Thirty-eight novels I often think of

Gilgamesh – Anon. (c. 800 BC)

Unlike the Odyssey, where Odysseus’ character is fixed, this is a Bildungsroman. The first hero of literature learns the meaning of friendship, that Eros is a civilizing force, the poignancy of death, accepts his mortality, and becomes a better king.

The Odyssey – “Homer” (c. 800 BC)

My father read it to me as a child, and I read it to my children. It shaped my idea of what it is to be a person. Unlike Gilgamesh, Odysseus’ identity, though often disguised, is ever fixed at the core.

The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu (11th century AD)

Embodies the role of time in human affairs in a way comparable in my reading only to Proust. I find the first sentence of the fifth volume the most moving in literature (But it will mean little to you unless you have read up to it, so there’s no use cheating.).

La Princesse de Clèves – Madame de La Fayette (1678)

This novel is, so-to-say, the good twin of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, see below. It is the story of two extraordinarily high-minded lovers trying to cope with possible adultery. It’s not widely known in English, but in France it is an icon. President Sarkozy’s scorn of putting questions about this novel in civil service exams provoked demonstrations and public readings. It is regarded as the beginning of the psychological novel. What haunts me is a scene where La Princesse waits in controlled turmoil to turn away the man she loves.

Tom Jones – Henry Fielding (1749)

Perfect plotting, perfect characterization of a kind, lots of yucks. The comments of the author provide a basic course in creative writing, and in much else besides.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses – Choderlos de Laclos (1782)

An artillery officer who wrote nothing else of note wrote this book to propagandize his theory that women should be allowed education. One of the cornerstones of the history of the novel. An epistolary novel, which gives De Laclos a wonderful chance to exercise a variety of styles and voices. A story of erotic vengeance. Full of provocative moral and gender relation questions. What gets me is the bitterness of the interest these people have in their own lives.

La Toison d’or – Théophile Gautier (1839)

An idle rich Parisian youth wonders what to do with himself, decides he will fall in love, then wonders what sort of woman to fall in love with, and decides to love a Fleming. He goes to Bruges where he has an affair with a naïve lace maker partly because she resembles a Madonna in a painting. He brings her back to Paris and their future is not clear. I read this when I was about 14 and, oddly, for a significant period in my early life it strongly colored what I imaged romance should be.

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas, père (1844)

My father read this to me and I read it to my children. It’s a potboiler really, but it sticks in my mind.

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

Again it’s the images that stick: the embroidered letter itself, Pearl in the forest, Dimmesdale atop the town scaffold.

Moby Dick – Herman Melville (1851)

It’s the language, which gives Melville mastery over the world in a way few writers achieve. And, because the world is varied, it is the rich variety of language and style. The closest thing to Shakespeare in a novel. Is there an alternate universe in which Strabuck persuades Ahab of his folly and they return rich with oil to Nantucket, where Ahab settles down with his wife and children, and Starbuck opens a coffee shop?

Benito Cereno – Herman Melville (1855)

This is more like Greek tragedy than any other work in prose I know

War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (1864)

Whitney says, reading War and Peace is like visiting old fiends.

L’Éducation sentimentale – Gustave Flaubert (1869)

I read this only after I was married and settled down and realized it is the book I should have read instead of La Toison d’or.

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (1873-77)

A few years ago I attended a talk by Wendy Lesser about re-reading novels. She said that when she re-read Anna Karenina, she found herself feeling that Karenin was right. I was utterly appalled.

À Rebours – J K Huysmans (1884)

This contrarian novel teaches me to keep my nose out of books.

The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy (1886)

My favorite novel. Not the greatest, but the one that speaks, or spoke to me most. The template of a novel I should be working on instead of fussing with this list.

Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy (1895)

This novel contains the scene in fiction that is most horrifying to me. But that’s not why it’s on this list. In the beginning Jude, a farm kid with ambitions to education, is disconcerted to find that learning Latin is not merely learning a substitution code, one word for another, but involves a whole different way of thinking.  His recognition appeals to me because of some obscure misunderstanding I had about the world.

The Lady With the Dog – Anton Chekhov (1899)

The spectacle of two lives wasted, also the background of a good short story I wrote.

The Ambassadors – Henry James (1903)

“If he is to bask in the Jamesian tickle, nothing will restrain him and no other author will to any such extent afford him equal gratification.” – Ezra Pound

The Golden Bowl – Henry James (1904)

Tickled again.

The Dead – James Joyce (1914)

The warmth of family, the snow of death, the quiet desperation of the protagonist’s final reflections.

Victory – Joseph Conrad (1915)

I read this novel when I was a freshperson in college. It taught me that a story, or a sentence in context, could mean more than what was on the page, and made me want to do for others what it had done for me.

Ulysses – James Joyce (1918-20)

I have read it several times starting when I was 14, in a semester class devoted to it, and once in the 24 hours of its own time. You do something like that and it’s hard to get out of your head.

The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann (1924)

Another book that taught me about things meaning more than they say. Also the sexiest heroine for me in literature. In the end the terrible waste of war.

À la recherche du temps perdu – Marcel Proust (1913-1927)

The thread spun by the Fates is not a monofilament but is made of many fibers twisted together on the spindle of Clotho and the wheel of Lachesis. Only Atropos, with her shears, is binary. Proust discerns the fibers in our thin but multiplex life as no other author does. He makes real the complexity of living in time. It was only on the 4th reading that I really understood why Swann married Odette. He also writes sentences that thrill me to my heels.

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf (1927)

Again images haunt me, not specific images so much as the cumulative image of the family on the island. Parts II & III are fine writing but do not haunt me. The poignant images are of disappointment. Mr. Ramsay failing to reach Q, Lilly Briscoe’s various frustrations, the failure to reach the lighthouse. For all her caring and their caring about her, Mrs. Ramsey cannot spare these people disappointment.

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner (1930)

Written before existentialism was widely known, this is an existentialist novel par excellence. Addie Burden allots to each of her children their own kind of being, and they live it out. With 15 narrators, it is an exercise in voices to rival Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It is also the funniest book on this list except for Tom Jones.

The Sound and the Fury/ Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner (1929-36)

Faulkner often writes with combined dread and admiration about stubborn people. The stubbornness of Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying drives the identity of her children; the stubbornness of her husband drives the plot. The Sound and the Fury & Absalom, Absalom! are about the heroic and self-destructive grand gestures of the living ghosts of the old south. We are all stubborn; it makes us who we are and keeps us from, from…from what? From something or other. The prose thrills me.

The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil (1930-1942)

When he began this novel, Musil, an engineer, calculated carefully, based mostly on the life span of his parents and grandparents, how many years he had to live. Unfortunately he died about 10 years earlier than planned. As a result, towards the end of the book it meanders into a copious estuary of printed partial versions, printed versions recalled, long clear alternative passage, short ambiguous alternative passages, sketchy notes, etc. Personally I think he had raised plot issues he could never have resolved, but that doesn’t matter because as a writer the multiplicity of shadowy outcomes is satisfactory, in fact engrossing.

Si j’étais vous – Henry Green (1947)

This novel has problems. It’s burdened with Catholic mumbo jumbo by its convert author. The descriptions and characterization have a creaky 19th century quality that the real 19th century novels on this list escape. Nevertheless it addresses what it might mean to become someone else more seriously than anything I know.

The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett (1953)

The phenomenological effort of identifying these novels in my mind is not easy. I’d been working on this list, more off than on, for months before I realized The Unnamable belonged here. Like The Scarlet Letter it is an image I remember, of the protagonist, reduced to a torso in an urn outside a bar talking to bystanders (or perhaps not that). But it is also the prose, shorn, like the protagonist, of all excess. My wife suggested it was one of the novels on this list preoccupied with identity, perhaps, oddly, most like The Odyssey. The end of that story, where Odysseus, after all his heroic adventures, starts out again, matches The Unnamable’s final words: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on,”

An Imaginary Life – David Malouf (1978)

Exiled in an illiterate, grungy peasant village on the Black Sea, Ovid, the worldly Roman author of the immensely influential poem, The Metamorphosis, finally learns from a feral child what change means.

Soul Mountain – Gao Xingjian (1986)

Who is I? Is he I? Who else is I? Who is she? Is she one or several? What does the answer to that question mean to what I is? This fascinating tale of someone researching folk culture in China dissolves identity as cubism dissolves perspective. Utterly intriguing. A sort of gymnastic for the sense of self.

The Rings of Saturn – W. G. Sebald (1999)

The most often read and praised of Seybold’s novels is Austerlitz. I love it, but think more often of this one, freed from plot compared to Austerlitz. The plot is that a guy walks around East Anglia and thinks about history. I hike though history with him at a walking pace, learning what it means at every step. The book it most resembles in my mind is another I think of often, indeed keep on my desk, which is not a novel: The Essays of Montaigne. A mind scanning the world, past and present together, and in doing so making it more precious.

Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper – Harriet Scott Chessman (2001)

In its way this is like The Dead, a story of what mortality means in the context of family, exquisitely drawn with a bright eye and a knowing hand. Maybe I also like it because it lets me re-visit from another perspective the Paris of The Ambassadors, and visit there with another American family.

Double Vision/Border Crossing – Pat Barker (2003)

A character haunts these two books. He haunts the lives of the other characters menacing, demanding love, and raising painful questions about what it means to be a member of society. He haunts me, as do the more or less inadequate responses of the other characters to him. Barker is the author of several haunting characters that raise similar questions, Billy Pryor in The Regeneration Trilogy, for example.

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

In a way this is an identity novel like Si j’étais vous, Soul Mountain, and The Odyssey. The question is what it means to be human. What haunts me is the heroine’s perspective: cool, engaged, hopeless, and optimistic. It is reconciliation, like Gilgamesh.

The Kreutzer Sonata – Margriet De Moor (2005)

Beethoven wrote a sonata for violin and piano and dedicated it to a violinist named Kreutzer. Beethoven was a quarrelsome fellow and soon fell out with Kreutzer so the dedicatee never played it. Tolstoy wrote a story in which, Ancient-Mariner-like, a man in a train demands that his fellow passenger listen to his story of killing his wife because of his suspicion she had taken as a lover her music teacher, with whom she played Beethoven’s sonata. The married Czech composer Leos Janacek had a period of extraordinary creative flowering in his later years contemporaneous with his (probably unconsummated) affair with a young woman married to another man, which includes a string quartet he titled “The Kreutzer Sonata.” In De Moors’ novel the point-of-view character meets on a plane a music critic who, Ancient-Mariner-like, forces him to listen to the story of his marriage with and suspicions of a woman who is in a string quartet that plays the Janacek composition. None of which fully explains the impression this book made on me. For one thing, I have always been interested in reading and writing about musicians.