The thing I hate about most "great" fiction is it's rarely made better by the theatrics of it. I'd much rather read the author's anecdotal opinion instead of an overdrawn lie that's subtextually getting to that same point, except taking more time and little entertainment along the way.
[eta:] On the other hand, some years later I got totally bogged down in Brothers Karamazov, and (rarely, for me) didn't finish the book.
I don't get literature culture in general. I love art. In my view art is aesthetics denouncing intention and information through symbology.
What I don't get is why something like In Search of Lost Time from Proust, which I love, is THAT much better than Diary of a Wimpy Kid, when it sometimes explores a lot of similar ideas except using a different aesthetic.
Is the value in art to be judged by how prestigious the aesthetics imply said art to be? Some SpongeBob SquarePants episodes have the same depth as a great Azimov short story except that's really far from how they're categorized.
Being a native Russian speaker, I've been forced to read Crime and Punishment in high school, and for me (personally, subjectively) it was very difficult to read. Obviously, I had no clue what the heck the fuss was about (because I utterly lacked the historical context - history and philosophy courses weren't there yet, a badly designed school program to be blamed), but three key points I still remember are weird original premise (in retrospect, I see how it was possibly constructed - a Frankenstein's monster of utterly exaggerated Western ideas perverted into a faux killer agenda), a sludge of random ravings beating around the bush of expected outcome until some arbitrary breaking point, and a catharsis and ensuing "enlightening" of sorts, where Dostoevsky had "won" his shower debate and reiterated his views. The language was good, but I had issues with the rest. Purely subjective opinion, of course.
I thought this exact thing while trying to read it. "Is he a coward and can't just state his thoughts? They don't seem so assblasting genius he needs so many pages to get there."
I'm from Brazil and most of our classic literature boils down to a cranky rich old man complaining a lot and strawmanning the kinds of people he doesn't like.
If he's a leftist it'd be rich people, if he's conservative it's the degenerate decadent youths.
>Professional critics and their opinions is the worst thing that could've happen to art (edit: in modern times, to be fair I've no idea about the past and its nuances). People like Tarantino killed some of that pompous nonsense, but world is super inertial (and critics had simply adjusted) so we're still there, with "high" and "lowly" arts.
I didn't know it was because of professional critics. A lot of people seem to repeat the same judgement so I just assumed it were organic popular opinions.
I don't know how others engage with books though. With a lot of "real serious" prosaic author's I'll just have no idea what they're exactly describing so I'll just imagine my own version of it. Whenever the language gets too obtuse I literally cannot get everything the author is talking about.
It's weird for instance that there was even a serious critic's discussion about videogames being art.
"But it's interactive"
living is interactive, our train of thought while reading a book is interactive, our train of thought while watching a movie is interactive, our interpretation of anything in a museum displaying contemporary art is very interactive. You'll see two sticks and a bucket and the artist will claim that's his wife.
Why are some mediums (books, sculptures) given much more inherent credit than videogames or movies or hacker news comments? Isn't it all just the meme of prestige?
I feel most comments here, certainly yours, have more thought and ideas behind them in a shorter format than a lot of important books.
Why is the behaviour of analyzing art, for all it's endless self deconstructions, still limited by the museum space or the book/movie/game format and more importantly it's social expectation to do so?
There's a quote from a Netflix series called Sense8 that I love:
"Art is like religion. For the believers, it's everything. For anyone else, it's just a pile of bullshit".
1. We're used to art being created by individual artists, not a team of people.
2. Video games are often mindless and commercially motivated.
3. Video games didn't emerge from high society.
I think number 2 was valid for the longest. But all of them are slowly crumbling. They'll be increasingly seen as an art form, because they are.
Something I find fascinating is just how often that people will think, when they discover that other people have different opinions from them, that they can't really mean it. They must be lying, or be making some sort of mistake, or (in your case) they are incapable of thinking clearly. The truth is that it's crazy, unpredictable world. Sometimes people sincerely like Notes from the Underground and don't like Sponge Bob Square Pants.
It was a bit of a slog and I’ve never been tempted to pick it back up, but it was worth it.
Teenagers had to read "non-western" novel for class.
Child's friend picked Crime and Punishment.
I steered child to Siddhartha by Hesse.
I liked that book when I was young but a recent reading didn't leave me super impressed.
My absolute favorite book by Hesse is Narcissus and Goldmund, it's beautiful. The Glass Bead game is pretty amazing too.
I can’t. Dostoyevski’s Russia is still very much European. It’s culturally a lot closer to what was produced in my own Western European country at the time than anything written in the USA at the same period. But the very idea of the western civilisation is dubious anyway.