I quit academia around the time of the pandemic, and somehow grew disillusioned in recent years. No one at the university was interested in the literature I wanted to research, and I consequently nearly stopped reading and writing. Your videos are re-animating my love of literature. Thank you.
This comment is really affirming to hear. As someone who spent nearly a decade in academia (STEM - not lit), I completely empathise. I'm glad I could offer something to help reignite such a fundamental pleasure in life. Appreciate you watching
Well commenting for the algorithm here but you have sold me on the novel. It sounds like the philosophical trolling that makes Lynch films fun. I hope you keep on posting because this was a fun video.
Very kind of you to say mate - thanks so much! Definitely plan to keep posting, although I want to keep quality as the priority over quantity so it'll be a few weeks before episode 3 is up. But it's already in the works!
I'm exceptionally grateful for this comment. Thank you for your incredibly kind words. The Narrator is among my list of works I'm very eager to make time for
I look forward to hearing all you have to say about it. The landscapes and ideas in its pages travel with me every day, it's a pleasurable haunting to carry with me. Also you say you live in Aus, if you're in Melbourne I could probably send you my copy of the san veneficio Canon if you'd like to borrow before you buy
Good to see more deep dives on BookTube. Have had this one staring angrily unread from my shelves for years. Going to read it, come back to this video and make it your fault when I don't understand it
Great stuff! Anything to further Cisco's readership is great, and it's a huge plus when done so well! :) You've also made me pick up Melancholy of Resistance, so thanks for that! I'll be looking forward to whatever's next.
Glad there was something in here for you mate. Your kind words are really valuable, so thanks for sticking around for a peek. Melancholy among the rest of Krasznahorkai's catalogue is worth reading. Let me know what your thoughts are when you get around to it!
@@wastemailinglist726 Btw, you worry about the "weird fiction" category... but, hey, he literally wrote the book on weird fiction. From Palgrave. Called... _Weird Fiction_. ;)
@@weirdchristmasweirdchristm1127 I think it's less "worrying" about it, so much as thinking that the term might be pigeonholing him in a little too tightly. I think he has a lot to offer beyond just the fringe. But that's just one perspective!
@@wastemailinglist726 Since no one who writes "weird fiction" can define what "weird fiction" is, I think he's safe. A bunch of good pieces on that in the end of The New Weird by the Vandermeers. Genre categories are only dangerous in the hands of people who think they don't read "that kind" of stuff. It's an old saw, but what genre really means is how you define the rules that are being broken. :)
This video is the exact type of discussion I wanted after finishing this amazing novel, thank you! I'm already growing my reading list from your channel, but what do we have to do to get a video on Against the Day or any of the Flann O'Brien novels?
Another great booktube deep dive, Seth. I’m really enjoying your channel. And if this episode is anything to go by, I’m especially excited about the literary territory you plan to explore - away from the Twentieth Century baggy behemoths of American Lit - and to throw a spotlight on some compelling outliers. Cisco is also a masterful short story writer as well; his ‘Genius of Assassins’ in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s exhaustive anthology, The Weird, is one of the best things in there.
As much as I would love to cover said baggy behemoths (Gravity's Rainbow being a notable offender), books like that have already been (to borrow my own words) "beaten to death" by the BookTube crowd. So I'm gonna try and focus my efforts on works that haven't gotten as much attention!
Many thanks for this. I started the novel yesterday, and upon reaching p. 28 wondered if the rest would be worth the time and intellectual energy the novel demands. I then stumbled upon your review, which inspires me to gird my loins and press on.
Thanks for dropping me a line Steven! While I can't speak for everyone, I thought the majority of it's thematic and human-interest power laid in the final acts of the book. While it's discursiveness can be frustrating at times, I thought the end justified the ride to get there
And in response to you wanting the divinity student, it is a part of "the San veneficio cannon, and contains that and the sequel "the golum". I believe that's still in print and quite cheap
I started it last night and can't put it down! The complexity of the book has not made it unenjoyable to me so far, something that I can't say for Gravity's Rainbow, since you brought it up. I got slight vibes of the Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem.
Seth, you are certainly not alone in your interest in Kafka's stories, letters and journals. Both Thom Jones and Lydia Davis have cited Kafka's diaries at some point in their writing careers. That is pretty good company if you asked me.
Fantastic discussion here. This has been sitting on my shelf for a while; probably time to get around to it. One of our first episodes actually was on The Divinity Student. Deep Dive Booktube Gang rise up.
I’m currently halfway through this novel and after loving it for the first few hundred pages, I’m starting to find myself now entering a sort of love-hate kind of mood with it (which is more a comment on my experience and expectations than some sort of essentialist comment on the novel itself, but still). I think the thing is that I want more of the substance of the novel’s themes and perhaps less of the back-and-forth kind of ‘antics’ of the novel, which I do enjoy, but I think I was expecting (or hoping for) the prose of these things to be a little more Pynchonian in its own way, where as instead I’m finding it a little more sci-fi in how it feels. Don’t get me wrong, it’s superbly written - I just think my expectations were skewed going into it. Will persevere, of course.
@@wastemailinglist726 A year since my original comment - and I have just finished Animal Money for the first time - incredible book and thanks for in-depth review! If you can get hold of Cisco's 'The Great Lover' I'd really recommend it as a similarly political, similarly insane novel.
A "whole ass audience" truly is the dream, hahaha! Dune is on my consideration list for videos to tackle down the track! Would definitely include comparisons to its many adaptions
I kind of skipped thru this one, the book sounds kind of interesting but kind of superficial in a way too, like the economic analysis is not that deep, not sure. But yes, all our systems are always evolving. We live in the middle of history, or really at the beginning, but we insist on not thinking it so. Peace
