Why haven't you read The Tunnel, anon?

I can imagine him making a cameo on frasier

>>8917926
it's a bloated work that /lit/ only likes because Gass is probably an anti-semite

"The bloat is a consequence of sheer adipose verbosity and an unremitting condition of moral and intellectual flatulence. (.....) The abjection of (Gass') hero seems less lived than written. It is an act of ventriloquism: behind the repulsive, potentially fascist narrator stands his critic, the novelist, presumably committed to humane, democratic values. But those values are nowhere intimated in the book, and what emerges is a kind of inadvertent complicity between author and protagonist. The supposedly critical novel becomes an enactment of bad faith." - Robert Alter, The New Republic

Goading the reader with obscenity and bigotry, Gass breathes so hard, we never believe Kohler as a cracked vessel of foul vapors and invidious intent. He’s a bogus boogie-man, guilty of overacting. He hogs the page.

>>8917926
I understand criticisms of it, because at first reading, it seems overly turgid, convoluted, and, moreover, terrifyingly cynical and heartless in a way that seems to serve no purpose.

There's no discernible plot, no discernible theme or message, and the narrator is a repulsive man who doesn't really endear you to him at all.

It seems intentionally written so as to confuse and bore the reader, with dialogue not only being not contained in any quotation marks, but all being in the same paragraph, so that, in other words, a bunch of different people are speaking in the same paragraph, sometimes even without any attribution of name (Planmantee said, Culp said, etc.)

Moreover, this dialogue very often, smoothly, confusingly glides into the narrator's own monologue, description of the world around him in a beautiful, pithy sentence, reminiscences, etc.

He makes his characters speak with an unbelievable eloquence and at much length, so that we begin to realize all the characters in this book are ineluctably being mediated through Kohler, the narrator, and that he is definitely embellishing their dialogue and probably even sometimes making them give speeches and make overly literary puns they never made in real life at all.

It can't be said to be groundbreaking, because it is really very, very evocative of Joyce's Ulysses in its stream-of-consciousness, obsession with daily minutiae, allusiveness, parody and pastiche of other literary works, highly poetic nature and lack of a compelling narrative. What he doesn't owe to Joyce, Proust did, with his semi-autistic (but beautiful) accounting of the minutiae of day-to-day life and the nature of remembrance, consciousness, time, etc.

It ... it has some pretty nice sentences in it, though.

>>8917926
But I have anon.
Lovely novel, probably Sábato's best work

I'll get around to it don't worry. this year.

>>8918134
>Gass is probably an anti-semite
Fine, I'll read it.

>>8918134
>quoting someone makes it true

>>8918984
>needs simple, happy literature