Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of… the 1880's, pt.1 (1880-1884)

À Rebours

À Rebours

― rolling keyring (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 1:05 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

First time I've read more than three books lol so I'll vote.

Very hard between Karamazov, Lady and The Posthomous Memoirs Of Brás Cubas (which has a brand new translation in English btw) (also read Washington and Treasure Island). Might go for Bras Cubas.

Quite like to read Pinocchio and A Rebours. Is The Shooting Party good? Lol I didn't know of its existence!

Good bit on the friendship and mutual admiration of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson in the last LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemout

Lol I didn't know of its existence!

Me neither! :-o

For some reason in my head reading that LRB piece I thought of Henry James as a young acolyte that RLS adopted while nearing death, surprised to find out Stevenson was actually the younger man.

Went for Brás Cuba as well.

Not five years I'm all that aquainted with

Adult me says À rebours but reading The Brothers Karamazov was a transformative turning point for me as a teen, so it gets my vote.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Not many Twain stans showing up here, maybe because he refused to paper over all the racism and ignorance of the characters in Huck Finn and it is not properly uplifting or moralistic. Instead, it's amazingly grim stuff, lightly told. The fact that it, like Gulliver's Travels, often gets mistakenly categorized as a children's book is one of the weirdest ironies in the history of literature. Twain and Swift each use the adventures of an innocent main character as a cover to flay humanity and nail its hide to the wall. America is written deeply into The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and it still describes us, while most Americans are still too blind to see what's up in that book.

The fact that it's often coupled with Tom Saywer probably doesn't help either.

it’s been 140 years and there still hasn’t been a book like huckleberry finn. twain perfectly captured the cognitive dissonance that permeates american society, the twisted morality one must develop to believe our way of life is just and godly.

I love Huckleberry Finn.

"Not many Twain stans showing up here, maybe because he refused to paper over all the racism and ignorance of the characters in Huck Finn and it is not properly uplifting or moralistic."

Doubt Twain will be 'cancelled' anytime soon...

Struggling to think of any canonical works about racism that ARE "uplifting or moralistic", tbh. That does feel like a bit of a strawman argument.

Concerned library patrons have been trying to cancel Twain for a while:
https://www.thoughtco.com/why-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn-banned-740145

ILB icon Ernest Hemingway:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It's the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

It's not all that, but I voted for it.

That Hemingway quote is still around because he was an ex-newspaperman and knew how to be quotable. His general sentiment is somewhere in the vicinity of being right, even though his judgment, as expressed, is obviously wrong.

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

My fellow Twain stans arrived!

See told you Twain wasn't cancelled.

Always extra interested in the votes for books I hadn't heard of so would be interested in the thoughts of the Giovanni Verga voter.

Couldn't vote, at least 10 masterpieces on this list.