Your greatest literary discovery of 09

[Daniel del Real]

Originally Posted by obooki

Yes, that's the one. I'm still in the middle of it. (I think perhaps I've become a little afraid of it, too). - In English, it's called "Body Snatcher".

Curious situation with me and Onetti. The first novel I read, Dejemos Hablar al Viento or Let the Wind Speak, was a bad choice, since it is one of the last ones of his Santa María cycle. So practically I couldn't appreciate. Then Juntacadaveres was an amazing selection. Tierra de Nadie or No one's Land was my last one, but again I wasn't that convinced about it. But yeah, check Juntacadáveres Thomas, it's a great read.

Originally Posted by LRiley

I took up Daniel's suggestion and read Javier Marias's novel 'Tomorrow in the battle think on me' and thought it was much greater than the one book I'd read of his prior--'All souls'.

I don't know why I keep recommending books I haven't read , however if you liked it , then it was all worth it.

[Heteronym]

Well, the year isn't over yet, but I'm sure my best discovery was Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. I never read anything like it before; I doubt I'll ever read anything like it again.

[saliotthomas]

Originally Posted by Heteronym

Well, the year isn't over yet, but I'm sure my best discovery was Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. I never read anything like it before; I doubt I'll ever read anything like it again.

Hard boiled ?

[Heteronym]

Sorry to disappoint you, but no.

[Flower]

P.O. Enquist Captain Nemos Library
Hjalmar Söderberg Dr. Glas
Carson McCullers The heart is a lonely hunter
Knud Romer Den som blinker er bange for døden
Kim Leine Kalak

[Sevigne]

I've said it before but I'll say it again:

Gert Hofmann's Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl was my grand discovery of the year and I found it right up there in the book widget.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. It was Liotard's Chocolate Girl that first caught my eye and made me focus my attention on this novel. A beautiful book to look at, a wonderful book to read.

[luchus]

Originally Posted by Heteronym

Well, the year isn't over yet, but I'm sure my best discovery was Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. I never read anything like it before; I doubt I'll ever read anything like it again.

Yes, it's one of the best novels ever. Read it four times now, and it never ceases to amaze me.

Greatest discovery of the year to me: Mircea Cartarescu.

[luchus]

Originally Posted by saliotthomas

Hard boiled ?

No, it's probably by far the funniest, wildest and most imaginative introduction into metaphysics and mathematics you could ever imagine.

It's the ultimate book about infinity, so to speak.

[saliotthomas]

Actually i'm reading it now and near the end.
I usually get lost with to abstrac novels but i had no probleme with TTP and really like it.

[Scott89119]

Best reads of 2009:

Snow Country- Yasunari Kawabata
The Cairo Trilogy- Naguib Mahfouz
Olive Kitteridge- Elizabeth Strout
The Age of Innocence- Edith Wharton
Kristin Lavransdatter- Sigrid Undset
Under My Skin- Doris Lessing
World Light- Halldor Laxness

[Omo]

My greatest literary discovery this year was definitely Aleksandr Zinovyev's "sociolocigal novel" Yawning Heights. If you want to understand what happened to people in the Soviet Union, read it. I will definitely also read all his other writings.

[Beth]

Right there with Thomas on the rapture of discovering Penelope Fitzgerald. Also, Bolaño and Zweig. Calvino's The Baron in the Trees has become part of me, as has Mantel's Wolf Hall. Geoff Dyer, Hugo Wilcken, Anita Brookner, Richard Ford, David Park. It's been a great year for reading and it ain't over, but definitely the surprise, delight, and laughter of reading Fitzgerald is something akin to Sevigne's happiness at finding Lichtenburg and the Little Flower Girl right there in the widget!

Edit: And Hrabal. Too Loud a Solitude is, for some reason, one I can't bear to give away.

[saliotthomas]

Talking about the Blue flower,i was reminded of The way of the Serpent by Torgny Lindgren that i forgot to mention i my discovery.
Beth you should try this, i can't put my finger on specifics but those two book somehow assiociat.An excellent read.

[saliotthomas]

I started Pierre Michon-la grande Beune yesterday and it might well be my great discovery of this year, in French anyway.
The language a mix of sofistication and simplicity, longue sentences followed by short to recreate the emotions of the personage.
Not really poetry but close, without trying to hard for originality.
I would suggest it to all the francophone here and i would say that even the translation could retend most of the beauty of it.
I have two novel and will open a thread to the man.

Pierre Michon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[lionel]

I've been meaning to read Pierre Michon for some time, starting with Vies minuscules, although this year I've mainly been reading Southern literature as I recently spent several weeks driving round the American South in search of literary sites. Out of about 100 books, these are a few by authors previously unread by me, and that I was impressed by the most:

Agee, James, Death in the Family

Brown, Larry, Dirty Work

Chesnutt, Charles W., The Marrow of Tradition

Dickey, James, Poems

Glasgow, Ellen, Virginia

Kelley, Edith Summers, Weeds

Mason, Bobbie Ann, In Country

Newman, Frances, The Hard-Boiled Virgin (Wonderful stuff, but not to everyone's taste as there are no paragraphs and the sentences seem endless, often with double or triple negatives)

Percy, Walker, The Moviegoer

Porter, Katherine Anne, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Siddons, Anne Rivers, Peachtree Road (Yes, seriously - a really good book about a spunky version of a Southern Lady. Don't let the cover put you off.)

Smith, Lillian, Strange Fruit (brilliant 1944 novel originally banned in Boston until Eleanor Roosevelt intervened - concerns a mixed race sexual relationship)

Willingham, Calder, Rambling Rose

Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread, about the destruction of Appalachian culture and the 1929 Gastonia mill strike, looks promising, although I'm not halfway through it.

Disappointments: Harry Crews, Erskine Caldwell, Barry Hannah, Sidney Lanier, Byron Herbert Reece.

To be read (if only because already bought, and all are by Southern authors): Olive Dargan's Call Home the Heart, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson before Dying, Reynolds Price's A Long and Happy Life, Olive Ann Burns's Cold Sassy Tree, Wendell Berry's A World Lost, Lee Smith's On Agate Hill, Clyde Edgerton's Walking Across Egypt, Frances Newman's Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers.


Thought: as virtually all interwar literature (1918-39) in Britain can be seen in terms of the effects of World War I, virtually all post-Civil War Southern literature (after 1865) can be seen in terms of the effects of that war. Even today. And those effects are of particular resonance in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and religion.

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[saliotthomas]

......and Larry Brown ?

[Clarissa]

Wthout a doubt - Herta Müller.

[lionel]

Originally Posted by saliotthomas

......and Larry Brown ?

Ooooh! Well spotted, Thomas! I think I missed him off the list because I was disappointed by his Joe, which didn't do anything for me at all for some reason that escapes me. I've now added him, as I really loved Dirty Work.

[lionel]

How could I have missed Calder Willingham's Rambling Rose (1972) from my above list? Historically, to keep the Southern Lady perfect, the sexual buck was passed to the black female, but what does Willingham do, in order to show that times have changed a bit? He creates a white nymphomanic! Lock up your husbands, she's on the loose! But...and here's the gender reversal, er, rub: the targeted husband keeps control of himself! Here's the letdown, though: she's working class. Yes, even a white middle-class nymphomaniac was impossible in Southern literature, it seems. (List amended.)

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[Chapman]

Out of about only 40 books read this year, these are the standouts:

Stream of Life - Clarice Lispector. Clearly in a class by itself.

How It Is - Samuel Beckett. He is growing on me.

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett. 2009 is the year that an interpretation for this play finally clicked for me.

Franny and Zooey - J. D. Salinger. A simply wonderful human story.

2666 - Roberto Bolano. Half done, and may yet make the list.

Go Down, Moses - William Faulkner. Only 30 pages in, but already an absolute winner. Headed toward the top of the list, along with Lispector.