November 2019 – The Spider's House

‘The poem, like most of my poems, and like the story I’d promised to expand, conflated fact and fiction, and it occurred to me – not for the first time, but with a new force – that part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.’

(Ben Lerner, 10:04)

In a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, an interview with the American writer Ben Lerner about his new semi-autobiographical novel The Topeka School could be heard back-to-back with a discussion between Olivia Sudjic and Meena Kandasamy on the nature and rise of autofiction. I read Sudjic’s Exposure earlier this year. At the time of listening to the programme I had just finished reading Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 in preparation for reading The Topeka School. As I write these words now, I turned the final page of Kandasamy’s third novel Exquisite Cadavers about half an hour ago.

Kandasamy has spoken of how Exquisite Cadavers is in part a response to the response surrounding her second novel, When I Hit You, much of which had the effect of relegating this singularly audacious, virtuoso autofictional essay on the radical power of literature to the domain of misery memoir. As part of the discussion on Open Book, Kandasamy was upfront about the repeated frustration she has experienced in being subjected to this kind of commentary:

‘When I wrote my second novel and it was very personal, people would reduce the whole thing to “oh, she just wrote about what happened to her”. Most of the emphasis was on the ‘what happened to her’ part of it, as opposed to the fact that ‘she wrote about it, and she’s creating a work of art here’. The fact that you’re a woman, the fact that this is an artistic endeavour that’s taken years to write is just erased.’

Sudjic was quick to confirm that her experience as a writer has thus far been very similar and I could have listened to their conversation for hours:

‘Autofiction when it’s written by women is often seen as this indulgent thing where they’re writing about themselves, and I find that so strange, because what they’re really doing is drawing attention to the frame. It’s a technique that sits next to metafiction really, which is drawing attention to how it’s all constructed, and I find it very frustrating that that’s what gets ignored when it’s women doing it, whereas for example with Ben Lerner, everyone’s very on board with reading those books as real, structural, artistic works, rather than constantly asking him what his mother thinks about the way she’s represented in them.’

Exquisite Cadavers is a brave and important work on so many levels. With a structure partly inspired by Derrida’s 1974 novel Glas, it presents a fictional story of a mixed-race couple living in contemporary London alongside margin notes detailing the ideas, events and research that inspired it. As the book progresses, the invented story and the autobiographical elements begin in their own strange way to coalesce, each illuminating the other in a way that reads as a genuine representation of the way fiction is actually created. It’s a brilliant achievement, and what I love most about it – as with When I Hit You – is its visceral revelation of the power literature can still wield, not in spite of its ‘literariness’, but because of it. The ‘lived experience’ is the creation of these words, these sentences, this body of work, not the facsimiles of experiences described, which may or may not be ‘true’ but who the hell cares? What we care about is what is on the page, the experience that brings reader and writer closer together.

The irony, as Sudjic points out, is the extent to which she and Lerner and Kandasamy are engaged in similar literary endeavours, as set against the peculiar distance that is drawn between them by many readers and commentators. I loved Lerner’s first two novels so much I found myself weeping in gratitude. I cannot imagine a more important writer right now than Kandasamy. I found Sudjic’s polemic in Exposure vitally enlightening and, safe in the knowledge that her second novel Asylum Road is coming down the line soon from Bloomsbury, I am about to begin reading her debut, Sympathy.

I’m saving The Topeka School for the week between Christmas and Hogmanay. Far from being played out, the novel today is more exciting than it’s been for years.

This year marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the work that is generally proclaimed as the first English novel. To mark this tricentenary, the BBC is launching a major new TV series exploring the phenomenon of the novel and the impact this art form has had, on our imaginative lives as individuals and on our development as a society. As part of its year-long celebrations, the BBC invited a panel of six well known writers and cultural commentators – Stig Abell, Syima Aslam, Juno Dawson, Kit de Waal, Mariella Frostrup and Alexander McCall Smith – to assemble a list of one hundred English-language novels they feel have exerted a major impact – both on them personally, and on our cultural life as a nation.

“We asked our prestigious panel to create a list of world-changing novels that would be provocative, spark debate and inspire curiosity,” explains Jonty Claypole, the director of BBC Arts. “It took months of enthusiastic debate and they have not disappointed. There are neglected masterpieces, irresistible romps as well as much-loved classics. It is a more diverse list than any I have seen before, recognising the extent to which the English language novel is an art form embraced way beyond British shores.”

A very conscious attempt to challenge the canon, then, which is much to be applauded. The list certainly encourages debate – there are titles here that almost everyone will agree on rubbing shoulders with titles that will leave some critics rolling their eyes and tutting about standards. This is all part of the fun of the thing, of course – and I’m greatly looking forward to all the upcoming documentaries, discussion programmes and author profiles the BBC is promising us.

The whole business has got me thinking, though, about the impossibility of assembling a list that will have meaning for everyone. The panellists have helpfully arranged their choices into ten broad categories: Coming of Age, Love and Romance, Crime and Conflict, Politics, Power and Protest, Identity, Adventure, Family and Friendship, Class and Society, Life, Death and Other Worlds and, tantalisingly, Rule-Breakers. It’s as good a way of organising one’s thoughts as any, but reading is, above all, personal, and so it is inevitable that everyone who encounters this list will respond with more enthusiasm to some categories than others.

There is also the perennially vexed question of how you choose, what criteria come into play when making selections. It would seem obvious that anyone compiling such a list as part of a curriculum for a course of study, say, or curating an anthology, or indeed setting down a framework for a BBC Arts series has a duty to be as wide-ranging and representative as possible. We would want such a list to encompass the novel across all periods in its development. We should also demand that such a list be inclusive – of women writers, LGBTQ+ writers, writers from diverse social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Lists that fail to be inclusive will – directly or indirectly – help to shore up existing boundaries and biases, leading to a lopsided, restrictive view of literature and the potential alienation of millions of new readers and writers.

If we are choosing just for ourselves, though, our choices will naturally reflect our personal biases, our life experiences as readers, and I would argue that this is a tendency that should not be stifled but actively celebrated. If I were to find myself perusing a list of Hilary Mantel’s favourite books, or Nicola Barker’s, or Will Self’s, I would want to get a genuine insight into their thought processes and working methods, their personal literary canon. The books that made them writers, in other words. I would not be nearly as interested in seeing a list of titles they believe might make them look politically acceptable, intellectually on trend, or – heaven forbid – a nice person. I want to get at the meat.

There is huge value in group discussions of what literature represents and who it is representing. When I look back at how my own reading might have been shaped by such discussions – or lack of them – within the British education system I find myself interested and disturbed in equal measure. But there is also value in individual response, in laying bare our personal proclivities and blind spots, the ragged and digressive path of our creative development. In examining our choices, we offer ourselves the opportunity for reflection, and, perhaps, change. In looking at what is important to us now, we begin to wonder what might be more important to us in ten years’ time.

So in celebrating the tricentenary of Robinson Crusoe, I’m suggesting we all get naked! Here below you will find my own list – not of novels that shaped our world necessarily, but of novels that irrevocably, unequivocally shaped MY world. My main criterion in assembling this list has been that anyone reading it should be able to tell a lot, maybe everything, about who I am as a writer, how my literary interests have developed and what makes me tick. The one rule I set for myself was that no author could be represented on the list more than once. My selection parameters differ slightly from those of the BBC panel in that I have included works in translation. Novels written in languages other than English have been so central to my life and to my thinking that a list that did not include them would be practically meaningless. In similarly cheating vein, I have also included two poetry collections, and three short fiction collections. In the case of the Eliot and the Plath, these works have been so central to my literary outlook that leaving them off would feel like a lie. In the case of Oyeyemi and Wood, I wanted both these authors to be on my list, and these happen to be my favourite works by them. In the case of the Williams, her debut novel isn’t out yet and her collection Attrib. is too important to me not to be included.

In the case of the four series I’ve included, it’s simple tit for tat: if the BBC can have the whole of Harry Potter, I can have the Tripods.

After careful thought, I decided that rather than arranging my list alphabetically I would list the books chronologically, that is, the order in which I personally first encountered them. I cannot be one-hundred percent accurate about this – I no longer remember if I read Picnic at Hanging Rock before The Turn of the Screw or vice versa – but it’s as close to the truth as I can get. There are also authors I read other works from before the one cited – I read Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden when I was fourteen, for example, well over a decade before Enduring Love, but it’s the later novel that has left the most lasting impression, and so that’s the one I’ve chosen.

The earliest book cited here forms one of very first reading memories and my heart still clenches every time I see the cover. The most recent, I haven’t quite finished yet but I know already that it’s a keeper. Are there books I feel sad not to have included? Dozens.

It’s been a fascinating list to compile. One of the things that pleases me most about it is that it includes only two books – the scintillating and important Wide Sargasso Sea, the seminal Nineteen Eighty-Four – that happen to coincide with those selected by the BBC panel. Which only goes to show how individual a passion reading is, how many game-chamging, groundbreaking masterpieces we have to choose from, and be inspired by.

100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED MY WORLD

Borka: the Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers by John Burningham

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Stig of the Dump by Clive King

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

Thursday’s Child by Noel Streatfield

‘Adventure’ series by Willard Price

The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones

Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

‘UNEXA’ series by Hugh Walters

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

‘Changes’ trilogy by Peter Dickinson

‘Tripods’ trilogy by John Christopher

The Dolls’ House by Rumer Godden

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

Watership Down by Richard Adams

The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Pavane by Keith Roberts

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

The Drought by J. G. Ballard

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Search for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Ada by Vladimir Nabokov

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell

Ghost Story by Peter Straub

The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Personality by Andrew O’Hagan

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The Gunslinger by Stephen King

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

Shroud/Eclipse by John Banville

My Tango with Barbara Strozzi by Russell Hoban

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Shriek: an afterword by Jeff VanderMeer

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Glister by John Burnside

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

The Kills by Richard House

A Russian Novel by Emmanuel Carrère

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano

The Dry Salvages by Caitlin R. Kiernan

In the Shape of a Boar by Lawrence Norfolk

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

The Accidental by Ali Smith

Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn

F by Daniel Kehlmann

Straggletaggle by J. M. McDermott

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble

All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson

The Infatuations by Javier Marias

Outline by Rachel Cusk

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates

This is Memorial Device by David Keenan

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Attrib. by Eley Williams

Berg by Ann Quin

When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

Munich Airport by Greg Baxter

Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz

The Sing of the Shore by Lucy Wood

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Month: November 2019

Pure love for words

100 Novels that Shaped My World

The Dollmaker: AMA

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