I've also been putting off reading
Rings of Saturn for a while now (and
Austerlitz too), so I can't say anything about Sebald's novels yet. But his essays in
On the Natural History of Destruction are worthwhile.
I've been lately feeling my own lack of orientation in recent writing. Certain things I've read (like books by some prominent younger American
novelists) haven't seemed very interesting. So I'm quite interested in what other people might suggest here. I guess many of us have private canons (explicitly held or not), books we have thought most about or bring up in conversation. While it would always be nice to have detailed discussion of individual books, I think this topic might be a good place to suggest titles and also to see whether there is anything approaching consensus. With that in mind, I'll withhold any disclaimer about the possible usefulness or otherwise of canons.
So here is a scattershot list, to which I may add others as they occur to me. In no particular order:
- Krasznahorkai László's novel
The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). Like his earlier
Satantango, which hasn't been translated in English as far as I know, this came to my attention by way of a film adaptation (
Werckmeister Harmonies, which like the film of
Satantango is one of relatively few strong films from the past decade that I've really enjoyed). I've been meaning to reread this in the context of other versions of pessimism; Krasznahorkai's seemed pretty nuanced and, if it's possible, humane, when I read it a few years ago.
- Like
The Melancholy of Resistance, Roberto Bolaño's
By Night in Chile (2000) is uninterrupted by paragraphs, and its sentences can go on for pages. Again it develops a kind of misanthropy or pessimism, but one I find much more thoughtful than what I've encountered in some fashionable recent European writing. More recently, Bolaño has received attention in the U.S. with the belated translation of
The Savage Detectives.
- I think also of Thomas Bernhard, though it has been a while since I've read him, and I am not quite sure of my relation to him. Caveat: he died in 1989, but a number of works have been translated since then.
- And speaking of Austrian novelist/playwrights, I wonder how others regard Peter Handke. Beside his earlier collaborations with Wim Wenders (e.g.
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick), I might suggest the little novel
On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (2000).
- Thomas Pynchon's
Mason&Dixon (1997). I haven't yet opened
Against the Day, though it's probably worth the effort.
- I hesitate to mention Cormac McCarthy, but he deserves attention at very least for his sense of English prose. His
Blood Meridian (1985) might be as good a place to start as any, though
No Country for Old Men (2005) would make the twenty-year cut. My reluctance here has something to do with his apocalypticism, which I would suggest is sometimes an indulgence instead of a way of understanding American culture or modernity. The current spate of movie adaptations might be taken as confirmation.
- Philip Roth has continued to produce some novels that seem important to me.
- I can't resist mentioning Eileen Chang (Zhang Ai-ling), even though she died in 1995 and almost all of her works are earlier than the period we're supposed to be talking about. Nonetheless many of those are still appearing in English translations, sometimes her own. I recommend her English-language novel
The Rouge of the North, or the collection
Love in a Fallen City.
- Other writers I think of in this connection: V. S. Naipaul, Murakami Haruki, Abe Kōbō (whose very late works make the cut, while again others took a while to be translated into western languages), J. M. Coetzee, Philip K. Dick, Gao Xingjian, Aleksandar Hemon, Dorris Lessing, Salman Rushdie.
Looking over this list, I see all kinds of imbalances and absences, mostly accidental I hope. I won't try to remedy them now.
I find it a little strange that I don't have a more conscious list
of important books from these years, in contrast to almost any other
period. The same could be said of movies, but that is less surprising. Surely the literary field must be more varied, less
constrained by costs of production, and, at least in some cases, less
unconscious about its relation to popular cultures.
Books Discussed
