|
8272. wonkers2 - 8/5/2006 10:28:22 PM The Gypsy Strings at the Rivera Court 8273. wonkers2 - 8/14/2006 5:26:00 PM Here's a shockerGunter Grass admits he was a member of Hitler's Waffen-SS.
Grass is Germany's best writer, author of the widely acclaimed "Tin Drum," which is perhaps the most biting satire of the atrocities of Nazi Germany. 8274. judithathome - 8/14/2006 7:05:31 PM I don't know that he is their best writer but he is certainly very good. 8275. PelleNilsson - 8/14/2006 7:57:40 PM Have you read Grass, wonkers? Personally, I think 'The Flounder' is better than 'The Tin Drum*. 8276. wonkers2 - 8/14/2006 8:01:12 PM Well, he's my favorite living German writer. Very imaginative guy. If you haven't seen Tin Drum, put it on your list. Or better, read the book. It's incredible that the man who wrote that book was in the SS. He was only 18 at the time and I guess he was drafted. 8277. judithathome - 8/14/2006 11:50:52 PM I've seen the movie AND read the book. I think the best German writer is Thomas Mann but if you narrow it down to living author, I won't quibble. 8278. wonkers2 - 8/15/2006 5:27:14 AM No doubt Thomas Mann is widely considered to by Germany's best. I like Grass better although I've read several of both. 8279. Magoseph - 8/15/2006 1:15:30 PM As soon as I finish "Rabbit at Rest", I'm reading Buddenbrooks. 8280. PelleNilsson - 8/15/2006 6:35:23 PM I read it in German during a beach vacation in Portugal long ago. It was a paperback printed on cheap paper. Maybe you know what salty spray does to such stuff. At the end it was hardly recognizable as a book.
I would like to reread it, but my German is no longer good enough, and to read it in translation wouldn't be the same.
Will you read it in English or in French? 8281. Magoseph - 8/15/2006 7:41:26 PM In English, Pelle, and the translator is John E. Woods. I have a yellowed copy printed in 1924 and translated by H.T Lowe-Porter and I read that one long ago. My oldest son gave the new one to me as a gift before I moved up here. The copy was packed and I just unearthed it lately. It is known as being much better than the one by Lowe-Porter, but you must know that. 8282. PelleNilsson - 8/16/2006 7:23:34 PM I wouldn't know anything about that, Mago. If I were to reread Buddenbrooks I would of course do so in Swedish, so I don't see a need to bother about the quality of this or that English translation. 8283. Magoseph - 8/16/2006 7:58:15 PM So, Pelle, you're assuming that your Swedish translation is the best one so far--there could be a newer better one, were you to reread it. 8284. wonkers2 - 8/17/2006 1:36:27 AM Gunter Grass under siege. Writing "The Tin Drum" more than suffices for having joined the Waffen-SS as a teenager. It's a German masterpiece on WWII on the same level or higher than Catch 22, in my opinion. 8285. wonkers2 - 8/17/2006 1:42:58 AM Of course, when considering great WWII era novels one should remember "The Naked and the Dead" by Normal Mailer and Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow." Also, "From Here to Eternity" by James Jones. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on the Spanish Civil war is also one of the best modern war novels. That's all that come immediately to mind. 8286. PelleNilsson - 8/17/2006 9:43:43 AM No Mago, I'm saying that if I cannot read a book written in a particular foreign language I prefer to read it in Swedish rather than in a second foreign language. 8287. alistairconnor - 8/17/2006 10:16:53 AM A major reason why I want to improve my schoolboy German (one day) is to read Grass in his own words.
Lech Walesa, the former Polish president, and Jacek Kurski, a deputy for the ruling Law and Justice Party, have called on Mr. Grass to relinquish his honorary citizenship of Gdansk, the city of his upbringing.
[...]
Adam Michnik, the editor of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, also spoke up for Mr. Grass, adding that “literature has never been Lech Walesa’s strong card.”
One of many weak suits, then. 8288. alistairconnor - 8/17/2006 10:55:07 AM Talk of the devil, Wonk...
Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after the First World War, Against the Day moves from the labour troubles in Colorado, to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, to Venice and Vienna, to the Balkans and Central Asia, to Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tungska event, to Mexico during the revolution, Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
The sizeable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it is their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it's not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide; let the reader beware.
Good luck.
Synopsis, by the author, of a novel about to be published...
Guess who? 8289. wonkers2 - 8/17/2006 12:38:13 PM Interesting. Pynchon and I were college contemporaries. I knew some people who knew him but never met Pynchon. He was known as the leading campus creative writer, a bit of a legend among English majors along with Richard Farina. Pynchon turned out to be much better than Farina who was killed in a motorcycle accident before he reached thirty. I did know him and thought he was a bit phony. Pynchon's books are hard to get through. It's been said that he writes for English professors. 8290. wonkers2 - 8/17/2006 12:39:45 PM A good book for trying Pynchon is "The Crying of Lot 49." It's only 150 pages or so. 8291. alistairconnor - 8/17/2006 3:26:15 PM I enjoyed Mason/Dixon and Lot 49. I venerate Gravity's Rainbow. I've never read V.
|
