RSSTom McCarthy lists his Top Ten novels, The Book Depository, 18 September 2007
Today’s Tuesday Top Ten comes from highly-regarded Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Men in Space, and it is Tom’s top ten novels. But, as Tom says, “If this was a Wednesday Top Ten I’d probably choose ten different books entirely, and another ten on Thursday.”
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
In my opinion simply the best book ever written. Structured around a single vanishing point — three brothers looking at their sister’s drawers while she stands in a tree — Faulkner’s four narrative chunks unfold into the most astonishing set of disquisitions on time, consciousness and tragedy.
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Worth the effort one hundred times over. It’s literature’s equivalent, not of the big bang, but of the viewing of the big bang through a telescope: the moment at which the possibility of literature, its source code, looms into view. And it’s really obscene and funny too.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Talking of loomings … Melville takes on space itself: blank expanses, white hides and the surfaces of coffins. Each chapter’s like a kind of Burroughsian ‘routine’: he starts out explaining something quite tedious, like the maritime law concerning ‘loose’ and ‘fast’ fish, and ends up roaring in the most impassioned prose about our globe itself and our souls, which are, reader, but loose and fast fish too…
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
I was going to say Heart of Darkness by Conrad, but this is a more original choice — plus it’s basically the same book. Max leaves the Western civilisation of his bedroom, sails to the country where the Wild Things are and, to borrow Conrad’s phrase, ‘takes a high seat among the devils of the land.’ Sendak was a European Jew who came to America fleeing Nazism. There’s so much going on in and around this book it’s almost unbearable.
Ada by Vladimir Nabokov
Much less read than Lolita, Ada (full title Ada or Ardour: a Family Chronicle) is an exquisitely-crafted ‘autobiography’ written in the third person by two people. It also, like The Sound and the Fury (or, for that matter, half the Western cannon from Oedipus Rex onwards), turns around incest. What I like about it is the delicacy of its transpositions: the way butterflies encrypt writers via the Latin names of flowers. Reading it is like being held entranced in front of cards shuffled by the world’s most devious and charming prestidigitator.
The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
Very short, very intense set of modulations around a set of figures — eggs, eyes, genitalia, the sun — that escalate in scale as they progress. So these teenagers start out playing sex games with eggs and end up cutting a priest’s eye out after they’ve made him come over his cross. It has an unforgettable bullfighting scene in it.
Jealousy by Alain Robbe- Grillet
The world’s greatest living writer I think. Robbe-Grillet’s genius lies in the way he displaces human drama onto spaces and objects: so we get descriptions of the layout of a table, how the light falls from a shutter (’jalousie’ in French), the angle of a hair-clip in a woman’s hair, and only these things, described with the assiduousness of a forensic report — all of which, if you read carefully, imply a tangled psychological web of Greek proportions.
Crash by J G Ballard
For me, this is the novel of the technological era. It manages to pare the complexity and discursiveness of the other two contenders, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, down into a pathological simplicity: let’s replay car crashes, again, again, again, again, again. When you’re done reading Crash, go check out Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which is breathtaking. The one great living English novelist.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Renaissance version of Crash. Quixote, like Ballard’s Vaughan, goes around re-enacting stylised violent moments — pathologically and ineptly. Both books, ultimately, are about issues of culture and curation: how do histories get memorialised, re-activated? What’s at stake when we do this?
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Many people are surprised to learn that Joyce cited Defoe as the novelist who most influenced him. But Defoe’s work is very much about the emergence of the modern self — how this is tied in with systems of the law, the space of the city, the movements of capital and so on. Defoe’s buried right next to where I live, in London’s Bunhill Fields. Next to him is Blake. The two poles of English literature side by side: the mad visionary and the systems novelist.