I bear the sin of being a somewhat reactionary reader; I almost only read classics or contemporary literature so consolidated that it’s like reading eventual classics. If you ask me about the current panorama of literature, except for inevitable names like Houellebecq or Murakami, I just don’t know or care. But now, from cinema, I see the need to perhaps change that.
I read the first and only novel from my favorite filmmaker: Antkind by Charlie Kaufman. And it was 700 pages of everything that has absorbed me in his films over the years. Tireless imaginativeness, raw perception of reality, wit, absurdism, symptomatic comedy, all the sociopathy and humanitarianism of man in a same character. But there was something else: relevance, our present.
No matter how timeless a literary construction may be, there will naturally be idiosyncratic, cultural, anthropological elements that will be linked to its temporal and geographical circumstance; to his time and nation. And that reflection of mine is something that I could find in Antkind and for logical reasons, even though he’s one of my favorite authors, not in Thomas Mann; and I kinda liked it.
The most natural equivalences that arise with Kaufman are authors like D.F.W or Pynhcon. But although I can agree on the surreal epistymological force and atmosphere of their works, the writing itself differs quite a bit between these authors. Kaufman is much more frontal, more honest: like his films, the story tells itself.
So I’ll be looking for 2020’s authors from now on I guess. Like I said, I have no f idea in what names of our present I could find that; but although I love Tolstoy with my soul and will continue reading him until my death, I know that I’ll not find a clone of B. Rosenberger exhibiting at the UN a plagiarized Netflix version of a lost film, in War and Peace or Anna Karenina.
And you (if you also were an almost only classics reader), wich author brought you to the new lands?
by FewOffice1998