Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1915

look at all these idle novelists. introduce conscription i say

also, woolf, already! had no idea

Interested in: Pointed Roofs (the first stream of conciousness novel, apparently!), The Forged Note.

Some heavy hitters showing up here - Woolf, Maugham.

"The Songs Of A Sentimental Bloke" sounds a bit too Ed Sheeran for me.

My vote goes to The Good Soldier, which I should reread some time.

lol good point imago, not even writing inspirational war novels even

look at all these idle novelists. introduce conscription I say

Cue Stoppard quote about what Joyce did during the Great War.

I haven't read a single one of these. I recall starting The Rainbow around the time I got bored with Lawrence, so that spelled the end of it. Anyway, I'm curious about Meyrink's Der Golem.

Re: Pointed Roofs, that's quite interesting, I've always thought of Édouard Dujardin's Les lauriers sont coupés (1887) as the first, but then again, it is debatable whether 'le monologue intérieur' is the same thing as stream of consciousness.

I won't vote for it since I haven't read any of the other books, but The Rainbow provided me with an epiphany when I read it more than 10 years ago. There's a long sequence where Ursula is stuck in a dead-end teaching job with students who don't understand her and colleagues who treat her coldly. At the time, I was feeling the same kind of hopelessness at work, and feeling the impossibility of taking action that Lawrence describes.

Eventually, she is able to change her circumstances and her way of living, but Lawrence doesn't explicitly underline this change. Instead he just describes the subsequent events, and we realize that Ursula's life is different than it was. What amazed me was his exactness at conveying both the hopelessness of being stuck and the way that time can change everything. It sounds banal in description because in The Rainbow it is all done by inference; although this attitude towards time passing has already been set up by the narrative starting years before Ursula's birth.

What's even more impressive is that none of this is what the book is supposedly "about". Anyway, it taught me that life is changing.

People fucking knew how to title a novel in those days

Anyway, I remember nothing about "The Good Soldier" except I thought it was absolutely slamming when I read it so I voted for that.

"The Songs Of A Sentimental Bloke" is an Australian classic -- epic love poems, etc, written in Australian slang. May not travel well to other nations.

Verse novel, i should say.

I've lorst me former joy in gettin' shick,
Or 'eadin' browns; I 'aven't got the 'eart
To word a tom; an', square an' all, I'm sick
Of that cheap tart
'Oo chucks 'er carkis at a feller's 'ead
An' mauls 'im . . . Ar! I wish't that I wus dead! . . .

I think The Good Soldier is the only one I read but I thought it was fantastic 12 or so years ago.

look at all these idle novelists. introduce conscription i say

― imago, Thursday, October 22, 2020 2:34 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

:-D

Surprised 'The Metamorphosis' by Kafka isn't on the list! I would've voted for that in an instant. As it stands, I've not read many others - and indeed it's a meagre French harvest - so I'll go with 'Of Human Bondage'.

It was on wikipedia but come on, that's a short story.

No I understand, just that it was published on its own that year, too. I’ve no complaints!

Anyway, I'm curious about Meyrink's Der Golem.

If you're at all curious, you should definitely check it out. It's a kind of bonkers, occult-steeped fever dream of the Prague Jewish ghetto, only tangentially about the Golem myth. I've actually read three of these, the most of any year so far, I think. Besides The Golem, I also read and enjoyed The Good Soldier, and most recently The Song of the Lark. I still don't really feel qualified to vote though.

Cool, thanks. I've been meaning to check it out as a companion piece to the work of another, considerably more famous early 20th century German-language Jewish writer from Prague, as there appear to be some surface similarities between the two.

Notorious white supremacist and antisemite H. P. Lovecraft was reportedly a fan, heh.

I've only read the Maugham, a long time ago, and remember it as pretty dreary.

The Rainbow is quite an incredible book

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

<3 Maugham, so that.

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1916

I've just been bamboozled by The Good Soldier. Unreliable narrators can do that to you I guess. As a study of people who are all stone cold bananas I could maybe get behind it; if I'm meant to have any sympathy for them then, save Leonora, it ain't gonna happen.