| Author | Message | ||
     Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.99.210 |
Possibly -- these days (when everyone has read everything) -- only oblique or difficult fiction can impart new truths from story-telling. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.153.150.117 |
I have a theory that we need a certain mix of things to flourish. I was in Ulverston recently and thought it had an odd mixture of rural and industrial, allsorts of little atmospheres in different parts of it. I felt quite invigorated by it. My idea is that if we are pushed and pulled by a thing or place - not even necessarily painfully - then we will grow mentally. The broad mind can come from a broadness in environment. That's why on demand tv is bad - there's no discovery, just a safe sticking to the things we like. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
That's a very interesting notion, Tony...I find lots to agree with there. Des, I'm finding a lot of new truths (or old truths stated in a new or original way) imparted in the storytelling of strange, nebulous crime fiction these days. In books by James Sallis and Rupert Thomson, for example. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
Tony - I will say that the broad mind can use on Demand TV as a useful tool. I've been able to see a lot of stuff that I wouldn't ordinarily have access to via normal terrestrial TV. You need that willingness, though, or else it is just a matter of sticking with the same old same old. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.99.210 |
Someone has said this elsewhere: 'difficult' is of course a relative term. Kafka is lucid, but difficult. Joyce is difficult, but intellectually quite straightforward. Discuss.  | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
I don't find Kafka difficult - quite the opposite, actually. Then again, I is a genius. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
I'm probably not as widely read as many of you, so I find I'm constantly finding 'new truths', and a sense of wonder, in everything I read. But I guess it must be very difficult for writers to come up with something new and different. When it works, as a reader, I get that lovely tingling feeling down the spine. Thanks to all you writers finding new ways to tell us stories!  | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
new truths - Des, are you saying there are indeed "new" truths? Or do you mean the same old truths, that are sometimes difficult to impart, when they become calcified by cliches, familiarity, etc.? I guess "new truths" are relative too—what's a new truth to me, may not be to you. But are you speaking relatively, or not?... I go back and forth myself. Complexity, the byzantine, the terribly obscure, the incredibly obtuse and maze-like and unclear... sometimes it strikes me as the hallmark of poor writing, of unclear thinking, of lesser-than art. It's much more difficult to be simple, than complex. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.99.210 |
I think it is indeed difficult to be either linear or complex in any form of effective story-telling. But the real difficulty, perhaps, is increasingly (with so much stuff about) the attempt to achieve the difficult goal of telling any story that's not been told before (whether linear or complex). And as is hinted at above, both simple and difficult can be simple or difficult. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.99.210 |
PS: new truths? Just my shorthand for stories that have not been told before. Stories that give a particular reader an eureka moment that he or she may find so rarely in popular fiction. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.128.128.241 |
Anyone read the story DEEP WATER in the anthology TERROR TALES OF EAST ANGLIA? | ||
| Kate (Kathleen) Username: Kathleen Registered: 09-2009 Posted From: 86.156.127.32 |
But fiction doesn't have to try to reinvent the wheel. I prefer writers who simply speak in their own voice, with their own style, rather than deliberately being difficult or impenetrably dense. Sometimes it's just plain awkward and the story suffers for it. One can be poetic and visionary and weird without necessarily being difficult. (Although I appreciate that word will have different meanings for everyone, esp. in this context.) I don't want to have to translate or search for meaning or pore over every sentence - I just want to be swept along and immersed in well-written prose. BTW, I don't find Kafka difficult either. And Joyce was brilliant, just not my cup of tea. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.128.128.241 |
I agree that impenetrability should not be the goal. But to 'break new ground' in telling 'a brand new story' (ie. a story not underpinned by previous templates of stories), it sometimes makes the text, at first, *seem* difficult, until you get acclimatised. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Indeed – and there's all the difference in the world between a work that deals with complex themes and one that is merely clogged up with pre-emptive mystification. People often say Aickman's stories are 'difficult', but they make perfect sense once you accept that he's not channelling some kind of mystical scholarship, he's just talking about people and the world in terms of how he feels they are really like. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.26.161 |
It's interesting that Faulkner wanted The Sound and the Fury to be more accessible than it became. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 147.252.233.44 |
Life itself has shrunk when the type of television we watch is a viable substitute for varied life experience. I fall into that trap myself. Turn the mind-flattening thing off! That said, just this week I discovered my DVD recorder had a Freeview tuner all along and now have digital. Analogue BBC2 has disappeared! They're withdrawing the plank! | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.44.186.70 |
I couldn't read Sound and the Fury. It was interesting, but there's only so much time in life... | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.49.37 |
I like different takes on the English language. First time I read Heart of Darkness I thought what the f***?! A writer I find 'difficult' in the sense that every sentence is densely packed with different shades of meaning, is Henry James, not so much in Turn of the Screw as in, say, The Golden Bowl and some of his shorter work. I'm by no means a James connoisseur, mind. But I definitely want to read more. Same with Faulkner and Cortazar. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
The Sound and the Fury is indeed a difficult read, and like Tony's assessment, ultimately not as weighty as it wants to be. It's clever, but it's not anything I even would want to read again, if I had another lifetime to read it in. Avram Davidson (clearly an acolyte of Faulkner) is a writer that makes you work to read, and I admire his rambling, meandering, tangential, non-sequiter-seeming style; it lushly reflects the kinds of stories he's telling, and doesn't at all come off as Kate's "deliberately being difficult or impenetrably dense"; as I agree, I can't stand. Henry James is a difficulty of a wholly higher order, and he too, matches content to style. Few can do this. Personally? I find, from the few pieces I've read by Thomas Ligotti, to be one whose style is "deliberately being difficult" and "impenetrably dense," for no justifiable reason I can detect. I've only read a handful of his short-stories, but they include some of his more famous ones; my opinion stands for every one I've read. Not the fan, others are.... | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.30.154 |
Ligotti's at his best when he has a thematic focus and a personal story to tell. Two stories in his last collection, 'Teatro Grottesco' and 'The Clown Puppet', are stunning examples. Looking back, other powerful stories include 'The Glamour', 'The Last Feast of Harlequin' and 'The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise'. His 'corporate horror' stories (such as 'Our Temporary Supervisor') are brilliant as well. Not difficult or obscure, just thoughtful and rich. But where the focus seems to be an abstract idea or a literary theory, as in a number of the stories that Ligotti enthusiasts often prefer, the effect is (to my mind) rather dry and tedious. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.145.216.15 |
I have a copy of 'songs of a dead dreamer' at home and i have to say i'm not impressed with the couple of stories i've read from it. The one i remember most is about a doctor just home from his day at the local asylum who tells his wife - in the most strained and unbelievable dialogue i've ever read- about the patient he's been talking to today, a complete psychopath who likes to kidnap young girls. When he finishes his story, he goes upstairs to find his young daughter has vanished. It was cliched pap told in a pointlessly strange style. I'm not a fan if that story is representative of his work. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.49.221 |
The only story I really liked from SoaDD is "Dr Lochrian' Asylum". I don't know whether Ligotti's style has developed into something more accomplished, but at the time it was a struggle to finish the book. An amateur with (sometimes) interesting ideas, that's how Ligotti struck me. Stylistically speaking he's nowhere near any of the 'real' authors in the modern canon. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Weber, Ligotti describes 'The Frolic' as his attempt to write a conventional horror story. I think it's a fine example of his lifelong fascination with the dangers of power, though I prefer 'Drink to Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes' as a treatment of that theme. The best stories in that first collection are perhaps 'Dr Locrian's Asylum', 'The Lost Art of Twilight' and 'The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise'. I like the strong personal voice of his first book, which wasn't equalled until the recent – and brilliant – fourth collection, Teatro Grottesco. The second book is more accomplished as horror fiction but less original, while the third is so ferociously avant-garde I can't digest most of it. There's also a 'best of' collection The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which is mostly excellent. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
I think Ligotti is one of the most original writers of weird fiction in recent decades – but I agree that his prose style is sometimes a difficult issue. While it can be precise, ironic and allusive, it can also be tediously academic or too clotted with literary references. A few of his stories demand a horizontally placed bookmark. But I would argue against his evaluation (positively or negatively) as someone writing essays on human consciousness in the form of stories. I think he's much more of a genre writer than that – and his essay 'The Consolations of Horror' illustrates his passion for the field. Here's a suggestion. Read 'Teatro Grottesco' (the short story). Take your time over it, and keep what the narrator is experiencing and feeling in mind rather than the details of what he's talking about. If the ending doesn't break you into pieces then Ligotti will never get to you. Another tip, while I'm at it: don't bother with 'Masquerade of a Dead Sword' unless you love every other word Ligotti has written, and even then I'd think twice. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.145.209.198 |
I might give him another go, but from my limited experience of his writing so far his style seems very self-conscious and forced - trying to be much cleverer than the story he's actually telling deserves. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I too might, Joel, and with "Teatro Grottesco." I did read "The Glamour," and that's one that really turned me off with its style and story, which I felt to be straining at contrivances. It's just possible I've not read enough to sort of tap into where he's coming from, and so am not getting the "Ligotti code," so to speak. "tediously academic" & "too clotted with literary references," that too could explain Avram Davidson betimes; not to mention, a deliberately rococo style. So why does Davidson work for me? This goes to a larger issue in the theme of difficult fiction, which is the issue of trust; and (or maybe, more specifically) do you trust the author is telling you the story s/he's telling you, the only way it can possibly be told. Sometimes it takes more exposure, or the explication of others. And sometimes, it doesn't matter how often you venture back into the pages, the author's not convinced you of his or her case.... | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.49.221 |
I do have fond memories of "The Spectacles in the Drawer" and, especially, "The Mystics of Muelenburg" which I read in Crypt of Cthulhu, if memory serves me right. They were different from the usual CoC fare. Thanks for the suggestions, Joel. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.39.138 |
Hubert, in that case you might appreciate Ligotti's second collection, Grimscribe. Much of it is influenced by, or playing with, Lovecraftian ideas. It includes the astonishing 'The Last Feast of Harlequin', which is 'The Festival' retold from an immigrant perspective. | ||
| Thomasb (Thomasb) Username: Thomasb Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.25.141.120 |
I think of "difficult fiction" I think of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, great book that I think was a bad influence on me. I spent years afterward trying to write like that. Yikes. There oughta be a law allowing only certain writers to write like that. If I'm going to challenge my readers like that, it had better be worth it. | ||
| David_lees (David_lees) Username: David_lees Registered: 12-2011 Posted From: 92.16.241.44 |
Reading Ligotti is about the closest you can come to experiencing another person's nightmares, I reckon. I have no problem with his prose myself, I can just sink into the claustrophobic atmosphere of it all. |