Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives is quite simply a magnificent novel. This is why I read literature.
Borges and Perec on Classifying Animals
In his short story The Analytical Language of John Wilkins Borges famously lists a hilarious classification of animals found in an apocryphal Chinese encyclopedia. In Penser/Classer Georges Perec lists an equally hilarious classification drawn from various official documents.
Joseph O'Neill: Netherland
It has won the PEN/Faulkner Award and it has been almost unanimously praised, but perhaps that is precisely the problem. The novel nestles itself comfortably in the nicely made corner lounge of current taste.
Richard Flanagan: The Unknown Terrorist
The Unknown Terrorist feels very contemporary and has a great sense of urgency.
Olivier Rolin: L'Invention du Monde
L’invention du monde (The Invention of the World) is a novel like no other. To say that it is ambitious is an understatement. But it succeeds in every respect.
J.M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello
Elizabeth Costello is not just a brilliant, moving novel, full of ideas. It is also an important novel. It questions the power of writing and answers it, in writing.
Michel Houellebecq: The Elementary Particles
A friend recently told me she had read about a dozen books during an illness and wondered how many books she could have read if she hadn’t partied so much all her life. I have read many books and I often wonder how much I could have lived if I hadn’t read so much.
Michael Cunningham: The Hours
The Hours is a book about happiness, the happiness that resides in the simple things which we only become aware of long after the moment itself has passed.
Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes is one of the few books I’ve read more than once. The sentences seem to flow over the pages, at once 'heftig bewegt', then 'utterly tranquil' or 'quietly flowing' as Anton Webern annotated his Five Movements for String Quartet.
Georges Perec: Life a User's Manual
Life A User's Manual is a book for readers, and the more you have read the more you will appreciate the subtle references to other novels and popular culture. But to say so would do injustice to a book that is quite simply a marvel to read.
Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
I must have been 9 or 10 years old when my mother gave me a big encyclopaedia of Greek mythology. I absolutely loved it. I bought The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony the year the Dutch translation was published, in 1991. I was hooked from the first page. This was the book I’d been waiting for.
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf renunciated the 19th century novel and the idea that life tells a narrative, that it unfolds as a tragedy, a comedy, a detective or some other style figure. A story creates a unity that doesn't exist, or at least not necessarily, thereby distorting reality.