Where are the authors like Baldwin and Victor Hugo today?
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Where are the authors like Baldwin and Victor Hugo today?
What they are portraying may very well represent a part of the reality today; but, does that mean these authors have to keep hammering on those points until we become numb to them? Do they not know how to rise above these pettiness, and create characters and stories that show us some light in the darkness?
Victor Hugo was right when he said "What a writer writes reflects his soul." These writers have won National Award, but what's reflected through their writings doesn't speak highly of their soul.
On the contrary, I also read "If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin. That's a story where the characters don't give in to despair; they struggle on, hold on to their dignity till the end, even if that means being beaten down by the system. His characters and their stories inspire us, give us hope. At no point, the author takes recourse to showing extreme violence, even though one can feel that happening underneath; nor does he use an over-abundance of vulgarity or repeated obscene language.
Where are the authors like Baldwin and Victor Hugo today? I shall really appreciate if some of you can point me toward some positive and constructive writers.
- Cat Suelo
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Maybe you can try reading Markus Zusak's The Book Thief. Or Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. Or Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. These stories are heart-breaking, however, the characters' strength give you hope. To use your very own words, the characters do "struggle on, hold on to their dignity till the end."
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- LivreAmour217
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In this category, the worst I have come across is Karin Slaughter, who has literally slaughtered my sensibilities through her perverted stories.
The other problem with this junk literature is this: the same way the junk foods thicken our tongue and we can no longer appreciate good foods, the junk literature thickens our senses and make us insensible to good literature. At least that's what happened to me; after I stopped reading junk literature, it took me a long long time to get back my sensibilities. And now that I have them back, I can see what difference it makes in terms of pleasure and personal growth, when we read authors like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wallace Stegner, and in France authors like Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and Gustave Flaubert, and Albert Camus.
I do the same, I read classics and non-fiction for the time being.
- Max Tyrone
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There is stuff out there, though, that are purely driven to sell.