>But there was another reason for including those long didactic passages. After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey's own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.Shrimply based
>>25091011He’s reddit
>I think the writer has an obligation to be upfront with the reader about what they are in forGass said it better. Probably a slight misquote but more or less what he said, I think I used more words than he did.
>>25091011I feel this because I'm getting filtered by the abbey plotline in KC:D. It got tedious to the point of pissing me off and made me suspect the devs did it on purpose up really drill in the tedium of monastic life.
>>25091011>Shrimply basedStalin minded. One cannot become an Autonomist without refuting Stalinism. FUCK STALIN, FUCK TROTSKY, SEIZE FIAT.
>>25091011>Friends and family filteredFirst 100 pages are kino. Borges re-telling Sherlock holmes
>>25091125I think there are fundamentally two different worlds of thought on this. Some authors feel that they are offering forbidden knowledge and readers should have to work for it, and if they can't work for it and get through it they're not worthy. The other sort of thought on this is that you should try to give your reader your idea as easily as possible because communication is difficult. It's sort of and elitism v populism conflict. IDK which is better, I'm a cunt so I side with the first one if I cant actually understand it and the second if I can't.
>>25091163sorry meant to say the first if I can the second if I can. after all I think you have to look out for number one. Truth flows from self confidence.
>>25091163There are probably more than two worlds of thought on this but Gass was expressing the exact same thing as Eco; Gass was talking about putting the difficult stuff at the start, being upfront with the reader instead of ambushing them with it in the middle or at the end. I think this was from his interview with Silverblatt, Silverblatt asked him about the difficulty of the first part of The Tunnel, but I am not sure if that was the interview, maybe it was The Paris Review's installment of The Art of Fiction with Gass?I enjoy Eco but absolutely hate his interviews, filled with needless verbosity; he seemed to think while he spoke and revised what he said while thinking more on the revision only to offer yet another revision and possibly yet another.
>>25091190I'm not really familiar with Gass's writing I'll admit, but I think how you characterize Eco is accurate but honestly I like it. He's a man who was constantly willing to take in new information and allow it to inform his views. Truely open-minded in the best way, and I say that as someone who would have likely disagreed with him on politics. Like, people talk about being open-minded but usually they're just ideological cunts where the brand of "open-minded" is part of their ideology so they just say that's them when they're really just hardcore ideologues.
did Eco write a book about abusive and obscurantist rabbies in the shtetls, killing bad jews who don't follow the guidelines? no? how comes?
Eco sounds like a massive faggot here.
>>25091895Why should he have done so? He wrote about what he knew and was interested in as an Italian, and there's a teensy chance he had more to do with Catholics and the roman church than with Jews. But well done my goy, that is a wise observation to make, perhaps there is hope for you yet.
shan't be reading it then
>>25093937I mean my boy, silly me
>>25093939The first 100 pages aren't any heavier or more tedious reading than the rest of it; it's brilliant, go for it. The book is about theology and the history of various schisms anyway. The murder mystery is just an excuse to write endless ekphrasis about religious tympana and relics around the abbey.
