Could you give me any examples of novels that are at the same level of "difficulty" as Ulysses?

V. wasn't that difficult
I just finished Under the Volcano's 3rd chapter and it's not really challenging

...

>no Ada

trash

>Elliot Rodger

Trash.

>Finnegan's Wake
>Finnegan's
>gan's
>n's
>'

You're a godsend

Cantos of Ezra Pound

"The Glass Bead Game" by Hesse seems really complex when I was 16.

seemed, I really need to sleep...

Speed boat, by Renata Adler? What's so difficult about it? I just picked it up the other day and I'm genuinely curious.

>I just finished Under the Volcano's 3rd chapter and it's not really challenging
It picks up a little bit, but yes--the act of reading most of it isn't that hard, but figuring out what Lowry is doing is, especially when it comes to the many illusions he makes and the extremely subtle way he writes stream-of-consciousness. Take the following passage as an example of the latter: "Ashamed, numb with nostalgia and anxiety, reluctant to enter the crowed bat, though equally reluctant to have the taxidriver go in for her, Yvonne, her consciousness so lashed by wind and air and voyage she still seemed to be travelling, still sailing into Acapulco harbour yesterday evening through a hurricane of immense and gorgeous butterflies swooping seaward to greet the Pennsylvania--at first it was as though fountains of multicolored stationery were being swept out of the saloon lounge--glanced defensively round the square, really tranquil in the midst of this commotion, of the butterflies still zigzagging overhead or past the heavy open ports, endlessly vanishing astern, their square, motionless and brilliant in the seven o'clock morning sunlight, silent yet somehow poised, expectant, with one eye half open already, the merry-go-rounds, the Ferris wheel, lightly dreaming, looking forward to the fiesta later--the ranged rugged taxis too that were looking forward to something else, a taxi strike that afternoon, she'd been confidentially informed." This sentence is pretty crazy: it spans multiple times, is packed with participles and appositives, and, near the end, actually begins to break down; but, despite this craziness, it is not meaningless; on the contrary, it is one of the most skillful applications of stream-of-consciousness I've ever seen. You see, the reason this sentence is the way it is is because it is stalling, or, more accurately, its subject, Yvonne, is stalling, because hectic experiences leading up to that moment, and because, more importantly, she is about to see her alcoholic husband for the first time in a bit of a long time, and, of course, she is nervous--very nervous--about it.

I just couldn't get into this book, first two chapters were like Hemmingway and Proust had a underachieving baby.

Should I try it again? I've seen plenty of people praising it here recently

You should, yes, if only to say you've read it.

Nadja

Are you fucking kidding me? Why did you put trash Breton into there?

Who does consider mainstream surrealists as canon?

Second Mason & Dixon. Pynchon to start, but then to write that shit like it's some nightmarish colonial cosplay? Hats off to you, Pinecone.

M&D is WAY harder than Ulysses, imo.

someone should make this into a chart instead of trolls like:

What is Ulysses' meme about?

I don't plan to read it anytime soon if at all, but y'all basically spam about how high brow it is and shit. Is it worth at all to read in the grand scheme of things? Will I gain anything from it?

Can you answer without the use of memes?

Yeah I dig what you say, but however it doesn't seem so mad to me. Faulkner and (as far as I remember) Cortázar used to do similar shit. Is Ulysses similar to those in that sense?

I probably will, at some point, but not for a while, probably.

Hey now, Eliot Rodger's My Twisted World is right up there with Morrissey's Autobiography. Penguin Classics, brah!

I do my best.

It's probably the greatest work written in the English language
t. Non anglo

Why?

It is a unique "difficulty."

There is not one range encompassing all fiction.

The Death of Virgil

It's beautifully written and extremely innovative.

Read essays on it. Then you'll change your mind.

>The Death of Virgil

came to write this. I think it's even harder thant Ulysses

It's one of the most forward-thinking, bizarre reads you'll ever have. Joyce's conquering of the english language is startling. The # of beautiful sentences per page is off the charts. The symbolic death, parody of genres, streams of conciousness....it is sui generis

>it
On Under the Volcano or on V.?
However, recommend me some dank one

I think he meant V.

bump

the people who said mason and Dixon what was hard about it? I've got 100 pages left to go. I haven't found anything hard about it. a few times where the conversations just felt like random jibber jabber but that's it. and I'm retarded, I'm the guy who did the bloodmeridian review.

I would place The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Around the same difficulty OP, and they're both phenomenal works of literature.

more

Either trim it to only works in English or add more works in other languages, and you'd have a stronger list.

This

I fucking love this book but I wouldn't call it that difficult.

It's hard to explain without understanding your aesthetic preferences, but I'll give it a go.

>Style

Every episode of the book is uniquely sublime -- sublime in an almost Kantian sense. Joyce's prose flows from page to page, sentence to sentence, word to word, and there are a variety of passages within the text which give a feeling of unbridled awe. He had an excellent instinct for the sounds of human speech and what appeals to the reader's ear; there's a passage which strikes me as special, almost magical, on almost every page, and there's nothing in the book that stands out as bad, or even mediocre, as a matter of opinion.
Each part of the book is written in its own distinct style, and -- divorced from the story itself -- the various episodes can be read as their own wonderful, experimental novellas and short stories. The result is that you don't get worn out by reading the same prose style for over 700 pages.
This is all a very poor tribute to one of the most astonishing and harmonious texts I've ever had the absolute pleasure to read.

>Structure

Joyce's use of recurring characters, themes, and even props is striking. For example, there's a rose which, over the course of a few episodes in the middle of the book, changes hands from one character to another on down the line, and -- without giving anything away -- the experience of following this single, simple background object is exquisite.
Nothing exists in isolation in Joyce's universe. Every action in the text has a payoff at a later time, but very little information is absolutely vital. As a result, there's not a single page wasted, but you don't feel like you have to absorb every detail. Nevertheless, you are rewarded for doing so. With Ulysses, you get out what you put in -- times ten. That apparently tangential moment where a character makes an offhand comment about a horse race will have a pay-off later, but if you missed it, you don't lose the story.

(1/2 Cont...)

(...2/2)

>Influence

In English and in plenty of other Indo-European language literatures, much of high modernism and almost all of postmodernism follows from Ulysses. Authors as seminal and diverse as Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, William Gass, Anthony Burgess, Joseph McElroy, Zadie Smith, Marlon James, Joseph Heller, John Hawkes, Sylvia Plath, Saul Bellow, Harold Pinter, Flann O'Brien, and so on owe a hefty part of their prose styles, theoretical bases, aesthetic, and even ability to publish freely to the influence of Joyce and his novel. Even writers such as Nabokov who denied any of his influence on their writing are just plum lying.
Aside from its direct influence on other writers, Ulysses, alongside a number of other modernist classics such as Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, Madame Bovary, and Lady Chatterlay's Lover, helped to reopen printing in the West to classic works that would otherwise be considered obscene. Though the salacious content of Ulysses would be considered tame by today's standards, the existence of novels such as Lolita and Naked Lunch is owed in large part to Ulysses.

>Bragging rights

Ulysses is a book with a reputation, and like anything with a reputation, it garners the respect and admiration of others. This is a stupid reason to read it, but if you are the sort who cares about that kind of thing, it's just one more excuse. I'm not often approached while reading in public (on account of being a solid 4/10 on a good day), but I've never been approached as much or as often as while reading Ulysses, not only curious types, but also DTF women and even literary scholars.

>Universality

There are certainly parts of Ulysses which are difficult, but the vast majority of the novel is easily digestible for the average reader. Last I read it, there were times when I'd fly through fifty pages in a half an afternoon and would wake up the next morning to spend the entire fourteen hour day reading, rereading, researching, crossreferencing, and taking notes, all over ten pages.
Joyce is on record as having said that he intended the novel to be a sort of everyman's novel, enjoyable and accessible both for/to busy working-class stiffs and scholars alike. While Joyce intended the book for your everyman from 1922 and not from 2016, and many of the references to nigh-forgotten operas and century-old Irish political scandals will fly over the head of the unprepared reader, the most fundamental elements of the book are felt across the boundaries of time and borders.

>William Gaddis, William Gass
I love how everyone lists these dudes together, lmao

>The Dalkey Archive
>At Swim-Two-Birds
>The Third Policeman
what the fuck is difficult about flann obrien??

I read them, but the didn't seem that difficult. Maybe I was overhyped about Ulysses.

What is meant by difficult in this context? I haven't read any of the books mentioned in the thread yet so I'm curious to know what it is that makes them difficult as I may want to read some of them in the future.

tfw when read all these books twive

:0)

I dont get what is so difficult about Ulysses, it is only difficult if you are trying to understand every allusion and hidden detail but that isn't completely necessary to enjoy it

Good advice.

Large vocabulary + esoteric allusions + strange syntax

Many of them are strangely written, reference many obscure works, and have highly complex themes and ideas.

Read Petersburg in Russian

Going off of OP, how would you personally characterize the difficulty of Ulysses?

I'm reading it now and I haven't had too much trouble, though I'm not too far (in Scylla and Charybdis atm) and my edition has explanatory notes/errata which have been extremely helpful. I do pretty much constantly have the feeling that things are going over my head though.

Thank you. That makes sense.

It's because they are both defining figures in 20th century American Literature.

Good posts.

>Hogg

>spend the entire fourteen hour day reading, rereading, researching, crossreferencing, and taking notes, all over ten pages.
Unrelated to the thread, I wonder what pushed a man to do this. I love reading as much as the next Veeky Forums epic memer, but even I have a bunch of other activities, if not many.

Or is reading truly your job and meaning in life?

That section really fucked me in the ass. Enjoyed Ulysses, but I'm not sure I enjoyed that part.

>implying several hundred pages of degeneracy isn't hard to ge through.