This is the
real nominations thread for April.
Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for April 2012!
The nominations will run through April 11 or until five works have made the list.
Final voting in a new poll will begin by April 11, where the month's selection will be decided.
The category for this month is:
Obscure
NEW THIS MONTH - In order for a work to be included in the poll it needs
FOUR nominations - the original nomination plus THREE supporting.
Each participant has FOUR nominations to use. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third or fourth) a work that has already been nominated by another person.
To nominate a work just post a message with your nomination. If you are the first to nominate a work, it's always nice to provide an abstract to the work so others may consider their level of interest.
What is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask!
The floor is now open!
*
Nominations complete:
The Permanent Husband (aka The Eternal Husband) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Fully Nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - caleb72, fantasyfan, Hamlet53, Bookworm_Girl
In print the story is approximately 150 pages give or take so it's not huge like some of his other more famous novels.
Quote:
From one of the world's greatest prose writers, this is a remarkable psychological novel examining the duality of the human consciousness. Velchaninov, a rich and idle man undergoing a moral crisis, is confronted in St. Petersburg by Trusotsky, the loyal husband of Velchaninov’s former lover. Trusotsky informs Velchaninov that his wife has died, and from here this fascinating novella charts the development of the two men’s lives. Beautifully portraying the confused and changing feelings the two men have for one another, this work moves through guilt, hatred, and love. This is Dostoevsky at his best, engaging with his favored themes of tortured minds and neurosis, and treating them in a captivating and highly revealing way.
...and this from Wikipedia:
Quote:
The Eternal Husband is one of Dostoyevsky lesser known novels. The subject of a deceived husband is lighter than in his other novels, but some critics say this novel ranks among his best works because of its style and structure. Alfred Bem calls it "one of the most complete works by Dostoyevsky in regards to its composition and development.
Columba by Prosper Mérimée - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - Hamlet53, Bookworm_Girl, sun surfer, fantasyfan
Set on the island of Corsica in the 19th Century it is the tale of a young solider who after serving in the French army returns home when his father is murdered. There his sister incites him to seek a revenge killing on the rival family that she is convinced murdered their father. Very colorful portrait of the Corsican culture of the time.
Wikipedia biography of Prosper Mérimée
Talismano by Abdelwahab Meddeb, as translated by Jane Kuntz - Fully Nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - toomanybooks, sun surfer, issybird, caleb72
A lush journey into a Tunisia of memory and imagination.
Talismano is a novelistic exploration of writing seen as a hallucinatory journey through half-remembered, half-imagined cities—in particular, the city of Tunis, both as it is now, and as it once was. Walking and writing, journey and journal, mirror one another to produce a calligraphic, magical work: a palimpsest of various languages and cultures, highlighting Abdelwahab Meddeb’s beguiling mastery of both the Western and Islamic traditions. Meddeb’s journey is first and foremost a sensual one, almost decadent, where the narrator luxuriates in the Tunis of his memories and intercuts these impressions with recollections of other cities at other times, reviving the mythical figures of Arab-Islamic legend that have faded from memory in a rapidly westernizing North Africa. A fever dream situated on the knife-edge between competing cultures, Talismano is a testament to the power of language to evoke, and subdue, experience.
Hunger by Knut Hamsun - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - Synamon, toomanybooks, orlok, paola
Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920 for
The Growth of the Soil. Hunger is an early work, written in 1890. The
public domain version was translated from Norwegian by Mary Chavelita Dunne using the alias George Egerton, but you can find later translations by Robert Bly and Sverre Lyngstad.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
wiki
Written after Hamsun's return from an ill-fated tour of America, Hunger is loosely based on the author's own impoverished life before his breakthrough in 1890. Set in late 19th century Kristiania, the novel recounts the adventures of a starving young man whose sense of reality is giving way to a delusionary existence on the darker side of a modern metropolis.
Memoirs of a Midget by Walter De La Mare - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - fantasyfan, toomanybooks, Hamlet53, caleb72
The author is known primarily for his strange stories, poetry, and writings for both adults and children. His masterpiece, however, may well be this extraordinary novel which not many even know about--let alone bother to read. Here is a selection from a review of it from The Observer:
". . . the reader will be charmed and amazed by this odd, creepy tale, which is a gripping account of a young woman enduring a confined life of quiet desperation. Miss M is intelligent and observant, with a profound sensitivity to nature, but she is also tortured by an unrequited, obsessive love for Fanny, the horrible daughter of one of her guardians - "With a silly, animal-like affection I brushed purposely against Fanny's skirts" - which drags her into despair and near-madness.
"De la Mare's preoccupation with the Brontës is unsubtle . . . . But Memoirs of a Midget is a triumphant work of fiction: a portrait of a complex heroine who the reader will ultimately find quite as compelling as Jane or Cathy."
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe - 1
The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe - 2
Spoiler:
In favour - sun surfer, paola
"When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs. Nugent."
Thus begins Patrick McCabe's shattering novel The Butcher Boy, a powerful and unrelenting journey into the heart of darkness. The bleak, eerie voice belongs to Francie Brady, the "pig boy," the only child of and alcoholic father and a mother driven mad by despair. Growing up in a soul-stifling Irish town, Francie is bright, love-starved, and unhinged, his speech filled with street talk, his heart filled with pain...his actions perfectly monstrous.
Held up for scorn by Mrs. Nugent, a paragon of middle-class values, and dropped by his best friend, Joe, in favor of her mamby-pamby son, Francie finally has a target for his rage--and a focus for his twisted, horrific plan.
Dark, haunting, often screamingly funny, The Butcher Boy chronicles the pig boy's ominous loss of innocence and chilling descent into madness. No writer since James Joyce has had such marvelous control of rhythm and language... and no novel since The Silence Of The Lambs has stunned us with such a macabre, dangerous mind.