Nominations for New Classics

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by entropic island

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by mal4mac

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by mona amon

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.

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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:

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

...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.

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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?

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Originally Posted by 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.

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

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

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

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,,,

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.

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.

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..

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Originally Posted by 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

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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