also loved for Whom the Bell Tolls.

Why does everyone hate Lawrence? Lawrence said: “I was brought up on the Bible, and seem to have it in my bones. From early childhood I have been familiar with Apocalyptic language and Apocalyptic image: not because I spent my time reading Revelation, but because I was sent to Sunday School and to chapel, to Band of Hope and to Christian Endeavour and was always having the Bible read to me.” As a child, then, Lawrence was infused, shaped, battered by Apocalypse, by the Sunday School teachers and by the fire-and-brimstone authority of the chapel pulpit. It entered his blood and he wrote: You can’t get away from this. Blood-consciousness overwhelms, obliterates, and annuls mind- consciousness. Mind-consciousness extinguishes blood-consciousness, and consumes the blood. We are all of us conscious in both ways. And the two ways are antagonistic in us. They will always remain so. That is our cross. Lawrence’s own ‘blood-consciousness’ carried the roaring sound of the words of the Apocalypse, the frightful visions of a saint brought to life in the thundering delivery of the preacher. He carried the visions and the sound in his own blood. His own mind and his own blood were antagonistic, overwhelming, extinguishing, consuming, annulling each other, the two ways of consciousness, a roaring battle between the twin antagonistic consciousnesses thundering inside him. That was his cross. He embodied the conflict in Women In Love, which he wrote during 1916, in the middle of the First World War -- an apocalyptic time, when the reality of the prophecy of the Apocalypse felt very close. For Lawrence, the world was ending. “For the time is at hand.” (Revelations XXII:10) Yes, Lawrence is "appalling" in many ways... but I find his writing addictive, seductive, appallingly powerful despite all its many many problems, appallingly lucid in spite of its opacity and appallingly poetic in the insistent rhythm of its repetitions. Oh yes.

I couldn't agree with you more pais! Unfortunately Lawrence seems to be suffering from being 'anti-hip' at the moment, not fashionable at all it seems. Who cares? Yes at times he is ridiculously over indulgent, corpulent almost but his writing has a undeniable power to it. Rock on Lawrence! Rock on pais! [%sig%]

OK, time to defend myself. Lawrence is so over-blown that his undoubted underlying talent is cleverly hidden beneath an avalanche of hyperbole. he over-writes to such an extent that I, for one, find it almost impossible to read him. I just burst out laughing. Hemingway - maybe I haven't read enough of him. I was put off early when I read The Old Man and The Sea and found it dull, dull, dull. A number of people have pointed me in the direction of the short stories so I'll give them a whirl and reconsider.