Wednesday 26 May 2010

Gratuitous Iconoclasm

I'm all for a spot of classics-bashing, so my gratitude goes out to Isa for pointing out a magnificent piece in the ZEIT, in which writers under the random age of 35 bitch about German and American classics. Hemingway's way too sweaty for Paul Brodowsky, Brecht wrote too many darn poems for Nora Bossong, Thomas Klupp just doesn't get Döblin. And more.

With plenty of gratuitous exclamation marks!

4 comments:

David said...

Rather silly comments, for the most part. Although I do agree that "Malina" is insufferable (I am a fan of Bachmann's poetry, however).

kjd said...

Oh yes, but that's the joy of it. Imagine you're a writer under the random age of 35 and a newspaper person contacts you and says, "We want 200 words slagging off a classic. And we'll run your photo really large over the top of the piece." You're hardly going to say no, are you?

David said...

kjd - OK, let's do imagine. Which classic would you gladly trash?

kjd said...

David, if I could remember it well enough it'd be Hesse's Narziss und Goldmund. But someone would have to pay me to get me to read it again (and run my photo really large over the top of the piece). As far as I recall, it was an incredibly pretentious adolescent male fantasy.