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4023

Schattenfroh Erlebnisbericht Teil II

FishHead, 24.05.2025

I’m now at page 247 and I have to admit the initial appeal of the consequent stream of consciousness throughout has worn off pretty much completely by now.

I’m currently 70 pages deep into a segment about the author/narrator being put on trial by his father who is also Lucifer but kind of not. The trial is not a trial but actually just a ceremony with the foregone conclusion of the narrator’s guilt. He stole a book out of a painting of a holy man or something.

It’s honestly really hard to follow because everything is written in the same kind of voice which is at the same time the voice of the narrator, Schattenfroh, who is most likely the devil, the father, who is also kind of the devil, various minions and servants of the father or the devil or both.

The delineations between who is speaking and arguing with whom are really tough to figure out since almost no inner dialog is quoted. This is sometimes used to great effect and can feel really good but following this labyrinth of a man’s thoughts without any breaks, changes in perspective and an obsessive tendency to drill down into a specific thought until you lose track of where you started is exhausting.

Toward the end of this reading session these thoughts felt increasingly like written noise to me. Some of it might be because I’m not picking up all the references and allusions but I can confidently say that even if I were, this is pretty tiring and challenging. Unfortunately this time it’s not particularly rewarding. Last time I felt like I got something out of reading the book but just now I closed the book and didn’t really take much away from it.

There was one interesting quote, which I liked and which felt immediately relevant to me, though:

[…]
Order is therefore an unlikely, temporary special case of disorder;
Disorder is predominant, order is a coincidence
[…]

Translated from German

And one technique or trick which I thought was interesting but felt kind of gimmicky. On page 234 we find the following sentences:

The future is measured in pages.
There are at most 774 pages remaining.

The book is 1008 pages long. I can imagine that this sort of thing must be a pain to maintain during the process of editing a book.

I can respect all of this as an intellectual achievement but reading it felt like a chore this time around. I’ll give the book another chance tomorrow but if it continues to feel like this I might have to quit this one, unfortunately.

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4024

I’m thankful to have the detailed record of your impressions, but it sounds like you should stop. I was committed to reading this when it comes out in August but I would way rather read Dream of the Red Chamber or Water Margin!

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4025

Glad my write-ups are of interest! Yeah, I’m feeling a strong tendency to drop this one. It’s impressive and was certainly a lot of work but I feel like I got out of it what I can. And with that, reading another ~750 pages does not seem like a wise choice.

Too bad, I wanted to like this more but for now it’s not for me, I’m afraid!
I picked up some other books at the library this week, on a whim, because heard good things about them and spotted them by chance. So I’ll read those before one of the Chinese classics, but they’re next!

  • Babel by Rebecca F. Kuang
    I somehow managed to dodge almost all discussion and information about this book, so I can’t say much about it plot-wise, just that it was very well received. I kind of love reading books like that. I knew almost nothing but the cover and the little blurbs of the backs of most of the books I read last year and that was a very good reading year for me.

  • Oben Erde, unten Himmel by Austrian-Japanese author Milena Michiko Flašar
    Also know relatively little about this one. It’s been lauded by critical voices in the German-speaking literature world I respect and seems to be about death and loneliness in modern society. In particular its about a lonely woman named Suzu who quits her office job to start cleaning the scenes of death, particularly of kodokushi cases - lonely deaths of people whose bodies don’t get discovered for extended periods of time. It doesn’t seem to a have any English translations yet.

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4026

Okay I mentioned a while back - and mentioned more recently on the “What do you do for fun?” thread that I have a letterboxd list and a backloggd list that I am working through, but despite my attempts I have not been able to make a book list that I’m satisfied with.

I spent way too much time today throwing books into a google doc and shuffling things around and yet I have no super sleek, stylish list of books that I plan on reading that will expand my horizons and make me seem cool while doing so :pensive_face:

That google doc is 10 pages btw

It’s futile. My attempts to set reading goals for myself always feel so arbitrary because at one moment the list is telling me to read The Bhagavad Gita and then the next it’s telling me to read Ta Nehisi-Coates and then the next it’s telling me to read Virginia Woolf.

For now what I’ve got is a few books that I’d like to read soon-ish:

  • Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
  • The Sellout by Paul Beatty
  • A Passage to India by EM Forster
  • Rave by Rainald Goetz
  • Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
  • The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
  • The Crying Lot of 49 by Thomas Pynchon
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
  • House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
  • Stoner by John Williams

Not gonna bother w/ the non-fiction but I am gonna listen to Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain soon (I miss him :pensive_face:)

In trying to make a list, I did hit a few snags that I’d like to ask the audience:

  • Ficciones and/or The Aleph by Borges - The Aleph was specifically rec’d to me; my only Borges experience is that I read El Sur from Ficciones 10+ years ago when I took Spanish lit in high school
  • Dickens - Dickens is a bit of a blind spot for me - I’ve only read A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. I liked but did not love those two. I’m not sure where to go next. David Copperfield is attractive because Demon Copperhead is attractive. Oliver Twist I already own, plus I’ve seen the film so this is the least intimidating. Bleak House excites me because of that one episode of Dickinson where they’re all fighting over the new chapter of Bleak House
  • Dostoevsky - White Nights is following me around, I swear to god. I first saw a girl reading it at Tatte and then the next day I see an article in The New Yorker about Penguin Little Black classics e.g. White Nights, and then I text some friends “I think it’s gonna be a russian literary canon summer” and now instagram has show me 5 posts in the past two days about people reading White Nights, so I might as well read it. I’ve only read Crime and Punishment, and I was probably just gonna go straight to Brothers K next, but “Demons” - the version I have is “Devils” - is calling me for some reason
  • Faulkner - one of my favorites ever. I’m not really sure which direction to go in now that I’ve knocked ou the big four novels though. Sanctuary? The Wild Palms?
  • The Collected Dorothy Parker/The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker - I’m trying to find a good collection so I can get into her writing
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4027

Ficciones and The Aleph does not feel like an either/or to me; you should absolutely read both… Ficciones does contain the more famous / more likely to be referenced stories though, so not a bad place to start.

Demons is my favourite Dostoevsky; if it’s already in your possession begging to be read, I would not ignore its call…

Also, I read A Passage to India very recently and was pleasantly surprised. On one hand, it was exactly what I thought it would be, but on the other, it kept minutely diverging from my expectations in interesting ways.

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4028

Thank you :heart:

Yea I plan to read both Ficciones and The Aleph in life, I was more initially concerned with trying to figure out which I should read first/include on a potential reading list for myself, though I think the idea of that list is dying

Re: Passage to India I read Maurice recently and really liked the writing a lot more than I was expecting to. I don’t know why, but I expected it to be kinda stuffy and that wasn’t really the case

4029

yeah Ficciones and El aleph collect stories he wrote in the 1940’s-early 50’s with El aleph generally containing the more recent work. It’s all the same kind of stuff.

Wild Palms and Sanctuary are very different though. The former is kind of like a Douglas Sirk melodrama and it’s one of his lightest books. I really like it fwiw. Sanctuary is super dark and gruesome like Jacobean tragedy kind of violent

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4030

+1 to both.

I read My Brilliant Friend last year and liked it, but you’d probably feel the same way toward it. If you read two of his books and liked but did not love, I’d say it’s time to move on. Those books are long!

White Nights is not that good of a story imo, but the collection I read it in (The Gambler and Other Stories) has some of the BEST writing from Dostoyevsky in my eyes. I can also endorse Brothers K—haven’t read Demons yet but I trust the Cestus.

I would substitute The Box Man or Face of Another for women in the dunes

I’d substitute Jesus Son for Train Dreams

I’d skip Pynchon.

I’d consider looking at Golgol or Turgenev (Hunters Notebook) or Chekov, too. I found all three rewarding.

Stoner is as good as everyone says. I’d tell you to add Butchers Crossing to the list, too, but you’ll likely do so yourself after reading Stoner.

I’d also consider adding Brideshead Revisited to your list as well as anything by Iris Murdoch. Both those fit your taste profile in different ways imo!

Oh also I could see you really liking Deborah Eisenberg (married to the goat Wallace Shawn) and Elizabeth Taylor.

I just edited to +1 Borges (gotta support the up and coming authors), so let me also add that I’d recommend anything by Cesar Aira. I seem to be the only one who likes him on this forum but he’s one of my favorites :cry:. There is no best starting point, just a pick a book that looks interesting to you and if you enjoy the game he’s playing as I do, you’ll always keep a stack of his books on hand to read when you feel like it.

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4031

don’t want to go point by point through the above but just want offer an alternative to this @Hunter

don’t consider this

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4032

Mom can you come pick me up? Yeah, I’m getting bullied for my Evelyn Waugh opinions again.

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4033

that dumb guy and his teddy bear. The whole dumb family. Come on why do people like it?

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4034

Idk I listened to it on audiobook narrated by Jeremy Irons on a long drive and I found it very lush and transporting, a very stuffy and rich type of novel that I don’t read often. Melancholic and obsessed with the past, melodramatic lives of the erudite upper class, fetishized and shoehorned Catholicism…I could see Hunter appreciating it in the way I do. It’s also just good writing. Waugh was pretty witty.

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4035

interesting. Well I see hunter agreeing with my opinions instead

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4036

Unfortunately for you I’ve already created an image where you are the crying soyjak and I am the chad

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4037

don’t know what that is and not going to look it up (ominous context clues)

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4038

@yeso @MoH watching the two of you go at it makes me the same kind of sad that Before Midnight does :frowning:

I have longer notes written about a lot of the books I was considering on the brainstorming google doc so I’ll include those here:

I read The Face of Another last year and loved it - I want to read Woman in the Dunes because I want to watch both of the film adaptations

On Train Dreams:
“I actually really want to read this but it’s one of if not the only book I own that’s small enough to fit in my bag - yes, men wear bags now - and so I keep feeling like reading it any time other than when I can fit it in my bag feels like a waste”

“I have to read this one bc the cute boy at the pool from last summer who asked me on a date because I was reading Infinite Jest said that Pynchon was one of his favorites. I need more weapons in the war on women readers. I fear my bit about Infinite Jest growing stale. Also, I’m too afraid to jump into Gravity’s Rainbow cold”

I haven’t read any of them, but I did write in my notes multiple times “it’s gonna be a russian lit summer.” For Chekhov I was thinking of reading through the Five Plays collection. I don’t know much about the other two authors. I know one of my nemeses (fictional), Rory Gilmore, reads Dead Souls and won’t shut up about it

“I saw MoH reading Stoner so I wanted to read Stoner (I was already planning on reading Stoner anyway)”

I own/would like to read The Sea, The Sea

I hadn’t heard of her/her writing before! I’ll check her out

anything for you, babe :heart:

And to settle the debate on Brideshead Revisited, this is what I have written about it in my notes:
“Have you seen photos from the miniseries? When I get gay married I want my engagement photos to look like that, with them all dressed up and punting on the cam and having picnics and being stylish in the english countryside and shit”

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4039

hey if you want to follow the jd Vance reading list it’s your life not my business

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4040

hmm i prefer to think we have more of a goku/vegeta thing going on.

kobo abe is really awesome–i found woman in the dunes to be a bit of an outlier in his catalog because of how “conventional” it is compared to his other works, but obviously still a masterpiece. and yes both film adaptions are quite good–dunes follows the book much more closely as i’m sure you can imagine parts of face don’t lend themselves to sound and vision.

trains dreams is really good too. give me a few hours or days and i’ll give you a list of books that i think are cool that fit the small book format. right off the bat i can tell you all of cesar aira’s books are like that.

re: pynchon - you can either play catch-up with your crush or get ahead of him and read gaddis or gass or david markson or flann o brien.

how dare you insinuate that a closet drama about the manners of english high society featuring effeminate and intellectual young men might be gay

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4041

i meant our mutual friend here also lol

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4042

Google AI search result cannot find any verifiable connection between Brideshead Revisitied and JD Vance :confused:

Sad to report that I (a Mexican :pensive_face:) don’t really know anything about Dragon Ball

not really a crush anymore since he moved away, now I’m just using him as reading motivation, esp since we seemed to have pretty opposite taste… profiles? He read a lot of postmodern stuff and I read more classics

I do have a separate section on the google doc of just gay books:

  • Queer by William S Burroughs
  • The Sluts by Dennis Cooper
  • The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
  • Querelle of Brest by Jean Genet
  • Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran (a cute guy working the desk at the gym was reading this)
  • Rent Boy by Gary Indiana
  • Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski
  • Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

forgive me for not being woke here but a lot of gay books do feel a little same-y…

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