Who is the greatest living author /lit/? Is it him?

>>8927944
joseph mcelroy
william h gass
joshua cohen
adam levin
thomas pynchon
william t vollmann

pick one

>>8927944
Considering that Pynchon has only released one good book in the 21st century, yeah, it's probably Murakami or maybe Vargas Llosa.

>>8927966
embarrassing post

>>8927954
>american "literature"

try again

>>8927944
Adolf Hitler or the guy who makes the chinese cartoons

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Not so fast.

>>8927976
rude :(

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>>8927966
Lazslo is up there too, actually.

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>>8927944
nope

I really like Ishiguro.

cormac mccarthy or pinecone desu

living or dead

>>8927966
>or maybe Vargas Llosa

/thread

Krasznahorkai is the only answer, Murakami fags can fuck off.

>>8928312
>not liking both

>>8928325
Only idiots like Murakami who think they are past the YA stage yet they read the same shit in every Murakami book.

>>8928063
keep your chin up bucko.

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Pic related. Vision trumps stylistic gimmicks.

The answer is easy. Bridget Jones

>>8928331
I'll bite. How is his stuff YA? Not even Norwegian Wood can be considered YA.

Murakami is actually underrated. Few people understand what he's trying to do.

>>8928429
What is he trying to do?

>>8928429
Not hard to understand when literally all of his books are the same, uses the same tropes, characters etc. You read 1 book you read all of them.

>>8927944

McCarthy, Pynchon, or Roth.

Murakami is a legitimately important author but I wouldn't put him in the 'GLA' tier. Definitely worth reading.

>>8928429
>>8928925
Agreed on Roth, but could you elaborate on why you think Murakami deserves such praise? I really don't get the hype. I read 1Q84 and disliked it.

>>8929197

Firstly, about Murakami being "important," it's because he's revitalized the modern Japanese novel and repopularized it in a lot of other countries. He kind of became the first modern Japanese author to make it big overseas (particularly in America) and in so doing has opened the doors for foreign lit.

As far as his actual quality I think it's really easy to mock him since he tends to follow patterns or have recurring elements. (Hence posts like "dude Beatles lmao" and "Murakami bingo") I really like him, though, because of his quirky ways of looking at the modern world and bringing a hint of mystery to its ennui. Often I feel like I can read him in a sort of semi-dream space where you can feel that things "just make sense" even though you might not be able to justify it consciously. I'm sure this sounds kind of all over the place but like I said I don't approach him in a positivist-rationalist sort of way. At the same time it feels like that's just the way he thinks and he's not writing like that just to provoke the reader or make a statement about narratives or something. He seems like a very genuine and not mean-spirited guy who wants to see what the world looks like when you crack the lens just a bit.

I actually haven't read "IQ84" but if you want to give him another shot maybe check out "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" or "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World".

Happy reading!

>>8928457
>>8929197
this is a pretty good essay http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/bungaku

>>8927980
here's a reply lol

>>8928072
This guy is right desu, the intensity of Laszlo's works is matched only by Thomas Bernhard.

Have you read The Melancholy of the Resistance, my man? I've been meaning to get a copy. Translated, unfortunately. I cannot even imagine Krasznahorkai in Hungarian.

>>8927944
Charles Portis

>>8929261

An honest and informed post on /lit/? Strange.

>>8929768
I can't imagine him in hungarian,because I can't find any of his books at the store.

>>8927944
His work either isn't yet known or it isn't yet written.

Of established writers of English-language fiction, William H. Gass.

Does nobody talk about Delilo anymore?

>>8930179
He wrote one good book - Libra.

>>8930183

He has a great array of great to amazing literature, yet doesn't fumble over pretentiousness or divert himself to over-experimentalism. Him along with Pinecone will probably be raised as the best of the late 19th to early 20th century. Although I have to agree both authors can get real fucking tedious.

I just wish there were more authors of this day and age from a younger generation that could match up. Maybe those born from 94-2001 can conjure up something great.

Cormac McCarthy. Yes, he's still writing books.

>>8928345
Really inclined to agree with you

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>>8930183
this meme gets me every time.

>>8930044
You can find all his works here:
https://pim.hu/hu/dia/dia-tagjai/krasznahorkai-laszlo#

>>8930183
Libra isn't a very good book, and definitely not his best. Though he's not a very good writer in general. Mao II was good but there's so much better writing out there.

>>8928072
>>8929768
Im a frequent Laszlo poster and I'm always happy to see people mention him on here. He's much better than Gass-- or just about anyone writing right now. There have been books of equal caliber to his, but no writer produces works as masterfully and as consistently as Krasznahorkai.

I'm not the guy you were replying to, but I own Melancholy of Resistance. It was the first one I started with, and immediately went and bought Satantango within 2 days of finishing it-- if even that. I bought Melancholy because I was bored and the selection of books in the city I was in were slim. When I bought Satantango I could feel the book burning in my hand I was so excited to read something else by him.

He will be around long after he's dead, it truly is zeitgeist literature.

>>8929768
Get it. It has some of the most powerful imagery I've ever seen in a book and it's just as intense as Satantango. The more "surrealistic" parts are, IMO, some of the best stuff he has ever written.

It bothers me how underread and underrated he is, and how popular guys like Murakami are (not that I dislike Murakami, he's probably the best guy around after Laszlo and arguably Vargas Llosa and Gass).

Also, watch the film adaptations of his works if you haven't already - they're just as good as the source material.

>>8930771
He isn't really underrated based on his awards and his name came up numerous times for the Nobel as well in the press.

>>8930775
Yeah, maybe not underrated, but he definitely is underread. The Bela Tarr films are far more popular than his books.

Gerald Murnane DESU
B
H

>>8930797

What is his best book other than The Plains?

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>>8930460

>When I bought Satantango I could feel the book burning in my hand I was so excited to read something else by him.

If you haven't read 'War & War' yet then you're in for a treat. It's his best work imo.

Shout out to all the Laszlo bros on /lit/. You guys are the real MVPs.

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>>8930826
Thanks homie, I haven't-- I did Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango in a row and with very little human contact, and I needed a break from the gallow's humor, which has now ended, and War and War was going to be my next.

I'll order it later this week.

I also wanted to check out pic related. I heard many comparisons of Melancholy to it.

>>8930196
Hey anon, no fair, what makes '94 the cutoff?

I just wish at least Hungary would know about Krasznahorkai since we barely have anything to be proud of nowadays and here's this man who might be the greatest living author and most of the country's population have never even heard of him.

>>8928072
Dude looks like a wizard or some End of Level boss shit.

>>8930460
>>8930771
But you guys are selling it to me. I'll pick him up.

>>8930885
He's the End Boss of 20th century literature. He took all the encyclopedic and macro fiction the 1900s had exploded with and ended it on a note of despicable peasants and suburbanites in loose political systems and decaying bland environments. He was truly the last and most powerfully original author of then, and all those great works (and the ones being published in this millennium) are being translated now, as in the last 10 years.

>>8928345
Vision and style are always the same, schmuck.

And yeah he is good but not the best.

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>>8930037
Did you read it? It's not. He complained no one understood Murakami's purpose and then proceeded to explain the barely-surface Murakami everyone does understand.

Murakami's not bad, he just isn't that new and he doesn't operate as unconsciously as other writers. He's better than David Foster Wallace and on-par with Don Delillo. He's good. He's not great and definitely not the greatest, and may be "literary fiction" now but will never be a classic.

Apparently Krasznahorkai's new novel 'The Homecoming of Baron Wenckheim' is going to be translated by Ottilie Mulzet again through New Directions.

Beyond hype.

Not sure of the date for this one though. Early '18 maybe?

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>>8930929

Wait just saw that is said '17 through his site:

http://www.krasznahorkai.hu/book_list_comingsoon.html

Best book of the year on the way, lads. You heard it here first.

>>8928094
Does he have enough money to get a dietician, cook, and PT now and lose some weight?

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this japanese dude

>>8927954
Is The Instructions really that good that you put Levin in with McElroy and Gass?

>>8931058

not that anon but i seriously doubt it

>>8930924

I think you didn't follow this thread correctly, friend. A poster at the top said Murakami was misunderstood and no one got him. I made a separate post about McCarthy et al. and said basically the same thing about Murakami as you did. That is, he is important and quite good but probably isn't the best living author.

You and I are mostly in agreement but I think you mistook another post for mine.

>>8930924
>he doesn't operate as unconsciously as other writers.

The fuck does that even mean?

Wolfe's still alive, guys.

>>8930997
>
This is the correct answer. It's hard to imagine another writer who will be looked at as positively as Coetzee will say, 100 years from now.

Houellebecq

>>8927944
Knausgård

>>8931305
not that guy. but murakami tends to write in this way where he's not that good at hiding at veiling the intention of the prose organically. it's always this sudden weird thing happening and i'm supposed to react to it or something. was good in the first 2 books then it just got old.

>>8929829
If he's actually alive I second this.

>>8930938
>From North a Hill, from South a Lake, from West Roads, from East a River
this is what I'm desparate to read, plus it's being translated by Szirtes (who I like slightly more than Mulzet)

>>8928462
yeah and nice parroting, faggot

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>>8931396
kys

>>8927944
John Green or George RR Martin.

>>8930460
>>8930771
>>8930826
>>8930938
>>8930929
My fuckin niggas. I've only read Seiobo There Below and The Last Wolf & Herman. With regards to Seiobo There Below, I knew I was reading something important after the first chapter. I know his other works are more apocalyptic. This one is more about art and the creation of art, beauty, the sacred with relation to art, disintegration, and restoration. It's fucking phenomenal. It's very dark and hopeless yet unbelievably beautiful (as a novel about beauty should be). I'm not sure how his other books are structured (other than his rejection of the paragraph break). This one is generally page long sentences making up sections of chapters. In some cases entire chapters are single sentences (there's one chapter that's about 45 pages and a single sentence, when one finally reaches the end they are left breathless and crushed).

The Last Wolf and Herman are definitely less important Krasznahorkai works but both are great. The Last Wolf is the lesser of the two, I think. Herman is one of my favorite short stories. Published by New Directions, of course. Easily my favorite publishing house.

Not related to Krasznahorkai, but I urge all of you to check out WG Sebald if you haven't yet. I've only read Rings of Saturn by him but will be reading The Emigrants after I finish up Bernhard's Gargoyles.

>>8930924
>He's better than David Foster Wallace and on-par with Don Delillo.

I don't understand why you would even make these comparisons.

>>8931466
Murakami fan here. I also noticed this, but it seems to be a problem with most writers I know. I could only really enjoy fiction 100% when I was a kid. As I grew up I started seeing more and more the author behind the story, and be annoyed by it. I even imagine him thinking "heh heh, this will get them. I'm so smart".

Murakami seems to handle this relatively well, but if you know someone who is even better at hiding his hand (especially someone who does the same kind of oniric/melancholic magical realism Murakami does) please tell me.

>>8930825
Barley Patch

>>8931621
I've wasted my time on 2 of his books and read summaries of others, how much more time should I waste on him to be a Murakami connoisseur?

>>8933126
What the fuck are you reading summaries of books for?

>>8933136
To be sure that that hack actually used the same tropes in every single book that I haven't read.

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>>8932571

Sounds interesting. Thanks m8.

>>8930196
i dont want to read anything from someone born after 94 lol

>>8930911
They're not.

"My friend, please be advised, yon bolder is about to crush your kin" is stylistically different from "watch out nigga that rock's gonna kill yo kids" but the message is of equal value when communicated to you.

Cormac McCarthy.

But maybe Knausgaard eventually.

>>8933138
Why is it so important? The cat, the unexplained situation, the coming of age person... they are only surface elements that tell nothing. One could write infinite stories with the same few pieces.

If anything, you could consider it an exercise of style.

>ctrl-f martin amis
>0 results

Plague upon this fucking board. Money and London Fields will still remain his best work, but even his last novel "The Zone of Interest" I thought was a minor masterpiece.

Murakami is pretty comfy-tier, and anyone who says otherwise has no soul, so I guess most of /lit/.

>>8933660
Martin Amis is a bloated midget who relies on petty stylistic tricks to make normies think he's some sort of casual genius. He's cancer. Not funny. Not clever. Not interesting.

>>8927954
Where is DeLillo, you philistine?

>>8928098
Can you explain why Never Let Me Go is good? I want to understand why people like it, but I can't get past thinking that it reads like a YA novel and that the writing is awful.

>>8927944

Fredric Jameson. Truly a gift to language.

>>8928331
>the same shit in every Murakami book.

bad meme

>>8933660
I only read Koba the Dread and I hurled across the room wishing Kingsley had drowned him in a sack and spared me his printed whining.

>>8928345
Every time I see his face I die a little inside knowing people want him jailed for his work.

>>8928072
Absolutely correct desu, I've read all his books that were translated in english, and my hungarian friend has been reading me some of the stories from Relations of Grace
My friend is a little clumsy so I'm super hype for a real translation but even with a bad translation, his work is immensely enjoyable

myself.

>>8929261
good post desu

>>8927944
Th..is m...an. In my count....ry h...e ...is n...o...t...h...i...n...g...

>>8927944

Cookies sure were good.

>>8933680
This.
Sad.

>>8934001
It's not my favourite book of his by a long way, but what I like about him in general that he also does in that book is the way he deals with memory and unreliable narrators. It seems subtler and more real than most, all those gentle lost souls telling themselves stories about their pasts that the reader comes to understand are heavily romanticised and talking around the bitter truths of their lives. He writes people lying to themselves like no one else.
The writing is an acquired taste, I like it for its Britishness and that special brand of reserved melancholy.

His masterpiece is The Unconsoled which I will never stop shilling on here.

>>8927944
No, he's not even worth the meme

>>8929261
Fact: nobody gives a shit about Murakami in Japan.

If you want quirky ways to look at the Modern world, go read Kobo Abe, or the better Murakami

>>8929261
https://shigekuni.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/mispraising-murakami-guest-post-by-jake-waalk/

I start then, with a parable, albeit an imperfect one, but I ask readers please go along with me for a minute. I will use an American example: imagine going abroad and visiting bookstores, talking to readers, and the only thing anyone ever talks about is Dave Eggers. At all the bookstores Eggers’ books fill up entire shelves in translation, with only one or two other books by an American author at all, one lesser Faulkner and maybe a late Hemingway, crammed beside everything Dave Eggers’ has ever written. Eggers remains virtually the only living American author anyone in this imaginary place has ever read and will talk about. I have just outlined the experience of Japanese people with Haruki Murakami. None of this was to disparage Dave Eggers, a solid writer who has done much to invigorate the American literary scene and support the genre of the short story writer. I chose Eggers name because he is a relatively well-known middling author in the realm of living writers in that country, though one with a solid cult following and perhaps more recognized by the group of readers that also read Murakami.

...

The Japanese Consulate-General official on my committee brought up my list and mentioned that most American’s only talk about Haruki Murakami and asked me why I thought he had not won the Nobel Prize. I gave an honest answer that Murakami did seem to embody the sort of politics and zeitgeist the committee often prefers in its picks, and I noted that he also lacks the profile in his home country that most Prize winners generally have. The answer noticeably impressed the official (and by noticeably I mean he complimented me on it), and I ended up getting the spot. In Japan, one of our prefectural supervisors turned out to have studied literature in college and we ended up talking about writers. He was ecstatic that I had heard of Kenzaburo Oe, and his English grew excited and a little fragmented as he tried to talk about a complicated subject such as Oe, saying “What he does, is genius. He is a genius. Very difficult to read, even for Japanese.” He seemed to have little interest in Haruki Murakami, and at point said Murakami wasn’t a particularly important writer. My school principal and district superintendent were also impressed that I liked Oe, who engenders a lot of respect even from some political conservatives. Both talked about books with me as best as I could manage with my limited Japanese, without ever mentioning Haruki Murakami.

>>8935404
Ryu Murakami aside, contemporary Japanese literature has many other immensely talented and respected authors, including many prominent female writers. There is Yuko Tsushima, the daughter of the famous author Osamu Dazai (who committed suicide with his lover in 1948). Tsushima’s novel Laughing Wolf is available in English and offers a very unique take to a young girl’s empowerment through her elopement with the older boy she develops an interest in. The novel, which cannot be reviewed here, makes skillful literary use of The Jungle Book to create a strange relationship between young girl and older boy, that of brother and sister. It is a relationship based on a rejection of ties to the broader world of humans, forged by an affinity and connection with death: the suicide of the girl’s father, which the boy witnessed as a small homeless child. The novel is phenomenal, and Tsushima has been a consistent literary presence for decades, yet is almost untranslated into English. There is Ogawa Yoko whom I have not read, but who has won most of the Japan’s most prestigious literary awards and is often talked up as one Japan’s premier authors, by no less than Kenzaburo Oe for example. Another that I have actually read is Kaori Ekuni, a bestseller with some serious critical gravitas, whose Twinkle, Twinkle was a light, but funny and interesting love triangle between a woman who didn’t want an actual marriage, a gay doctor needing an out for his family and work, and his long-time lover. There is even the bubbly and decidedly more lightweight Banana Yoshimoto. Other names that have come in inquiring about leading Japanese authors beyond my reading are Toshiyuki Horie, and several Japanese people I have spoken to think Yasutaka Tsutsui might be the most important living sci-fi author in the world right now. Another author completely unavailable in English but quite influential in Japan is Noboru Tsujihara [note: after I posted Jake’s essay, @maorthofer corrected this on Twitter: “Tsujihara not untranslated @thamesriverwpc did Jasmine in 2012″], and the not quite-so-undertranslated Genichiro Takahashi has published many influential works and developed a strong literary reputation.

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>>8933680
>>8934875

>passive aggressive reddit plebs

you have to go back.

Kundera is still alive.

But besides Unbearable Lightness, Book of Laughter & Forgetting, and Immortality - he became shit.

>>8935404
How did Murakami become the most translated living Japanese author? Is it because his books are easily accessible to plebs and they feel a false depth in them?

>>8931314
W O L F E
O
L
F
E

>>8935502
surprised he wasnt mentioned sooner

>>8935361
Ryu Murakami is genre-fiction tier. Also Haruki Murakami is both popular in Japan and there are many respected Japanese critics and writers who support his work. No need to exaggerate. I do agree Kobo Abe should be more widely read. Try his plays, they're pretty good.

>>8935468
Personally I think he's really good when his stories are short and to the point (e.g. On Seeing the 100% Woman etc..). But he really only captures one style of Modern Alienation or Loneliness in that dreamlike style of his. It just happens to appeal to a lot of people who feel those same kinds of feelings. That kind of thing has always been a hit with people ever since existential angst Lit appeared.

Of course the Western references and foreign appeal is one part of it as well. There's no denying that Jazz and seeing a stream of references & psychology feels comfy and easily intellectual. Also Japanese can be seen as a pretty difficult language to translate into English properly due to all the extra stuff like polite speak and Kanji, and it has its own set of cultural references, so people who master the prose over there can't really be transported over here.

>>8935526
Which other authors haven't been translated that you think should be?

>>8935347

Remains of the Day brah

>>8935534
Toshio Shimao and Kenji Nakagami mainly. Also Izumi Kyoka, Mieko Kanai, Gen'ichiro Takahashi. A few others too but that's all I can recall right now.

>>8927944
>greatest living author
>posts a picture of tao lin
i hope ur bein srs anon

>>8931321

He puzzles me. I've read most of his books, yet I wouldn't consider him a favorite. Obviously there must be something I like in those depressing stories but I can't really put my finger on it. Sometimes he makes me physically wince, and I have to wonder if some of it is autobiographical. For example, the theme of an older man having an inappropriate relationship or pseudo relationship with a much younger woman pops up again and again in his novels.

>>8935738
http://www.cosmoetica.com/B353-DES292.htm

> Please, shudder along with me. I can never understand how artists can think so little of their audiences that they proffer such crap. The whole of the novel is so one dimensional. Not once does Coetzee even attempt to dig under the characters’ skins. The characters, from Lurie’s acceptance of his kangaroo court fate, to Lucy’s acceptance of rape, are not really characters, but servants to a screed of white forgiveness laid bare. No wonder it won prizes- it certainly was not for the literary merit. It is typical of the Left Wing mentality that flays Lurie for ‘abusing the human rights’ of a willing bed partner who uses him to get good grades, yet dismisses gang rape of an innocent woman for presumed prior crimes she never committed. This is what passes for great literature these days, when it really is only a passable first draft for a novel, and one that reads like it was written more by a twenty year old, than a man Coetzee’s age. I would be hard pressed to recall a work that had a better premise and worse follow through than this, and it’s the premise, itself, that is the book’s strongest suit. Life Of Pi, by Yann Martel, is a worse book, but it also has a less realistic premise. That something that would seem such a slam dunk idea could be so misused is a shame. Even worse is lauding such a failure. Ain’t prizes wonderful?

>>8935446
To those book I would add The Joke, and take away the Unbearable Lightness. Honestly, it's the book I liked the least. Until I read a time-line of his bibliography I was convinced that it had to be his first try, when he was just putting all his tropes to the test without really creating something organic. I'm convinced that the only reason it is liked so much is because of the hipster title.

>>8935410
On the usual pirate sites I could find nothing by Genichiro Takahashi, Noboru Tsujihara and Yuko Tsushima. Do you have something you could share?

>>8935969
I don't even think those are translated.

>>8935535
That's also a masterpiece I SUPPOSE.

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Sai King