A reading friend (somehow many of my friends are placed in a kind of activity taxonomy; there are overlaps, like my cycling/punk rock or shooting/opera friends) sent me a link to a list of the “20th Century’s Greatest Hits” by Prof. Larry McCaffrey of SDSU.
They probably sent it because it lists “Pale Fire” as #1, and it may well be my favorite book, and Nabokov my favorite author.
I thought I’d burn some pixels commenting on McCaffrey choices. Start with numbers 1 – 10:
# Pale Fire, Nabokov. A freaking brilliant book. An epic poem wrapped in an academic misinterpretation worth killing for. The madness of analysis. But not the book I’d take as an entree to Nabokov’s coruscated world. I’d suggest three others: Lolita, mentioned below; The Defense, a novel about genius; and Ada, a sprawling book that was my personal introduction to the idea that books could do more than tell stories.
# Ulysses, James Joyce. The only book more owned and less read is ‘Remembrance of Things Past.’
# Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon. Sorry, ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ takes this and launches it to oblivion. ‘Lot 49’ is still one of the best books about Southern California – and what we have done to America. Funny, wild, and you’ll never look at a W.A.S.T.E. basket (or a mailman) the same way again.
# The Public Burning, Coover. Don’t know it, but I’ll go look for it.
# The Sound And The Fury, Faulkner. Sorry, ‘Absalom’ gets my vote as the best Faulkner.
# Trilogy (Molloy 1953 , Malone Dies 1956, The Unnamable 1957), Beckett. Sorry, again, I’ve never appreciated Beckett.
# The Making Of The Americans, Stein. She was never a great writer, but she led a great life, and reported it well.
# Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine 1962, Nova Express 1964, The Ticket that Exploded, 1967), Burroghs. Any one of these is enough; worth the read, but tame today, when we’re on the other side of the psychedelic revolution.
# Lolita, Nabokov. God, what a great book. I reread it last year, and was amazed that I had forgotten how funny and sad and brilliantly written it is. One of the best novels, and certainly one of the best American novels (by an author who first wrote in Russian, then in French!!)
# Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce. Somehow, I like this better than Ulysses; I’ll need to go reread it someday and figure out why.
I’ll get to the other 90 as time and space allow, but go check them out for yourself
Speaking of Faulknewr, Claudia Rossett has a WSJ article subtitled “What Faulkner had to say about the War on Terror.” It’s a good one.
That’s a pretty mixed bag. There appears to be an implicit limitation to English-language lit, but that should be explicit. Faulkner, Joyce, excellent. Pynchon & Coover? Feh & double feh. Where are?: Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds & The Third Policeman), Edward Dahlberg (Because I Was Flesh), W.C. Williams (the Stecher trilogy), Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), John Hawkes (Travesty & Sweet William, Hubert Selby (Last Exit to Brooklyn), Robert Creeley (The Island), Ishmael Reed (Reckless Eyeballing, etc.), James Purdy (oh, whatever), Coleman Dowell (Island People), Gilbert Sorrentino (Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things & Mulligan Stew), the early William Eastlake (the Bowman trilogy), Nicholas Mosely (Accident, Impossible Object, etc.), Douglas Woolf (Wall to Wall).
Not to mention Nathanael West, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, etc.
Now that I’ve looked ove the Top 100 list instead of just the top 10, I see some more of the writers I mentioned. But there is a lot of second-rate stuff in that Top 100. Sorry, but Pynchon, Gass, Coover, DeLillo, Vonnegut, Barthelme, Robbins, LeGuin, simply do not belong on such a list. Delaney is quite questionable, too.
I’ll give it this much. It’s sane enough to omit Bellow, Updike, & Styron. I’m not sure I like seeing Mailer there.
I’ll give it this much. It’s sane enough to omit Bellow, Updike, & Styron. I’m not sure I like seeing Mailer there.
I’ll disagree about Pynchon and Updike; I also agree that it is a 100% American list.
Given that, I’d like to have seen Stone, Stegner, and Harrison on it. I’d consider LeCarre and Greene.
Vollmer certainly doesn’t belong there; the wild enthusiasm for his work has always kind of puzzled me.
A.L.
Updike: “The faucet dripped rusty tears.” His work is filled with sub-sophomoric anthropomorphisms. The moon barking at people & so on. And a lot of cheap saccharinism in glittery disguise.
Pynchon’s prose is usually around newspaper-level. Very hard to be top-flight with such a failing. Dreiser is the only writer who seems to have done so.
Some of the writers mentioned are Irish, not American. Flann O’Brien (aka Myles NaGapoleen aka Brian O’Nolan), Joyce, & Beckett (the “Irish trinity”). The omission of English writers like Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier & Parades’s End) & Wyndham Lewis (The Apes of God, The Revenge for Love, & Self-Condemned) is totally absurd.
Wallace Markfield’s Teitlebaum’s Window, Douglas Woolf’s The Timing Chain, & even LeRoi Jones’ Tales (from the 1960s) are far more deserving of being on that list than many there. Jones = Baraka; I include him though politically I’m on the right. There are plenty of nuts in literature. Jean Genet (adores evil), Ezra Pound (anti-semitic fascist), Paul Goodman (pro-pederasty–if only this brilliant pervert could have kept it from peeking out in his first-rate novels like The Grand Piano), etc.—another disaster for American literature.)
Damn. I must be a philistine. I’ve read maybe 13 or so of the books on the list, liked 9 of them and have issues with 2 of them being picked (Gibson’s Cyberpunk trilogy is all right, but they don’t hold a candle to his and Sterling’s Difference Engine* and The Man in The High Castle is a masterpiece, period – and suggesting that Dick was on any treadmill at any time is practically a killing insult). And I’m an English lit major with a 3,000 book library.
Of course, I’m a scruffy SF reader who thinks that Randall Garrett and John Myers Myers were two of the best unknown authors of their respective generations, so what do I know? 🙂
Moe
*For that matter, Sterling’s a better author than Gibson is – and Tim Powers utterly destroys them both. Not that he would, because I’ve heard that he’s a nice guy and everything.
Sterling’s a more interesting writer than Gibson, and I like his books more than Gibson’s books, but he isn’t a better *writer*. For one thing, almost all of his novels are then-this-happened picaresques, and he couldn’t plot his way out of a tinfoil hat.
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who loved the Crying of Lot 49 but was alienated and irritated by Gravity’s Rainbow. I’m also ashamed to admit that The Sound and The Fury sits in my begun-but-not-finished pile. Absalom, Absalom was a lot of fun, on the other hand. Satoris didn’t put me to sleep, either.
Looks like I’ve read maybe fifteen of the rest of that list. I have to wonder if these one-person top 100 lists aren’t to a certain extent “top 100 books I’ve read”. Surprising number of SF novels from a literary type, though. Sturgeon? Most non-SF fans wouldn’t know Sturgeon from the fish, in my experience.
Personally, my favorite Faulkner is “The Hamlet”, but at least 5 of his belong on the list. I also liked “Light in August”.
It’s a sad commentary that Toni Morrison, William Burroughs, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Henry Miller and Kurt Vonnegut (I could add some more) are even on the list. Most of the books on the list are not as good as Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels [too much self-pity, defeatism, supercilious irony presented as depth, clever writing about nothing of importance].
Good that Bellow and Updike are omitted.
“The Grapes of Wrath” is a good inclusion. It tends to be underrated, probably because it’s written without eloquent pity, and because the Joad family never gives up working to make their lot better.
I don’t know what got into me so that I forgot to include Heller, Morrison, & Salinger on the “simply do not belong” list along with Vonnegut etc. There’s some amazing stuff in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, & Henry Miller was, I think, a true writer, but neither Burroughs nor Miller have written a Top 100 book (20th Century English-language division), I agree. In terms of significance for prose & the novel as a form, we’d probably have to include Burroughs. What went wrong with Burroughs, if you can stand his sheer grossness & “shoving it in the reader’s face,” was, as Irving Rosenthal (in Sheeper) said, not the drugs but his falling into the web of a “spider” friend with the overreliance on the cut-&-paste technique that just works too seldom well.
Mailer coulda been a contenda. I can imagine a universe where he would have made it. His schmaltzy “hard-bitten” paranoia-laced romanticism, his avowed supreme esteem for hipness & glamor, etc., his craving to be “interesting” & popular, his ambition to write novels of “ideas” (the last a difficult but not impossible goal, as Paul Goodman & the British Nicholas Mosley & show) have defeated his talents. And even Algernon Blackwood, who long believed in supernatural & mystical clichés, including some of the very ones satirized by Flaubert, managed to produce many a fine piece of writing, tone poems in prose. Most often Mailer just mails it in, just as Bellow bellows, & Updike anthropomorphizes (& Bugs Bunny he’s not).
Another Irish writer: Ralph Cusack, for Cadenza, funny & occasionally sad, & including a disguised account of Gödel’s insanity. And the Italian immigrant who wrote so beautifully in English, Emanuel Carnevali, if you can get hold of a copy of A Hurried Man. Either of these books is more deserving than many on the list. Then from Britain: Ronald Firbank; Angela Carter particularly for tales collections like The Bloody Chamber from some of which the movie The Company of Wolves was woven together; Douglas Oliver (Scottish), some kind of loony leftist, wrote a remarkable novel The Harmless Building.
Why the Anglocentrism of this “Greatest Novels” list? I’d say much, perhaps most, of the finest writing of the 20th century was done in languages other than English, so restricting things to English-speakers only is bound to boost a lot of dross at the expense of plenty of gems.
How meaningful can it be to talk about 20th century literature without mentioning Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Jorge Louis Borges, and Italo Calvino? Or, in the East Asian context, Yukio Mishima, Yasunori Kawabata, Juniichiro Tanizaki and Natsume Soseki? Pretty much meaningless, I’d say. Most of the creative action in literature in the last 103 years has been in languages other than English.
Wow. That’s nice. You know what I see when I look at that list of books. Right at the top of the page are the following words: “100 English-Language Books of Fiction”.
No offense meant, but I get profoundly annoyed when people bitch about the whole “white males” blah bling blah-Western-canon thing. There’s a reason most of those books in the WESTERN canon were written by white males. Look at a history book or a map. For some reason, I can’t see anyone faulting a list of African literature for being Africa-centric.
I for one wasn’t complaining of the limitation to English-language lit, any more than I would complain about a list of Top 100 Mandarin Chinese novels. I mentioned when I had seen only the Top 10 list, that the limitation wasn’t specified, & I thought it should be explicit. But in fact it was, in the source article. I was just going too fast, in annoyance at the Top 10.
There’s lots of literature to read. Nothing wrong with a list confined to one language. However, for understanding of literature, the novel for instance, it’s another story. The great Russian, French, & Spanish novelists of past centuries are indispensible, & the variety of languages represented in the Western “canon” has increased. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see what’s wrong with lists of novels in a particular language. And English certainly has more than a 100 20th-Century gems. No need to worry about dross there. English itself is a remarkable language for literature. As Sorrentino once said, it’s the language of cats & dogs—& of Christopher Marlowe.
People who think most of the 20th-Century action in literature has been in languages other than English have a non-literary agenda. Chauvinism, or reverse chauvinism.
Oh, ForNow, I wasn’t referring to your post at all, but now that you’ve mentioned it. Did you look at the link? Because it literally says “100 English-Language Books of Fiction”. And AL said: “I thought I’d burn some pixels commenting on McCaffrey choices.” Perhaps the headline should have some sort of “(English language only)” tag added to it, but once you actually look at the information, it’s clear that it’s only English-language books being mentioned and no one has even implied that books from other cultures and in other languages have no worth or only English-language books can rank.
I apologize if I seem somewhat nutty about this, but I loathe how reading has become politicized. It’s one of those things I like to rant about 🙂
Yes, I did look at it right after my first post. I agree with you & all who like to rant against the politicization of reading. In fact now I have an excuse to prolong my own rant.
(Picking up from my previous post:)
And the British Henry Green! Many one-word titles, Living, Loving, Doting, Nothing, Blindness, Caught, Concluding, & the two-word-titled Party Going. Does any single novel of his belong in the Top 100? I don’t know, but he was a fine writer. Now, some of his novels had a lot of casual conversation. Imagine a character saying something, & you know he’s lying, & you don’t know how you know. Then some pages later, the character says something similar, almost the same words a little re-ordered, & this time you know he’s telling the truth, & again you don’t know how you know. And these appearances of lying & truth-telling are borne out later in the novel. I wish I could remember which one it was. It’s a remarkable effect, a mark of a writers’ writer.
Many will always have a special liking for novels in the languages or language in which they are fluent & at home. Some things are hard indeed to translate, particularly the finer precisions & splendors that a work has in the language in which it was wrought. Seldom is there a Baudelaire to translate a Poe into a form considered better than the original. So I don’t hold such a preference against anybody, I share it to some extent myself. Not that I haven’t slid out of my chair laughing at Dostoevski’s comedy, or finished a novel by Svevo & carried the feeling around for days, or been amazed at the perfections of Babel’s prose translated though it be.
“No offense meant, but I get profoundly annoyed when people bitch about the whole “white males” blah bling blah-Western-canon thing. There’s a reason most of those books in the WESTERN canon were written by white males.”
What a profoundly ignorant statement on your part. Since when have Proust, Mann, Musil and Borges ceased to be white WESTERN males? Since when have these authors been excluded from any WESTERN canon? Or do you think that the WEST and the English-speaking worlds are synonymous?
As for your frankly ridiculous statements about it being a list of 100 greatest English novels, well yes, I already knew that, which was precisely why I was complaining; the world of great literature, even great WESTERN literature, does not consist of only English-speakers, and it smacks of parochialism to pretend that it does. You just happened to come along and confirm the very same blinkered worldview that I was speaking out against.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about. I suspect you’ve just been itching to get a predigested rant about “Multiculturalism” and other silly right-wing bugaboos off your chest, and seized on what you (erroneously) imagined to be a good opportunity to do so. Next time, I’d advise exercising some restraint before displaying the depths of your ignorance to the world.
Or do you think that the WEST and the English-speaking worlds are synonymous?
I thought it was clear I’d moved on to a different topic in that post.
the world of great literature, even great WESTERN literature, does not consist of only English-speakers, and it smacks of parochialism to pretend that it does.
Yeah, but no one did. Who are you arguing against? I even stated previously that the topic should probably be amended to indicate this is English-only. If it was a list of the best French lit from the past century, would you also bitch about it not being a World List as well? It’s like faulting an orange for not being an apple. I find it mystifying. Like when movie reviewers fault action or disaster films for having explosions and people running.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about. I suspect you’ve just been itching to get a predigested rant about “Multiculturalism” and other silly right-wing bugaboos off your chest, and seized on what you (erroneously) imagined to be a good opportunity to do so.
That may be so if I was actually right-wing, but I’m a registered Democrat who’s also a hispanic female (though I have been rethinking my allegiance to the Democrats lately since they have no spine and seem completely bereft of any new ideas).
I didn’t even mention “multiculturalism” but now that you’ve brought up the topic, I’ll explain what irritates me so much about the politicization of reading. Books of high quality are what belong in the canon regardless of the sexual orientation, gender, or race of the writer. It’s superficial, cosmetic and meaningless to attempt to rewrite the canon to make it more “representative”. It’s a sad attempt to erase a long history of repression of women and minorities. If we push it under the rug, it’s ok! It’s a whitewash, incredibly condescending and it pisses me off. What matters is that the Canon be open now to works of quality literature and that a reexamination be done to make sure none have been missed due to prejudice. Time and improved access to education will work out the “representativeness” of each culture’s respective Canon. Not allowing this to happen organically brings into question the credibility and quality of the entire Canon.
I had been a careless reader when I wrote my first post, but I remedied that. But somebody here seems determined to go on reading carelessly, & just as determined to psychologically project in issuing the accusation against another poster of a “predigested” rant. Misreads not only the other poster’s words but personality as well, that of a literary aficionado capable of down-to-earth self-deprecation—somebody you can talk to. It’s not even a contest. A dominant non-literary agenda & a persistence in careless reading combine to void irreversibly the value of any judgments about where the action was in 20th-Century literature.
” But somebody here seems determined to go on reading carelessly, & just as determined to psychologically project”
That “somebody” would be YOU, and I would advise you to take your own advice and stop projecting.
I must have hit the spot.
C’mon folks…
A.L.