Information Please
October 14th, 2006 by tree
The Guardian releases its choices for top British novels.
I am unfamiliar with Penelope Fitzgerald. Recommendations?
I have decided to start going to the library for quick reads since my book group and I have parted reading ways. So last week, I picked up Tom Perrotta’s Joe College, which was fun, not as well-developed as Little Children. I think I’ll slip off next week when no one’s looking and see the big screen version of Little Children. I feel like everything I want to do is rebel. Yet I realize that it’s not really a rebellion for a forty year old woman to sneak off to see a movie in the middle of the day when she should be doing layout. It’s surrepetitious, but not rebellion in any sense.
Now I’m reading Sebastian Junger’s Death in Belmont, which is a recounting of the Boston Strangler. I was telling my 16 about the book and then I said, it’s like that killer in London. She had a blank look on her face. You know, I prodded. The 19th century murderer. And I couldn’t for the life of me recall Jack the Ripper’s nickname. Completely and utterly couldn’t remember. Ugh.
Next up, a Dennis Lehane novel. Never read him before; feel as though it’s time.
Then: Dickens! Woo.
First place
Disgrace (1999)
JM Coetzee
Coetzee became the first writer to win the Booker Prize for a second time with this exploration of post- apartheid South Africa, which centres on Professor David Lurie, in self-imposed exile at his daughter’s remote farm after an ill-advised affair with a student.
Second place
Money (1984)
Martin Amis
Super-charged, anarchic and full of narrative acrobatics, Money burst on to the Eighties literary scene leaving a trail of imitators and devotees in its wake, not least because of its formidable, if frequently repulsive narrator, ad director John Self .
Joint third place
Earthly Powers (1980)
Anthony Burgess
Homosexual writer Keith Toomey is asked to write the memoirs of the late Pope Gregory XVII - a commission that takes him on a whirlwind recap of the major events of the 20th century.
Atonement (2001)
Ian McEwan
Opening in 1935 , Atonement focuses on Briony Tallis , at first as a 13-year-old implicated in the conviction of a family friend for rape and, latterly, an elderly novelist on the brink of losing her memory.
The Blue Flower (1995)
Penelope Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald’s final novel is frequently cited as her masterpiece. It recreates the life of the 18th-century German poet and philosopher Novalis , focusing on his romance with a 12-year-old girl .
The Unconsoled (1995)
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro’s intricate, dream-like fourth novel marked a radical departure from the more conventional narratives of his earlier work, evoking the great European masters of film as much as fiction.
Midnight’s Children (1981)
Salman Rushdie
Rushdie’s second novel not only won the Booker prize but was also awarded the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993. It unites powerful subject matter - the partition of India - with a dazzling, playful style.
Joint eighth place
The Remains of the Day (1989)
Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens , a butler at Darlington Hall, takes a trip to the West Country . His memories - particularly of the late Lord Darlington , revealed as a Nazi sympathiser - throw into sharp relief the novel’s themes of collusion, betrayal and repression.
Amongst Women (1990)
John McGahern
A powerful meditation on 20th-century Irish history, particularly focusing on the Troubles, this novel was a runner-up for the Booker prize of 1990, and a national bestseller, confirming its author’s reputation as Ireland’s leading novelist.
That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001)
John McGahern
A study of a rural community in Ireland, the changing seasons and the gradual creep of modernity. A genre-bending fiction that incorporates memoir, history, folklore and a therapeutic reprise of the author’s own career.
Kazuo Ishiguro, who migrated with his family from Japan to Britain at age 6, has two novels on the list!!! Remains of the Day was his third novel. He wrote that novel determined from the outset to separate himself from anything Japanese. He was tired of being described as a “Japanese writer” … or even an immigrant writer. Since his parents were both professors, he was differnt sort of immigrant.
He’d tell you himself that he is a Brit.
But I have a special love for one of his first two novels, both of which were set in Japan. “Pale View of Hills” is a story told by a Japanese woman who, though living in England in the 1980s, suddenly remembers a brief period of her life as a young wife in Nagasaki in 1950. Although Ishiguro would hate my writing this, it’s a very Japanese story. So much remains unsaid.
The Atomic Bomb is barely mentioned. Equally devastating events in the woman’s life are also left unexplained. That is certainly how this woman would handle her life story if the reader met her over a cup of tea.
I read “Pale View of Hills” the first time while staying in a workers dormitory in Shizuoka, Japan while most of the other workers had returned home for the Golden week holiday. Those were the years when much of the world was enthralled with the Japanese economic miracle. But the surroundings there — the crummy neighborhood, dirty factories, cheap bars and shops had more in common with the bombed-out, rebuilding Japan of 1950 than any “miracle” economy. Because the Japanese economy has since been proven somewhat less than miraculous, it’s evidence that a well-thought out novel is a better source of truth than whatever the latest wave of journalism carries.
I just read Tom Perrotta’s Election, a much more hopeful story than the dreary movie. The students and the teacher proved a bit deeper than the characters of Alexander Payne’s movie. No one was quite as evil, as stupid, as bumbling as the over-stated movie. Rather they were simply human beings being human.
Binx, I also read A Pale View of Hills a number of years back and thought it was brilliant. The Remains of the Day, also. One of my English professors is an Ishiguro expert and has written two books about him, so she was partial to teaching his work. However, when reading “Hills,” I got a bit too caught up in the unreliable narrator analysis and it took some time and a discussion with the aforementioned prof to get me to understand that it was the tragedy of the bomb that caused the disjointedness of the book, not any malice or character flaw on the part of the protagonist.
I agree with Disgrace being in the top 10, as well. I didn’t really enjoy Elizabeth Costello, but after reading some commentary, I can see that it’s a worthy read anyway. Who says it has to be fun? But I was deeply moved by Disgrace and by Waiting for the Barbarians when I read them.
Perrotta is what I consider to be a “light” literary writer, not quite to the level of Michael Chabon or Jonathan Lethem, but he hits just the right note about contemporary life. Joe College’s narrator is my age, and so all the cultural references felt familiar and relatable.
What are you reading lately, Binx?
The Blue Flower is as good a place as any to begin with Penelope Lively. It was rather fascinating; she did a rather interesting job of fictionalizing Novalis’s life. However, I liked Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers more. Burgess does an interesting job recreating the European literary world from between the world on. Oh, and it’s nothing like A Clockwork Orange.
lately?
Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman’s Life - Polly Spence. A wonderful memoir from an unexpected source.
Snow - Orhan Pamuk. (suddenly famous this week)
when i have brain farts and can’t remember things that i know i know, then i know (i know, several too many i knows) it’s time for me to eat something.
Coetzee and McEwan are two of my favorite authors, and Coetzee deserves every accolade he recieves despite his being such a cranky bastard. “Disgrace” is IMHO one of the very best novels of the last 50 years-it has everything-it sucks you in, chews you up and spits you out a more enlightened person then when you started; and McEwan’s “Atonement” is no slouch either, for who cannot have empathy with anyone like the main character who makes the kind of “wrong” decision that affects and haunts her for her entire life. She is never quite able to accept and forgive herself. Reading this book reminded me of when I was a child watching a classic “Twilight Zone” episode which at the end of the show would precede to blow my young little mind.