What's the most interesting book with the driest prose you've ever read?

What's the most interesting book with the driest prose you've ever read?

Attached: descarga (1).jpg (274x184, 8K)

Agota Kristof

My diary desu

Leviathan

Borges and Kafka are both dry as hell but it serves a purpose thematically, I suppose

None of these is as dry as Agota Kristof.

Another good one is Buzzati. Check it out OP.

Anything by a brazilian.

>asshole beta piece of shit writes his lifestory about how he was always in love with this woman, but could never trust her even after they married while asking for forgiveness from his reader

Interesting idea with the most horrible prose imaginable. Incredibly dry, sluggish, without any soul, clearly the brain child of a depressed lawyer / journalist (as most brazilian writers are).

Thanks to this novel "Dom Casmurro", brazilian literature lost all soul that was previously set up by romantic authors.

>woman reflects upon her life when she sees a cockroach, eventually deciding to eat the cockroach after killing it as a metaphore for women overcoming their attachments to their historical roles in society

Then again, interesting idea for a literary novel. Result: a product as dry as the 'To Buy' list of a supermarket, as it's a trend in brazilian works. The refusal of the brazilian to toy with words and embrace sin (colombian authors, per example, turn sin into art and write incredibly sexy literature).

Seriously, can brazilians explain to me how out of so many depressing countries, they write the driest literature possible even though they live in a happy tropical country?

Attached: brazil2.jpg (480x360, 19K)

I read a 19th-century English translation of the Decameron when a kind of faux-medieval style was in vogue. It was nearly incomprehensible and also very bad.

Good to see that some anons appreciate Agota Kristof. The Notebook trilogy is an extraordinary read.
I enjoyed Yesterday too. It's about a guy who falls in love with his daughter but she rejets him because his mom is a whore. Short and dry and as depressive as it gets.

Attached: 9780099268079.jpg (258x400, 19K)

Hey Brazilfag (if that's you), have you ever read Budapest by Chico Buarque? What do you think of Buarque in general? I read the book not realizing he was a well-known singer. I gotta say, I loved it. Really gave that feeling of loneliness and isolation of being in a place that's not yours. I wonder if Brazil feels like that in general.

woops, meant sister.

you should read Guimarães Rosa, Euclides da Cunha and João Ubaldo Ribeiro. They're more well talented writes, although I like Lispector very much too

if you want poetry, I recommend Ferreira Gullar. I don't read translated poetry and don't even know if he has good translations, but he's just unbelievably incredible.

What are you on about, Hobbes' English is incredible.

>Leviathan
>parts one and two talking political theory, rule of law etc
Okay, this is dry but fascinating stuff
>get to part three
>200 pages of him arguing with some Bishop nobody remembers
>going through every possible passage in the Bible that might contradict his position and explaining why it doesnt
>repeats the same point about why a secular sovereign has precedence over the Pope about twenty times
Sweet Jesus. Most tedious thing I've read outside the bit in City Of God when Augustine stops with the interesting historical and philosophical discussion and starts trying to tie up all the different chronologies in the Bible. People died over this shit

I like it but isn't it 'dry', am I using the word wrong

Anything written by Tolstoy.

I like his subject matter, but good lord his prose is bland.

Marx’s ‘Capital’.
This is honestly why I had such a hard time getting into them. They’re just so d r y. I liked ‘Metamorphosis’ off the bat, but I had to slam my head into ‘The Trial’ like four times before I could bear to finish. Ditto with Borges.

>Borges and Kafka
They're only dry if you're not engaging with them in the right way honestly. "The Trial," for example, is actually frequently quite funny. The entire premise and the situations K. finds himself in are entirely absurd and might even be suitable for a comedy if we weren't moored to K.'s anxiety-ridden perspective. Kafka was of course aware of this, and often laughed out loud when reading the book to his friends. I also never found Borges to be dry although I read him in Spanish, so it's possible that the translations sap his prose somewhat.

I think part of the problem is they're often presented as dark and troubled in Kafka's case and erudite and academic in Borges' case, which can bias our perception of how we read them.

I'm not into Buarque because he is a known hack in Brazil and often associated with communism and corrupt parties. He has himself used his influence to gain grants and culture incentive money from the government. Budapest is unironically his best work, having succeeded for his own merit.

Brazil is just like you've described, except much worse. Joy is more joyful in Brazil, yet in no land you'll be as lonely as when you are lonely here.

Guimarães Rosa is the salvation of this land.

Dry doesn't mean bad, you fucking retards. You're completely misunderstanding the thread. A dry prose is synthetic, short, evocative, effective. Pointillist, if you like. Believing that only a torrential, abundant, roaring prose can be good is pretty dumb. Read Agota Kristof. Her books are awesome and her prose is the epitome of D R Y

>Believing that only a torrential, abundant, roaring prose can be good is pretty dumb.
No one's saying that. Dry just means dull or boring, unengaging. Overly verbose prose can be just as dry as more economic forms of writing. It's typically interpreted as a negative, although good writers can have dry prose because prose is not the end-all of literature.

I get where you're coming from, I'm a Borges fan but Kafka is hard to get into

Kafka is definitely underrated as a comedic writer, The Trial isn't haha funny but existentially it's hilarious

You wrote that as if you didn't even hear me. Dry does not mean dull or boring. The fact that English-speaking people use that word with the meaning of dull or boring does not change its actual and original meaning. Dry means short, synthetic, or economic, as you said. And I'm almost sure OP asked an example of that. He's looking for good authors that write in a beautiful dry prose. Beautiful and dry is not an oxymoron and there are many writers that can demonstrate it.

All existentialist writers have their hilarious moments