The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford – I've written about this one at length before. See my blog post on it HERE. All I can say is that I've never read another novel like it. Twists and turns? Try corkscrews and wormholes. I still read it once a year, just to see how he did it.
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940)
Meet the almost most dysfunctional, chaotic, insane family that has ever been, or at least written about. Sam Pollitt is what would have happened if Alden Pyle from Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" had come back home, married, and had children. They're both American bureaucrats, egoistic idealists, who love mankind, but...
(I can't help but compare Pollitt's mission in Malaya to Pyle's in Vietnam: disastrous, although Pollitt survives his.)
The Pollitts have too many children (and Sam always wants more, and the question is why), too little money, too little love, devotion, faith, warmth or peace - and complete chaos. It's a complete shit-show in lyrical prose.
Jonathan Franzen said of it, "Its prose ranges from good to fabulously good — is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity — and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond. And, worse yet, can never stop laughing at that violence!. . .The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours." Then again, maybe it is.
MY NOTE: I can say that last line because years ago, I met a family straight from hell. They were the parents of the man I'd left Los Angeles with, and they explained so much. A family where the parents were both alcoholic drug addicts who were in their 60s and looked at least 30 years older than that. The parents regularly took off, abandoning their 4, maybe 5 children. The state would come get the kids, eventually, put them in orphanages and/or fostercare, and then the parents would come staggering back, semi-sober, pick them up, and it would all start over again. By the time I met this monstrous couple, they were actively trying to kill each other, and their lack of success was a deep disappointment to many, including me. All of this is absolutely true, and it's not even the worst. I wrote a very long story called Grace about them which I've never been able to find a market for. Probably just too damned dark. Some things no one wants to hear...
Rift by Liza Cody (1988).
This is actually the first coming-of-age book of a young woman I ever read and it doesn't involve love and/or romance. (Huzzah! Passed the Bechdel test!) Fay is working on a film shoot in Kenya and decides to drive to / through Ethiopia, and agrees to deliver a letter across the border from a writer to his estranged lover, Natasha Beyer. She ends up in a nightmare, from the famine, epidemics, armed insurrections, crime(a), and intrigues that take her far too long to catch on to. But Fay finds out that she's willing to do anything to survive, absolutely anything, and she does it. And then she "gets" to live with it.
"It's based on a trip I made myself at a time of famine and revolution. All the places are real, as are a lot of the characters and some of the events. I should not have been there, because to witness events like those and yet be able to do nothing to help made me part of the problem. I thought about it for over 10 years before I dared write about it. But even after 10 years, the trip was, in memory, still so catastrophic that I needed to face it and try to make sense of the experience.
I don't actually believe that writing a novel was the appropriate response, but it's the only skill I can use to remind people about other, godforsaken parts of the world where ordinary folk, just like you and me, endure or die in unbelievable suffering." - Liza Cody, July 2008 (Link - Robert Davis' comment)
My note: To me one of the hallmarks of adulthood is to recognize and admit that you have done something wrong and irreparable: and then learn to live with it, without inflicting the pain and/or self-pity on others, without falling into the too-handy illusion that it really wasn't that bad, and/or diving into any of the many substances or distractions provided by our world to make you even worse... Fay manages that hat trick. That's a reason to read it right there.
Nemesis by Agatha Christie (1971)
This is my personal favorite of the Christie canon, and I feel the most literary of her works. There is far more style and mood in the writing than Christie usually provided.
“It was a neglected garden, a garden on which little money has been spent possibly for some years, and on which very little work has been done. The house, too, had been neglected. It was well-proportioned, the furniture in it had been good furniture once, but had little in late years of polishing or attention. It was not a house, she thought, that had been, at any rate of late years, loved in any way.” (Which sounds to me almost like Shirley Jackson in my favorite of hers, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.)
*There's a similar couple in Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire Chronicles, only neither gets murdered.
Just read it. Just read it. Just read it.
“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson he was not prepared to forget.”
Morel, talking about a stray dog he'd picked up in Berlin which vanished one day. "He wandered all over looking for her, qeustioning people, but it was not a time when people were interested in lost dogs. Finally, someone advised him to go to the pound. He went. The man led him in. It was a place about 50 yards by 10, surrounded with barbed wire. Inside it were about a hundred dogs, mostly mongrels, the kind one saw on every road of Europe or Asia, animals with no pedigree... They gazed at him intensely, hopefully, all except the most discouraged ones, who seemed to know their fate and who did not even raise their heads to look at you. But the others - they had to be seen to be believed, the ones who still hoped to be rescued, and who pricked up their ears and looked at you as if they knew how you felt..." (p. 212)*
And this one seems very timely:
"That someone may simply be fed up with them and their ways and may want to look for another company, that just cannot enter their heads. They can't believe it. There must be a trick about it, a dishonest trick, something crooked, something political, something they can understand. They're so used to sniffing their own behinds that when someone wants to get a breath of fresh air, to turn at last to something different, and more important, and threatened, something that's got to be saved at all costs, it's quite beyond them." (P. 264-265, and always timely)
NOTE: Romain Gary is the only person to have ever won the Prix Goncourt twice, first for Les Racines du Ciel (Roots of Heaven) and in 1975 for La Vie Devant Soi (The Life Before Us). Madame Rosa, the film version of La Vie Devant Soi starring Simone Signoret, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1978. I recommend reading him.
*The first time I read that paragraph, I instantly thought of a scene in Fellini's Satyricon, when Encolpius and Ascyltus wander into an abandoned villa and spend the night with an African slave girl who was left behind, abandoned. She sings, but she doesn't talk. When they leave, she doesn't run after them. There's something missing in her: hope. Which is what happens, over time, to the homeless, the abandoned, the stateless, the orphans.
Which is why we long for stories where (most) villains get their comeuppance, (most) victims get their revenge, and there is always a new beginning and a sure place for the lost and abandoned. Today there's too damned many Successions, Billions, House of Cards,etc. where all that happens to rich villains is that they die of old age in a cushy bed. We want a lot more than that.
The great masters were the Victorians, both in England and in France.
Dickens, except that he would keep killing off someone young and helpless like Little Nell, or abandoned and crippled like Smike, etc., to ram home how bad the baddies were.
Robert Louis Stevenson could get pretty damn dark, too, what with Jekyll and Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae - but oh, Kidnapped (I fell so hard for Alan Breck) and Treasure Island. Loved them both.
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are my two favorites. (I tried the later D'Artagnan stories, but... not that good.) Anyway, we're having the time of our lives watching the new production of The Count of Monte Cristo on PBS. Let's face facts, there's nothing like watching someone betrayed, abandoned, and almost destroyed rise from the ashes and work out complete revenge on all those who did them wrong.
"All human wisdom is contained in these two words – Wait and Hope”
