This isn’t where the thread is going, but it made me think. I teach reading to middle schoolers. I’m always talking about making inferences, do think alouds as we read, etc. I’ve had some kids say to me things like, “I read this before, but I never got that out of it. Sometimes they’ll say, Now I get it, or that’s why…”. Reading takes work and the work can often be rewarding.
Or you can get different things from it at different times in your life. It’s really wonderful that way.
Somewhere I read that Lathe of Heaven is what happens when Ursula Le Guin writes a Philip K. Dick novel
That’s good. I love him too.
Le Guin is one of my favorites. She also did a sort-of translation of the Tao Te Ching. What are her other books in your set?
Thank you for giving an explanation. I can also see why it connects to certain period authors. Writing styles change over time and have fads and popular trends.
But that’s not a definition, that’s an observation about how it feels.
Weber books are pure Space Opera, but they are loaded with characters and their internal motivations. But also the tech speak is a massive component of discussing interstellar warfare that mimics high-seas battles in the Napoleonic era. Discussion of how many missiles and how fast they are accelerating and the technology of the shield generators and how they make missile attacks challenging its a huge element of his writing. His plots have callbacks and hints of what’s to come threaded through. But I don’t know anyone would call that “literary”. Or else I’m using the term incorrectly.
The latter describes Dune to a T. That’s an appendix to discuss desert ecology and the sandwom lifecycle, and another to discuss the father of the current planetologist Liet Kynes, whose father Pardot Kynes started the Fremen on their decades-long, perhaps centuries in scope, transformation project for the surface of Arrakis. Herbert lays out actual desert remediation techniques he learned about.
I would add to this, I tend to think of literary fiction as focusing primarily on internal character development - or a failure of said development (such as an attempt at redemption resulting in a tragedy.) Most books have some kind of internal character development alongside the main plot, but what I think of as literary fiction typically gets extraordinarily deep into character so much so that these books may be described by bored English students as “nothing happens.”
Romance is unique because it requires the character development of two characters in order to get the characters to their happily ever after, and may not be literary at all. Austen set the standard with Pride and Prejudice, where the required character change is literally baked into the title. Elizabeth has to get over her prejudice and Darcy has to get over his pride. I have read a ton of romance and this basic concept - two people have to change - is integral to every working romance story, no matter how trashy. I think this is why I find it so difficult to write - you’re managing two separate character arcs along with the external plot.
As for me, I would be bored out of my skull writing a genre where stuff doesn’t blow up from time to time. But I enjoy reading just about anything well-written.
Next up is Eye of the Heron. I’ll have to check the others.
Interesting. I think we differ on this–I think of Borges and Calvino as “literary,” too, and their work represents at least a subgenre without much character focus.
I disagree. That is often true, but it isn’t an inherent aspect of literary fiction. Salman Rushdie, for example. His prose is gorgeous, his themes complex. And, man, all kinds of stuff happens plot wise.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment…I love storytellers.
Given our discussion here, I’m not sure it’s very easy to pigeonhole literature in general.
I finished Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac.
I found it pretty compelling. It’s about a decent young guy scrambling for social status in Paris to try to support his family, and all the excesses of wealth and superficiality that drive him to disillusionment. You might think it’s kinda heavy reading, but it didn’t feel that way, I think because it seemed to have an intentionally satirical edge to it. All the characters are cranked to 11. The old man (Father Goriot) is so over-the-top in the singleminded adoration of his spoiled adult daughters, at one point he’s kissing their feet. But the ending was solid, and serious, kind of that final gut-punch that lands when you didn’t expect it.
I think the author was markedly harder on women in Parisian society than their male counterparts. But in general I think his point about high society was effectively made. But it’s yet another example of the literary focus on class stratification. This one was not remotely subtle in its aims.
Some interesting historical background via Wiki
This is useful to me, maybe I’ll actually learn some history by osmosis through 19th century novels.
I’m on to the next, The Inferno by Henri DeBusse. Another French novel, this one 1908. Here we are in yet another boarding house.