'>>23361145
Joyce is the reverse filter in that anyone who recommends him is guaranteed to be a pseud.

Nothing after dubliners is worth reading.';

'>>23361145
Stay tuned for the /lit/ Ulysses read along, anon';

'>>23361188
Is there any noteworthy author except for Virginia Woolf who disliked Ulysses?';

'>>23361208
>Virginia Woolf
This always makes me laugh because she would then vanish for a few years and come out with the very obviously Ulysses inspired Mrs. Dalloway.
Apart from her, a lot of authors really disliked FW. Shaw, if I remember well enough, hated it and Ulysses, so he might be the closest to it, most just really didn't understand what the fuck Joyce was doing in FW (and rightly so when you actually think about what FW actually is) but even then a lot of people stood by him, including a certain Oliver St. John Gogarty or, as Ulysses readers might know him as, Buck Mulligan.';

'>>23361208
Nabokov was mixed on him as a whole

> Ulysses. A divine work of art. Greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. Towers above the rest of Joyce's writing. Noble originality, unique lucidity of thought and style. Molly's monologue is the weakest chapter in the book. Love it for its lucidity and precision.
> A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Never liked it. A feeble and garrulous book.
> Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.';

'>>23361319
Nabokov was a fucking weirdo, though, that thread a few weeks back with all his opinions on authors contained some of the most contrived attacks possible. I would say being around him was fucking tiring.
>phony folklore
FW isn't folklore at all, it's Dublin again and the opening of the book (Riverrun.....) describes where Dublin is. The book itself is about dreams and dreaming.
>Conventional
I mean come on.';

'>>23361319
>>23361330
It doesn't help that you're not actually reading Nabokov, you're reading a few out of context snippets some guy put on a wiki page. He didn't describe the whole thing as "conventional"
> Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.';

'>>23361319
yet he proceeded to quote the "color children" passage in one of the plays inside Lolita, and the book appears everywhere in Ada.';

'>>23361371
>Finnegans Wake’s façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.
To be honest this doesn't help. FW is anything but conventional, compared to Ulysses or not. Saying that it simply disguises something very uninspired and poor is just wrong. The final comment
> I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.
is also a bit jarring and embarrassing seeing how even now, the popular opinion is that FW is a mess of a book. He's hardly martyring himself. Nabokov always comes across as this condescending weirdo, even his praise drips with the feeling that he thinks that because he is the one saying it, it makes it definite and concrete and superior to others.';

'>>23361299
>Shaw
Love this fucker like you wouldn't believe it';

'>>23361145
Clalrel for me. have you read Dubliners? very approachable.';

'>>23361379
Generally Nabokov tended to hate authors close to himself. He's been said to despise Gogol and Dostoevsky but it's plain as day that he stands on their shoulders.';

'>>23361945
In what sense does he stand on Dostoevsky's shoulders? What does he take from him? If anything the problem seems to be that Nabokov fundamentally doesn't care about those qualities that are strongest in Dostoevsky. (At least that's the impression I get from reading people's praise of Dostoevsky and reading Nabokov's criticisms. I haven't read any Dostoevsky (yet).)

>He's been said to
You can read what he said himself: https://library.lol/main/E770320A6A20A9386AD83FC1E79E256A

For Gogol there's some ambivalence.
When asked about the biography he wrote of Gogol:
>I loathe Gogol’s moralistic slant, I am depressed and puzzled by his utter inability to describe young women, I deplore his obsession with religion. Verbal inventiveness is not really a bond between authors, it is merely a garland. He would have been appalled by my novels and denounced as vicious the innocent, and rather superficial, little sketch of his life that I produced twenty-five years ago.
Another interview:
>Every Russian writer owes something to Gogol, Pushkin, and Shakespeare.
Yet another:
>I was careful not to learn anything from him. As a teacher, he is dubious and dangerous. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stuff, he is a worthless writer; at his best, he is incomparable and inimitable.
And in this lecture he gives high praise to a Gogol story: http://www.kafka.org/index.php?id=191,209,0,0,1,0
My read is that he greatly respected Gogol but simply didn't like the guy. (He didn't respect Dostoevsky nearly as much.)

On Tolstoy:
>I go by books, not by authors. I consider Anna Karenin the supreme masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature; it is closely followed by The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I detest Resurrection and The Kreuzer Sonata. Tolstoy’s publicistic forays are unreadable. War and Peace, though a little too long, is a rollicking historical novel written for that amorphic and limp creature known as “the general reader,” and more specifically for the young. In terms of artistic structure it does not satisfy me. I derive no pleasure from its cumbersome message, from the didactic interludes, from the artificial coincidences, with cool Prince Andrey turning up to witness this or that historical moment, this or that footnote in the sources used often uncritically by the author.

On Pushkin:
>I love him dearly of course, he is the greatest Russian poet, there is no doubt about that
>There is hardly a single Russian major writer of the past whom pigeonholers have not mentioned in connection with me. Pushkin’s blood runs through the veins of modern Russian literature as inevitably as Shakespeare’s through those of English literature.';

'>>23361319
Not on Ulysses';