Boring and torturing writers

 

I consider writers according to two categories.

1) boring writers
2) writers who make me suffer
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About the first category, there is not so much to say. The 98% is boring, pointless, battery-hens-writers. See my post about MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ.

About the second category, I include those few writers who, when I read their novels, make me suffer, and I have to read them in instalments. I can read a half page or one page each time, a maximum of two pages, after that the sufferance becomes unbearable, overwhelming, but nonetheless, I return to their pages because that sufferance, in the end, makes me think and opens new unprecedented horizons in front of me. It is well known that scientia dolorem auget.

The most typical example is J.M: Coetzee. For example his Disgrace or Slow Man. But the peak is Salvador Besnedra, El traductor. His writing is first of all irritating, hurting, excessive, and displacing...but he teaches new ways of writing, new ways of thinking, and new ways of mixing different literary genres.

He shows a new way of experimenting with writing. He talks about socialism and love, sex and strikes, work and life, social life, politics, Argentina.

La novela [El Traductor] intenta el casi imposible objetivo de reconstruir un sistema de pensamiento perdido en el cual se mezclan, como partes integrales, el socialismo, la cultura sefardí, el pensamiento de la ultraderecha alemana, las teorías biológicas del positivismo decimonónico, la dictadura argentina de 1976-1983, la soledad existencial, la religión, la sexualidad, los mitos de la historia argentina y los de la izquierda local, sus triunfos y sus traiciones, su capacidad de supervivencia y sus metamorfosis en la cultura argentina, la escritura como Babel y el personaje central, Ricardo Zevi, como traductor. Precisamente, el texto se concibe como un espacio natural de traducción y reconstrucción del imaginario de los años 60 y 70, así como su desarrollo durante los 80, en una arquitectura novelística avasallante. (Silvia G. Kurlat Ares in Academia).

A particular case is Dostoevskij who is swaying between both categories. The Idiot is more than half unreadable. The Brothers Karamazov, in my opinion. completely boring in many parts, the same for Notes from Underground, but at the same time he has some breathtaking tirades where he takes the folly of the characters to extreme outcomes, which is the thing that makes those parts fascinating.