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Solzhenitsyn seconded. Without his work, particularly One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle, our understanding of Stalinist repression and its impact on the wider Russian consciousness would be much the poorer. He followed a distinctly Russian tradition of critical realism, which included Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov, but his books were arguably more potent than his antecedents’ due to the risks he took in denouncing the soviet system.
William Faulkner also deserves a mention. Notable chiefly for his formal innovation and revelation of the complexities of the southern psyche, he has, I think, a body of work unparalleled in American Literature. One of the key figures in the modernist experiment, Faulkner’s fiction witnesses an audacious imagination at play… determinedly complex at times, but never gratuitously so… he basically redefined my conceptions regarding what books could, and should, achieve. My personal fav’s are The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, but I’m halfway through my third reading of Absalom Absalom! and I suspect that, once I’ve finally worked out what exactly he’s trying to say, and how he’s trying to say it, it might be his finest novel.
Balzac has to be in contention for a lifetime achievement award, if only for the sheer scale of his output, and the consistency of quality which he maintained throughout. And Dickens, for bringing great, accessible literature to the masses without any dilution of artistry or integrity. Modernism’s great and all, but, without wishing to sound patronising, much of it precludes the ‘ordinary’ reader, often intentionally so. |
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