lydiardbell t1_j18f6tz wrote
Not all books have to focus on the plot. Mann wasn't trying to achieve the same things as Dostoyevsky; you might as well say Tolkien is lazier than Sanderson because we don't get a videogame tutorial chapter explaining the rules governing Gandalf's magic.
Castorp learns and grows throughout the book. On one level it's about that growth >!and it's futility!<; on another, the characters Castorp meets allow the reader to explore Europe in the years leading up to WW1, as well as Mann's changing opinions on Europe and his hindsight about the war and the zeitgeist that led to it. It's notable that he began the book in 1912 and slowly revised it over the next decade, as the war changed his own viewpoints on Germany and on Europe as a whole.
[deleted] OP t1_j18mkk8 wrote
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Vir_illustris t1_j18sv7i wrote
If you’re going to get into modernist literature it’s important to understand that it was a time when writers were trying to get away from the formal structures which had traditionally defined literature in favour of an expression of aesthetics and a mélange of emotional experience.
To try and assess a book like Der Zauerberg within a framework of traditional literary structure is like assessing a painting by Paul Klee on the basis of how physically accurate he renders his subjects, or to say that a cake is badly cooked because it doesn’t taste like a rack of lamb.
lydiardbell t1_j18vrkh wrote
I'll give you the latter, I guess I mean just "learns". To be fair, there is an entire subgenre of Russian novels about young men who do nothing, don't change or grow at all, and then die.
Complexity can be seen in more than just the book's plot. Henry James has some very simple stories (The Ambassadors), but uses complex prose that elevates it above what it would be if anyone else had written the same story.
On the other hand, Hemingway uses fairly plain prose to write stories which are sometimes incredibly simple on the surface level (Big Two-Hearted River and Old Man and the Sea, for example) - and yet their meanings and the complexity of their characters are debated to this day. Would you say that everyone who studies those works is wrong, and you can simply dismiss them out of hand because not much happens at the story level?
v-pascan t1_j1ah3ea wrote
What is the Russian subgenre that you mentioned? Can you please give some examples of novels or authors?
lydiardbell t1_j1bc0ux wrote
It's the "superfluous man" novel. Probably the most famous example is Eugene Onegin, but other well-known books are A Hero of Our Time and Diary of a Superfluous Man.
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