Top Ten Books of the 20th Century (Fiction Division)

[walto]

achilles last post (and a couple of Gary's) on the what are you reading thread made me start wondering just how many best novels of the century there can possibly be. I'm not ready with my list yet myself (and may never be), but maybe those with all that "one of the very very best" talk will be willing to put up more quickly than moi. Here's hoping: I'd love to see their lists!

[Joe Milazzo]

Not "best", but some of my favorites and some American literary works I do consider to be very, very important:

| Nathanael West, MISS LONELYHEARTS
| Ralph Ellison, INVISIBLE MAN
| Saul Bellow, HENDERSON THE RAIN KING
| Joseph McElroy, LOOKOUT CARTRIDGE


And more when I can think of them.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

one per author, plays allowed:


Joyce -- Ulysses

Shaw -- Pygmalion

Proust -- In Search of Lost Time

Kafka -- Short Stories

Beckett -- Trilogy

Sartre -- No Exit

Borges -- Ficciones

Hemingway -- Short Stories

Nabokov -- Pale Fire

and a three-way (cop-out) tie between Bellow's Herzog, Gaddis's JR and Anderson's Winesburg Ohio

[Salvador Dali Lama]

See, my biggest problem is some of my favorite fiction is 19th century.

But I'd definately put Siddhartha by Herman Hesse up there. And LOTR without question.

[al j]

nice idea, looking forward to some lists. Not a best of, but some books that had great impact on my thinking, and some that were just a great read, including some poetry and non-fictition.


Don DeLillo - LIBRA
Richard Wright - NATIVE SON
William Faulkner - ABSALOM, ABSALOM
Fyodor Dostoevsky - THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
Albert Camus - RESISTANCE, REBELLION & DEATH
Cormac McCarthy - SUTTREE
Franz Kafka - THE COMPLETE STORIES
Ayn Rand - THE FOUNTAINHEAD
Joseph Conrad - VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY
Zukav - THE DANCING WU LI MASTERS
George Orwell - INSIDE THE WHALE AND OTHER ESSAYS
TS Eliot - SELECTED POEMS
HL Mencken - THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
Ambrose Bierce - THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES
Hermann Hesse - SIDDHARTHA
William Manchester - THE LAST LION, Vols. I & II
John Keegan - THE FACE OF BATTLE
Nabokov - PALE FIRE

i'm going to post a few that *might* be a bit more obscure:

Michel Tournier The Ogre
Hermann Broch The Death of Virgil
George Konrad The Loser
Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities


and Al, your list is amazing! Ayn Rand, perhaps the worst (famous) novelist in history in the same company as perhaps the two greatest, Conrad and Faulkner.

[walto]

Gotta love my buddy SqD. First he says "One per author" then he puts down Beckett's Trilogy.

Beep.


Here's a couple of my faves that won't make anybody else's lists (probably for good reason):

Moore, "Heloise and Abelard"
Huxley, "Eyeless in Gaza"

I'm also a big fan of Butler's "Way of All Flesh" but, in spite of its publication date, it probably shouldn't count as 20th Century.

I also love Kafka's "Trial" and "Castle," Dostoevski's "Brother's K," Conrad's "Youth and Other Stories," the Beckett novels, and "As I Lay Dying"--but who doesn't? More later.

[Captain Hate]

Any of youse guys like the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell?
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Possession by A. S. Byatt

achilles, I keep trying to get the jackasses in my book group to read The Man Without Qualities (the 2 volume set that came out a while back and I scarfed up from Dedaelus books).

[al j]

Adam, I likes what I likes. I haven't read the Rand book since I was 19 or so, when it completely floored me. Wait a minute there, are you trying to say she's dated?

Al,
I'm gonna take a wild stab and guess you wouldn't like the
book as much today as you did when you're 19. Unless you're only 20

Heck,
there's a good thread: Books we loved when we were very young but now realize are crap.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Now Walt, the three novels of the Trilogy ARE an integrated work, clearly the same central character, and all together the three novellas total just over 400 hundred pages, well within the length limits of a single novel: so call back your 'beep!'


After all the dumping on Hesse, I'm pleasantly surprised to see Siddhartha on two lists. I think The Glass Bead Game is a better book, and the Siddartha theme is handled more deftly in the final Incarnation of the GBG.

[Dr Dave]

Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon

J.R. -- William Gaddis

The Deptford Trilogy -- Robertson Davies

Money, A Suicide Note -- Martin Amis

Snow White -- Donald Barthelme

Infinite Jest -- David Foster Wallace

[al j]

Maybe I'll look into that. I read ANTHEM about 6 years later - long after I was smitten by McCarthy, Conrad and Dosty - and loved that too.

Relatedly, I used to think Mrs. Kotter was friggin HOT. Still do.

No books we love when we were young should ever be called crap. I defy any man here to bash WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS.

Steve, big fan of BENEATH THE WHEEL. Ever read Hesse's war shorts?

[walto]

SqD, next you'll be saying "Harry Potter" or "Lord of the Rings" is one book! They center on the same characters too.

Interesting to see "Pale Fire" on a couple lists. I admit it's fun (and a dazzling display of virtuosity), but I'll take "Lolita" any day. Seems so much more heartfelt.

I forgot to mention "To the Lighthouse." LOOOOOVE that book. Also "Farewell to Arms" and "Great Gatsby".

Hesse's made a couple lists so far and Pynchon and Barthelme, one, but 20 years ago, I wager you'd have seen not only more of them, but also more Barth, Updike, Roth, Mailer, Kesey, Vonnegut, Heller, Mann, Lem, and Brautigan. But while Kafka seems to me as modern today as ever, some of these other guys seems dated now. BWTHDIK?

BTW, No Wyndham Lewis fans?--not that I am myself

Oh, and many of the books I used to love but don't like so much anymore are Sci-Fi. Also, "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" and "The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs."

[Salvador Dali Lama]

where the red fern grows is garbage man!!! what was the point other than to make the reader feel bad? It wasnt even that well written. I always hated that book.

LOTR WAS one book. It was written that way, the publisher chopped it into three.

[walto]

Publishers get to do that. Once they do, you got three books.

I mean, what if the whole thing had originally been one sentence?

[Salvador Dali Lama]

You mean like the Torah?

I guess the publishers "fixed" that one too.

You can still get a hold of LOTR as one book though.

No books we love when we were young should ever be called crap.


Point well taken, Al. I will always love Old Yeller despite its easy sentimentalism and lack of character development (besides the dog, that is)

and Lolita is THE novel of the 20th century. It's perfect, it's perfect, it's fucking perfect. End of all discussion.

[al j]

add 2, thanks to Uncle Waltie:

Farewell to Arms
Cat's Cradle


Pale Fire took me a few tries. Then, Bam! That was the effect or thereabouts. I never finished Lolita, don't know why.

Sal D. Lama - you have been marked. How dare you. I must now send my 'coon hounds after you. And so it goes.

[bluenoter]

A couple of nominations for the list:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

E. M. Forster, Howards End

[Salvador Dali Lama]

Hey, bring the coon hounds on. I'll just pack a mountain lion and it will be over real quick, just like in the book

did I mention that Lolita was perfect?

It's one of those books that people often read once, and don't feel wild about. Then they read it again, and suddenly, you
wish it wouldn't end.

The Ogre, the first book I mentioned is also damn close to perfect and should be read by every person with eyes in their head.

[al j]

In your honor, I'll get back to Lolita and put The Ogre on deck. What's the premise of the latter?


Lama, S. Dali- shame on you. Shame.

[Monte Smith]

No absolute claims, no attempt at absolute claims, but here are the first ten I come up with glancing over the shelves of the home office.

1984, George Orwell
THE CASTLE, Franz Kafka
GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK, Josef Hasek
OUR MAN IN HAVANA, Graham Greene
THE FALL, Albert Camus
THE MALTESE FALCON, Dashiell Hammett
MOSCOW SAGA TRILOGY, Vassily Aksyonov
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, Phillip Roth
MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY, Roberto Callasso
MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE, Gregor von Rezzori

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

>>Steve, big fan of BENEATH THE WHEEL. Ever read Hesse's war shorts?<<

Al/Joe -- I have read this, yes, but it's been a long time and I no longer have a clear recollection of it.
Do you know Miguel Serrano's "Jung and Hesse, a record of two friendships," a fascinating book about Hesse's late period? Hesse's "Piktor's Metamorphoses" came from this period, when the author was living like Elder Brother from GBG. At one point he apologies to Serrano for ignoring him and his explanation is along the lines of "At my age a man should be allowed to contemplate his own death without distractions."


>>I mean, what if the whole thing had originally been one sentence?<<

That posthumous Gaddis novel I'm looking forward to reading next IS all one sentence!

But Walt, you missed your best shot -- the Proust! Even I couldn't defend the claim that In Search of Time Past is a single novel.

You're dead wrong about the Beckett, though. The publishers don't get to say what constitutes a single novel. They're only in it for the money. We the readers who know the books get to say. And although each book of the Trilogy CAN stand alone, the power of the three together -- the cumulative descent into solipsism -- is what elevates the Trilogy to the level of a classic. If you deny me the Trilogy, I'd substitute Godot or Endgame, rather than any of the novellas which constitue the Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies or The Unnamable.

[Nate Dorward]

Originally posted by walto
BTW, No Wyndham Lewis fans?--not that I am myself

I'd have thought that Lewis fans were rare specimens nowadays. Been a while since I read Lewis--I remember being quite impressed by his work at one point (read Tarr, The Revenge for Love, Snooty Baronet), but last year I picked up Self-Condemned & couldn't make it past the first 50 pages, given the truly vehement egotism & misogyny on display. I haven't read The Childermass, which is the one that Alan Halsey tells me is the one to try.

One novelist worth mentioning here is Henry Green, whose Loving, Living & Party-Going are some of the finest English novels of the midcentury. Not sure which I'd single out among the three--perhaps Loving.

Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita should also get a mention, as should Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End. Jean Rhys. Perec's Life: A User's Manual.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

>>Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita should also get a mention<<

Yes it should.

And so should the criminally underrated Richard Yates, for Revolutionary Road and for The Easter Parade.

[Douglas]

This is too difficult. A few quick mentions of scattered books I have enjoyed. Trying to avoid repetition with the exception of Ulysses

Ulysses - Joyce (actually the only one I like, though I have yet to finish Finnegan's Wake)
The Return - Platonov (in this collection the Epifan locks is one of the most brutal short stories)
Doctor Faustus - Mann
V - Pynchon
The Counterfeiters/the Immoralist - Gide
The Chancer/How late it was, how late - Kelmann
Pereira Declares/the Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro - Tabucchi
History of the Seige of Lisbon - Saramago
Labyrinths - Borges
Earthly Powers - Burgess (before lionising Burgess too much, Adair's A Closed Book is an antidote)

More time, different list.

[Gary Sisco]

Well, I'm not even going to attempt a top ten of an entire century. Are we counting all languages? We'd be trying to make a list forever... But all of these novels have been very important to me and have been read and reread through the years, with no diminishing returns:

Thomas Pynchon -- V.
Thomas Pynchon -- Gravity's Rainbow
Carlos Fuentes -- The Death Of Artemio Cruz
Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Cormac McCarthy -- Suttree (I love them all but if I have to choose one ...)
Ralph Ellison -- Invisible Man
Malcom Lowry -- Under The Volcano
Gunter Grass -- The Tin Drum (if I had to choose one ...)
Heinrich Boll -- Group Portrait With Lady (ditto)
J.M. Coetzee -- Waiting For The Barbarians (ditto)
James Joyce -- Ulysses (or A Portrait Of The Artist ... hard to pick)
Ken Kesey -- Sometimes A Great Notion
Jean-Paul Sartre -- Nausea
Albert Camus -- The Plague (or The Stranger, hard to pick)
Nadine Gordimer -- My Son's Story (or The Late Bourgeois World, or July's People, hard to pick)
James Baldwin -- Another Country
Graham Greene -- The Comedians (or The Quiet American or ... really hard to choose, here, as I hugely admire Greene)
Don DeLillo -- Underworld
Tim O'Brien -- Going After Cacciato
William Faulkner -- As I Lay Dying

[Tanager]

A few that I, for lack of a more all-encompassing term, loved:

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Larry Brown, Joe
Bertolt Brecht, Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis

I agree with Gary - choosing a top ten of the century in English, let alone for all languages, is simply an impossible task for anyone to do it with any credibility.