This book won the Pulitzer Prize today. What did we think of it?
>>25255074>Jew York TimesHow many victim points does the protag get?
>>25255074No one here cares about your little prize or your little book.
>Angel Down is a World War I novel with a narrative structure that is a continuously streaming monologue, consisting of one continuous sentence, from the first page of the novel to its last pageLOL
I didn't think the Pulitzer did fiction
>>25255235>the fact that corporal Jones stole my bully beef, the fact that my feet are wet, the fact that Donald Trump will be elected president again in 108 years time
Anyone read/reading it and can give a quick comment?>>25255235Books with gimmick writing and structure can be very good in the usual way also. I'm skeptical but not dismissive. I loved War & War.
>>25255074Opening page:and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky, he ought to be topped off, gone west, bumped, clicked it, pushing daisies, a new landowner, napooed, just plain dead, not only dead but scattered around in globs, for the last thing he saw was a shell dropping on top of him with the noise of colliding freight trains, a jim-dandy of a shot from Fritzy the Hun, and kind of ironic, seeing how the whole reason Bagger prefers burial duty is artillery shells can’t reach this far behind the frontline trench, but this shell sure did, the way he always pictures it in dreams, a red skull of fire screaming down, giving him one second to think, That old Bagger luck has finally run out,and the afterlife, for the brief time he knew it, had been delectable, he was gentled back into the arms, and the long, long legs, of Marie-Louise, the prostituée on whom he’d lavished all his francs when the Butcher Birds of the 43rd had been stationed in Vosges, pretty, dry, warm, quiet, bloodless Vosges, where every inhale was Marie-Louise’s La Rose Jacqueminot parfum, her rosewater hair and periwinkle powders, every exhale the flutter of her dyed red hair and the lace whatchamacallits of her lingerie,and so the last thing he wants is someone fucking with him and demanding, “You alive?,” to which Bagger responds, “Fuck no,” to which the man laughs mirthlessly and pulls him up by the armpits like a breech birth, so Bagger the newborn unseals his eyelids, a crust of mud, oil, and embarrassing tears, and discovers he’s being lifted from the burial pit he’d been digging when the mortar hit, now blown to triple its size and is stacked with triple the dead, all being sprayed with quicklime and hastily carpeted in soil,
>>25255365i'm sorry to comment so vapidly but i am more and more feeling like all modern fiction is blending into one mess. i can hardly tell the one style apart from the next anymore. i get a strong sense that i've read this at least four or five times before. i'm sure it's good, in fact it's probably really great and i should show some respect for the artistry, but i'm just so tired
>>25255235The stream of consciousness novel has been done so many times in the last decade. These are always shortlisted for prizes even though they are all dogshit and nobody ever remembers them. They are painful to read, so I doubt they even have any real fans.
>>25255365Does it actually have a paragraph in it? It has enough punctuation to make it readable but it makes me wonder why not have a full stop occasionally. the literary equivalent of Sam Mendes' 1917.
>>25255365urgh
>>25255235Septology pulled this off wonderfully. Every other time I've seen it done has been an absolute fucking pointless headache
>>25255224>t. pathetic goblin smeared with shit living in a hole under a rock
>>25256045Pathetic goblin smeared with shit living in a hole under a rock site, tourist.
>>25255074>pulitzer prize post 1990Nah
>>25255365Genuinely terrible
>>25255074>this novel leaves you breathless
>>25255235bruh why do awards committees love this shit so much both fosse and kraznhorkai or whatever pull that shit too, fucking tedious than a mf
>>25255569when u read this kind of shit u just have to take a break at place like:>like a breech birth, so Bagger the newbornread as:>like a breech birth. So, Bagger the newborn
>>25255365very readable pynchon rip-off. winning the pulitzer tho indicates that it must have a bunch of bitching about european antisemitism and probably some feminist stuff about patriarchy bad and maybe some gay stuff. pulitzer is award for politics not prose.
Crazy how some nobody’s prior work was some middlebrow horror slop and suddenly won the pulitzer just by using a gimmick
>>25256111dude at least two european men won nobels for the same gimmick in the last decade. the pulitzer just aping their betters.
>>25256117>dude at least two european men won nobels for the same gimmick in the last decadeEveryone is aware of Kraz and Fosse. Is some random genreslop writer, Daniel Kraus, them? >the pulitzer just aping their bettersMy point
>>25255365On the prose itself,Good, but made lesser by its gimmick. The content so obviously wants periods and paragraphs, but is denied as much by what amounts to a worthless adherence to technical exercise. Of course, the gimmick is what helps set it apart in the market. Whatever.Red skull of death isn't a great metaphor, either. Maybe it's better justified later. Whatever.I already see pro-whore propaganda so Im waiting for someone to post the interracial cuck scene/ppst-colonial metaphor halfway through the book that won it the pulitzer.
>>25256178the red skull of fire was for the movie adaptation that WILL happen
>>25256109and these might not be hypotheticals, but the only man left to address them can’t be expected to do it, for a man like Lyon Reis doesn’t speak to a man like Ben Veck, Bagger identified Veck as the anvil of their life raft the moment he entered the crater, the surest sign their fivesome was doomed, for Negroes don’t fight alongside whites, yet here Veck is, and has been, for an astonishing seven days, a mystery that the men of the 172nd have chosen not to solve in favor of spitting both saliva and invectives at him,and the only reason Bagger knows about Veck at all is that his arrival marked Lewis Arno’s sole success as a runner, and the kid, big for his britches, jabbered Bagger’s ear off about Veck’s history, how the all-Negro 368th Infantry Regiment failed to plug a hole at the west end of the line and had been exiled to Marbache, of little consequence until P Company’s last flamethrower operator was burned alive, and because Major General Reis was partial to flamethrowers, he requested, nay, demanded a prompt replacement, who arrived, led by Arno, in the form of Ben Veck,[...]and Veck, patient bastard, draws an inhale so long it might have traveled the full length of a horse’s snout, his eyes bright as flaming petrol but strobed by that pesky facial tick, and with a hush he replies, “If you asked before France, I would’ve said my family, I wished good on my family, something like that. But after all I seen?,” and he shakes his head once, a crack of neck, a crunch of soot, “No, sir. What I’d wish now is for revenge,”and Bagger knows he best be vigilant after hearing such an oath from a Negro, but Veck only burps, and his eyes water, and he’s briefly handsome, and he says, “What they say about the 368th is all lies,” a claim that makes Bagger uncomfortable, so he replies, “No one says shit, we’re busy fucking up a war if you didn’t notice,” but Veck ignores him, it’s clear he’s heard the same slanders as Bagger,and Veck says, “They set us up to fail. We shoulda known. We were dumb not to. It’s just we were treated all right at Camp Meade. Frenchies were good to us, too, treated us square. But then they carved us out of the 92nd and strung us between the 77th and the French, no idea who’s leading who. When H-hour came, they pushed us into woods nobody’d bothered to shell. Still had all its barbed wire. We didn’t have wire cutters. We didn’t have maps. We had to use what lanes we could. Made us sitting ducks. We were turning into puddles. Damn right we ran, no different than the 43rd running today, except the 43rd will get a second chance. You’re in the 368th, one chance is all you get,”
>>25256229and so he says, “Well, Veck, you said yourself you shoulda known. No one put a gun to your head and made you volunteer,” though the second Bagger says it, he pictures the Selective Service form he was forced to sign and the tiny text printed in the lower left, If person is of African descent, tear this corner, how all those little corners must have collected on the floor like spent cartridges,and Veck breathes low, and steady as a river, “You want better for your family, you got to prove you are better, then maybe they give you what they ought to gave in the first place,” and Bagger wants to ask who they are, but is afraid he’ll end up being blamed again, and even more afraid he deserves that blame, maybe it’s best to calm this private down,and so he asks, “You got a big litter of kids at home or what?,”and Veck’s face crimps like he’s hit with a hurled pebble, the worst tick Bagger’s seen yet, but he manages a reply, “Got a wife and a little girl, Naomi. Loves everything. Animals, especially. You saw her yourself,” a crazy offhand claim that makes Bagger’s incredulity soften to pity, the man’s falling apart, wearing a horse head is saner than seeing a phantom Naomi ghosting about the Argonne,and Veck continues, normal as can be, “Guy like me, you got to prove everything. Prove you deserve to work the job you work. Prove the pay you get should be as much as the next guy. Prove you deserve a home. When men break your windows, prove to the police they should go after them, not you. Prove to the bosses you’re better than the other guys that look like you, but don’t let those other guys know you said it or you’re going to lose some teeth,”and Bagger says, “Like dogs fighting,” and Veck laughs, “You think we’re dogs? Well, how about this? Your people are rats. Look around, Bagger. Don’t see a whole lot of dogs, do you? Rats, though, they everywhere. They ought to call it War of the Rats,” and Bagger blinks, “Did you just call me a rat?” but the insolent bastard has moved on,and Veck’s whisper is the shiver of stirred syringes, “Soon as white boys started shipping out, they started hiring us for you all’s old jobs,” and goddamn it, there it is again, the blame, “Who’s you all?” Bagger challenges, and Veck, haughty bastard, replies, “The rats,” before continuing, “And there were riots. They chased us out of a factory with guns. Forty dead men that look just like me. A fellow starts doubting the point of fighting for a country who won’t fight for him,” and Bagger goes so cold the only warmth inside him is Uncle Sam,
>>25256229oh, civil rights stuff sixty years behind the curve, brave.
>>25255235>Angel Down is a World War I novel with a narrative structure that is a continuously streaming monologue, consisting of one continuous sentence, from the first page of the novel to its last page
>>25256178>>25256234I take back what I said about the book seeming good, negro diddling aside (how did I know? I was joking about the interracial scene ffs), that dialogue is atrocious.
>>25256300>>25256243There were Blacks in WWI, you dont even know history
>>25256609Everybody knows that, anon, and you know that they do and that that isn't why they're groaning. Don't be annoying just for the sake of it. Anyway, yeah, I love run-on styles but his writing does nothing for me. Like the other anon says, the dialogue is horrible.
>>25255235So it copied the 1917 movie by instead of being one shot, it's one sentence?
>>25256229>doesn’t speak to a man like Ben Veck, Bagger identified Veck as the anvilIsn't he just using a comma where there should really be a period here? This doesn't read like a single sentence to me. Jarring.t. esl
>>25255249They've been awarding a prize for Fiction since the 1910s, anon.
>>25255074white male author won the prize over two foids. enough said.
>>25258635>two foids You sure about that?
putting full stops in dialogue is cheating, the ramblerman should summarize conversations in his style
Taking out the punctuation doesn't make it a continuous sentence. A 200 page sentence that is actually grammatically a sentence would be impressive.
>>25256109>very readable pynchon rip-offit's definitely a pynch ripoff but it's like he's ripping off later, bad pynchon
Every single award season I lose whatever remaining faith I had in the Jewish Literary Mafia Complex. This book is not even worth wiping one’s ass, that’s how heinous it is.
>>25255074Its shit-cunt rubbish.
>>25256229>>25256234>Whitey bad and emotional, Nigga be virtuous and wise
>no one ITT has read the book
>>25259222Kill yourself.
>>25259222We don’t post selfies here
>>25259222That's all threads, no one here reads
>>25259141>muh victimhood
>>25259222>pay 28.99 USD and put the turd in your mouth or you can't say anything!>Noo you have to chew it tooPiss off sister
>>25255074if this is a straight white male, i find it Problematichttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FgxacX72snA&ra=m
>>25259225Yes we do