Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1936

Three Comrades for me. Maria Remarque's Weimar books felt very relateable to me in post-2008 Portugal.

I could've included both Gone With The Wind and Ayn Rand's debut in this for the lols, btw

Really hard to choose between War With the Newts and Absalom, Absalom!

Went War With the Newts because it's the most amazingly prescient satire about (among other things) human industry leading to catastrophic sea level rise. Just a great, weird, funny, angry book, and frighteningly accurate about how people react to what's happening.

This is Nightwood vs The Diary of a Country Priest for me, probably the former.

I need to revisit Nightwood. Amazing writing but I struggled with it from the beginning, in her portrayal of the Jewish character - there's obviously sympathy for the outsider, which made me initially okay with it, but in the end it still felt uncomfortably like racism. I never felt the same way about Leo Bloom: despite the oscillation between Joyce's characters as avatars and humans, he always lands on the side of the human. Barnes, I feel, ends up on the side of racial essentialism. This issue made me pretty unable to digest the rest of the book tbh.

I felt the same way about Nightwood. I read it so long ago that I can't remember anything about it except the feeling that I was being attacked.

I read Nightwood years ago and found it quite savage. Is there canine, ah, intimacy in the book, or am I thinking of something else?

have only read "a gun for sale" by graham greene, so gave that a vote. not one of his literary books, one of his "entertainments", and entertaining enough it is

Death On Credit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

It may not be as accurate a translation of the original, but I always thought that the title Death on the Installment Plan was pure brilliance.

I had no idea CLR James wrote fiction (it's Minty Alley just fyi)

I've read some pretty appealing descriptions of that lately, so was already thinking of reading it.
I'll go with Faulkner again, even though I don't understand something about this one(that I can't even sketch the path of) as well as I hope to---it's my personal Maltese Falcon to pursue.

What about it are you trying to understand? (Not that I think I can answer - I read this book like fifteen years ago. I'm just curious.)

I can't even put my finger on it well enough to say, that's what I meant by "can't even sketch the path of." But I'll get back on the trail sometime.

Haven't read that much from this year, and I haven't read 'Nightwood' either. Will vote for John Fante, who's always a joy to (re-)read. Not his best, but 'Ask the Dust' won't stand a chance in 1939, so

I know Orwell kind of hated it, but Keep the Aspidistra Flying was a truly transformative book for me. It shattered the delusions that attracted me to the idea I'd long romanticised of quitting my job to become an artist in search of some misguided notions of freedom and peace.

I've read Diary of a Country Priest, and started to read Nightwood, but apparently I never made it to the introduction of the main character.
I read Bernanos after seeing Bresson's film, and somehow the extra detail in the book seemed superfluous, even though it existed before the movie. I also tried reading it in French and English simultaneously, but stopped after a few pages because I was debating the translation every few words.

From the last chapter of War With the Newts. The author is talking to himself:

"I did what I could; I warned people in good time...You know what happened. Everybody always had a thousand perfectly sound economic and political reasons why this wasn't possible. I'm not a politician or an economist; how could I convince them? So what's to be done? The world will probably disintegrate and become inundated - but at least it will do so for universally accepted political and economic reasons, at least it will do so with the aid of science, engineering and public opinion, with the application of all human ingenuity! No cosmic catastrophe - just national, power-political, economic and other reasons. What can you do against that?"

and a bit later:

"Let me ask you this: do you know who even now, with one-fifth of Europe inundated, is supplying the Newts with high explosives and torpedoes and drills? Do you know who is feverishly working in laboratories night and day to discover even more efficient machines and substances to blow up the world? Do you know who is lending money to the Newts, who is financing this end of the world, this whole new Flood?"

"I do. Every factory in the world. Every bank. Every country."

"So there you are. If it were merely a case of Newts against people something might perhaps be done; but people against people - that's something you cannot stop."

ugh, italics fail. War with the Newts.

wow. I'd probably eyeroll at those excerpts if they were from a 2021 novel but for 1936.....

I read R.U.R. in something---maybe The Big Book of Science Fiction and omfg--gotta get more, thanks for the tip on this.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I am a huge Capek stan. I can't think of anything I've read by him that I haven't liked, and that includes his book of gardening columns. He's best known for the sci-fi/futurist/satire thing, but he also has some great collections of slightly surreal short stories (Tales from Two Pockets probably a good place to start) and an amazing philosophical novel in three parts that's sometimes called Three Novels and sometimes the Noetic Trilogy.

Absalom, Absalom! easily, even though this is a great list. There is such an urgency in the prose—I devoured it in one sitting the first time I read it, which sounds insane because it is a dense and by design exhausting read, but that’s what happened.

Nightwood is also tremendous. Really quite visionary and insane—some of the descriptions I’ll never forget. This is the woman who is the object of so many others’ obsession:

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule

Absalom, Absalom! is one I kept thinking about during the Trump era, b/c Sutpen is such a Trump-like figure - an old man who's emotionally still a teenager, who's built this entire racist empire out of sheer sociopathic entitlement and an obsessive need to avenge his own perceived humiliation at the hands of a Black man.

That vision of the born somnambule (as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire) makes me think of someone I've known most of my life (not myself) bingeing and purging sleep----there's something to it beyond the literary, and that's what literature can deliver, at its best, or one of its best(s?)

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

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1937

Can't believe Death on Credit got no votes! I love the writing in Nightwood though Emily's post makes me want to revisit

Missed this somehow. Probably would have went with Locos.