Say No to Fat (Fat Books, That Is)

[Hamlet]

I'll be short and tripple-equivocal, a bit insane, an innuendo-maker, as the tread requires, Hamlet. (...Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime...) Proper nourishment can not destroy. Even Angelina Jolie knows it and keeps it on the skin above it. Womb, matrix - its child reads food there. (For where is she so fair whose uneared womb disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?) Time comes thrice. (Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, now is the time that face should form another,whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.) Then it strikes for the third time. (Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.But if thou live rememb'red not to be, die single, and thine image dies with thee.) Trees born, grow and fall.*

Frog was bored.
There was nothing to do.
‘Don’t be bored, Frog,’ said Mouse.
‘We can go to the seaside, see?’

(A touching depiction of friendship between a timid Frog
and an adventurous Mouse. Mouse gently encourages Frog
into a world of discovery.)

Tracey Corderoy. She now lives in a hidden valley surrounded by sheep, wild deer and cows with big fluffy ears. Along with her husband and two daughters, she shares an ancient cottage with a huge Golden Retriever called Dylan (from Pontypool), several cats, guinea pigs and a teeny mini-lop eared rabbit who makes loud ducky noises.

Thank you for clarifying TTT,
I'm reading you now.

The triple- equivocal, selectively from your cryptology-

"Womb" - you're referring to my children's fiction thread, you've adopted that genre.

Angelina eludes me for now ... she's a tricky one.

However:-

Frog doesn't have to be bored ... he'll eventually see the sea for herself.

Literary Criticism. Reversal and Anagram are a frequent Elizabethan trope deployed in sonnets.

Sonnets often answer one another.

I like The Beatles, don't you?

SONG
Who is Silvia?
Two Gentlemen of Verona

[Threetrees]

I knew you'd decipher it, Hamlet. Therefore I like you. )

Sonnet # 155 (a new Shake cocktail to make it more abundant)
by Threetrees

Let's shake the Shakes' spears
And wake this little Love-god.
Rough winds will shake the darling buds of May.
So should that beauty and acumen which you, Hamlets, hold in lease
Bring breath and breeze.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Do we still breathe, folks? )

[Threetrees]

Tracey Corderoy was also addendum to the children section. I like her. Short-thin-rich-sensitive fiction (with corpulent and less weight animals) for children to evoke imagination. It was Mouse to take Frog there - it's funnier together. Or if you prefer Don Quixote and Sancho go to Nerja, Costa del Sol, Andalusia. ) We can take Sylvia. Do you know any?

[Hamlet]

We'll slowly coax you out from behind your metaphor. There's some good literature to be discussed.

I've spent quite a lot of time around Shakespeare's sonnets, in the last year I've tended to turn to them instead of the plays. I also enjoy the history of Elizabethan England, as well as the playwrights and poets who would have known William Shakespeare, John Donne, is my favourite, but Andrew Marvell, Spencer, Sydney, Herbert, and of course the other dramatists, John Flectcher, Middleton, Jonson, Massinger, Ford, Marlowe (my Avatar) Lyly.

[Damian Kelleher]

Resurrecting a (possibly) dead topic here, but...

When I was younger (early 20s) I was of the belief that a larger book meant a better book. I had not yet learned to appreciate brevity of thought and clarity of expression. So, I admired Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, The Discovery of Heaven, The Magic Mountain, Middlemarch and so on, while discounting the merits of works with a fewer pages. Unfortunately, this tendency led me to read some of the large, more contemporary American/English/Australian novels. It seems that writers in English need to fill out pages and "cram it all in" to give their books value. I blame the Great American Novel for this, as the implication is that it must contain everything to be relevant, which means lots of pages. Sadly, some writers in Australia have been affected by this as well (I'm Australian).

Now, I prefer smaller books. 150 - 250 pages seems to me ideal in that an idea can be coherently and fully explored. Bartleby & Co is a good example of this - Vila-Matas stops his novel once the idea has been explored fully. Would there be anything to gain by another 100 pages? I think not. Vila-Matas is a good example of the short book done well because he doesn't refrain from big themes or grand ideas, rather he just avoids writing 500 page novels. A small book does not necessarily mean a small idea.

That said, there is still some merit in larger books. I like it when a writer can keep all his juggling balls in the air - 2666 is a good example of this (and, from above, so is The Magic Mountain, Gravity's Rainbow, etc), but so often this is not the case.

One area this is often seen is fantasy literature, which tends to overpraise ridiculously stuffed books. Not content with a single thousand page book, an author is expected to write an endless series of them. And oh, the padding! Again, when I was younger (this time in my teenage years), I valued more because more = more! but, it really doesn't. I wouldn't say that mainstream literature or high-art literature is necessarily following fantasy in "requiring" enormous tomes, but it seems to be heading down that path. I groan when I see American/Australian/English writers with their new, massive books.

I haven't noticed the trend as much in European or Latin American literature, though I'm happy to hear a rebuttal in this case. Perhaps it is because there are more short novels translated into English than long? I couldn't say, but I will note that with the exception of 2666, I haven't enjoyed many of the very large novels recently translated (Parallel Lives, The Kindle Ones, etc).

[Eric]

I more or less subscribe to what Damian Kelleher has to say. While I do appreciate some big novels - and "The Magic Mountain" was a case in point - there is a lot of waffle and padding in some long novels. For instance, I won't even attempt to read the autobiographical Knausgaard (Knausgård) trilogy, narcissistically entitled "Min Kamp", trying to allude to Hitler just to make the readers more curious. That sort of fat book smacks of calculated commercialism.

People like Clarice Lispector, Sjón, Amélie Nothomb, Asko Sahlberg, and similar do pare down their books. And the short-story genre is not to be sniffed at.

Nevertheless, there are two fat books about the former GDR I hope to read, ones by Uwe Tellkamp and Eugen Ruge.