Anyone better than this guy at brilliantly witty prose? Native

>no one likes fielding
figures.

>>9226042
I've always felt that Tom Jones is one of the strangest classics in English, as if something else was hovering over the surface of its pages other than (if similar to) reflected light. I'm serious. There's something odd about that book. Joseph Andrews is a romp by comparison.

>>9226101
This is a slow board. Allow some time for people to reply.

>>9226149
Say more about Tom Jones

>>9226149
yes, do go on, try to describe what you mean, i'm very early on in the work, but i am certain that his prose is some of the best if not the best i have read. you say the work is strange, how so? something sinister?

>>9226149
Did you died

>>9226292
Sinister, yes, but I feel a little foolish saying so because I thoroughly enjoyed the book AS a book. I don't think I'm necessarily a 'sensitive reader' but I did once have an experience with a book comparable to the one I had with TJ, and far easier to describe. Magarshack's Signet Classics translation of Anna Karenina New Year's Eve about 8 years back.. was to meet friends at a party, but began reading it at about 6p and I couldn't stop reading.. If you've read it then you know how Anna and Levin's stories (the two principal stories in the book), through circumstances, draw closer and closer together, until you realize that an intersection must occur somewhere toward the conclusion. The lines of narrative IN YOUR HEAD descend down that singular page as if attempting to form a V, which the actual narrative, as read in the book, completely answers. So, I was aware of this and somehow became terribly excited. Some time after turning off my phone my mind felt like it was growing out of itself, trying, as it were, to 'take over' the entire room (it was a lovely room, literally across the street from a train station, with an argon street lamp just outside the middle of the three windows facing it, giving the stained pine floors an oragey sheen-- I was sitting by a fold out card table on a wooden chair, a red, glass dome lamp the light I read by) all this, of course, with my nose buried completely in the book. The sensation? I wasn't even aware of it UNTIL I became aware of it: the book had somehow managed to become alive, in the sense that it was part of my body, and tears started streaming down my face though I was neither spooked nor sad. To recognize it killed it but I kept right on reading until finishing, literally at dawn, New Year's Day. ... I should have bunched this up in paragraphs. At any rate, when it was over I stood up and walked over to one of the windows and looked out at a freight train thundering by the station, cold and grayish. The weird thing about telling this NOW is that I've never, not once, associated my proximity to a train station as in any way figuring in to my over-all experience. Did it? I don't know.

To get at my TJ experience I'll have to take it off the shelf. I know I wrote little marginalia but I haven't looked at it at all since the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, the last one I would spend at what was the house I grew up in. Tom Jones I read over four consecutive evenings in the bedroom of my childhood. Will have to wait till morning. Here, it's late.

>>9226507
What a let down.

>>9226515
I can only apologize-- sorry.

>>9226507
well, i suppose this was a little off topic in regards to how tom jones affected you in such a way to consider it an odd book, and your comparison to Anna Karenina really makes me frown, as I did not particularly care for that book, or even its structure. if i can ever manage to read a book in a short period of time, typically i become so absorbed in whatever i am reading that i forget how even to speak to people in a way that isn't at least a poor copy of etiquette from the period and culture of the book. i have yet to read a book that imparted a sinister sense, some sort of creeping horror, i usually just have an urge to carry on living in the way the author does or his characters do, despite the ending of the book. i suppose i will have to look forward to your impressions of Tom Jones tomorrow, whenever you have had time to collect your thoughts.

>>9226671
Ok, what of Tom Jones? I remember Thwackum and Square, of course-- the characterological cartoonishness of most every character EXCEPT Tom, and I do include the idealized, if not fetishized, Sophia amongst the odd..

But let me cut to the chase: I was 19, a heavy reader and I believe an adequate one, and I found myself palpably opposed to a mind far superior to my own, and as if living quite actually on the other side of each and every page. I don't know how he managed this, but part of the art must consist of not allowing oneself AS AUTHOR to get too close, because he never really does, unlike, say, Dickens, who was in love with the idea, and who often makes gestures that he wants to be your guide, or helpful friend. Fielding, by contrast, merely wants to show you things as they are, and succeeds, terribly.

Allow a literal pack of cards, an interesting collection of neatly distorted humanesque monsters, to have absurd opinions about a cipher, Tom himself, and the reader will rush in and fill that emptiness up with his or her own life. Fielding himself leaves Tom all but blank for just this reason, and yet Fielding himself is the one who intentionally distorts the distorters, distorted the distorters, and to what purpose?

This is enough for now, and may be of too little interest to continue..

>>9226042

>brilliantly witty prose

Sterne
Sterne
Sterne

>In the case of knots,—by which, in the first place, I would not be understood to mean slip-knots—because in the course of my life and opinions—my opinions concerning them will come in more properly when I mention the catastrophe of my great uncle Mr. Hammond Shandy,—a little man,—but of high fancy:—he rushed into the duke of Monmouth's affair:—nor, secondly, in this place, do I mean that particular species of knots called bow-knots;—there is so little address, or skill, or patience required in the unloosing them, that they are below my giving any opinion at all about them.—But by the knots I am speaking of, may it please your reverences to believe, that I mean good, honest, devilish tight, hard knots, made bona fide, as Obadiah made his;—in which there is no quibbling provision made by the duplication and return of the two ends of the strings thro' the annulus or noose made by the second implication of them—to get them slipp'd and undone by.—I hope you apprehend me.

It's sex, wit and counter-enlightenment philosophy in that order. I've never read a novel that was more serious, and I've never read a novel that made me laugh more often. Reading Tristram Sandy is more than a good read, it's an ablution of the soul.

>>9228197

To continue Sterne, the author himself, who's writing a novel about the human condition, death, and our incapacity to understand the world, was dying slowly and painfully of consumption, and makes jokes about his own impending destruction.

That's a philosopher.

But I don't mean to make it sound intense or cerebral because it isn't. The whole thing is done in a thoroughly good and loving spirit. I really want to post some of my favorite passages but I don't want to spoil the surprise of reading them yourself.

>>9226507
>my mind felt like it was growing out of itself, trying, as it were, to 'take over' the entire room
Oh i fucking love this feeling

>>9228224
Sterne turns a corner, and disappears forever. He is SO in tune with the desperateness of our condition!

>>9226671
I feel like i'm miles away from my point

One gains a sense of an author by reading his works to a point of knowing him beyond his works- it's weird, but it certainly happens- the mind will do what the mind will do and there's very little our speaking selves can do about it except stay glued to what it considers the pevailing social forms, or norms, of behaviour, and of speech. But

what's a book but a spell to make you see what it has to offer if you have the eyes to hear it, and the mind to process? In your query (you) indicate brilliance and wit, lively qualities that qualify the mind's 'engagement' in such a way that one feels one could be reading something other than a novel, if one's mind feels so disposed.. And this was my experience, although I was prepared neither to accept nor to reject, it just happened.

Briefly, ..while reading I felt engaged by some authorial something not attempting to break up through the text but actively alive in the lit space between the words and my eyes. This happened each of the nights I was reading it; I tested it by asking 'it' questions AS I read and it answered in spades time and again in what became less a novel, and more a proof text. I could go further but feel this is quite enough. And the only time it ever happened to me while reading was when reading Tom Jones.