Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1948

Puzzled respect to the person who voted for the Heinlein.

It was the only one in the list I'd read! Also a classic example of his distinctive style of epic YA space adventure, that still manages to include an author-substitute character blathering off at great length while parroting his quite frankly barmy political views.

Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot
Concluding by Henry Green
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Funeral Rites by Jean Genet
The Atom Station by Halldor Laxness

All good, not bad. Probably would've voted Blanchot as well.

I Capture the Castle sounds good, although it isn't my thing.

one of the things i enjoy about I Capture the Castle is that it functions as a charming and well written bildungsroman, but it's also low key a skeptical take on high modernism, particularly the type of experimental fiction exemplified by Ulysses. Cassandra in the novel feels a bit anxious about her father's literary work and how it's nothing like her own, and one imagines Smith felt similarly about figures like Joyce. i mean, i like Joyce well enough, but i still appreciate the seriousness of Castle's engagement with the gendered anxiety of literary influence. and i prefer Smith's immersive realism to high modernism tbh. also she's funny about the Joycean thing without being cruel or unfair.

oh, that's a really interesting aspect of it that I hadn't considered/remembered. I haven't read that book in a long time but it's on my shelf, maybe I'll reread it now that the weather is nice. (It's the sort of book I want to read outside.)

it's worth rereading! it's less sentimental and more...flinty than i recalled it being when i first read it in my early 20s.

truly in the Austenian line

i remembered Simon as romantic and dreamy, but his behavior seems pretty shitty and self-indulgent on a reread, for example.

oh, definitely! She's so going to outgrow him.

I went on a kick of trying to track down all of Dodie Smith's novels after I read I Capture the Castle, and the rest of them are not anywhere near as good but I still liked them.

i sometimes mean to find the rest of them, too! maybe i'll try again.

It Ends With Revelations is probably my favorite of them. Not great, but very readable.

"i mean, i like Joyce well enough, but i still appreciate the seriousness of Castle's engagement with the gendered anxiety of literary influence. and i prefer Smith's immersive realism to high modernism tbh."

Interesting to come up with this in the late 40s, years after Joyce has passed away. Surely the kinds of novels that Smith or Joyce were publishing were going to be published?

not sure i follow your question...i guess Smith still had a bee in her bonnet about Joycean experimental fiction in the 40s!

Sorry yes was just a reflection on the discussion I probably shouldn't have posted.