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English authors

Started by Twit 2, October 06, 2017, 06:40:19 PM

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Twit 2

I have barely read any classics by British authors; maybe Frankenstein...and ...er...struggling to think.
I love tons of authors in translation as well as a lot of American and Irish stuff. But I just don't see the appeal whatsoever in stuff like Dickens, Austen, Eliot and all that. Am I missing something?

buttgammon

I don't like Dickens or Austen either (though I do make a bit of an exception for Great Expectations, which has its moments), but I really love the Brontes - Jane Eyre just might be the greatest novel written by an English author. But in general, I seem to have an issue with canonical English stuff as well, despite loving lots of the Irish, American and French classics.

mr beepbap

No. Did a degree in Eng Lit and used to choose modules and books to avoid like the plague.  Same again when became English teacher . Just boring , irrelevant unreadable stuff to me. A real grind. Avoid Austen at all costs. Did Pride/Prej for A Level. 60 odd chapters and after ch.1 thought "FFS ,  this book is just gonna be about her getting with this arrogant prick. "Spoiler -60 chapters later, yes it was.
In my degree had a crack at Ulysess. Gave up in chapter 1 when I couldn't work out if it was a guy on land looking at a boat or a guy on a boat looking at land.
I would just read what you like instead of what you think you should be and don't worry if you think the 'classics' are boring as fuck

Serge

Occasionally I do feel mildly guilty that I haven't really read any of the 'classics' - Austen, Brontes, Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, etc - with the exception of 'Far From The Madding Crowd', which admittedly was good, but didn't really make me want to dig into any more Hardy, and about half of 'Pickwick Papers', which I remember very little about. Then I remember that they probably would bore me to death, and as I never had to study them, I've just been able to get on with reading whatever I like, which is a lot more fun.

the ouch cube

'Tess Of The D'Ubervilles' I thought was nicely bleak and Schopenhauerian, and (just about) on the right side of melodrama.

'Wuthering Heights' is perhaps on the wrong side of melodrama, though it is quite impressive what a dense, confusing, experimental work it is.

Can't really get on w/ Dickens. Austen is freezingly tedious.

My fave classic is 'Confessions Of A Justified Sinner', but that's Scottish not English.

18th century comic novels could hold some more interest for someone interested by modern literature because there's usually more disruption of the stories being told. Of those I could cautiously recommend Fielding's Joseph Andrews which the narrator designs in short chapters as if it were a long walk needing some rests at inns and some longer overnight halts between the large sections - this could get tiresome before the end but I enjoyed it for a while - and Johnson's shorter Rasselas which Howj Begg reviewed recently. But I prefer Tristram Shandy and Gulliver's Travels. I suspect you've already read those two since you mention getting on with Irish novels. Anyway I find that there's less difference between English and Irish humour in the 18th century novel than in 20th century novels.

In the 19th century you might find something against the grain in Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey or in James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner but Hogg was Scottish. I recently heard James Kelman discussing the importance of the latter for him, saying that it anticipates certain narrative effects usually credited to modernists. On the subject of confessions, Confessions of an English Opium Eater has always sounded entertaining to me but I've never got around to reading it. In the 20th century I like Graham Greene best of the major English classics (Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair). Is B.S. Johnson a classic?

In the area that you highlighted I enjoyed David Copperfield despite its being extremely long and sentimental and Wuthering Heights which gripped me when we studied it at school. I'd like to read more 19th century novels but Hardy's poetry dampened the small interest I once had in reading Jude the Obscure recommended to me as an especially gloomy and pessmistic novel, while all the television adaptations of Eliot, Austen and the Brontë sisters have put me off bothering with most of them.

Why not try devoting yourself to Shakespeare? I remember Doomy Dwyer planned a year of doing that and never came back.

Edit: Some similarities with the ouch cube there I see. Maybe try Wuthering Heights if you haven't already.

Serge

Quote from: the ouch cube on October 06, 2017, 09:51:15 PMMy fave classic is 'Confessions Of A Justified Sinner', but that's Scottish not English.

Oh yeah, I have read that, it's fantastic.

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on October 06, 2017, 09:52:21 PMIn the 20th century I like Graham Greene best of the major English classics (Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair). Is B.S. Johnson a classic?

I think for the most part anything post-1900 is probably not going to cause me the same problems I fear I would have with most things pre- that date. I've read a lot of Graham Greene, find him very readable, and you have reminded me that I really must get around to reading B.S. Johnson.

The two classics that spring to mind that I love are both comic novels - 'Three Men In A Boat' and 'The Diary Of A Nobody'. 'Three Men...' is just astonishingly funny. In fact, I might have to start a separate thread for that....

Twit 2

Great recommendations, as always. I read the de Quincey at uni and loved it, and of course I love Shakespeare. I was thinking more of novelists, though, than any English writing whatsoever. Wuthering Heights and Hardy would probably be my cup of tea. Are either (JC or TF) Powys worth a crack? John Gray thinks a lot of Mr Weston's Good Wine...

Dr Rock

William Blake?

edit, I know he's more a poet than a novelist, but then Shakespeare didn't write books and I see he's in this thread, so there.

Dr Rock

And count me as another that doesn't think much of Jane Austen but loves Bronte's Jane Eyre

'Three Men In A Boat' and 'The Diary Of A Nobody' are great too.

Shame Irish authors are out or I'd recommend 'The Third Policeman' by Flann O'Brien. Maybe we should let them in, someone already said how impenetrable 'Ulysses' is.

Twit 2

Ulysses is fucking great, leave it out of this please.

mr beepbap

Was he on the boat or on the land?

selectivememory

Have you read any Virginia Woolf? I'd feel quite comfortable recommending her to someone who likes Joyce. I'm not sure I can think of novel by an English author I like more than To the Lighthouse.

zomgmouse


Twit 2

Quote from: mr beepbap on October 06, 2017, 11:23:45 PM
Was he on the boat or on the land?

Does it matter?

Quote from: selectivememory on October 06, 2017, 11:27:11 PM
Have you read any Virginia Woolf? I'd feel quite comfortable recommending her to someone who likes Joyce. I'm not sure I can think of novel by an English author I like more than To the Lighthouse.

I did my modernist's duty and read The Waves, which I liked.

Middlemarch tops everything for me, books, music, films, the lot. It's Eliot's narrator voice above all that I love. It's so intense, so intelligent and perceptive about people and the illusions they cling on to- especially the illusions of educated people.  Eliot translated some important German books with atheist themes into English, but the spirit of Middlemarch is a kind of Level 2-atheism where the woolly ideas that people use to take the place of religion get themselves revealed to be pathetic.  Sentimental and half-baked ideas about love, education, science and art all get a good kicking as does the idea of martyrdom in the name of a great cause.

But the main reason I like it, the reason it changed my life really, is that it achieves this scorching intensity of vision without ever crossing into insanity or nihilism, as so many of the 20th century classics do. It's this that makes it a greater achievement than anything by Joyce or Woolf, for example:it's relentlessly sane, which might not sound like the most thrilling prospect, but personally it showed me the way out of a curious kind of addiction to fucked-upness.

shh

Try 'Far From the Madding Crowd'. I think the problem with the classics is that people usually encounter them in the form of BBC adaptations intended to sell a certain idea of Britain to the world, and therefore not unreasonably dismiss them as no more than novelistic beefeaters. To me anyway, Hardy writes about real human beings and not workers in the heritage industry.

Patrick Hamilton (Slaves of Solitude) for bleak unfulfilled inter-war lives.

Wodehouse, EF Benson, Laurence Sterne ('British') or Evelyn Waugh for laughs.

They are for children, and Boris Johnson and Walt Disney will have made reading him less palatable to some, but Kipling's Jungle Books really are worth reading. ('Plain Tales from the Hills' is for adults, but the quality of the stories is less consistent).

TF Powys for someone a bit more out of the way. I'm not sure he was ever popular enough to be a 'classic' but 'Unclay' & 'Mr Weston's Good Wine' are sorrowful fatalistic earthy Hardyesque 'Christo-pagan' little gems.

newbridge

Quote from: mr beepbap on October 06, 2017, 08:20:47 PM
In my degree had a crack at Ulysess. Gave up in chapter 1 when I couldn't work out if it was a guy on land looking at a boat or a guy on a boat looking at land.

The key is to try and read Finnegans Wake first.

the science eel

Quote from: shh on October 07, 2017, 03:49:45 PM

Patrick Hamilton (Slaves of Solitude) for bleak unfulfilled inter-war lives.



Oh, Christ, he's amazing. Read everything the bastard ever wrote. Hangover Square is my favourite.

Does that include Rope? In Hitchcock's film version the attraction to Nietzsche is completely attached to Hitler but the play was written in 1929. I wondered if it carried more ambivalence or equally undermined the appeal of the superman.

Quote from: Astronaut Omens on October 07, 2017, 03:52:36 AM
Middlemarch tops everything for me, books, music, films, the lot. It's Eliot's narrator voice above all that I love. It's so intense, so intelligent and perceptive about people and the illusions they cling on to- especially the illusions of educated people.  Eliot translated some important German books with atheist themes into English, but the spirit of Middlemarch is a kind of Level 2-atheism where the woolly ideas that people use to take the place of religion get themselves revealed to be pathetic.  Sentimental and half-baked ideas about love, education, science and art all get a good kicking as does the idea of martyrdom in the name of a great cause.

But the main reason I like it, the reason it changed my life really, is that it achieves this scorching intensity of vision without ever crossing into insanity or nihilism, as so many of the 20th century classics do. It's this that makes it a greater achievement than anything by Joyce or Woolf, for example:it's relentlessly sane, which might not sound like the most thrilling prospect, but personally it showed me the way out of a curious kind of addiction to fucked-upness.

Would anyone else be interested in reading (or remembering) Middlemarch based on this review? We could attempt to start a CaB book club for the new board. By using the classics it might be easier to get a few people with different tastes to commit to the same book at the same time, but we could also recommend and vote for novels to read.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: the science eel on October 07, 2017, 06:00:10 PM
Oh, Christ, he's amazing. Read everything the bastard ever wrote. Hangover Square is my favourite.

Came in to mention him. So bleak.

Jerzy Bondov

I think The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the secret best Brontë novel. It has the nested structure of Wuthering Heights and the strength of Jane Eyre. Gilbert is a very funny narrator and Helen is a heartbreaking one. And Huntingdon is the greatest Byronic arsehole of any Brontë novel. Give it a bash.

Genevieve

...and an important early feminist novel cruelly suppressed by Charlotte so Anne B deserves our coins.  I'd be up for doing that as well as Middlemarch in a book club. 

I'm never quite sure what's meant by classic, I tend to think pre-1900 and very well known but anyway.  Also if you do mean British not English, Irish writers would have been included during certain periods so we probably are best sticking to the individual nations.  I've read quite a lot of Hardy, for some reason the less celebrated ones especially, people say it's depressing but so am I so it's fine with me.  I find his English easier to read than Brontes, Austen, Dickens.  How about trying Mrs Gaskell, DH Lawrence, EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh and Daphne du Maurier?  I'll break my rule to add Muriel Spark.

Quote from: Genevieve on October 07, 2017, 07:40:10 PM
...and an important early feminist novel cruelly suppressed by Charlotte so Anne B deserves our coins.  I'd be up for doing that as well as Middlemarch in a book club.

Good. I'll start another thread.

Quote from: mr beepbap on October 06, 2017, 08:20:47 PM
In my degree had a crack at Ulysess. Gave up in chapter 1 when I couldn't work out if it was a guy on land looking at a boat or a guy on a boat looking at land.
Quote from: mr beepbap on October 06, 2017, 11:23:45 PM
Was he on the boat or on the land?

They start at the top of the Martello Tower (now a Joyce museum on the Dublin coast) looking out to sea and halfway through the chapter Stephen, Buck Mulligan and Haines go outside still looking out at the sea from the bay.

mr beepbap

Ah nice one! Been wondering about that for 20 years!