Busy since getting back to Toronto and no time to read. Had to read this book for other reasons and then realized it was on this list. But not on the Modern Library list which is what I’m supposed to be concentrating on. From the price sticker on the cover of my copy, I can deduce that I bought it over 26 years ago. Bizarre. I’ve been toting this and other books around for 26 years unread. Kafka has always struck me as sort of a one gag writer: you wake up in the morning, the world has gone insane and there’s nothing you can do about it. His work is often seen as prescient: the twentieth century saw both the Holocaust – Kafka’s work has been read as exemplifying the incomprehensible history of oppression of Jewish people – and the growth of bureaucracies to labyrinthine complexity and impenetrability. His writing is dream-like: in dreams one find the leaps of surreal logic, the nameless sense of dread, the haunting tone of Kafka’s writing. It is interesting that the changes often occur in the morning for Kafka’s characters, just after dreaming: Joseph K. in The Trial wakes up to find that he is under arrest; Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis wakes up to find that he is a bug. The story of The Trial doesn’t really progress, however. We are treated to a series of incidents, arranged by his friend Max Brod after Kafka’s death and later editors in varying order, which lead to Joseph K.’s death. He makes absolutely no progress in his attempts to understand why he has been arrested and, often, seems to make things worse by his bungling interference. In Kafka’s world, man is absolutely powerless: against the State, against God, Fate, however you care to interpret it. Part of me always resists this. I don’t want to believe that Kafka is right. Even if I’m as deluded as Joseph K., I refuse to accept that I am powerless. And I find the origins of his work in what we know of his relationship with his father (the majority of it from Kafka’s Letter to His Father), whom he viewed as larger than life, oppressive and impossible to understand – although the analysis of his father’s character and of their relationship in the Letter is masterful. Somehow, the Letter is more interesting to me than Kafka’s fiction. Here, at least, we get a more human, psychological picture of why Kafka was compelled to write his paranoid fictions – fictions about the publication of which he was very ambivalent. I will read The Castle (I lost my copy 26 years ago (again!) on a trip, mid-read) and Amerika. Kafka certainly had his finger on the zeitgeist. But it’s a geist that every fibre of me wants to resist.
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Okay, I know this is insane, and no more lists. First thing: I only get a total of 95 books. So both Telegraph lists are skewed. The idea was that they would compare the 1899 list and this one, which was done in 1999. The titles were chosen by contemporary writers; each writer got one choice; some books ended up being chosen more than once. I will never get to this but I love these lists. I guess I love lists. And books. Blue ones I’ve read, green ones I own. Some overlap with the Modern Library List.
1. J. R. Ackerley My Father and Myself
2. W. H. Auden Collected Poems
3. J. G. Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition
4. Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind
5. Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot
6. Saul Bellow Humboldt’s Gift
7. Brigid Brophy Flesh
8. Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita
9. Rachel Carson Silent Spring
10. C. P. Cavafy Collected Poems
11. Apsley Cherry-Garrard The Worst Journey in the World
12. John Stewart Collis The Worm Forgives the Plough
13. Cyril Connolly The Unquiet Grave
14. Jim Corbett Man-Eaters of Kumaon
15. Charles Doughty Travels in Arabia Deserta
16. T. S. Eliot The Waste Land
17. William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
18. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
19. Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier
20. E. M. Forster A Passage to India
21-22. Robert Frost Mountain Interval; North of Boston
23. Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows
24-25. Gabriel García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera; One Hundred Years of Solitude
26. Henry Green Pack My Bag: a Self-Portrait
27. Vasily Grossman Life and Fate
28. Thomas Hardy Collected Poems
29. Ernest Hemingway In Our Time
30. Christopher Hibbert Cavaliers & Roundheads
31. Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf
32. Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems
33. A. E. Housman Last Poems
34. Aldous Huxley Brave New World
35. Henry James The Golden Bowl
36. Sebastian Junger The Perfect Storm
37. James Joyce Ulysses
38. Franz Kafka The Trial
39. Jack Kerouac On the Road
40. J. M. Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
41. Rudyard Kipling Kim
42. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopard
43. D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers
44. Halldór Laxness Independent People
45. Munro Leaf The Story of Ferdinand
46. Primo Levi If This Is a Man
47. Sinclair Lewis Babbitt
48. Wyndham Lewis Blasting and Bombadiering: an Autobiography 1914-1926
49. Hendrik Willem Van Loon Van Loon’s Lives
50. Rose Macaulay The Towers of Trebizond
51. Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle Being Geniuses Together: 1920-1930
52. Claudio Magris Danube
53. William Manchester The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill – Alone 1932-1940
54. Thomas Mann Joseph and His Brothers
55. Daphne du Maurier Rebecca
56. Michael Moorcock Jerusalem Commands
57-59. Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire; Speak, Memory; Lolita
60. Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman
61. F. S. Oliver The Endless Adventure
62-64. George Orwell Animal Farm; Homage to Catalonia; Nineteen Eighty-four
65. Frances Partridge Good Company: Diaries
66. Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago
67. Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time
68. John Cowper Powys A Glastonbury Romance
69. Marcel Proust A la recherche du temps perdu
70. Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front
71. Henry Handel Richardson The Getting of Wisdom
72. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children
73. Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy; History of Western Philosophy
74. J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye
75. André Schwarz-Bart The Last of the Just
76. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman 1066 and All That
77. Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy
78. Mikhail Sholokov Quiet Flows the Don
79. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago
80. W. Olaf Stapledon Last and First Men
81. Edward Thomas Poems
82. William Trevor The Collected Stories
83. Barbara Tuchman The Proud Tower
84. John Updike Pigeon Feathers
85. Kurt Vonnegut Breakfast of Champions
86. Sylvia Townsend Warner Mr Fortune’s Maggot
87. Evelyn Waugh The Loved One
88. H. G. Wells The History of Mr Polly
89. Geoffrey Willans Down with Skool
90. Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire
91. Chester Wilmot The Struggle for Europe
92. Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
93. P. G. Wodehouse The Inimitable Jeeves
94. Virginia Woolf The Diary of Virginia Woolf
95. W. B. Yeats The Tower
