Companion pieces

[kev67]

What books make good companion pieces?


I thought Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller were companion pieces. Both were about the madness of war.
I heard the author Will Self describe The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K.Chesterton as a companion piece to The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Both are about 19th century Anarchist terrorists, I believe. I have only read The Secret Agent.
Possibly Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a companion piece to 1984 by George Orwell. I dare say they are the two most famous dystopias, but maybe they have been overtaken by books like Fahrenheit 451 and A Handmaid's Tale now. Maybe We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a better companion piece to 1984.
I have not read either, but I wonder if Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy would go together.


So, what else?

[sandy14]

Nice question.

W G Sebald's Austerlitz & Iain Sinclair's Edge of the Orison (or any other of his psychogeography books). Both use the same literary techniques and complement each other in this way.

Game of Thrones and Shakespeare's History plays - just to show you that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Both series are entertaining in their own right, and contain parallels, delicious plot twists and characters enganged in acquiring power.

Irvine Welsh's Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chef's & Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde. Welsh's book contains deliberate nods to Jekyll & Hyde, but both are entertaining reads.

[Lykren]

The Dream of the Red Chamber and The Tale of Genji.

Crime and Punishment and The Good Soldier.

The Great Gatsby and Brideshead Revisited.

The Homecoming and Waiting for Godot.

The End of the Affair and Snow Country.

Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses.

Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy.


For some of these the connection is obvious, for some it's a bit of a stretch.

[Calidore]

Hunchback of Notre Dame / For Whom the Bell Tolls

Jaws / A Farewell to Arms

The Age of Innocence / Lolita

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho / Men Without Women

[mal4mac]

Companion piece: a work (as of literature) that is associated with and complements another

Complements: a thing that contributes extra features to something else in such a way as to improve or emphasize its quality.

Having read Conrad and Chesterton's works I can see what Will Self us getting at - the latter is written just after the former and it "internationalizes" the situation, and highlights the zaniness of the anarchist position. So it's taking Conrad and adding extra features, improving it in some ways. But 1984 and Brave New World present two very different dystopias, I think they stand alone and one is in no way a companion piece to the other.

Note - surely a companion piece has to come after the original work? So Anna K. may be a companion piece to Madame Bovary, but not vice versa.

[ladderandbucket]

Lermentov's A Hero of Our Time and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. Two short books with unusual structures. The protagonists behave very differently but for similar reasons. They are both acting in response to troubling European ideas.

[JBI]

Flowers in a Mirror and Guliver's Travels.

[sandy14]

Companion piece: a work (as of literature) that is associated with and complements another

Note - surely a companion piece has to come after the original work?

To a writer - yes, but readers do not read books in a chronological order. In addition, the connections (or associations) may not necessarily be deliberate. The decision that books complement each other well is as much the opinion of the reader, as it is the writer.

I find that Philip Larkin and Bukowski complement each other well. Thematically they are slightly different, but both use plain language and usually reflect upon their themes with an outsiders point of view. There is a stark bleakness in their poems. I don't think everyone will agree with me (and I'm not saying they are exactly the same), but generationally there is a link between the two poets in the way they use language and how they address their themes. You can see how British poetry differs from American poetry - the British approachis based the observations and the theme develops from that whereas the American is much more personal and used "I" a lot more. (I'm not saying either approach is wrong or better - just different).

[wreade1872]

How about Gulliver of Mars and Princess of Mars. Or Across the Zodiac and Princess of Mars.

Voyage to Cacklogallinia and Gullivers Travels. OR Gullivers Travels and Riallaro the Archipelago of Exiles.

The Time Machine and A Crystal Age.

The Face in the Abyss and Lord of the Rings.

The Yellow Danger and the Insidious Fu Manchu.

Raffles and Arsene Lupine.

The First Men in the Moon and the Earth to the Moon.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordan Pym and The Sphinx of the Ice Fields.

The Beetle and Dracula.

Moby Dick and House of Leaves.

[kev67]

Companion piece: a work (as of literature) that is associated with and complements another

Having read Conrad and Chesterton's works I can see what Will Self us getting at - the latter is written just after the former and it "internationalizes" the situation, and highlights the zaniness of the anarchist position. So it's taking Conrad and adding extra features, improving it in some ways. But 1984 and Brave New World present two very different dystopias, I think they stand alone and one is in no way a companion piece to the other.

Note - surely a companion piece has to come after the original work? So Anna K. may be a companion piece to Madame Bovary, but not vice versa.

True, 1984 and Brave New World are quite different. I considered them as companion pieces because they were the two most famous dystopias that I have known of since my teens. Perhaps We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and 1984 are companion pieces. H.G. Wells wrote a dystopia called The Shape of Things to Come. I have not read it, but perhaps that might be a better companion piece to Brave New World.

I don't think a book has to be written after another to be considered a companion piece, especially if it has been a long time since they were both published.

I am not sure companion pieces even after to agree with each other. They might address the same topic from different angles. For example, Hard Times by Charles Dickens with one of Ayn Rand's books.

I even wondered whether Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe might be considered companion pieces. Both are about young, disaffected men. Both go on giant benders. Both are good with the ladies. Both are set in the 50s, and both very much of their time. Holden Caulfield and Arthur Seaton would have the utmost contempt for each other.

[Paulclem]

The House of the Dead by Doestoyevsky and The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which deal with the prison/ slave labour/ Gulag system first instituted by the Czars and continued and expanded on by the communists. Alternatively you might go for A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn.

Also Tolstoy's War and Peace and Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Both deal with invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler.

[JBI]

Tale of the Heike and Romsnce of the Three Kingdoms.

Currently writing that paper.

[Lykren]

Tale of the Heike and Romsnce of the Three Kingdoms.

Currently writing that paper.

Have you read The Tale of the Heike in the original? I read the translation by Royall Tyler, who also did the Genji I liked so much, but couldn't enjoy it (although I still liked it more than Three Kingdoms). I preferred reading about the little anecdotes which populated both stories, such as the story of the dancer Hotoke in Heike, and the conspiracy of the letter written in blood in Three Kingdoms, as opposed to the monumental military expeditions, which I could neither visualize in a satisfying way, nor relate to personally. What's your take on the Heike Monogatari?

[mortalterror]

I made a post like this a couple of years ago:

Greece, Rome, Italy, England, France, Germany, Russia, Other
Epic
The Odyssey, The Aenead, Jerusalem Delivered, Paradise Lost, The Franciad, ? , ?, The Lusiads
Short story anthologies
Aesops Fables, The Metamorphoses, The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, La Fontane's Fables, Grimm's Fairytales, Anderson's stories
Comic novel
?, Satyricon, Orlando Furioso, Catch-22, Gargantua and Pantagruel, ?, ?, Don Quixote
Comic play
Lysistrata, The Pot of Gold, Love For Three Oranges, The Importance of Being Ernest, Tartuffe, Leonce and Lena, The Inspector General,
Tragic play
Oedipus Rex, Thyestes, ?, Hamlet, Phaedra, Faust, ?, The Doll House, Fuente Ovejuna
Novel
?, ?, The Betrothed, Tom Jones, Madame Bovary, Sorrows of Young Werther, War and Peace, Dream of the Red Chamber, Tale of Genji,

and

Russian XIX, French XIX, English XIX
War and Peace, The Red and the Black, A Tale of Two Cities
Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Scarlet Letter
Crime and Punishment, Les Miserables, Moby Dick
Dead Souls, ? , Huckleberry Finn
The Brothers Karamazov, Chartrehouse of Parma, Middlemarch
Chekhov's short stories, Maupassant's short stories, Poe's Short Stories
Fathers and Sons, Old Goriot, Barchester Towers?

[JBI]

Have you read The Tale of the Heike in the original? I read the translation by Royall Tyler, who also did the Genji I liked so much, but couldn't enjoy it (although I still liked it more than Three Kingdoms). I preferred reading about the little anecdotes which populated both stories, such as the story of the dancer Hotoke in Heike, and the conspiracy of the letter written in blood in Three Kingdoms, as opposed to the monumental military expeditions, which I could neither visualize in a satisfying way, nor relate to personally. What's your take on the Heike Monogatari?

I'm reading it both in Chinese and in English. I'm not done yet, but it is very interesting, especially with all these footnotes that Tyler often misses. Still, the vast majority of people in Japan read it in translation (similar to how modern readers of English literature read Beowulf), so there generally are very few "original" readers. Generally my discussions have been centered on questions of Daoism and the development of military culture, which is all filtered through the problems of sino-Japanese relations (especially since the translator of the book was a well known "traitor", Zhou Zuoren, the brother of the more famous Lu Xun who, who during the war not only embraced the Japanese occupation, but became part of their propaganda ministry, teaching Japanese to the conquered).

As for how I like it, I do not care for novels in general, though it is somewhat interesting. I'll post more as I read more.

[kev67]

Another set of companion pieces perhaps? Moby Dick by Herman Melville and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway. I have not actually read either of them. Both are about a man's struggle with an individual sea creature. Of course there are contrasts: Moby Dick is very long; The Old Man and the Sea is short. Captain Ahab has a ship and crew; the old man is by himself in a boat.

[Lykren]

The Tale of Genji and The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei).

[JBI]

The Tale of Genji and The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei).
Dream of the Red Chamber may be better, since it a personal rather than a collective novel. Still, there is nothing really in Chinese literature that approaches the subtlety and force of expression that Genji provides. There is no real character who is as deep as the Japanese prince, and no world as subjective. It has much to do with the cross between Shinto and Buddhism that dominated the Heian period, where the world of emotions got mixed into the world of spirits. Such a mix created a sort of over-subjectivity of the world which does not exist in Chinese literature, which maintained until the common era this overarching myth of the will of heaven dictating and forming the world. So for instance, Genji can do what we regard as the wrong thing (his time the right thing) and feel bad about it constantly, whereas in Chinese literature, you would not get such a subjective or deep reaction.

Jin Ping Mei is more often than not a sort of literary farce. It is a comedic novel, which means it is very much designed to be shallow in personality.

Then again, I suspect the Japanese conscience expressed in Genji is very rare to find in any piece of literature. He's deeper than any Shakespeare character, and the story is far more subtle. I have seen it compared to Proust, which actually may be an interesting companion.

[Lykren]

Very true, the general attitude of the Jin Ping Mei is vastly different than Genji. Only in the surface of the novels, in which a similar tradition of sexual forwardness is carried out, can the two be compared. But even then, as you say, the evocation of Genji's actions is subtler.

[JBI]

Very true, the general attitude of the Jin Ping Mei is vastly different than Genji. Only in the surface of the novels, in which a similar tradition of sexual forwardness is carried out, can the two be compared. But even then, as you say, the evocation of Genji's actions is subtler.

In a sense, we can compare this in many ways to pre-tang poetry, and especially pre-song poetry in China. The sort of court poetry written by Xie Tiao, Xiao Gang, and later Yu Xin was far more subtle than Li Bai, who flaunts his outward hyperbole. The Chinese tradition as a whole moved in a very different direction than Japan for this very reason - Confucius made a large comeback, and Buddhism moved into the background, whereas in Japan Buddhism was identified less with "foreign" and more with "Chinese" - and what they were emulating was a subjective experience of the world, where subtle feelings and clues make up a world of images and ideas. In that sense, China moved into a more direct philosophical world with the rise of the literati class, and Confucian teachings, whereas Japan remained during the Heian period, a court culture focused on expressiveness and the court and less on cross-border governance.

I'm sure such an argument can be made in terms of economics as well, given that despite the large court presence during the Heian and Kamakura periods, the actual economic and military weight moved outward into the provinces and the hands of warlords. They still would need to pay cultural tribute to the over-classed court, who would create the refinements necessary for ceremony and to be regarded as cultured, but eventually they would move the entire country in their own direction. Heike is very much that story, but even more takes off once the Mongol threat becomes entrenched in the local imagination. The general feeling of personal begins to shift toward national.

As for Genji though, it is clearly the product of a closed court space, the likes of which disappeared from the literary Chinese world by about 800AD.

[Lykren]

Interesting. So you are saying that there is more cultural similarity between pre-Tang Chinese poetry and Heian period works like Genji than between Genji and post-Tang poetry?

When you mentioned in a earlier post that the Chinese worldview was more centered on the will of Heaven being dictated directly from above, that accorded well with what I apprehended while reading Red Chamber. It is perhaps a more plainspoken interpretation of the human experience, whereas Japanese works tend to be less founded on the abstraction of a monolithic, centralized objective reality, meaning that in works such as Genji the relationship between the abstract eternal and the ephemerality of physical existence is more fluid and flexible. Am I understanding correctly?

Incidentally, are there any translation of pre-Tang and pre-Song poetry that you would recommend? I am curious to see the trends you speak of for myself.

[JBI]

Interesting. So you are saying that there is more cultural similarity between pre-Tang Chinese poetry and Heian period works like Genji than between Genji and post-Tang poetry?

When you mentioned in a earlier post that the Chinese worldview was more centered on the will of Heaven being dictated directly from above, that accorded well with what I apprehended while reading Red Chamber. It is perhaps a more plainspoken interpretation of the human experience, whereas Japanese works tend to be less founded on the abstraction of a monolithic, centralized objective reality, meaning that in works such as Genji the relationship between the abstract eternal and the ephemerality of physical existence is more fluid and flexible. Am I understanding correctly?

Incidentally, are there any translation of pre-Tang and pre-Song poetry that you would recommend? I am curious to see the trends you speak of for myself.

It has much to do with Buddhist history. The monasteries in China got beaten significantly in 845, but even before that in the literary sphere they were being blasted. Much of the buddhist culture from the period (that is, superstitious and practiced buddhism) was more or less lost until in 1900 it was unearthed in a mass of cultural documents in Dunhuang. From that perspective, we realize that there was so much more going on than the texts demonstrate. As Japan had a better time preserving texts, we get more out of it.

But even so, the super-structure vision of Chinese thought was rather at a low during the period of disunion (from roughly 200 AD through 700), when Buddhism was really flourishing, as were daoism. The so called Neo-Confucian movement is more of a reactionary revolt against these subjective individualized cultural world. That's generally why all poets tend to sound rather similar after 1200AD, and to conform in thought pattern to the major schools of their time.

This sort of lack of subjectivity took its toll culturally as well.

As for Japan, Shinto is very much a thought pattern of subjectivity of the world (in that the world is considered to be "alive" in a sense foreign to the Western imagination). If you couple that with 7th century buddhism, and its later forms (which subsequently died out in China, but not in Japan), then you get the product that is Genji.

As for what is left from the period, well, there are not many "major" texts of the period of disunion in China that warranted translation as a whole. The premier book is perhaps what is available in Sunflower Splendor under the period (as that is the best collection of translated poems from the Chinese tradition), and as for other specific poets, well, we only have the rhapsodies of the major Wenxuan anthology translated (by Knechtges) and he has not published the poetry section yet (as he has not translated it fully yet). There is a full translation of New Poems from the Jade Terrace available which has much of the poetic representation (of court poetry, though it has a wider range) which is always worth reading. In terms of prose fiction, very little remains.

In that sense it is hard to draw such a line, since the Japanese novel (or monogatari) form developed faster than the Chinese form of personal novel. Genji is a single-author work, with more or less its own version of the world. Chinese early novels are generally creations of many oral traditions (like Heike) which makes them better companions to other works. The first really big individual author novel is the first half of Dream of the Red Chamber, but by then the world is so far removed from the court culture of the 6th century that it is so difficult to find anything that matches Japan.

There are some books on individual poets floating around - my favorite poet being Ruan Ji - as well as Bao Zhao, and a few others that you could look into. Mostly they are the product of graduate theses more than publishing houses, though Ruan Ji should be available as a whole. New Poems from the Jade Terrace is also a great work and one of the major depositories of poetry from the time period.

[Whosis]

Any pieces by the same author are companion pieces :p.

[R.F. Schiller]

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys & Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman & The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The American by Henry James & The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells