Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of… the 1860's, pt.2 (1865-1869)

James Wood twenty years ago on Sentimental Education:

So it is not really that Flaubert withdraws from his books to become God, for God does not exist. No, he withdraws only to the place that God would occupy if God existed. This strange, vacated metaphysics is reflected in the fiction. The insistent thrust of Flaubert's fiction is towards nullification. He looks upon his fictional world like an angry God who no longer exists. He lays waste to his people; he is disappointed in them. Henry James, who admired Flaubert, rightly complained that Frédéric, the young hero of Sentimental Education, is an uninteresting blank, and that the novel is thus something of an "empty epic." The only burning question of Sentimental Education is whether Frédéric is going to have sex with his various lovers. Frédéric has no other apparent preoccupation.

Perhaps Flaubert wanted to create a character so foolishly vain and empty that he would wander through Paris during the 1848 revolution and nullify the excitements around him. And that he does; bin then the novel also nullifies them, and rather nullifies itself, despite its many ravishments. (It is certainly a great novel.)

Voting for Therese Raquin, not Zola's best, but his only great standalone novel.

I'd say Dostoevsky, Alcott, Flaubert and Tolstoy all have a good shot here.

Personally I will cast what is sure to be the lone vote for Júlio Dinís and A Morgadinha Dos Canaviais, a novel of rural life that is like a warm hug to me, and which I managed to love despite living in rural Portugal myself at the time and knowing he was full of shit. I think of his description of a Portuguese christmas dinner on the regular.

If I could vote for two I'd also cast a vote for The Moonstone, fondly remembered Summer reading, crazily entertaining.

xposts

voted for Our Mutual Friend as I hadn't given Dickens a vote yet. plus having been an English major my classic world lit knowledge is super weak

this is brutal

Dostoevsky will suffer from vote splitting ... The Idiot > The Gambler > Crime and Punishment imo

Sentimental Education and Our Mutual Friend are my favorite Flaubert and Dickens novels

the correct answer is probably War and Peace, even though Tolstoy said it wasn't a novel

I voted for Uncle Silas because Sheridan LeFanu rules

Alice

Some really strong contenders here. Not ready to vote, yet.

Not voting here because there's too many books I haven't read which I can't deny are probably better than the ones I have read.

Alice is such a literary unicorn it is impossible to assess it in the same universe as Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens, or Dostoevsky. It is as iconic as Shakespeare. But how can one say it is 'greater' than those other pinnacles of literature? If one tries to form objective measures by which they may be compared, Alice still scores amazingly high for popularity, familiarity, imagery, metaphor, quotability, even (yes) serious intent.

I just wish Alice's stans weren't such egregious fanboys and that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson weren't such a damaged and creepy human being. It makes it hard to want to endorse them, even if the book itself is innocent of these heavy faults.

For me, if I don't vote Alice, it will have to be The Idiot. It feels better if I don't reveal which.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

https://i.imgur.com/uZIIGvx.jpg

I'm impressed by how well read you all are. I've only read Alice.

Lorna Doona is my favourite on this list, technically it is by far from the best novel, it feels like RD Blackmore struggled to meet his publisher's word count for a lot of episodes and got asked to extend the story half way through, which results in quite a lot of filler although some of that filler is great and very picaresque, it has the best prose description of ducks I've ever read. It's also a historical romp I love historical fiction in general and this is set 200 years before its time and is full of romantic swashbuckling and derring do.

I'm pretty sure I've read it more often than any other Victorian novel.

I'd really like to vote for Hugo in one of these, but I can't go around The Idiot here.

Eck, I think it'll have to be Crime and Punishment, even if my main memory of it is reading it in a Thai toilet with a disgraceful case of the trots.

Asking for recommendations always feels trite, but where to start with Turgenev?

I haven't read Fathers and Sons, which might be better, but I started with Sketches from a Hunter's Album aka A Sportsman's Sketchbook and liked it quite a bit

I read Fathers & Sons and enjoyed it but my favourite Turgenev experience was a NT performance of Three Days In The Country

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Raskolnikov's Adventures in Wonderland

where to start with Turgenev?

First Love in the Isaiah Berlin translation. it's short and sweet.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of… the 1870's, pt.1 (1870-1874)

i feel confident claiming out mutual friend is dickens' finest even though i haven't read bleak house (or a whole bunch of lesser ones).

"First Love" is marvelous. I'll rep for On the Eve, oft overlooked.

The Last Chronicle of Barset would have got my vote if it'd been included. Trollope's best in my view and one of my favourite novels

Yeah, I don't really have a grasp of what Trollope's best/most highly rated work is and he put out like two books a year, so'z for omissions.

The Last Chronicle of Barset would have got my vote if it'd been included. Trollope's best in my view and one of my favourite novels

i'd probably have gone for this but 'best' seems like a stretch! i remember explaining the action of it--so it's about a clergyman who's genteel poor, and he may have stolen some money, but he's too depressed to remember, and it just follows him for a thousand pages--to a lot of people and getting quizzical looks and inquiries as to why i would read such a thing

The Way We Live Now is generally regarded as his best, but I'd go for The Last Chronicle of Barset (and I've read tons of Trollope). The 1000 page torturing of Josiah Crawley might not be everyone's cup of tea but I think it's the kind of thing Trollope does best (see also Louis Trevelyan). You try and explain a Kafka or Beckett novel to most people and you'd probably get quizzical looks too.

"Germinie Lacerteux by Edmund and Jules de Goncourt"

The Journals by them are a marvel.

Ah, I still need to read them! Proust's loving send-ups are glorious.

Cheers for the Turgenev recommendations. Ordered First Love.

there are lots at Project Gutenberg if anyone with an ereader wants to do similar (i have a couple on my todo list)

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/922

The Last Chronicle of Barset would have got my vote if it'd been included. Trollope's best in my view and one of my favourite novels

Not surprising given my username, but I totally agree. Mr. Crawley is such an amazing character, I can't think of another Victorian novel with such a realistic and sympathetic depiction of mental illness.

(Mr Dick in David Copperfield is the other one people usually suggest with, variably, schizophrenia or autism)

Yes, I can see that. But still, he's a minor character. With the Last Chronicle you have a whole Victorian epic, by a writer at the height of his powers, focusing on the intersection of poverty and mental illness, with a central character who suffers from severe clinical depression, who's not always rational, who's tremendously hard on himself and his family, and who you nonetheless sympathize with and root for and respect. I just can't think of anything else like that in Victorian literature.

i've not read any trollope, i will add it to my list (but am i going to have to read the previous 5 to get to the good one?)

No, you can start with it. There are some plot strands that continue from the previous book, which is also very good, so if you care about that sort of thing you could start with The Small House at Allington, but I don't think it's necessary.

The whole series is worth reading, though. I'd say the first three books, though good, are the weakest; after that it just keeps getting better.