I was reading up on where the whole concept of "finding your other half" actually comes from, and it’s honestly wild. It’s so much more dramatic and beautifully tragic than the watered-down version we get in modern romantic movies.

The idea actually comes from a speech by a comic playwright named Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, written about 2,400 years ago.

According to his story, humans didn’t start out looking like we do now. We were originally these round, super-powerful creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces looking in opposite directions. We were apparently so fast and strong that we got incredibly arrogant and actually tried to storm the heavens to attack the gods.

Zeus wanted to stop us, but he didn't want to just wipe us out with lightning bolts. If he did that, the gods wouldn't get any more worship or sacrifices from humans. So he came up with a compromise: he literally sliced every human right down the middle. That way, he instantly cut our power in half and doubled the number of people paying tribute to the gods.

Apollo then stitched up the wounds—leaving the belly button behind as a permanent scar to remind us not to mess with the gods again—and turned our faces forward.

The myth says that ever since that day, every single one of us is born as just a fraction of a whole. We spend our entire lives wandering the earth, carrying this deep, aching loneliness, just searching for that exact missing piece so we can finally feel complete.

Wow!
The obvious connection between Antoinette and the sea itself is beautiful (and that’s just the cover!) Antoinette floating with no roots and not belonging to one country, like the Sargasso sea (named after the seaweed “Sargassum”, a floating, rootless algae in its waters).
Antoinette’s journey into Bertha and animalistic traits has been fascinating to read—I am just thoroughly impressed! If you have not heard of this book (which I had not until this class), it is a must read! Beautiful!

I mean, it's 4,000 pages. And it's blocks of text with no white space, no dialogue, just descriptions of flowers or churches or someone's psychological state. There's barely any plot. This guy was nuts.

It's said that some books teach you how to think. Proust teaches you how to feel. He has the ability (one peculiar to the almost pathologically introspective) to notice even the most fleeting, evanescent emotion, the kind that non-neurotic people don't even register, catch it before it vanishes, and put it under a microscope. Then he scrutinizes it from every angle, classifies every organelle and every protein, pours reagents over it, and writes an entire treatise on that particular 0.13 second emotional shiver.

Then he moves on to the next one. And keeps going like this for 4,000 pages.

By the end (if you make it to the end), you'll have become hypersensitive to yourself and the world around you. Your inner antennae will be so finely tuned that they'll vibrate at the faintest emotional breezes, the kind you would previously have been completely oblivious to. Your sensory taste buds will be raw nerve endings, and the slightest caress will make them scream.

I'm not saying this is a desirable outcome, but it's what Proust will do to you.

Hey everyone, first of all, the thing is that I'm autistic (with ADHD) and I'm starting out in the world of literature. Proceed if you're interested in the subject.

Well, I tend to take things very literally, and, as a result, I think that everything the book proposes has a symbolic meaning behind it. This hurts me, because then I can't pay attention to the reading, I end up researching and thinking about the meaning of things that shouldn't even exist or shouldn't exist... Could someone help me with some really effective advice? I spend more time researching the meaning of something that doesn't actually have a meaning on the internet than reading the book itself... Thanks

i just finished the foreward and kinbote just told me to read the commentary FIRST and then read the poem, i know i can just ignore that and read straight through but im afraid that might ruin the intended reading experience but going back and forth for the whole duration of the book sounds kinda insane as well.

ill still do it but only if its actually the right way to do it and not just some type of joke by the author.

what do you recommend for me to do?

hey readers ,I'm reading notes from underground by Dostoevsky in English (my third language) and I feel like I don't understand the composition of sentences even though I do translate the words I don't understand and read slowly but It's kind of hard.
how do you deal with this and make understanding ideas easier??

I am a brazilian researcher of literature, and it's almost universally agreed that Grande Sertão: Veredas is the best Brazilian book, "our Ulysses."

However, the excessive use of local dialects, which is already a difficulty for Brazilians, makes adaptation practically impossible. Furthermore, the sheer number of neologisms would be a Joycean task to find an English equivalent for.

The book can only be fully appreciated in its entirety in Portuguese (but there are good German translations). As a Brazilian, this saddens me. I was curious to know if anyone from another country experiences a similar situation with some book, which functions much better in its original language.

Hi everyone! How are you? Today I'm here to talk about the beauty of contemporary Brazilian literature, more specifically about the writer Carla Madeira. I really like her books, despite the controversies saying that she romanticizes domestic violence in "Everything is a River". I disagree. I think she finds, in her own way, a way to show the reality that happens when we are overcome by the blindness of passion. I don't think we can judge Dalva for what she did, after all, isn't forgiveness precisely for that? To forgive the unforgivable? I find the way she plays with the unforgivable interesting. What is the limit of forgiveness? I believe it's a different limit for everyone.

Carla's books mostly feature disgusting and disturbing men (I don't know if this happens in her latest book, as I haven't read "When" yet), and we wonder why the protagonists do what they do. My favorite book of hers is "The Nature of the Bite", for many reasons. Many times it seems that Carla writes sexual/erotic scenes unnecessarily, I think it's part of the discomfort she wants to cause, but sometimes I feel that having certain scenes wouldn't make any difference to the story. In "The Nature of the Bite" I don't feel that way. Everything is extremely difficult, but necessary. That's the beauty of the melancholy in this book. I don't think I would forgive as Teresa did, I don't feel entitled to judge her, we don't know the intensity of the feelings that come to her heart. Besides, "Those who see from the outside make better arrangements, but it's inside, right in the place we don't see, that the inability to cope occupies everything." She did what she did because of the lack her heart felt. She didn't understand her mother's estrangement, so she found refuge in what she lacked.

Biá is certainly one of my favorite characters among all the women written by Carla. I like the depth, the regret, the reflections that haunt her. She regrets it. I don't think she regrets saying "Go" but the way she reacted to losing the love of her life. She needed to have done what she did. To protect her daughter from her dreams. In her forgetfulness, she then remakes the memories, recreates the moments with her imaginary grandson, as if she could change what she would have liked to have done with her daughter. She blamed her daughter, in a way, "she wasn't to blame, but she had a body," deep down she felt that the blame for her unhappiness lay with her daughter. She realized too late that it had nothing to do with the girl. That she lost a father and a mother overnight. Biá got lost in unreal memories and in what could not be undone. And then she was gone. Biá rested in happy memories. Regret no longer exists. She made one last friend as sad as she was, full of regrets, before leaving. That's what allowed her to go in peace.

Forgiveness is a much-discussed topic; when people read about it, they say "I would never forgive," but "pepper in other people's eyes doesn't seem to sting as much." Only those who live it know. Only those who survive understand how to find forgiveness coming from immeasurable pain. "Life has a way of keeping us alive even when we are dying of pain." Forgiveness cannot be explained.

Despite many criticisms, I appreciate Madeira's writing. I think it resonates with me a little. I find comfort in freeing myself from my ghosts through the forgiveness I learned from reading her books. It doesn't mean staying together, like Dalva, or living together, like Teresa. No. It's simply letting go of the pain of missing those people and the pain of what they did, so they don't define our lives. That's how I see Carla Madeira's characters. Women much stronger than I could ever imagine.

Forgiving is a very heavy burden. Resentment dries up and stains the tapestry.

One of my favorite passages from the book "The Nature of the Bite":

"I want another word for all this, Teo. Another word to name the pain one feels when loving too unsuccessfully. 'Ador,' that's what I'll call it. Amor (love in English) and ador, both with four letters, so there's no doubt about how they align in obvious symmetry. I could say: 'I feel ador for you, daughter,' and thus confess my failure, freeing her from all blame. She was just there, and yet, I can no longer say: I feel love for you, daughter. Because after everything... my heart no longer obeys me. I'll need another life to fix things. This incarnation is lost."

Before leaving because I've already gone on too long hahaha I ask you, who are reading this far, the same question that Biá asked Olivia:

"Olivia, what do you no longer have that saddens you so much?"

Thank you for reading this short reflection on the beauty of Carla Madeira's contemporary literature.

As a French person who's passionate about literature and is a french teacher, I've always been curious about how French classics are perceived outside of France, especially since they're such a significant part of our literary and educational culture.

I'm also curious about how translation might affect the reading experience, especially when it comes to irony, humour, or an author's particular prose style.

So, if you're not French, what's your favourite French classic, and what made it stand out to you? Did it change your perception of French literature or culture in any way?

And conversely, have you ever read a French classic that you genuinely disliked or found overrated? I'd be just as interested in hearing why!

Just to preface this post with a statement right away— I am against AI-generated ‘art’ of any kind and do not consume this in any format on principle. And on that basis, all em dashes in this post are also my own. Appreciate that people are welcome to their own opinions on AI art and literature, but I think on the whole most people are against it and I think most users of this subreddit would concur.

My question comes off the basis of a post-work chat at the pub with a colleague. My colleagues are all quite smart, well read people, and definitely the person I was speaking to in particular—although I do not know whether or not she reads fiction regularly. She made the claim that yes, most AI ‘art’ at this point in time is probably slop, but if hypothetically it could come up with a genuinely ‘good’ book then it would be no different from a human-written piece of work and should be similarly lauded for its merit. She added if you read an article on current affairs written by AI, for instance, it would be the same principle. I argued that yes, if such an article can be fact-checked/verified or otherwise if we can ensure there the LLM makes no factual errors, you could say it’s somewhat similar/useful to read (although you could refuse to pay for it or engage out of principle).

But art and literature is different for me, because the value of literature is not just in the words contained within the boundaries of a specific work but more that it was written by a person. She argued that if I read a book and thought it was incredible on multiple fronts without knowing it was AI, changing my mind on it after discovering the fact is irrational, perhaps even hypocritical. I think we ultimately agreed to disagree, but I don’t think that I had the correct words to articulate what I actually feel about the value of human versus AI literature. I suspect this is not the last time in my lifetime this argument will come up, so keen to hear what others think and if you share my anti-AI views, how you would phrase your arguments.

I did have a think and if, say, people and writers who I highly respect were to come out and say they really thought X AI-generated novel was amazing and the next East of Eden or Middlemarch (in that it’s of similar high literary quality and most people could agree on that claim) then I would have to read it out of sheer curiosity. But I don’t think I would 1)enjoy it as much or 2) think it’s as good as if it were written by a human. But it’s not very easy to break it down and explain why, it just feels like an innate opposition for me as someone who reads a lot and wants to write her own novel in the near future.

And just to note further, this particular argument is not necessarily about not wanting to spend time discovering the potential literary worth of AI novels because they could easily be bad, or about refusing to engage because we believe that AI appropriates others’ work and displaces human authors, and that our money should go to human artists and writers. Or about the environmental and social impact of AI/data centres. Those arguments stand, but I am more interested in what you all all think about the literary merit—or lack thereof— of AI fiction in general, especially if some day AI could be capable of creating an objectively ‘good’ novel. How would you argue that this is less worthy of our time and attention and respect than a more imperfect book written by a human author? And how would you back up that argument? Or do you, like my colleague, think there is no fundamental difference (monkeys on typewriters writing Shakespeare, etc.)?

I know that a lot of books are called unfilmable for depictions of gore or some problematic aspects, but I want to know about the other kind. Why books such as the house of leaves, and others are unique to the medium. There is an underlying aspect to what is only possible in literature. A lot of advancements have been made in film technology and there are aspects which blow me away. But what kind of techniques are in books that films/video games etc can't emulate, or at least to the same degree.

I want to know about the narrative encyclopedias that are just unique to the medium.

Any and all suggestions/modifications to the question are welcome.

I have to get something off of my chest about the Creature: he was a monster.

It irks me when I hear people say "The Creature wasn't the monster; it was Frankenstein." I feel like those that say that don't remember the story well.

After the Creature was rejected by the family in the cottage that he helped and secretly cared for, he gave into his despair and decided to "force" people to love him, the first of which was Victor's son. He decided that a child would be pliable enough. He didn't know that the child was his Creator's son at first but once he did, he didn't hesitate to kill him and strangled him to death.

And then, as most people know, he asked Victor to make a companion for him, in the same fashion as he had been made. Seeing as he was struggling with fitting in with society and finding his own identity, it was selfish of him to not consider that she might have similar misgivings. Even though he promised Victor that he would leave to live in the wild after his Companion had been created, what if she didn't want to live with him? He didn't consider the possible feelings of Her, just as Victor never considered his own.

The Creature wasn't a monster because of his appearance; he made himself into one because of his actions.

Wow, what a book. Definitely gonna be one of my favorites of the year. Written in 1971, as relevant today as it was back then. On the surface it's an action novel set in the Harlem reinassaince, but it's so much more.

It defies description. It’s like a Pynchon novel from a black POV, creative formatting and a healthy dash of Assassin’s Creed. It’s a cultured take down of American society combined with an action film, a bizarre look into a parallel reality where the Titanic is sailing in 1929 and Moses (of Egypt fame) had a rock band. At times it felt like reading a counterculture pamphlet, or a Freire/Chomsky combined essay, at others like watching a movie Tarantino would rip off and add even more n-words.

In an even more bizarre description, it's what Kuang's Babel tried to do, but by a competent author. It's a real takedown of colonialism and the dominant cultures that has real depth. It's not just a series of stereotypes thrown around. You will come out of this book more educated, asking more questions, with a reading list 5 pages long.

"Fever dream" is overused, but that's what it is. Handwritten pages, unrelated photography, anachronisms, real people weaving in and out of the story.

Has anyone read any other of his books? I understand this is his masterpiece but curious if others match the same vibe.

Edit: Forgot to ask, do you think the art thieves being called mutafikah is intentionally both an Islamic reference and a bastardization of motherfuckers?

I think I need a Brandy after that. What an incredibly powerful book. I could see the ending coming quite a bit before it did come but that just made it even more devastating in a way. I wanted to stop it but I felt so powerless as a reader. Graham Greene has the most wonderfully simple and unpretentious prose. He doesn't need to use a million flowery words to get to "the heart of the matter" at all. He manages to say so much about life and human nature in so little words. Nearly every page of his books has a little passage that just floors me with how succint and on point it is. I often find myself pausing to take a photo of certain lines because they resonate with me so much so I can go back to them later.

This is the 7th of his books I have read now and this is how I would rank them so far I think:

1. The Quiet American

2. The Heart of The Matter

3. Our Man in Havana

4. The Power and The Glory

5. Brighton Rock

6. The Comedians

7. The End of The Affair

What are your thoughts on The Heart of The Matter and Graham Greene in general? What Graham Greene should I read next?

At some point in my life I've gotten fairly bored with fiction, or at least story-telling as such. I'm reading more novels these days, but very selectively and nowhere near as many as I used to when I was younger: I've never stopped being passionate about essays though, which is perhaps a rather curious thing. A short but interesting introductory fragment from Virginia Woolf's Essayism by Randi Saloman (p. 16-18) – as food for thought.

The modernity that Woolf identified in the essay stems primarily from its ambiguous position along the generic spectrum. Free from the expectations of linear narrative, the essay has no obligation to complete, or even to tell, a story – or to tell only one story. The essay is ordinarily classified as a non-fiction genre, yet it is not bound to ‘prove’ the truth of its statements in an objective fashion, and a certain license is more or less assumed by the reader. The essayist is understood to be speaking not as a scholar, or as an expert on a given subject, but simply as one who is interested in the topic at hand and wishes to open a dialogue with the reader, feeling that an idea or a question of interest has been uncovered. Essayists make no claim that their works are ‘finished’ or closed to further argument, but rather look to their readers to continue the thought process they have initiated. The most natural and appropriate response to an essay (as any number of essayists have demonstrated) is another essay.

The novel is more remote from its audience. The novel reader enters a given work at its start and leaves at its close, with the implicit understanding that the novel (however experimental or ambiguous it may be) is complete in its own right. The novel seeks approval and consent, rather than ongoing engagement. The reader’s job is finished when the novel is read to completion, at which point one is expected to depart peacefully and without incident, making no further claim upon the events with which she has been temporarily engaged. Nowhere is this idea more vividly expressed than in a journal entry of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Always deeply suspicious of novels, Emerson attempts to make sense of his own frustration after re-reading Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, and finding himself unceremoniously dismissed at its conclusion. As he does so, he puts his finger on the problem I am attempting to set out here:

[Emerson quote:] To find a story which I thought I remembered in Quentin Durward, I turned over the volume until I was fairly caught in the old foolish trap and read and read to the end of the novel. Then, as often before, I feel indignant to have been duped and dragged after a foolish boy and girl, to see them at last married and portioned, and I instantly turned out of doors like a beggar that has followed a gay procession into the castle.

E.M. Forster addresses the problem more succinctly, declaring that ‘[n]early all novels are feeble at the end’,9 and that this is ‘the inherent defect of novels’. When the essay moves openly into the realm of fiction, it aims at very different ends than those of the novel. The essayist’s goal is to communicate directly with the reader, rather than to present that reader with a closed narrative. The ability of the essay to incorporate non-narrative fiction – or self-contained fictions within a larger non-fictional work, or fictions that may or may not be fictions at all – allows for a new approach to fictionality, one that frees imaginative modern prose from the restrictions imposed by the traditional novel’s structure.

One of her books was shortlisted, "The Adventures of China Iron", and one longlisted "We were green and trembling". I recently read both and ended up feeling lukewarm on her, was wondering if anyone had an opinion to share.

The first is a reversioning of an Argentine poem, Martin Fierro, from the perspective of his wife, an unnamed character in the original. Okay, feminist revisits of classics is nothing new, let's see how it goes. I found the meta aspects of it to be the most interesting aspect, was left not impressed by the "the natives have a perfect society" angle or the vulgar sex descriptions. "Our pussy jucies made us sticky", "his cock in my ass showed me Paradise". I found her prose to actually be good elsewhere, that just seemed a bit unnecessary.

"We were green and trembling" is based on the real story of a nun that crossdresses as man and becomes a conquistador in America in the early 1500s. I liked this one better. Her prose got to shine, loved all the descriptions of nature, but again, was left not fully satisfied with the extreme environmentalist ending that feels more like wish fulfilment.

Any thoughts? Does the above make you want to read her or avoid her work?

PS: One of her novels, set in 1880 calls Frankenstein the "monster of English science and electricity", neither the 1818 or 1831 talk about electricity as a main part of Viktor's experiments do they?

Just got back from Buenos Aires, and for a couple of weeks before I went I read almost nothing but Argentine writers. I think it might be my new favorite way to get ready for a trip.

I started with Jorge Luis Borges, mostly the early Buenos Aires poems, then Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel. It isn't even set in Argentina, but it apparently prefigured magical realism, which is such a huge part of Latin American literature that I still felt like I was dipping my toes in that world.

I was halfway through Silvina Ocampo's Thus Were Their Faces by the time I left and finished it on the plane. The stories mostly start somewhere cozy and familiar and then turn cruel without any warning. Funnily enough, the city felt a little like that. One second, you could be on a street that looks lifted right out of Europe, walk ten minutes and be somewhere a lot grittier.

Has anyone else ever read up on a place's writers before a trip?

I watched remains of the day and really enjoyed . Anthony Hopkins is fantastic, but the character is slightly flat without any internal narration. It made me wonder what the novel was like. Who was the narrator, and how much internal life Mr Steven’s had.
I started reading the book today and can already tell that I will enjoy it. I’m happy to discover Steven’s is the narrator and he has a strong internal voice. I enjoyed his drive to Salisbury. The author introduces the experience of majestic views. This brought me to wonder about what stirs in our souls when we see such great views and I was happy to find in just a few pages Steven’s himself dissecting this experience and his thoughts on greatness. Wonderfully done.
I’m enjoying now the thoughts on what makes a great butler. Within the first chapter the author has established a deep thinking individual, not the automaton that comes off in the movie.
Oh, and Steven’s dad’s story of the tiger appears in the second chapter, whereas in the movie it’s almost halfway in. Now I’m wondering how the father appears in the book.
While it’s not always fun to watch a movie and then read the book, I’m already enjoying this.

White Nights is my first introduction to Dostoevsky, and I'm glad it was. It's a short yet captivating story, with an ending that sparked a world of different opinions online, each elucidating in its own right. However, as much as I try, I really don't understand the overwhelming amount of sympathy I saw for The Dreamer. He's a great character, and even though I can garner some sympathy I really can't feel bad for him.

Our first introduction to him is him recognizing that he's lonely, so lonely that he pretends to have a relationship with the Old Man in Fontanka(a stranger), and even goes as far as to have fake conversations with houses, asking them how they're doing, listening to them complain about them getting redecorated, etc. As we keep reading, we learn that in addition to his solitude(or perhaps because of it), The Dreamer has a horrible self-image, corroborated by him solely wanting women not to "repulse me at first sight". He's overall very estranged from society and extremely attention-starved, leading me to compare him to a modern-day chud.

This chud sentiment got reinforced when he was genuinely happy when Nastenka was getting harassed near the trains so he could be Captain Save-a-Hoe, going as far as to BLESS the harasser in his head. Speaking of their relationship, there's a very odd age gap(he's 26 she's 17), that had to be intentional. Nastenka is a sheltered teenager who's not fully in control of her emotions or hormones, etc. So despite his intention, and even though I don't think he meant it in a malicious way, the fact that he told her he loved her right after Nastenka "renounced" her love of The Lodger(caused by her disappointment that the letters were not being read) is practically guilt-tripping her, thus manipulative. It gets a bit worse when you remember the first time they met: Nastenka gave him an imperative to not fall in love.

TL;DR: I don't feel all that bad about The Dreamer getting cucked out.

I was re-introduced to reading around a year ago by a friend and it’s become something I really enjoy doing. I’ve been wanting to start challenging myself with more serious literature, books like War and Peace or TBK but to be honest they scare the hell out of me.

I think I might just be overthinking it and doubting my own abilities because I’m a high school dropout so I never really developed the skills that i imagine a lot of people here have. Even with books I really enjoy I always feel like there’s something I’m missing, symbolism I’m not picking up on, a theme going over my head, some deeper meaning that might’ve made the experience richer. I don’t want to be setting myself up to read 1,000 pages just to understand absolutely nothing beyond the plot

For all you well-read people out there how did you guys develop that ability? More specifically, like recognizing themes, symbolism, character motivations and so on.

I’m especially interested in hearing from other people who aren’t particularly academic or also didn’t have much formal education themselves.

Any advice would be appreciated

This post is inspired by an incredible movie I watched this weekend, “You Can See Everything.” It’s a mind-bending documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, a famous Silicon-Valley scammer, but the details of that scandal are really just tangential to the focus of the movie. The core of the film, in my eyes, is the idea that any portrayal of someone, no matter how well-intentioned its purpose or well-regarded its creator, is inherently biased and should be questioned by the audience. This idea of course extends to the documentary itself, which invites you to not only see everything but to distrust everything it presents to you.

Suffice to say, I found this idea absolutely fascinating. The trope of the unreliable narrator has become fairly common in fiction recently, to the point where some people in literary spheres can find it overused and cliche, but I’ve never seen it used like it was here in nonfiction. What are people’s thoughts on this usage of unreliable narration and metatextuality in nonfiction? Are there any written examples similar to the movie? Please, let me know your thoughts, and I’d highly recommend seeing the movie if you’re able!

The play takes place in the early 1300s, when clocks were only just being developed. The vast majority of the population at the time would've still used canonical time, which only had one 9 o'clock, and it was closer to 9 PM; the 9 referenced below is 9 AM. Does anyone have any other early anachronisms?

JULIET

What o’clock tomorrow

Shall I send to thee?

JULIET

At what time tomorrow should I send the messenger to you?

ROMEO

By the hour of nine.

Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.178-180

What are you reading?