Books on the absurdity of life -3-
Italian and Russian sphere
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Go to page 2(Beckett, Lowry, three US writers: Hawthorne, Keyes, Brautigan and one Japanese: Murakami)
There are two Italians authors who treated the absurd delightfully.
Dino Buzzati (b. 1906) The Tartar Steppe is the most well known book of Buzzati, but not my preferred one: I thought it was too close to Kafka. Buzzati won my heart with a short novel called Il crollo della Baliverna (The collapse of the Baliverna). A man absentmindedly takes out a piece of iron which protrudes from the wall of a huge apartment building, and a few minutes later the whole construction fells apart. If you ever felt that something you had done or said had grown unwanted consequences, you should read this: it is all about guilt. You can find a few short novels here.
Italo Calvino (b.1923)It is easy for adults as well children to love Calvino for all his extraordinary tales, from a baron who lives in the trees and refuses to come down (The baron in the trees) to the The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount. Calvino has the rare gift of being very satiric while remaining pleasant.
In the Russian sphere
Chekhov (b. 1860) was the king of despair.The despair here is much more described in intimate relationships than in society. There is for instance the story of a peasant always insulting and abusing his wife who cries in despair when she dies. Chekhov's plays are difficult because they are about what is not said rather than on the exchange between characters, what critics call the subtext. I prefer his short stories, specially The Lady with the Little Dog*** It turns out that it made one of the most beautiful movies about ill fated love.
Kafka***(b. 1883): He was born and lived in Prague and wrote in German. Like Chekhov, he died from tuberculosis. There is a fine biography on Wikipedia. Imagine that you have read all the major works of western literature from Homer to Proust, and you open a book which starts like this: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." You would find yourself in a totally new ball game: before Kafka, nobody wrote like this, nobody prepared you to this, which is why you should read The Metamorphosis
Tynianov (b. 1894) The style of this Russian author is a bit too complex for me, but he is the author of the tale of a lieutenant who exists only on paper and has a bright military career. The story gave birth to one great very warm musical piece: Lieutenant Kijé from Prokofiev.Tynianov is also the author of the most extraordinary book about fate: Smert Vazir-Mukhtara, the death of the Vazir-Mukhtar, translated, I think, under the title Death and Diplomacy in Persia and hard to find (easy to find in French). For 300 pages, you follow the efforts of a young Russian diplomat to get a position in Persia, and suddenly, it becomes clear to you that there is no reward for him, he is just walking to his grave. It is like a big puzzle suddenly making sense. There is a mob on his arrival in Persia and he gets killed. The description of the return of his body (not all parts of it) to Russia is one of the most striking pieces of literature you can read. So the whole book says that whatever you do is just going to your grave, nothing else. For me, the last chapter and the sudden understanding of what this is all about is worth reading the whole book.
Gombrowicz (b. 1904) born in Poland, Gombrowicz lived mainly in Argentina and in France. His main book, Ferdydurke, is hard to describe, it is in the same family as Swift and Rabelais; it is imaginative, creative, funny, nonsensical and cynical: an experiment in immaturity.
Kundera (b. 1929) a Czech communist writer who escaped communism and became a French writer, Kundera is not, for many reasons, a very appealing personality, but he is a good writer. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an interrogation about life and politics ("Einmal ist keinmal": if you live only once, what does matter?); it is the story of a philanderer, his wife, his mistress and the lover of the mistress. All in Czechoslovakia under the heavy boot of communism. Politics interfere with the private, and love and sex introduce philosophical digressions.
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Go to page 2(Beckett, Lowry and three US writers: Hawthorne, Keyes, Brautigan)
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