Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress Book

Compendiusly Nipping Pastiche. Clearseeing.


I bought this two years ago as a summer read and I still haven't read it.

There is a labored ugliness to Stein. Anyone expecting a Buddenbrooks type novel should be forewarned. Every one always is repeating the whole of them. Combined with Stein's repetitious style of writing, it becomes extremely tedious. The language is intoxicating. Yawn! I like my art post-modern and marginally comprehensible.

It's revolutionary prose and exactly what good writing should be. Then it just became as tedious as my, always repeating is all of living, everything in a being is always repeating, more and more listening to repeating gives to me completed understanding. Isn't that the writerly voice of someone who just likes to hear themselves talk? Boring; tired; she was cruising on her own self importance on this one; well written, educating and entertaining tale; crap. I wonder if she was obsessive compulsive. Repeating is often irritating.

I am rereading as write poems inspired from various passages. Worth the effort; currently reading this book...

Don't blame me if you love this book; repetitive, nonsensical, tedious, at times appearing to be hundreds of pages too long. Truly remarkable; a functionless piece of art for shock value but have little use for her writing. "You're not mad at me are you?" That Stein was wealthy & spoiled & egomaniacal & insensitive to others around her? A number of crazy men and women are writing stuff; the most eminent of the idiots. I've found myself drunkenly quoting. And no matter how much effort she puts into precision, there is no end to what can be said about a family. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth the pain and suffering. It's like breathing.

It's hypnotic, folding over itself and winding through people and thoughts and the lives they were leading. Anyway, whew, I haven't tried to read her in years and years; if you are okay skipping head; summarized as great writing by a brilliant game-changer. I was so hypnotized by its repetitions that I actually began to feel as if I was living. I just got bored. Every word spanked me; thats a summer job. Repeating can be irritating.

As I was saying, it is finished. That Stein was a relentlessly arrogant person. Adjectives don't really apply in this universe. It could be I don't know my ass from a hole in my head. As I was saying, he repeated them. Over & over; dry and repetitive sentences seem vapid, useless, and self-indulgent in the worst sense. Repetition, of course, is the key aesthetic device. Stein makes it redundantly stupid. Whatever. If you thought ullyses was difficult to read dont try this; that includes the complete works of Plato. Something continuously "in the making..."

Stein's truly mind-bogglingly tediously self-indulgent & largely contentless The Making of Americans thought poetys could learn something from it.. Perhaps the repetitions of a person can be used to define what's most common in that person. Big deal. So she likes the repeating, so she repeats, & repeats. All individuals essentially repeat others. What a bore.

......the same five thoughts over and over and over and over.

It's repetetive Gertrude Stein to the extreme.

bad

unreadable