Prose

Who is your favorite prose stylist? All languages welcome. Post favorite works, favorite passages, judge others' tastes, etc

Pic related for me obviously
>So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left — a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes — those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

Woolf is shit. Kill yourself.

If you haven't read Proust in French you can't understand what good prose is

>hasn't read Woolf

Good taste. I have a hard time getting started on her books but when I finally do, it's very rewarding

>pic related
Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I
see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am
inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing
to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking
machinery of humanity -- I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow
and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all
those cracked forbears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging
me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with
their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated
grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rains crocodiles. Behind my
words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and
grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lock-jaw, some grinning
with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always
going on. Clearer man all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton
dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated
pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my
madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean
vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on
endlessly through the minds of those ho come in the inexhaustible vessel that
contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs
another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by
unknown impulses, take the listless mass of humanity and by the fever and
ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the
bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert
slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of
individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their
feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always
clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying
everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their
vitals. I see that when they tear hair with the effort to comprehend, to
seize this, forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed
beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other
path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high
place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and
just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening
spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less
intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The
rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.

Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front as translated by Wheen, or if I have to stick to native language, Gardner's Grendel
Also love Vonnegut in the last few chapters of Breakfast of Champions, but he can also bore me to tears as in Player Piano, so I suppose it depends on the subject matter.
Steakley's Armor also has some standout prose when dealing with The Engine

been learning french for a while actually but mine is still too shit to read real literature 2bh, can't decide if I should just cave and read proust in english now then reread in french or hold out a few years and read it for the first time in french

Nabakov, Proust

>Best prose stylist
Is there any answer but Joyce?

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life
and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She
cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars;
she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered.
She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a
thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was
stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missis-
liffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I
mean for those crylove fables fans who are 'keen' on the pretty-
pretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it
was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh!
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Thomas Wolfe

Who has seen fury riding in the mountains? Who has known fury striding in the storm? Who has been mad with fury in his youth, given no rest or peace or certitude by fury, driven on across the earth by fury, until the great vine of the heart was broke, the sinews wrenched, the little tenement of bone, blood, marrow, brain, and feeling in which great fury raged, was twisted, wrung, depleted, worn out, and exhausted by the fury which it could not lose or put away? Who has known fury, how it came?
How have we breathed him, drunk him, eaten fury to the core, until we have him in us now and cannot lose him anywhere we go? It is a strange and subtle worm that will be for ever feeding at our heart. It is a madness working in our brain, a hunger growing from the food it feeds upon, a devil moving in the conduits of our blood, it is a spirit wild and dark and uncontrollable forever swelling in our soul, and it is in the saddle now, horsed upon our lives, rowelling the spurs of its insatiate desire into our naked and defenceless sides, our owner, master, and the mad and cruel tyrant who goads us on for ever down the blind and brutal tunnel of kaleidoscopic days at the end of which is nothing but the blind mouth of the pit and darkness and no more.
Then, then, will fury leave us, he will cease from those red channels of our life he has so often run, another sort of worm will work at that great vine, whereat he fed. Then, then, indeed, he must give over, fold his camp, retreat; there is no place for madness in a dead man’s brain, no place for hunger in a dead man’s flesh, and in a dead man’s heart there is a place for no desire...

I've been reading translations of Proust. Is it even worth it to read a translation of prose? Should I just stick to English prose?

Thousands

Henry Miller is up there for me.

Probably Fitzgerald. I only like Gatsby out of his stuff that I've read, but here's the thing - literally the entirety of Gatsby is genius prose. If I quoted my favorite part of Gatsby I'd have to quote the whole novel.

Robert Walser, the great collector of beer bottles and candy wrappers.

Mein Schulkamerad Schacht ist ein seltsames Wesen. Er träumt davon, Musiker zu werden. Er sagt mir, er spiele vermittels seiner Einbildungskraft wundervoll Geige, und wenn ich seine Hand anschaue, glaube ich ihm das. Er lacht gern, aber dann versinkt er plötzlich in schmachtende Melancholie, die ihm unglaublich gut zu Gesicht und Körperhaltung steht. Schacht hat ein ganz weißes Gesicht und lange schmale Hände, die ein Seelenleiden ohne Namen ausdrücken. Schmächtig, wie er von Körperbau ist, zappelt er leicht, es ist ihm schwer, unbeweglich zu stehen oder zu sitzen. Er gleicht einem kränklichen, eigensinnigen Mädchen, er schmollt auch gern, was ihn einem jungen, etwas verzogenen weiblichen Wesen noch ähnlicher macht. Wir, ich und er, liegen oft zusammen in meiner Schlafkammer, auf dem Bett, in den Kleidern, ohne die Schuhe auszuziehen, und rauchen Zigaretten, was gegen die Vorschriften ist. Schacht tut gern das Vorschriften-Kränkende, und ich, offen gesagt, leider nicht minder. Wir erzählen uns ganze Geschichten, wenn wir so liegen, Geschichten aus dem Leben, d. h. Erlebtes, aber noch viel mehr erfundene Geschichten, deren Tatsachen aus der Luft gegriffen sind. Dann scheint es um uns her, Wände hinauf und hinunter, leise zu tönen.
Und dann klagt er öfters, und das liebe ich an der Unterhaltung. Ich höre gern klagen. Man kann dann den Sprecher so ansehen und tiefes, inniges Mitleid mit ihm haben, und Schacht hat etwas Mitleiderweckendes an sich, auch ohne, daß er Betrübliches spricht. Wenn feinsinnige Unzufriedenheit, d. h. die Sehnsucht nach etwas Schönem und Hohem, in irgend einem Menschen wohnt, dann hat sie es sich in Schacht bequem gemacht. Schacht hat Seele. Wer weiß, vielleicht ist er eine Künstlernatur.
Er hat mir anvertraut, daß er krank ist, und da es sich um ein nicht ganz anständiges Leiden handelt, hat er mich dringend gebeten, Schweigen zu beobachten, was ich ihm natürlich auf Ehrenwort versprochen habe, um ihn zu beruhigen. Ich habe ihn dann gebeten, mir den Gegenstand der Erkrankung zu zeigen, doch da wurde er ein wenig böse und kehrte sich gegen die Wand. »Du bist schamlos,« sagte er mir. Oft liegen wir beide so, ohne ein Wort zu reden. Einmal wagte ich, seine Hand leise zu mir zu nehmen, doch er entzog sie mir wieder und sagte: »Was machst du für Dummheiten? Laß das.« – Schacht bevorzugt den Umgang mit mir, das merke ich nicht gerade deutlich, aber in solchen Dingen ist Deutlichkeit gar nicht nötig. Ich habe ihn eigentlich riesig gern und sehe ihn als eine Bereicherung meines Daseins an. Natürlich sage ich ihm so etwas nie. Wir reden Dummheiten miteinander, oft auch Ernstes, aber unter Vermeidung großer Worte. Schöne Worte sind viel zu langweilig.

And so but then Wallace had a like, unique style I sincerely enjoyed reading

Gustave Flaubert - I've only read him translated, but even then his prose is transcendent. My blood turns to wine.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Yes, I have read more than just Gatsby.

lieblich

It's okay, but I don't see how it's great prose. Not that that's the only qualifying principle for a great artist. Thomas Mann's prose is incredible for example, but it's also distant and somewhat sarcastic, while what Walser wrote is much closer and more intimate, in less opulent style.

He has different styles to be T.B.H f amily

>It's okay, but I don't see how it's great prose.
I don't know what great prose is, that is to say: I couldn't point to any specific technical quality that makes 'great' prose. I know Thomas Mann and Kleist. I understand that they're regarded as masters of the hypotactic writing style and writing in general. I like their prose. Kleist's more than Mann's.
I guess I like most to feel vivdly the author in each sentence he writes, which is definetly the case for Walser. His prose evokes a strong feeling of immediacy, like Walser sitting on a chair, hands folded and legs crossed, looking endearing at the reader while nodding his head.
The example I picked was randomly chosen. I couldn't find Felix'-Szenen online.

Probably a meme answer but Pynchon.

This guy

Er ist der Feind, gegen welchen die weisesten Geister aller Zeiten den ungleichen Kampf unterhielten, und nur was sie ihm abgewannen, ist Eigenthum der Menschheit geworden. Daher ist es gut, sogleich auf ihn aufmerksam zu machen, indem wir den Boden betreten, auf welchem sein Gebiet liegt. Obwohl oft gesagt worden, daß man der Wahrheit nachspüren soll, auch wo kein Nutzen von ihr abzusehen, weil dieser mittelbar seyn und hervortreten kann, wo man ihn nicht erwartet; so finde ich hier doch noch hinzuzusetzen, daß man auch ebenso sehr bestrebt seyn soll, jeden Irrthum aufzudecken und auszurotten, auch wo kein Schaden von ihm abzusehen, weil auch dieser sehr mittelbar seyn und einst hervortreten kann, wo man ihn nicht erwartet: denn jeder Irrthum trägt ein Gift in seinem Innern. Ist es der Geist, ist es die Erkenntniß, welche den Menschen zum Herrn der Erde macht; so giebt es keine unschädliche Irrthümer, noch weniger ehrwürdige, heilige Irrthümer. Und zum Trost Derer, welche dem edlen und so schweren Kampf gegen den Irrthum, in irgend einer Art und Angelegenheit, Kraft und Leben widmen, kann ich mich nicht entbrechen, hier hinzuzusetzen, daß zwar so lange, als die Wahrheit noch nicht dasteht, der Irrthum sein Spiel treiben kann, wie Eulen und Fledermäuse in der Nacht: aber eher mag man erwarten, daß Eulen und Fledermäuse die Sonne zurück in den Osten scheuchen werden, als daß die erkannte und deutlich und vollständig ausgesprochene Wahrheit wieder verdrängt werde, damit der alte Irrthum seinen breiten Platz nochmals ungestört einnehme. Das ist die Kraft der Wahrheit, deren Sieg schwer und mühsam, aber dafür, wenn einmal errungen, ihr nicht mehr zu entreißen ist.

Probably a meme answer but only because he's one of the obvious masters of prose.

>Hemp gripped in the teeth of the steel snake, ready to be lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea, and destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness, within its first minute of amazed vision, of wet down stirred cool by these southeast trades... Each hour he sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever, he might have seen how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth's own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world's light. There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer.

But even in English it's still good af, French is just a bonus

Nicely written, but he was wrong

Woolf is the best one ITT so far, which makes me wonder why a woman was that good?

Also a lot of these you read and they sound good but your brain is just dead and empty. They mean nothing.

Woolf is also one of my favourites, specially the passages about the abandoned house in To the Lighthouse. Great taste OP.

I recommend you read Hamsun, specially Pan if you want more of that.
Flaubert as someone pointed out is also a master stylist.
I have not read Joyce beyond Dubliners but Araby has some of the best prose I've ever read in English.

Brautigan
HD
Dylan Thomas

how dare you

Virginia, pls go, you're dead already you don't need to keep hating yourself

Thomas Browne
Melville
Faulkner
John Ruskin
Henry James

Faulkner
Pynchon
Joyce
Stendhal (French or C.K Scott Moncrieef translation)
Tolstoy (In Russian)

finesse taste. who is hd?. i dont know why brautigan is barely posted here.

Hilda Doolittle-- of Hedgehog fame.

Don't you dare

Every pick a winner, user. James gets way too little love.

Pynchon

Oh grandes, tontas, ousadas baratas, janeiras e fevereiras, na pele nova consolidadas, vítimas das nossas
insônias! Cacralaca, cucaracha, carocha, só ou de súcia, costas sujas de cal ou descascando um marrom
sintético, vinda de antros, dos ralos, de frequentações várias, discutindo aos minutos sua imprópria existência,
mas mesmo nas desaventuras mostrando a maior flipância; voluntário animal doméstico irrealizado,
sobrevivendo à fúria de um pogrom sem fim. Deu volta ao planeta, nos navios, buscando nas casas humanas a
melhor solução econômica, e não pôde chegar a mais que um out-law, que uma peça franca. E repugna.
Milhões delas, não, sim.

Kafka
Sherwood Anderson

>not recognizing that Joyce is objectively the best
What a pleb

read more joyce pham, dubliners is fantastic but you're selling yourself short not to read portrait or ulysses

Mervyn Peake was the greatest English prose stylist of at least the 20th century and likely all time.

>muh passage of time
How boring

hemingway, fiht me

fpbp

C’est un grand & beau ſpectacle de voir l’homme ſortir en quelque manière du néant par ſes propres efforts ; diſſiper, par les lumières de ſa raison, les ténèbres dans leſquelles la nature l’avoit enveloppé ; s’élever au-deſſus de lui-même ; s’élancer par l’eſprit juſque dans les régions céleſtes ; parcourir à pas de Géant ainſi que le Soleil, la vaſte étendue de l’Univers ; &, ce qui eſt encore plus grand & plus difficile, rentrer en ſoi pour y étudier l’homme & connoître ſa nature, ſes devoirs & ſa fin.

Fitzgerald. The description of the big party in The Great Gatsby is the most beautiful passage in all of writing.

This response is basically incoherent as a reply. Your reading comprehension is just atrocious.

Will do, I actually started with Portrait but I dropped it because my English was not up to the task. I'm pretty confident in it now so I will try again soon

What's so great about this? It's not bad, but surely French has better to offer. This is just functional. Is this Saint-Exupéry?

I have got to say Joyce, however I think that Woolf may be just as good or better but I didn't enjoy her as much as I had a more difficult time understanding her writing. Probably gotta reread to the lighthouse so that my opinion isn't held back by poor understanding.

Nabokov is my main prose lad

yikes

Rousseau

Thanks. And what's with those ſ replacing both s and l? Did he actually use ampersands?

These are the only threads on Veeky Forums that I like, except when people post meme passages like the sex passage from the Tunnel, or the meme Ulysses or Pynchon passages

this user got the HD thing but her books are generally published under HD. if you like brautigan, her stuff has a similar feel at times from prose styles. his description of a man as WHITEWHITEWHITE could easily have come from her in terms of style. she sounds more energetic and furious though, while dylan thomas sounds more laid back like brautigan's tone.

there's a few fans of his about, but i think people who rate him as their favourite author tend to not shill him too much because nobody should be forced into that. if you don't know about the autistic collection of everything brautigan that is brautigan.net i'd recommend stumbling around that. i planned a tour of san francisco around visiting places he worked/lived/mentioned from their biography, and i think if you have fans like that you need them to not be obnoxious about it. nobody who likes him would like him to be another DFWtype meme here.

Hamsun in Norwegian. He makes my prose dick diamonds just talking about how great potatoes are.

We're lucky to have a great translator of Hamsun in Spanish who is going over most of his catalogue (back then we only had second hand translations from German) and holy shit does the prose shine through, I can't even imagine how good it must be in the original.

>Mr. Flay appeared to clutter up the doorway as he stood revealed, his arms folded, surveying the smaller man before him in an expressionless way. It did not look as though such a bony face as his could give normal utterance, but rather that instead of sounds, something more brittle, more ancient, something dryer would emerge, something perhaps more in the nature of a splinter or a fragment of stone. Nevertheless the harsh lips parted. 'It's me,' he said, and took a step forward into the room, his knee joints cracking as he did so. His passage across a room--in fact his passage through life--was accompanied by these cracking sounds, one per step, which might be likened to the breaking of dry twigs.

O brood O muse upon my mighty subject like a holy hen upon the nest of night.
O ponder the fascism of the heart.
Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean's salt seems thinly shaken, of let-downs local as the sofa where I copped my freshman's feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking.
Behold the sagging tit, the drudge-gray mopped-out cunt-corked wife, stale as yesterday's soapy water or study the shiftless kind, seedy before any bloom, thin and mean as a weed in a walk;
Smell the grease that stands rancid in the pan like a second skin, the pan aslant on some fuel-farting stove, the stone in its corner contributing what it can to the brutal conviviality of close quarters,
Let depression like time-payments weigh you down; feel desperation and despair like dust thick in the rug and the ragged curtains, or carry puppy pee and plate-scrapings, wrapped in the colored pages of the Sunday paper, out to the loose and blowing, dog-jawed heap in the alley;
Spend your money on large cars, loud clothes, sofa-sized paintings, excursions to Hawaii, trinkets, knicknacks, fast food, golf clubs, call girls, slimming salons, booze;
Suffer shouting, heat rash, chilblains, beatings, betrayal, guilt, impotence, jail, jealousy, humiliation, VD, vermin, stink.

My man Gass

Cervantes even though he was shat upon in life and death. Just started his Novelas Ejemplares. Good shit

have you checked out Lazarillo de Tormes? you'd like it.

I remember when I was 18.

I find myself returning to White's essays often. Anytime I wish, he's there to remind me of all that is wholesome, simple, and good in the world.