So is it the inheritor to Infinite Jest we've all been waiting for?
>>24879210I don't know, but looks interesting. I'll check it out.
long ass title
>>24879210I’m liking it so far. Will elaborate later.
>>24879463looking forward to it anon
>>24879210Didn't know the author, but reading her wiki she sounds very interesting. Thanks for exposing me to this - apparently this fucking board still works every once in a while.Has anyone read other books by Helen DeWitt? Are they good? I'm very curious about the Last Samurai.
>>24879854The Last Samurai is great but the smattering of books she's put out since are massive disappointments, wastes of time even. She's on her way to joining the legendary level of authors who write one or two great books and spend the rest of their career stalling, like Capote or Brodkey. Unless.......Your Name Here is great.
>>24879999Checked
lmao it's just a ripoff of this
>>24880525Only in the most superficial sense imaginable
Infinite Jest FUCKING SUCKS what a troll of a book the start is okay but then it begins to really suck where nothing is really happening and it's just writing in a similar style to this like it just goes on and on and on with not a lot actually being said, just filler, dry filler, over and over and over, and then when there's a good bit it'll get cut offHALF CUT OFFEXPOSITION DUMP AFTER EXPOSITION DUMP OF LAME DRY SCIFI NONSENSE TIER INFO DUMPit's a shit book, Infinite Jest is shit, David Foster Wallace roped himself because his magnum opus is trash and he knew it
>>24880801Thanks for the input!
>>24879854why does it have two authors?
>>24880801Absolutely filtered. The scene changes are necessary to both keep all the characters fresh in memory and also the long, digressive segments from becoming tedious. There's always something new. There's not a single real slump in the story's flow over a thousand pages plus. /digress
>>24880525>>24879210Not everything 2nd person is a rip-off of If on a Winters night, but this could be. I was thinking more like it was a rip-off of this written in 2nd person (The Mezzanine)There has been a slew of things written in 2nd person this decade, usually by women, which are very mediocre and literally only praised for the fact they're written in 2nd person. In fact, almost every book in 2nd person is only praised for being in 2nd person. Even Calvino's is basically just a gimmick but he gets a pass because the Oulipo were all about exploring interesting language gimmicks with the intention of inspiring others. The lipogramatic work "A Void" by Georges Perec is an interesting example that tries a bit harder. It is a book written without the letter E which is about trying to find the missing letter E. That's a decent idea for one of these gimmicks. But these new authors literally just write a normal boring book with a gimmick and then demand praise for doing something quirky. It's annoying af
>>24880845based on a news report i read:>gridneff, 20-something hipster in like 2005, approaches dewitt (reading Adorno) at a bar>they get to talking>they leave, but he sends her an email relating some anecdotes in (apparently) kinda deranged prose - she thinks it's brilliant>they start writing a two-narrator novel: dewitt writing laconic and deadpan woman, gridneff writing unhinged man>can't publish it>decide to add calvino second-person shit for no reason>still can't publish it>put it online as a pay-what-you-want deal like radiohead>now everyone thinks it has been published>continue wrangling publishers and agents for 10 years>finally get it publishedmore or lesso
>>24880856the phone call between Hal and Mario which gets cut off to info dumps from TP cartridges goes from something interesting to something dull, then the following chapter about Brando is somewhat interesting except its far too recursive and drawn out, and the Jim Hick routine is also tedious, 2 chapters in a row being shit isn't good, I dropped it after thatthe beginning of the book its like he understands drawing out scenes to create tension, but then he goes full hog for 3 chapters back to back of just being dulland the Bukowski-esque slobby writing gets tired after a while
>>24880900she sounds basedhttps://www.vulture.com/2016/07/helen-dewitt-last-samurai-new-edition.html>She used the word morons a lot, spoke of TPWs (“typical publishing wankers”), and said she has a long blacklist and a short whitelist of editors and agents in New York and London. (She told me I am in a gray zone between the lists.) She mentioned the Wylie Agency, which represented her for a few months between 2000 and 2001. “Those people,” she said, “they are so lucky they never tried to get a job in corporate law, because they’d be out on the street in a week.” >she said, “how to deal with a world where there’s this language of infatuation that people use. ‘Well, I didn’t fall in love with the book.’ Or: ‘I fell in love with the book!’ ‘Infatuated!’ ‘Besotted!’ ‘Obsessed!’ I’m not sure that that has ever been my attitude toward any text. Throwing around this language is really a way of denying the mechanics of attachment. You hear this all the time: If they don’t fall in love with it the first time, that’s it. Well, that’s a psychological issue.>Once, after a book deal that she negotiated herself fell apart, she took a sedative and put a plastic bag over her head, but she couldn’t fall asleep. She sent an email to a lawyer asking that she ignore the previous email about disposing of her corpse. She went to Niagara Falls, but by the time she got there Reuters had reported her disappearance and a policeman picked her up on the street and took her to a hospital. Six years later, after the agent Bill Clegg failed to sell Lightning Rods to about a dozen publishers and resigned as her agent, she sent him a suicide email and set out to throw herself off a cliff near Brighton.
>>24881060>If they don’t fall in love with it the first time, that’s it. Well, that’s a psychological issue.>Six years later, after the agent Bill Clegg failed to sell Lightning Rods to about a dozen publishers and resigned as her agent, she sent him a suicide email and set out to throw herself off a cliff near Brighton.This lady is a card. Furthermore, I can save her. Buying the new book now.
>>24881060Turns out cats aren't enough to make single chicks happy.
>>24879210Plz post an excerpt, any of you anons who already have the book.
bump
>>24879854The Last Samurai is her masterpiece and probably one of the best post-postmodernism contemporary books ever written
>>24882140What do you mean post-postmodernism?
Bump
>>24880900I don't undrestand why this was a pay-what-you-want PDF on her website instead of just going on Kindle self-published. What was the idea there? It's not like when a real publisher picked it up they woudl consider it some kind of never-published book anyway.
>>24882878Per my view postmodernism in literature is defined as this sort of movement/genre characterized by the usual metafictional, self-referential, highly ironic or satirizing tropes present in the work of those few writers typically associated with the label: Pynchon, Delillo, Gaddis, Barth and whatnot. This kind of writing obviously peaked in the 70s and 80s and whatever has emerged in the Anglophone literary scene since the decline of postmodernism seems to me a kind of nebulous grouping of uncertain new ideas and directions about the novel and its form going into the 21st century. This board’s meme trilogy associates Infinite Jest with this “movement” as the successor to postmodernism under the label of metamodernism, which I find to be rather ill-defined and vague. There’s clearly a ton of new schools of thought going on in the popular literary novels of the last 20 ish so years, the “hysterical realism” or sometimes “New Sincerity” movement championed by DFW and followed by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan; the mfa slop sparse prose of Rooney and Vuong and whatever else is winning Pulitzers these days. The Last Samurai is a novel that really defies categorization in these respects, at its core it’s quite a simple story told straightforwardly but Dewitt’s style really elevates it into something else entirely, it’s really unlike anything I’ve read. The prose is teeming with wit and erudition to the point where some on this board would probably find it disgustingly masturbatory, but the sincerity shines through and keeps the book focused. Highly recommend checking it out if you’re disillusioned by contemporary fiction and the churning tides of slop that are published nowadays. That said the line that The Last Samurai walks is quite tight between temerity and restraint and some of the reviews I’ve read of Your Name Here are worrisome, although I’ve yet to pick up a copy for myself.
>>24884075have you read anything else by this queen?
>>24884222She hasn't written much else tbf
>>24885661she has a hard time gettint bpuglished but surely she's ritten a lot? she claimed to have written 50 novels before last samuraiman
