See above reply.







You're joking, I assume? Sholokhov got the Nobel Prize for this in what was an example of shamless Soviet pressure on the committee. Some parts of the story are interesting, even a bit controversial, but I just can't bring myself to enjoy it. There's something profoundly dissatisfying about it.



I actually didn't mind Portrait of the Artist that much. I just felt that Ulysses was an attempt to do to literature what a Rothko or Pollack did to art (kill it by reducing it to nonsense). I got all the references - I'm quite sure of that - and my impression, as an elitist, was that Joyce was just being a pompous asshole but failed to demonstrate the requisite talent to be able to justify being a pompous asshole. If I wanted to parody it, I'd write a ten-chapter novel with references to the Aeneid about my last trip to take a shit, with each chapter taking a different muse as its title and a different writing style.








Flat characters, terrible plot, scattershot attempt at writing that ends up being just so much verbal diarrhea - wait, this is sounding like my criticism of Ulysses, but Duncan can't even really be pompous because he doesn't have the requisite knowledge.



Not really.