So, she's translated Flaubert and Proust, both award winning translations...

So, she's translated Flaubert and Proust, both award winning translations, she has a huge collected stories publication that one numerous international prizes including the man booker, she is considered one of the foremost prose stylists of our time.

How the FUCK does she get away with writing stories that are literally sometimes one or two sentences?

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Here is one of her stories:

Judgement

Into how small a space the word judgement can be compressed: it must fit inside the brain of a ladybug as she, before my eyes, makes a decision.

wtf this is good

This is a really good sentence, but it's stupid that it's considered an entire short story.

i dont get it

Then you shouldnt be on Veeky Forums

the lady bug determines if it is safe to go about its business or if it has to fly away somewhere else

Then you have turds for brains.

Here's another:

My Childhood Friend
Who is this old man walking along looking a little grim with a wool cap on his head?

But when I call out to him and he turns around, he doesn’t know me at first, either—this old woman smiling foolishly at him in her winter coat.

Very nice

Even better.

One more:

In a House Besieged

In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. "The wind," said the woman. "Hunters," said the man. "The rain," said the woman. "The army," said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.

This one's hilarious if you've read Atlas Shrugged

Start with the Greeks.

Yeah, they call it mini-fiction in Latin America.

>, both award winning translations
>one numerous international prizes

It's called affirmative action

Get a job

What she translated of Proust is unironically better than than Moncrieff, the only people who think otherwise are midwits who think Proust = permanent purple mode.

their simply inferior

I haven't read Proust, in fact, I don't even read. I just know that if women ever wins an award it's because the committee thought it cute that a woman actually bothered writing something. *pat on head*

Literally who cares

Proust is midcult trash anyway.

She’s a pretty good writer. Plus she was CUTE back in the day.

pobrecito

God, I fucking hate her style. Plus, that doesn't make sense at all.

How is this a short story? I mean its good but there should be a minimum standard of words for what constitutes

These are shit. How little must one have read to be awed by these coprolites she sells as pearls?
Ah, I see: little enough to think she "improved" on Moncrieff by de-purpleing Proust.

Moncrieff was excessively floral where Proust wasn't. Then again I would not expect a person who typed this
>coprolites she sells as pearls
unironically to understand the issue of it.

Pleb

>How little must one have read to be awed by these coprolites she sells as pearls

ahhahahahhaahha

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where do i start with her

These seem trite and forgettable. There is an art to simple and modest short stories (de Maupassant and Carver come to mind), but this isn't it.

embarrassing post

This makes no sense at all...

Brainlet

The lady bug doesn't determine shit, lady bugs don't have self awareness.

why are you on a literature board

Did she even finish In Search For Lost Time?

Who cares. Swann’s Way is the only one worth reading. And yeah, I read it all.

afaik only the first volume

surely she must be working on the others

ITT: Veeky Forums proves itself beyond any doubt to be completely retarded, by being shocked, confused and angry at a writing format that has been in existence for ~150 years. Congratulations, you idiots.

dunce

Tfw more talent in this sentence than most books ever written.

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t. did not read the thread

My inner Kantian pedant is trying to jump through my sternum

Only Kafka can pull that shit off.

Epigrams have existed since ancient Rome actually

how much of our machinations are hard coded into us though? Poor asshole.

Like Nabokov but worse. A true paragon of the female species

i can't help but be annoyed at the implication that ladybugs think in language and then also that language physically takes up space

and that's actually preventing me enjoying the story

thats like actual autism isn't it

absolutely based

>The cat is crying at the window. It wants to come in. You think about how living with a cat and the demands of a cat make you think about simple things, like a cat’s need to come indoors, and how good that is. You think about this and you are too busy thinking about this to let the cat in, so you forget to let the cat in, and it is still at the window crying. You see that you haven’t let the cat in, and you think about how odd it is that while you were thinking about the cat’s needs and how good it is to live with the simple needs of a cat, you were not letting the cat in but letting it go on crying at the window. Then while you’re thinking about this and how odd it is, you let the cat in without knowing you’re letting the cat in. Now the cat jumps up on the counter and cries for food. You see that the cat is crying for food but you don’t think of feeding it because you are thinking how odd it is that you have let the cat in without knowing it. Then you see that it’s crying for food while you’re not feeding it, and as you see this and think it’s odd that you have not heard it cry, you feed the cat without knowing that you’re feeding it.

>No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.

Now this is actually fucking good. Not like that ladybug shit

actual garbage

Yeah, ok, I was exaggerating, only half of the board is retarded.

These stories aren't epigrams, though. They are in prose and not intended to be humorous (nor are they particularly similar to other conceptions of the epigram of the later epochs, as far as I know). Much closer to Baudelaire than Martial.

That does sound pretty autistic indeed. It's just a metaphor m8. If texts always reflected reality properly they'd be boring af.

Cool opinions

I just downloaded her Collected Stories edition

I actually dislike her microfiction but her short stories seem kind of interesting?

she's actually won a crazy amount of acclaim (and I just found out she was also Paul Auster's first wife waaaow)

some more microfiction:

>I am trying to learn that this playful man who teases me is the same as that serious man talking money to me so seriously he does not even see me anymore and that patient man offering me advice in times of trouble and that angry man slamming the door as he leaves the house. I have often wanted the playful man to be more serious, and the serious man to be less serious, and the patient man to be more playful. As for the angry man, he is a stranger to me and I do not feel it is wrong to hate him. Now I am learning that if I say bitter words to the angry man as he leaves the house, I am at the same time wounding the others, the ones I do not want to wound, the playful man teasing, the serious man talking money, and the patient man offering advice. Yet I look at the patient man, for instance, whom I would want above all to protect from such bitter words as mine, and though I tell myself he is the same man as the others, I can only believe I said those words not to him, but to another, my enemy, who deserved all my anger.

>In our town there is an actor, H.—a tall, bold, feverish sort of man—who easily fills the theater when he plays Othello, and about whom the women here become very excited. He is handsome enough compared to the other men, though his nose is somewhat thick and his torso rather short for his height. His acting is stiff and inflexible, his gestures obviously memorized and mechanical, and yet his voice is strong enough to make one forget all that. On the nights when he is unable to leave his bed because of illness or intoxication—and this happens more often than one would imagine—the part is taken by J., his understudy. Now, J. is pale and small, completely unsuitable for the part of a Moor; his legs tremble as he comes onstage and faces the many empty seats. His voice hardly carries beyond the first few rows, and his small hands flutter uselessly in the smoky air. We feel only pity and irritation as we watch him, and yet by the end of the play we find ourselves unaccountably moved, as though something timid and sad in Othello’s character had been conveyed to us in spite of ourselves. But the mannerisms and skill of H. and J.—which we analyze minutely when we visit together in the afternoons and contemplate even when we are alone, after dinner—suddenly seem insignificant when the great Sparr comes down from the city and gives us a real performance of Othello. Then we are so carried away, so exhausted with emotion, that it is impossible to speak of what we feel. We are almost grateful when he is gone and we are left with H. and J., imperfect as they are, for they are familiar to us and comfortable, like our own people.

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Does "decision" function metaphorically to mean "blindly respond to sense stimulus"?

No.

Cool opinion

It's not really an opinion. "To decide" doesn't metaphorically mean "to blindly respond to sense stimulus", unless you're on drugs/retarded. The ladybug made a decision. That's what it says right there the text.

I don't like it.

They who cannot understand jokes ought not to call others autistic, especially if they don't know what the metaphor in the "story" is supposed to be.

Wow I read her translation of Madame Bovary but had no idea she was a massive qt.

Oh, usually I have no problem with recognizing jokes, but yours was so bad I couldn't be sure.

>they don't know what the metaphor in the "story" is supposed to be.
And the metaphor is...?

I can tell from the fact that you're dancing around concrete assertions that you have no idea what a metaphor is, otherwise you would not have applied the term to this "story."

>you would not have applied the term to this "story."
I wasn't the one who applied it to the story, though. It was who applied it initially, to one word. I have never claimed to know what the story represents metaphorically.

>I wasn't the one who applied it to the story, though.
>It's just a metaphor m8.

Lol you got me
But yeah, it's not a metaphor as in "it symbolizes something completely different from what the text says", more as in "not how things work in real life", that's what I wanted to say in (I think - maybe I was just shitposting at that point).

For sale; unused condoms
:'(

ITT

Veeky Forums torn between jealously and awe at the fact a woman is smarter and more literary than they are

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lets see a photo of your face

Utterly meaningless and nauseatingly bourgeoisie at that.

Dunning-Krueger effect in action.

This is actually correct.