It's dispiriting to begin book after book, hoping each time to strike gold, only to close it again after 20 or 30 pages. Maybe you can point me in some new directions.
My favorite novel is Ulysses – it ruined fiction for me, for years, because everything else seemed so pale and lifeless by comparison. I'm a fan of big, hard books, in general: think Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, War and Peace. I love Cormac McCarthy, too, and have argued that Blood Meridian may be the "Great American Novel." Style matters to me, and little else.
Not all of my favorite books are long and difficult. Pale Fire. The Great Gatsby. The entire Patrick O'Brian canon. I admire things like Lonesome Dove, True Grit, and Elmore Leonard's work, too. Ernest Hemingway. Virginia Woolf.
I'm looking for recommendations for beautifully written works that are outside the normal run; anything that shows up on a "100 Best Books of Arbitrary Timeline" is something I am likely to have already considered. If your tastes are something like mine, you would do well to read books like the following; I'm hoping that you can recommend something similar.
- Fredick Rolfe/Baron Corvo. Best known for Hadrian the Seventh (1904)
- Kyril Bonfiglioli. Wildly inventive detective novels, like Don't Point that Thing at Me (1972)
- Robin McLean. Short stories and a novel, Pity the Beast (2021), that is the best thing I've read for years.
Delight me, please.
by fromberg
4 Comments
If you’ve ever wondered how your life may have been different given slight changes, *4 3 2 1* by Paul Auster may be of interest to you. That said, it’s a book that requires complete attention or you’ll be lost.
I’ve thought about reading *Cloud Atlas* but never seemed to manage it. I’m not familiar with *Life after Life* at all. But back to you, have you read any Dostojewski or Chekov?
>beautifully written works that are outside the normal run
I don’t know if you will like these because it sounds like we have pretty different tastes, but I think these are both beautifully written and lesser known:
* The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D. G. Compton
* Void Star by Zachary Mason
You’ll forgive me for saying you’ve named such good authors it hasn’t really narrowed much down for us. What does ‘beautifully written’ mean to you specifically when it’s not Joyce/Patrick O’Brien/Cormac McCarthy?
Have you tried Iris Murdoch? ‘The Sea, The Sea’ is fantastic, it aims for beauty, and it’s structurally fairly interesting as well. Murdoch was a professor of philosophy at Oxford (sorry if you know this already), and you can tell.
You might also enjoy Paul Scott’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’, apparently (if I remember the quote correctly) ‘the twentieth century’s great nineteenth-century novel’, which is quite long, quite difficult, quite beautiful, and also structurally fairly interesting. Although of course neither of the two compare to Ulysses in that respect.