So I've just finished reading picrelated, and if before I only had some suspicions...

So I've just finished reading picrelated, and if before I only had some suspicions, now I'm absolutely sure that Mishima was just batshit insane. His prose may masterful, but it's also disgusting and repulsive. It was Mishima himself who said that beauty is honey mixed with poison. In this case, it's not even poison. Art like this is honey mixed with shit.

Now, coming to my main point. Do you know any good books where the characters are mentally healthy and ethically good people who are not suffering, or dying, or losing their loved ones? By "good books" I mean high literature, not adventure books or young adult fiction. Because it seems to me that most of the books that are considered masterpieces are either portraying madmen and perverts, or depict suffering and agony, or both. And I want books to bring something bright to my life, not make me observe yet more filth and pain.

*may be masterful

Sailor is better tbqhwyfamily

Novels give you insight on people - you don't have this kind of insight in real life. You don't know the inner life of other people, in real life.
If you could, you would see what novels show you: everyone is batshit, everyone is perverted, everyone is weird.
Everyone is honey mixed with poison. Or shit.

No it isn't

>I'm absolutely sure that Mishima was just batshit insane. His prose may masterful, but it's also disgusting and repulsive. It was Mishima himself who said that beauty is honey mixed with poison. In this case, it's not even poison. Art like this is honey mixed with shit.

Elaborate on this, cunt.

>Do you know any good books where the characters are mentally healthy and ethically good people who are not suffering, or dying, or losing their loved ones?

why don't you fuck off back to normie land you disgusting casual

Wow you suck

how can you say you know what his prose was like unless you read it in japanese

Most of his main characters - many of which are to a large extent autobiographical - are obsessed with suffering, sadism, evil, and death. Presumably because these things create beauty and freedom. This, however, is an outright lie. There is neither beauty nor freedom in evil and death, no matter what edgy teenagers and Japanese writers might say.

I've had enough shit in my life, so I have no intention of having more of it in the books I read.

How can the beauty and freedom in his work be a lie if you acknowledged in the OP that it's masterful? And suffering is nice. It's how we get rugged manly men who write stories about boats and talking to ladies.

>his prose

Oh wow, you read it in Japanese?

What a boring critique

But the main character frees himself from the controlling influence of the Temple in the end, the book ends on a genuinely optimistic note

What you need is some P.G. Wodehouse.

"Can't stand an unknown life"

>How can the beauty and freedom in his work be a lie if you acknowledged in the OP that it's masterful?
I think it's quite obvious that mastery is not synonymous to beauty. His books are very skillfully written, yet they are appalling because they portray ugly things like suffering or death. Which doesn't mean that they should not be read or published, of course.

>And suffering is nice.
I've never gotten this idea. I think there's this special kind of emotional numbness or impotence when your feelings are so dull that you feel alive only when you feel strongly, and it doesn't matter whether it's happiness or suffering. Whenever I feel pain, especially psychological pain, I only want it to stop, and when I'm not in pain, I feel happy and alive enough even without having to resort to artifical stimuli. I guess most other people are like this.

t. edgelords who think that you have no right to discuss a book's worth if you don't read it in its original language, and still discuss Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Thank you for your well-substantiated feedback.

>there's this special kind of emotional numbness or impotence when your feelings are so dull that you feel alive only when you feel strongly
Don't try to flatter yourself. It's the other way round.

Interesting points, but on some level don't you think that this suffering and pain and ugly is somewhat a motif for the writer. Without it, What point do you think he would even be trying to make? Perhaps you read well into what he was trying to make his readers feel when engrossed in the book: disgusted and repulsed.

This is a good point IMO. If you cannot relate to the author even on some level, however small, wouldn't you be the weird one? Because user is right - everyone is batshit and perverted and weird. I wouldn't want to read a book where everything is dandy and great and characters have no flaws. What would be the point of reading it? I wouldn't be able to relate to the novel at all, and that would make me truly disgusted and sick.

I dunno. I still sympathize with book characters who are suffering, to the point where I find it difficult to continue reading. If it is numbness and this sick sensuality many seem to appreciate here is true sensititivy, I'd trade this sensitivity for numbness any day.

>t. edgelords who think that you have no right to discuss a book's worth if you don't read it in its original language, and still discuss Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
You can't measure prose quality in a translation you fucking twat.

You can't measure it as much as you can in the original, but, to some extent, you can. Twat.

It's not a matter of emotional endowments.
It's commendable to sympathize with other people and it's normal to be repulsed by pain but it's not normal to avoid pain at any cost. The whole point of sympathy is to help each other. Imagine a doctor that faints away at the sight of blood.
Consider the situation in which a child has been emotionally or physically abused and has had no close contact with a competent adult. Then the feelings of love would be associated with emotional or physical suffering. Emotional numbing is most often a coping mechanism to escape the effects of this. Violence and impulsive behavior are a result of never having been taught how to express your emotions in a socially acceptable manner.
It's not very pleasant but trying to deny it, turning away and saying "I just can't accept this" won't change the situation or the circumstances it arose from.
If the very thought of pain is that insufferable to you you should analyze the reasons for it.

The best you're going to find is people dealing with disgusting, dark, horrible things and overcoming them, growing into better, stronger people as a result.

But, OP, the best narratives focus on conflict and flawed characters, otherwise there would be little momentum or intrigue in the stories.

>There is neither beauty nor freedom in evil and death

Yet Fascism had the greatest aesthetics. Beauty has nothing to do with goodness.

it is

Did you actually read the book you fucktard? it's exactly the opposite of what you said. Overwhelming beauty can be terrifying, create suffering and evil

this is the level of discourse now on Veeky Forums. People have actually become 5 years old again

It seems you are some kind of mental gnome without an innfer life who's afraid of the unknown and obsessed with the mundane and tellurian, i.e. a dumb normalfag.

Try reading some self-help books to get your "mentally health" fix, or the dime-a-dozen preening moralists you find all over modern english and american literature if you still have pretensions of reading actual books(which doesn't seem to be meant for you)

Well you can evaluate the translator's prose, basically.

>Fascism
>evil
Okay, Shlomo.

Just because some psychotic teenager thinks an old wooden building is the most beautiful thing in the world doesn't mean the majority of people would agree with him