The most glorious fictions that I've read in many years are late writings by two nineteenth-century masters. The first is Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murad; the second, Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Heart. Hadji Murad (published posthumously in 1912) is a novella on the subject of war and its follies. A Simple Heart (1877) is a short story about an exploited servant woman who finds a bit of beauty in an ugly world. They're both absolutely transcendent stories — "beyond beyond," as Shakespeare says.
April 2. Additional recommendations. I've now read three "detective" novels by Leonardo Sciascia. They are all superior creations, although their open-endedness might be disappointing to people who expect that mysteries must be resolved and that criminals should be brought to justice. They're not genre fiction; they're writings that cleverly expand and question the crime genre. The novels: he Day of the Owl (1961), To Each His Own (1966), Equal Danger (1971), — all reprinted in attractive, reader-friendly editions by New York Review Books. I'll be looking for more Sciascia on the library shelves. Also, You Know Me All, by Ring Lardner, an excellent baseball novel first published in 1916. It holds up well, although the humor leans heavily on "country bumpkin" stereotypes.
Leave a Reply