FIFTY GREATEST NOVELS – AGAIN!

Paul Cummins
Mirror contributing writer

   Wow! I received another wonderful response to my column, FIFTY GREATEST 20TH CENTURY NOVELS. This particular letter was in response to my original article, and to Jeffrey Graham’s response to it. 
   So, we have a genuine conversation going on which I thought I would, again, share with our readers of this column. This response, by a former Santa Monica High School English teacher, Bill Clawson, presents a wonderful, slightly off-beat list of great novels. 
   So, between my first article and the Graham and Clawson lists, we should have enough reading to keep any interested readers busy for the next decade.

   January 31, 2001

   Dear Paul Cummins,
   I wrote this as soon as I read your first column, but I did not send it because It has been on my laptop and I have been having trouble with the machine. However, it always happens that whenever a newspaper prints something about books and reading, the book nuts come out of the bushes (witness your letter from Jeffrey). (Would that we could all come out of the Bushes!)
   I am prompted to write this letter for several reasons, the major one is that I have just read your list of 50 novels in the Mirror. In addition to this, I feel that I know you, as your life and mine have been parallel in Santa Monica for some time. I taught English at Santa Monica High School from 1960 to 1998, published a few screeds over the years and read your poems and writings from time to time.
   I like your list, and find that there are a few titles I haven’t read and that is fairly unusual for most lists I see. I have never got around to reading Gaddis, Jos. Roth, and Solzhenitsyn. 
   I think I’d like to make a list for those of us who have read thousands of books over the years and have read most of the great novels of the 20th Century. And since I have always been interested in quirky titles, I thought I would make a sort of quirky list, not frivolous reading, but just books that might make the second string. These are not all novels and not all from the 20th Century. Some of them are books that I have loved to teach to adolescents, thus learning a great deal myself. Others are books that have taught me things I wanted to know without reading the great long nonfiction, instructive tomes necessary (good examples of this sort of thing are the novels by Umberto Eco—Foucault’s Pendulum, the occult and cabalistic interpretation, Island of the Day Before, how we tried to measure longitude,  and The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery in the medieval church).
   Here goes.
   Beowulf paired with John Gardner’s small but brilliant book Grendel.
   Heart of Darkness paired with Things Fall Apart. These four books, taken together, teach us how to balance our points of view.
   The Campaign by Carlos Fuentes and The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (about Simon Bolivar). We should all know this much history of South America presented inimitably by these wonderful fiction writers.
   Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A mature love story for those mature enough to get it.
   Possession by A.S. Byatt and The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Booklovers’ stories of how booklovers — in this case historians — uncover the mysteries of the past. Again through fiction.
   Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips and Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth. Fiction reveals what slavery is in a way that just knowing about it cannot do.
   None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer. What happens to white liberals and Black African revolutionaries after apartheid is defeated in South Africa. And because of the magnificent writing of Nobelist Gordimer. (I would love to include a short book by the writer Adam Zameenzad titled My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore, but it is probably not available in this country. This is the most amazing book about starving African children whose spirit is so indomitable that it shames saints.)
   There are so many good and entertaining books recently by Native American writers that one should probably do a whole list on them; I recommend three: Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, a chronicle of Indian life following several families from ancient times to today; Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart, The Heirship Chronicles, a surreal journey into the future following the last Indians, their bears, their trees, and their crows; Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, how modern Indians fight their battles with humor and basketball. 
   There are so many books about war, but I am assuming that you have read all the classics, so here are two modern ones: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, You can’t get any closer to the young soldiers in Vietnam than this; and Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier; a man leaves the Civil War and walks home over the mountains. (If you need more or crave WW I, look up the British writer Pat Barker.)
   The American Cormac McCarthy is best known for his recent border trilogy starting with All The Pretty Horses. But I am going to list the ultimate book of violence about violence. Everyone who reads this book says that the violence is so awful, but it is so compelling you cannot stop reading it. The character of the Judge will haunt you long after the book is gone. If you are looking for the roots of violence in this country, here it is. Title: Blood Meridian.
   I put this next book here because it is another ultimate, but don’t read it any time soon after Blood Meridian. Of all the thousands of books that I have read, this is by far the scariest, most existentially frightening book I have ever read. It is by the recent Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago. The title: Blindness. It is so frightening I don’t even want to tell you about it.
   This is so much fun, I could go on for many more pages, and now I have ideas for lists of quirky poetry, science for the nonscientists, most unusual books for teenagers, etc., but let me finish with these: 
   If you enjoy Irish humor and have tried to read Joyce’s Ulysses, relax and laugh out loud as you read Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds.
   You enjoyed Frank McCourt but now you want a real writer about Ireland, try poet Seamus Deane’s novel Reading in the Dark. If you loved Virginia Woolf, read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Can’t handle the whole of Proust, Swann’s Way. If Ken Burns’s Jazz on PBS doesn’t make it, try Toni Morrison’s Jazz. And finally the booklover’s book about booklovers If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler... by Italo Calvino.
   I have to mention a writer who, if I had any clout, I would recommend for the Nobel Prize in literature. Ismail Kadare is an Albanian writer who can teach so much about the Balkans and the Ottoman Turks that people are always amazed by him: Pyramid (about the politics during the building of the great Egyptian pyramids) The Story of H.; The Three Arched Bridge; Chronicle in Stone; Elegy for Kosovo. 
   I’m sure that Harold Bloom would say why mess with the second string if you have not read the 600 or so books in his Western Canon. Well, I tell people, go ahead; it will take you only 20 or 30 years. But then you can start my list, or if on a winter’s night the Western Canon gets too heavy for you, try the second string. I’m starting on my second 60 years of reading, so I have to go now.
   Sincerely, Bill Clawson

   So, thank you Bill. I will soon be running a new article – Fifty Great Non-Fiction Works of the 20th Century – and I hope it generates further dialogue. 

   Paul Cummins is the President of Crossroads, the Founder of New Roads School, and the Executive Director of the New Visions Foundation.