Birth Year Project: 1989
Well-Known/Bestselling Fiction:
Clear and Present Danger, Tom Clancy
The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett1
A Time to Kill, John Grisham
The Russia House, John le Carré
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
Seven Works of World Literature:
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel [Mexico]2
Naustet (Boathouse), Jon Fosse [Norway]
Sweet Days of Discipline, Fleur Jaeggy [trans. from the Italian by Tim Parks (1991) [Switzerland]3
The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai [Hungary]4
The End of a Brave Man, Hanna Mina [Syria]5
Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee [India/America]6
The Great Indian Novel, Shashi Tharoor [India]7
Two Novels Cited in Earlier Posts:
Hyperion, Dan Simmons
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Six Literary Books That Subsequently Became Well-Known:
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn8
London Fields, Martin Amis
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Julian Barnes
Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
American Appetites, Joyce Carol Oates
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
One I Found While Researching This Year:
A Failure to Zig-Zag, Jane Vandenburgh9
My List:
Affliction, Russell Banks10
Nebraska [stories], Ron Hansen11
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos12
August Heat, Beth Lordan13
Lust and Other Stories [stories], Susan Minot14
The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick15
Ordinary Love and Goodwill [novellas] Jane Smiley
Family Sins and Other Stories [stories], William Trevor16
Loss of Flight, Sara Vogan17
Follett: He’d been a writer of thrillers, but here was a novel about the construction of 12th century English cathedral. Gothic architecture, the murder of Thomas Becket, the goings on within a fictional priory. It was a massive success in the marketplace, spawning a miniseries, a video game, three sequels and a prequel. Read it myself—pretty engrossing, actually.
Laura Esquivel: The film (1992) was a delight—a beautiful example of magical realism (the tears of the lovesick daughter fall into the batter for the wedding cake; later, the guests are overcome with longing, leading to a scene of mass vomiting . . . OK, I know it sounds gross, but it’s a beautiful story.
Jaeggy: An intense, unusual writer whose work I’m not equipped to describe. Her Wiki is little help. Here are a couple of others:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/fleur-jaeggy-thinks-nothing-of-herselfhttps://www.andotherstories.org/authors/1177/
Melancholy of Resistance: Here’s James Wood [The New Yorker]: ". . . a comedy of apocalypse, a book about a God that not only failed but didn't even turn up for the exam . . . The Melancholy of Resistance is a demanding book, and a pessimistic one, too, since it seems to take repeated ironic shots at the possibility of revolution. . . . The pleasure of the book . . . flows from its extraordinary, stretched, self-recoiling sentences, which are marvels of a loosely punctuated stream of consciousness."
Hanna Mina:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_MinaJasmine: From LitHub:
When Jasmine was first published in 1989, the New York Times called it “one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American.” Thirty years later, Jasmine has only grown in its significance. With a new introduction by Mira Jacob for this thirtieth-anniversary edition, Jasmine is a masterful examination of identity, immigration, and sexuality from the “Matriarch of Indian-American literature.”
The Great Indian Novel: A wicked satire that transfers the epic Mahabharata to the Indian Independence Movement.
Geek Love: Maybe this is the year I read this . . . started it once, got weirded out, put it down. But people admire the hell out of it, so I ought to try again. Katherine was a cool old-timer when I crossed paths with her at Pacific University’s MFA Program where she was a visiting writer. She gave a craft talk on swearing, which everyone ate up. I just now found it was printed (posthumously) in the Paris Review. A link to that:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/26/on-cussing/And a Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Dunn
Vandenburgh:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_VandenburghBanks: I’ve read maybe half of his novels, but ever since I had his daughter Danis in a workshop in the 90s, I felt a connection to him. We intersected once at a writer’s conference in Homer, Alaska, held on the summer solstice. Besides the conference, he was doing a piece for Esquire: they’d deliver him a vehicle of his choice, he’d drive around for a week and write about it. Thus, a memory: Russell and I making a late-night emergency run to a convenience store (smokes for him, junk food for me) in the shiny black Hummer he’d requested, horizontal sunlight burnishing the hull of a container ship passing the Homer Spit.
Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter (1991) were the first two of his novels I read, the former a story of two brothers, the latter (using a cohort of first-person narrators) based on a school bus tragedy. Both were subsequently filmed—The Sweet Hereafter (1997) was directed by Canadian filmmaker, Atom Egoyan, and was my introduction to Sarah Polley as an actress (she went on to direct the adaptation of fellow Canadian Miriam Toews’ novel, Women Talking [book (2018), film (2022)].
Banks was a powerful, humane writer whose work ranged across social strata and history. If you haven’t read him, you should.
Hanson: At last count Hansen has published ten novels, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983) and Mariette in Ecstasy (1991), but it’s this early short story collection that won my admiration, especially the story, “Wickedness” (about the Blizzard of 1888) and the title story, a portrait of a small town, which contains this small, homely observation that delights me beyond reason:
Mrs. Antoinette Heft is at the Home Restaurant, placing frozen meat patties on waxed paper, pausing at times to clamp her fingers under her arms and press the sting from them.
Mambo Kings: The story of two brothers, musicians, who emigrate from Cuba to NYC in the 1950s. An international bestseller, later a film (1992) and a musical (2005). Awarded the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His next novel, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993), was the source of my writing principle, The Hijuelos Revelation: Because I wrote short fiction, which typically focused on only one or two characters, I needed this insight to help me open my novels to a bigger cast: If you’re stuck, write about a different sister.
Lordan: I have a distant memory of writing Lordan a fan letter after reading something of hers and getting to know her and her work that way. Anyway, she is a writer of close observation and sympathy, not prolific, but worth knowing.
Minot: I was surprised to learn that after I’d known her as a story writer/novelist, she wrote plays, also screenplays: Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996), starring Liv Tyler, and (along with Michael Cunningham) the adaptation of her 1998 novel, Evening (2007).
The title story of Lust is essentially a chronological list of the narrator’s lovers. As I mentioned in Suprise Me, it’s a good example (along with David Markson’s Notecard Quartet) of how a pile of items (lovers, reading notes) can have the beginning/middle/end structure. In “Lust,” the earliest experience has the quality of firstness—the narrator’s initiation into sex, the reader’s initiation into the story; the middle has middlesness; the end achieves the feeling of lateness/finishedness/exiting/ by focusing on the mood of aftermath following a sexual encounter.
Ozick: Though not prolific, she’s had a long fruitful writing life. Here’s a piece on her from the Jewish Virtual Library:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cynthia-ozickTrevor: As I said in Reading Projects [9]: You Are What You Read, Trevor was essential to my development as a sentence writer. He came from an older world—his rhythms, his diction, his world-view was so removed from my Massachusetts upbringing, yet as I aged I felt a strong affinity for his writing, his sensibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Trevor Vogan: Sara was my friend in Missoula, Montana, in the 1970s and 80s. She’d just published her first novel, In Shelly’s Leg (1981). We both taught for Montana’s Writers-in-the-Schools Program and had books of stories in the University of Illinois Press Short Fiction Series—mine: Home Fires (1982); Sara’s Scenes From the Homefront (1987).
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/06/obituaries/sara-vogan-43-dies-novelist-and-teacher.html
I loved a lot of books from this year. I taught Good Will for years from Jane Smiley's pair.
I couldn’t get into Geek Love, either, but that was years ago. May be worth another look. I loved Mambo Kings.