Literary Time Period Nominations • May 2015

[sun surfer]

Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for May 2015!


The category for this month is:

Time Period
1961-1980, as chosen in the poll


This month is a two-part process:

The first part begins with a one-day poll to determine the time period we will use. It is multiple choice; you may choose as many options as you like when voting. This voting is separate from your nominations. There are no nominations during the poll, only voting. I will not vote in the poll, and if there is a tie, I will break it.

As soon as the poll is over and the time period is determined, then the second part (nominations) begins as normal. This will run for four days until 6 May.

Nominations can be set in any time period and published in any time period, but they should be written during that time period.


Notes:

-Previously chosen time periods currently ineligible:
1981-2000
1801-1900
1901-1920

-The period of 2001-Present has been given its own category (Contemporary) and therefore isn't eligible anymore for the Time Period poll.

-Per our discussion and agreement last year (and that luckily I remembered at the very last second before posting this thread and poll ), the oldest three categories - BCE, 1-1000 and 1001-1500 - have been condensed into one category, BCE-1500.


Once the poll is over and nominations begin:

In order for a work to be included in the nominee 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 are closed. Final nominations:


Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, 1975 - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- Bookworm_Girl, Bookpossum, Hamlet53, caleb72


Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time.


Quote 1:

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.


Quote 2:

In this stunningly original chronicle of an age, such real-life characters intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish and one prosperous WASP, to create a dazzling literary mosaic that brings to life an era of dire poverty, fabulous wealth, and incredible change - in short, the era of ragtime.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 1972 - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- caleb72, Bookpossum, sun surfer, ccowie


“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” — from Invisible Cities

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Frost by Thomas Bernhard, 1963 - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- paola, sun surfer, HomeInMyShoes, Bookworm_Girl


Thomas Bernhard...Frost, his first novel:

Visceral, raw, singular, and distinctive, Frost is the story of a friendship between a young man at the beginning of his medical career and a painter who is entering his final days.

A writer of world stature, Thomas Bernhard combined a searing wit and an unwavering gaze into the human condition. Frost follows an unnamed young Austrian who accepts an unusual assignment. Rather than continue with his medical studies, he travels to a bleak mining town in the back of beyond, in order to clinically observe the aged painter, Strauch, who happens to be the brother of this young man’s surgical mentor. The catch is this: Strauch must not know the young man’s true occupation or the reason for his arrival. Posing as a promising law student with a love of Henry James, the young man befriends the mad artist and is caught up among an equally extraordinary cast of local characters, from his resentful landlady to the town’s mining engineers.

This debut novel by Thomas Bernhard, which came out in German in 1963 and is now being published in English for the first time, marks the beginning of what was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful, provocative literary careers.


It seems to be available on Overdrive - here is further background from an article in The New Yorker

Saville by David Storey, 1976 - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- Bookworm_Girl, sun surfer, Billi, paola


Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 1976 and referred to as 'the best of all the Bookers'. David Storey won several major awards in the 1960s and 1970s for his works.


Quote 1:

Set in South Yorkshire, this is the story of Colin Saville’s struggle to come to terms with his family - his mercurial, ambitious father, his deep-feeling, long-suffering mother - and to escape the stifling heritage of the raw mining community into which he was born.


Quote 2:

This is the story of Colin Saville, a miner's son, and his growth from the 1930s on, his rise in the world by way of grammar school and college. At first there is triumph in this, not least for the father who had spurred him on, but later "alienated from his class, and with nowhere yet to go" Colin finds himself spiritually destitute, bitter, still held against his will in the place that made him . . . A feast of a book . . . it engenders remarkable tension because this self-effacing author, before removing himself from the book, seems to enter organically into his characters, writing from the gut of their experience.' - Sunday Telegraph

'Reading this magnificent book is like drinking pure spring water from cupped hands. It has no false notes, no heaviness of emphasis, no editorial manipulations of plot to prove a point. One becomes so totally involved in the lives of these people that their every word and action becomes charged with meaning.... Reminiscent of a nineteenth-century classic.' - Jeremy Brooks, Sunday Times

'Again and again I found myself paying Storey the reader's finest compliment of saying, "This is the way it has to be, because this is the way it really is." If you are looking for an intellectual and artistic honesty, a patient thoughtfulness and detailed insight into other lives, a controlled drama of ordinary and extraordinary people, this novel will delight and move you.' - C.J. Driver, The Guardian

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, 1973 - 2

Spoiler:

In favour- Bookpossum, paola


From Goodreads:

Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, 1978 - 3

Spoiler:

In favour- sun surfer, Bookpossum, Billi


4.26 rating on Goodreads.


From GR:

Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, and extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.

But the novel in more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.

Falconer by John Cheever, 1977 - 2

Spoiler:

In favour- ccowie, Billi


From GR:

Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. Only John Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, 1963 - 3

Spoiler:

In favour- HomeInMyShoes, ccowie, Synamon

[paola]

sheer laziness is what pushed me to the more recent periods, shame on me...

I voted for one of the 20th Century options so that my vote would matter. Also for the 1501-1800 in the hopes that I will actually see the day.

[Bookpossum]

I just went for 1961-80 as I have a book in mind.

Thanks for the reminder sun surfer - I had lost track of the date and hadn't looked!

[sun surfer]

1961-1980 it is - should be an interesting time frame. Let the nominations commence!

[caleb72]

Admittedly, this one is pretty short, but I'd like to nominate Inivisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” — from Invisible Cities

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

I've picked this one because it looks like it could be a rather beautiful introduction to the author.

EDIT: Should have mention, this novella was first published in 1972 according to Goodreads.

[Bookpossum]

That sounds fascinating, Caleb. I'll second Invislble Cities.

I would like to nominate The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (published 1973). I read it a great many years ago (in the seventies when it came out in fact!) and have always remembered it as my favourite book by Murdoch. I would love to revisit it to see if it is as good as I remember it to be. Some information from Goodreads:

Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

[paola]

Let me throw in one more title then. I really wanted to read something from Thomas Bernhard, and not knowing where to start (or rather, finding The correction somewhat daunting), let me propose Frost, his first novel:

Visceral, raw, singular, and distinctive, Frost is the story of a friendship between a young man at the beginning of his medical career and a painter who is entering his final days.

A writer of world stature, Thomas Bernhard combined a searing wit and an unwavering gaze into the human condition. Frost follows an unnamed young Austrian who accepts an unusual assignment. Rather than continue with his medical studies, he travels to a bleak mining town in the back of beyond, in order to clinically observe the aged painter, Strauch, who happens to be the brother of this young man’s surgical mentor. The catch is this: Strauch must not know the young man’s true occupation or the reason for his arrival. Posing as a promising law student with a love of Henry James, the young man befriends the mad artist and is caught up among an equally extraordinary cast of local characters, from his resentful landlady to the town’s mining engineers.

This debut novel by Thomas Bernhard, which came out in German in 1963 and is now being published in English for the first time, marks the beginning of what was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful, provocative literary careers.

It seems to be available on Overdrive - here is further background from an article in The New Yorker

[Bookworm_Girl]

I totally missed the vote to select the time period! I am happy with the result though. Should be very interesting nominations from this time period.

I nominate Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time.

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

In this stunningly original chronicle of an age, such real-life characters intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish and one prosperous WASP, to create a dazzling literary mosaic that brings to life an era of dire poverty, fabulous wealth, and incredible change - in short, the era of ragtime.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I also nominate Saville by David Storey, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 1976 and referred to as 'the best of all the Bookers'. David Storey won several major awards in the 1960s and 1970s for his works.

Set in South Yorkshire, this is the story of Colin Saville’s struggle to come to terms with his family - his mercurial, ambitious father, his deep-feeling, long-suffering mother - and to escape the stifling heritage of the raw mining community into which he was born.

This is the story of Colin Saville, a miner's son, and his growth from the 1930s on, his rise in the world by way of grammar school and college. At first there is triumph in this, not least for the father who had spurred him on, but later "alienated from his class, and with nowhere yet to go" Colin finds himself spiritually destitute, bitter, still held against his will in the place that made him . . . A feast of a book . . . it engenders remarkable tension because this self-effacing author, before removing himself from the book, seems to enter organically into his characters, writing from the gut of their experience.' - Sunday Telegraph

'Reading this magnificent book is like drinking pure spring water from cupped hands. It has no false notes, no heaviness of emphasis, no editorial manipulations of plot to prove a point. One becomes so totally involved in the lives of these people that their every word and action becomes charged with meaning.... Reminiscent of a nineteenth-century classic.' - Jeremy Brooks, Sunday Times

'Again and again I found myself paying Storey the reader's finest compliment of saying, "This is the way it has to be, because this is the way it really is." If you are looking for an intellectual and artistic honesty, a patient thoughtfulness and detailed insight into other lives, a controlled drama of ordinary and extraordinary people, this novel will delight and move you.' - C.J. Driver, The Guardian

[Bookpossum]

I second Ragtime - sounds great!

My dozy library doesn't seem to have most of the nominations, so I'm going to look elsewhere, as they all sound interesting.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I second Ragtime - sounds great!

My dozy library doesn't seem to have most of the nominations, so I'm going to look elsewhere, as they all sound interesting.

They all sound great. Tough decision like always! I am waiting to see what else is nominated before I use all my votes.

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

They all sound great. Tough decision like always! I am waiting to see what else is nominated before I use all my votes.

Me too.

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I totally missed the vote to select the time period! I am happy with the result though. Should be very interesting nominations from this time period.

I nominate Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time.

Oooh, that was a pretty good film. James Cagney came out of years of retirement to play the villainous police commissioner. I believe it was his last role. Evelyn Nesbit was a real person and at the center of the original Trial of the [20th] Century. I recall Emma Goldman appearing and J P Morgan being mentioned, but no appearance (he was on a cruise down the Nile River). Don't recall Freud or Zapata, but that could be my faulty memory or edited out for the film.

I'll third this.

I'll nominate Rabbit Run by John Updike (first published 1960). From Goodreads:

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.