Latest news! Latest news! Starting this year, the Man Booker Prize will be known as the Macho Man Booker Prize.
(Please, please, I know I deserve it, but don't shoot me.)
I love how the international version of this prize is also for a writer who writes in English. Can you get more international than that?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
By all means, let's judge novelists by their subject matter and not their level of craftsmanship. That Raymond Chandler -- always writing about detectives. That Joyce -- always droning on about ambivalent bookworms. That Hardy and his tragic heroes. That Edith Wharton and her young women always wishing to enter into New York society. That Virginia Woolf -- always with the Freudian interior monologues. Waiter, this wine is old.
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Come on, SlowRain is not judging his work (actually he admits that Roth is good), he is just sharing his personal impression as a reader. Certainly one can do that without offending anyone, right?
One of my favorite writers is Henry Roth (the author of
Call It Sleep) and his sexual obsession is so disturbing that Philip Roth looks like a nun in comparison. If I had to read all his books one after the other, I'd shoot myself. But he is still one of my favorite writers, as he has impressed me so much.
I still don't have an opinion about Roth (this time I mean Philip
.) I have read a couple of his later works (
The Dying Animal and another whose title I don't remember right now) and I was very disappointed. I've been told that those books don't make him justice. In that case, I don't understand why he keeps publishing books if he has nothing to add to his best works. I'll eventually read one of his best-known novels and I guess that day I will understand why everybody thinks he is one of the best living American writers, but right now I just think he is a creepy old man.