D7_bohs said:
What is interesting - a point made up- thread - is that novels which now seem to represent a timeless past were actually brutally contemporary in their day; this is certainly true of Fielding, and of George Eliot, Henry James and Forster alike; a contemporaneity which their merchant ivory/ penguin classics packaging strips from such works; whereas contemporary 'literary' fiction seems too often to lag way behind the culture; too much Hampsteady English fiction, too much rural irish tales ........ haven't read zadie Smith/ Monica Ali tho' - is that where the zetgeist lives? why do i doubt it?
Actually, I'm not sure if that's entirely true. Many 19th Century writers actually set their books in the past - perhaps the past of their own century usually, but the past nevertheless. Middlemarch for instance was published in 1871 but is set around the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1820s/early 1830s, and this was a common technique of the era. (Ulysses too - published in the twenties (albeit in instalments before then) is, famously, set in 16 June 1904 (sh*t - I hope I've got that right))...
But your last question about Zadie Smith/Monica Ali representing the contomperary is a good one: they certainly represent, at a one level, an experience which hasn't found its way into much British fiction - the second/third generation immigrant experience, an 'ethnic', urban experience that has been crucially influential on, say, music in the UK, for instance, yet has so very rarely found its way into fiction. But I can't help thinking there's something so terribly safe about their work - it really is the sort of fiction that an Oxbridge educated liberal publisher/reviewer approaching middle age might find 'exciting' and 'cutting edge' (or whatever) but which seems to me to lack genuine bite. I dunno. I might be wrong about that. I wonder what others might think?
As for Hamsun's Hunger, I too, alas, haven't read it yet, but he's been on my 'must read' lis for longer than I'd care to remember as I know stuff about his work without actually having read it. As for the Singer quote about 'the whole of modern ficiton in the twentieth century' stemming from Hamsun, well hmmm, such claims sound rather grand and impressive but don't always stand up to much serious scrutiny. I think he's making a point about a certain tendency of the 'modern'(ist) novel that dominated much of the first half of the century - a representation of 'modern' 'alientated' consciousness (modern because alienated, alienated because modern) in a (mostly urban setting ... although such tendencies are there in Joyce, Faulker, Lowry, Satre, Woolf, Conrad, etc (so, thinking about it, maybe he's right after all!)
On that note (and in that tendency) can I recommend one of my own personal favourites: Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I dunno if it's still in print anymore, but if you can get hold of it, it really is an astonishing piece of work - beautifully lyrical, haunting, but very dark. It's about a ficitonal Dutch aristocrat living in Paris at the beginning of the 20th Century, an aesthete and poet, overwhelmed by the squalor of his existence (which sounds, from what I understand, rather Hamsun like). If there were a pictorial equivalent to the novel it'd probably be Munch's 'The Scream' - an alienated subject distressed to the point of breakdown. Ah - they don't write 'em like that anymore...
