I'm thinking of names like Hemingway or Thomas Mann. Perhaps the market for "culture" has so broadened and the amount being produced is so great that no one can command the kind of attention that writers did when fewer works were published.
I'm interested in hearing nominations for "well-known" contemporary writers (not necessarily in English) that you think have this kind of stature.
Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
I'm probably the only person I know who has read V and Gravity's Rainbow, Except for a book dealer I know, whose place of worship is like 'Black Books', but 10 times more cramped with tomes.A little vertical mambo is required to reach his perch behind the till. I was there yesterday with surplus-to-requirement softbacks of the above-mentioned. He grabbed them immediately out of a bag of such no longer needed stuff such as Horses and horseriding (from 1928), Elvis, Whitaker's Almanac 1973 and humour books from Alan Coren and the like. I could see in his eyes that he knew the Pynchon's well, and that acquisition of these softbacks was his chance to indoctrinate others ;-) You can't be me, I'm taken
I did find Gravitys rainbow hard, and it took me a couple of attempts to read it, but I was only about 14 at the time. and I didn't come across V till a few years later. MAson & Dixon is sitting on the unread section of my bookshelf waiting till i'm in the right mood to tackle it. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
No there's three of us here
Four.
Scratch Dan Brown. He is well-known but hardly in the same league with Hemingway and Thomas Mann.
Gore Vidal here in the states. Maybe.
My nomination is "The Baroque Cycle" by Neal Stephenson: "Quicksilver," "The Confusion" and "The System of the World." They are the only works I know that combine the "swashbuckling adventure" of 17th Century, mercenary adventurers, the development of the sinews of modern business and finance, English, French, Dutch and German court and society, Pepeys, Hook, Newton, Wren and the Royal Society, the American colonies, including Harvard and M.I.T, the original usage of "redneck," India, Egypt and Japan, etc. etc. I have some familiarity with many of these subjects and found no significant issues. Stephenson creates believable characters and places them in appropriate historical context. I think it is a natural for ET members who have not previously found it. I found it a compulsive read at around 2400 pp for all three volumes. We had just moved from L.A. to northern Arkansas. The wife was a little annoyed. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
You are probably familiar with Frank Herbert's excellent Dune series, similarly "completed," but you may be unfamiliar with an older S.F. author, A.E. van Vogt and his Null-A series. Van Vogt was a Holocaust refugee living in L.A. and active in the 40s and 50s. He was a popularizer of the works of the Polish semanticist Count Alfred Korzybski, who developed what he called "non-Aristotelian logic" or Null-A. "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-aristotelian Systems and General Semantics" is available on Amazon. "The map is not the territory" is perhaps his most widely known statement. I used to employ these concepts to confound uncomprehending managers by informing them that they were applying either-or logic to both-and situations. (This scarcely does justice to Korzibski!) What I find particularly interesting and ironic about the Null-A books in todays context is that they developed the theme of a persecuted minority possessing extraordinary abilities who understood that their lives, individually, were less important that the survival of their kind. Today's suicide bombers come to mind. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Paulo Coehlo? Umberto Eco? Erica Jong? Doris Lessing? Günter Grass?
I am sure there are more.
Then do the same thing with Hemingway (or Dickens) and see what the response is. What I suspect is that there are just as many good writers these days (perhaps more) they just don't generate the same amount of cultural awareness since the market place for culture is so much broader.
There seems to be less of a consensus of what the cultural core contains. This may even be a good thing - too much uniformity constricts creativity. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
This brings up the whole issue of popular culture vs the "classics". Perhaps I'll write something up about this, the idea of a core of knowledge that needs to be taught in schools has been a contentious issue in the US since the 1960's when Columbia University came out with its two year "Contemporary Civilization" course. Lots of schools adopted the text (which was just selections from the "core") and fights over what should be included have never ceased. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
