Stranger Than Fiction
Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
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- ¥1,400
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- ¥1,400
発行者による作品情報
AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
'A masterclass in masterpieces' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
'Epic, personal, smart, wise, witty' JOSHUA COHEN
'Sizzles with passion' TOM McCARTHY
For more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger than Fiction, he offers a legendary editor’s survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel.
Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway’s reinvention of the American sentence; Colette and André Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles; and the monumental ambitions of works such as Mrs Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities to encompass their times. Also included are Japan's Natsume Soseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, as well as Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack and Elsa Morante. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel García Márquez and WG Sebald.
Frank makes sense of the century by mixing biographical portraiture, cultural history and close encounters with great works of art. In so doing he renews our appreciation of the paradigmatic art form of our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sophisticated analysis from Frank (Snake Train), a poet and editorial director of New York Review Books, studies how Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and other novelists refracted historical, philosophical, and social change through their writings. Viewing the 20th-century novel as more of an attitude than a strict category, Frank suggests that Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1864 novella Notes from the Underground laid the groundwork for 20th-century literature by embracing an unvarnished form of psychological realism that sought not to make sense of political and social crises but to reflect them in its fragmented, "helter-skelter" prose. Elsewhere, Frank suggests that Kafka's convoluted run-on sentences in Amerika capture the "relentless pressure of time" that characterizes modernity, and that James Joyce's Ulysses aspired to reinstate a notion of the universal after the factionalism of WWI. Frank doesn't make any pretenses to comprehensiveness, focusing largely on books "written in major European languages" before 1960, but he distinguishes himself as an erudite tour guide who, while never arriving at anything resembling a unified theory of the 20th-century novel, still sheds light on numerous thematic and aesthetic through lines, all presented in sinewy prose ("Notes resembles nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass"). This rewards and delights.
