Books on the absurdity of life -1-
Go to page 2(Beckett, Lowry, three US writers: Hawthorne, Keyes, Brautigan, one Japanese: Murakami)
Go to page 3 (Italian and Russian sphere)
Most of the books on the absurdity of life are from the 19th or 20th century. I think the genre developed as a result of rapid industrialization and the massive transfers of population that came with it. This movement was later supported by opponents and victims of the nazis and the whole philosophy surrounding Jean-Paul Sartre.
But of course, the master of all descriptions of the world's absurdity is much older than that, it is a book of the Bible called the Ecclesiastes which states that everything is meaningless. "Vanities of vanities, all is vanity!" has been translated from the Hebrew (habel ha balim hakol habel) by Chouraqui in a more simple and forceful manner: "Smoke of smoke, everything is smoke". The sense that nothing makes sense is expressed even more strongly in Eccl.4:2 "I congratulate the dead!" A lot of religious books have followed through centuries discussing the origin of evil, but the absurdity, the vacuity of life itself became a prominent theme only in the 19th century. I have to make an exception with Shakespeare's play The Tempest***: in this play, everything is mirrors and vanity. It differs in style, but not so much in thought from Kafka or Beckett. You got to read the play behind the magic: who is lying, what is the reality behind this? Nothing on the island is true, nobody is what they seem to be, nothing in the rest of the world is what it should be.
The king of absurdity remains Lewis Carroll (b. 1832). Alice in Wonderland was written for children and it is easy to read, but a lot of words and puzzles and images from the 19th century are not making sense today, whereas they were obvious for kids then, so I recommend the best version: The Annotated Alice with notes from the wonderful Martin Gardner.
Small note on the art of denial Carroll(his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician) has been accused of pedophilia because he collected photos of nude children, but I think repressed Victorian bourgeois had no mental access to that kind of sin. Similarly, despite saying that she only fell in love with girls, and because she said it so bluntly, I do not think that Alcott was a lesbian. It is putting our understanding of the world in a generation that did not have access to it. I never forgave Carroll for another Victorian sin: he did not believe in non-euclidean geometries.
Lewis Carroll influenced many writers. Amidst the ones I like best stands Alexander McCall Smith (b. 1948), a Professor from the wonderful Edinburgh university, with discrete delightful humor. Alexander McCall Smith has a knack for titles: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" "Tears of the Giraffe" "Morality for Beautiful Girls" , Espresso Tales. Underneath this bright surface lies a vast array of knowledge (specially of Africa) and interests (folk tales, languages, forensics) and a love for fellow humans that is extremely rare in literature.
You got to read Jasper Fforde (b. 1961) if you can imagine a world where bad people can enter classic books and change the end of the story, so that when it is changed in the original manuscript, all published books change and the real story is lost. My preferred one is Lost in a Good Book but it may be because it was the first one I read, and I had never read anything like it. You might prefer to start with the first of the series: The Eyre Affair.
Go to page 2(Beckett, Lowry and three US writers: Hawthorne, Keyes, Brautigan)
Go to page 3 (Italian and Russian sphere)
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