Would you consider this to be the most recent work in the western canon?

It's not 2666, so no.

...

Thish

I'm gonna scalp every stupid fucker in this thread

>1985

There are numerous books that could be considered worthy of the canon.

Beloved
The Broom of the System
Infinite Jest
The Satanic Verses
Vineland
Mason & Dixon
Blonde
White Teeth
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Corrections
Freedom
Purity

this man baiting hard

ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shillelagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

>Vineland

Baiting .500 Anonymous Pal

Song of Silent Snow- Hubert Selby Jr.
Trainspotting- Irvine Welsh
Jesus' Son- Denis Johnson
Fake Girls- Matthew Sloane
Dennis Cooper might make it.

Anyone have any more like this. Edgy/10 and all that stuff.

>ends with three franzen
suurely you jest

How close to history did McCarthy write this because I really didn't like the past 1/3 of the novel?

He did a serious amount of historical research for it, if you're interested in that topic I suggest you check out Notes On Blood Meridian, don't remember the author's name.

Thanks; and I meant, "last 1/3 of the novel."

If this isn't copypasta,
Underrated post

Indeed it is.

nice.

it was autobiographical, ofc

It's a great book about spitting and riding horses

youtube.com/watch?v=TIQynsWpBpQ

>reading for plot

holy shit

Not really. All the chapters are essentially the same (kill indians, move across Mexican landscape, watch naked judge pirouette in the moonlight, kill indians, move across Mexican landscape, watch naked judge talk about botany, and so on) and the ending was hurried. Should probably have been a hundred pages shorter.

Harry Potter is definitely part of western culture

Oh shit, when OP said western canon, I thought he meant WESTERN canon, as in western the genre, not geography.

Would OP be right if that's what he meant?

Yes, "It is the ultimate western, never to be surpassed." - h bloom

To be fair, with how shallow and stale the genre is, that could very well be true. And this is coming from a fan of westerns. I compete in cowboy action shooting and everything.

I'm gonna snatch every motherfucker birthday

Remains of the Day probably

Warlock supersedes it by some degree imo

>semi-colon and conjunction
REEEEEEE

Europe Central? The Dying Grass? Argall?

STRETCHED

McCarthy pushes the archaic vocabulary too far to the point where it becomes ridiculous and bathetic.

This user is correct--it's shit

>tortilla and tortilla and tortilla and tortilla

Fucking pretentious, gimmicky garbage

>Tommy Lee Jones, Russel Crowe, and James Franco
Thank ye al'mighty that it didn't.

Remember when Veeky Forums loved McCarthy?

>the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The worst book I've read in recent memory. A dilettante nerd's wet dream. Are you Sunhawk?

>any pynchon

Mason & Dixon is phenomenal. Actually

Once anything seriously hits the mainstream Veeky Forums drops it like a hot turd. Same with DFW. Now that every thread on /r/books mentions DFW, Veeky Forums has started to consider it pseudo-intellectual.

McCarthy has always been a point of
contest; let's not pretend otherwise.

>naihill dice it
triggered.

The bottom line is that Veeky Forums never obsesses over GOOD authors like Updike, Roth and Coatzee. Only flashy self-referential garbage like DFW. It's says a lot about the millennial narcissists who post here.

Good authors Veeky Forums enjoys:
Calvino
J. Williams
Joyce
Gaddis
Wolfe
Hesse

BAD authors that Veeky Forums enjoys:
McCarthy
DFW
J. Diaz (lmao)

Authors that Veeky Forums hates unjustifiably:
Saunders
Chabon
Franzen

Authors Veeky Forums hates justifiably:
Eggers
Coelho
Pirsig

The hatred of Franzen is very justified.

Brilliant

Wow what, the Franzen hate is completely justified.

top kek

>BAD authors that Veeky Forums enjoys:
>McCarthy

maybe in 2014

Chabon is also irredemable trash.

Can't explain the Díaz.

And 99.99% of good authors are just completely ignored by Veeky Forums. People here can't stop talking about the same handful of overexposed authors.

Yeah? Have you read Franzen? Veeky Forums climbed aboard the hate train after he went on Opera. The hatred has always been centered around contrarian nonsense. The Corrections is a good novel. Veeky Forums hates that Franzen clearly relishes in being a writer

Hasn't read the book

>Chabon is also irredemable trash.
Kav and Clay is a great novel. What are your qualms with his writing?

franzen is better than pynchon
not that it's saying much

Errrr I would say that Franzen is a good writer while Pynchon is a great writer. Why dont you like Pynchon?

I have read The Corrections and it was decent at best. The book is a non-entity for the most part, with some funny scenes.
It reads like a watered down Delillo, and i'm pretty sure it has some scenes almost straight from White Noise.
Franzens prose is only a means for the story. It's grammatical and that's it, soulless and dull. There is only one part where the prose can be considered good, and that's when he falls off the boat, that and a sentence when the sister steals her mother's meds.
I didn't know about the opera thing until long after i had read the book.

I thought it was *good*

Not great. But the hatred is unjustified. He's a decent author, not a hack. I don't disagree with what you said at all--in fact, im inclined to agree. I mean, I think that, as a whole, the work is better than you're painting it to be, but it isn't phenomenal.

I will never understand the Chabon hatred. He's brilliant.

Also my phone autocorrected Oprah

you guys talk about writers like a god damn pokemon card collection. sickening and goes against the entire core of the humanities.

I agree that he isn't a hack or a fraud.
But compared to being 'the great american novelist' he's closer to being a hack. He's just taken too seriously and spoken of too highly (outside of Veeky Forums)

Franzen is middlebrow to the core. Stop defending this hack.

He's a second-rate Sedaris where Sedaris isn't that good. His phrasings are quaint without being of any impact or quality. It's cutesy bullshit for fat housewifes or teenagers who don't know any better. I can't take it seriously and nobody who cares about literature can, either.

Franzen reads like he doesn't care if you forget the characters, plot, and any qualities (not many) of the prose all within seconds of finishing the last page—sometimes he even seems to consiously write "so immaterial, you can forget it right now" bullshit.

I don't know how anyone can call Chabon "brilliant", except as a bad joke.

I don't get it. Saying some authors are
Good while authors aren't goes against the core Of humanities? I think most literary criticism will prove otherwise. How about Wordsworth's dismissal of the Shelley and Byron? Or Bloom's praise of Pynchon and infamous detest for David Foster Wallace?

Preference isn't counter to he humanities my man. Any taste-based subject is bound to be caught up in likes and dislikes

Mhm good reasons, good reasons, I like it.

I disagree. I think Chabon is a great stylist. Vague dismissals ("his phrasings are quaint" (this means nothing)) aren't enough to support anything. How about you give an example of a BAD section that Chabon had written, and I'll defend it while providing a section I think is good? Im assuming you have Chabon on hand since, of course, you've read him? Im not sure appeals to obfuscated/anecdotal authority count either, but maybe you can phone a friend to your colleagues who actually care about literature?

>Landsman puts his hand on Tenenboym's shoulder, and they go down to take stock of the deceased, squeezing into the Zamenhof's lone elevator, or elevatoro, as a small brass plate over the door would have it. When the hotel was built fifty years ago, all of its directional signs, labels, notices, and warnings were printed on brass plates in Esperanto. Most of them are long gone, victims of neglect, vandalism, or the fire code.

>The door and door frame of 208 do not exhibit signs of forced entry. Landsman covers the knob with his handkerchief and nudges the door open with the toe of his loafer.

-----------------

>At this very moment, Joe’s attention was diverted by the sound of someone, somewhere in the drawing room, talking in German. He turned and searched among the faces and the blare of conversation until he found the lips that were moving in tine to the elegant Teutonic syllables he was hearing. They were fleshy, sensual lips, in a severe way, downturned at the corners in a somehow intelligent frown, a frown of keen judgement and bitter good sense. The frowner was a trim, fit man in a black turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, rather chinless but with a high forehead and a large, dignified German nose. His hair was fine and fair, and his bright black eyes held a puckish gleam that belied the grave frown.

Good luck finding an excerpt that is an example of good writing (meaning doesn't have this twee garbage like "pluckish gleam that belied the grave frown" and "toe of his loafer"). It's rather disingenuous to say "quaint phrasings" means nothing, especially when Chabon's prose is swaddled in them. They may have been cool and worked for a comedy writer like James Thurber 50 years ago, but this just won't do for modern literature.

This prose was unremarkable, but i don't agree that 'quaint prose' is something bad in contemporary lit.
Would you not call McCarthy quaint, or is that okay because of the time period he's portraying?
What about Delillo, Pynchon or Gass?

Hmm. I see what you're arguing for now. Im going to bed now but I'll respond in the morning. I actually do appreciate you posting excerpts and I'll follow up tomorrow. I don't agree with what you're saying but I respect what you're arguing for--im just not sold on the notion that these "quaint phrasings" are inherently bad. I think they work well with the voice that Chabon cultivates. I'll get to it tomorrow. Goodnight and good post

This would make great comedy. He has a way of phrasing things that's inherently comical; as it is, however, it's tantalizingly half-comic, always seeming as if it's on the verge of hilarious Gogolian/Kafkaesque absurdism but failing to deliver at all. Do you understand what I'm saying?

As it is, trash.

>At this very moment, Joe’s attention was diverted by the sound of someone, somewhere in the drawing room, talking in German. He turned and searched among the faces and the blare of conversation until he found the lips that were moving in time to the elegant Teutonic syllables he was hearing. They were fleshy, sensual lips, in a severe way, downturned at the corners in a somehow intelligent frown, a frown of keen judgement and bitter good sense. The frowner was a trim, fit man in a black turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, rather chinless but with a high forehead and a large, dignified German nose. His hair was fine and fair, and his bright black eyes held a puckish gleam that belied the grave frown. Beneath his pants was a giant erection.

McCarthy is very deft with words. He doesn't have to rely on readily understood phrasings to draw the story on out.

>Up these steep walkways cannelured for footpurchase, the free passage of roaches. To tap at this latched door leaning. Jimmy Smith's brown rodent teeth just beyond the screen. There is a hole in the rotten fabric which perhaps his breath has made over the years. Down a long hallway lit by a single sulphurcolored lightbulb hung from a cord in the ceiling.

Only real argument against this stellar passage is that it seems to try to be like Joyce with his "scrotumtightening sea" phrasings, but just about anyone would be proud to have written such prose, I think.

McCarthy is a far cry from the Chabon, I'm not even sure why you'd mention him in this conversation. (No, to the quaint question.)

>Franzen explores the duality of solitude and interpersonal relationships. Primarily using his mother's death as a metaphor for all human relationships, Franzen concludes that relationships are essential to our existence although we often fail to recognize and appreciate their importance at the time.
>He proposes a "Status model", whereby the point of fiction is to be Art, and also a "Contract model", whereby the point of fiction is to be Entertainment, and finds that he subscribes to both models.

Franzen is truly one of the great public intellectuals of our time.

>i dont know words and it hurts my ego when authors are significantly more knowledgeable than I am