Well-known/Bestselling Fiction:
Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis1
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith2
Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor 3
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Sloan Wilson4
Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk 5
A Sample of Literary Fiction:
Molloy, Samuel Beckett6
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore7
Less than Angels, Barbara Pym8
Ten North Frederick, John O'Hara9
The Inheritors, William Golding10
The Rest of the World:
The Forbidden Forest, Mircea Eliade [Romania]11
The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis [Greece]12
Memed, My Hawk, Yaşar Kemal13 [Turkey (Kurdish)]
Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo14 [Mexico]
Boys Alive [Ragazzi di vita], Pier Paolo Pasolini15 [trans. by Tim Parks] [Italy]
The Tree of Man, Patrick White16 [Australia]
Special mention:
Notes of a Native Son [autobiographical essays], James Baldwin17
The Recognitions, William Gaddis18
The Chrysalids [classic science fiction], John Wyndham19
My List:
The Spider’s Nest, Paul Bowles20
The Ginger Man, J. P. Donleavy21
The Quiet American, Graham Greene22
A Good Man Is Hard To Find [stories], Flannery O’Connor23
The Breaking Wave [aka Requiem for a Wren], Nevil Shute24
[Illustration by Val Biro]
Mame: Subtitled An Irreverent Escapade. A big-time bestseller. It spawned a Broadway play with Rosalind Russell, a film, a musical with Angela Lansbury, then a film of the musical with Lucille Ball. Patrick Dennis’s real name was Edward Everett Tanner III. He wrote other books under that pen name, a few more as Virginia Rowans.
Highsmith:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith
Kantor: In 1864, my mother’s great-grandfather, a Canada-born Michigan artilleryman, died of typhoid fever near Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia. My great-grandfather on the other side spent time in a Union hospital, survived, worked for the railroad, invented a gizmo to cool train axles, made a little money, had a pack of daughters (his grandson, my uncle Jim, would die in the Battle of the Bulge). As a kid, I paged through my father’s set of Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes—they had vivid blue spines and teemed with crystalline pictures by Mathew Brady’s crew of battlefield photographers. Aftermath, ravaged landscapes, strewn corpses.
I watched the Ken Burns series, but was never a Civil War buff the way earlier men in my line had been. By my time, those events were fixed in our national history but were largely absent from mine. As I said above, my father’s grandfather participated, was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, and was around for my father’s youth (much later I found the typescript of a speech he gave to a Flint school assembly in 1905, rather bombastically recounting his wartime experience, as well as the run-up to the war amid “the last dark days of the Buchanan administration.” For my father, that stuff was still reachable. For me, no. In any case, something possessed me to order a copy of Andersonville. Andersonville Prison (in Macon County, Georgia) housed upwards of 45,000 POWs, of whom about 30 percent died of scurvy, dysentery, diarrhea, etc.
Andersonville won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize and, though banned here and there, has been read by tens of thousands. The copy that arrived in my mailbox was a mass market paperback. I walked it to my TBR shelf; a few weeks later I nudged it back into dead space behind the other books, where it remains.
Gray Flannel Suit: A troubled ex-paratrooper and his wife in postwar America. Chicago Tribune columnist, Bob Greene, gave this assessment in the 1990s:
. . . the title of Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel became part of the American vernacular—the book was a ground-breaking fictional look at conformity in the executive suite, and it was a piece of writing that helped the nation's business community start to examine the effects of its perceived stodginess and sameness."
Wouk: He won a Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny (1951), but I first knew of him from the 1983 miniseries made from his Winds of War books of the 1970s. Marjorie Morningstar spent more than half a year on the NYT Bestseller List—it’s been called "the first Jewish novel that was popular and successful, not merely to a Jewish audience but to a general one.”
Molloy: Much too much to say about Beckett here. In Reading Projects [7]: Oddball Novels, I wrote:
The first of Beckett’s trilogy, followed by Malone Dies, and The Unnamable]. Beckett was an Irish ex-pat, living most of his life in Paris; he wrote these novels first in French. I remember wading into Molloy a bit gingerly, expecting pure existential despair, ala Sartre.
Page 1: The narrator is at his mother’s, confused. How did he get here? He’s not sure. Then there’s this:
The truth is I don’t know much. For example, my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she die later? I mean enough to bury.
Enough to bury? I’m sorry, this put me in hysterics. I had him all wrong. Forget French. This was the black, self-lacerating humor of Irish pub stories, of wakes. If you don’t hear the undercurrent of fierce comedy in Beckett, he makes no sense at all.
A few pages later: :
Yes, the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered, believe me or not, if it wasn’t a state of being even worse than life.
Moore: From Belfast, emigrated to Canada. Prolific novelist known also for The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965) and others. BBC Arts included Judith Hearne in among the 100 Most Influential Novels. Maggie Smith starred in the 1987 film adaptation.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n15/colm-toibin/gaelic-gloom
Pym: She was not well-treated by the machinery of publishing, suffered rejection, dismal sales figures, etc. but ultimately prevailed. Her late novel, Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker, and she was elected a fellow of Royal Society of Literature. Five novels were published posthumously. Nine of her books (including Less Than Angels) are in print from Virago Press—like Persephone Books, a major force in reprinting novels by (mainly) British women writers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Pym
O’Hara: This was also a National Book Award winner and bestseller. Filmed in 1958 (same title) with Gary Cooper. O’Hara was a premier short story writer of his era (published in The New Yorker)—highly regarded by other writers of his day. Also known for Appointment in Samarra (1934), BUtterfield 8 (1935), From the Terrace (1959), Sermons and Sodawater (1960).
Here’s a bit from Wiki:
Despite the popularity of these books, O'Hara accumulated detractors due to his outsized and easily bruised ego, alcoholic irascibility, long-held resentments and politically conservative views that were unfashionable in literary circles in the 1960s. After O'Hara's death, John Updike, an admirer of O'Hara's writing, said that the prolific author "out-produced our capacity for appreciation; maybe now we can settle down and marvel at him all over again."
Golding: His second novel, following Lord of the Flies, set in pre-history among the last-surviving band of Neanderthals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritors_(Golding_novel)
Eliade: Wiki’s lengthy piece begins:
. . . a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. One of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and interpreter of religious experience, he established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day.
I talked a little about my history with Eliade here [https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-project-9-you-are-what-you] . . . his studies of myth and ritual were important to me when I was in my early 20s, especially, The Sacred and the Profane (1957) and Myth and Reality (1963). He’s a complex figure, his story tangled up in Romanian political history, exile, arguments/re-evaluations of his writings, etc. Impossible to summarize here. But I’ve learned that he was more of a fiction writer than I’d appreciated.
Kazantzakis: Born on Crete while still part of the Ottoman Empire. Considered the giant of 20th-century Greek lit. Spent fourteen years writing his epic poem, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938). Novels also include Zorba the Greek (1946); wrote travel books, translated Dante, Darwin, Nietzsche and other works into Modern Greek. An ardent socialist at odds with the country’s right-wing government. Nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize in Literature (once losing to Camus by one vote, it’s said). The Last Temptation . . . was deemed blasphemous and obscene by the Greek Orthodox Church and remains controversial among true believers. Kazantzakis led an active and complex life as a public intellectual—read more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis
Kemal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memed,_My_Hawk
Rulfo: This short novel has generated a vast amount of commentary and testimonial. Indeed, this is the fourth time I’ve posted about it—see also:
https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-7-oddball-novels
https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-12-listen-up
Here’s what two of the Latin Boom writers said about the novel (according to Wiki): Gabriel García Márquez has said that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books and that it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 that opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Moreover, García Márquez claimed that he "could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards." Jorge Luis Borges considered Pedro Páramo to be one of the greatest texts written in any language.
Pasolini: Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders:
“Episodic and unpredictable, this novel . . . move[s] effortlessly between scenes of everyday life and moments when characters find their lives in extraordinary danger . . . It’s no easy feat to evoke both the exuberance of young men coming of age and the stark state of post-World War II Italy; Pasolini, in Parks’s translation, does a striking job of it.”
Patrick White: Winner of 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Baldwin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_of_a_Native_Son
The Recognitions: One of the Big Hard Novels from Reading Projects [3].
Wyndham: I’ve never read this guy’s novels, but lists of foundational sci-fi novels always includes at least two of his—this one and his breakthrough book, The Day of the Triffids (1951).
I just ran into a YouTube copy of an hour-long BBC production on Wyndham, “Invisible Man of Science Fiction” (2005 TV Documentary)—the link is disabled if I copy it here, but you can find it easily at YouTube.
He also wrote upwards of a dozen collections of sci-fi short fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wyndham
Bowles: He and wife, Jane, were American ex-pats living in Tangiers. Most readers know Bowles from The Sheltering Sky (1949), or Bernardo Bertolucci’s film with John Malkovich and Debra Winger (1990). But his other novels and story collections are no less compelling—The Spider’s House, The Delicate Prey (1950) and Let It Come Down (1952). In 1957, he published a collection of travel essays with one of the all-time great titles: Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World. Jane Bowles’ novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943), has its own cult following.
Donleavy: Brooklyn-born to Irish parents, moved to Ireland in his early 20s. The Ginger Man is his most recognized work; originally banned for obscenity, it eventually sold upwards of fifty million copies.
Here’s a blurb from Goodreads:
First published in Paris in 1955 and originally banned in America, J. P. Donleavy's first novel is now recognized the world over as a masterpiece and a modern classic of the highest order. Set in Ireland just after World War II, The Ginger Man is J. P. Donleavy's wildly funny, picaresque classic novel of the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American ne'er-do-well studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Dangerfield's appetite for women, liquor, and general roguishness is insatiable--and he satisfies it with endless charm.
Before our novels were full of girls behaving badly they were full of boys behaving badly. I’m thinking of novels like Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959)—one of last year’s finds at Valancourt Books [https://www.valancourtbooks.com/], or films like Alfie (1966)—perhaps you can supply your own list. I’m not thinking evil, but rather doofus-ness, cadishness, cluelessness, opportunism, ethical corner-cutting, and so on. Remember when this was funny? Before we canceled people?
I haven’t read The Ginger Man since I was in my 20s. There are books I know I would no longer find funny—men being assholes to women used to be funny but no longer is . . . well, actually, it depends—on where we draw the line on badness, on whether the jerk later gets what’s coming to him (especially if it involves female empowerment). We like imperfection in our characters—there’s room for improvement, growth. But cultural growth also happens, and sometimes “growth” means seeing things for what they are—slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, anti-semitism, animal cruelty, waste, climate denial . . . despite enormous resistance, we do make some headway against our worstnesses; realizing that misogyny is everywhere and isn’t funny (no matter that we’ve laughed at it for centuries) is a measure of cultural evolution. I remember the lyrics to the song “Hey Joe” hitting me nakedly one day—I heard what was actually being said without the Jimi-filter, the blues-language filter . . .
Hey Joe, I said, where you goin' with that gun in your hand? Oh
I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady
You know I caught her messin' 'round with another man, yeah
Now I cringe. [And—though this note has gone on waaay too long—I remember how Lolita began to feel icky, and how I lost sympathy for critics extolling Nabokov’s genius.]
Undoubtedly this is putting too much weight on The Ginger Man. I’m gonna have to re-read it and see what I think now. In the meantime, thanks to LitHub, here’s Dorothy Parker’s spin on the novel from 1958:
https://bookmarks.reviews/dorothy-parker-on-j-p-donleavys-the-ginger-man/
Greene:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_American
A Good Man:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Man_Is_Hard_to_Find_and_Other_Stories
Shute: Here’s the note on Shute from Reading Projects [4]: Speculative Fiction. This one of several that changed its title when published in the U.S. The original British title, Requiem For a Wren, depended on knowing that a Wren was a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service during World War II. A sad story—about a Wren who makes a well-intentioned mistake and must live with it.
I am glad to see you wrote about Kazantzakis. I read The Last Temptation of Christ as a 19 year old at university -- for some reason I recall having read this during my Junior year study abroad program in Japan -- but never did read Zorba the Greek (or see the movie). As I recall, Last Temptation has Jesus as a VERY human guy, subject to all the usual human frailties -- including a normal adult male sex drive, along with self-doubt and existential questioning as to why HE had to fulfill his heavenly father's mission on earth, which of course was to end with his crucifixion. Along the way, though, there were many temptations -- let's just say that in 1st century Judea, Jewish prophets were kind of like ROck Stars, and they attracted groupies. We'll leave it at that.
Some months after reading the book, I visited Greece on my way back to the States, and stayed for a week in a cheap hotel (The Phaedra - also the name of a film starring Melina Mercouri), which for the equivalent of 5 bucks US a night, ans leaning out over the balcony slightly more than was recommended, could give you a free view of the Son et Lumiere show playing on the Acropolis. The hotel was adjacent to a nameless tavern which had a juke box (this was the '60's) whose 3 or 4 records included the well-known theme from the 1960 film, Never on a Sunday (also starring Melina Mercouri). I don't recommend that you try clicking thru to the theme song on Youtube: it is veritable ear-worm material.
To continue to bore you with my recollections from a half-century ago, a month after Greece I was in England with my then-GF and visiting her various family members on a get-acquainted tour (this was in preparation for us getting married the following year). One distant relation was a rather elderly Anglican cleric who was a professor of comparative religion at Cambridge. I was eager to make a good impression and let on that I had read Kazantzakis' Last Temptation of Christ -- which was quite controversial and banned in Greece by the conservative military Junta of the day --and over lunch at a Cambridge watering hole gave him a blow by blow synopsis of all the most shocking bits.
The good Reverend was sufficiently broad-minded to not be alarmed at the prospect of having such a Free Thinker joining the family that he agreed to conduct our wedding the following year.
On Wyndham, The Chrysalids was the first of his I read, the gateway drug. Some SciFi doesn’t age well but his has - at least I think so.