Nominations for New Classics

[Paulclem]

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.

[NikolaiI]

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?

[Pompey Bum]

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.


Here are some suggestions, none too new since I don't think everyone reads the Booker list as faithfully as you do, and we need books people have read or no one will post on the thread. Please turn all diversity filters off--this is not a comprehensive list:

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'd have something to say about any of those (and many more) but use what you like.

[Ecurb]

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.)

[Pompey Bum]

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.

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.

[Marcus1]

Parallel Stories (Nádas)
The Melancholy of Resistance (Krasznahorkai)
Primeval and Other Times (Tokarczuk)
Austerlitz (Sebald)
Kafka on the Shore (Murakami)

[ennison]

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.

[Paulclem]

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?

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.

[Pompey Bum]

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.

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.

[Pierre Menard]

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.

[Paulclem]

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.

[Paulclem]

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.

[Paulclem]

Ecurb - you've convinced me about Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes.

[sandy14]

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 -

[ennison]

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!

[Pompey Bum]

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!

That was my nominee for the worst book I ever read. :)


The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. About a gay Nazi who drinks his own diarrhea. Very highly regarded in France.

[Calidore]

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.)

Seems like we have similar tastes in comic strips, and for similar reasons. For fellow fans of Peanuts, I can't recommend Patrick McDonnell's Mutts highly enough.

[Lykren]

Good thinking with the comic strips, Ecurb. I think Calvin & Hobbes is a fantastic work of art. However, my sympathies are rather limited when it comes to Peanuts. I don't see much of either pathos or humor in that strip, let alone intriguing art work.

So, beyond Calvin & Hobbes, I haven't read a whole lot of contemporary literature since I give up reading children's/young adult literature about 8 years ago. I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead right now, though, and it is quite fascinating, though sometimes I find it difficult to forgive the narrator's sheer narrow-mindedness as a mere tactic of the author. Although most of his unlikeability is actually a quite interesting sort of vice.

Other than that I don't know that I've even read any contemporary novels that I've enjoyed in the last eight years. I hope I'll remember something soon after I post this.

[Härt Noiz]

So maybe I'll propose something from the Polish contemporaries - the first author that came to my mind and which makes quite a good option here is Dorota Masłowska, and particularly her book "Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną" (translated as "White and Red" in UK and "Snow White and Russian Red" in US). This is a brilliant, a little sarcastic and grotesque image of a group which in Poland is know as 'dresy' or 'dresiarze' - unemployed, aggressive and anti-social youth of a working class background ('dres' is a Polish word for track-suit).
I personally love stories related to some kind of a social analyzing. The author is currently quite popular in Poland mostly because she recently released an album with experimental music, also dedicated to the criticism of Polish society. I'd also recommend to check it out.

[TheFifthElement]

Modern classics: I'd go with:
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
- All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
- H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
- How to be Both by Ali Smith
- Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa
- the Neopolitan series by Elena Ferrante (nominated on strong recommendation of a trusted source, though I have read Ferrante's Days of Abandonment which was powerful and disturbing).
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

Actually it strikes me that Antipodean women are producing some amazing literature: Eleanor Catton, Hannah Kent and Evie Wyld have all been standout reads for me over the past year or so.

Overlooked classics: EVERYTHING by Tove Jansson. She wrote for adults and children, fiction and non-fiction. She is clever, profound and funny and not read nearly widely enough.
Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset - though it won her the Nobel, it's still not widely known.
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer.

There will be others, I'm sure.

Murakami is overrated. His work is patchy, and 1Q84 is baggy, cartoonish and poorly executed. The female characters and 'sex' scenes are truly cringe-worthy. His early works showed real promise, but lately he's been well off the boil. For Japanese writers, Yoko Ogawa is vastly superior.

[Pompey Bum]

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.

The only problem I had with Beyond Black was that it didn't have much of a plot, at least not in a conventional sense. Actually there was a plot--it involved facing memories of things too awful to remember--but a lot of the book was peripheral to that. What I liked about the novel was its rollicking black humor and vision of an afterlife no better than the life you've got--in fact, probably a little worse. In Beyond Black, being dead is like finding yourself in the wrong part of town and unable to get a cab. Some of the dead are dangerous, some vain or stupid, but most just confused. I remember a particularly hilarious scene in which the none-too-swift shade of Princess Diana materializes briefly and proves unable to remember the names of her own sons. "Kingy and Thingy" is the best she can manage. (I still call them that).

I thought Beyond Black worked best as a road story. The over long satire (in the second part of the book) of life in the English Home Counties, though scathing, wasn't necessary to the plot and slowed the book down a bit. I guess it was a little uneven in that respect. Beyond Black wasn't a suspense novel, either. Obviously it was never intended to be, but I have occasionally heard misdirected Stephen King fans complain that Beyond Black "wasn't scary at all."

The other two Mantel books I mentioned are also black-humored ghost stories. Every Day is Mother's Day is the better novel of the two. Like Beyond Black, it is a satire of middle class English life. Mantel's characterization is deft and disturbing. There's a gloomy tone to the novel that works well for a ghost story but won't necessarily lift your mood (as Beyond Black did for me). My only problem with the book was the plot was largely driven by the implications of an adulterous affair that happens early on. While I am personally a proponent of fidelity, it rang a little false for me that people today wouldn't be able to shrug off an extra-marital affair more easily than these characters did--especially someone as shallow the male character.

Vacant Possession is the sequel to Every Day is Mother's Day. I don't really see that it needed be written. I imagine a publisher was trying to cash in on the success of the previous novel. Early attempts to actually make the story chilling aren't very effective or believable. But the comedy is ratcheted up in this one and the book does have its moments. If you liked Every Day is Mother's Day, it's worth a read. If not, don't bother. But don't read it as a stand alone.

Speaking of ghost stories, has anyone read (and could anyone recommend) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters? I read a positive review of it by Hilary Mantel, but she focused mainly on Waters' Socialism and the books context in British social history. It's not that politics isn't an important topic to me, but I'm not British, and I fear that a book with a British Socialist agenda might not have much meaning for me--as Mantel's satire of the Home Counties in Beyond Black left me a little cold.

I suppose that raises a question about whether an emphasis on politics lends itself to a book's longevityor not. Not only do political fashions come and go, but whole historical landscapes can and will give way eventually. (Does anyone care about "Socialism in one country" anymore?) Writers in particular are notorious for attaching themselves to political movements--Communist, Fascist, etc.--that later prove quite embarrassing to their reputations. LitNet doesn't do a lot of politics. Maybe there's a good reason for that.

Anyway, should I read The Little Stranger?

[ennison]

I had noticed PB but that didn't deter me. I guess there are folk who don't like Moby Dick. I myself would not take Joyce with me to a desert island but I see his cleverness. I'll fling in some others gradually. I'll try to avoid diahorrea-drinking homosexual Nazis in my next few choices.

[Pompey Bum]

I'll try to avoid diahorrea-drinking homosexual Nazis in my next few choices.

You don't have to. I have nothing against people disagreeing with me. I gave that book a chance. I even read it to the end of its 975 pages. But at some point--I think when the narrator was doing his sister in the guillotine--I just said to myself: This is such trash. I'm glad someone liked it, though. It won a big literary prize in France.

[ennison]

Here's a second candidate. It's by a South American called Llosa. I am not what you would call well read in South American literature but I have dabbled and La Guerra Del Fin Del Mundo impressed me. The scale was big; the canvas wide and it held my interest. It is not that I think a large canvas and a long text with multiple scenes and characters are in themselves enough but when everything seems to fit together, when there is an apocalyptic vision, when there is a writer who is intelligent and interesting then that generally impresses me and I'd say this has all of these.

[Pompey Bum]

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.

You probably know that the Glanton party and its horrors were historical events and that many of the characters in Blood Meridian, including the Judge, were fictional versions of real people. (I think parts of Child of God may have had some basis in fact, too--creepy). A few years ago I was looking at prehistoric cave art among some weird rock formations in west Texas, near the Mexican border, and I remembered a similar setting from a scene in Blood Meridian. Later I checked and sure enough the spot was closely described by McCarthy (who I assume went there while researching the book).

In my view, the mythic quality of the Judge is tied to the perverse creator archon of Sethian gnosticism. (Harold Bloom wrote a well known essay about gnostic thought in Blood Meridian, but I've never read it, so I'm innocent of any plagiarism there). Gnostic themes are also found in The Road, but for some reason McCarthy drew more from the (slightly gentler) ideas of Valentinian gnosticism in that book. It's not that The Road lacks a mythic quality. It's just a rather obscure mythos.

And yes, by the way--I think that's exactly the way people would act if the food ran out.

[bohem]

Would survivors really keep women enslaved for sex and eat their children, in the meantime imprisoning people for cannibalism?


I could, but that just my brain ofcourse, thoughts doesn't work at all.

[Ecurb]

It seems to me that identifying modern "classics" involves (a little bit, at least) a lack of confidence in our own taste. When we admire Joyce, or Tolstoy, or Nabokov, we feel pleased with ourselves, because our taste resembles that of educated readers (and writers) who have preceded us. We wade through "Ulysses", in part at least, to justify our taste and ability as an educated reader.

Awards serve a similar purpose. If we dislike Nobel Laureates, or Booker winners, or National Book Award recipients, we think twice about admitting it, even to ourselves. Our self-images as educated, insightful and sensitive readers are at stake.

The canon does serve other purposes: nobody can read everything and awards and critical acclaim help us decide what to read. In addition, it's more fun to read books that other educated readers have read, so we can have someone to talk to about them. Nonetheless, one of the joys of reading new books is that we can reach our own opinions about them, unfettered by our self-image, or by professional critical judgment.

When we go to an art gallery or minor art show, it's fun to judge the quality of the paintings. We can also do this at famous art museums, where the paintings are (of course) better. But seeing a painting that is surprisingly good at a gallery remains a different kind of joy. I suppose that's what people are attempting in trying to identify "modern classics". Those mentioned here, however, are not sufficiently modern -- they're already well known and critically acclaimed.

[Pompey Bum]

I expressed similar concerns on another thread when Paul suggested this one. They were resolved for me by his suggestion that we would be trying to predict future classics by assessing the aspects of a book that would lend it to survival or oblivion. That sounded like fun--and it has been so far, at least for me. The thread has also turned out to be a good source of recommendations for new book purchases (thanks to Ennison, Hart Noiz, and others for that).

I appreciate your concern about the newness of the books discussed (or the lack of it, rather). The problem--at least the one I mentioned at the start of the thread--is that there may not be much discussion of book that is too new, simply because not many people may have read it yet. That shouldn't discourage people from talking about new books, of course. But again, the idea (at least in theory) is to identify potential longevity, and that can be done for currently recognized books as easily as cutting-edge ones. After all, novels and authors sometimes fall from favor over time. There are also many currently read books which may or may not be well regarded, depending on who you ask. In my view, there is no reason to restrict ourselves.

Added: And in fairness to Paul, I think he's off reading a new-ish and very long book called The Kills right now. It sounded like he wanted to finish that book before starting this thread, but I talked him into doing it, specifically saying that the books didn't necessarily have to be that new. So my bad, but I still think it's a good thread the way it is.

[wordeater]

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Under the Skin - Michel Faber
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

[Paulclem]

I expressed similar concerns on another thread when Paul suggested this one. They were resolved for me by his suggestion that we would be trying to predict future classics by assessing the aspects of a book that would lend it to survival or oblivion. That sounded like fun--and it has been so far, at least for me. The thread had also turned out to be a good source of recommendations for new book purchases (thanks to Ennison, Hart Noiz, and others for that).

I appreciate your concern about the newness of the books discussed (or the lack of it, rather). The problem--at least the one I mentioned at the start of the thread--is that there may not be much discussion of book that is too new, simply because not many people may have read it yet. That shouldn't discourage people from talking about new books, of course. But again, the idea (at least in theory) is to identify potential longevity, and that can be done for currently recognized books as easily as cutting-edge ones. After all, novels and authors sometimes fall from favor over time. There are also many currently read books which may or may not be well regarded, depending on who you ask. In my view, there is no reason to restrict ourselves.

Added: And in fairness to Paul, I think he's off reading a new-ish and very long book called The Kills right now. It sounded like he wanted to finish that book before starting the thread, but I talked him into it, specifically saying that the books didn't necessarily have to be that new. So my bad, but I still think it's a good thread the way it is.

Not bad at all - I was convinced by your argument and the number of posts and discussions which justify the thread.

I have finished The Kills- 1033 pages but well worth it.

Will it be a classic? I doubt it because of its size and some features of the book such as the threads of stories whose endings are at best are implicated. It doesn't finish off, confirm or follow through to a normal denouement.

That's why I think it won't be a classic, but in my opinion it is one of its strengths. House lays out his aim at the end of the book.

The narrator comments about the final heroic fatalism of one of the characters:

"... what she is finding is that there is no single starting point, only multiple threads that seem to bind because of distance but only ever run parallel."

The whole book is a series of parallel stories with well described characters and situations. We find we are dropped into situations where there has been violence, disappearances, murder, or situations where these are developing. We have to repeatedly get to know characters and suddenly leave them. We have implied reasons and speculations about events from multiple perspectives. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is finished. Nothing is satisfactorily explained. This is what I like about it. It is the most realistic thriller with all the uncertainty, obfustication and false trails.

It is also very well written.

[ladderandbucket]

Marilynne Robinson, for me. I don't have the words to say how impressive I find her, but there is a fine article here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/07/marilynne-robinson-lila-great-achievement-contemporary-us-fiction-gilead

If I had to pick a single novel it would be Housekeeping.

[stlukesguild]

Umberto Eco- The Name of the Rose- 1980
John Kennedy Toole- A Confederacy of Dunces- 1980
Mario Vargas Llosa- The War at the End of the World- 1981
James Merrill - The Changing Light at Sandover- 1982
José Saramago- Baltasar and Blimunda- 1982
Raymond Carver- Cathedral- 1983
Norman Mailer- Ancient Evenings- 1983
Milan Kundera- The Unbearable Lightness of Being 1984
John Updike- The Witches of Eastwick- 1984
Gore Vidal- Lincoln- 1984
David Mamet- Glengarry Glen Ross- 1984
John Ashbery- A Wave- 1984
Don DeLillo- White Noise- 1985
Gabriel García Márquez – Love in the Time of Cholera- 1985
Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian- 1985
José Saramago – O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis- 1986
Homero Aridjis- Persephone- tr. 1986
Jaroslav Seifert- The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert- 1986
Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood- 1987
W.S. Merwin- Selected Poems- 1988
Richard Wilbur- New and Collected Poems- 1988
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day- 1989
Gabriel Garcia Marquez- The General in His Labyrinth- 1989
Thomas Pynchon - Vineland- 1990
Mario Vargas Llosa- In Praise of the Stepmother- 1990
Derek Walcott- Omeros- 1990
Anthony Hecht- The Transparent Man- 1990
Cees Nooteboom – The Following Story- 1991
John Ashbery- Flow Chart- 1991
José Saramago- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ- 1991
John Ashbery- Hotel Lautréamont- 1992
Cormac McCarthy- All the Pretty Horses
Anthony Burgess - A Dead Man in Deptford- 1993
W.G. Sebald – The Emigrants- 1993
Geoffrey Hill- New and Collected Poems- 1994
Cormac McCarthy- The Crossing- 1994
Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theater- 1995
José Saramago- Blindness- 1995
Anne Carson- Plainwater- 1995
Yehuda Amichai- Selected Poetry- 1996
Don DeLillo - Underworld- 1997
Thomas Pynchon- Mason & Dixon
Anne Carson- Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse- 1998
Geoffrey Hill- The Triumph of Love- 1998
Anthony Hecht- Flight Among the Tombs- 1998
Cormac McCarthy- Cities of the Plain- 1998
Seamus Heaney- Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996- 1998
Homero Aridjis- Eyes to See Otherwise/Ojos de otro mirar- 1998
Geoffrey Hill- Speech! Speech!- 2000
Richard Wilbur- Mayflies: New Poems and Translations- 2000
Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections- 2001
Anthony Hecht- The Darkness and the Light- 2001
W. G. Sebald – Austerlitz- 2001
Czesław Miłosz- New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001- 2003
Richard Wilbur- Collected Poems- 2004
Homero Aridjis- Solar Poems- 2005
Cormac McCarthy- No Country for Old Men- 2005
John Ashbery- Where Shall I Wander- 2005
Czesław Miłosz- Last Poems- 2006
Yehuda Amichai- Open Closed Open- 2006
W.S. Merwin- The Book of Fables- 2007
W.S. Merwin- The Collected Poems- 2013

[Pompey Bum]

Gore Vidal- Lincoln- 1984


It's good to see Gore Vidal's Lincoln on the list. Vidal became so well known for his more controversial books (not to speak of his catty essays) that his historical novels were a little neglected. What worked for me in Lincoln was the improbable marriage of Vidal's urbane wit (often expressed through the character of William Henry Seward) and Lincoln's own folksy charm. It's remarkable that such a well known story could be made as fresh and even compulsively readable as Vidal managed, but he succeeded with his familiar flair. It's too bad Gore Vidal has gone off to whatever the snarky version of Valhalla may be. I miss him.

In my view Lincoln deserves to be read for generations, but I doubt it will be. Despite its lively tone, there is a certain static quality to the novel. The action mostly involves back room conversations. While engaging to those who enjoy politics, I wonder how appealing a generation that grew up on first person shooter video games will find a novel like Lincoln. It's also a sizable book, which may limit its accessibility to a generation that has been actively encouraged to throw attention span to the wind. But perhaps their children will turn those things around.

Other worthwhile (and somewhat neglected) Gore Vidal historical novels include Julian and Creation. Burr is fun (in fact, wickedly fun), and 1876, its sequel, is okay. I never read Empire so I can't comment on it. I hope future generations read these novels--but will future generations read novels at all?

[Ecurb]

Mark Twain's comment on "classics": "A classic is a something everybody wants to have read, and nobody wants to read."

Speaking of Twain, I recently read "The Good Lord Bird" by James McBride (the 2013 National Book award winner) and it reminded me a little of Huckleberry Finn from a black perspective. It's an historical novel about John Brown.

(I wrote "an historical" instead of "a historical" only because the thread is about "classics".)

[AuntShecky]

I do admire a trio of American novelists with the same first name, Richard: Ford, Powers, and Russo. All three of them have a good strong "voice," and none shrinks from adding a little levity into the mix when appropriate. Contrast them with the critically lionized Ian McEwan and Donna Tartt who aren't exactly a barrel of laughs. Same with C. McCarthy.

There is no American writer who suffered more from depression than Mark Twain; yet you could argue he is our funniest as well as our greatest novelist. Hemingway said of Twain: "All American literature begins with Huckleberry Finn."

If you only show the dark and unrelieved bitter side of life, you are omitting half of what makes us human; indeed, what makes the unbearable aspects slightly less hopeless. A tiny crack in the wall letting in a tiny ray of the light of humor is one of the reasons we consider otherwise nihilistic authors like Samuel Beckett to be great.

[Pompey Bum]

I do admire a trio of American novelists with the same first name, Richard: Ford, Powers, and Russo. All three of them have a good strong "voice," and none shrinks from adding a little levity into the mix when appropriate. Contrast them with the critically lionized Ian McEwan and Donna Tartt who aren't exactly a barrel of laughs. Same with C. McCarthy.

There is no American writer who suffered more from depression than Mark Twain; yet you could argue he is our funniest as well as our greatest novelist. Hemingway said of Twain: "All American literature begins with Huckleberry Finn."

If you only show the dark and unrelieved bitter side of life, you are omitting half of what makes us human; indeed, what makes the unbearable aspects slightly less hopeless. A tiny crack in the wall letting in a tiny ray of the light of humor is one of the reasons we consider otherwise nihilistic authors like Samuel Beckett to be great.

For me, Russo shows more than a little levity. His best work is utterly side splitting without losing any of its power or seriousness. The first lines of the quasi-autobiographical The Risk Pool shows an example of this trick (but there are many more):

My father, unlike so many of the men he served with, knew just what he wanted to do when the war was over. He wanted to drink and whore and play the horses.

Nobody's Fool, just as fine a novel, is even funnier (in fact, it's much funnier), and Straight Man, though not as thematically significant, in nevertheless the funniest of them all--for me, one of the funniest books ever written.

As far as Donna Tartt goes, I reread The Secret History this year (I hadn't read it since it came out) and got all the black comedy I had missed as a kid. The epilogue, which I remember finding long and anticlimactic the first time, was particularly hilarious. There was also a relatively minor character named Judy Poovy--a promiscuous airhead--who I found unnecessary and irritating on the first reading (the type was an all too fresh memory from college at the time). It turns out Judy Poovy is a riot--although strictly as a lampoon. That's why she is always turning up necessarily: she's comic relief. Judy Poovy is now my favorite character from The Secret History. And her section in the epilogue is the funniest part of the book.

But I agree about Cormac McCarthy: he has little in the way of humor. It doesn't really affect his books for me. I just change gears. But in principle the best writers--Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens--do both.

[Pompey Bum]

Mark Twain's comment on "classics": "A classic is a something everybody wants to have read, and nobody wants to read."

Speaking of Twain, I recently read "The Good Lord Bird" by James McBride (the 2013 National Book award winner) and it reminded me a little of Huckleberry Finn from a black perspective. It's an historical novel about John Brown.

(I wrote "an historical" instead of "a historical" only because the thread is about "classics".)

Unfortunately or fortunately, (opinions differ) American writers can't stop themselves from participating in two home-grown literary traditions: the voyage of the damned (after Melville) and the journey of youth (after Twain). Blood Meridian is probably the definitive 20th century version of the voyage of the damned, with Charles Johnson's The Middle Passage laying claim to the "black perspective" (to use your expression). Philipp Meyer recently gave the voyage of the damned another spin with The Son (a book I should have included in my original list). And The Pequod sails on.

Everyone wants a piece of the Twain action, too. But it's striking to me that The Good Lord Bird, like the Melville successors I mentioned, is set in the 19th century. It makes me wonder if a degree of nostalgia has settled on these literary traditions--or if not nostalgia, then at a least safe distancing of the reader from the book's real issues by using a remote setting in time. But neither Moby Dick nor Huckleberry Finn were historical novels as published. Why should their successors be of any less immediate relevance to their readers? Are the voyage of the damned and the journey of youth becoming mere tourist excursions?

All of which reminds me of a strange novel I read recently called Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks (better known for Continental Drift and The Sweet Hereafter). Lost Memory of Skin is a Bildungsroman about a nameless 22-year-old sex offender who, when even younger, was arrested after turning up at the house of an underaged girl who may never have existed. Although the story is sometimes shocking, there is nothing lurid about it. The boy, when we first meet him, is mostly confused about the course his life has taken: neglected to the point of abandonment by his parents; addicted to hardcore internet pornography since childhood; still a virgin. He is living with an ankle bracelet now, trying to survive in a shantytown of other sex offenders located beneath a Florida overpass--one of the only places the conditions of his parole will permit him to live.

As the boy makes the torturous journey of owning his troubled life (befriended by a sociology professor with issues of his own along the way), he disappears for a time into the rivers of the Florida swamps. At some point during that part of the book, I seemed to notice Banks, who claims Twain as his greatest influence, winking at the reader. "Oh my God!," I said to myself when I finally got it. "He's Huckleberry Finn!"

The analogy may be offensive to those who love Twain's book (and in fact, it is not a very comfortable one), but it suggests a more versatile use of the literary tradition than less immediate period pieces, however well framed, are able to provide. After all, Tom and Huck's world was hardly a safe one. Has the journey of youth improved so much over the years? And shouldn't novels tell the truth about it in any case?

Added: It occurred to me after writing this that some of Philipp Meyer's The Son takes place in the 20th and even 21st century. But the part that follows the Melville/McCarthy tradition is set in the 19th. The rest, oddly enough, follows Edna Ferber's Giant.

[Lykren]

Umberto Eco- The Name of the Rose- 1980
John Kennedy Toole- A Confederacy of Dunces- 1980
Mario Vargas Llosa- The War at the End of the World- 1981
James Merrill - The Changing Light at Sandover- 1982
José Saramago- Baltasar and Blimunda- 1982
Raymond Carver- Cathedral- 1983
Norman Mailer- Ancient Evenings- 1983
Milan Kundera- The Unbearable Lightness of Being 1984
John Updike- The Witches of Eastwick- 1984
Gore Vidal- Lincoln- 1984
David Mamet- Glengarry Glen Ross- 1984
John Ashbery- A Wave- 1984
Don DeLillo- White Noise- 1985
Gabriel García Márquez – Love in the Time of Cholera- 1985
Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian- 1985
José Saramago – O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis- 1986
Homero Aridjis- Persephone- tr. 1986
Jaroslav Seifert- The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert- 1986
Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood- 1987
W.S. Merwin- Selected Poems- 1988
Richard Wilbur- New and Collected Poems- 1988
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day- 1989
Gabriel Garcia Marquez- The General in His Labyrinth- 1989
Thomas Pynchon - Vineland- 1990
Mario Vargas Llosa- In Praise of the Stepmother- 1990
Derek Walcott- Omeros- 1990
Anthony Hecht- The Transparent Man- 1990
Cees Nooteboom – The Following Story- 1991
John Ashbery- Flow Chart- 1991
José Saramago- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ- 1991
John Ashbery- Hotel Lautréamont- 1992
Cormac McCarthy- All the Pretty Horses
Anthony Burgess - A Dead Man in Deptford- 1993
W.G. Sebald – The Emigrants- 1993
Geoffrey Hill- New and Collected Poems- 1994
Cormac McCarthy- The Crossing- 1994
Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theater- 1995
José Saramago- Blindness- 1995
Anne Carson- Plainwater- 1995
Yehuda Amichai- Selected Poetry- 1996
Don DeLillo - Underworld- 1997
Thomas Pynchon- Mason & Dixon
Anne Carson- Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse- 1998
Geoffrey Hill- The Triumph of Love- 1998
Anthony Hecht- Flight Among the Tombs- 1998
Cormac McCarthy- Cities of the Plain- 1998
Seamus Heaney- Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996- 1998
Homero Aridjis- Eyes to See Otherwise/Ojos de otro mirar- 1998
Geoffrey Hill- Speech! Speech!- 2000
Richard Wilbur- Mayflies: New Poems and Translations- 2000
Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections- 2001
Anthony Hecht- The Darkness and the Light- 2001
W. G. Sebald – Austerlitz- 2001
Czesław Miłosz- New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001- 2003
Richard Wilbur- Collected Poems- 2004
Homero Aridjis- Solar Poems- 2005
Cormac McCarthy- No Country for Old Men- 2005
John Ashbery- Where Shall I Wander- 2005
Czesław Miłosz- Last Poems- 2006
Yehuda Amichai- Open Closed Open- 2006
W.S. Merwin- The Book of Fables- 2007
W.S. Merwin- The Collected Poems- 2013

1 woman :(

[TheFifthElement]

If you only show the dark and unrelieved bitter side of life, you are omitting half of what makes us human; indeed, what makes the unbearable aspects slightly less hopeless. A tiny crack in the wall letting in a tiny ray of the light of humor is one of the reasons we consider otherwise nihilistic authors like Samuel Beckett to be great.
Aunt Shecky, you must read Helen DeWitt. Either The Last Samurai or Lightning Rods (TLS is my favourite). She is humorous and very clever.

[TheFifthElement]

Marilynne Robinson, for me. I don't have the words to say how impressive I find her, but there is a fine article here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/07/marilynne-robinson-lila-great-achievement-contemporary-us-fiction-gilead

If I had to pick a single novel it would be Housekeeping.

I agree ladderandbucket. Housekeeping is an excellent novel. Am waiting (impatiently) for Lila from my local library.

[stlukesguild]

1 woman :(

I read for pleasure, not out of some misguided sense of duty to rectify socio-economic/racial/gender/nationalistic biases.

[Ecurb]

Unfortunately or fortunately, (opinions differ) American writers can't stop themselves from participating in two home-grown literary traditions: the voyage of the damned (after Melville) and the journey of youth (after Twain)......


Good post, Pompey. "Huckleberry Finn", though, is SOMETHING of a historical novel -- at least, it is not set in what was then the present. It was published in 1884 -- and depicts a time before the Civil War. It is probably set in the era of Clemens' childhood, in the 1840s -- 40 years prior to the novel's publication. "War and Peace: was published only 50 years after the era it depicts.

"The Good Lord Bird" is a historical novel in that it features real-life people: John Brown, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman and others. "Finn" does not.

[Paulclem]

1 woman :(

It was only a few years ago that I realised I mainly read male authors, and when I think about it I mainly listen to male bands. This was a surprise to me, but then in bookshops you often only need to look at the book cover to guess the target audience and the sex of the author - not so much I crime but in general fiction.

My wife and I read different things and I wonder how widespread that is.

[Ecurb]

1 woman :(

I read for pleasure, not out of some misguided sense of duty to rectify socio-economic/racial/gender/nationalistic biases.

Few people think that by reading the proper novels they can "rectify socio-economic/racial/gender/nationalistic biases." How would that work? In addition, most novel-readers "read for pleasure" (unless they are high-school students, reading to pass their English Lit. classes). Nonetheless, it's at least mildly interesting that your list contains works by only one woman. Why do you think that is? Random chance? An artistic taste and sensibility that finds more in common with that of other men than with that of women? Men are simply better novelists, poets, and playwrights than women?

I glanced at the Booker Awards list and the National Book Awards list: both lists have 11 female winners in the past 30 years (I think -- some authors go by initials, and others by ambiguous first names like "Shirley" or "Hillary", and I don't know the gender of all of them). Since 1984, 7 women have been Nobel Laureates in literature (there are fewer than 30 winners, because some years no award is given). So, by comparison, stlukes' list is male dominated. 35% of the winners on these lists are women; 2% on stlukes' list.

p.s. Paulclem gives one possible explanation, which was cross-posted with the above.

[Lykren]

1 woman :(

I read for pleasure, not out of some misguided sense of duty to rectify socio-economic/racial/gender/nationalistic biases.

You spoke too hastily. My comment was not a criticism of perceived gender biases in your list - in fact I believe you chose that list objectively and fairly. I was merely lamenting the fact that it is rather difficult to think of well known and respected modern female authors.

[ennison]

Interesting PB. I think I will now lay my hands on these two books as you have made them sound as if I would enjoy them - Lost Memory of Skin and The Good Lord Bird. On the point about historical fiction. To me that has to be set in an era before the novelist's birth in fact sometime before it as if it is his childhood he can remember those times and will have heard his parents talk. A true historical novel would be of the nature of Scott's Heart of Midlothian or Stevenson's Kidnapped.

[ennison]

A minor point about identifying modern classics. There are novels etc coming out now which may attain the status of genre classics. There seems to be nowadays fairly well-defined genres and some writers write within their chosen genre almost exclusively. I do not mean to suggest there were no genres in say the nineteenth century, only fewer and probably not so many really able writers tending to focus on a particular type of novel as in recent decades.

[Pompey Bum]

Good post, Pompey. "Huckleberry Finn", though, is SOMETHING of a historical novel -- at least, it is not set in what was then the present. It was published in 1884 -- and depicts a time before the Civil War. It is probably set in the era of Clemens' childhood, in the 1840s -- 40 years prior to the novel's publication. "War and Peace: was published only 50 years after the era it depicts.

"The Good Lord Bird" is a historical novel in that it features real-life people: John Brown, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman and others. "Finn" does not.

Okay, fair enough--in a way. I mean, Huckleberry Finn isn't anything like a historical novel, even a highly fictionalized one, because no historical characters or events are depicted (unless one counts antebellum America in a general sense). War and Peace is a historical novel not just because it includes fictionalized versions historical figures like Kutuzov and Napoleon, but because it presents Tolstoy's theory of history and destiny ("Life and Fate" as Vasily Grossman called it in his book), including a broadside assault on Carlisle's "Great Man" theory of history. War and Peace is not just a historical novel, it is a book about how history does and does not work. Distance in time from the upheavals it describes isn't really the point.

But your point about Huckleberry Finn is relevant. Twain sets the novel in the America of his youth. He uses dialect from the time, and of course the humor of children. So maybe there always was an element of nostalgia to the story. But for me, Twain's genius (when he had his good stuff going) was to write in such honest and legitimate human terms that his work transcended its own nostalgia. That's why it has lived, and in my opinion, why we must guard against its Bowdlerization.

I haven't read The Good Lord Bird, by the way, although I have heard great things about it. I didn't mean to imply that it was necessarily nostalgic just because it's a historical novel (I can't imagine getting too nostalgic for John Brown), just that it is striking how often the two great American literary traditions come wrapped in the swaddling clothes of their 19th century births. It's important not to drift into nostalgia and genre (in a bad sense) if the meanings of new works are to remain relevant.

So does The Good Lord Bird work? Is Brown depicted as a freedom fighter, a terrorist, or something in between? In what way did it remind you of Huckleberry Finn? Was it a picaresque novel (I'll forgive a lot for that, but that's just me). Did it strike you as "politically correct"? Do you think it is likely to be read in the future? (Personally I think having a strong political orientation makes a book less likely to last simply because times change so much, but I don't think that's a very common view).

[stlukesguild]

I glanced at the Booker Awards list and the National Book Awards list: both lists have 11 female winners in the past 30 years (I think -- some authors go by initials, and others by ambiguous first names like "Shirley" or "Hillary", and I don't know the gender of all of them). Since 1984, 7 women have been Nobel Laureates in literature (there are fewer than 30 winners, because some years no award is given). So, by comparison, stlukes' list is male dominated. 35% of the winners on these lists are women; 2% on stlukes' list.

I suspect that the choices made behind the scenes of the Booker Awards, The National Book Awards, and certainly the Nobel prize have far more to do with politics whether these be of race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, etc... I read for pleasure. I could probably add Toni Morrison and Wislawa Szymborska... but limited to Modern/Contemporary writers (of the past 30 or so years) I find myself honestly limited in my choices by what I am familiar with and what I think is truly worthy. Undoubtedly my choices are also biased in terms of nationality and linguistics (where I am limited to works available in quality translations into English). But at the same time, I don't buy into the notion that the arts are an Egalitarian endeavor where each nationality, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc... has produced an equal amount of masterful works of art in every known genre.

I actually have far more female writers from earlier periods on my shelves.

[Pompey Bum]

Interesting PB. I think I will now lay my hands on these two books as you have made them sound as if I would enjoy them - Lost Memory of Skin and The Good Lord Bird. On the point about historical fiction. To me that has to be set in an era before the novelist's birth in fact sometime before it as if it is his childhood he can remember those times and will have heard his parents talk. A true historical novel would be of the nature of Scott's Heart of Midlothian or Stevenson's Kidnapped.

Just to clarify, ecurb has read The Good Lord Bird, but not me. I read Lost Memory of Skin and highly recommend it. By the way, I just picked up The War at the End of the World on your recommendation. It looks amazing. Thanks.

[NikolaiI]

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. It's funny, uses the Scottish accent rather well, and says unsayable things about drugs that actually make sense.

Thanks very much for sharing this information! :) I never knew Trainspotting was a novel. It's one of my favorite movies, although I can only watch it in pieces I'll definitely have to read the novel.

Is the book better than the movie?


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.

That makes sense.

"Ender's Game" is one I don't believe I've seen mentioned.

I think James Michener would make the list as well, although he does get a lot of help from his research team.

[Ecurb]

I have just a minute today -- perhaps I'll post more tomorrow. To answer your question, Pompey, John Brown is portrayed as an insane fanatic, and Frederick Douglas is portrayed as a lecherous blowhard (a portrayal McBride probably couldn't get away with if he were white). One of the fun things about the book, though, is that although Brown is insane and a murderer -- in the end his murderous madness is not so different from saintliness, and he is, after all, an honorable man.

To stluke: I'm sure the awards ARE political (I have no idea if feminist political goals have helped women's books win). Nonetheless, whether a book becomes a "classic" is also political. Isn't a thread about what modern books will become "classics" different (at least slightly) than a thread about which books someone personally thinks are the best of the past 30 years? The reality is that Booker and National Book Award winners have a leg up on non-winners in terms of whether they will attain "classic" status -- and Nobel Prizes are awarded by committees that think the author has ALREADY written some "classics".

Perhaps we should define what we mean by "classic", and what qualities a book must have to qualify.

[stlukesguild]

Nonetheless, whether a book becomes a "classic" is also political.

Certainly. A brilliant writer who writes in Hungarian, Korean, Afrikaans, Swahili, Ndebele, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Azeri, Kurdish, etc... is at a major disadvantage. There is far less chance that his or her work will be translated into the languages spoken in the major socio/economic/cultural powers. For a work to be recognized as a "classic" it needs to "travel"... beyond its local confines. One may also have the advantage of having attended the "right" schools, made influential connections, been employed in the right place at the right time. Looking to my own area of expertise, I can immediately recognize that Michelangelo quite likely would not be as central a figure as he is in the visual arts had he not been employed by the Medici in Florence and the Popes in Rome, but rather had worked in a small or medium sized diocese in Hungary or Norway.

Isn't a thread about what modern books will become "classics" different (at least slightly) than a thread about which books someone personally thinks are the best of the past 30 years?

Is it? Perhaps slightly... but only if we recognize that what we "like" is not necessarily the same thing as what is "good" or "great". But the very idea of a "contemporary classic" seems a contradiction in terms to me... and predicting which contemporary works will eventually be recognized as "classics" seems little more than a shot in the dark... a sucker's bet at best.

The reality is that Booker and National Book Award winners have a leg up on non-winners in terms of whether they will attain "classic" status -- and Nobel Prizes are awarded by committees that think the author has ALREADY written some "classics".

But how accurate have these awards been historically? By most standards, the Nobel Prize seems to be the award most honored. The winners of this award from the first 60 years of the 20th century include:

Sully Prudhomme
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen
Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson
Frédéric Mistral
José Echegaray y Eizaguirre
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf
Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam
Romain Rolland
Karl Adolph Gjellerup
Henrik Pontoppidan
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler
Anatole France
Jacinto Benavente
Wladyslw Stanislaw Reymont
Grazia Deledda
Henri Bergson
Erik Axel Karlfeldt
John Goldsworthy
Roger du Gard
Pearl Buck
Frans Eemil Sillanpää
Johann Vilhelm Jensen
Gabriela Mistral
Winston Churchill
Halldór Kiljan Laxness
Bertrand Russell

A good many of these Laureates I have never even heard of... and are probably unknown or forgotten by most others. Now there are a number of Laureates who unquestionably deserved their awards. Among these I would certainly include:

Rudyard Kipling
W.B. Yeats
G.B. Shaw
Thomas Mann
Ivan Bunin
Luigi Pirandello
Eugene O' Niell
Hermann Hesse
Andre Gide
T.S. Eliot
François Mauriac
Ernest Hemingway
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Albert Camus
Boris Pasternak
Salvatore Quasimodo

But even there... who among us can't come up with a list equal or better... or at least certainly better than 2/3rds of the list as it stands:

James Joyce
Marcel Proust
Ranier Maria Rilke
Eugenio Montale
Franz Kafka
Wallace Stevens
Federico Garcia Lorca
Jean Genet
Guillaume Apollinaire
Joseph Conrad
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Virginia Woolf
W.H. Auden
Graham Greene
Leo Tolstoy
Anton Chekhov
Vladimir Nabokov
etc...

I somehow doubt that today's critics are any more discerning as to what will truly stand the test of time and be recognized as a classic.

[JCamilo]

I find funny people are quick to point the "bias" of Stlukes reggarding gender and pointing to the solution using prizes who are even more biased towards the limited world of the limited english literature (or american).

[Paulclem]

I think the attempt to define what qualifies a book as a classic is more difficult to predict than it may have been in the past. Reading 1984 for example, you find a novel which is notable more for the effects of the ideas than the quality of the writing. There are new elements - will there be a film/ box set effect? Will how a novel interfaces with other media have an effect?

[Paulclem]

As for the relevance of the Booker or any literary award - it is merely a filter. The works tend to have a certain literary quality and with the recent inclusion of US authors, it does present a wide range of books from different cultures. Would the recent winner have come to the fore without it?

[JCamilo]

My point is not to you, Paul. You decided for a list and you are not nitpicking someone else list. It is absurd ridiculous to imagine anyone else will be able to bring on a perfect inclusive critery. There is a reason why Bouvard et Pecuchet works even unfinished; it is impossible to include all.

Anyways, the capacity to be translated to other medias is a good factor. That may be relevant for Harry Potter's series, for example. I think for example, Diana Wynne Jones Moving Castle is a superior book, but, despite a good anime, didn't had the same impact. I say, Terry Prachet's Discworld will be "damaged' the same way. In other hand, Trainspotting is a good book, has a good movie with cult following, but as the poster here suggests, the movie and the book are not linked so strongly. Cormac McCarty is already using movies-books relationship to the point it has changed his writing style, The Road for example was made to be movie already.

[Pompey Bum]

Some of the posts above are giving me the oddest feeling of déjà vu.

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?80391-Old-Classics-or-New-Literature

"Modern classics" is an oxymoron. The Booker Prize is useful but corrupt. Literary canons are silly, or useful, or neither (I vote silly). But let's have fun trying to guess things we can't know (as with theology, new marriages, and the color of strangers' underwear). That pretty much sums up the other thread, right?


Cormac McCarty is already using movies-books relationship to the point it has changed his writing style, The Road for example was made to be movie already.

I read a rave review of that movie in Esquire, then nada. I'm not in a position to follow American cinema very closely, but if the thing was even released, I never noticed. I assume it merely tanked. Despite its video game potential ("Shoot down the cannibalistic mobs while putting tiny scraps of food in your supermarket cart!"), modern audiences just don't like to be depressed. Ridley Scott is perennially threatening to make Blood Meridian into a movie. (I guess audiences prefer that sort of thing). No Country for Old Men, of course, was "Oscar's fav" a few years back (but then the Cohen brothers have a lot of pull in Hollywood). I wonder if the guy from Sling Blade is still around. He'd make a great Child of God. :)

[JCamilo]

It is not Deja vu, it is just the Avenger's of Paul's Iron Man.

Anyways, The road is a good book, nothing near the best of McCarty, of course. Also, more typical thrailler like (of course). The movie also. I think the reason of the lack of popularity was timing. Despite that I have sometimes the giggles thinking that the little boy is Jesus Christ, if you analyse you will see it is Walking Dead (a father trying to keep his son alive in a pos-apocalyptic world. The zombies are a detail - in both tv and comics - and in McCarty they are such a detail that they do not appear, but let's suppose they are a local color that the natives do not feel need to mention, like the famous camel in the koran - according to Borges - which was according to Gibbon, both wrong anyways).

No Country was also written with hollywood as a target, I meantioned the road because it is more a "finished package", since No Country still roams in some grey areas that hollywood would not consider typical, but there is no doubt the movie helped him to break out the american label and be a more well-know name outside america, so it will have some height on his chances of prosperity. As Ridley Scott... He probally thinks the Judge is some alien, hence he wants to make it as Prometheus 3.

[Ecurb]

"Modern classics" is an oxymoron. The Booker Prize is useful but corrupt. Literary canons are silly, or useful, or neither (I vote silly). But let's have fun trying to guess things we can't know (as with theology, new marriages, and the color of strangers' underwear). That pretty much sums up the other thread, right?
)

I associate "classics" with Greek and Latin literature -- but making lists and rating things can be fun. In general, though, talking about the lists (What makes a book a "classic"? What qualities in a particular book help it make or miss the list?) is more fun than simply listing books.

I'd forgotten that the early Nobel Literature Prizes have been so controversial to later generations. One reason: our concept of what constitutes "literature" has changed. Bertrand Russell or Henri Bergson would not win Literature Awards today -- and advances in academic fields being cumulative, their books are not as "timeless" as a work of art is. Personally, I think non-fiction literature can have as much literary value as novels -- but perhaps advances in academic fields and our current love of science and modernism makes this an unpopular opinion. Today, "Decline and Fall..." is as likely to be dismissed because of Gibbons' historical errors as it is to be lauded as a seminal literary work.

Joe Simpson, author of the mountaineering "classic" "Touching the Void", recounted a story about literary prizes in his second book. "Touching" was nominated for some major literary award, and his competition included some very famous writers (I forget who right now, and I forget which award it was). Sitting at the gala, he wondered how his book rated -- since he had dropped out of school at age 16 and never written anything before. He won.

[Pompey Bum]

Anyways, The road is a good book, nothing near the best of McCarty, of course. Also, more typical thrailler like (of course).

I have a good opinion of The Road. I think some of the literati who go ape for Blood Meridian were a little hard on it, or at least too jaded. McCarthy stoked that fire a bit himself, though. He is notoriously reclusive and has made himself less than accessible to the Powers That Be over the years. But (a little hilariously) he made a point of "doing Oprah" when The Road came out, to promote his book to be sure, but also to just diss 'em. I kind of like that.


The movie also. I think the reason of the lack of popularity was timing. Despite that I have sometimes the giggles thinking that the little boy is Jesus Christ, if you analyse you will see it is Walking Dead (a father trying to keep his son alive in a pos-apocalyptic world. The zombies are a detail - in both tv and comics - and in McCarty they are such a detail that they do not appear, but let's suppose they are a local color that the natives do not feel need to mention, like the famous camel in the koran - according to Borges - which was according to Gibbon, both wrong anyways).

Spoiler alert: If you don't want to know how The Road ends, skip the next three paragraphs. Skip the paragraph after that if you've never read or seen World War Z, and the one after that if you've never read or seen No Country for Old Men.

I saw the man with the crossbow, who the boy goes off with at the end, as the Christ figure (crossbow, get it? And it's on his back). The boy and his father are just "carrying the fire," which has to do with the Valentinian gnostic concept about redemptive purity. Or you could skip the hocus pocus and just say that they maintain their humanity because they will starve before they join the "zombies." The father fulfills his duty by delivering the boy safely to an area where a community of like-minded people can find him--perhaps.

I would have ended the story differently. The sudden appearance of the Savior figure was too much of a deus ex machina for me (where were the "good guys" all through the rest of the book?) I would have made it more ambiguous. The father would have been teaching his son mushroom lore (or mycology, if that's the word) as they passed through the dark mountains: remember this kind because you can eat it; remember that kind because, if you ever really needed to die, it would do the trick; avoid this kind because it will make you go crazy and see things for a while. But the boy would have a hard time remembering the differences, and eventually his father would tell him to forget it. After his father dies, I would have shown the boy sitting beside his body eating a mushroom (the pistol would be out of bullets, which it is not in the book). Is he eating to live? In other words, left alone in the nightmare world, has he now taken responsibility for his own survival (by choosing the right mushroom this time)? Or with his father gone, has he chosen to die? And was he even capable of choosing the right mushroom? Was it one of the hallucinogenic ones?

At that point, after the boy had sat beside his father's corpse for some time, the man with the crossbow on his back would arrive. Is he what he claims to be? Or is he just a cannibal trying to con the boy out of the pistol, then lead him away be slaughtered and eaten? (That point is actually left slightly ambiguous in the book as it is--and to good effect, in my opinion). Or is the man Jesus, come to take the boy to be with his his father--in other words, is the boy dead, too? All that would be ambiguous in my ending, and made the more so by the potential that the boy's perception might be clouded by hallucinations.

I never saw The Walking Dead, by the way, but it does seem a little similar to The Road in some ways. (I watched World War Z on the back of a plane seat recently and was disappointed that at least one of Brad Pitt's little girls didn't get eaten up--but I guess that's what sequels are for. :) )


No Country was also written with hollywood as a target, I meantioned the road because it is more a "finished package", since No Country still roams in some grey areas that hollywood would not consider typical, but there is no doubt the movie helped him to break out the american label and be a more well-know name outside america, so it will have some height on his chances of prosperity.

I had the very strange experience of finishing No Country for Old Men on an airplane, and then watching the movie on the back of the seat in front of me. Consequently, I have a little trouble sorting them out in my memory. They both (I think) had a Ford Madox Ford-style modernist ending, in which the climax happens "offstage." That was fine in the book (I think), but later I heard a lot of disappointed movie-goers say that they felt like they had missed a step on a staircase. People also complained that there was no reason for the wife to have been killed, too. But personally, I thought that was one of the more powerful moments in the book. The devil goes by karma, not mercy.


As Ridley Scott... He probally thinks the Judge is some alien, hence he wants to make it as Prometheus 3.

Or the Glanton party's helicopter crashes and "the boys" have to fight their way out of Mexico while the UN just shrugs? Or the Judge is a secretly a Roman general who will have his vengeance--in this life or the next? (Actually that does sound a little like the Judge).

[sandy14]

Is the book better than the movie?

As far as I remember, the book and the novel are quite close - the film adaptation is pretty faithful to the book. The book's humour is funnier- and uses the accents of the characters which can be a problem for folk who are not used to its cadence.

Sex Lives of the Master Chefs is worthwhile - his best book for a while.

[NikolaiI]

That's usually what makes for good movies.

Thanks for the recommendation, I will remember it.

[Pompey Bum]

Joe Simpson, author of the mountaineering "classic" "Touching the Void", recounted a story about literary prizes in his second book. "Touching" was nominated for some major literary award, and his competition included some very famous writers (I forget who right now, and I forget which award it was). Sitting at the gala, he wondered how his book rated -- since he had dropped out of school at age 16 and never written anything before. He won.

"Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Bony M!"

[JCamilo]

I have a good opinion of The Road. I think some of the literati who go ape for Blood Meridian were a little hard on it, or at least too jaded. McCarthy stoked that fire a bit himself, though. He is notoriously reclusive and has made himself less than accessible to the Powers That Be over the years. But (a little hilariously) he made a point of "doing Oprah" when The Road came out, to promote his book to be sure, but also to just diss 'em. I kind of like that.

I think the main reason is "selling to hollywood" part. Considering this is a strategy for best-sellers as Dan Brown, etc. he went to a muddy water. Of course, the trade with popular art - which is what they do with movies - is not so unique. Happens a lot. But I guess the ivory tower trembles when this happens.



Spoiler alert: If you don't want to know how The Road ends, skip the next three paragraphs. Skip the paragraph after that if you've never read or seen World War Z, and the one after that if you've never read or seen No Country for Old Men.


I saw the man with the crossbow, who the boy goes off with at the end, as the Christ figure (crossbow, get it? And it's on his back). The boy and his father are just "carrying the fire," which has to do with the Valentinian gnostic concept about redemptive purity. Or you could skip the hocus pocus and just say that they maintain their humanity because they will starve before they join the "zombies." The father fulfills his duty by delivering the boy safely to an area where a community of like-minded people can find him--perhaps.

Well, I think the boy behaves in a way that make me think it, it is like he is leaving Joseph (the mortal father) to christianity, in the end of the book. Anyways, I just chuckle. In the end it is only about a father -son relationship.


I never saw The Walking Dead, by the way, but it does seem a little similar to The Road in some ways. (I watched World War Z on the back of a plane seat recently and was disappointed that at least one of Brad Pitt's little girls didn't get eaten up--but I guess that's what sequels are for. :) )

Like i said, the overall theme , specially in the comics, is the father protecting his son in a apocalyptic world. Most Zombie movies, have the zombies as irrelevant, a meeting by chance no difference from locusts to egyptians. The usual danger is the human, so the Road is pretty much like it. World War Z is more a super-hero movie which villain are hordes of zombies. I cannot even say it is an apocalyptic work, they basically win...




I had the very strange experience of finishing No Country for Old Men on an airplane, and then watching the movie on the back of the seat in front of me. Consequently, I have a little trouble sorting them out in my memory. They both (I think) had a Ford Madox Ford-style modernist ending, in which the climax happens "offstage." That was fine in the book (I think), but later I heard a lot of disappointed movie-goers say that they felt like they had missed a step on a staircase. People also complained that there was no reason for the wife to have been killed, too. But personally, I thought that was one of the more powerful moments in the book. The devil goes by karma, not mercy.

The thing about the movie (good movie) is that the acting and audio-visual aspect steals some of those momments up for meditation that you find in a book. And with this, we would see the entire theme of the movie is how pointless all is. The killer does not play with a coin to scare people, it is a failed prophet, one that is afraid of cassandra and then take the risk for himself. Of course, the movie is inconclusive, of course, average viewers would complain about it.

[JCamilo]

meh (double, mods could delete it?)

[Ecurb]

"Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Bony M!"

I had forgotten that part!

One more (similar) mountaineering "classic" story, since I've attracted a little interest in the subject: many people think "Conquistadors of the Useless" (Les Conquérants de l'inutile) is the best mountaineering autobiography. It was written by Lionel Terray, the greatest of all French climbers. Terray was a professional mountaineering and ski guide in Chamonix, and had dropped out of school at age 11 (or somewhere thereabouts). As a result, many critics thought "Conquistadors" must have been Ghost-Written.

A recent book by David Roberts (True Summit: What really happened on Annapurna) investigates another mountaineering "classic", Maurice Herzog's book "Annapurna", which was the best-selling mountaineering book of all time until "Into Thin Air". Among other interesting discoveries, while rooting around in Terray's family home in Chamonix, Roberts discovered an original manuscript, handwritten in Terray's own scrawl, of "Conquistadors". Hardly a word had been changed for publication.

[Pompey Bum]

I had forgotten that part!

That line had me in stitches, though it must not have been very funny for Simpson at the time. I wonder what it is about the brain that makes it play music for you under extreme physical duress? Ages ago I had an experience, nothing like Simpson's (who was probably starting to die at the time), but bad enough, in a remote-ish part of central Africa, in which I keeled over from heat exhaustion. According to the friend who was with me, my pupils rolled back and I tossed about. All I remember--except for a thrashing sensation--is that my brain played Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA at an obnoxiously high volume the entire time. I think I would have preferred Bony M. :)

Ecurb, I think you're a mountaineer.

[Pompey Bum]

Again, spoiler alerts for The Road, World War Z, and No Country for Old Men.


In the end it is only about a father -son relationship.

I agree. I think that's why this book will live in people's hearts when books like Blood Meridian and Child of God are being kept on life support by academics. Speaking personally, I remember turning over the last page of The Road (books had pages in those days), then driving to a bookstore (which we also had in those days) and buying my dad a copy for Father's Day. True, he later told me that he found it "Really depressing," but we had many good talks about it, too. :)

I heard a rumor--I don't know how true it is--that McCarthy, no spring chicken, was inspired to write The Road after marrying a much younger woman and having a son with her. Feeling fatherly love for the boy, and realizing that he would certainly not be alive for much of his son's life, he had to confront his extremely negative feelings about human nature and the world. What kind of place was he abandoning this child to? And what was his duty before he left?

That is why, according the report, there is a question repeated over and over in the novel--Will the boy be okay? It starts when the son thinks he sees another little boy looking out of a window in one of the ruined towns he and his father pass through; but of course all he is really seeing is his own reflection in the window pane. His concern for this "boy" never leaves him, and the last thing that his father tells him before he dies is that the little boy will be okay--that goodness will find him.


World War Z is more a super-hero movie which villain are hordes of zombies. I cannot even say it is an apocalyptic work, they basically win...

I don't watch many American movies. I have only see them on airplanes for maybe ten years now--and then I usually watch the silliest ones I can find, like World War Z. When I was 18 or 19, though (in the pre-ceramic Neolithic), I used to go "with the guys" to see the old George Romero zombie flicks. Watching World War Z, I was really struck that what had once been a shocking cinema form, intentionally so, to the point of near-obscenity, had become, over the years--processed cheese? That's the best way I can describe it: the zombie movie reduced to family fare--starring the perfect husband, who was once a secret military ops guy (for the UN no less!) and who doesn't mind driving into the city to pick up the kid's prescription (despite the flesh-eating ghouls); with a nice soft focus on the people being ripped apart, and a jerky camera so you don't really see anything anyway. What a difference a generation makes! I did like the zombie who kept chomping his teeth at the end, though. Oddly enough that was a fairly well acted scene. The actor had obviously studied the behavior of mental patients. So like the boy from The Road, we look at the image looking at us, without knowing that it is just us looking at the image. :)


The thing about the movie (good movie) is that the acting and audio-visual aspect steals some of those momments up for meditation that you find in a book. And with this, we would see the entire theme of the movie is how pointless all is. The killer does not play with a coin to scare people, it is a failed prophet, one that is afraid of cassandra and then take the risk for himself. Of course, the movie is inconclusive, of course, average viewers would complain about it.

My take on the scene with the coin was that it had to do with a kind of mindless karmic evil. The devil (here Mammon, from what McCarthy later says) has no real will. He'll kill the clerk or spare him depending on the toss of the coin. By the same token, there's no emotion about killing the wife. He kills her because he promised her husband he would. It reminds me of something I once read by the director of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington. In writing about the many unfulfilled promises made to Jews by various nations and other parties in the long run up to the death camps, he noted that the only one who kept his promises to them was Hitler.

[Ecurb]

I have done some climbing, Pompey, and still occasionally bag a relatively easy peak (Shuksan, this summer. Whitney by the East face last summer). All those nights spent in tents are great for reading. What else is there to do? My ice axe and crampons went to the top of Denali this summer, with one of my son's friends whom I helped turn on to climbing, by the Cassin Ridge. I doubt I'll ever see them again.

Perhaps I'll read "The Road". McCarthy turned me off when I read "Blood Meridian". I recognize his talent, of course, but reading the book was not a pleasant experience I was eager to repeat. I emerged from the book feeling like the kid, beaten and abused.

[Pompey Bum]

I have done some climbing, Pompey, and still occasionally bag a relatively easy peak (Shuksan, this summer. Whitney by the East face last summer). All those nights spent in tents are great for reading. What else is there to do?

Well done. I used to climb the Presidentials (the highest peaks of the White Mountains in New Hampshire), but mostly when I was a teenager or a 20-something. (I was at the summit of Mount Washington on July 4, 1976, which was a good way to spend the Bicentennial). My favorite peak in those days was Mount Lafayette, the second tallest after Washington (so named to honor the Marquis de Lafayette--without whom there would have been no United States--in his lifetime) But I climbed most of them and others besides in those days.

In my mid-thirties, I decided to try to climb Lafayette again. I felt every moment of age that had gone by in the ten years or so since I had last climbed it. I got very near the summit, but turned back at the last minute in a sudden snow storm (it was Columbus Day which is a stupidly late time to try a fall climb on a big mountain like that). Nevertheless I consider it a victory of age: if I had been a teenager, I would have been dumb enough to have kept going. As you know, mountains don't forgive youthful folly--or any other kind.

In my mid-forties, I decided that I wanted one last shot at it (midlife crises are not pretty). This time, I made it to the summit and back, and retired with a single moral burnt into my soul: NEVER AGAIN. :)

I am in my even older now and borderline handicapped (not to mention old and getting fat). I have had to put beautiful mountains in the same emotional drawer I have long kept beautiful women (with the exception of the beautiful Mrs. Bum): been there, done that, not afraid to move on.

Ironically, Lafeyette was also getting old (and fat) when his name was given an honor second only to Washington. He was visiting America at the time, but there was no possibility of getting him anywhere near the White Mountains for the ceremony. Instead he was hoisted up tiny tiny tiny Bunker Hill (near Boston), the highest point he could still ascend. That I will accept as my mountaineering legacy. "Lafeyette, we are here." :)


My ice axe and crampons went to the top of Denali this summer, with one of my son's friends whom I helped turn on to climbing, by the Cassin Ridge. I doubt I'll ever see them again.

Sounds like they are in good hands.


Perhaps I'll read "The Road". McCarthy turned me off when I read "Blood Meridian". I recognize his talent, of course, but reading the book was not a pleasant experience I was eager to repeat. I emerged from the book feeling like the kid, beaten and abused.

I recommend it highly. It is not a cheerful book (far from it), but it has a humanity that some of his other books lack at times.

[Paulclem]

Although I liked The Road - book and film - I felt it inferior to both Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. This is because of what I felt to be an inconsistent ending. I also thought that whilst it challenged common heroic conceptions of what humans would do to survive, this challenge was not such a strong feature as in the other two.

I liked everything about Blood Meridian, but particularly this notion of challenging an accepted stereotype - the essentially good, independent man. The kid could have been this figure, but as the story progresses you realise that he is one of a company of murdering, raping, pillaging child killers. It's grimness is compounded by the factual basis which I found somewhat shocking.

Old Country I found to take this further. We see the psycho - Chigurh - becomes the antithesis of Moss, with an oddly consistent moral philosophy. What he says is what you get. There's no trickery in him. He doesn't kill gratuitously, and sees no problem in carrying out what is right absolutely consistently. This is what makes him a psycho. He cannot waver from his moral standards to a different set - the ones you and me hold.

In this sense he is superior to Moss who, whilst pursuing his aim has a confused morality revealed when he goes back to the shooting. Moss represents the capable independent American outsider. A Vietnam vet who relies on himself but who cannot begin to understand Chigurh moral worldview and represented by Moss being unable to pronounce his name.

Both novels for me challenge accepted views of US icons very successfully.

[JCamilo]

Again, spoiler alerts for The Road, World War Z, and No Country for Old Men.

I agree. I think that's why this book will live in people's hearts when books like Blood Meridian and Child of God are being kept on life support by academics. Speaking personally, I remember turning over the last page of The Road (books had pages in those days), then driving to a bookstore (which we also had in those days) and buying my dad a copy for Father's Day. True, he later told me that he found it "Really depressing," but we had many good talks about it, too. :)

Well, I am never so sure about the motives why a artwork is alive. I like the road, but I think it was the less impressive book of McCarthy I read. This includes even the border triology last book. But this is a thread about immortality, so let's wonder a little. I wonder if all the motives why McCarthy will be remembered are remarkable in The Road, having a theme that provoke empathy or not. In one of triology books, he tells the story of a cowboy who saves a she-wolf. I am not saying the relationship between a man and his pet is the same as a boy and his father, but notice how both are about a mature person traveling to take his "cub" to safety. But see the difference, there is not a road for the wolf and the cowboy. The action is told from such perspective that is more unique also stronger than in the Road. Despite, perhaps, a less complex journey-relationship. I suspect that is where his genius is to be found. This is not saying The Road is bad, not this, more the evidence that McCarthy is good enough for minor works.

As Blood Meridian, let's just say, it must survive because Moby Dick will survive and needs spawns that are not just Benchley's Jaws.



I don't watch many American movies. I have only see them on airplanes for maybe ten years now--and then I usually watch the silliest ones I can find, like World War Z. When I was 18 or 19, though (in the pre-ceramic Neolithic), I used to go "with the guys" to see the old George Romero zombie flicks. Watching World War Z, I was really struck that what had once been a shocking cinema form, intentionally so, to the point of near-obscenity, had become, over the years--processed cheese? That's the best way I can describe it: the zombie movie reduced to family fare--starring the perfect husband, who was once a secret military ops guy (for the UN no less!) and who doesn't mind driving into the city to pick up the kid's prescription (despite the flesh-eating ghouls); with a nice soft focus on the people being ripped apart, and a jerky camera so you don't really see anything anyway. What a difference a generation makes! I did like the zombie who kept chomping his teeth at the end, though. Oddly enough that was a fairly well acted scene. The actor had obviously studied the behavior of mental patients. So like the boy from The Road, we look at the image looking at us, without knowing that it is just us looking at the image. :)

Well, we must be careful to not see much beyond the zombie movies. Sometimes zombies are just zombies in a zombie movie. As the changes, they are more suited for the comedy like Shaun of the Dead or the very interesting Le Revenants (the original, not the american version) tv series. However, zombies there do not eat anyone.




My take on the scene with the coin was that it had to do with a kind of mindless karmic evil. The devil (here Mammon, from what McCarthy later says) has no real will. He'll kill the clerk or spare him depending on the toss of the coin. By the same token, there's no emotion about killing the wife. He kills her because he promised her husband he would. It reminds me of something I once read by the director of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington. In writing about the many unfulfilled promises made to Jews by various nations and other parties in the long run up to the death camps, he noted that the only one who kept his promises to them was Hitler.

Well, true, but let's think of the coin gimmick original user: Batman Two-faces. Two-faces gimmick with the coin is just a symbol of the duality, he is both evil and good. Chiurgh is not. He is just evil and cold. So, what he does? He knows what will happen and he gambles with fate. He is not giving the clerk or the wife the chance to live. He is giving himself the chance to kill or not. It is like he is adding this possibility to avoid to fullfil the prophecy (I will kill - as you said, he has not really a will, he is a killer so he would have no option), so he has some control, he has a dialogue with Fate. Hence why he is so cold - the victims are not relevant to him at all. His attempts to avoid to be caught in a 'system" however fail, does not matter how many coins he tossed, in the end he is a killer that keep killing and the occasional mercy of the coin does not change the scales. Does not matter also, he has no real options, no control and fate will rub on his face: all the time it was matter of a coin being tossed anyways, adding it didn't made any change. Adding to Paul, Moss is also the commun people, the modern people, Chiurgh plays with myth-like forces, which Moss avoid. Moss just accept the outcome without any hope to change it, like Chiurgh in vain tries to pretend to be doing.

[Pompey Bum]

Very interesting. You and Paul certainly have a higher opinion of No Country for Old Men than I do. I thought it was okay, mostly because Chigurh was an interesting character, but beyond that all I really took from it was McCarthy's view--articulated through Bell--that a moral evil, specifically a dehumanizing greed, was about to bring hell to the American Southwest. Okay. I mean drugs are bad. But in the decade or so since the book came out, it seems like drought has been the bigger culprit. The rest (except for the murder of Moss' wife) seemed like one long chase scene to me. The Road, for me, was about staying human in the face of evil. We don't all face Apocalyptic nightmares (or demonic hit men), but we all struggle to hold on to something sacred in ourselves. No Country for Old left me a little indifferent, but The Road moved me--to be honest to tears. But then I am predisposed to relate to its very low anthropology and its stubborn theology. I also love picaresque novels (which in a very weird way The Road is).


As Blood Meridian, let's just say, it must survive because Moby Dick will survive and needs spawns that are not just Benchley's Jaws.

Heh heh. Amen! :)

[JCamilo]

Well, let's put this way, just like The Road may be just about a father-son relationship in a typical pop zombie apocalypse world, No Country maybe just about hell in Southwest in a typical mix of Serial Killer Hannibal Lecter Hollywood style mixed more than often with the Fugitive (with Tommy Lee almost reprising his role) and all the rest is merely a way to count the stars.

As I said, both were written with hollywood in mind and McCarthy shows to flirt with pop american culture in both. How good they are is another matter.

[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.

[entropic island]

I realize you started this conversation hypothetically, but I seriously doubt Dickens will be neglected in the future - the novel is too central to our culture, and Dickens is too central to the novel's development as a form. Few people place A Christmas Carol above Bleak House, and I think the disparity between academia and the general reading public is less clear-cut than you suggest. But I could be way off-base here; the vast majority of my interactions with people is at bookstores or libraries, so I'm definitely not someone with their finger on the cultural pulse.

[Pompey Bum]

Hey EI. Glad you decided to stick around. :) Yes, I was originally speaking hypothetically, and I certainly didn't mean to imply that Dickens had fallen from Esteem academic or literary circles. The future, of course, is a big place, and writers who were once considered indispensable to cultural self-understanding--Scott in Britain, for example, or Longfellow in America--have experienced unexpected falls, if not from Grace, then at least from the cool kids table. I agree, though that Dickens is likely to go that way academic circles, not only (as you point out) because of his role in the novel form, but even his importance to the language itself. But I repeat: in academic or literary circles.


Few people place A Christmas Carol above Bleak House, and I think the disparity between academia and the general reading public is less clear-cut than you suggest. But I could be way off-base here; the vast majority of my interactions with people is at bookstores or libraries, so I'm definitely not someone with their finger on the cultural pulse.

Few of which people place A Christmas Carol over Bleak House for what purpose? At least the common man/woman knows the plot of A Christmas Carol, although many have not actually read it. And of that group (much the majority compared to those with literary educations), how many do you suppose have read or even know the story of Bleak House? I know academia favors Bleak House (so do I, for that matter--as I said, it is a better novel), but that was my original point to Paul (at least I think--I miss you, Paul, come back!) A literary canon (a concept I despise but of which Paul was deeply infatuated) must dance a merry jig, if not a slow, grinding prom dance, between the cultural perspectives of the literati and the populares. Others would surely add the dimensions of culture, gender, and "race," as well. Or to put it in the terms you used, fingers need to be flying between all sorts of pulses--not just those at the bookstore cafe.

[mona amon]

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.

Out here most people will say "A Tale of Two Cities" or "David Copperfield" or "Oliver Twist" if asked to name a novel by Dickens, as these (usually abridged) are sometimes in the school syllabus as non-detailed readers. Unfortunately I do not know any real life people who read Dickens, so I can't form any conclusions about that, but I feel as long as Dickens is read by 'the common reader', it is a Tale of Two Cities that has a better chance of remaining in the canon rather than the Scrooge book (which I haven't yet read :blush:). We have two memorable characters in the Defarges, as great as any Dickens has ever created and who can be compared favourably to the Macbeths, and whatever the book's shortcomings, you really can't beat that sublime speech at the end. For me it was one of those earth shaking literary moments - I was reading along, not impressed, thinking it was not up to Dickens' usual standard, and as I already knew the plot, was waiting in a cynical way for Charles Darnay's supreme sacrifice, and then he starts his speech at the foot of the Guillotine and I was touched beyond belief. I was blown away! Is there any more celebrated passage in the whole of Dickens? Surely this book will be remembered for the sake of this one passage alone.

[mona amon]

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.

Oooh I had no idea Kazuo Ishiguro had written a new one. Will definitely be reading it sometime. And coming back to the topic of the thread, I think, with any luck Remains of the day has a good chance of becoming a classic. Excellent work of art, critically acclaimed, quite popular, made into an acclaimed movie, and so on.

[Pompey Bum]

Out here most people will say "A Tale of Two Cities" or "David Copperfield" or "Oliver Twist" if asked to name a novel by Dickens, as these (usually abridged) are sometimes in the school syllabus as non-detailed readers. Unfortunately I do not know any real life people who read Dickens, so I can't form any conclusions about that, but I feel as long as Dickens is read by 'the common reader', it is a Tale of Two Cities that has a better chance of remaining in the canon rather than the Scrooge book (which I haven't yet read :blush:). We have two memorable characters in the Defarges, as great as any Dickens has ever created and who can be compared favourably to the Macbeths, and whatever the book's shortcomings, you really can't beat that sublime speech at the end. For me it was one of those earth shaking literary moments - I was reading along, not impressed, thinking it was not up to Dickens' usual standard, and as I already knew the plot, was waiting in a cynical way for Charles Darnay's supreme sacrifice, and then he starts his speech at the foot of the Guillotine and I was touched beyond belief. I was blown away! Is there any more celebrated passage in the whole of Dickens? Surely this book will be remembered for the sake of this one passage alone.

A Tale of Two Cities has the distinction of being the first book ever to make me cry. I was a Middle School student, and seated in our school library with other boys when it happened, utterly mortified. mortified. These were less sensitive times and 13 year old boys cried in front of each another at their own risk. As it happened, I escaped their fearful tribunal and took sanctuary in the boys room, where I managed to collect myself unobserved. But the book still has a special place in my heart and in my development as a reader. I wrote about this in another thread:


...the book whose unexpected appearance opened the gates of Troy for the others was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which I blundered upon in a 7th grade school book fair. Professor Challenger's dubious lizards made way soon enough for the unofficial consulting detective himself, followed in due course by the heaving bosoms of Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker. One day I happened to find myself in a tumbril (only dimly aware of what a tumbril actually was) when a little seamstress asked me to hold her hand. As the guillotine loomed up before us, I noticed a small miracle (for a 13-year-old boy) running down my face and silently dropping to the page. That doomed seamstress and I have kept a merry company ever since, but it has always been understood between us that what happens in the tumbril stays in the tumbril.

It's easy to point to A Tale of Two Cities deficiencies, some genuine (what exactly did Sidney Carton do to earn his poor self-and social esteem?--he seems like a good enough guy to me); but some mere fashions. In those days, when some intellectuals chose to look away from Soviet atrocities for the sake of their supposedly egalitarian dream, Dickens' less than enthusiastic view of the French Revolution was seen as historically awkward (after all, as I was taught in my world history class, global revolution was an historical inevitability). And in today's world of secular triumphalism and post-modern cynicism, Carton's sacrifice strikes some as a bit hokey.

Get away from the literary theorists, though, and it's a different revolution. The populus, for which Dickens prided himself on being a vox, has always loved A Tale of Two Cities (and some counter-revolutionary wussies have even cried over the ending). Madame Defarge seems to a enjoy a lasting tenure in the popular imagination. She has done cameos on the Simpsons and other cartoons, and haunts the latest Karen Joy Fowler book as a ventriloquist's dummy (knitting needles and all). Okay, okay, she's iconic, to use that despicable term. And Carton's visionary benediction: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done” is even better known. Popularized by Ronald Colman's cinematic portrayal of Carton, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny have both been known to fall back on it in extremis, and an army of savants who haven't really read the book pretend to understand its context--though usually they get it wrong.

So I am not convinced (as EI seems to be) that a less flawed novel about the French Revolution would render A Tale of Two Cities redundant--at least not to those who love it now. As far as academia's assessment goes, I can't predict the book's future fortunes. But post-modernism is sure in time to go to the same guillotine that it erected for modernism. As to what Robespierre may lie beyond, who can say?

[ajvenigalla]

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.

I read it and loved it. Btw, it won the Pulitzer Prize this year. It deserved the prize

[Pike Bishop]

My Top Ten as-yet-recognized (or recognized enough) Classics:

1. Pattern Recognition--William Gibson
2. Ghostwritten--David Mitchell
3. Anil's Ghost--Micheal Ondaatje
4. My Life as a Fake--Peter Carey
5. Galveston--Nicholas Pizzolato
6. The Diamond Age--Neal Stephenson
7. The Book of Evidence--John Banville
8. Austerlitz--W.G. Sebald
9. The Sea--John Banville
10. The Book of Evidence--John Banville

[kev67]

I might nominate the book I am reading now, Brick Lane by Monica Ali. It is certainly very good so far.

[Goodman Brown]

I have to nominate the book I am currently reading,I just discovered it, Bought it at a thrift store one dollar , the name is ,,The Fisherman,, Russian Author,Dimitry Gregorovitsh, Translated excellently by Dr. Angelo S. Rappoport Written about 1917 excellent reading at only 370 pages ,,, this is a classic , don't know if someone else has mentioned it in this thread, I didn't go through all the pages,,,

[Eiseabhal]

Thank you for that reference above. I've found it available to read on line. I can't say I had ever heard of Gregorovitsh but it seems interesting. Now that the lambing is over I can afford some evenings to myself.

[WICKES]

I would like to put in a plug for Edward st Aubyn's Melrose novels. I have a feeling they will be hailed as satiric classics in decades to come. They are superb and he should have won the Booker at least once.

I also suspect J G Ballard will be more highly thought of than he is today.

...just out of curiosity, how many people believe the Lord of the Rings will one day be considered major literary works? I was reading today that C S Lewis sincerely believed them to be among the greatest works of imaginative fiction written in his lifetime. He thought more highly of Tolkien than he did of Joyce or Woolf. I know they were pals, but he meant it- and Lewis was a man of dazzling learning.

[Pike Bishop]

Lewis may have been a man of dazzling learning, but Tolkien was not better than Joyce or Woolf. Many, many other men and women of dazzling learning will agree with that.

And J.G. Ballard is well thought of now. He's considered one of England's greatest Postmodern novelists..

[mortalterror]

My Top Ten as-yet-recognized (or recognized enough) Classics:

1. Pattern Recognition--William Gibson
2. Ghostwritten--David Mitchell
3. Anil's Ghost--Micheal Ondaatje
4. My Life as a Fake--Peter Carey
5. Galveston--Nicholas Pizzolato
6. The Diamond Age--Neal Stephenson
7. The Book of Evidence--John Banville
8. Austerlitz--W.G. Sebald
9. The Sea--John Banville
10. The Book of Evidence--John Banville

Hmmm. I've read Gibson and Stephenson before, but not those works. Usually, people tend to like Gibson's Neuromancer and Stephenson's Snow Crash. They are already classics of the science fiction genre. David Mitchell is a nice pick. Most people go for his Cloud Atlas though. Also, Austerlitz by Sebald stinks. I had to read it in college with a bunch of much better books.

[WICKES]

Lewis may have been a man of dazzling learning, but Tolkien was not better than Joyce or Woolf. Many, many other men and women of dazzling learning will agree with that.

..

I didn't say he was. I don't know whether C S Lewis really believed he was either. But Lewis did say that we can never know what works will be hailed as classics in centuries to come. He thought it quite possible that the academics of 2300 would consider Tolkien the great literary genius of the 20th century rather than Woolf or Pound or Joyce. I think his exact words were "this century may be known as the century of Tolkien rather than of Joyce and Pound" Is Ulysses better than The Lord of the Rings? I don't know- Bloom doesn't even include it in his canon!

As for Ballard, well, I have heard several critics say he is yet to reach the status he deserves and that he will be remembered as a prophet of things to come when his contemporaries, like Amis and McEwan, are forgotten.

[ajvenigalla]

The novels of Cormac McCarthy

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (which deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize)

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

[Pike Bishop]

I didn't say he was. I don't know whether C S Lewis really believed he was either. But Lewis did say that we can never know what works will be hailed as classics in centuries to come. He thought it quite possible that the academics of 2300 would consider Tolkien the great literary genius of the 20th century rather than Woolf or Pound or Joyce. I think his exact words were "this century may be known as the century of Tolkien rather than of Joyce and Pound" Is Ulysses better than The Lord of the Rings? I don't know- Bloom doesn't even include it in his canon!

As for Ballard, well, I have heard several critics say he is yet to reach the status he deserves and that he will be remembered as a prophet of things to come when his contemporaries, like Amis and McEwan, are forgotten.

I never said you said he was. You did however say: "He thought more highly of Tolkien than he did of Joyce or Woolf...and Lewis was a man of dazzling learning." So, you were clearly implying Lewis' evaluation had legitimacy. As to Ulysses being "better" than Lord of the Rings, I will just say it was more of a linguistic, structural, psychological, and intertextual achievement that has had much greater influence on other great writers than LOTR has. Also, if one can't say Ulysses is better than LOTR, one also can't say LOTR is better than Twilight. Also, this century may be known as the century of Fifty Shades of Grey for all we know, that doesn't mean Twilight or LOTR is as good, or as much of an achievement, as Ulysses...Harold Bloom is hardly the final authority on the matter.

Neither are those J.G. Ballard critics you mention. Many critics, including myself, have included J.G. Ballard in the Postmodern literature canon and have also credited him with greatly influencing cyberpunk literature. So, I don't know what your critics expect more out of academic evaluation of Ballard, but it's certainly not poor right now.


P.s. What do you think about Ulysses and LOTR. How would you compare them and which do you think is the greater literary achievement?

[TheFifthElement]

6. The Diamond Age--Neal Stephenson
Is this a good place to start with Stephenson? I'd like to try him out, but daunted by the general 1000+ page size of Stephenson's work (though this one is shorter, I believe). Also tempted by Reamde and Snow Crash.

[Poetaster]

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks seems set to become a classic.

[Iain Sparrow]

Is this a good place to start with Stephenson? I'd like to try him out, but daunted by the general 1000+ page size of Stephenson's work (though this one is shorter, I believe). Also tempted by Reamde and Snow Crash.

The Diamond Age is perhaps the best Science Fiction novel I've read in the last ten years, definitely in the top five... so yes, it is a wonderful place to begin exploring Stephenson's work. The Diamond Age is strictly speaking SF, with a good dash of Cyberpunk and Steampunk, but it actually reads somewhat like a fantasy. I gave a signed Easton Press (leather bound) edition of The Diamond Age to my youngest niece for a high school graduation present... she loved the book too!