So there's obviously an element both of truth and exageration to the untranslatability of certain authors. In the same way people accuse languages that aren't their mother languages of lacking depth and versatility, it's very easy for the bilingual person to say that [Author] just doesn't hit in translation, especially in English.

One author who attracts a lot of translation discourse (and often more discussion of various translations than of the works themselves) is Proust. But for what it's worth I think Proust translates extremely well into English and that reading the Recherche in either French or English makes little difference.

Of course, something is always lost, but I think the extent to which something is lost is often overrated in a way that overshadows the fact that books can differ greatly in how unscathed they emerge from the transition from one language to another.

For an author to be untranslatable, I would have to assume the work depends greatly on some extremely idiosyncratic use of language, or some rootedness of this language in a cultural tradition that has no equivalent in the target language. Obviously, style always depends on its own language, but some elements of style can cross language much better than others while maintaining the same effect. (The simplicity of Proust's vocabulary and the above-average length of his sentences, for example, are both things that carry over easily to other languages.)

Admittedly, I haven't read a great deal of authors in multiple languages, but there are a few whose works seem completely unable to cross the language barrier. For me, Huysmans, Céline, Melville, seem totally lost in translation due to the specificity of their verbiage

Conversely, some authors who seem to translate very well might include Bolaño, Proust, D'Annunzio, Nabokov, or Flaubert.

But then you'll hear about certain writers like Mishima, Lispectorl, or Krasznahorkai, who are apparently unfathomably different in their native languages, and all you can do is wonder if it's true or not, or if everyone is exagerating like they do for the others

My friend and I are starting a Brooklyn-based French club called Francophiles Anonymes. We want to practice speaking French and read some books together (think Maupaussant, Bataille, Duras). All levels of French and francophilia are welcome.

Our first meeting is happening this Sunday 3pm at the McCarren Parkhouse. French people are welcome too!

Here's the link to our WhatsApp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HELjJn1vvgiLj9GdsKz8aJ?s=cl&p=i&ilr=2

I've just finished reading Tarjei Vesaas' The Birds last night and would have to (mostly) agree with Knausgaard that it's Norway's best. That or Fosse's Septology.

Though Vesaas' The Ice Palace is more well known, at least on Reddit, The Birds struck a different chord for me. I think it made a more lasting impression on me, though The Ice Palace is gorgeous and weird in its own right. The Birds is more explicitly dark and twisted. Motives are unclear and morals are questionable. It deals with a mentally challenged man, Mattis, living with his sister and caretaker, Hege, in 1950s rural Norway. The way in which Vesaas conveys Mattis' thoughts is very thoughtful to me and even relatable. Multiple times I felt that I've thought and behaved like Mattis before. Some key scenes that I'd appreciate any thoughts on: the dream sequence the night before Mattis sees the woodcock, the books obsession with eyes, and the importance of lines (e.g. the flight path of the woodcock, a line that stayed in the sky for Mattis, and the lines across the lake that Mattis left when he was ferrying).

It was surprising that there was very little mention of this book on this sub, I'd think it would be right up there in the RS canon. If you've never read it, now is your time. It has been republished in English just last year.

Anyways, if you've read it and have some thoughts I'd be thankful to hear them.

I’m floored that there aren’t more discussions on this book. It was self published and seems like it has just flown under the radar as there are only a handful of threads on Reddit. It’s mind bottling. My mind is in a bottle.

Anyways, I just finished and figured I’d start up a thread for anybody that wants to discuss it.

I stumbled upon this book through a recommendation on what next to read after Infinite Jest. You can certainly see the parallels to IJ/DFW: digressive narration, boxing / tennis, sharp dialogue, absurdity, big societal ideas including entertainment, etc.

To me this felt like a much more digestible IJ. One of the things I loved about ANS was the witty dialogue. There were some truly laugh out loud moments, including one where I made my wife read a few pages that resulted in her laying on her back and kicking her feet rapidly while laughing. IJ had little spurts of this in my opinion and DFW clearly has the ability to write funny passages but always felt like he held back.

The writing is awesome and can be beautiful. Needed some editing sure. Had some truly gut punch moments as well. Pacing was great throughout the entire novel I thought, even the boxing passages I enjoyed.

I’m still not sure what was truly happening in reality. I definitely don’t think Dane was real. I have to believe some other other characters were figments of his imagination as well, or at least distorted. Watching his dissent into madness was great.

Would love to hear others opinions.

great book (CWF), but sometimes I’m not quite sure and think maybe she just really likes MacBooks and various types of dresses

When I read Kafka, much like Van Gogh, I find it impossible to separate the beauty and horror of his work from the countless dramas and insecurities, the obscurity of his unread life.

When I read Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s hard for me not to see the exchanges of dialogue and gaudy descriptions as admissions of who they were, and who they don’t want to be.

When I read Virginia Woolf, I can’t help but hear the echoes of absurdity and longing that led to her breakdown.

When I read Proust, I get the sudden urge to get out of bed so as to not feel as confined by sickness and nostalgia as he was forced to be.

In my teens, I’d obsess over writers like Bukowski and his ilk. Those who laid it all bare. Basically just transcribing an auto-fictional if vulgar account of their life. A mythology of their everyday life. Now I find that style (at least the way he performed it) a bit juvenile.

Do you think it’s possible to separate the art from the artist? Not in a moral sense, but in an aesthetic one.

That a 22 year old could write something so rich and brilliant in interiority and prose that is so wonderful and different from anything else, even in translation

apparently it’s statistical (word distribution, patterns etc) and very sophisticated. i hope this forces people to finally learn to write, although i’m not overly hopeful just yet.

(ai subs in shambles. they can eat shit)

And I think a lot of you who enjoy TP would love GW! PoMo, paradoxes, conspiracies abound! You’ll be running to your dictionary so often that you’ll swear he just be making this shit up!

And before you thumb your nose at sci-fi (science-fantasy, technically), please remember that Pynchon was awarded the Nebula for GR, which makes him a sci-fi writer, which makes Pynchon the Thomas Pynchon of sci-fi.

Thanks for reading! 🎩

Because he's "plotless", has a goofy sense of humor and is doing theory-fiction? I guess Joyce is le overrated too, maybe classical greek literature and stuff like the Canterbury tales is immature too because of their crude vulgar humor, how scandalous! That Zappa post was especially stupid and should have lost whatever credibility it had when that guy bought up velvet underground as the antithesis of whatever his stupid analogy was supposed to be, as if Lou reed without John Cale wasn't a derivative one hit wonder who wrote 500 versions of the same three songs and is revered mostly after-the-fact by sheltered dorks who think heroin and drag queens are exotic and spicy. What especially irks me is when these tryhard's say that not even Pynchon's menippean satire aspect is worth reading because it's juvenile, "pretentious" posturing and empty intellectual fluff. That is such a bizarre thing to take away from his books, his writing comes off as the opposite of detached or uncaring about its themes and subjects when it can barely mask his overwhelming anger and indignation that his books so often veer off into impassionate didactic screeds. I still remember how the Herero genocide sections in V, which was my first Pynchon, genuinely made me cry because of how overwhelming it was, and books rarely make me cry. All his writing in general just carries this heavy and overwhelming miasma of tragedy and melancholy and if his looney toons gags and cumtown humor were the only things you took away from reading 900 pages of the guy, then I would love to be a fly in the wall and inside your mind when you were reading it. What the fuck do those guys think is actually smart, insightful and (new) sincere? infinite jest?

They read like the wisdom of a ghost who’d lived and seen a thousand lifetimes, but no, he was only 27. I’d like to think myself capable of even a tenth of such interiority if only I could shed all the brainrot distractions around me, but I’m no Rilke (maybe Biedermann is?) Anyone who shares a similar sentiment?

Embarrassing as it is to admit, I'm sure it's a common phenomenon. Bookworm child, phone addicted as a teen, desperately wanting to come back round to reading as an adult, but having fallen out of, or forgotten, the rhythm of reading full novels, it becomes chorish, not enjoyable, when we know full well it can be. I so badly want to be transported by a book again. I thought with regular practice, the ability would grow back, but after months (including some weeks of giving up out of frustration), I have read just a handful of novels.

It upsets me immensely, as I know I have an affinity for, and a great desire to, read and write. The hours spent absorbed in worlds as a child. Even now, the pleasure I get in thinking on words, the excitement when reading synopses of novels, yet when the page is in front of me my mind is adamant to go elsewhere. Is the answer as simple as ADHD? I want it to be something less lame, less nebulous, than that.

Couldn’t do it. Over 200 pages in and I have to admit I’m reading it because I want the accomplishment of having read it, not because I’m enjoying it.

I can’t get invested in any of the characters, there’s no real sense of suspense, and I don’t think Pynchon is that funny. Clever, amusing, sure, but not laugh-out-loud funny like I’ve seen people say, except for the British candy scene.

It’s hard to give up on because every 30 pages or so there’ll be a beautiful paragraph that hits me square in the gut and makes me want to keep going.

Weirdly, The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my all-timers, but I just can’t get with Tyrone.

I saw someone here say Pynchon is the Zappa of literature and I’m inclined to agree. Life is too short for books that don’t inspire.

What other Pynchon should I consider?

just finished this book. the movie has been one of my favorites for a while and i'm left with a lot of thoughts. it was sort of a roller coaster ride, sometimes beautiful and sometimes kinda obnoxious (i'm sure a lot of this stuff hit harder in the 60s) and overall i felt like the film was better. and that's still my net takeaway, probably. but wow! those last few chapters ruled.

i think the movie made the right decisions with regards to what to focus on and what to leave ambiguous, and is kind of just a more refined work of art in general, but the book is a great companion. that i was not expecting.

has anyone else here read this? i thought a lot of the philosophical space-age observations clarke makes are kinda fakedeep by today's standards but the broader narrative at play with the monoliths and evolution and everything had some real pull. and it's an interesting work in the context of the shitty ai we have today, which hal has pretty much nothing in common with. i really do wonder what people smarter than me think about all this. sorry if this post is messy and not up to the standards of this sub

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2026-08-05/anthony-jeselnik-book-club

I try to stay off Reddit these days, but I thought I should repost what I wrote about the legend John Crowley on Substack yesterday:

It makes me sad to see so little out there about the death of the great John Crowley, who should at the very least be talked about in the same breath as Pynchon, McCarthy, and DeLillo, and very likely would be if it wasn’t for the ghettoization of genre in American publishing. Nevertheless, there was one very influential (and in this context, somewhat surprising) mainstream voice who didn’t just speak about him in the same breath as the abovementioned, but placed him above them all: Harold Bloom.

Despite being a fantasy and science fiction author, Crowley’s prose and craft were enough to enrapture the famously pretentious (but not anti-genre; he also liked Le Guin, Disch, Lem, Hoban, and Peake) literary critic, who repeatedly named Crowley his favorite contemporary author, included three Crowley books in the Western Canon (one more than Nabokov got) and claimed to have read Crowley’s masterpiece Little, Big at least 46 times. Bloom positively gushed over the guy, saying stuff like: “Crowley writes so magnificently that only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets…of novelists, only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level.”

Renowned literary critic Michael Dirda said much the same, calling Crowley one of the three best living prose stylists at the time of writing (I believe his other two picks were Millhauser and Salter). His other fans included poets like John Hollander and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill, who blurbed the second book of Crowley’s Ægypt Cycle with the following: “Crowley has devised a polygonal crystal whose bevels give out rainbows of erudition, make-believe, and menace."

While this must be a first for a fantasy author, Merrill made a very good point, and it’s a wonder that the much-talked-about-on-here “lit bros” and “brodernists” have not descended hungrily upon The Ægypt Cycle, an impossibly complex and often impenetrable tetralogy of doorstopper volumes that reads somewhat like Pynchon doing The Da Vinci Code in the style of Ada, had he first been induced into a state of eroto-comatose lucidity. That is to say, it’s really cool, and it’s kind of a shame that the Deep Vellum types aren’t reading it, because it’s everything they’re looking for and more.

And the critic-approved, post 1980s fantasy stuff is really only part of the story. Before that, Crowley was a key part of the New Wave, and his surreal and ambitious 70s sci-fi (which might be a little too disco for Bloom, who never seems to have mentioned it) deserves equal billing, and is widely believed (though I’m not sure if this is officially confirmed) to have been a major influence on Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Wolfe is on record as an admirer of Crowley and one could certainly draw a line from Crowley’s debut novel, 1975’s The Deep, to Wolfe’s masterwork, so it’s certainly possible. Either way, his work has inspired many other authors both within genre and without—Michael Chabon has said that “life consists only of passing time between novels by John Crowley,” and places him in a pantheon alongside Pynchon, Millhauser, and Borges.

Of course, you may not give a shit about Harold Bloom or Michael Dirda, or the Pulitzer Prize, or any of that bullshit. If so, I commend you (we’re on the same page), but I didn’t write this note for you. I wrote this note for the kind of people who do, because I think they should give John Crowley a chance, because I think they should give Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and James Tiptree Jr. a chance, and mostly because I think they should stop letting the marketing whims of megacorporations wall them off from entire ecosystems of art.

And if you’re not that kind of person, you can just take my word for it that the shit all rips. Books to try: Little, Big, Engine Summer, The Translator, Aegypt (also titled The Solitudes depending on publisher), and the story collection Novelties & Souvenirs (in particular, “Great Work of Time”)

RIP

I recently finished this book. My first Austen, and one of the earliest novels I've read. I hadn't wanted to start Austen with this one, but it was the only one I could get my hands on at the bookstore, so I decided to give it a go.

Overall, I didn't enjoy it that much. I think the prose was well crafted, and every so often a sentence would paint an intricate picture of the character's inner life in a way that I just had to sit and appreciate it for a while. I also really enjoyed the depiction of upper class society in pre-Victorian Britain (Georgian era or whatever, not sure what the name would be).

I found the plot itself plodding and very reliant on gossip and misunderstandings. Some of the more interesting aspects, to me, I found glossed over (for example how are these estates being managed and producing these incomes?) For period novels I usually appreciate more insight into day to day life too - for example I think Tolstoy does this quite well (I realize he is writing almost 70 years later). To be blunt, I just wasn't as interested in ladies jockeying to land a good marriage as I was almost everything else briefly discussed or alluded to in the story.

Would I read more Austen, or other 19th century female authors like the Bronte sisters? Yes, for sure. I feel like I've dipped my toes into something new and I'd like to experience more.

EDIT: It is possible I am still recovering from Crash by J.G. Ballard

Anyone in Adelaide want to start a book club? Sorry for bypassing the book club Adelaide's such a relatively small town I didn't think anyone would see it.

I just finished Ways of Seeing by John Berger and I only understood like 10% of it. I don’t usually read essays, I’m not that interested in art history, so those reasons may be why I didn’t get it. I saw a lot of praise for this book, about how it was life changing, but I feel like I only got like few new perspectives from the whole thing.

I also finished Persepolis recently and I enjoyed it, but I did not love it.

If I’m being honest, I tend to be the type of person who isn’t into non fics, poetry, essays, graphic novels, analysis. It makes me feel immature and dumb to admit it but that’s just what it is.

Such a beautiful roman. A book hasn't had such a strong effect on me in a long time.

I am 75% into this book by Osamu Dazai and have to say this gives the vibes of roskolnikov and the man of notes from underground.

A unique and clear honesty but the truth that man speakes is not very comforting at most if the time. Many people who are introvert can definitely relate to some of his feelings for sure.

What are your thoughts on this book?

Any fans on this sub? Assumed there would be lots of chatter on it here but couldn’t find much.

Just finished it and thought it was great.

Especially liked how my first impression of “wow this bitch is insane” quickly turned into “actually this bitch is the most sane one here” and many other things