Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1911

Going for Undset's dramatic 'Jenny' over Larbaud's 'Fermina Márquez'. Undset would go on to receive the 1928 Nobel mostly for her work 'Kristin Lavransdatter' but 'Jenny' is not to be overlooked imo.

Lots of books with excellent titles here that I never heard of.

probably loads of macho posturing

― Chip-vill-A (imago), Monday, 5 October 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Thank you for being such an ally.

the_rainbow_sympathiser has logged on

Post here when you want to shit on someone passive aggressively until they see it and start a fight with you ITT

Reading DH Lawrence in the #metoo era

Anyway, I’m too much of a low information voter to participate in this one. I trust LBI’s pick as he seems to have a lot more experience with the early 20th century novel.

Ethan Frome is awesome, y'all are fucking crazy to pick anything else imo.

There's loads I don't know here, Pom. I benefit from being in a book club abt 19th/early 20th century French novels when in uni. Paired with an above average interest in Scandinavian lit is how I navigate through these polls. Lots of American literature I'm not drawn to but willing to learn.

The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma by Lima Barreto

This looks really interesting btw..

It's the Brazilian/Portuguese literature Daniel picks that has me most curious.

This one is a wash for me again.

Lots of American literature I'm not drawn to but willing to learn.

This makes me curious what American lit non-Americans generally read in pre-university/canon-focused education.

That's a good question, albeit a difficult one to answer. I think our secondary schools are mostly focused on national lit first, then UK/EU books. Thinking back I don't think there were any American books on the list we had to read when I was 14/15, except for Huckleberry Finn! After that it's mostly a question of where you end up education-wise. I dare say o'er here American literature is a small to non-existent portion of the curriculum, before young people go to uni that is.

I haven't read the Wharton, so I'll vote for Under Western Eyes, Conrad's take on Dusty Dusty and revolutionary politics

the Fantômas series is pure pulp but entertaining and interesting as a source of popular culture tropes ... he's an anti-hero super-villain with mysterious powers, and the crazy plots are heavy on weird menace, sometimes drifting into horror

This is purely anecdotal and hardly relevant since my own education was a weird transatlantic and translinguistic mishmash but I was somewhat surprised by the relative popularity of Faulkner in France.

It's so cool to watch children's literature developing as a genre as we go through these lists.

I haven't read anything here beyond The Secret Garden, Peter Pan and Zuleika Dobson. Zuleika Dobson was a lot of fun, but I think I'll have to vote Secret Garden.

Lawrence gets a terrible rep these days but his poetry, which is a strange alloy of the incantatory and the tone-deaf, helped me through my late teens.

― pomenitul

Kind of on your side here. I mean, maybe it's b/c he's a Notts lad so I've got more patience to extend, but I will defend a Lawrence to a certain extent. Novels really are too much macho posturing for me despite his skills with language, but the poetry is definitely worth checking out.

Its quasi animist (iirc) understanding of nature also jives with current developments in ecocriticism.

It's the Brazilian/Portuguese literature Daniel picks that has me most curious.

ftr I only include the works that English language wikipedia itself includes - so it's more about which countries have ppl who care enough to write English language entries for their canon. So far I've noticed Brazil and the Philipines being really good at this - conversely, I'm sure that if I went into French or German language wikipedia there'd be a lot of stuff that hasn't gotten mentioned in these polls

A sad truth is that we did literally zero Brazillian literature in high school :(

Par for the course, alas. Québécois literature is all but nonexistent in France.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Its quasi animist (iirc) understanding of nature also jives with current developments in ecocriticism.

― pomenitul

OK now I'm intrigued, thanks

That was a bit of hyperbole on my part, but his animal poems, starting with ‘Snake’ are worth exploring. There’s an acknowledgment of the proximity between us and other species but also an emphasis on remoteness, which bespeaks respect. It’s still mediated through myth, in accordance with poetic tradition, but there’s more to it than that: it’s an encounter with an irreducible other whose existence is beyond what we humans attempt to make of it.

I also quite like ‘New Heaven and Earth’, which is a somewhat artless yet highly effective take on the fin de siècle spiritual temper tantrum. It blew my mind when I was 18.

Jenni or Ethan, both are great.

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

The Lair Of The White Worm by Bram Stoker

what's this like? i haven't read any stoker besides the obvious, but the premise of this one is intriguing enough.

It's terrible, really. All of his novels other than Dracula are terrible, but in this one the syphilitic brain damage was really kicking in.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1912

I am sorry I missed this one, I'd have voted for Fermina Márquez, which I loved.