I guess this is a recipe for disaster, really. Once you get going it's very difficult to confine yourself to just twenty. The idea was prompted by looking at the line-up in the Auckland University English course "Novels since 1900," formerly convened and taught by the late David Wright. His list of eight - or nine, depending on whether you count John Barth as one or two books - was as follows:
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)
- E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
- John Barth, The Floating Opera / The End of the Road (1957/1958)
- Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
- Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
- Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
- Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)
It sure got me thinking, though. I've had to settle on a couple of lists (I'm sorry to say, since the point was supposed to be conciseness): one of English-language novels, one of foreign-language novels I've only read in translation. It's a desperately subjective list. See what additions (and subtractions) you'd like to make yourself:
- Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy (1946-59)
- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
- Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry (1957)
- Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)
- William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
- Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)
- Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann (1972)
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)
- Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
- Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (1978)
- David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978)
- Troy Kennedy Martin, Edge of Darkness (1985)
- Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective (1986)
- Alan Moore, Watchmen (1986-87)
- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
I've cheated by putting in some trilogies and quartets of novels, but I guess I could settle on just one from each series if you want to get really purist about it. Obviously I had the advantage of being able to leave out all of David Wright's authors, also.
There are other features which some might find unusual: two TV-series, each of which seems to me every bit as complex and "written" as a great novel; two Sci-Fi novels; two Fantasy novels; one graphic novel; Australian and NZ authors jostling with the Americans and Brits ... Anyway, there it is.
If I could have, I'd have liked to fit in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954); Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962); Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966); William Golding's Pincher Martin (1956); Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter (1947); C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (1943); Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947); Gerald Murnane's The Plains (1982); John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance (1932); Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958); Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1994) -- something by Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms (1929) is probably my favourite), Kerouac (of course On the Road (1957)); D. H. Lawrence (perhaps Women in Love (1920)?); Wyndham Lewis (The Childermass (1928)); Norman Mailer (Ancient Evenings (1983)?); Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (1934)?); Steinbeck (I guess it would have to be The Grapes of Wrath (1939)); Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)?); Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited (1945)?); and lots more graphic novels (including Blankets (2003), pictured above) but everything you put in means that something else has to come out. That's how I understand the rules of the game, at any rate.
Here's my companion list of foreign language novels (equally contentious, I hope):
- Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk (1912-23)
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27)
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
- Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926)
- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1928-40)
- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)
- Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1943-48)
- Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (1952-59)
- Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy (1956-57)
- Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1957)
- Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
- Mario Vargas Llosa, The Green House (1965)
- Milan Kundera, The Joke (1967)
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (1968)
- Augusto Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme (1974)
- Gunter Grass, The Flounder (1978)
- Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual (1978)
- Marguerite Duras, La Douleur (1985)
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1992-95)
No Brazilian writers there, I'm afraid: Jorge Amado or Clarice Lispector. No Chinese novelists either: I simply don't know their work well enough.
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