MY 28 FAVORITE NOVELS
MISCALLANEOUS 2
I’m 28 years old today.
Yes, I share a birthday with the greatest man who ever lived: Albert Einstein, whose famous quote I take as my personal motto:
Christ is not the messiah.
I’ve been reading what I would call real literature for about 10 years, ever since I picked up Crime and Punishment (1866) during my senior year of highschool in an attempt to prepare myself for college, —moronically expecting college to require serious reading.
I have no doubt that the novel is the best art form. When done right it is the most expansive exuberant capture of an individual consciousness.
I’m sure by the end of the decade we will just be mainlining tiktoks directly into our arteries, —and I’m not gonna make a case for literature, —but every book on this list is worth reading & rereading.
Remember the limits of our mind are the limits of our world: if you wanna fill up your mind & days with Captain America 10 The President is Batman, be my guest.
This is a list, and for that I deserve jeers and derision, but I will indulge myself because it’s my birthday.
And anyway, I always wanna know what my favorite writers are reading because literature is created in the context of other literature.
This is my context.
HONORABLE MENTION: INFINITE JEST (1997)
I read Infinite Jest the summer after I graduated highschool, —like exactly a year before being obsessed with DFW became synonymous with being an insufferable douche, —and I became an insufferable douche. I wanted to be him so bad.
There was an English professor at Miami University who had gone to Amherst with him, and I went to his office hours after turning in a paper, doing my brooding best, hoping, praying, that he would say I reminded him of DFW. He didn’t. I dropped the class.
I can’t read DFW now, but that book made me want to write fiction.
28. ANATOMIA DO PARAÍSO (2015) BY BEATRIZ BRACHER
This novel is about a pervert named Félix living in Copacabana obsessing over Paradise Lost.
As a pervert named Harold who has lived in Copacabana and is obsessed with Paradise Lost, of course I fucked with it.
Felix is astonished. What a courageous vision! He sees Milton blind, in England, dictating the horror, his heart racing like Felix’s, in Copacabana, in a flow that’s impossible to interrupt: the blast like a stampede of buffalo, a whole village destroyed, pillaged, a vagina eternally open, penetrated, penetrated. Felix hunches over himself. Milton’s pen, Milton’s tongue. Felix’s dick starts to get hard, it’s good and it anguishes him. Felix returns to the story.
27. THE HEALING (1998) BY GAYL JONES
Gayl Jones is Gertrude Stein. Her The Making of Americans is Mosquito: a 600 page magnificent failure.
Her most fun novel is The Healing which incidentally was the novel that caused the U.S. Government to ruin her life.
It describes itself in the guise of describing another novel late in the book,
This one ain’t just an American book, the heroine travels not just among different classes but among people of different nationalities and political persuasions it suggests more improvisational techniques and has sort of a modified frame and an open-ended resolution that’s why she calls it picaresque, you know the technique in those novels, like Lazarillo de Tormes, anyway all the men in the novel have the same name.
26. GABRIELLA, CRAVO E CANELA (1958) BY JORGE AMADO
A beautiful girl named Gabriella falls in love with Nacib and it upends the whole moral structure of a town-in-flux, Jorge Amado’s hometown: Ilheus.
Bonus points cause my girlfriend Gabriella is named after her.
Gabriella rested, living was good. When it hit eleven o’clock she would go back home and wait for Nacib. Maybe it was one of those nights when he would come to her room, his mustache tickling her neck, his heavy leg over her hips, his chest soft like a pillow. At home she squeezed the cat against her face, he meowed softly. She basked in the sun in the rainless morning, bit into guavas, red cherries. She talked for hours with her friend Tuísca, who was studying carpentry. She ran barefoot on the beach, her feet in the cold water. She danced with kids in the park, in the afternoon. She watched the moon waiting for Nacib. Living was good.
25. TEXACO (1997) BY PATRICK CHAMOISEAU (TRANSLATED BY ROSE-MIRIAM RÉJOUIS AND VAL VINOKUROV)
I found out about this novel because the best teacher I ever had, Erroll McDonald said it was one of his three favorites, alongside Severo Sarduy’s Cobra and another book you’ll see later on this list.
A playful, beautiful creation of identity and history on the periphery of Martinique.
Along his way, he saw the Christ. The latter was just walking, nose in the wind, dazed, scrutinizing our shacks and their assault on the timorous cliffs. There was some repugnance in his stride. The stiffness in his bones spoke of his confusion. Iréné looked at him as if he were a bag of flies dressed up as a man. The Christ did not see him or pretended not to and continued down the Pénétrante into Texaco.
24. I, THE SUPREME (1974) BY AUGUSTO ROA BASTOS (TRANSLATED BY HELEN LANE)
Another book I first heard about from Professor McDonald.
I didn’t give two fucks about Paraguay until I read this book.
The dictator Dr. Francia talks to his amanuensis: an insane meditation on time, power, history, and Latin America.
The only reason it’s not higher on this list is due to Paraguay going to war with Brasil in the 1860s.
But then, what skull hammered to pieces by the enemies of the fatherland; what particle of thought, what people, living or dead, will there be left in the country who do not henceforward bear my mark? The red-hot brand of I-HE. Entire. Inextinguishable. Left behind in the protracted nothingness of the race to whom destiny has offered suffering as diversion, non-lived life as life, unreality as reality. Our mark will remain on it.
23. AMERICAN PASTORAL (1997) BY PHILLIP ROTH
A book I almost threw out the window the first time I read it.
But between this and Sabbath’s Theater (1995), this horny motherfucker can WRITE, and I realize that now,
You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.
22. THE LAST SAMURAI (2001) BY HELEN DEWITT
Ain’t really no samurais in this.
A book that makes me wanna do more with my life, with my brain.
Crisp & lucid & smart. A story about a good mother, and a good son.
Being an accountant, it’s not the end of the world. Something looked at my Uncle Danny. Something looked at my aunts, and it said A secretary, is that so terrible?
Linda had already seen four before her do something that was not so terrible and already there was something about them, their whole lives ahead of them and the best thing cut off, as if something that might have been a Heifetz had been walled up inside an accountant and left to die.
21. THREE NOVELS (1958) BY SAMUEL BECKETT
A life-affirming heresy of annihilated being.
By the dude who dumped Joyce’s daughter and used to take Andre the Giant to school in the bed of his pick-up truck.
Sounds pretty good, don’t it?
Here’s one of my favorite passages ever:
And all during this long journey home, when I racked my mind for a little joy in store, the thought of my bees and their dance was the nearest thing to comfort. For I was still eager for my little joy, from time to time! And I admitted with good grace the possibility that this dance was after all no better than the dances of the people of the West, frivolous and meaningless. But for me, sitting near my sun-drenched hives, it would always be a noble thing to contemplate, too noble ever to be sullied by the cogitations of a man like me, exiled in his manhood. And I would never do my bees the wrong I had done my God, to whom I had been taught to ascribe my angers, fears, desires, and even my body.
20. MULLIGAN STEW (1979) BY GILBERT SORRENTINO
Of books that are an acquired taste, this might be the most so.
Basically the world’s worst writer is writing the world’s worst book, and it’s FUCKING hilarious.
But it was not God who brought help from the faraway blue or from anywhere else, how well I remember, sitting here now, the wind—always the moronic wind!—screeching across the lake, clawing hag-like at the windows, Ned Beaumont tragically dead, crumpled in the fireplace, like an old fish, tragic, but not moreso one than I. It was not God, I say!
19. A NAKED SINGULARITY (2010) BY SERGIO DE LA PAVA
A start to finish AWESOME book.
A public defender in New York City gets caught up in a heist is the essential plot drive, and the book moves like a thriller.
But what makes it truly great is the ear for spoken language, the humor, and the moral humane energy animating the whole thing.
I saw the horizons rise as if to merge directly above us while the ground beneath our feet began to sink; jagged swaths of earth along with the structures and people atop were disappearing concentrically as if into a drain and countless humans whistled by making sounds that were either pleas for mercy or yelps of celebration; I saw events and deeds displaced from their proper setting and from notions like past or future and I stared, through regret, at all the ill I’d wrought.
18. THREE TRAPPED TIGERS (1971) BY GUILLIERMO CABRERA INFANTE
A mixture of Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, and the heat of Havana. This book is a deluge of vibrancy. I’m not sure what it all adds up to, but God is it fun!
There are so many voices in this book that it’s hard to pick a representative passage, but here,
and that literature is no more important than conversation and that neither of them are more important than the other and that being a wrighter is the same as being a reeder as B. called them and that both was nothing to write home (or anywhere else) about, after all or before nothing.
17. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
I have not given Woolf the attention she deserves.
I’ve only read Mrs. Dalloway (twice) and this book once.
But if one of the central purposes of literature is to explore Time’s relationship with the Self, then To the Lighthouse is unequivocally one the best, most beautiful books.
Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul…
[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]
16. THE ADVENTURES & MISADVENTURES OF MAQROLL (1993) BY ALVARO MUTIS (TRANSLATED BY EDITH GROSSMAN)
Maqroll is one of my favorite characters in all of literature.
One of those books that make you regret being a desk-bound imbecile and make you wanna be a runaround sailor.
But who knows, she has a sharp nose for losers and they’re usually not to her liking. How complicated it all is. How many wrong turnings in a labyrinth where we do everything we can to avoid the exit, how many surprises and then the tedium of learning they weren’t surprises at all, that everything that happens to us has the same face, exactly the same origin. I won’t sleep tonight. I’ll go get coffee with Miguel. I know where these tortured musings on the irremediable can lead. There’s a dryness inside us we shouldn’t get too close to. It’s better not to know how much of our soul it occupies.
15. ANNA KARENINA (1878) BY LEO TOLSTOY (TRANSLATION BY PEVEAR AND VOLOKHONSKY)
Tolstoy who made his wife read the detailed accounts of his sexual conquests before he married her, Tolstoy who died in a train stop running away from home, is also the Tolstoy that seems to know everything about human beings.
‘Shall I go or not?’ he said to himself. And his inner voice told him that he should not go, that there could be nothing here but falseness, that to rectify, to repair, their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive and arousing of love again or to make him an old man incapable of love. Nothing could come out of it now but falseness and deceit, and falseness and deceit were contrary to his nature.
14. MIDDLEMARCH (1871) BY GEORGE ELIOT
The grandiose expansiveness of vision of Tolstoy, but a spot higher because Eliot’s style is more extravagant than his.
Almost took it off my list when I realized George Eliot was actually a woman named Mary Ann Evans, WTF?! She must surely have had a ghostwriter.
The ending of this marvelous book is one of my all-time favorite passages,
Her finely touched spirit still had its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.
13. THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT (1970) BY JOSE DONOSO
This the single WILDEST book. Ever.
From Professor McDonald’s favorites list.
It is a demented Carnival of masks & myths & class struggle.
Decadence & perversion is its own moral rot: not that it matters when the poor, the rich, the beautiful, the ugly, the healthy, the lame are just cannon fodder for the annihilation of oblivion.
Humberto had no talent for simplicity. He felt the need to twist things around, a kind of compulsion to take revenge and destroy, and he complicated and deformed his original project so much that it’s as if he’d lost himself forever in the labyrinth he invented as he went along, a labyrinth that was dulled with darkness and terrors, more real than himself and his other characters, always nebulous, fluctuating, never real human beings, always disguises, actors, dissolving greasepaint… yes, his obsessions and his hatreds were more important than the reality he needed to deny…
12. MANUAL DOS INQUISIDORES (1997) BY ANTONIO LOBO ANTUNES
Antunes was born September 1, 1942, the same day as my grandpa Hugo who had portuguese ancestry on his father’s side. So Antunes is my grandpa.
I copied the style of this book for the third chapter of Tropicália.
I’ve read it twice in portuguese and once in Gregory Rabassa’s translation (The Inquisitors Manual) and each time I’ve been overwhelmed and shocked and riveted.
Antunes is a prophet of melancholy ruin: he is the most portuguese fucker on the planet.
He’s also the bleakest humorist in the game. Here are the last lines of the book which end on an absent note of love,
how can I explain to you, how can I make this clear, tell my idiot of a son that I couldn’t have been more than, I might have failed more than, tell my idiot of a son, you understand, tell my idiot of a son, I am asking you to not forget to tell my idiot of a son that despite everything I
11. THE PENGTH LIMBUS (1931) BY P.P. VON SOLDIERBERRY
A completely forgotten book.
Penchant Pressmark von Soldierberry was the scion of a noble Anglo-Austro family who decided to abdicate the family fortune and adventure around the world.
He ended up in the Amazon rainforest where he got lost for almost three months, and after he got out, he married a Yanomami woman and had two children until he was mysteriously chased out of the tribe.
He ended up in Taperoá, Paraíba where he went insane writing this book: a memoir slash novel slash mathematical theory that supposedly held the key to everything.
He died raving and alone at 47 years old. I know of him from the brilliant passage in Ariano Suassuna’s Romance d’A Pedra do Reino (1971).
Soldierberry wrote in a mix of bad portuguese, tupi, and english, that Helen Lane and Gregory Rabassa heroically translated into barely comprehensible english. It was one of the first ever Dalkey Archive books in 1984.
But I don’t know where the hell you can find a copy now (the one the NYPL had was stolen). I read it in the original, in a battered copy I found in a used bookstore in Camões street in Rio which I accidentally ended up setting on fire in a very crazy story I’ll save for another day.
I almost don’t understand anything in The Pength Limbus, but I will continue rereading it for the rest of my life if I can find a copy.
Here is the opening paragraph that I’m quoting from memory:
The coagulational geometric relationship of the pength limbus to an articulated zero is 3.4569 divided by Pi… The limbus scares me. Buburugagatatata! Where am I now? Out in Amazonas when I was beneath the stars I would imagine the void of the limbus. The empty echo when I was inside, when I would find it there and it would make me shiver. If I blink once I am in Vienna. Clapsodoisical rhomboids I called Mom: Dad.
Though the life there is ruined from me. I am desolation. I am the limbus. Where do I begin?
Call me P.P.
10. COMPASS (2015) BY MATHIAS ÉNARD
Énard is the best contemporary writer.
Could’ve been Zone, could’ve been The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild but I’ll go with Compass.
Franz Ritter is up all night, dying, remembering the woman he loves and the whole relationship between the East & the West.
Erudite, romantic, and gorgeous.
What a strange sensation, rereading yourself. An aging mirror. I am attracted and repulsed by this former self as by another. A first souvenir, inserted between memory and me. A diaphanous leaf of paper that light passes through to outline other images on it. A stained-glass window. I is in the night. Being exists always in this distance, somewhere between an unfathomable self and the other in oneself. In the sensation of time. In love, which is the impossibility of fusion between self and other. In art, the experience of otherness.
9. ADA, OR ARDOR (1969) BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I love Nabokov. One of the first real books I ever read was Lolita which I picked up because it topped a list of 100 best novels.
I remember sitting next to my grandma on a plane reading it on my kindle and she asked me, “what is that about?”
I said, “fuck Grandma, are you stupid?”
But I can’t really read Lolita now. Pale Fire and Ada are the true masterpieces.
This is what I quoted in another post about this book:
Van, in blue gym suit, having worked his way up to a fork just under his agile playmate (who naturally was better acquainted with the tree’s intricate map) but not being able to see her face, betokened mute communication by taking her ankle between finger and thumb as she would have a closed butterfly. Her bare foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other, and the next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud—the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his wristwatch and a cotton frock.
8. NADA (1945) BY CARMEN LAFORET (TRANSLATED BY EDITH GROSSMAN)
A seventeen year old orphan girl shows up in Barcelona (after the devastation of the Spanish Civil War) to live with her extended family.
She stays there for a year, has friends, falls in love, endures hunger and disaster, and then leaves.
The narrator, Andrea, imbues everything with a sublime sadness that is moving and magnificent.
I LOVE this book with all my heart. It was the first present I ever gave to Gaby.
Andrea has been using the scant allowance she has to buy food to instead buy presents for her only friend because,
Until then no one I loved had shown me so much affection, and I felt gnawed by the need to give her something more than my company, the need felt by all people who are not very attractive to make material payment for what is, to them, extraordinary: someone’s interest and affection.
7. JAZZ (1992) BY TONI MORRISON
I think you could teach American History in three books: Moby-Dick; Absalom, Absalom; and Beloved.
It’s hard for me to pick a favorite T.M. I’ve read all but one, and most of them multiple times. But I am gonna go with the Purgatory in her Divine Comedy (Beloved, Jazz, Paradise) tracing the effects of slavery on Love and Agency.
I think Paradise (1997), —which was widely panned: including by that dolt James Wood, —is probably her best book, but I don’t totally understand it.
The Bluest Eye is a perfect crystal of a book.
But Jazz, the story of a love-triangle gone wrong in Harlem Renaissance New York is the novel of hers that I purely enjoy the most.
While you flicked your foot, turned your ankles for the admiration of the heels, I looked at your knees but I didn’t touch. I told you again that you were the reason Adam ate the apple and its core. That when he left Eden, he left a rich man. Not only did he have Eve, but he had the taste of the first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life. The very first to know what it was like. To bite it, bite it down. Hear the crunch and let the red peeling break his heart.
6. MOBY DICK (1851) BY HERMAN MELVILLE
We’re still catching up to Melville.
Pierre and The Confidence Man are excellent novels. The poor miserable fuck was writing too good for his own day: a time period which for the most part recognized every great writer.
And it’s funny that this book has a reputation for being boring when it’s the most thrilling book in American literature: Ishmael is such a funny and playful narrator, Captain Ahab is a figure straight out of Shakespeare, and of course, there is the Leviathan and everything that signifies.
I reread Father Mapple’s sermon every few months to always keep in mind that “on the starboard hand of every woe there is a sure delight”.
Essentially, if you haven’t read Moby Dick, what are you doing?
Here is Ahab, grand as Hamlet:
But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: —through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
5. DOM CASMURRO (1899) BY MACHADO DE ASSIS
Machado over Moby Dick?
Yes!
I don’t think Melville ever loved anyone romantically (maybe Hawthorne, but he never had to navigate a real consensual relationship with a person he loved).
Machado knows love intimately, perspicaciously.
Plus, Machado’s books take place in Rio de Janeiro.
I love Brás Cubas deeply, but I think Dom Casmurro is the pinnacle. It took brasilian readers decades to realize they were reading a tragedy.
Bentinho marries the love of his life and he lets his own jealousy destroy him. That’s essentially the plot. He can’t forgive Eve and it ruins his life.
Machado believes completely in free will, and he is so attuned to the ways that we misuse our freedom. Plus the prose is so stately & delectable.
Bentinho thinks his dead best friend Escobar is the father of his child, and this is how he ends the book,
One thing remains and that is the sum of sums, or the residue of residues which is that my first love and my closest friend, both of them so loving and also so beloved by me, were destined to come together and deceive me.
But he’s wrong, I think, and anyway, it doesn’t matter.
I wrote more about Machado here.
4. ABSALOM, ABSALOM (1936) BY WILLIAM FAULKNER
The best American novelist, and possibly the best novelist anywhere anytime. The reason America is suffering literarily is because we have ceded the influence of Faulkner to the rest of the world.
Who has so many bangers? As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, The Hamlet, Go Down Moses… and there’s readers who would include several others of his books in the all-time slapper list.
He’s the writer I’ve read and reread the most.
Absalom, Absalom is his history of the South as the Old Testament. It is about naming, marriage, burial, and legitimacy, —how we uncivilize ourselves clinging to arbitrary standards of purity. It is about hate and everything that is rotten in America. An unstoppable torrent: this is the deluge Quentin drowns in.
Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm thinking Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us.
I think out of everyone on this list, if you wanna be a writer, Faulkner is the single most important person you can read (another thing the great Erroll McDonald taught me).
3. TRISTRAM SHANDY (1759) BY LAURENCE STERNE
This is probably the most innovative novel ever written, —at least until Ulysses, and it is the central model for all of Joyce’s work, so he should get credit for that.
Also, it is a novel of conventional pleasures, despite what you might hear from pedantic numbnutses: character, scenes, psychologizing.
The language is incredible, the style is incredible. And it is 100% legitimately funny.
I won’t say too much more about it because I wrote a big essay on it here.
2. ULYSSES (1922) BY JAMES JOYCE
Yeah the best novel in English, it’s gotta be. I was tempted to put Finnegans Wake in this spot, but as much as I like that book, —and I spent nine months reading it closely, so I really really love it, —Ulysses has real novelistic pleasures. I love Leopold and Stephen and Molly. Everyone in Finnegans Wake is everyone else.
And things actually happen in Ulysses despite what people might say. I wrote a big essay about rereading Ulysses recently which you can check out here.
Since I wrote so much about Ulysses in that essay, I’ll quote from the end of Finnegans Wake,
It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it’s all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You’re but a puny. Home! …But I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.
1. GRANDE SERTÃO: VEREDAS (1955) BY JOÃO GUIMARÃES ROSA
I think João Guimarães Rosa is the best writer ever. I don’t know! Maybe it’s my brasilian bias. But what I love is pushing language to its uttermost boundaries and a sincere love for the world.
And it doesn’t seem like any writer loves humanity and nature as acutely as JGR.
And what he does with the portuguese language is completely outrageous.
They say, maybe apocryphally that before Brasil became a country, when it was a shitshow of settlers, priests, natives, slaves, that the people didn’t speak portuguese, they spoke a meldation of all those languages, they spoke Brasilian. That’s the language JGR writes in.
Grande Sertão: Veredas, or as it will be known in English, Vastlands: The Crossing is a story about an old uneducated jagunço (an outlaw, a cowboy, who was running around in the vast uninhabited areas of northern Brasil, just warring) telling his life story to an educated city man (who never speaks).
This book is the Brasilian Epic. I don’t even wanna say too much about it. When the English translation comes out I’ll do a big post.
(JGR also has two books of short stories which are just unbelievably good.)
This is what Clarice Lispector said of this novel the year it came out,
It’s the most beautiful thing in recent memory. I don’t know how far his inventive power goes, it surpasses the imaginable limit. His language, which sounds perfect, is immediately understood as our intimate language, —and in this sense he more than invented, he discovered, or better, he invented the truth. What more can you want? I like it so much it hurts. This book is reconciling me with everything, guessing things I needed explained, enriching everything. How everything is worthwhile! The smallest try is worthwhile.
This is an excerpt that was published of Alison Entrekin’s translation in 2016. It’s impossible to say what the translation looks like now because I haven’t seen it, but here is the opening of GSV; the voice takes a few pages to get used to,
Nonought. Shots you heard weren’t a shootout, God be. I was training sights on trees in the backyard, at the bottom of the creek. Keeps my aim good. Do it every day, I enjoy it; have since the tendrest age. Anyhow, folks came a calling. Bout a calf: white one, strayling, eyes like no thing ever seen and a dog’s mask. They told me; I didn’t want to see. Seems it was defective from birth, lips curled back, and looked to be laughing, person-like. Human face, hound face: they decided—it was the devil. Oafenine bunch. They killed it. Nought a clue bout the owner. They came to beg my guns, I let em. I’m not superstitious. You got a way of laughing, sir . . . Look: when shots are for real, first the dogs set up barking that instant—then you go see if anyone’s dead. Don’t mind, sir, this is the sertão. Some reckon it in’t: the backlands are further off, they say, the campos-gerais inside and out, back-o-beyond, high plains, far side of the Urucúia. Lottarot. To folks in Corinto and Curvelo, in’t this here the sertão? Ah, and that’s not all! The sertão makes itself known: it’s where pastures have no fences, they say; where a man can go fifteen, twenty miles without coming to a single house; where outlaws live out their hallelujah, in the yonder beyond the law. The Urucúia comes from the highlands in the west. But nowadays, all long the riverrun, there’s everything—walloping great farms, lushlands bordering banks, the floodplains; crops that go from wood to wood, thickset trees, even some virgin forest. All round is Minas Gerais. These gerais have no bounds. Anyway, you know how it is, sir, to each his own: cows or kine, depends on your eyen . . . The backlands are everywhere.
Please leave a comment if you looked up The Pength Limbus.
Thanks for the Clarice quote at the end, I consider her one of the greats and it looks like she made this list in one way or another.
Bro who the fuck is PP Von Soldierberry