The ten best works of fiction I read in 2022

 The Ten Best Works of fiction I read in 2022: 

Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1898)

Inspired by the play-within-a-play in the film Drive My Car, I re-read Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, one of his 4 late-life plays, and was blown away by its beauty and pathos - as audiences (and readers) have universally for a century - the essence of what’s considered Chekhovian: adults living their late life in a provincial setting, a sense that their lives were of great promise that has never materialized; many missed connections among the unmarried, who are generally on the cusp marital eligibility, time has passed them by, and secret longings are never realized or recognized much less consummated, bursts of violence and remorse. (See also: Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull)

George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)

There’s a long way to from here to Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch; that said, there are in this short many of Eliot’s insights and apercus - plus some sharp-witted addresses to the reader, all of which will sustain her throughout her career. (See also Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda) 

Lion Feuchtwanger. The Oppermanns (1933) 

This novel has to rank among the greatest (if lesser known) grand 19th-century novels that conveys a great movement in history as seen through a group lens - usually a number of family members, each affected by the change and upheaval taking place around them, and their dawning awareness - or oblivion to and denial of - the change that is gradually becoming universal: e.g., Buddenbrooks of course, also The Leopard, Lucky Per, maybe A Fine Balance, maybe Lonesome Dove, 100 Years of Solitude, The Makioka Sisters, and let’s not forget Middlemarch. What makes The Oppermanns stand out even more among this august group of novels is that Feuchtwanger was writing even as the events - the Nazi takeover of the government of Germany under the leadership of the man called in this book always The Leader - took place all around him.

Annie Ernaux. The Years (2008)

I was blown away and deeply moved by the beauty and intelligence of this novel, which I took up with some trepidation but thought I’d like to check out the latest Lit Nobelist of whom I’d never heard - the Nobelists haven’t rung the bell pretty much since the Dylan surprise of ’16. But here this surprise work comes along, so smart, so insightful, and so accessible.

Graham Greene. A Burnt-Out Case (1960)

This Greene novel follows Querry (note the homonym), a lost soul, highly intelligent, a bit acerbic, self-destructive - in this case a renowned architect (of churches primarily), famous on the order of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, who gives up his profession/vocation and journeys aimlessly up an unnamed river in central Africa - shades of Conrad here, obviously - and we find him at the terminus of the river ferry days or even weeks upstream at what we (and he) soon learn is a leper colony staffed by a medically skilled team of (mostly) Catholic priests. Query decides to stay, and he helps out, to some degree. (See also The Quiet American, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory) 

Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon (1970) captures a time and place like too few contemporary novelists. It lacks the humor and irony (or sarcasm) of some of Hazzard’s earlier writing, in particular the novel and stories built on her experiences working at the UN in the ‘50s; but it is in tune with some of her short fiction about Americans in Italy in mid-century. I can’t help but think that Hazard would be much better recognized and more often read today had she set more of her fiction in the U.S. (or London). (See also Collected Stories, The Great Fire, Cliffs of Fall) 

Julia May Jonas. Vladimir (2022) 

Vladimiar must have been the success de scandale of the year, maybe the century, at Skidmore College, the thinly veiled setting. So there’s lots to enjoy here, lots of insight into the character of a middle-aged woman desperately seeking to retain and rekindle the allure of her youth, some great skewering of academic politics, and all in not much more than 100 pp.

Per Petterson’s first work, Echoland (1989) has finally been published in English and it’s obvious that this guy would be a real talent - beautiful passages (a night-time fishing expedition, an exuberant bike ride on fitted nearly deserted roads, family waking up in early hours nearly dead because of propane leak, first realization of sexual urges, complicated relationships with domineering dad and a demanding grandfather, puzzlements about his friend’s attraction to older sister. (See also Out Stealing Horses) 

Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

The writing is at times quite beautiful, esp in Rhys’s evocation of the look and feeling of the tropical Windward Island, in its beauty, danger, isolation - in particular the subtle and mean interaction of the proud English landowner and the slave/servant population, on the verge or just past the verge of outright revolt.

A.B. Yehoshua. The Lover (1977)

This early work by Israeli writer boy the great Israeli novelist, who died in 2022, and possibly his first translated into English is a really excellent novel and a great intro to Yehoshua’s interests and style. (See also Mr. Mani, Open Heart, A Woman in Jerusalem) 

December 2022: George Eliot's first novel, A.B.Yehoshua, and a great work from the 2022 Literature Nobelist, Annie Ernaux

 George Eliot’s first book of published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), a collection of 3 substantial stories each concerned with the relationships - monetary, familiar, amorous, and obviously religious - in small, rural English villages at about 1800 or so (I think). There’s not a bit of nostalgia here; the village life is full of gossip, contentious relationships, animosity, and inequity. We can see in these stories Eliot’s emerging style - acerbic, highly literary, with the occasional metaphor or point of observation that just pierces threader and demands a 2nd look. It’s not yet Middlemarch, Eliot’s master work, but we see the foreshadowing. What’s missing, what she developed in her later style was the ability incorporate and motivate a plot; the character in these 3 stories are far less vivid and complex than later Eliot characters: Each of a type, and the type doesn’t change much or evolve over the course of the work. All the stories including a significant death element; in the first w, that element is more of the pathetic sort - plus a story of love gone wrong and succumbing the family pressure, much like the romantic fiction that Eliot sought to avoid in her choice of a masculine nome guerre. The highlight by far is the final story in the trilogy, where Eliot boldly takes on themes alien to the highly masculine world, at that time at least, of literary fiction, notably drug addiction, alcoholism, and spousal abuse - more than a century ahead of her time. 

A.B. Yehoshua’s early novel A Late Divorce (1982) is a rarity in his work, one of the novels of his that in my view just ran out of gas and got away from him. The main reason to tackle this dense doesn’t work though his experiments with narrative bore fruit in his later work, notably Mr. Mani - maybe his best novel and known for its narrative construction in which the whole story is told from the point of view of a single speaker with his or her respondent must just be surmised from the surrounding - a dialog posing as a monolog. He does the same thing in Divorce none section, but the effect is to put a strain on the reader. This is a novel in 6 long (50+ pp) sections, each from a different POV but following a straight-along 3 (or so) days of plot line; in essence, a father/grandfather who some years back had left his wife (she had tried to stab him to death and is now in a psychiatric hospital) to seek her signature on a divorce decree - and story draws on his three children, their spouses/lover, his grandchildren, ex-wife, and several peripheral characters. This novel cannot support this abundance of characters and events and collapses under its own weight - esp. for American readers who will be puzzled by the many names and nicknames and abbreviated names and the frequent changes in locale - it’s much like the grand Russian novels in this, and a “cast of characters” at the outset would help. Obviously, ABY is indebted as well to Faulkner - the novel opens with an attributed quote from Faulkner - particularly in its use of multiple narrators or points of view esp in Sound/Fury. So in  short for ABY readers, such as me, this novel is worth a look, but it’s a big time absorber of mental space for readers new or indifferent to him 

I was blown away and deeply moved by the beauty and intelligence of Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008) - a book I took up w/ some trepidation but thought I’d like to check out the latest Lit Nobelist of whom I’d never heard - the Nobelists haven’t rung the bell pretty much since the Dylan surprise of ’16. But here this surprise work comes along, so smart, so insightful, so accessible. If one had to classify this work it could maybe be called a work of autofiction - Ernaux’s depiction in some 240 pp. of the span of her life, mostly spent in France, Paris esp in her adulthood, a full-time teacher in a lycée (high school) and later a prof in a college ed dept - but still she writes a slew of books, perhaps picking up the pace in her retirement. As the title suggests, this covers the span of her life -but it’s not exactly a memoir; in fact, it’s an autobio w/out using the word “I” - it’s the story of the evolution of the world in which she lives/we live or have lived, and full of such odd insights and observations that the only close counterpart might be Proust - but AE’s case without the stylistic flourishes. Anyone whose life span is remotely close to AE’s can recognize him/her/their self, or world, in which and of which she writes - entirely in short, clear sentences, each passage an essay in and of itself. Toward the end she discusses this writing project directly: “She would like to assemble these multiple images of her self, separate and discordant, thread then together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth…up until the present day.” She succeeds. Some readers may be a bit stumped by her observations on French politics; never mind that, skip past the Mitterands and the Le Pens et al and get what you can from the rest, including trenchant and timely passages on immigrants, on Sept 11th, popular culture, on hypermarkets and capitalism, on it goes - a remarkable work that pushes the boundaries of genre. 

November 2022:Yehoshua's The Lover, Greene's The Shipwrecked, Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, and The Oppermanns

 Elliot's Reading - November 2022

The Lover (1977) is and early work by Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua and possibly his first translated into English (?), is a really excellent novel and a great intro to ABY’s interests and style. It’s really quite long - -350- pp. but a font using a minuscule style, thanks a lot Harcourt Brace and it’s told in a series of personal voices - 5 main characters and smattering of minor ones - so we’re going from speaker to speaker and sometimes of scenes covering the same ground, a style that could be annoying in the hands of others but honestly ABY’s great skill at maintaining a narrative and establish a character’s voice and milieu that there’s no problem in following the story line and in watching the characters grow and develop; at times toward the end ABY’s style is (intentionally) a recollection of Faulkner and Joyce - exalted company if you ask me. Yet there’s nothing pretentious about the story - it’s easy to follow and offers a great insight into life in the multi-linguistic, multi-faith populace that feels both ancient and contemporary. In brief the story line: A young man (Gabriel) who had been living with a Haifa family, enters the Army during the 2nd War (I think) and disappears: did he die in combat? Did he desert? The head of the family (Adam, aha!) who runs a highly successful car-repair company, sets out to find out the fate of Gabriel, in a long search that takes him across military lines and across much of the land of Israel - in a plot that also involves his teen daughter and his wife (who’d had an affair with Gabriel - this does not seem to bother Adan in his quest, which is one of the few flaws in the novel) and, most consequently, Na’im, a teenage Arab boy who works in Adam’s garage and plays a pivotal role in the chase for Gabriel. In each of ABY’s novels he seems to don a cloak of expertise in a different field - in this one, auto repair in particular: How does he know, or lean, so much about so many different skills and occupations (in later novels, more tilted toward the arts: classical harpist, film director …)? How does he know so much and wear it so lightly? That’s part of the pleasure of reading ABY: His ease with such a wide range of skills lends credence to every other aspect of his writing. This is not a perfect novel, as several key elements are established but never resolved (most notably a highly troubling affair involving a friend of Adam’s daughter), but it’s a striking, memorable piece - an announcement to the literary world that here’s a new guy with whom to reckon. 

The Shipwrecked is an early Graham Greene novel in which he was working out some new material - good! - but has a # of flaws that have kept it more or less underground. It was first issued in 1935 and was a complete failure; initial title: England Made Me. Reprinted some 20 years later under the banner: The Shipwrecked. Neither title tells us anything we need to know about the work itself, which begins w/ a meeting between a career-woman (Kate) and her woefully incompetent dashing twin brother (Anthony) - Kate lands him a job at her company, which seems a lot like a behemoth investment conglomerate such as Berkshire Hathaway, with the stink, however, of bending the rules to advantage. It turns out, improbably, that Kate is to get married to the head of the conglomerate; things, therefor, look promising for Anthony, but when he witnesses some shifty trading, faming of a second-tier associate, brutal beating of a man who crossed the line Anthony’s had enough and says (improbably) that he intends to moved to the U.S. and marry a trashy showgirl he’d met at the Rivoli gardens. So there’s a lot of plot material here, but in this instance the dough never rises: We don’t know or care enough about Anthony’s fate, nor can we look back sympathetically from our 21st century on Kate’s using sexual favors to advance in the corporation. That said, there are some find passages never the less - notably a great description of an early airline flight and a good meditation on the observations one make when traveling by train. 

Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) was George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) first published book of fiction; it consists of 3 sections, each of which is what today we’d consider to be of novella (short fiction)-length or even a novel. We turn to this work with its unenticing title for insight into the writer Eliot was to become. I read just the first section, and will probably come back to the latter 2. The first section - which tells of a rural English minister whose wife takes in to share their domicile an exotic (for rural England) lady, the Countess, which leads to much gossip about the stress this must put upon the husband-wife relationship. Rumors develop end fly - but then tragedy hits the family and the townsfolk feel guilty and admonished for their nasty supposition. There’s a long way to from here to Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch; that said, there are in this short seaman many of Eliot’s insights and apercus - plus some sharp-witted addresses to the reader, all of which will sustain her throughout her career. What this work lacks, however, is a sense of narrative: We get numerous dinner-table conversations and introduction to a lot of characters, but it’s hard to find a driving force in this work - a lot of chatter, but the characters are not faced with crucial life decisions and their consequences; they characters, some of them, may suffer - but not because of their doings and the failures. As Eliot matures as a fiction writer, this will change. 

Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermanns (1933) has to rank among the greatest (if lesser known) grand 19th-century novels that conveys a great movement in history as seen through a group lens - usually a # of family members, each affected by the change and upheaval taking place around them, and their dawning awareness - or oblivion to and denial of - the change that is gradually becoming universal: e.g., Buddenbrooks of course, also The Leopard, Lucky Per, maybe A Fine Balance, maybe Lonesome Dove, 100 Years of Solitude, The Makioka Sisters, and let’s not forget Middlemarch. What makes The Oppermanns stand out even more among this august group of novels is that LF was writing even as the events - the Nazi takeover of the government of Germany under the leadership of the man called in this book always The Leader - took place all around him (I think he was in exile in Switzerland when he completed this novel?, not sure haven’t yet read the brief intro to this intelligently edited (helpful rather than pedantic or condescending footnotes, e.g.); the novel has the vividness of journalism and long perspective of literature. In essence we follow the lives of various members of the O family and several friends/neighbors as the Nazi (Nationalist) party flourishes and there’s one attack or indictment of the Jewish community after another, as many of the characters refuse to recognize the changes in their beloved country, unable to give up their prosperity, fantasizing that this too shall pass - it’s only a phase, only a small # of Germans, etc. - as their world collapses into death and exile. Nobody could read this today and not make analogies between the growing, leadership inspired hatred and oppression that we have seen, are seeing, in our own country: We all are Oppermmans! No doubt the novel gets a bit disentangled and frayed on the cuffs at the end: How could LF possibly bring this novel to a conclusion in 1933 as anything but death in obscurity or a false hope; ending aside, though, the O’s is a completely engaging, informing, and sadly familiar nearly a century after its publication. Langth aside (+500 pp) this novel deserves a much wider readership.