I thought a thread which discusses your nominations of books which might become modern classics would be interesting.
I anticipate: controversial nominations which will generate discussions; well known modern titles; translated works from other cultures; and books unheard of by many, but which are promoted because of outstanding, innovative or revolutionary qualities.
We might even spot what becomes a classic book.
Well, at first I have a hard time recommending any - then when I do, I think they are already considered fairly classic. Identity by Milan Kundera is exceptional,
K-PAX by Gene Brewer is one of the best books ever written..
I think I may be off a little on my dating though - perhaps you could clarify - books within the last 15 years, the last 25? or would a 35-year-old book that has escaped public notice qualify?
Here's the list I suggested on the other thread. I'm not saying they will all gain classic status over time, I just thought it would be interesting to predict which will and which won't.
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-19-2014 at 11:49 AM.
Thinking outside the box about modern classic "books", I'll nominate "The Complete Peanuts" and (#2) "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes".
Peanuts is the greatest comic strip ever. It's hilarious, and it maintained a high level of humor for 50+ years. Perhaps 10-20 of those years were inferior to Calvin, but that still leaves 30+ years of Peanuts which are as good as the 8 years of Calvin. Also, many of Calvin's best recurring themes were derived from Peanuts -- Calvin's "show and tell" strips were funny -- but not any better than Sally Brown's or Peppermint Patty's. Calvin's snow art was almost identical to Linus's.
Watterson's color strips are spectacular, especially in the glossy books, but Schulz's ability to depict emotion with one, simple, squiggling line is unmatched. Also, the recurring images in Peanuts are great: Charlie flipping upside down with his socks flying off after yet another line drive through the box; Charlie flying through the air after Lucy pulls the football away; etc.
I was reading one of my many Peanuts books this morning -- a book which I've read many times in the past -- and started laughing out loud over a strip (similar to some Calvin strips) in which Peppermint Patty, sitting at her desk, asks Marcie, "Psst! What's the answer to question #4."
"Why should I tell you?" asks Marcie.
The next panel shows Patty writing, "Why should I tell you?" on her test.
The final panel: "Thanks, Marcie. We'll probably be the only one's to get that right. What's the answer to #5?"
Calvin would sympathize with Patty. Hobbes, of course, is similar to Snoopy in many ways.
ON the pro-Calvin, anti-Peanuts side of the argument, the Peanuts "brand" has been corrupted by TV specials, movies, toys, bumper stickers and other saccharine accessories. Bill Watterson never allowed Calvin and Hobbes to be as fully commercialized. However, I don't think that fact can really be used to criticize the Peanuts comic strips, any more than a mediocre movie version of a great novel can be used to denigrate the novel. I admire Watterson for the purity -- but Peanuts gets the slight nod as greatest comic strip of all time. (#3, from before my time, "Barnaby", by Crockett Johnson, who also wrote the great children's book "Harold and the Purple Crayon", but it ran for only a couple of years. I know Watterson loves "Krazy Kat", but I never really got into that one.)
The mention of Kundera's novels raises a question that the literary status quo (who the site has apparently made the future's judges) may not be able to assess with sufficient objectivity: what exactly comes after post-modernism and will it react strongly against its antecedent? The same obviously pertains to the works of Roberto Bolano, Robert Mitchell, Richard House, and many others. (I mention those three only because they followed Kundera's precedent in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting of placing thematically linked narratives together so that reader becomes involved in the work's judgments). The post-modern literati may appreciate such books and want them to live, but will the next generation of "judges" find them bloated and obscure? Will they cast them into the same vault in which the moderns dumped Sir Walter Scott and the post-moderns chucked Nobel Prize winners like Rudyard Kipling and poor Pearl Buck?
I predict--since that is what the thread seems to be about--that The Unbearable Lightness of Being will survive in any case (Identity I haven't read) because it addresses themes that transcend its literary theory, including the ever popular love and sex, and because it draws on a philosophical conversation with Nietzsche that pre-dates even the moderns and shows no sign of cooling off to date. The novel's setting in 1968 Czechoslovakia will no more impede its relevance to future readers than the Napoleonic era obscures Tolstoy to us.
I am less sure about the other authors I mentioned. I think it will help Kundera that he wrote relatively early in the post-modern era, leaving his books free of some of its excesses. But what happens to a book like The Bone Clocks when today's second graders decide in time that their parents should have lived in the real world a little more and that magic realism insults their collective intelligence? Stranger things have happened in the uncomfortable jostling between generations. P.T. Barnum's personal business dictum is supposed to have been, "Today is not tomorrow." And after all, the show must go on.
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-19-2014 at 04:27 PM.
Parallel Stories (Nádas)
The Melancholy of Resistance (Krasznahorkai)
Primeval and Other Times (Tokarczuk)
Austerlitz (Sebald)
Kafka on the Shore (Murakami)
Last edited by Marcus1; 11-19-2014 at 01:58 PM.
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
Every Day is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel
Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel
The Risk Pool by Richard Russo
Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams (or Stoner--I haven't read it, but you talk about it a lot)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthay
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthay
Child of God by Cormac McCarthay
The Road by Cormac McCarthay
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Quincunx by Charles Palliser
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (for the fantasy fans)
A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks
I have not read Seth's book (although it's on a shelf somewhere) but it was certainly praised a lot by the Scottish writer, social commentator and literary critic, Allan Massie. As I tend to find his judgement on fiction pretty sound then I think that it may well become a classic. Mantel seems not only to be very prolific but also varied and able. A Place of Greater Safety is one of hers that I think could attain classic status. I would agree about CM. He, for me, is one of the most brilliant stylists and also entertains through plot, character and ideas. Tart - maybe. I was not that taken by the first novel, preferred her second and have not read the third. Catton and Clarke - not for me. I find a general flakiness there. No doubt they might get a cult following. Banks and Berry I cannot comment on. Palliser writes well but is it really more than Dickensian pastiche. I await convincing.
35 years takes us back only to 1979 so why not. It's really the reasons for the nomination and the quality of the argument for a book that's really interesting.
I think that A Suitable Boy will have staying power exactly because it is so pre-mod. It's all about earnestness over irony and conventional narrative structure over smoke and mirrors. My guess is that the next generation will rebel against the hipsters and prefer writers more like Seth. A Suitable Boy is massive, of course, so that may limit its popular appeal. Seth keeps saying he's writing a sequel. I'll believe it when I see it. But I predict A Suitable Boy will become a classic.
I like Hilary Mantel's early ghost stories, but I hated the smug tone of A Place of Greater Safety. She wrote it back when she was crazy and saw it rejected. It would never have seen the light of day if her other books hadn't sold later on. I haven't read the Thomas Cromwell books yet. I have a feeling future readers may find her novels a little over-rated.
I love Cormac McCarthy's supernatural characters: the Satanic cowboy in Outer Dark, the Judge in Blood Meridian, the impotent God who appears briefly in The Road--even Chigurh from the otherwise flimsy No Country for Old Men, who appears to be the demon Mammon. And yes, McCarthy is a great stylist. I guess you have to be when your novels are about genocide, necrophilia, and cannibalism. They're not pretty, but they are great stories--already classics and destined to remain such.
Donna Tartt is a sentimental favorite. I read The Secret History when it came out, not long after attending a somewhat similar school. I reread it this year and noticed all the hilarious black comedy I missed when I was a dumb kid and mostly interested in the thriller aspect. The Goldfinch was about a hundred pages longer than it needed to be, but I loved its prose and didn't care. I like Tartt herself, too: the way she ignores the publishing world (and it's marketing machine) for decades at a time, then comes back after everyone's forgotten about her. I appreciate her limits as a writer, though, even if I like the way she bucks post-modern theory. If her books survive at all, it will be because the people love her and not academia.
Eleanor Catton--I agree, a flakey post-mod kid. Her book was okay but it didn't deserve the Booker. Susanna Clarke, as I said, is strictly for the fantasy fans. Russell Banks, an academic realist, was unexpectedly good. Sebastian Barry, a "great writer" was oddly superficial. Barry's work may live, but not on the basis of the book I read.
It's hard for me to know about Palliser. I have a strange bond with his first book that makes it difficult for me to assess objectively. I'll have to write about that in another post, though, since this one is too long already.
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-19-2014 at 06:12 PM.
I'm a staunch believer that William H. Gass is one of the greatest living writers, and a fantastic potential candidate for a future classic status (as misguided as it is to guess). A master of the novel, short story and essay. His essays in particular are up there with some of the finest of the 20th century. His prose is wonderful, vibrant and rich at times, witty and to the point at others. A writer of great humour, pathos and intelligence.
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
I agree with you about Cormac McCarthy. I thought Blood Meridian worked in many different ways presenting us with the Mythic Satanic Judge in a novel set in a little known but real historical setting. But it really worked well.
I'd never heard of scalping bounties, having only associated such things with Indian Tribes because of the kind of Mythic American lone stranger who is tough but essentially good and who you see represented in many Hollywood films. It rely was an excellent read.
The Road I found to be realistically bleak. Would survivors really keep women enslaved for sex and eat their children, in the meantime imprisoning people for cannibalism? Who knows, but he at least broached this.
What didn't work for me in The Road was the Mythic element which seemed much weaker the Blood Meridian.
I think Hilary Mantel has developed as a writer. When she won the Booker the first time I thought I'd give one of her earlier novels a whirl first. Beyond Black was a complete surprise to me. It described a world - commercial spiritualism - which I recognised as pretty accurate with a very weird story about spirits hanging around her new home. I didn't think the novel worked particularly well, though it engagement for its duration.
Wolf Hall is different again. Her narrative approach is very interesting taking you inside the head or Thomas Cromwell and making this maligned historical figure sympathetic. You have to work at it too. The only description comes from Cromwell's thoughts, and you have to orientate yourself in each chapter. It's a great work and could well - in my view- become a classic. I have the next book - Bring Up the Bodies, but I haven't yet read it.
Ecurb - you've convinced me about Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. It's funny, uses the Scottish accent rather well, and says unsayable things about drugs that actually make sense.
J G Ballard's Empire of the Sun
Iain M Bank's The Bridge
William Gibson - Neuromancer - created a whole new genre of science fiction.
Alan Moore - Watchmen
Michael Moorcock - Elric Saga - the pinnacle of the Eternal Champions series, and a move from muscle bound fantasy heroes.
Barry McSweeney - Wolf Tongue - English poetry with a distinctive voice.
Atomised - Michel Houellebeque - a controlled angry book -
Right. I shall suggest one to start with. "Les Bienveillantes" by Jonathan Littell. Shocking subject. Appalling protagonist. Brilliant detail. A massive piece of social realism but employing an underlying series of mythic tropes. About a hundred pages too long. The autoerotic orgy drags the reader into the muck of boredom. However this is a serious book, a tome that educates and uplifts despite the subject being so vile. It explores human nature as well as history and some scenes are vividly intense. Yes. He may write no more but I'd put a ... couple of quid on this being still around in 2114. Doubt if I will be here to claim my winnings from any taker!
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