Well, since you ask, it was "Au revoir là-haut" by the distinguished writer of thoughtful thrillers, Pierre Lemaitre. It begins with the most grisly account I have ever read of life in the trenches, and goes on in a vein close to that of Hašek's "Good Soldier Švejk". Although it has won the Prix Goncourt it (typically) has not been translated into English yet - but a film version will appear next year. I don't know how this will turn out, since one of the two main characters has only a stinking red hole between his upper teeth and his Adam's apple...
I have read so many books in my lifetime - thousands of them - that I cannot construct a 'canon'. But at the solid base are the historic Greats : Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, Eliot, Zola, Laxness, Hamsun, Orwell, Brecht, Lampedusa, Genet, Beckett's novels, Flannery O'Connor and Steinbeck and the out-of-fashion Solzhenitsyn...right up to a whole load of current writers, especially those who take a genre (detective fiction or the thriller) and turn it into a vehicle for social comment. As Eurasia and North America start sliding down the john we are living in a golden age of literature in English. And French literature, too, may be rising from its post-Genet torpor, with writers such as Edouard Louis, Pierre Lemaitre, Frederic Beigbeder gaining huge readerships.
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Which novel was that, if I may ask?
Well, since you ask, it was "Au revoir là-haut" by the distinguished writer of thoughtful thrillers, Pierre Lemaitre. It begins with the most grisly account I have ever read of life in the trenches, and goes on in a vein close to that of Hašek's "Good Soldier Švejk". Although it has won the Prix Goncourt it (typically) has not been translated into English yet - but a film version will appear next year. I don't know how this will turn out, since one of the two main characters has only a stinking red hole between his upper teeth and his Adam's apple...
Would it be too much to ask for your own personal "canon" (a word stinking of academic snobbery!) of books and authors?
I have read so many books in my lifetime - thousands of them - that I cannot construct a 'canon'. But at the solid base are the historic Greats : Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, Eliot, Zola, Laxness, Hamsun, Orwell, Brecht, Lampedusa, Genet, Beckett's novels, Flannery O'Connor and Steinbeck and the out-of-fashion Solzhenitsyn...right up to a whole load of current writers, especially those who take a genre (detective fiction or the thriller) and turn it into a vehicle for social comment. As Eurasia and North America start sliding down the john we are living in a golden age of literature in English. And French literature, too, may be rising from its post-Genet torpor, with writers such as Edouard Louis, Pierre Lemaitre, Frederic Beigbeder gaining huge readerships.
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