Could’ve been a 5 star read if not for the weird nurse fetish

Excelente novela, resulta dificil hablar un poco de ella dada la gran riqueza que se obtiene en su extensión. Elijo resaltar las dicotomías que presenta Oskar, el protagonista, aveces Jesús, aveces satán, aveces Rasputín, aveces Goethe, aveces Oskar Matzerath otras Oscar Bronsky, con la cercanía del relato en primera persona y el desdoblamiento que lo aleja al alternar a la tercera persona. Encontré en el trancurso de las edades del protagonista la evolución de su contexto que, permea de forma latente la manera en que el protagonista se desenvuelve con su entorno. Un libro con capitulos geniales, cargados de símbolos donde la sátira rebosa y expresa la dinámica de un tiempo entre guerras, el inicio de ese tiempo, la guerra misma, a la distacia con mensajes radiales y en el frente mismo, donde lo que era dejó de ser y al término de la guerra debe reinventarse. Recomiendo leerla, hay que asumir los artificios que presenta primordiales y siempre queda alguna duda sobre lo relatado. Considero que es de suma importancia, no dejar de lado cada evento que sucede en el fondo de los hechos narrados en la novela.

De los libros más extraños que he leído, varias veces pensé dejarlo pero no me arrepiento de haberlo terminado. Cuando dejé de buscarle sentido y lógica a la historia lo disfruté bastante.

Yikes, what a crazy ride.

It is really hard to keep going with this one. Am persisting.

A few days ago, I attended a meeting of the head honchoes of the sometimes awfully wonderful, sometimes terribly nonsensical city I've found myself a librarian of. The meeting was a regular occasion where highfalutin know-nothings with way too much money to throw around(/away) met and shuffled through their responsibilities until they could foist it on the newest/youngest individual with the least amount of legacy clout; but first, they wanted to put all their newly hired employees on display and pat themselves on the back for running their current underlings through the wringer so that they may acquire their potential successors. Needless to say, the language was droning yet emotional, bureaucratic yet handholding, and when the first of the new employees stood up to make a brief introductory statement and ended up sounding as if they thought this was the last and final interview, that was the icing on the cake. Now, this work may be a lot of things, but it's also kindred to that pontificating assembly: self-assured, bloviating, and only real so long as everyone submits to worshiping at the feet of the golden calf: capitalism in the case of my workplace, longwinded metaphors interspersed with gore porn in the case of this work. In other words, a reader comes, a reader sees, and a reader chooses whether to literary crit their way in copy paste glory, or to close off an author as simply being too incompatible on a subjective level to continue dealing with in any serious fashion. Life's too short and my unread library's too large, and so while I'll do my regular looking back on this, you're going to have to look elsewhere if you came here in the mood for the sort of self-abasement that customarily accompanies the rating above.

I'm looking forward to when the world gets over WWII, I really am. Not in any sort of 'oh both sides were complicated so just let's brush over the entire thing with bourgeoisie complacency in the hopes that all sides being able to make money (while not actually tackling any of the cesspools of dehumanization) will solve it all', but in the way that showcases certain adults seizing power cause they could and many other adults going along with it because, at heart, they were scared little children in the dark of history and of capitalism, then demonstrates how such will go on forever so long as we're willing to pay for it. However, if you're going to confine me in the habitus of some kind of 'rebel without a cause' who isn't interesting enough to carry a narrative for nearly 600+ pages, it really doesn't matter how many obtuse Occidental references you make or how carefully you juxtapose your poignant historicisms with vulgar banalities. It's neither trainwreck enough to entice (that belongs to the likes of [b:The Obscene Bird of Night|382975|The Obscene Bird of Night|José Donoso|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1627486247l/382975._SY75_.jpg|372745]) nor degenerate enough to relate (you ever going to get into a definition that isn't the kind a twelve-year-old boy would conjure up? no? ok then), leaving it the only saving grace of knowing when to take itself out. As the text blew past the 150 mark, barely even played with the 300 bar, and insisted on driving itself into a fatuous burp of an end beyond the 500 indicator, so to did my rating go from equivocating, to middling, to done. The text has obviously done much for a lot of people, but I personally prefer to my reading to not resemble nothing so much as an NFT.

I'm winding down the last few weeks of my 2022 classic reading challenges, and if this latest read isn't an indication that I need a break from it all, nothing is. Then again, for the last two months I've been receiving some hardcore vindication for a good portion of my personal breed of uptight numbfuckery, so this entire reaction of mine to this work might be one supersized ego overreacting to the experience of another. In any case, this is the seventh of the eight Nobel laureates for Lit I'm due to get through for challenges this year, and if I didn't hate the work of at least one of them, I'd have to turn in my Readership card and resign myself to pathos-dribbling network television until I developed some critical thinking/autonomy again. As for Grass being a Nazi, you might as well sit him alongside every white US author who never overtly denounced the KKK, and lord knows I got along fine with those. I just didn't see what the point of this all was, and fortunately these days, I can earn my pay regardless.

Tendenz 3,5