satirical/realist literature

>>9907507
>Catch-22
>Realism
The whole point of Catch-22 is to portray the funny, surrealist antics of shoving horseapples in your cheeks and selling chocolate-coated cotton with rape and Snowden bleeding to death on the inside of the B-24 in horrifying detail.

Anyway, try Anthony Burgess's stuff which isn't A Clockwork Orange, like Time for a Tiger or Honey for the Bears. Alternately, Kingsley Amis (Stanley and the Women being my favorite) or Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust being my favorite).

>>9907516

You guys should try Paradise Lost for a nice dose of wartime absurdity. My favorite part was when Satan and his crew were rolling in a fiery gulf of perdition for nine days and nights. Absolutely btfo by God.

>>9907507
Catch-22 was fucking garbage. Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.

>>9907516

Did you read the part where I compared it to actual historical events? Maybe I read too much history, but the books are chock full of accounts just as farcical as anything in this work.

>After the explosion, the squadron’s orderly formation fell apart. Suddenly guns went off: a gunner had lost his head and sent a shell toward a neighboring ship, and others fired in response, having no idea what they were firing at. “Submarines!” someone shouted. Torpedo-wielding subs were the latest invention. In fact, both sides possessed them but they were never deployed in this war.

>Men tore life-belts out of each other’s hands and prepared to jump overboard. A quaking bugler was ordered to sound a cease-fire, but he choked as he blew into his bugle, finally managing an audible tone. Even that did not restore calm. At last men were forcibly pulled away from the guns—they’d been shelling each other’s ships.

>The fleet never recovered from Makarov’s spontaneous combustion. At length, Admiral Nikolai Skrydlof was appointed to replace him. But Skrydlof was unable to reach Port Arthur, due to the Japanese blockade. Instead, the post went to Rear-Admiral Vitgeft, whose bureaucratic habits had irritated Semenov. Even if Vitgeft had possessed initiative, he would have been overruled by Viceroy Alekseev, who ordered the fleet to avoid all risks.

I get the impression that Kafka is more realistic than Russian realism.

>>9907507
I think you mistake the words you use. Realism is a mode of writing, a certain type of portraying things. So is satire, which is over the top and cartoonish. The two do not intersect. Realist writing makes you think "this is down to earth, low key," it sells its events by playing them down. That doesn't mean that's how reality actually is (fuck if we know what reality is) but realism in fiction is not over the top zany things even if that's how you think reality is.

good soldier svejk

going after cacciato

>>9907516
this guy's rec of waugh is good, but for something closer to catch 22, maybe Put out more flags

satire often strikes very close to home. that's what makes it so cutting: take out the emperor's title and nobody would put up with his crazy perverted ass.
even when it gets surreal, the audience needs some acceptance that the surreal might indeed happen to them. when reading kafka or brecht and someone makes an unreal astounding demand of the person filling out the paperwork, the reasoning that the paperwork demands it has an overwhelming reality which quells the surreal nature of the demand. havel's garden party works because too many family friends and neighbors became unrecognizable when they integrated into the machinery of bureaucracy that it's plausible your parents wouldn't recognize you if you came straight from work.

>>9907538

Why?

>>9908053

I see. But what about say, dirty realism?

>>9907507
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