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Original poster

Was 80s literature as crap as 80s clothes?

85 replies

Nightynight · 17/03/2006 07:43

Remember all those worthy, Booker Prize winning authors in the 1980s? Was it just me, or were they all really (whisper) ?

And isnt there a whole load of more interesting fiction being published today?

VS Naipaul, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner, AS Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Roddy Doyle, Ben Okri....I really tried to read their stuff in the 80s but I couldnt usually get past the first few pages.

I have revisited some of it recently, and find it just as turgid, just as pseudo-intellectual, just as boooooooring.....

is it just me, were the rest of you in raptures over Hotel du Lac, The Famished Road and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha?

OP posts:
hoxtonchick · 17/03/2006 13:00

i was at school :o

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:59

I was more a rag-market black lace and droopy vintage sort of gal dino!

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:58

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Bink · 17/03/2006 12:58

when I say "not going to sign off", that is very very Freudianly meant to be "now going to sign off"

a bientot

hoxtonchick · 17/03/2006 12:58

i read the whole of the new jm & really liked. raced through it on hol with no 'puter.... the digested version was pretty spot-on!

Bink · 17/03/2006 12:57

I so totally love this thread that I am not going to formally sign off so that I do some work today.

Catch up at the weekend (by which time I will have looked at dh's book collection which is a veritable time-capsule of what floppy-haired pseudo people were reading in 1986).

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:56

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Carmenere · 17/03/2006 12:56

Oh yes I loved Peter Carey too Smile

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:56

I bet if we ever locate a numbers sold table for the 80s though bink he will be right up there with Judith Krantz and Catherine Cookson...

Bink · 17/03/2006 12:55

Jeffrey Archer does NOT count as books.

Does anyone read those condensed-into-a-page joke versions in, is it the Guardian? Came across a collection of them the other day and they were hilarious. Especially the Paul Auster one, dino

suzywong · 17/03/2006 12:52

Love Peter Carey
The Tax Inspector
The Illywhacker

Was a bit disappointed with Jack Maggs tbh

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:50

We bicker over PC. Dh loves, I roll eyes...

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:50

Yes I was too, but have also not revisited dino...

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:49

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Marina · 17/03/2006 12:49

Nice Work is 80s I think Hoxty but I must confess to preferring his earlier, 70s stuff like How Far Can You Go?

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:48

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Marina · 17/03/2006 12:48

Misleading x-post from me now bink! Have been trawling around for that kind of site without success so far.

DM Thomas....ugh.
Jeffrey Archer...quadruple ugh with sauce on...

sansouci · 17/03/2006 12:47

I really enjoyed my 80s wardrobe for what it was. (no, I did not wear shoulder pads & power suits - I was a struggling art student in Paris). And my 80s literature, which was mostly hanging around Shakespeare & Co with all the other literary wannabees.

What I think is really pathetic fashionwise is this obsession with the 60s/70s.

And now for something completely different?

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:46

As bink suggests:

\link{http://www.swindon.gov.uk/textV2/libraries/readingroom/readingroom_litawards/readingroom_literaryawards_manbooker/literaryawards_manbooker_prizewinners.htm\hurrah for Swindon Libraries!}

Whatever happened to Keri Hulme...

Bink · 17/03/2006 12:46

What we need is an archive of "Guardian books of the year 1980-1989" don't we? - as in not the prizewinners but the critical choices? Does that exist?

hoxtonchick · 17/03/2006 12:45

whhen was nice work written? great book & dramatisation.

Orlando · 17/03/2006 12:43

Possession was fab. I remember going into Waterstones in Manchester to buy it before my finals and keeping it on my desk through all the miserable, tedious weeks of revision, and then starting it as soon as the exams were over.

(well, as soon as I'd recovered from the hangover. Obviously.)

It was worth the wait.

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:42

Qutie right - 1991. Memory playing tricks then...

Bink · 17/03/2006 12:41

(that sounded like me snippily contradicting you, dino - actually was a cross-post!)

Bink · 17/03/2006 12:40

I'm sure Buddha of Suburbia is 90s - because I went to a pre-publication reading of it after I came back from the States (which was in 1990). Most of my 80s novel-reading was US stuff, I realise - I had a very different 80s, all Bonfire of the Vanities and so on.

Oh, re Predilection stuff: DM Thomas ugh ugh ugh. Defines a kind of 80s writing for me.