Absurdist literature

>>9489033
Aristophanes deserves more love around here. His plays are 1000+ years old and they're still funny.

The Birds and The Assemblywomen are pretty good, would recommend.

>>9489067
>>9489067
>Aristophanes
2scat4me

>>9489033
If you're not baiting with some notion that Kafka doesn't fit the absurdist definition, (irreal, er, really sweet stuff though). I'll blat.

Daniil Kharms "Today I Wrote Nothing" should be picked up now. Not because it's the best, but because they are Russian. I also love Gogol's Nose, because it is a very Ukrainian nose.

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Back in the day there was a good mag. called: "Bust Down The Door And Eat All The Chickens." Now you'll get some decent shit from Lazy Fascist Press. "Animal Money" is decent. Most bizzaro cheese is sad and not stinky like that French feet smell. Camus is soft blue gooey summer day sweaty shoes.

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I'd consider "Rabbit, Run" by Updike to be an absurdist novel. But then I don't ascribe to the tenets of those who believe in keeping Absurdist lit in a box without holes. Air and sunshine for creatures is best to keep them alive, as well as plenty of grass.

>>9489033
My diary desu

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>>9489033

my diary desu.

Depends on what you call the absurd. If you think of it has the loss of meaning our modern times go through : Read Céline's "Voyage au bout de la nuit".

Don't bother reading Sartre. Except for "The words", this book is gold. Camus's "Stranger" wasn't bad. "The Plague" was a mistake.

>>9489033
Waiting for Godot

>>9490017
Seconded

>>9489033
Complete Samuel Beckett. All prose, all plays. Read all of it. All of it

>>9489033
Gravity's Rainbow

>>9489067
Aristophanes was an unfunny cuck

Cleon did nothing wrong

>>9490605
t. feminist

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>>9489033
Harold Pinter. British playwright who won the Nobel in 2005. His shtick is that all the dialogue is remarkably naturalistic, and it's almost all set in suburban England, but his characters end up in progressively strange and macabre situations. I'd describe it as David Lynch meets Mike Leigh. Severely underrated, and I think he'd be really popular on /lit/ if more people read his stuff. He's also the rare writer who doesn't let his politics influence his work

Start with his shorter stuff like The Room and The Dumb Waiter (imo he really shines in his shorter sketches), and move onto The Caretaker and Birthday Party which are his most well-known plays.

>>9490919
>severely underrated

Uncomfortable pauses in theatre are literally named after him

>>9490919

The caretaker is awesome. Has some overtones of doestoyevsky's double.

>>9490919
I know that Pinter was heavily influenced by Beckett. I want to read him because of that, but I wonder how oppresive that influence was. Is he that different from Beckett? Is Pinter derivatie, or does he bring something new to what Beckett established?

>>9490951
Oh yeah I know that, I guess I just don't see him discussed a lot even among people I know who enjoy theater.

>>9490992

His dialogue is much more naturalist than Beckett's. I would argue that his absurdism is more effective b/c it's more rooted in lived experience.

>>9489033
Why is this dude mid-dunk on the cover of an absurdist novel? What's the connection between basketball and absurdism that I don't understand?

>>9490992
I honesty haven't read much of Beckett except parts of Godot, but I did see a trio of his shorter works performed at my local theater.

Beckett is much more explicitly absurd from the get-go. Pinter sort of creeps up on you in the sense you can't distinguish when exactly things started getting weird. Like >>9491010 points out, this is partly due to the realistic undertones, and it gives it a sense of the uncanny I haven't encountered in Beckett.

As an example, there is a character on stage for at least a third of The Room who does not speak at all to the point where it becomes slightly creepy. His wife basically has a one-sided conversation with him, going about her morning, but seems completely oblivious to his silence. The characters in his plays sort of go along with the weirdness which is why I cited David Lynch. Eventually things go terribly wrong and it kind of illuminates all the weirdness before the big WTF moment at the end. This also happens in Dumb Waiter and Tea Party. He's a master at manipulating the audience and playing with conventional expectations.

Another thing that separate him from Beckett is that most of his plays don't really have a 'point'. His more grounded plays like No Man's Land and One for the Road explore memory and political authoritarianism respectively, but these are certainly exceptions. When I recommend someone Birthday Party, I love seeing their reaction afterwards because it's usually 'what in the fuck did I just read.' This can be frustrating to some people, but it's really about reveling the moment and enjoying the verbal sparring, of which there is plenty, and no one does it half as good as Pinter except for maybe David Mamet imo.