/lit/ - Literature

Read it a couple years ago and loved it, if you like the opening so much you're in for a real treat

Eh, not to sound too elitist, but are you new to reading? Because it's kind of a trivial thing to have noticed. To begin with, the book was originally written in Russian, which use a different quotation symbol («OP is a fag»).

Furthermore, the apostrophe thing is more of a style guide for American and English publishers AFAIK. British use single quotes, Americans double. Not sure how Brits render inner monologue or if Americans use double quotes for them though (I think that they use the same symbol than for any sort of speech). But okay.

>>15949727
I've never seen the same thing come up in Gogol or Dostevsky, but other than that I haven't read much Russian literature.

I am a postgraduate in English literature though, so I have read more than the average person.

Also you're completely wrong about the American vs British style. Literally open most contemporary American fiction and they use italics for inner monologue and single speech marks for dialogue. I have no idea where you got your views on this from.

>>15949820
>I've never seen the same thing come up
You've never seen the guillemets because translators and publishers convert those symbols in Russian or French lit to regular quotation marks. Same thing happens with Spanish, and sometimes in Italian iirc, which style dialogues entirely different (they usually use hyphens or em dashes), and it goes both ways (translations from English are converted accordingly).
>Also you're completely wrong about the American vs British style
Well, I've spent several several weeks editing books and researching about the basic style guides. I was referring to dialogues btw. See pic related. It's an English edition versus an American one. Italics are not exactly the only way to express inner monologue either.

If your copy uses single quotes, it's possible it's a British edition, like most books published in Britain (it's a style thing though, and a pretty superficial thing).

>>15949820
>>15949969
And here's an UK version of Lanark which uses double quotes for dialogue and single quotes for inner monologue.
As usual, it's a stylistic type setting choice, unlike McCarthy's deliberate style of omitting quotation and punctuation marks.

>>15949969
>>15949998
Alright thanks for that. I was wrong, and I never usually check my books for where the book was published

>>15949633
I read this book in school. It's on the recommended reading list in this little post-soviet country. It was engaging though I don't remember that much about the book now. I also watched the Russian TV series.
An angle to keep your eye on while reading: the parts of the book that are a satire and criticism of the soviet system, written from within the then-young soviet system, and because of which the book was not published for decades and even then censored at first.

>>15949633
Got about 30% through and dropped it. It’s too clowny for me.

>>15950305
Yeah it outlines lots of the themes of an oppressed writer in the introduction.

>>15950374
Was Bulgakov honkpilled?

>>15949820
Are you a Master's or Doctorate? Every program I applied to told me to fuck off. Been applying to teaching programs this year and it's fucking depressing.

>>15950412
Do you think that's because of your grades or the current situation with face to face teaching and not having places for more scholars? What country you live in?