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Post by Carl LaFong on Nov 10, 2019 15:31:53 GMT
A guiding hand to the heavyweight greats of European literature www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/09/book-clinic-where-to-start-european-classicsQ: What big European classics can I read? I want long, thick books to get me through autumn and winter.Enid Lacob, 70, Cape Town, South Africa Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola, founders of Europa Editions, write:
The first titles we would suggest are the great masterpieces of the 19th century. The Russian novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the French novels by Balzac, Dumas, Hugo and Zola, as well as the English ones by Austen, Dickens and Conrad. The foundations of literary realism – not only are they able to tell of social and personal universes, but they remain compelling narratives that allow the reader to identify with characters and situation despite the temporal distance. It’s also very enjoyable, if more demanding, to read the masters of modernism, those who questioned the basis of the traditional novel. We’re talking about Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Then we have the great European classics of the 1900s. Among those who wrote in German: Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Leo Perutz and Ernst Lothar, who told of the demise of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire and the ascent of Nazism; Christa Wolf, Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, with their novels about postwar Germany and the political and personal angst people felt until the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Among Italian authors, Guiseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa, with his canvas depicting Sicily and Italy’s unification, The Leopard; Pier Paolo Pasolini, visionary reporter of the changes taking place in contemporary Italy (in The Street Kids, about the young men growing up in the bombed-out suburbs of postwar Rome); Elsa Morante and, more recently, Elena Ferrante, on Italian women’s arduous route to emancipation. And among the French: Albert Camus with his existential novels, The Plague and The Stranger; Simone de Beauvoir; André Malraux with Man’s Fate; Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. Last but not least, the great writers of eastern Europe, from the Czechs Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal, to the Polish Kazimierz Brandys. And the Russians: Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Svetlana Alexievich with Chernobyl Prayer and Vasily Grossman with Life and Fate. |
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Post by amyghost on Nov 10, 2019 17:32:23 GMT
Good list. I'd definitely add Thackeray's Vanity Fair to it--the comedy and pretty devastating social commentary still hold up fresh today.
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Post by Carl LaFong on Nov 10, 2019 19:28:52 GMT
No Thomas Hardy or Trollope (as well as Thackeray.)
No Walter Scott. No Stendhal.
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Post by amyghost on Nov 10, 2019 20:06:48 GMT
No Thomas Hardy or Trollope (as well as Thackeray.) No Walter Scott. No Stendhal. Yeah, although there are some excellent selections, it does seem a bit scattershot. I'm not sure I'd rank some of the titles mentioned on it in the realm of 'European classics'. At least they didn't append Toni Morrison, Alice Walker or Amy Tan onto it  for purposes of 'correctitude'.
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Post by Prime etc. on Nov 10, 2019 21:14:14 GMT
It's funny how the exclude all the authors that used to mentioned first like
Chaucer, Dante, Swift, Tennyson...
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Post by staggerstag on Nov 16, 2019 14:31:50 GMT
All the above are big well-known authors whose work is ingrained on us at school to read. My choice would be something I found for myself just by browsing the shelves of a bookshop a couple of decades ago, reading a page or two of several titles that appealed to me, and choosing one to take home with me. I still have it, stained with tea drips, battered, bruised and musty. Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890) The fellow in South Africa could do far worse than start here. Has anyone here read it?  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(Hamsun_novel) |
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Post by Carl LaFong on Nov 16, 2019 15:04:46 GMT
All the above are big well-known authors whose work is ingrained on us at school to read. My choice would be something I found for myself just by browsing the shelves of a bookshop a couple of decades ago, reading a page or two of several titles that appealed to me, and choosing one to take home with me. I still have it, stained with tea drips, battered, bruised and musty. Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890) The fellow in South Africa could do far worse than start here. Has anyone here read it? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(Hamsun_novel)I read Hunger a few years ago. Rather bleak but you really get under the character's skin.
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Post by staggerstag on Nov 16, 2019 15:40:15 GMT
I read Hunger a few years ago. Rather bleak but you really get under the character's skin. Very good, LaFong. I didn't find it bleak. I also got under the character's skin so as to sympathize and, yes, find humour in his various predicaments because they're described in such earthy, realistic ways that we all at some or other point in our lives can relate to by varying degrees. As he is once again aimlessly traipsing the cobbles he tells us how ragged he is looking and that "even whores on the street crossed over the road to avoid me". Now I find that funny - his honesty, his hopelessness, putting himself on a lower social rung than prostitutes. That kind of situation, those few words, induces in me laughter not sadness - even though it's a sad state to be in. Or maybe I like the down-and-out character over one who is comfortably off. Another example of finding humour in a character's predicament is in the pawnshop scene in Down and Out in Paris and London. A desperately skint Orwell offers up a bundle of ragged clothes for some money and takes his seat with the other men waiting to be called up with an offer for their stuff. On a previous visit to the pawnshop Orwell had observed a poor man being refused any offer at all for his rags and who had been laughed out of the shop by owner and patrons alike. As Orwell sat there waiting for his offer he tells us something along the lines of "I lowered my head so as not to see the other men laughing at me when the owner offered me five sous". And I'm reading that with a smile - it smacks so much of reality and how even flogging rags in a pawnshop has not taken away his sense of pride. And for some reason that cheers me rather than saddens me. (Oh, and if you read the book, you'll remember how Orwell was in fact offered something like 70 Francs for his old clothing, something he later came to believe had been a mistake by the owner who had probably got Orwell's offer confused with another, and how he and his roommate Boris celebrated by gorging on fine bread and wine) Super stuff.
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Post by Carl LaFong on Nov 16, 2019 16:03:40 GMT
I read Hunger a few years ago. Rather bleak but you really get under the character's skin. Very good, LaFong. I didn't find it bleak. I also got under the character's skin so as to sympathize and, yes, find humour in his various predicaments because they're described in such earthy, realistic ways that we all at some or other point in our lives can relate to by varying degrees. As he is once again aimlessly traipsing the cobbles he tells us how ragged he is looking and that "even whores on the street crossed over the road to avoid me". Now I find that funny - his honesty, his hopelessness, putting himself on a lower social rung than prostitutes. That kind of situation, those few words, induces in me laughter not sadness - even though it's a sad state to be in. Or maybe I like the down-and-out character over one who is comfortably off. Another example of finding humour in a character's predicament is in the pawnshop scene in Down and Out in Paris and London. A desperately skint Orwell offers up a bundle of ragged clothes for some money and takes his seat with the other men waiting to be called up with an offer for their stuff. On a previous visit to the pawnshop Orwell had observed a poor man being refused any offer at all for his rags and who had been laughed out of the shop by owner and patrons alike. As Orwell sat there waiting for his offer he tells us something along the lines of "I lowered my head so as not to see the other men laughing at me when the owner offered me five sous". And I'm reading that with a smile - it smacks so much of reality and how even flogging rags in a pawnshop has not taken away his sense of pride. And for some reason that cheers me rather than saddens me. (Oh, and if you read the book, you'll remember how Orwell was in fact offered something like 70 Francs for his old clothing, something he later came to believe had been a mistake by the owner who had probably got Orwell's offer confused with another, and how he and his roommate Boris celebrated by gorging on fine bread and wine) Super stuff. I don't think I have read DAOIPAL. Pretty sure I read The Road to Wigan Pier though. I'll add DAOIPAL to my To Read list!
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Post by staggerstag on Nov 16, 2019 16:20:48 GMT
I don't think I have read DAOIPAL. Pretty sure I read The Road to Wigan Pier though. I'll add DAOIPAL to my To Read list! Ah, Wigan Pier - now we're sucking diesel! His descriptions of the Brookers' squalid lodging house in the first chapter, Mr Brooker's black thumb prints on the bread and butter as he clasped the loaf and cut slices for the lodgers, the undersized beds, Mrs Brooker's tripe dinners and wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper, the sight of Mr Brooker carrying a full chamber pot to the drain with his thumb well over the rim of it etc, until finally Orwell can bear it no longer. ""On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. " 
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Post by Carl LaFong on Nov 16, 2019 16:44:22 GMT
I don't think I have read DAOIPAL. Pretty sure I read The Road to Wigan Pier though. I'll add DAOIPAL to my To Read list! Ah, Wigan Pier - now we're sucking diesel! His descriptions of the Brookers' squalid lodging house in the first chapter, Mr Brooker's black thumb prints on the bread and butter as he clasped the loaf and cut slices for the lodgers, the undersized beds, Mrs Brooker's tripe dinners and wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper, the sight of Mr Brooker carrying a full chamber pot to the drain with his thumb well over the rim of it etc, until finally Orwell can bear it no longer. ""On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. " Wish I hadn't been eating when I read that! 
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Post by nutsberryfarm 🏜 on Nov 16, 2019 17:50:36 GMT
going to start reading Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.
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for purposes of 'correctitude'.
