I hate Blood Meridian and Cormac McCarthy with a a passion. Toni Morrison mostly bores and annoys me. Maybe I have a tin ear for fiction. To be honest I find myself rereading the Dead White Males, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Goethe, Stendhal, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Ibsen, Mann, Brecht -- among the Americans, Melville, Twain, more recently Pynchon. My wife keeps up with new fiction, I find it hard to focus on that.
--- Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Agreed. The only american novel of this century
> that can really stand
> up to Beloved is, in my opinion, Blood Meridian. I
> don't put any
> Pynchon book against it because while I think he's
> the overall better
> novelist, his central work--- Gravity's Rainbow---
> is genuinely fairly
> impenetrable, and will get more so as the sixties
> fade from view.
>
> But I saw Toni Morrison speak, and let me say, her
> comments on
> political subjects were... the opposite of
> inspiring. Huge
> dissapointment. Ah well. I love that she did Oprah
> so much, though.
>
>
> >
> > I have the opposite reaction - Walker's "Meridian"
> is a fine text, but her
> > later stuff is less interesting. But Morrison's
> "Bluest Eye" and "Beloved"
> > rank among the greatest texts of the 20th century.
> >
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