Oz Zee wrote:A tie between Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy --- just shortly after reading a few lines from their novels, you can feel your primary life slipping away life sand seeping through a punctured sack, and all of a sudden you are in this second life that has turned into a reality. The way they've decribe, not in detail but in experience, the atmosphere of the setting, the feelings of each character in a particular event (let it be a minor character; e.g butler, or a dog), is a wake up call to anyone who's been living in zombie mode.
Simply daily events have turned into something spectacular and exciting, from such scenes as being conscious of having murdered an old lady and having the realization that you may have just gotten away with it, to the short yet thrilling scene before proposing marriage to the woman of your life.
Both writers are almost two centuries old, but they continue to change lives. How infinite must that be?
oh yes, how could you not love the russians? what is it about mother russia and her bearded browbeaten supermen? i don't care if the country's a refrigerator, if i will have to brave a throng of idiotic neo-nazis, if russian is a language that refuses to be learned, but i will go visit fedya's grave someday (i call him that kasi close kami
). and solzhenitsyn's too (kailngan ko pa igoogle name nya because of the spelling). it's so funny because i have been reading woody allen's without feathers lately and i kept thinking that the humor's nothing new. the soviet writers were doing that, what, decades before allen. and before them was the god gogol who believed that something could be so tragic it's actually funny.
actually ang fab five ko ay sina:
1. dostoevsky -- oh i'm a sick man. in his universe small talk means ten pages of existential ennui.
2. eugene o'neill -- who was also smoking hot. you think you know family drama? this guy had a patent on it.
3. toni morrison-- please don't die! she actually turned down the offer to write a memoir because she thought her life was "not interesting enough." seriously? the first african-american woman to win a nobel for lit. and the silver dreds are amaaazing.
4. william faulkner-- who actually inspired morrison. my faulkner deflowering was courtesy of as i lay dying.
5. james baldwin -- god couldn't part with him too long he actually had to take him back so soon. brilliant, beautiful man.
kung pwede lang utangin ang talent nila.