Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1945

I think Chester Himes though surprised by how early it is. Gorlumme maybe I'm cast adrift by films etc.
BUt dfo love a bit of old Chester Himes .
Still need to read Pink toes which I think I would have associated more with this time than the black police stuff . should be more familiar with the set up than the novel plots i guess.

Did enjoy the BY Grand Central Station too.
Woulda thunk everybody was too busy winning the 2nd World war and dropping the bomb to be dropping great prose in 45. BUt may need to unlearn shit.

Elizabeth Taylor! Or the Steinbeck, which is one of my favourites of his.

Stevo, I think you can actually identify the conflict in these past few years - broadly, I'd say literary fiction took a beating but sci-fi and detective stories just kept chugging along. Here in '45 it seems to me the UK is recovering but the US is still pretty muted.

The Tin Flute, although I suspect I’d go with the Broch had I read it.

lol i like Brideshead Revisited.

the Himes is very good.

Also I’m not sure I get why ‘Secondhand Happiness’ didn’t cut it.

Someone in the translation dept had a time machine and wanted to cash in on Gunter Grass?

Heh, I believe it.

yeah, cannery row is a blast after those other two downers.

I've read six of these. As much as it has fallen out of favor lately, I will still vote for Animal Farm, with Cannery Row a very close second. There has never been a more brilliant use of the animal fable, as an extended parable. Within the corpus of Orwell's work, nothing could have been more surprising than a novel about farm animals. It's a shame it's been embraced by reactionaries so tightly that it has now been fully enclosed into that worldview, like an axe head that became incorporated into the very tree its wielder failed to chop down.

Loving, Green, is high in my queue of upcoming books, but not yet broached. I suspect it belongs at or near the top of this list, but can't vote for it.

The Moomins And The Great Flood by Tove Jansson -- embryonic Moomin work, not great yet but the signs are there

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck -- fun Steinbeck is very fun

Focus by Arthur Miller -- pretty good from memory, Americans starting to realise in 1945 that maybe anti-Semitism is a Bad Thing

Animal Farm by George Orwell -- I still think it's great, despite everybody having Wrong Opinions on Orwell these days

At Mrs.Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor -- fantastic, maybe gets my vote? I love her with a pure, undying love

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh -- good in bits, one of his weakest

In Youth Is Pleasure by Denton Welch -- magical, surely the Denton Welch revival is due about now?

Loving by Henry Green -- also magical, Green is just masterful

Most Secret by Nevil Shute -- I know I have read this, but can't remember a thing about it

The Pursuit Of Love by Nancy Mitford -- her second-best book after Cold Climate?

That Hideous Strenght by C.S. Lewis -- away with this bumf

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept by Elizabeth Smart -- I did NOT like this; very short and I still couldn't be bothered finishing it

The Age Of Reason by Jean Paul Sartre -- this trilogy is excellent and surprisingly funny

The Blood Of Others by Simone de Beauvoir -- speaking of which, this is excellent and not even slightly funny

Caucasian Days by Banine -- really fascinating and entertaining memoir of growing up in Azerbaijan in a rich semi-Westernised family, not a novel

A Dark Stranger by Julien Gracq -- creepy, wonderfully written novel about a couple planning to kill themselves

The English Teacher by R.K. Narayan -- one of his best early books

Maigret In Retirement by Georges Simenon -- despite retiring in this book he is not retired for the next 49 books. Weird. Very good book in a series that is astonishing in its maintenance of quality

This might sound strange, James, but I was involved in a one-man show about a man going through a personal crisis who rediscovered his sense of self partly through finding and reading the diaries of Denton Welsh. (link redacted)

I really do love the diaries. In Youth is Pleasure is enjoyably weird.

The guy that wrote the show, who was an ex of mine, made it in order to come to terms with ideas around campness and femininity which he had always railed against but those books helped him to come to terms with them and embrace them. Funnily enough, a year after the show played at the Edinburgh festival he became a born again Christian and renounced homosexuality!

became a born again Christian and renounced homosexuality!

renounce is probably le mot juste here, just as monks may renounce their sexuality as part of their renunciation of worldliness. doesn't mean it isn't there, because renunciation of your nature can only be a ceaseless process.

The Death Of Virgil by Hermann Broch

Green and Welch are good (but yes, his Diaries are probably his greatest work).

Really like to give that Vesaas a go, an author I've not explored as much as I'd like.

Is Cannery Row the one with the beer milkshake?

jed_, that sounds fascinating! I always remember that bit from one of the memoirs where he's in China during an anti-Westerner uprising and he decides this would be the ideal time to dress up in drag and wander the streets at night. how he survived is beyond me.

haha! yes!

Age of Reason didn't leave as big an impression on me as Nausea but I def read it in my teen existentialist days and obviously loved it (14 yr old Sartre stans unite). I just feel like it's another case where fuzzy memory might rule a vote out unless I can pick it up again.

Otherwise I have to pick between horror, kidlit and Orwell (which you could argue is both, ha).

Has anyone here read the novel of Valerie? I'd be interested to see how it compares to such a highly stylised film.

Nausea is the only Sartre work (regardless of genre) I’m willing to stan for. Everything else features at least one prominent element that bugs the hell out of me.

I remember liking the Valerie novel! Even if I don't remember much.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

I've been intending to read the Valerie novel - iirc she's much closer to being an adult in the novel.

I thought "By Grand Central Station..." was cringey af. Stopped halfway through.

ha! I'm glad to see that the Tsar did the same.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1946