I love Dubliners, it's one of my favorite books. Fortunately it wasn't ruined for me by reading it in my high school English class. Class discussion consisted of a series of painful silences following questions by the teacher. Joyce isn't necessarily the best author for a group of 17-year-olds to read.
You know, I've never read that story, but reading the final paragraph, I'm not sure why you pick it as an example of the breadth of effective styles, because it delivers its prosy pleasures in so straightforward and classical (probably the wrong word for fiction, sorry) a manner.
Also I'm not happy with the parallelism of the two clauses that begin with "and."
That whole story is devastating. This is my favorite paragraph, which just comes crashing down by the end:
He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl's bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognize from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.
Was the girl in the pantry also of a "grade of culture" which "differed from his own"?
Here is a link the the story in full.
The link in the post isn't good enough for you, JO?
Also available at the link in the post.
SPOILER
There's a dead guy referenced in the story.
That story is amazing. Filmed surprisingly well too.
I was meaning to ask, and it's vaguely on topic: Can someone recommend me something to read? I've been wandering into bookstores, picking things up vaguely, and putting them back down. Constraints: I really, really like plots. I just read White Teeth (I was in a bookstore doing the picking things up vaguely thing, and recalled it as having been recommended as wonderful) and, you know, Smith's very good. Characterization, humor, insight into society... but the whole drive of the last half of the book is going toward "What's going to happen at the meeting where they unveil the genetically engineered mouse? Is Millat going to kill someone? What are Josh's group going to do?" and then she blows it off. I'm not saying it's incompetence -- the mouse was clearly a Macguffin, Smith meant to do exactly what she did -- but dammit I want a plot that functions.
So, any recommendations? I read anything, in any genre, with a surmountable prejudice against post WWII literary fiction for the reasons above. Non-fiction as well, although not really what I'm looking for this week; I do love chatty essays, though, so anything in that genre would be richly appreciated.
It's worth noting that the incident the protagonist is referring to, with the retort from the girl in the pantry, wasn't (as one might deduce without the context) some embarrassing romantic overture; just a minor faux pas -- the kind of thing that most people aren't even aware of committing but certain self-conscious people beat themselves up over obsessively.
15: Done, and it left me cold. (That's Jonathan Franzen, right? I'm not mixing up another book?)
LizardBreath -- I have recently been absolutely stunned by the virtuousity of Annie Proulx, which I find to be particularly evident in her "Postcards" and "Accordion Crimes". So if you have not read those two books, there's a recommendation for you.
LB, if you're looking for chatty essays, you might want to check out Joseph Epstein's Line Out For A Walk.
LB: I just read Doctorow's The March and really really loved it, though it's not exactly plot-driven. More of a broad, rich canvas. Though there are definitely through-lines and character arcs and things.
virtuousity s/b virtuosity -- I was not meaning to imply that Proulx is especially virtuous but rather that she is a virtuoso.
I was just remembering how much I liked the evil characters in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride and Irish Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat. And evil character wreaking havoc (in these cases) equals plot.
Read Gogol. Like most Slavic Lit, he's more into the psychological stuff, but he's also pretty damn funny, and the reading is not as slow as reading, say, Dostoevsky.
I really enjoyed Hilary Mantel's new book, Beyond Black (if I'm recalling the title right).
20, 21, 22: All noted, thanks! and to 22, I'm not so much demanding that a tight, orderly plot be the most important thing in the book, just that what there is should function, if you know what I mean.
I just read Midnight's Children, it's very good. It does fall into that whole post WWII litereary fiction category, but Rushdie has a thing for plot, so you should give it a chance. A Movable Feast is also enjoyable, it's a cool potrait of boho Paris back in the 20's. And it's come up before, but Jonathan Stange & Mr. Norrell is a recent favorite of mine.
Great plots: A Suitable Boy, A Very Long Engagement, Clarissa. I seriously recommend Clarissa: am teaching it at the moment, and the students are finding it fascinating.
Oh, Leo Perutz, also very good. Short Czech novels.
And I second the recommendation for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell--very much *not* the kind of thing I usually read, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I liked The Corrections. Though it's amazing how if you write a zeitgeist book at precisely the wrong moment, it's out of date six months after it's published. But LB, if you haven't read it, I would recommend Possession, by A.S. Byatt, as passionately as I would recommend anything, and it is full of rich, coherent plot.
White Teeth was meh.
Also, I like John Irving, and he is all about teh plott. Have you read The Cider House Rules? Perfect, Dickensian plot.
Recently finished Alan Furst's Red Gold, which is nice and plotty. Starting Caro's Power Broker, of which the tiny, tiny part I've read is great, and in terms of chatty essays I just picked up Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation at a used bookstore, but I haven't really started that at all, so don't feel like I can recommend it or not.
BPhD, are your students reading all of Clarissa? (I second the recommendation, but you've got to approach it in a perverse and patient spirit.)
The God of Small Things: the best fiction prose style I've ever read, IMO. Also, teh plott.
Everyone loves that Ian McEwan fella, I'm told.
28: I actually wouldn't recommend any Rushdie to LB based on her complaint about WT. A lot happens, but it doesn't usually follow conventionally satisfying narrative arcs, IMO. And I like all the Rushdie I've read, and I love TSV/
16: That's me completely. It's gotten better recently, mainly because I've "improved," not because the inner voice is harrassing me less.
I agree that The Corrections captures the zeitgeist pretty well, and that might be part of why I liked it -- I'm nostalgic for the 90s, which seemed to be such a happier time than now. Of course, that's only coming from the white-guy perspective that Franzen and I share. I was talking about this phenomenon with some people at work who come from the south side of Chicago, and they were saying things like, "You mean the 90s of the Rodney King beatings, and the LA race riots, and...." None of those things had occurred to me whatsoever.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is pretty good, at least the half that I read.
I would not recommend Middlesex to LB based on her complaint with WT. That book totally failed to climax.
This is great. I don't think there's much Gogol I haven't read, but he's a favorite, and I love A Suitable Boy and enjoyed Clarissa a great deal, despite wanting to smack everyone in the plot constantly (assuming I have the right 18thC-named-after-the-heroine novel: three guardians, one's extorting money from her by threatening suicide, one's a crazy miser who won't give her any of her money, and she's in love with the third one's son despite the fact that he's too much of a snob to talk to her?)
Oddly, I wasn't crazy about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, and it is the sort of thing I read. I don't quite know what I'm carping about -- I just found it dull. (This may be one of the problems with liking SF and fantasy for the exciting new ideas -- once you've read a metric assload of it, there isn't much that's new. While I still think of myself as a SF/Fantasy geek, most of what I've picked up in the last decade or so has left me cold as well; not that it's any worse than the stuff I used to love, but that it mostly seems overfamiliar.)
40: My online personal ad used to say under religion: "'Open,' she was crying. 'Open wide.' And at the instant that his heart broke, he opened."
16: That's me completely. It's gotten better recently, mainly because I've "improved," not because the inner voice is harrassing me less.
Totally. I identify with Joyce's protagonists (Gabriel Conroy, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom) more than those of probably any other author. It's always so incredible to read something that seems to be speaking directly to you (God, that sounds trite, but you know what I mean).
I would recommend Possession, by A.S. Byatt, as passionately as I would recommend anything, and it is full of rich, coherent plot.
Yes -- this is exactly the book I want people to write more of for me.
Starting Caro's Power Broker, of which the tiny, tiny part I've read is great,
And this. Come to think of it, I haven't read the most recent volume of the LBJ bio -- that'll take care of a week's reading or so.
I thought that the God of Small Things was an all-time great, but I didn't like the ending. Partly because it was so terribly sad, but also because there was an incest thing that I thought was forced.
Bestiality good. Incest bad. Got it?
Knut Hamsun, Hunger: just remind yourself that it was written in 1890 or so. He had a fresh way of writing which still sounds contemporary. His character has a sort of crazed solipsism that is alsovery contemporary. Dostoevsky without the gloom.
Anything by Flann O'Brien, especially the Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds. His stuff is very readable, even though some of his devices (the characters going to visit the author, etc.) are avant-gardish. Written about 1940, ahead of the various trends.
For old stuff, if you haven't read The Bros. K, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Of Human Bondage, or A Room With a View, I'd recommend them all. All quite plotty.
LB, I would recommend "An Instance of The Finger Post" by Ian Pears to any one who would listen. There are plots enough to keep you amused.
Also, for light chatty essays, I have just finished re-reading some "Letters From America" by Alastair Cooke.
Tia, if I'd have seen that in an ad when I was on the scene, you'd have gotten a too-precious response from me in a jiff.
47: All good recommendations, but I've done a lot of damage to the 18th/19th/early 20th C backlist; while I obviously haven't read everything, I've read an annoyingly large percentage of anything likely to show up in, say, a Penguin Classics edition. But that's the sort of thing I am looking for.
I previously recommended @Sw2B to lizard, but if you want plot you might want to start with The Third Policeman (as I shoulda).
Alice Munro's short stories are really good. Most don't lack for plot and epic swim. I recommend Friend of My Youth. Everyone else here can go jump in a lake.
LB, what's your general feeling about mysteries? Have you read the Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vines?
47: okay. I won't go on with my Penguin classics list then. That's the only way I know to jump out of post WWII literary fiction.
This might be the right place to complain about a certain class of books that are fantastically written, but reveal their true nature just when I'm too hooked to stop reading; at which point I narrow my eyes and mutter, "Oh Christ, it's a metafiction". Atonement, Slow Man, I'm looking at you. If you're going to drop the meta bomb, you'd better shoot the moon* (cf. If on a winter's night a traveler).
*Whee, metaphors.
Speaking of Possession, I love the outer story of Babel Tower, which has what I think is my favorite, most gripping plot of all time. But there's the damn book within the book that slows it down.
LB--I'm with you on Jonathan Strange: all of the plodding 19th-c style with none of the characterological pay-offs.
Tia--Yeah, Middlesex started meandering towards the middle (no puns intended); I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the grandmother was the best-written character, and she spends the second half of the book hidden in a guest bedroom.
About Joyce--I totally identify with his protagonists as well, but the neat trick Joyce manages to pull is to remind me continually of the profound difference in men's experience. He was the first writer to do that for me.
46: I thought it was believable. Also, it wasn't exactly smiled upon by the hovering authorial consciousness, just compassionately understood.
Then there would be Harry Mulisch's "The Discovery of Heaven?"
It's behidn the paywall now, but did you guys read the story about the woman who got the collection of 1,082 Penguin Classics from Amazon? A non-Times free version of the story is here.
An oldish American book that I think gets overlooked a lot is Faulkner's "The Hamlet" -- it is kind of overshadowed by the books that everybody associates with his name like TS&TF and Light in August -- but I think it is a fine story and beautifully told. I kept a diary while I was reading it if you want to see my reactions to it in real time.
52: I like them fine, in theory, and have read buckets of the backlist -- when I pick current ones up, they tend to be awfully thin. I'll take a look at Rendell, though.
You know what's an awesome book? The Da Vinci Code.
The Hamlet is great! Also The Town and The Mansion, though I liked the first best.
Preëminent Unfogged commenter Joe Drymala tapped at his computer writing world-famous comments, but suddenly a masked figure hiding under his desk grabbed his legs and traversed him brutally across the room, rendering him dead. Halfway across the country, a sense of urgency began to weigh on Matt Weiner. He was a philosopher—but no wisdom could have prepared him for what followed.
62 - OK, I was going to blog this put pulled the post because it's one of those things that you read and think someone has to be making up but I swear this is absolutely true so I'll just put it here. This was what what my roommate leaned over and whispered to me last weekend in the theater when the DaVinci Code preview came on. In her defense, she hadn't read the book...but still.
So, wait, that was, like, a fiction book? I thought I read that really happened?I swear she was not kidding.
The DaVinci Code got recommended to me by older female relatives. I read the first two pages and closed it. I strugged to find an uncondescending way to explain to them why there was no way in hell I was going to devote another minute of my life to that book. I think what did it was "His thoughts swirled with fear and regret."
The Hunger guy manages to stay snarky and impudent even when he is starving -- a great triumph of the human spirit. How could that not be cheery?
Whereas the Notes from Underground guy was all gloomy and serious-minded.
A very fun read, strongly plotted and with well-drawn characters, though not ultimately of too deep a significance: "Foucault's Pendulum" by Eco.
Man, you guys are bitches. No one believed, even for a minute, that I might be sincerely endorsing The Da Vinci Code?
I suck at this.
Now Mysteries—there's a lighthearted romp.
Well if its lighted hearted romps... how about the Roman romps from Steven Saylor?
Wait, we owe someone a fucking apology if we don't immediately dismiss their uncharacteristic low-brow earnestness, but we're bitches if we do? Can't catch a break 'round here.
There are worse fates around here
61: Rendell is uneven (she writes so many books she could hardly help it); my favorites tend to be the Barbara Vines, which could be under R or V in your library/bookstore. You might start with No Night Is Too Long if you like teh gay, or House of Stairs if you like teh lesbian. (House of Stairs is my favorite, of course.) Or if you want to read one of her own-names, Talking To Strange Men is really incredibly good. And Master of the Moor made me curl up on the floor whimpering. Recent Inspector Wexford novels have been somewhat perfunctory, I think.
Hamsun is my project. No spoilers, please.
I'm reading his anti-American book. It's fairly cliched and filled with heavy sarcasm, with some good points in it. I have a definite feeling that in that book Hamsun was externalizing an inner struggle.
The homeless-bum hero in Hunger goes to enormous lengths to maintain a scrap of respectability, and the anti-American Hamsun is sort of a TS Eliot-ish snob. Hamsun was also ridiculed on the streets of Minneapolis for being too dandyish.
Like Charlie Christian, Hamsun spent some time in North Dakota.
The Dan Brown Hater's Handbook.
I clearly need to study the master more carefully.
The Alan Furst recommendation above is a good one. His stuff is plotty and exciting enough but he does some nice things with character too.
I second B.Phds Czech novel recommendation too. Some Kundera or Hrabal would be literary but plotty and, often, funny too.
If you want to laugh a lot, Scottish thriller writer Christopher Brookmyre is worth a go. He writes Carl Hiassen style black comic thrillers but with some real panache and a lot of anger. Also, he writes the best 'patter' dialogue ever...
The Barbara Vine novels are considerably artier than your average mystery, BTW.
I knew Alan Furst slightly in college. He was a very nice, pleasant, unassuming guy who tended to be taken for granted. No one thought he'd be the famous one of us.
Definitely a "Nice Guys Finish First" story (no pun originally intended).
Some of the recent Le Carre stuff is great too.
The Constant Gardener and Absolute Friends are both gripping but also exhibit a lot of the virtues of the best literary fiction.
81: That reminds me of the obsession I briefly had with Corelli's Mandolin, a book that was actually well-received as literary fiction, but almost as poorly written as The DaVinci Code.
I ve been an avid Le Carre reader for years. I think The Constant Gardner the best thing he has ever written, closely followed by "Our Game". I think he lost control of "Absolute Friends" though.
I have general problems with most 'literary' fiction but only where that's taken to mean a certain sub-genre of mid-to-late 20th century fiction. The whole 'novels of angst and adultery in the self-obsessed middle-classes' genre which seems to have won the majority of the Booker prizes awarded in the past 20 or 30 years.
Lots of it is badly written and boring, imho.
[Of course, the very best of it is good, which is why I end up reading much of it anyway, just in case... ]
I have a friend who's obsessed with Mishima. The portion of Spring Snow I read was excellent.
The whole 'novels of angst and adultery in the self-obsessed middle-classes' genre
Totally. That solipsistic horror that the baby boomers have rained down upon us.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with The Sea is pretty devastating.
Hey, James Wolcott just informed me that the two Brokeback guys were sheepherders and not cowboys. Is this true? All the stereotypes are different.
LB: Since you've read the western canon, it's time to look east. Total plot paradise for ages: Edward Seidensticker's unabridged Tale of Genji. (must be Seidensticker, must be unabridged.) If you like fantasy and SF, Arthur Waley's abridged translation of Monkey will slay you. Three Kingdomsis amazing but I can't remember which translation I read. For a lively personal depiction of a very weird culture try The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (The Ivan Morris translation is good). The great thing about these books is once you've finished them you can start all over again.
John Emerson: They were working as sheepherders when they met. However the older of the two was a rodeo cowboy, the younger ended up working as a cowboy.
Speaking of Dostoyevsky, I somehow managed to miss Notes From Underground until about a month ago. What a fool I have been for not reading it before. That book blew my head off.
The Brokeback Mountain story that originally appeared in the New Yorker is good, a quick read. More grit than in the movie. Them boys ain't so pretty.
Chinese: Lu Hsun (mostly short stories, plus a novella, "Story of Ah Q") and Qian Zhongshu "The Fortress Besieged". Both tend toward irony and satire. The latter book seems to be terribly popular among young Chinese.
The second title comes from a witticism: "Marriage is like a besieged fortress. Everyone outside is trying to get in, and everyone inside is trying to get out." The main character gets married by accident, in order to get out of an uncomfortable social situation.
Pai Hsien-yung, "Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream". Short pieces about mainlanders stranded in Taiwan after WWII. Many of them have unrealistic pretensions, like the genteel maiden aunts in American Southern fiction.
the two Brokeback guys were sheepherders and not cowboys. Is this true?
Annie Proulx says,
Excuse me, but it is NOT a story about "two cowboys." It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who have left home and who find themselves in a personal sexual situation they did not expect, understand nor can manage. The only work they find is herding sheep for a summer some cowboys! Yet both are beguiled by the cowboy myth, as are most people who live in the state, and Ennis tries to be one but never gets beyond ranch hand work; Jack settles on rodeo as an expression of the Western ideal. It more or less works for him until he becomes a tractor salesman.
Gee, I might go to that movie. If it's sheepherders there's gotta be some bestiality.
I had a friend whose father was a cowboy. He spent the summer of his 15th year helping out, and said that spending 3 months alone in a valley with your father and several hundred cattle can give you the creeps.
He's an effete intellectual now and doesn't miss it a bit.
Of course they're not cowboys. They're in Wyoming, sheesh.
Thanks for the link, ogged -- a good interview.
Re: 101
I second the Lu Hsun/Lu Xun recommendation.
There's a Lu Xun collection online.
I don't think Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina is on Penguin's list. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is, but it may be sufficiently obscure for you to have not read it, LB. It has many, many, plots - plots within plots at times - that sort out in the end, but not in an entirely satisfactory way. But it's a lot of fun anyway.
"The Saragossa Manuscript" is a movie which I highly recommend. Music by Penderecki, and I believe that Polanski has a cameo as a homicidal dwarf similiar to his cameo in Chinatown.
mcmc, Seidensticker is the translation that reproduces the original circumlocutions and pronouns instead of sprinkling the characters' names throughout the text, isn't it? It seems to me that it might be a good idea to keep Waley near you as a crib. I did not enjoy spending half my reading time trying to figure out who 'that lady' referred to this time. (Long time ago, so I may be misremembering how the circumlocutions worked.)
Definitely go for Monkey, though.
No, no, Seidensticker is very readable! As an example, in Waley's translation I could not figure out what was so wrong with To no Chujo's bumpkin daughter--in Seidensticker's translation it couldn't be more clear. He does a great job with the poems, too, probably no more accurate than Waley, but with (in my not too educated opinion) more elegance. As far as I recall, he picks a sobriquet for each character and sticks with it, so captains don't suddenly turn into ministers of the left or whatever. And you always know who's talking. I really enjoyed reading this version.
Seidensticker might easily have done a more literal, less readable version before the one that's now in print, though--I wouldn't know about that.
'kay, I'll check out the latest Seidensticker sometime. I don't actually remember enough to be sure if that was the edition that confused me.
"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." Never had to read Teh Sound and Teh Fury in school. Found myself going on a long trip and checked it out. Incredible. He wrote it in the 1920s? I'm amazed he wasn't burned at the stake.
Bill -- if you liked that be sure to read Absalom, Absalom! and The Hamlet.
I need someone to read me a story. Naming and Necessity does not count.
I'll do it. I've got a good one titled "Justine."
Durrell's Alexandria Quartet had some great stuff in it. Very un-PC, though, Durrell was unreconstructed.
I've fond of his little brother's work. Haven't read any Lawrence Durell other than Bitter Lemon.
I enjoyed the book I was carrying at the meetup: A Bright Shining Lie, although I thought it could conceivably have been truly transcendent, as opposed to just entertaining and informative, but Sheehan wasn't quite a good enough writer to pull it off.
If you are in the mood for some 'olde worlde' literature, then Egil's Saga or Njal's Saga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Njals_Saga) are both wonderful.
I can't remember which is the best translation of either although the Penguin Classics are good but there are translations of wildly differing quality around - some are even online. The poetry in Egil's Saga is great but notoriously hard to translate. Skaldic verse was teh complex.
Or you could read the original:
http://www.snerpa.is/net/isl/egils.htm
I'm fond of his little brother's work.
Agreed, and after reading Gerry's My Family and Other Animals I had a hard time not giggling at the author when trying to read the Alexandria Quartet
You must have tried John McPhee. His short essays often appear in the New Yorker. The books are much the same. Interesting, lightly informative and entertaining. I'd call them chatty essays.
But most of the recommendations I'm seeing are way too heavy. If I want to read something depressing that I'm sure is going to end badly, there's no need to go for something as long and heavy as Dostoyevsky: the essays on politics and law in the New York Review of Books are just as depressing in far fewer pages.
Have you tried Sharyn McCrumb? Her Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool are fun. If you find an early printing of Bimbos it even comes with a cover featuring a scantily clad young woman, implausibly buxom yet defiantly perky. I just finished her PMS Outlaws featuring a woman lawyer on a crime spree, and another woman in a mental hospital with depression . . . I'm not explaining this very well, am I? It's funnier than it sounds. I think she does plot. Being myself somewhat plot impaired (I'm unclear on what connects cause and effect) I probably have a rather low standard of plausibility.
#35: Damn right they are. Every blessed word.
My bookshelves are full of metafiction, but two recent books that weren't, and were very good, were The Known World and Life of Pi. Oh, also Atonement. You must read atonement. Kind of Jane Austen meets Virginia Woolf.