Literary Highly Challenging Nominations • July 2013

[issybird]

With my last nomination, I'm putting up The History by Herodotus. What is apparently the most accessible translation is under five bucks at Amazon.

Here's the squib:

David Grene, one of the best known translators of the Greek classics, splendidly captures the peculiar quality of Herodotus, the father of history.

Here is the historian, investigating and judging what he has seen, heard, and read, and seeking out the true causes and consequences of the great deeds of the past. In his History, the war between the Greeks and Persians, the origins of their enmity, and all the more general features of the civilizations of the world of his day are seen as a unity and expressed as the vision of one man who as a child lived through the last of the great acts in this universal drama.

In Grene's remarkable translation and commentary, we see the historian as a storyteller, combining through his own narration the skeletal "historical" facts and the imaginative reality toward which his story reaches. Herodotus emerges in all his charm and complexity as a writer and the first historian in the Western tradition, perhaps unique in the way he has seen the interrelation of fact and fantasy.

"Reading Herodotus in English has never been so much fun. . . . Herodotus crowds his fresco-like pages with all shades of humanity. Whether Herodotus's view is 'tragic,' mythical, or merely common sense, it provided him with a moral salt with which the diversity of mankind could be savored. And savor it we do in David Grene's translation."—Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

"Grene's work is a monument to what translation intends, and to what it is hungry to accomplish. . . . Herodotus gives more sheer pleasure than almost any other writer."—Peter Levi, New York Times Book Review

[Bookpossum]

Fourth Paradise Lost of Milton.
Second The History of Herodotus.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by issybird

With my last nomination, I'm putting up The History by Herodotus. What is apparently the most accessible translation is under five bucks at Amazon.

Here's the squib:

I have read some selections from Grene's other translations and they are very enjoyable. Herodotus is fascinating but unfortunately I've used up my nominations on other {very interesting} books. This month looks as if we are going to get some excellent choices.

[Billi]

I third The History.

I read parts of The History by Herodotus for the material on the Scythians during a college course on the history of nomadic people. This was many years ago, but I recall it being good stuff. I'll use my final nomination to fourth it.

[desertblues]

ho,ho, ho...stop...what's the hurry.....
I am too late for giving my last vote for The History

[HomeInMyShoes]

"Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable."

I second that sentiment. I am not up for a re-read.

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by desertblues

ho,ho, ho...stop...what's the hurry.....
I am too late for giving my last vote for The History

I think it was already fully nominated, so you will get your vote back, and you still have a bit of time before it closes.

[paola]

I've two more nominations up my sleeve, waiting to see whether anything else needs support: sorry though but I am keeping to shorter works this month, as I am still battling my way through the Andes, and this time I want to make sure I finish with the rest of the group, to get more out of the discussion. Still more than one day to go, I'll be watching this space.

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by paola

I've two more nominations up my sleeve, waiting to see whether anything else needs support: sorry though but I am keeping to shorter works this month, as I am still battling my way through the Andes, and this time I want to make sure I finish with the rest of the group, to get more out of the discussion. Still more than one day to go, I'll be watching this space.

Yes, some books are rather long.
But couldn't we nominate Lucretius, On the nature of Things? (330 pages).
That is both challenging and literary and also would be good to read for the other choice of the Bookclub, the Swerve? It is a separate book......
And it's not expensive as well, or free I think at MR?

[paola]

why, yes of course: so let me nominate De rerum natura/on the nature of things, and see what happens

[Billi]

I second De rerum natura/On the nature of things.

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by paola

why, yes of course: so let me nominate De rerum natura/on the nature of things, and see what happens

I third De rerum natura/On the nature of things.

[sun surfer]

With my last nomination I'd like to nominate Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. I think it definitely qualifies as highly challenging yet it's also accessible, and it was specifically mentioned as the principal reason that Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature.


From Goodreads:

Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature.

It is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate. As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor.

In its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

With my last nomination I'd like to nominate Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. I think it definitely qualifies as highly challenging and it was specifically mentioned as the principal reason that Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I'd love to reread Buddenbrooks; alas, I am out of nominations. And I ought to read Lucretius!

I'd be happy with any of the books named in this thread. Really, nominating and voting come down to whim and a soupçon of randomness. They all sound good.