Authors I have not read.

Ten authors I have not read.  The conceit at The Broke and the Bookish, who originated the idea, is to list popular authors, and they succeed to the paradoxical extent that I have never heard of seven of their ten choices.

My conceit will be that I will pick authors whose work I should have read because I would likely enjoy it quite a lot, and whose work I would have read if I had not followed a path back to older and older books.  This is one of those road not taken sorts of things.  To follow the exercise to its end, I will pair each choice with the writer I actually did read but would not have read if I had read this one.

This game is not as fun as it might seem because you, the reader, are missing information that allows suggestions.  You cannot tell me that I ought to try – I will pick someone no one will suggest – William Burroughs, because I might have read Burroughs.  And I have.  I have met William Burroughs (at a signing, not an interesting story).  I guess you can argue I should not want to read someone I chose.

I remind myself that these are authors who I have not read, so as little Edith Wharton as I have read, for example,  I cannot put her on this list since I have read the one about the sled.

1.  August Strindberg, although I have seen The Dance of Death, a wonderful production, which might violate the spirit of the list.  And anyways I am going to read him soon enough.  (Gotthold Lessing)

2.  Nathanael West.  Easily the most puzzling omission.  Funny, audacious, sharp.  The other big American writers I have not read – Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder – do not bug me so much, and in fact I fear that a couple of them might be big drags, but West is my kind of writer, yet somehow I never quite got past browsing through Miss Lonelyhearts  in the Library of America edition I bought several – many – years ago.  (Sir Thomas Browne)

3.  Andrei Platonov.  When I put together my mental map of Russian literature twenty-five years ago, Platonov was off in the hinterlands.  His translator Robert Chandler has argued that the current generation of Russian fiction writers has been finding all sorts of new things in Platonov; meanwhile a series of his books have become available in English.  A copy of The Foundation Pit is in my house.  (Marguerite de Navarre)

4.  Vasily Grossman.  See above.  The attention to Grossman has grown enormously over the past decade or so.  Every blog review I have read has sharpened my interest.  Life and Fate is very long, which is an obstacle, but Everything Flows is not.   (Plutarch)

5.  Witold Gombrowicz is the kind of writer I used to read a lot more of, original and surprising modernists messing around with fiction.  Ferdydurke sounds fun.  All his books sound fun.  (Oliver Goldsmith)

6.  Dorothy Richardson’s stream of consciousness novels, especially the thirteen volume Pilgrimage sequence, do not sound like fun, exactly, but rather a bracing challenge.  I am surprised that Woolf fans have not explored her work more.  (Samuel Richardson)

7.  Grazia Deledda.  Sardinian, a plus, since what do I know about Sardinia; her books are short, a plus.  After the Divorce (1902) and The Mother (1920) sound especially good.  (Stendhal)

8.  Paul Valéry wrote a little bit of everything, which somehow, even with a twenty year crisis period where he did not publish, added up to a huge mass of stuff.  I worry that he is too difficult for me in any bulk, but that is no reason to avoid his poems.  (Michel de Montaigne)

9.  Miguel de Unamuno, speaking of difficult.  Forget his philosophy – I want to read his mishmash of fiction and criticism Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho (1914), available in English as Our Lord Don Quixote.  The English title alone has affected my thinking about Don Quixote.  Why have I not read the actual book?  Do I fear it does not live up to that title?  (Pedro Calderón de la Barca)

10.  Now I am undecided.  Isaac Babel?  Richard Wright?  Christina Stead?  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who sounds awful, but interestingly so?  Julio Cortázar, how did I miss him?  Or perhaps I will reserve a spot for a writer whose name I do not know, whose books I have never seen, whose existence I am not even aware of.  I am imagining her, or perhaps him, now.  What a great writer.  I can hardly wait.  (William Shakespeare)