/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22010120]

I need a book that feels like IJ - it's so exciting to read. Anything comparable stylistically or structurally?

[Anonymous No.22010130]

>>22010120
IJ is part of a whole tradition of such novels, that starts with more or less with D. Quijote.
Read Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Pale Fire, Thomas Pynchon, Beckett, Barth, etc.

[Anonymous No.22010133]

>>22010130
Read all of the above, none of them are anything like this stylistically really - GR shares some similarity and is amazing, but mainly on account of being American and broadly 'post-modern' and big. The others are even less similar.

[Anonymous No.22010195]

>>22010120

[Anonymous No.22011946]

bump

[Anonymous No.22012289]

>>22011946
Bro, just read Infinite Jest again. That’s what you really want. Or maybe try another Wallace book. Beyond that you’re not going to get anything other than what >>22010130 recommended.

[Anonymous No.22012319]

>>22010133

[Anonymous No.22012331]

>>22010120
Pale King?

[Voluntary Fool No.22012636]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91gT68xeDMM

[Anonymous No.22013784]

>>220123
Never read any Dara will check these out thanks

>>22012289
That's what I'm doing right now - about 500 pages through. Read the other Wallace.

I've got The Recognitions and The Gold Bug Variations to read which hopefully will scratch some of the same itch

[Anonymous No.22013802]

>>22010120

[Anonymous No.22014058]

>>22010120
Franzen - Freedom is pretty much a companion to IJ, his homage to his dead friend and he very much built the novel around IJ. Elkin - George Mills, explores some of the same grounds but in a very different way, four different generations of George Mills with the earliest going back to the Crusades and the latest being contemporary to the time of the novel, they are all failures in life and we all have some George in us.

[Anonymous No.22015058]

>>22014058
I recall an interview where he said it was an homage to one of his dead parents.

[Anonymous No.22016561]

>>22015058
It would not be much of an homage to parents, a fuck you perhaps. It is essentially a realist character study built around the Incadenza family. Quite a bit is changed to make that work and make it Franzen's own thing and he does quite well.

[Anonymous No.22016575]

>>22010120
House of Leaves has an identical plot

[Anonymous No.22016899]

>>22016561
Life got in the way before I could finish that post and since thread was about to be bumped off I just posted, so to continue.

Character study is not quite right, he is still very much exploring the societal topics which DFW goes after in IJ but he does it through a few characters over many decades instead of a great many characters over a few days. So we get considerably more complex characters at the cost of seeing how everyone is complicit but DFW already showed us how everyone is complicit anyways. Franzen gives us the how, it is not just parents handing down habits and behaviors, they have reason and motive now which wonderfully highlights the benefits and faults of DFW's way, Franzen makes it all too easy to say "not my problem." He attempts to make up for that through empathy and he does quite well, despite all the characters being despicable it is difficult to not get caught up in their lives and through that empathy we see how we have contributed, how we are guilty of those same things.

Freedom is filled with allusions to IJ, the characters, structure and themes all come from IJ with a different view on the whole thing and some new stuff thrown in for good measure. It is possible that Freedom had been intended as an homage to one of his parents but changed partway through, he had been working on it for a while by the time DFW killed himself so he may have reworked things. Great book either way.

[Anonymous No.22016919]

David Foster Wallace was a White, bourgeois American with slight leftist-leanings, whose academic output must be treated as idiosyncratic and the product of US hyper-individualism, imagination and anti-intellectualism.

[Anonymous No.22017342]

>>22016919
true dat

[Anonymous No.22017430]

>>22016919
That's just labels, bro

[Anonymous No.22017548]

>>22016919
Yes, so?

[Anonymous No.22017582]

>>22016919
How can you say so much with such big words and say absolutely nothing simultaneously

[Anonymous No.22018208]

>>22010120
2666 is better than IJ imo

[Anonymous No.22018252]

>>22018208
Might check it out. Read Savage Detectives and find it quite dull desu