It is good.

>>25207576
>good
>every person that's read it says the first 200 pages are torture
hmm

>>25207654
Your Gaddis thread no giving what you need?

>>25207541
It was out of print, hard to find, and extremely expensive when you did find if used. Since it was rare for someone to have a physical copy and a bunch of pseuds were praising it, it built a cult following around it of people who had never read the novel but believe it to be the greatest novel of all time. So when Dalkey reprinted it, all the pseuds went wild because now they could finally read this book

>>25207984
Yet nobody actually has read it aside from me. Curious

>>25208069
Gass and Gaddis and the other writers you keep making low effort bait threads about will still be read long after your being a minor annoyance has been forgotten by everyone but you. Why not make threads about books you have actually read and like?

>>25208885
bro mad as hell over something

>>25207984
Dude I bought the last printing for like $11 and people were calling it a masterpiece a decade beforehand

>>25209094
It wasn't even out of print all that long and the new edition was announced shortly after the previous edition sold out. Ignore the troll.

>>25209220
It was out of print for multiple years, you nonce

>>25209225
I know two or three year can seem a literal lifetime when 3 years is nearly a quarter of your life, but it is not that long and about an average amount of time between editions for small niche publishers.

>>25209274
Being an insufferable idiot who thinks they’re far more intelligent than they actually are is your entire personality, isn’t it?

>>25209287
Not that anon, but yes.

>>25209287
>has his insult responded to in kind
>cries

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>>25209274
Nonce sissies…not like this

>>25209410
>ai gets it wrong again
Dalkey has has it in print for most of that time.

>>25209421
Nope. Keep lying, nonce, to save face.

>>25209421
Actually, pretty sure someone else had it before Dalkey, did a paper back edition that looked like the first edition.
>>25209447
So the copy I bought from Dalkey in 2018 does not actually exist?

>>25209274
kek

>>25209452
Let's see it

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>>25209671
NTA but I bought this one in 2024 or so for roughly the price it's offered for now. It's still unread because I'm a procrastinating piece of shit.
>inb4 why Gatsby in German
It's a bilingual edition. It's still unread because I'm a procrastinating piece of shit.

>>25207541
>insufferable
all shit posting aside I have this on my kobo because some anon said it was good. I just ran thru ulysses so I'm DeLilloing a little before jumping into another work people call difficult.
U guys think it's worth it?

>>25209957
>dalkey
He already used AI to prove that edition doesn't exist.

I found a lightly-used Dalkey paperback for under ten dollars so I had to read it.
I didn't like it all that much! Gass can write a beautiful sentence, but you can't just string them all together and make a beautiful book; I found the characters dull, the themes muddled (understandable given how long writing took), and the experimental elements superfluous. It reads like a desperate and misguided attempt to turn Thomas Wolfe into James Joyce. Maybe if I'd read it as a teenager I'd like it more, but honestly I don't see myself coming back to it... if you're looking for a good pomo doorstopper, I'm sure you can find someone giving away The Sot-Weed Factor for free in your town.

>>25210654
>themes muddled
You have to identify theme (singular) before you can understand themes (plural).

>>25209966
I think it is good enough to have read 3 times and I will read it again. Only the first ~75 pages are difficult; he dumps you into the thick of it, does not let you get your bearings and gives an insane amount of information, but things settle down after that.
>>25210654
I am finding it difficult to believe you read it, everything you say is generic, nothing specific. But what do you think are the superfluous experimental elements?

>>25207541
>voraciously
Why does EVERYONE use this to describe people reading books?

>>25210704
>what do you think are the superfluous experimental elements?
On pages 627-268 of the Dalkey edition I'm holding, there's a crossword puzzle visual overlaid on the text. It has no function as a puzzle, makes the text harder to read for no reason, and compared to other experimenters of his ilk it just feels uninspired. Look at the books John Barth had been writing for decades by the time The Tunnel was published, and how lively and meaningful those experiments are by comparison.
All of Gass's characters just feel like reflections of himself, without angle or irony, and they all feel like caricatures, especially the women. Gass sucks fat dick when it comes to writing women, and to sexuality (of which unfortunately there's quite a lot).
Have you read any of Gass's essays on other writers? I did, and could instantly pick up on his efforts to imitate specific writers he liked, and the whole thing felt kind of pathetic.

>>25211778
That is not a puzzle and not experimental, it serves the same purpose as the rest of the graphical elements in the novel. What do you consider to be the premise of The Tunnel?

He does impersonations of who he writes about for a reason, he is demonstrating what he is talking about as he talks about it. He does this in most of his essays, style is used for exposition or as a way to provide extratextual information.

You don't seem to understand anything that you are talking about.

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the novel makes a bold declaration: sure, maybe you could argue some elements of fascism (hitler invented fascism; it doesnt exist outside context of him) may SEEM true, but have you considered fascism is... le mean??? so mean in fact it may convince you to strangle a cat
truly we must bury this fascism and ensure it never comes to light within the plebeian mind (who KNOWS what the uninitiated and the mere might do with the devil-like folksy charm of fascist thought) while also keeping it alive perpetually for centuries so that the well of society may always drink from this bitter reminder that 66 billion jews were put on a rollercoaster leading directly into a cage with bears in it
>25 years of writing to produce the above
>mfw

>>25211894
that is just the reality beneath every "great" post-war writer

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>>25211812
>not experimental
What if anything would (You) point to in the book that is?
>it serves the same purpose as the rest of the graphical elements in the novel... he is demonstrating what he is talking about as he talks about it
Maybe this stuff interests you but it doesn't me. I find the narrator disappointing but also and more importantly irritating, and never felt sympathy for him, which makes his long dense narrative a real slog instead of the joy it could have been if someone else had written it.

I don't even hate the book so much as feel mixed and mostly disappointed feelings toward it; if it's your favorite novel and you want to sell it to me, I'll hear out why you think it's great.

>What do you consider to be the premise of The Tunnel?
I read it years ago and I was kind of just waiting to die for the last two hundred pages or so. IIRC the central theme is that History is... well, you got me. A mean Midwestern housewife? Completely trivial? I found it hard to care when I simply wasn't have a great time reading the book. Gass somehow isn't very funny even when he ought to be (intentionally?), and the brand of misery he brings to the table lands as desperate and distasteful to me for some reason (there are plenty of comparably dark and transgressive writer I adore). My problems with The Tunnel are mostly with it as a novel and as a reading experience, not with its ambitions. But those ambitions don't even excite me.

>>25211894
On that his point is that fascism is more than Hitler and so were the Nazis, reducing either to Hitler and killing jews is voluntarily blindness.
>>25211903
As with much of Gass, he tells you what the experiment is with the title. Can you say something interests you if you don't understand it? Premise, not theme, was trying to establish some things about what you did get and how you see the novel so I could explain without having to shoot in the dark.

>the grasshoppers
Absolute perfection.

>>25211903
You're not supposed to feel sympathy for the character, Gass certainly didnt. Gass is a formalist, he views content as a vehicle for form. If you're reading for plot or "sympathetic characters" then you are missing the point. He's all about prose structure and rythym and he's heavily influenced by symphonies. Its like looking at a classical painting and being like "I don't sympathize with these characters". The character was never the point

>>25212212
There is a great deal that is sympathetic about Kohler, but he is not a victim or literally me, so we won't always sympathize with him. We are clearly ment to sympathize with him at times, hate him at other times, be disgusted with him at others, petty him, envy him, etc etc etc.

You know you understand The Tunnel when you realize he is not a miserable person and why he stays with Martha.

>today I began to dig
Started it a few days ago, really enjoying it so far. Maybe I will do dailish posts like I did in the Gaddis thread for JR but haven't really been coming here much since then, no one reads.

>>25207541
>this gripping and deeply personal interrogation of fascism
Cringe. I can already tell it's dogshit.

>>25212420
I read. Found this great passage in the Recognitions:
—A steady hand! he said, and drank down the brandy. —Do you think that's all it is, a steady hand? He opened the rumpled reproduction. —This . . . these . . . the art historians and the critics talking about every object and . . . everything having its own form and density and ... its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this . . . and so in the painting every detail reflects . . . God's concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. —There isn't any. There isn't any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there ... I take five or six or ten . . . the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can't include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it ... when it degenerates, and becomes conscious of being looked at.
Recktall Brown stood up, and came toward him.
—Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that's the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and . . . and shape and smell, being looked at by God.

Which I consider almost a manifesto of postmodernism. A rejection of 19th century realism and return to baroque-like intensity and obsession with structure, but rather than arising from the belief in God, as with Bach, it's due to art turning in on itself and becoming self-conscious.
I'd maybe blogpost about it in a Gaddis thread, but those are not doing so well recently. Also I'm still not sure if I should classify the Recognitions as a modernist or a postmodern text. I always found the difference nebulous, and with Ulysses being as experimental as it is, more forward-looking than many postmodern texts that I read, I find classification difficult.

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>>25212528
Wow, it reads just like Ulysses. Did Gaddis ever read Joyce?

>So now my book is done: Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany needs only its impossible introduction to go forth. And what is all my labor worth? What does my work do but simply remove some of the armor, the glamour, of Evil. It small-e’s it. It shakes a little sugar on the shit. It dares to see a bit of the okay in our great bugaboche. Inexcusable. Slander our saints, if you will, but please leave our Satan undefiled by any virtue, his successes inexplicable by any standard.

>Great undulating banners red as blood. And the brass bands. And the manly thud of uniformly set-down boots. And the rage inside the happy shouts. A hundred thousand spleens have found a mouth. Curtains of sperm are flung up the side of the sky. Hell has fertilized heaven. And now the hero comes—the trumpet of his people. And his voice is enlarged like a movie’s lion. He roars, he screams so well for everyone, his tantrums tame a people. He is the Son of God, if God is Resentment. And God is Resentment—a pharaoh for the disappointed people.

>If you want to think about something really funny, kiddo, consider the fact that our favorite modern bad guys became villains by serving as heroes first—to millions. It is now a necessary apprenticeship.

>Martha hates being called “kiddo.” She thinks it the first letter of condescension.

>But if you want to think about something really funny; consider how the titles of tyrants change. We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs, or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger our boys; the masses make such appointments now; the masses love tyranny; they demand it; they dance to it; they feel that their hand is forming the First Citizen’s Fist; so we shall murder more modestly in future: beneath the banners of Il Duce, Der Führer, the General Secretary or the Party Chairman, the CEO of something. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called Coach.

>>25212528
Go post in the Gaddis thread, I will respond tomorrow. Pay the retard no mind, let him scream until he tires himself out, only respond to those who write something worth responding too.

>>25212550
Ulysses! That business again...

>>25212550
>>25212584
It's so awesome how you can see just how mid Gaddis and Pynchon are. You're one of the few anons with intelligence on this board.

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>>25212212
>You're not supposed to feel sympathy for the character
That might be tolerable in a 150-page novel, but a 700-page novel? You don't see why I and others find that a frustrating slog?
>He's all about prose structure and rythym (sic) and he's heavily influenced by symphonies
I love prose stylists, which is a large part of why The Tunnel frustrated me. A good one can do all those formal things you mentioned as well as Gass or (often) better, while also giving you great characters, authentic voice, and rare feelings, all of which Gass either lacks the talent for or intentionally avoids for some stupid reason; a better writer would not have to compromise. If you like those formal qualities, why not read Gaddis, who is basically a superior writer on every single level? Why not read Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard or John Hawkes, each of whom cold achieve ten times more with less, giving you similar dark tone and rhythmic formal beauty but also style that is truly and confidently his own? Those guys also knew to keep such writings short and tight, not to waste the reader's time. So did Faulkner. So did Stein. I could go on. Even Gass's more blustering and masculine literary crushes, guys like Lowry and Wolfe, showed a little restraint; they had no trouble yoking the stylistic power to human feeling that enabled it to transcend mere academic bullshitting, sterile retreading.
Oh and what on Earth is a "classical painting"? Like from the Greeks? I'm not a big visual art guy but this phrase confuses me and makes me suspect you don't know what you're saying and have not engaged with a large body or art, literary or otherwise.

>>25212014
>Can you say something interests you if you
To varying degrees, I like all the non-Gass writers I name dropped in replying to the other anon. Pic related is a beautiful book Gass could only have dreamed of writing, and no one ever talks about it, and it's far from the only one. Pisses me off, frankly, when a book like The Tunnel steals the spotlight from books that deserve it.

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>>25212919
>Oh and what on Earth is a "classical painting"?
NTA but it can technically refer to Renaissance/Enlightenment-era classicism.
>The ornate, organic, and complexly integrated forms of the baroque were to give way to a series of movements that regarded themselves expressly as "classical" or "neo-classical", or would rapidly be labelled as such.
'Classical' is also used to denote the classical period in classical music (as confusing as the term is in English). We use "muzyka poważna"/"serious music" instead in Polish, which I like a lot more than the English "art music", which sounds a bit kitsch to me.

But judging by the typos he might be a retard who meant all pre-20th century paintings in general. Which might've been your point all along, I find it hard to detect sarcasm without body language to accompany it.

Anyone in this thread read the Sot-Weed Factor? You guys seem like the kinda people who would have read it, since it's a long, unwieldy postmodern classic. If so can you tell me your thoughts on it. I'm interested in it, but long books are such a commitment, y'know.

>>25209410
except this isnt true lol

>>25213007
I have a copy in my house, but I'm yet to get to it. Seems like a fun romp:.
>In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffeehouses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
>As poet, this Ebenezer was not better nor worse than his fellows, none of whom left behind him anything nobler than his own posterity; but four things marked him off from them. The first was his appearance: pale-haired and pale-eyed, raw-boned and gaunt-cheeked, he stood — nay, angled — nineteen hands high. His clothes were good stuff well tailored, but they hung on his frame like luffed sails on long spars. Heron of a man, lean-limbed and long-billed, he walked and sat with loose-jointed poise; his every stance was angular surprise, his each gesture half flail. Moreover there was a discomposure about his face, as though his features got on ill together: heron’s beak, wolf-hound’s forehead, pointed chin, lantern jaw, wash-blue eyes, and bony blond brows had minds of their own, went their own ways, and took up odd postures, which often as not had no relation to what one took as his mood of the moment. And these configurations were short-lived, for like restless mallards the features of his face no sooner were settled than ha! they’d be flushed, and hi! how they’d flutter, and no man could say what lay behind them.
>The second was his age: whereas most of his accomplices were scarce turned twenty, Ebenezer at the time of this chapter was more nearly thirty, yet not a whit more wise than they, and with six or seven years’ less excuse.
I highly recommend pirating e-books on Anna's Archive, reading the first few pages and deciding based on that whether you want to order a copy and jump in now, or if it seems like it might not be your thing and pushing it back on your TBR list.

>>25207541
>germans are... le bad!
more blood libel

>>25212919
>. Even Gass's more blustering and masculine literary crushes, guys like Lowry and Wolfe
nigger gass shat on wolfe every chance he got.

>>25209410
>well ai said
Kill yourself and the rest of your bloodline

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>>25213025
That's just the new standard gramps, get with the times
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/25203173#p25203247

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I'm sorry anon but you're wrong

>>25212919
>That might be tolerable in a 150-page novel, but a 700-page novel? You don't see why I and others find that a frustrating slog?
I haven't read The Tunnel and don't intend to for that reason, simply pointing out that there seemed to be a disconnect between what you were looking for and what Gass is known for and how's talked about the book in interviews.

>>25213007
TSFW is great, as are Giles Goat-Boy and LETTERS. Tons of fun. Gass could only dream of having Barth's genuine love of books, and even Pynchon looks bad by comparison (Mason & Dixon isn't a bad read but it's a poor man's Sot-Weed and I'm sure Pynchon knew it).

>>25213020
I'm talking about the writer of Look Homeward, Angel, not the writer of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Gass may have disliked the latter but had nothing but praise for the former, and having read both, that Wolfe's influence on Gass (in Omensetter's Luck as well as The Tunnel) is plain as day. WHG's claims regarding his inspirations as a young reader further support this.
Mixing those two up- Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe- is a common mistake among beginners; don't beat yourself up over it.

>>25213025
Quite “literally” linked to Dalkey’s website, you unread retard

>>25213007
John Barth is much easier to read and way funnier than a lot of the other people who get brought up in these conversations.

>>25213016
this reads great

>>25213205
>I'm talking about the writer of Look Homeward, Angel, not the writer of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Gass may have disliked the latter but had nothing but praise for the former
wrong, nigger, gass annihilates wolfe as second rate, read a fucking collection of his criticism for christ's sake. of course we're talking about thomas wolfe, tom wolfe is too insignificant to even enter my mind, YOU are confusing the two, not me

>>25214528
He never read The Tunnel and is samefagging. He reduced The Tunnel to misery ffs, at best he dropped it 50 pages in. Don't feed the troll.

>>25209312
>cries like a bitch about people insulting him when he’s the dipshit calling people children
So that a yes on the whole pretending to be intelligent thing?

>>25214641
No one insulted me until now and it failed to insult me, it was more tiresome than anything.

Okay but what's this book about anyway

>>25214850
A digs a tunnel

>>25214673
NTA but
>oh it’s all so tiresome… I’m just so superior in intellect and erudition to these… these children! Yes! Children, they must be since they insult me in such a puerile manner (puerile means immature by the way)!
But I’ll admit it, that faggot’s post was provocative when it really had no reason to be. I just felt like poking fun at you.
>>25213007
Been meaning to read this myself. I haven’t read Gass and the only postmodern stuff I’ve read is by Pynchon and Calvino. The replies here though are selling me on it.

>>25214870
My recommendation for Barth would be to start with something smaller, like Chimera or Lost in the Funhouse (you should also read Lost in the Funhouse before David Foster Wallace's Girl with Curious Hair collection, because the last story in there references it so heavily)

>>25214884
Thanks for the recs, I know how big an influence Lost in the Funhouse was on DFW, so much so that he took his metafictional irony and attempted to birth something more “sincere” from it, as far as I understand. I’ll start with Chimera.

>>25214870
I plan to pair Sot-Weed Factor with son & xon, read them back-to-back.

>>25214916
Why not add Vollmann's Argall to the mix?

>>25214921
>3rd book in a series
Maybe if it can be read standalone. It'd also be my first Vollmann.

>>25214928
Yes, every book in that "series" is completely standalone. The only thing that connects them is the topic: encounters between European settlers and Native Americans.

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>>25214916
>son & xon
i can't imagine reading that garbage, but you do you

>>25214528
>gass annihilates wolfe as second rate, read a fucking collection of his criticism for christ's sake
I won't read another of Gass's books because after reading three I realized I don't like him very much. Where in his "criticisms" does he "annihilate" Wolfe? I've tried a number of search engines and can't find anything at all to support this, just the same few vaguely positive quotes. Point me to a relevant article of his and I'll educate myself, but if he did talk shit it seems to have been in a fairly deep cut.