Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1970

The Beckett is posthomous; this year also saw the release of post-death novels by Hemingway and Malcolm Lowry.

Big push for representation in mystery novels in this year: a native american detective ("The Blessing Way"), a gay detective ("Fadeout") and of course Shaft.

I'm holding my Ballard vote for later but damn The Atrocity Exhibition is a trip. I think I'll vote for The Bluest Eye.

After a few years of difficult choices, there is nothing here which I have read and want to vote for.

tau zero is among the worst books i’ve completed

Jeez I’ve only read Dahl & Ballard, don’t know how I haven’t read some of the others

I wouldn’t have thought to call the atrocity exhibition a novel (jgb called the stories themselves “condensed novels”) but that would be my vote on behalf of teenage me. Sitting this one out tho

I'm The King Of The Castle did scare me as a kid, might vote it. Post-LOTF psych horror

> tau zero is among the worst books i’ve completed

and the only one on this list i've read!

The bit at the end when they are tooling around in nothingness orbiting a nascent universe is pretty funny. I'm sorrier that I've read Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.

Yeah, was going to say that the winner here is definitely not Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Aside from that stinker, my only choices here are between Dahl, Blume and Ballard, and Ballard very much wins that fight.

is Judy Blume the dark horse here?

The Lime Works by Thomas Bernard
The Obscene Bird Of Night by José Donoso
Mercier and Camier by Samuel Beckett
Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo

Going for Beckett over Bernhard (whose best is yet to come)

Probably Robertson Davies.

Beckett died in ‘89…

Mercier and Camier (not really a 1970 novel) and Jonathan Livingston Seagull (read when I was 12) are the only things I've read here. This could be the year for which I've read the least since these lists began

Beckett died in ‘89…

Yeah, posthomous was the wrong word; it's a release of an older book is what I meant.

Adding my voice to the list of people who haven't read many of these. JGB beats Dahl by some margin, I should dig into Moorcock one of these years though.

Too bad The Lost Ones (Le Dépeupleur, which was published in 1970) doesn't count, or I'd vote for it in a heartbeat. I've always found Mercier and Camier to be one of his slightest works, a rehearsal more than anything.

Anyway, it'll be another write-in for me: Anne Hébert's Kamouraska, a Québécois lit classic.

Pierre Guyotat's Éden, Éden, Éden also deserves a shout if you're into that kind of thing.

i'm voting for play it as it lays, book was life-changing for me even though everyone i've recommended it to was like "why did you do that"

I've read four: I wrote an adaptation of Mercier and Camier for a class, but it's really a 40s book; The Goalie's Anxiety is interesting, but it's surpassed by the Wim Wenders movie; the Blume book probably introduced me to the concept of menstruation; but I love the Ballard book more than anything else he's written, partly because he removed all the boring connecting bits from his other books, which I think he found as pointless to write as I did to read.

Jack’s Return Home (filmed as Get Carter)

I used to have the RE/Search publications edition of "Atrocity Exhibition", the illustrated large-format paperback one (roughly the size and shape of a thick, glossy magazine) with the anatomical cutaway of a naked lady on the cover, that was a staple of the book racks at independent record stores in the '90s. I think I never actually read it all the way through though. Probably the only one of these I've read in its entirety is "Mr. Sammler's Planet".

The Bluest Eye

I wrote an adaptation of Mercier and Camier for a class, and I did some illustrations (M & C talking to the bartender etc, who looked like God x whitehaired Teddy Roosevelt, in a rudimentary way), for no reason that I can think of, but only time I ever did that for a book, so gets points for that. Also for being good in ways I can remember, incl. violence that kept me on my toes, in w the shuffle-along comic elements, and being the only one o these I've read. ut it's really a 40s book in a lot of ways, yes, but published in 1970, so qualifies in that sense too (ffs).

Have only read Moscow-Petushki (my copy was Moscow to the End of the Line), which I liked. Have a copy of The Obscene Bird of Night that I’ve been meaning to read for years.

Expecting a landslide for Bottom’s Dream.

You're right, dow, but Atrocity Exhibition represents the spirit of its age more than Mercier and Camier so that helped move my vote.

Yeah, 69-70 cusp was pretty much an atrocity exhibition, but like I said, only read the one, depressingly enough---will start doing better when we get to 2012.

Bluest Eye for me, my favorite of Morrison's

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

S. L. Bhyrappa sounds like an interesting writer. He is still living.

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

Wow, who else voted for Fifth Business?

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1971