Edwin Frank is the editorial director of New York Review of Books and founder of the NYRB Classics series. Instead of titling his book Stranger Than Fiction, Frank could have called it The Best Novels of the 20th Century because that’s pretty much what his book is all about.
Frank starts his review of great books of the past century by going back in time to 1864 because Frank claims “It is the beginning of 1864. Fyodor Dostoevsky is in Moscow writing the first twentieth-century novel.” (p. 3) From there, Frank takes a mostly chronological approach to the books he considers great and most influential.
While I’m not a big fan of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, I agree with Frank that Wells helps to create “genre fiction” with more successful novels like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds.
I struggled with chapters like “A world of literature: Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro” because I’m not familiar with those writers. But I had no problem grasping Frank’s analysis of “What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses.”
Here is a list of many of the novels Edwin Frank writes about in Stranger Than Fiction:
Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells
The Immortalist by Andre Gide
The Other Side by Alfred Kubin
Amerika by Franz Kafka
Colette’s Claudine at School
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Ulysses by James Joyce
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
Confesssions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
The End by Hans Erich Nossack
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Artemisia by Anna Banti
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpenter
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
How many of these books have you read? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction — xi
- Prologue: the ellipsis: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground — 3
- Part I. Breaking the vessels. 1. The vivisector: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau — 29
- 2. The abyss: André Gide’s The Immoralist — 46
- 3. Shutter time: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side and Franz Kafka’s Amerika — 62
- 4. Youth and age: Collette’s Claudine at School and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim — 79
- 5. The American sentence: Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives — 101
- 6. A world of literature: Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro — 116
- 7. Hippe’s pencil: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain — 142
- 8. What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses — 160
- Part II. A scattering of sparks. 9. For there she was: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dolloway — 191
- 10. Nick stands up: Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time — 211
- 11. Critic as creator: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities — 226
- 12. The human and the inhuman: Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight — 241
- 13. The exception: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow — 255
- 14. The end: Hans Erich Nossack’s The End and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate — 280
- Part III. The withdrawal. 15. Don’t cry: Anna Banti’s Artemesia and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — 301
- 16. Reflections on damaged life: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps — 317
- 17. The whole story of America: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man — 334
- 18. Boom: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude — 351
- 19. Into the abyss: Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual — 363
- 20. Being historical: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Elsa Morante’s History — 377
- 21. The enigma of arrival: V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival — 394
- Epilogue: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz — 411
- Appendix. Other lives of the twentieth-century novel — 421
- Notes — 425
- Bibliography — 429
- Acknowledgements — 437
- Index — 439
“How many of these have you read?”
I wish you’d asked, “How many of these have you started to read, but the print was too small.”
Or “How many of these have you always meant to read?”
Or “How many of these have you even heard of?”
I’ve read a number of them, but sometimes it feels as if it were another person who read them. For instance, I know I read THINGS FALL APART and I can tell you, in a very broad way, what it’s about, but as for the details of the story…nada. Of the books listed, the ones by D.H. Lawrence are probably my favorites.
I’ve read very few of them. When I minored in English in college at the cusp of the 60s and 70s, the study lists were mostly the books of white, male, American writers–Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. I believe there was one lone feminist literature class. I have to dissent on ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU; great novel with continuing relevance to the re-emergence of the Beast in our increasingly unhinged society, domestic and global alike.