jenks
thread death
John Doe said: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...
I have never heard of this but I want to read it - i'll have to go look on abebooks right now
As to the stuff about contemporary depictions - i agree with your point about the 19th C novellists - Dickens was always very careful to set his work a good twenty years earlier. I think the french were more willing to be ultra modern - Flaubert's Mde Bovary, Stendhal's Scarlett and Black, Blazac's Lost Illusions, Zola's L'Assomoir (sp?!) But the reason that they are still read isn't because they are accurate records of the past but because they have something else going for them.
I think Zadie Smith is getting better all the time and I think it is interesting that the writer she aspires to be is Forster.
I found Ali's novel fizzled out too quickly - moving towards very unconvincing characterisation of everyone except the central figure.
I thought Andrea Levy's novel Small Island worked a lot of these themes in a much more gripping manner - without falling into a box ticking exercise in 'immigrant experience' writing .