Category: underappreciated books
“Every time I try to describe David Grossman’s See Under: Love, I get the same reaction: raised eyebrows and skeptical laughs,” Row says. “One writer, after hearing my attempt at a plot summary, said, ‘That sounds like the worst novel I can possibly imagine.’ OK, so I don’t have much of a future as a book publicist, but I’m going to keep trying to spread the word about this remarkable novel, which seems almost unknown outside Israel, though it’s been available in translation for fifteen years.
See Under: Love is about the Holocaust, about the origins and future of Israel and the persistence of Eastern European Jewish culture in the most extreme circumstances, but it’s so radically ambitious and makes such strange demands on the reader that to call it a “Holocaust novel” is almost beside the point. It’s been compared to The Tin Drum, The Sound and the Fury, and Midnight’s Children, and it certainly belongs in that company. It’s one of the most hallucinatory and transporting experiences I’ve ever had as a reader.”
Jess Row is the author of The Train to Lo Wu (Dial, 2005) and a professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey. His story “For You” will appear this fall in an anthology of Buddhist fiction from Wisdom Publications.
“I would very much like to recommend William Trevor’s novel Other People’s Worlds,” Li writes. “Trevor may not be an underread author but often when he is mentioned, he is called a master of short stories. He is also a master of novels. Other People’s Worlds was published in 1980, Trevor’s eighth novel and twelfth fiction work–just think how many authors’ twelfth book would be considered an early work. (As of last year, Trevor has published twenty-nine books.) It starts with a slightly unconventional wedding between a forty-seven-year old widow and a young, attractive, second-rate actor in a tranquil stone house where everyone tries to stay positive about the marriage, while a sales assistant in a department store in London drinks every night and dreams that the actor, who was the father of her only child, would come to her like a husband. The narrative then moves from one character’s world to another’s and unfolds the most horrible tragedy in a very humane and sympathetic way. Unlike a lot of novels where, by the last chapter or two, we can feel the authors’ eagerness to wrap up everything, Trevor is very patient and makes every line matter till the very end. Read slowly and marvel at this perfect novel.”
Yiyun Li grew up in China and started to publish in English in 2002. She is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
“With all that is going on in Iraq and the world, all the Harry Potter and chick Lit discussions need to take a hiatus,” Desousa says. “Not that I do not read strictly for entertainment. But we are running out of time and in this frame of mind I went out and bought The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. It’s a story of a white South African woman’s journey to the village of her Muslim lover. I think there is no way to understand a religion without experiencing the culture that nurtures it and this book takes its time (another virtue one needs to develop when reading serious lit). It’s a slim novel and it’s amazing how I am not feeling rushed to finish it, but instead am savoring it, one awkward compromise at a time. Ever since I read The House Gun, I have liked Gordimer’s writing. Her treatment of gay men in the novel was so subtly woven into the broader conflict of race.”
Born in Kenya, raised in Goa, corrupted and educated in Bombay, Neale Desousa now lives in Los Angeles. His work has been published in Chiron Review, Slipstream, and is forthcoming in Swink.
“Wright Morris published more than thirty books and won a National Book Award before he died in 1998, yet his work was never widely read and now seems–alas–in danger of slipping entirely from sight. The Works of Love was my introduction to Morris, and it remains my favorite among his novels,” Arvin says. “It is a strange novel, although strange in a manner that is not currently in fashion. Its protagonist, Will Brady, is a Midwesterner, gentle, quiet. He is lonely, but has little bitterness. The book has almost no plot–which usually I cannot bear in fiction, but in Morris’s beautiful, descriptive prose, as the novel drifts on the intense but curiously disengaged observations of Brady, it attains a unique power. Brady rarely knows quite what to make of the world around him or how to react to it, which has a tragic aspect, but it is also unexpectedly liberating, and it allows the novel to explore that extraordinary emotion–difficult to write about and often neglected in fiction–called wonder.”
Nick Arvin is the author of a collection of stories, In the Electric Eden, and a novel, Articles of War, which was published in February.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
“I strongly recommend the book Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War,” Shihab Nye says. “It’s edited by his son Kim Stafford, who also provides the introduction. Poetry and prose by a dedicated, articulate conscientious objector, one of the most beloved poets of the 20th century. Mandatory reading, I think, for anyone troubled by the “news” and deeply helpful for thought processes in a time when “patriotism” has been maligned and misinterpreted in all sorts of dubious ways.”
Naomi Shihab Nye’s books of poetry and prose include Going Going, A Maze Me, Habibi, Sitti’s Secrets, among many others. She lives in San Antonia, Texas.
“Last year I went through a Polish phase,” Alarcón says. “At one point I was doing some serious ethnic profiling, buying almost every book I came across by an author with a Polish surname. Janusz Anderman, Tadeusz Borowski, Bruno Schulz, Maria Kuncewicz, Jerzy Andrzejewski and of course, Ryszard Kapuscinski. I’m not really sure how to explain this, and I can’t really remember how it began. It’s a strange way to come to know a country, a people, a culture-necessarily incomplete of course, especially given that my knowledge base of Polish history is limited to what I learned in high school and whatever I picked up the summer I stayed with a friend in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. But I don’t really know any Polish folks, have never been there, don’t speak the language-but what struck me was how much I recognized in the work. They say that winners write history, but losers write the literature: I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Poland has lost quite a bit throughout history. My own country-Peru-has done its share as well. Maybe that’s what I recognized: the dark humor, the fatalism, the savage beauty of the prose and the strong, unflappable, acidly funny people these authors described. Everything. I won’t lie. I loved all of it. These writers could be Peruvian, I thought. What’s more, I wished they were. We have our own masters, but still.
The novel that has stayed with me most is A Minor Apocalypse by Tadeusz Konwicki. The copy I found at University of Iowa Library was from an old one, but it turns out it has been re-released by Dalkey Archive Press (God bless Dalkey Archive Press) in an the same excellent Richard Lourie translation. I don’t think I’ve ever read a funnier, sadder, stranger novel. When the novel opens, a older man, a writer, is visited by some Communist dissidents: you’re done, they say. You’ve accomplished all you’ll ever do, probably more than you could have hoped, but let’s face it, you might as well kill yourself. They propose he set himself on fire in front of the Congressional building that evening, in protest. The writer agrees to spend the day thinking it over. And so he does, and we follow him as he half-heartedly prepares for his death, writes his last will and testament (which is outrageously funny) and wanders around a crumbling, chaotic Warsaw that is as much a character as any in the novel. Bridges collapse around him, no one seems to know if it’s warm for fall, or cold for spring-but everyone agrees the weather is very, very strange. People stroll onto the scene, disappear, the action and dialogue is almost continuous with very few breaks. Everything is negotiable, everything is unstable, as the narrator gets drunk, falls in love, avoids friends, makes enemies, and prepares for the inevitable. It’s trite to say that I didn’t want this book to end, but it’s true. Konwicki is the real deal.”
Daniel Alarcón is the author of the story collection War by Candlelight.