So here we are in Letsbeavenue; Desert Island books. I don't accept these nominations at all. Further, from this desert island, I sustain the whole -Library approach.
La Repubblica says:
125 autori del mondo anglosassone hanno scelto i libri più belli di tutti i tempi
Vince la letteratura dell'Ottocento, con Tolstoj. Poche citazioni per quella di oggi
Nella hit parade degli scrittori
Fra i primi venti solo il libro di un vivente: Cent'anni di solitudine
Classici battono contemporanei dieci a zero. O giù di lì. Non si tratta di calcio, bensì di letteratura: un sondaggio tra 125 scrittori americani, inglesi e australiani per scoprire quali sono i romanzi più belli di tutti i tempi, i dieci libri che ognuno dovrebbe portare con sé su un'isola deserta, o al limite anche su un'isola abitata, insomma i libri da non perdere. Ebbene, gli scrittori di oggi hanno scelto, quasi esclusivamente, scrittori di ieri, o anche di ieri l'altro.
La letteratura dell'Ottocento stravince questa speciale graduatoria, con gli scrittori russi che occupano in maggioranza le primissime posizioni e uno su tutti che risulta, per così dire, il campione del mondo: Lev Tolstoj, che con i suoi due capolavori "Anna Karenina" (primo posto) e "Guerra e pace" (terzo), conquista due delle prime tre piazze.
Segno che gli scrittori contemporanei non hanno una grande opinione dei libri che loro stessi scrivono? Il sospetto è legittimo. Martin Amis, Ian Mc Ewan e Salman Rushdie, per citare tre di quelli più stimati dalla critica e più premiati dalle vendite, hanno ricevuto appena un pugno di citazioni dai centoventicinque intervistati, che comprendevano gli stessi Amis, Mc Ewan, Rushdie, e tra gli altri Norman Mailer, Stephen King, Tom Wolfe.
Alle spalle di Tolstoj, in seconda posizione, si è classificato un altro grande classico dell'Ottocento, Flaubert, con "Madame Bovary". La lista dei primi dieci è completata, nell'ordine, da "Lolita" di Vladimir Nabokov, "Le avventure di Huckleberry Finn" di Mark Twain, "Amleto" di Shakespeare, "Il grande Gatsby" di Francis Scott Fitzgerald, "Alla ricerca del tempo perduto" di Marcel Proust, "I racconti" di Anton Checov e "Middlemarch" di George Eliot. Trai primi venti, c'è un solo scrittore vivente: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, con "Cent'anni di solitudine", il romanzo che ha fatto vincere allo scrittore colombiano il premio Nobel per la letteratura e che ha affermato nel mondo la narrativa latinoamericana.
I risultati del sondaggio diventeranno a loro volta un libro, intitolato "Top ten" (I primi dieci). Prima ancora di leggerlo, ognuno di noi può chiedersi se è d'accordo con la classifica compilata dagli scrittori e domandarsi quali sono i nostri personali "top ten", i dieci libri da non perdere, quelli che bisogna assolutamente aver letto. Chissà se anche i non addetti ai lavori preferirebbero i classici ai contemporanei.
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19 comments:
any list that puts ian mcewan anywhere near the top is clearly untenable. (i haven't read any martin amis except for the rachel papers, which i confess i quite enjoyed at the time (in chadlands) but i suspect i'd have a similar antipathy to him too).
i like american fiction. i can't abide the smug sel-satisfaction of the self-appointed current british canon. (the american counterparts may be just as bad in their world, but from here i can ignore that aspect of it and just relish in their superior writing)
on the today programme as i type: what does it take to be a great author. debating the question: Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens. Apparently they have "developed a great friendship over the years". QED.
beachbum just switched the radio off in disgust. "I'm not going to listen to Christopher Hitchens. I don't care what he thinks about anything. I don't care what he thinks he had for breakfast. He's still going to be wrong."
Right.
The Australians were in there nominating but I don't think any Australian authors made it onto the list.
My difficulty is being able only to consider English-language works unless there are particularly distinguished translations - which is why I suspect the Russins are scoring so well as Russian seems to translate well into other languages. Having said that I want to nominate Balzac (read in translation) the whole corpus.
Giules, could you provide the entire winning list ?
Beachbum has never been a fan of radio 4 in general, Christopher Hitchens on radio 4 at breakfast demands action (as he showed).
I'll see if i can find the whole list. But I couldn't find any of this reported on any of the english online newspapers, it caught my eye in la repubblica as i was having my cappuccino yesterday in the bar.
But I wouldn't have put Madame Bovary up in the tops, and anyway i thought it was just supposed to be scrittori anglosassoni, otherwise if we're opening it up to the whole of literature where are the italians? (gianni rodari?)
There was also another article in la repub. saying the latest edition of war and peace by harper collins was 600 pages shorter than the original. Cribs have always existed but to publish it shortened by half seems a bit of a modern britain dumbing down thing to do, like putting do not lean signs on a rope in the post office. Surely one should be allowed to edit one's own reading? I skipped all the dull bits of Anna Karenina all by myself (although I was later told these were the whole point of the novel but I think that's rubbish as abviouly we all want to know what's happening to Anna and Vronskij).
Found the list:
125 scrittori hanno scelto i loro libri preferiti. Ne è venuta fuori la classifica che vi proponiamo. Tra questi qual è secondo voi il vero capolavoro?
1 "Anna Karenina" - Lev Tolstoj
2 "Madame Bovary" - Gustave Flaubert
3 "Guerra e pace" - Lev Tolstoj
4 "Lolita" - Vladimir Nabokov
5 "Le avventure di Huckleberry Finn" - Mark Twain
6 "Amleto" - William Shakespeare
7 "Il grande Gatsby" - F. Scott Fitzgerald
8 "Alla ricerca del tempo perduto" - Marcel Proust
9 "Racconti" - Anton Cechov
10 "Middlemarch" - George Eliot
11 "Don Chisciotte" - Miguel de Cervantes
12 "Moby Dick" - Herman Melville
13 "Grandi speranze" - Charles Dickens
14 "Ulisse" - James Joyce
15 "Odissea" - Omero
16 "Gente di Dublino" - James Joyce
17 "Delitto e castigo" - Fedor Dostoevskij
18 "Re Lear" - William Shakespeare
19 "Emma" - Jane Austen
20 "Cent'anni di solitudine" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
21 "L'urlo e il furore" - William Faulkner
Fancy having Mark Taiwan fifth.
I think we can do a better list than this. But we can all vote on http://www.repubblica.it/speciale/poll/2007/spett_e_cult/libri_preferiti.html?ref=hppro
i haven't read any of those. not kidding.
1,2,4,6,7,some of 8,10,some of 14, some of 15,16,18,19.
Goodness, Mark Taiwan! Why?
Lenna, not even Hamlet?
Giules, thank you (whoops, sorry) for the list; certainly we can list more interestingly though perhaps we should all read on instead and say about anything particularly enjoyable?
All the books are in the Library, in various languages. Mark T is in execrable Italian, but it's written in execrable English in the first place so 10 alla lavagna to the translator.
I don't feel moved to read the ones I'm missing and I do so agree that we can all do our own editing (in everything, not just books). Beachbum's comment hinted that Anna and Vronsky might not be the story - but they should be, I'm with G.
Lenna, you may care for 2 and 16.
The thing that got me really angry about the edited war and peace was that it said it was authentic as it was based on a previous version of the manuscript - like, before Tolsotj had finished writing it.
I've read 1, 2, bit of 3, 10, bits of 15, 19. I have no intention of ever reading 5, or 12 (too reminiscent of Dickfish).
Giules, It was only on your departure form Brux that Dickfish was ever open; quite eery really. I peeked inside but while they were obviously selling fish, couldn't make out exactly what.
these are just books people think they should read, or at least say they have read. i strongly suspect they bear little or no reflection of what people actually have read or enjoyed.
sorry, but the whole concept of a canon makes me quite angry.
that's not to say that some of the things on the list might not be worth a look, but frankly they have no more claim to anyone's time and attention than literally thousands of volumes that just haven't been publicised so much.
i have no objection to people enjoying them. i do though to people pulling rank with them.
no, not even hamlet.
I did enjoy those I read, though I agree that they don't particularly reflect my literary tastes as a whole. I read them not so I could say I had read them, but I suppose because I was curious as to why they were so famous. Not all of them, for example middlemarch and Emma I remember reading in Barga as I needed books at those were what I found in the house before leaving, and was sure they would be safe; but some of the others, for example anna k. and madame b. I did read because I like books where there are super girl heros, and those are the ones par excellence so I thought I'd try them, and I did enjoy them. also because they do have a sort of veneration about them so, in the same way that I'd listen to a beethoven symphony if i'd never heard it or look at botticelli's venus if i'd never seen it, I did want to know what all the fuss was about, and why these are considered to be the great classics. And in the same way, having read them, I can decide if I like them or not and if i'll ever want to read them again, like I know i'm not actually very fond of beethoven's 9th and want to tell the people queueing up via Alfani to see michelangelo's david that it's not worth it.
Why are these works so famous? is it because they do something for the very first time? in the case of the books mentioned above yes, they are very scandalous for the time they were written. To continue with the comparison, similarly beethoven's harmonies were innovative and made his contemporaries sound like babies (so much so that the audience didn't much like him). Because never before had marble been carved so finely and david looks like he's real (I think he's really ugly). I think classics, more often than not, earned their status of classics, but that doesn't mean we have to like them - I am however interested in them. I agree with lenna that making a list and putting them in order of which is best classic is stupid for all the classics that have been left out. Plus it is true that the list does not reflect enjoyment in a book.
Insofar as what we read interacts with mindset then canons are pushy things. (boom boom, sorry) This one strikes as overburdened with attitudes implanted at very traditional, perfectly competent, ever so dull, school. Agreed no-one gets offered Joyce at school (I was punished severely by Mother Joseph Dolours when found read the Dubliners) but the worthy attitude is carried over.
Of the books I have read here I would strike out 4, 7, 10, and perhaps 16 as not being great enough; it would take a very long book drought to make me pick up 5, 12 and 21.
Only Emma is unassailable. ( Hamlet and Lear don't belong in this kind of list I'm not negating their status.)
Also consider walking into La Edison in Piazza della Repubblica looking for book to take on a journey or read while away. Would you rather:
1) stupid book by crap contemporary italian author
2) The time traveller's wife (or some other ganzo English book) translated into italian
3) classics written in other languages other than english translated into italian.
I found only 3 to be accettable so that's why recently I've been going for the heavy-going russian and french literature. I've now started on the italian classics in desperation. They're not bad. But I think a visit to the trash library is necessary...
From today's guardian, a propos of the boiling down of long books and autoediting:
Two leading publishers have hit on the idea of boiling down classic novels for modern audiences who are too busy/stupid to read the real thing. Orion was first off the blocks with its Compact Classics, which will appear in May - Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss, David Copperfield and Wives and Daughters, all reduced to not more than 400 pages for "less confident readers". Soon after come Bleak House, North and South, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Portrait of a Lady, similarly straitjacketed.
Without falling into the trap of condemning all abridgement - it happens on radio without a squeak of protest - at least half these titles should not be on the list. The fact that Moby-Dick is a digressive, unboildownable whale of a book is the whole point; The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Middlemarch are straightforward reads - page turners, even for less confident readers, though in the case of Middlemarch there are admittedly a lot of pages to turn. The rambling David Copperfield is ripe for cutting, but Bleak House, in which Dickens was consciously widening his scope as an artist, is not. A great novel is more than its plot; it is an ecosystem, a world. Tamper at your peril.
Meanwhile, HarperCollins is reducing War and Peace from almost 1,500 pages to 900. It says it will give us less war. Perhaps it has hit on the answer. Why not The Only Child Karamazov, Le Misérable, A Tale of Two Medium-Sized Towns, Limited Expectations and A Couple of Days in the Country? That should do the trick.
David's too close for comfort, his leg (can't remember which one) and one of his hands are done for a different distance. When in dull concerts I stare at him trying to mentally place him at the right point for him to look normal. (it passes the time). As for the Alfani queues, I think it's really cruel in the hot sun, and then when they get in there is something that needs so much input they can't offer to make it worth while.
I've got years of going into the Bargello when I notice it's empty when passing to get to grips even with the ground floor. Sculpture is MUCH harder than words. Just as pleasurable though.
I do think enjoyment should be an aspect of greatness.
giules, I vote you blogger of the year for your postings of 28 february.
what makes a classic? success. top of the pops (or top of the tops, as I freudianly mystyped). inertia, or rather contagion. bandwaggoning. wrong to expect success to be an indication of worth. Berlusconi is successful. QED.
Amazingly, the only translations i also read are from languages other than Italian or Inglish. Great minds...
But what i loved most in your 28 February postings is The Only Child Karamazov, Limited Expectations and the like. This is a very good game. May I contribute I Promessi Conviventi, Guerrilla and Truce, Hundred Minutes of Loneliness, Crime and Condono, The War of the Campanili...
BTW (=by the way in sms language) I have read the first 6 of the Repubblica list and another 6 from the following 15, which is just a reflection on old age rather than literacy. I recommend Madame Bovary and cento anni di solitudine (which I read in Italian) any time, not to pass time but to enjoy. Can't list my favourites because I can't remember - titles and authors, or indeed the content, only an inner glow when somebody reminds me of one of them.
giules, I forgot to say, the condensing of books is an old American vice: see Selection from the Readers' Digest, which translated in Italian after the last War did a great damage americanising the Italians fast (through the selection, not the condensing). I have seen collected and lavishly bound Readers Digest magazines and digestions in the bookshelves of many illiterates.
The best, unrivalled and perhaps only condenser was certainly and absolutely Julius Cesar: Veni, vidi, vici.
"Un classico è un libro che non ha mai finito di dire quell che deve dire" (Italo Calvino).
Calvino is a great man, the father of “Il barone rampante”, who since childhood had been swinging from tree branch to branch living a full life at the time of Enlightenment; “il Cavaliere inesistente”, the Crusader did not not know he did not exist other than as an empty armure and really stopped existing only when he realised that he did not; “Il visconte dimezzato”, the knight split into two by a sword, healed into two separate pieces that rejoin together to make love to a woman. And many other wonderful, deep novels, from the early Resistenza account of “Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno” (beautiful title too) to “Diario di uno scrutatore”, about the 1948 elections.
But his definition of a classic is very, very feeble. Classico = Dense??? A classic must have a lot to say, true, but the best ones communicate all the great deal they have to say fast, as a flooded river, not slowly and meanly.
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