Intense Longing for a classic!

When was the last time this happened to you? With music that can happen often enough. The band/artist you follow, whose singles and gigs are good and you wonder if they can string it together to make an amazing album. Novels are different as I don't follow living writers like this (from when they start writing short stories, idk, or following small presses to uncover a diamond, or attending a reading) but at some point you are reading enough and building a taste and you hope this or that novel will fit right in to that and you are going to have an unforgettable experience! Its what I felt when reading about Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. A novel I read about months ago and looking to check out soon:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/15/on-uwe-johnson-poet-of-both-germanys/

And then when it doesn't? I was reminded of that later on, when reading about Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and thinking about the frustration and disappointment in the old translation a few years ago. Reading the reviews of the new translation, seeing how the dialogue just doesn't scan, knowing this could never be as good as I wanted it to be.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/berlin-alexanderplatz-explosion-pure-fact/

Overall its a crappy attitude to lay on a work - no biggie if Anniversaries isn't a classic, but I was reminded today how I would've looked differently on it once.

I know what you mean; I suspect the last time I got really hooked on the idea of reading a GIGANTIC CLASSIC BOOK and it really paid off was reading Musil's Man Without Qualities. I really enjoyed Berlin Alexanderplatz, for example, but it didn't change my life.

I got this from reading "The Savage Detectives" last year - a GIGANTIC CLASSIC BOOK (well on ilx's terms anyway) which I felt was classic even halfway through as I was reading it and even went beyond my expectations

The Savage Detectives was very confounding for me. 2666 is still laying in wait.