Nominations for New Classics

[Paulclem]

I've begun Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies. It is very good. Her style is polished though I am going to have to look back and see exactly how she achieves it.

Despite my general disdain of royalty, Henry VIII and the Tutor court is fascinating. She manages to bring forth a man through the writing rather than the myth and I find this fictionalised account very convincing. She does the same with Thomas Cromwell through whom we experience the court. Her descriptions are evocative but economical,and the dialogue is illuminating and funny - very funny at times.

Is it going to be a classic? Maybe, but of course I'll see how the book pans out. I'm impressed so far.

[Paulclem]

Of McCarthy's books that I've read so far that I think will become classic - I think it has to be Blood Meridian. All the Pretty Horses was interesting, and I've begun The Crossing. I'm also going to read Suttree - perhaps after Christmas.

[JCamilo]

The thing is that sometimes a book is a classic not for the whole, specially novels, but for a specific chapter (Like the impact of the Great Inquisitor chapter in Brothers Karamazov was higher than the whole of the book at first or those momments of Ahab in Moby Dick), perhaps for a writer's style (like Balzac for example) or sometimes for a character. Maybe Blood Meridian may go as his best work, sort like Madame Bovary is Flaubert's best work, but his overall quality we see in the detailed lists of Bovard and Pecuchet, the researches for Samlambo, etc.

[Pompey Bum]

I agree. And the potential for a work to last over time is dependent on a strange dance between the literati and the--populares? Bleak House is a much better books than Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, or A Christmas Carol. Is it as widely read or as beloved? If Dickens becomes neglected in future centuries, which do you think will be the last to go?

[Paulclem]

I agree. And the potential for a work to last over time is dependent on a strange dance between the literati and the--populares? Bleak House is a much better books than Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, or A Christmas Carol. Is it as widely read or as beloved? If Dickens becomes neglected in future centuries, which do you think will be the last to go?

in my opinion A Christmas Carol would be the last to go as it embodies so much of what has become culturally prominent at Christmas - nostalgia, a kind of non-committal spirituality, and all the trappings of Christmas including Scrooge's benevolent capitalism.

I agree that some aspect of the book finds prominence. The outstanding thing in Bring up the Bodies is Mantel's writing. It is very polished, but it is supported by a very popularly regarded period of English History. ( The more I find out about he restoration, the more intrigued i am about how the historical focus has been on the glorious Tudors and Elizabethans and not the rather gruesome retribution and re-instatement of the royals. I no longer think this is accidental. That's not to say that the Tudor and Elizabethan periods were not without their gruesome martyrdoms, but this seems to have been superseded by the power exhibited in the reign).

[Paulclem]

So I've nearly finished Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winner Bring up the Bodies.
I reserve judgement upon whether it will be a classic along with Wolf Hall, but I must say it is looking good.

I am enjoying it very much. The Tudor period, and Henry VIII's court in particular, is fascinating. You may know that the focus of the book is Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith raised through his considerable talents to advisor and fixer for Henry. Given the poisonous nature of the aristocratic court, Mantel examines how such a man could survive and succeed.

She does this through a very lifelike portrait of a capable man who gained experience abroad and applies his understanding of human nature to his daily dealings.

I find that she writes men and their conversations very well, capturing the sudden crudities and jokes men speak privately convincingly. She is equally good with her portraits and psychology of the women in the piece.

I think it is a great achievement to be able to marry historical research and an adopted view of events and combine them with a fictionalized, but convincing characterisation. The people fit the Times as drawn by Mantel and the situations they find themselves in.

The romanticisation of Anne Boleyn has been undercut by Mantel who portrays her as calculating, flirtatious and devious without finally presenting her as an adulteress, though certainly - and this in the novel condemns her - capable of it with opportunity to secure a male heir and thus her place as Queen.

Henry is portrayed as regal, boorish, immature, religious, headstrong, sensitive, responsible and reliant. He too is portrayed convincingly with the assumed pressures of kingship and his defensive regality presenting a flawed man.

As I said, I am enjoying the book and I'd like to follow this update with an attempted analysis of Mantel's style.

[Pompey Bum]

I find that she writes men and their conversations very well, capturing the sudden crudities and jokes men speak privately convincingly. She is equally good with her portraits and psychology of the women in the piece.

I noticed exactly the same thing in Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession, both written by Mantel many years earlier. Maybe it's a sign of a great author to be able to do that. (Donna Tartt's best books are both written in convincing male voices).

In the meantime I have finished my annual reading of A Christmas Carol, and with cockles warmed, I am ploughing into The War of the End of the World, on Ennison's recommendation. It's a long one, but I will post my analyses of it when I'm finished (if not sooner).

Looking forward to hearing more about the Mantel books, Paul.

[Eiseabhal]

I think an underrated American is Mr Salter. In a few years he will be hailed as a great American writer. "A few" is an indeterminate number of years.

[easy75]

1. I think collectively, McCarthy's Border Trilogy is likely to be his most enduring. I enjoyed Suttree (And it was humorous!), but it is not as accessible. I didn't love No Country when I read it, but I think the movie is an almost perfect piece of filmmaking.
2. Richard Ford's Bascomb books should be considered.
3. I loved Billy Flynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, and I think it captures a time in U.S. history and the pulse of a segment of our population so well, that it will endure. In the same way that educators are forcibly making Tim O'brien's The Things They Carried a classic, I think it will be the same with Fountain.
4. Although I didn't love it, I think that The Corrections will also inevitably come to be considered a classic. Or maybe another book by Franzen.
5. The Good Lord Bird is a riot! I don't know that it is classic material, but it is a funny and wonderfully told tale and for those reasons it might make it.

[Paulclem]

This thread is great for getting recommendations.

I've just downloaded my next literary book The Narrow Road to the Deep North - the latest Booker winner.

I had to get this one as it combines WWII writing about the Burma railway with an appreciation of Basho's Haiku - from which the title is taken. I'm looking forward to reading this as my holidays start on Friday.

[easy75]

One I forgot that I read this year :
All The Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doer
I can't imagine this book not being considered a classic many years from now. For me it meets or exceeds all of the requirements : exquisitely drawn characters, amazingly elegant prose, the story is moving and it is about things that matter. This was the type of contemporary writing that left me sort of slack jawed. It was well received critically, which helps. It was a finalist for the national book award ultimately losing out to Phil Klay's "Redeployment".
Has anyone else read this? I don't recommend it because it was a good read, I really think it was GREAT.

[Pompey Bum]

I get the feeling that Kazuo Ishiguru's The Buried Giant began life as a short story about marriage, dreamlike and allegorical, and that it grew to short-novel stature because a publisher needed something new from Ishiguru, who had not been otherwise in print in ten years or so. It is a strange and wildly uneven novel, capable in parts of moving readers, but also, in parts, of making them--or me anyway--want to chuck it out the window unfinished. And that's quite a confession since I make myself finish every book I start, even if it is lengthy (which this one is not) and I find I don't like it. For me, however, The Buried Giant ends even more strongly that it begins, so I am glad I muddled through its none too effective middle passage. It wasn't a terribly long slog--I read the book in two nights--but I was surprised to see a good writer like Ishiguru pad out what amounts to a short story so ineptly. Perhaps he's got writer's block.

The Buried Giant opens in a cursed and ruined Britain a little less than a generation after Arthur's death. Britons and Saxons have fallen into an apathetic but peaceful coexistence, at least for a time. The setting is otherwise rather vague--vagueness being a theme of The Buried Giant--for the "reality" in this world of ogres and dragons invites us not to inquire about it too critically.

This constitutes my first problem with The Buried Giant. A blasted post-Roman Britain in which endemic violence has produced psychotics who lurk in the mist to carry off children or murder unwary travelers, understood by the populace as the monsters they are, would have been more effective than a compendium of fantasy-novel bogies, cliches for which Ishiguru attempts to compensate by making his fiends often more pathetic than otherwise. Such "iconic" fantasy elements leave too much of The Buried Giant without a dimension sufficient for its themes (icons are flat, right?) Ironically, Ishiguru manages things more smoothly when the dragon--yes, an actual dragon--turns up in the latter part of the book. But by then, he has remembered that The Buried Giant is an allegory and not a Harry Potter cash in.

But I have gotten ahead of myself. The Buried Giant, when it is effective, is the story of an elderly husband and wife who, while devoted to one another, have become estranged from their work-a-day community, and are being increasing ostracized by it. At the same time, they come to notice that a malaise, eventually connected to the dragon, is consuming their world: memory is increasingly absent from their neighbors' experience of reality, and even their own. People live within vague parameters of what is expected of them, but their histories, and even the events of days or hours ago, have become as dim as the mist that shrouds their swamp-side community. How, the old lovers worry, will they retain their love for one another if
they lose the precious and bonding memories of their life together?

This theme of misted memory has obvious resonance in an age of Alzheimer's disease, and more subtle implications for any lasting marriage. Courageous victories, condolences in defeat, sweet nostalgia--these things bind a marriage; but what about the things a couple chooses not to remember? Are some things better left in the mists of oblivion or better faced? And what are the implications either way? At its best, The Buried Giant explores these themes on micro- (that is, interpersonal) and macroscopic (that is, historical) levels. Ishiguru is masterful on the former; and while history is not entirely his bailiwick (nor is The Buried Giant in any real sense a historical novel), he offers keen and disturbing insight into the latter. Getting there, however is what might be termed a "short strange road."

Early on in The Buried Giant, the elderly couple, Beatrice and Axl, decide to leave their community and journey to the home of a vaguely remembered son to seek protection. This may be a plan they have long entertained, and it may have been resisted to a degree by Axl. Neither one is too sure. The first stages of this journey are expressed in symbol-heavy allegory (think Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal). Although a little heavy handed, these parts are intelligent and important to the book as a whole. Unfortunately The Buried Giant soon veers wildly in another direction--that of cliche-ridden Sword and Sorcery. Well, more sword, I suppose, than sorcery, although the aforementioned ogres and the obligatory female medicinal healer do put in cameo appearances. Sword-wielding Saxon action heroes play their usual riff for a time, and an absolutely unnecessary, unmotivated, poorly plotted, and yes, poorly written subplot involving bad-guy Christian monks (boo, hiss!) very very very nearly spoils the whole goddamn book. Worst of all is the dialogue: stilted, trite, and unworthy of even Xena at her most cliched--far worse, in fact, since Xena at least had humor and camp. If this is camp, it does not belong in the same book as Axl and Beatrice. A little humor, on the other hand, would have gone a long way to offset their inevitable heaviness. But this is neither. As I commented several times while reading the middle part of The Buried Giant: what the f *ck is going on here?

Well I have two theories. The first is that we are dealing with a post-modernish appropriation of a socially devalued literary genre that something something something paternalistic something something something-centric something something something subverting the something-phobic narrative something something something or other. That is possible. And to give Ishiguru his due, at least two of the clichéd characters introduced in these chapters are subverted and reconstructed as full fledged characters later in the book. Perhaps he's just "taking risks as a writer." That is possible.

My second theory is that a publisher rang up Ishiguru, after having received only one novella in ten years, and said, "Listen, Kaz baby, it's just not long enough. Why don't you pad it out with something that'll expand your market base a little. I mean, it's already kind of 'Dungeons & Dragons,' right?" And Ishiguru, who was busy thinking deep thought at the time, got one of his kids to do it for him. That is possible, too.

But The Buried Giant does get a grip. It returns to the themes of mist, memory, and marriage and becomes once more the story of Axl and Beatrice. In fact, although I just finished it last and the story is still weaving its spell on me, I would say in the immediate afterglow that the last chapter of The Buried Giant is one of the more moving finales I can remember reading in recent years. Younger readers, the unmarried, and some of the divorced (the ones cynical about marriage in any case) may mistake it for sentimental. It's not, although Axl may seem a little uxorious to some (he sometimes sounds like he's playing Stan Laurel to Beatrice's Oliver Hardy). But in the end, I suspect that many who have spent long years in loving marriages will be moved to tears by this book--eventually. I was not, but I did, on finishing, turn out the light and hold my wife until dawn. For all my criticism of The Buried Giant, I can give it no higher complement than that.

[Pompey Bum]

Plastered on the front cover of Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is an assurance by Dan Chaon, author of this, that, and a book of short stories, that it "doesn't just break your heart; it takes your heart and won't give it back." It's a lie. We Are All Beside Ourselves is a riot. It has a high energy, just-this-side-of-hip narrative style, a moving but unsentimental story, and most of all, a dry, dead-on and hilariously effective sense of humor. The novel, which was short listed for the 20014 Booker Prize, may have its faults, but being a tearjerker isn't one of them.

That is not to say that We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a lark in the park. It is a "message book," and its message is disturbing enough. But Fowler is an effective enough dissembler to know to put her best jokes up front as a kind of fish bait, and to reel her readers in with fun and intimate conversational style. Now that we've laughed together, we're friends, right? Her cause, which she doesn't directly address for the first third of the book, is animal rights, more specifically the notion that our closest evolutionary relatives are and ought to be treated as persons. The sucker punch comes when one of the characters--but maybe you should read it for yourself.

If We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has a weakness, it's plot. But even that needs a qualification. Fowler is a savvy writer and the novel is a tour de force. She handles the intricacies of its plot deftly enough until the reappearance of the narrator's brother, Lowell, in the second half. Fowler continues to control the plot and its out-of-sequence structure (middle-beginning-composite time) well later, too, but after Lowell's reappearance, the story begins to play second bassoon to the message, and certain characters (the nutty and slutty Harlow, for example) are left at looser ends than would have been completely effective. But Fowler's only real gaffe is a drunken college night sequence that is a little too long. Aside from that she knows exactly what she's doing.

I recommend We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves to those on any side of animal rights issues. It is fast and funny enough that any objecting to the emotional aspects of her appeal will not get too flustered, and there is plenty of rational argument for those of us who prefer it. Bring an open mind, though. Compassion is a feeling, not a thought, whoever or whatever is on the other end.

[mal4mac]

I agree. And the potential for a work to last over time is dependent on a strange dance between the literati and the--populares? Bleak House is a much better books than Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, or A Christmas Carol. Is it as widely read or as beloved? If Dickens becomes neglected in future centuries, which do you think will be the last to go?

Easier to say which might be the first to be dropped from the canon

I think A Tale of Two Cities may go, I think someone might write a better novel about the French revolution and render it redundant - it doesn't have the creative originality or unforgettable characters of his other novels. Scrooge, Fagin, "Ghosts of Xmas", ..., are strong, archetypal characters who will never be forgotten as long as literature survives. It would be like ditching Ulysses or Hamlet to ditch these characters. i.e., impossble.

[Pompey Bum]

Easier to say which might be the first to be dropped from the canon

I think A Tale of Two Cities may go, I think someone might write a better novel about the French revolution and render it redundant - it doesn't have the creative originality or unforgettable characters of his other novels. Scrooge, Fagin, "Ghosts of Xmas", ..., are strong, archetypal characters who will never be forgotten as long as literature survives. It would be like ditching Ulysses or Hamlet to ditch these characters. i.e., impossble.

You are right that Scrooge and the spooks aren't going anywhere in a hurry, but that's probably got more to do with their incorporation (no pun intended) into the annual Christmas money grab than their status as "strong, archetypal characters" (and thank you for not saying icons, by the way ) A Christmas Carol is dragged out each year with the old plastic snowman and new plastic debit card. Last year's cheap TV remake becomes next year's lump-in-the-throat classic. Like all beloved fixtures of sentimental capitalism, Scrooge will be welcome as long as he keeps making money. He'd be so proud.

For like the good 21st Century capitalists Scrooge and Fagin turn out to be, they understand that the key to survival is media. The populares know Fagin from the musical Oliver! and Scrooge from his endless seasonal avatars. If that makes them live for a time in the public imagination, it is not necessarily or directly due to their (undeniable) literary qualities. Clement Clarke Moore's entirely mediocre poem The Night Before Christmas is a equally beloved literary work, and far more people could tell you the name of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer's girlfriend than could recall Ebenezer Scrooge's. Scrooge and Fagin are everything you say, but they survive in the public mind because they have learned to live outside of their original contexts. As is the case with the Bible, the vast majority of those who purport to love Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol have never actually read them. When their new contexts go, I suspect, so will the good old characters; Fagin before Scrooge--because, hey, we still listen to Andy Williams, right?

Not that Scrooge and Fagin aren't memorable, even extraordinary literary characters. But what of it? For much of the 19th and some of the 20th century, virtually all educated and most uneducated primary English speakers would have had no difficulty placing the name Micawber. "Something will come up!" would have been as recognizable a catchphrase as "Bah humbug!" Even those who had never read David Copperfield eventually became familiar with W.C. Fields' cinematic treatment of David's impecunious ally. Today, you and I are weird enough to recognize the Micawbers, but until the Muppet version, or more probably a hit Broadway musical (DC!), they have both gone off the archetypical radars screen. If A Christmas Carol is impenetrable moorland to the 21st century reader, then what hope is there for David Copperfield?

In the context of my original point (I think--it was some time ago), it is precisely that extra-contextual half life that keeps these characters alive in popular culture. If it were the characters themselves, then Bleak House, would hold the highest honors: Jo, Krook, Guppy, Skimpole, Smallweed, old Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellyby, Miss Flite, Inspector Bucket, and others; arguably Dickens finest assembly of "unforgettable" characters (although Little Dorrit might give Bleak House a run for its money where characters go). How many are remembered now, outside of academic or classic literature circles like this one? In that way you are right that these characters "will never be forgotten as long as literature survives." But whether anyone notices is another matter.