The Guardian’s new list of 100 greatest novels of all time

I’m currently taking a break from the hellsite still known as Twitter, though I’m aware people have been arguing about this list. I don’t care all that much, to be honest. The list is mainly useful for tracking what I have and haven’t read: here the strikethrough is for the books I have read; the tick is for when I have seen a screen adaptation. 

100 My Ántonia

99 The Go-Between

98 The Road ✔

97 Catch-22

96 Pedro Páramo

95 The Return of the Native

94 The Known World

93 Invisible Cities

92 Sentimental Education

91 Life and Fate

90 Jacob's Room

89 The Left Hand of Darkness

88 Ragtime

87 The Line of Beauty

86 The Turn of the Screw ✔

85 The Vegetarian

84 The Talented Mr Ripley

83 A Farewell to Arms

82 The End of the Affair ✔

81 Buddenbrooks

80 Rebecca ✔

79 Go Tell It on the Mountain

78 A House for Mr Biswas

77 The Rainbow

76 Dracula ✔

75 The Bluest Eye

74 Nervous Conditions

73 Austerlitz

72 Our Mutual Friend

71 Kindred

70 Jude the Obscure ✔

69 Crime and Punishment

68 Blood Meridian

67 The Man Without Qualities

66 The Master and Margarita

65 The Color Purple ✔

64 The Good Soldier

63 White Teeth

62 Half of a Yellow Sun

61 The Rings of Saturn

60 Howards End ✔

59 Never Let Me Go ✔

58 Disgrace

57 The Sound and the Fury

56 Mansfield Park ✔

55 The Waves

54 Orlando ✔

53 The Transit of Venus

52 The Golden Bowl

51 My Brilliant Friend

50 Wide Sargasso Sea

49 A Fine Balance

48 The Metamorphosis

47 Vanity Fair

46 The Leopard

45 The Golden Notebook

44 Giovanni's Room

43 Housekeeping

42 The Magic Mountain

41 Heart of Darkness

40 Song of Solomon

39 Their Eyes Were Watching God

38 The Age of Innocence ✔

37 Invisible Man

36 The Handmaid's Tale

35 Great Expectations ✔

34 Wolf Hall

33 David Copperfield ✔

32 The God of Small Things

31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ✔

30 Frankenstein ✔

29 Pale Fire

28 The Brothers Karamazov ✔

27 The Trial ✔

26 Don Quixote

25 Lolita ✔

24 The Remains of the Day

23 Midnight's Children

22 Things Fall Apart

21 The Portrait of a Lady ✔

20 Wuthering Heights ✔

19 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

18 Persuasion ✔

17 One Hundred Years of Solitude

16 Nineteen Eighty-Four

15 Moby-Dick ✔

14 Mrs Dalloway

13 Emma ✔

12 Bleak House 

11 The Great Gatsby ✔

10 Madame Bovary 

9 Pride and Prejudice ✔

8 Jane Eyre ✔

7 War and Peace ✔

6 Anna Karenina ✔

5 In Search of Lost Time

4 To the Lighthouse

3 Ulysses

2 Beloved ✔

1 Middlemarch ✔

You know how I feel about Middlemarch. It is undoubtedly a masterpiece, but in the English language alone, there are 3 novels I’m placing above it: Moby-Dick, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights. In terms of greatness, I mean. On a personal level, I also have more love for Mansfield Park, David Copperfield, Tom Jones, the Alice books, and a few others. Beyond the English language, we also have Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Don Quixote. 

My list—if I’m ever shameless enough to make such a list—would be very different. But who cares. This is a reminder that there are lots of novels out there I need to read (once I’m done exploring the ancient Greece and ancient Rome).  

Dombey and Son: “I have nothing else to sustain me when I despise myself”

I almost quit on Dombey and Son, around page 425 or so. It is a transitional novel (according to my friend Himadri, the Dickens expert): Florence Dombey is insipid (Dickens clearly learnt and improved himself when he later created Amy Dorrit and Esther Summerson); Walter Gay is a blank; the supporting characters are forgettable, lacking the vitality of the ones in Bleak House or David Copperfield; there are some deeply moving passages but some passages drag; and the highlight (up till that point of the novel) is little Paul.  

But I’m glad I read on, because Dickens gives us some magnificent scenes, such as the scenes between Edith and her mother Mrs Skewton, between Mrs Chick and Miss Lucretia Tox, between Edith and Florence before the wedding—who says Dickens can’t write women? For those of you who have not read the novel, or read it long ago and don’t remember, here’s a quick summary: Mr Paul Dombey is a rich man, a cold man, who doesn’t care for his first wife and doesn’t notice his daughter Florence, as he only wants a son; his first wife dies after giving birth to little Paul; Miss Tox takes advantage of her close friendship with Mr Dombey’s sister, Mrs Chick, and tries to insert herself into his circle, trying to ensnare him; but on a trip after the death of his little son, Mr Dombey is ensnared by someone else, and marries the beautiful but penniless Edith. 

The confrontation between Edith and Mrs Skewton is one of the greatest scenes in the novel. We have seen them for some time, but now we see them for what they truly are: a mercenary, calculating mother who has raised her daughter for the sole purpose of catching a rich man, and a proud daughter, full of self-loathing and painful awareness of the sordid transaction now taking place. 

““You might have been well married,” said her mother, “twenty times at least, Edith, if you had given encouragement enough.”

“No! Who takes me, refuse that I am, and as I well deserve to be,” she answered, raising her head, and trembling in her energy of shame and stormy pride, “shall take me, as this man does, with no art of mine put forth to lure him. He sees me at the auction, and he thinks it well to buy me. Let him! When he came to view me—perhaps to bid—he required to see the roll of my accomplishments. I gave it to him. When he would have me show one of them, to justify his purchase to his men, I require of him to say which he demands, and I exhibit it. I will do no more. He makes the purchase of his own will, and with his own sense of its worth, and the power of his money; and I hope it may never disappoint him. I have not vaunted and pressed the bargain; neither have you, so far as I have been able to prevent you.”” (ch.27) 

What a scene. The quote from the headline comes from the same conversation. Dickens is extremely good at depicting resentful and broken women—we see it in Great Expectations, in Little Dorrit—we see it here. Compared to Mrs Skewton, Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet is much more likeable.  

The second confrontation is even better, when Edith tells Mrs Skewton not to corrupt Florence. When Dickens first introduces Edith, she’s a proud, genteel woman, weary of it all. Slowly he removes the layers: she has been taught and forced to catch a rich man to lift herself and her mother out of destitution; she has been degraded and corrupted, “fallen too low, by degrees, to take a new course”; but she’s aware, and has the conscience not to let her wicked mother destroy an innocent soul. In Florence, she sees a pure girl she could have been. 

The depiction of Edith during the “courtship”, during the preparation for the wedding, and at the wedding is magnificent: she doesn’t love Mr Dombey but doesn’t care; this is what she’s made for; she’s so full of self-loathing and contempt that she’s indifferent to it all. Next to her, Austen’s Charlotte Lucas is tame.  

I also love the scene where Mrs Chick tells her friend Miss Tox about her brother’s upcoming marriage. 

“Miss Tox left her seat in a hurry, and returned to her plants; clipping among the stems and leaves, with as little favour as a barber working at so many pauper heads of hair.” (ch.29) 

Who says Dickens cannot write women? This is one of those things I keep coming across over and over again on the internet, but people seem to repeat it without examining it, without thinking much about it. 

Look at Miss Tox at the wedding: 

“Miss Tox emerges from behind the cherubim’s leg, when all is quiet, and comes slowly down from the gallery. Miss Tox’s eyes are red, and her pocket-handkerchief is damp. She is wounded, but not exasperated, and she hopes they may be happy. She quite admits to herself the beauty of the bride, and her own comparatively feeble and faded attractions; but the stately image of Mr Dombey in his lilac waistcoat, and his fawn-coloured pantaloons, is present to her mind, and Miss Tox weeps afresh, behind her veil, on her way home to Princess’s Place.” (ch.31) 

Miss Tox previously didn’t create a strong impression—here, just a few lines give her life, get us to feel compassion and pity for her. 

This is masterful. 

My 10 favourite literary works

A list of the 10 literary works I think about, or revisit, most often: 

• The Iliad 
• The Odyssey 
• King Lear 
• Othello 
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets 
• Don Quixote 
• War and Peace
• Anna Karenina 
• Moby-Dick 
• Mansfield Park

This looks quite basic, does it? But the central figures of my personal canon do happen to be Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, so I can’t pretend they’re not, just to avoid being called pretentious. 

I refuse to choose between the Iliad and the Odyssey, the same way I refuse to choose between War and Peace and Anna Karenina. 

2 epic poems, 2 plays, 1 sonnet sequence, 5 novels (4 of which are over 700 pages). 2 in ancient Greek, 5 in the English language (4 English and 1 American), 1 in Spanish, 2 in Russian. 2 from the 8th century BC, 4 from the 17th century, 4 from the 19th century. All Western. 9 written by men.

If you have been reading my blog and/or my tweets, I’m sure I’ve been annoying enough about these works for any choices to be a surprise. Maybe the Sonnets, as I don’t blog about them, but I do revisit them often—there’s a Shakespeare sonnet for every mood (I went out yesterday and on the way home thought of Sonnet 34—guess what happened). The only surprises, I guess, are the exclusions of Greek tragedies (couldn’t pick one) and Chekhov’s stories (what do you do with short stories on such a list?)—a longer list of my personal canon would include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, The Tale of Genji, all of Shakespeare, Molière, the (dirty) poems of Hồ Xuân Hương, Tom Jones, Hong lou meng (better known as Dream of the Red Chamber or Story of the Stone), Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov, the plays of Henrik Ibsen (especially The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm), the short stories of Akutagawa, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Metamorphosis (Kafka), Invisible Man, Lolita, Pnin, the poems of Hàn Mặc Tử (especially Đau thương), etc. 

The only thing that bothers me, which is perhaps irrational, is that my literary tastes are strongly Western. I am Vietnamese, I can read well two languages (my Norwegian isn’t on the same level), I spent years promoting East Asian classics, but in the end, my favourite 18th century novel is still Tom Jones, not Hong lou meng; my favourite female writer is still Jane Austen, not Murasaki Shikibu; the central figures of my personal canon are still Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, not Nguyễn Du… Japanese cinema may be the one I know and love the best after English-language cinema, but in literature, my tastes are markedly Western. 

Does this mean I have lost my roots? Mất gốc? (The Vietnamese phrase carries much harsher overtones). 

I suppose the main thing is that I’m most fascinated by human nature and the human mind, and most interested in characters, which is probably also why I much prefer the Greeks to the Romans (you probably have noticed, with horror, the absence of Virgil and Ovid on my personal canon). Generally, Japanese writers—at least the ones I have read—don’t seem to explore the complexities and contradictions and irrationalities of people as we see in Western literature. Their characters are more opaque, even impressionistic; on the one hand, Japanese novels convey that sense of human mystery, the sense that we can never truly know another human being, which I like; but on the other hand, the characters also feel less alive, and don’t leave deep impressions on my mind like Akhilleus, Cleopatra, or Andrei Bolkonsky. The characters in Hong lou meng in comparison are alive, especially Shi Xiangyun (Sử Tương Vân) and Weng Xifeng (Vương Hy Phượng), but they don’t have the depth and complexity of Elektra, Hamlet, or Anna Karenina, and frankly I think Cao Xueqin takes a lot more pages to give life to a character (which Shakespeare can do in five words: “I was adored once too”). 

I’m also not much of a poetry person, despite liking the little I have read of Donne, Keats, Bùi Giáng, etc. I have The Oxford Book of English Verse, and lately have been slowly getting through The Oxford Book of Sonnets, trying to be less of a philistine, but unfortunately still have a strong taste for narratives and characters. My favourite poet (restricting to only those I can read in the original) is therefore a dramatic poet (and before you ask, I read Shakespeare’s sonnets as dramatic monologues, not autobiographical pieces). 

(If I were pretentious, as some people might call me, I would pretend to love poetry, but I acknowledge my failing).  

My tastes are also predominantly classic. When I first got into literature properly, I was mostly reading the 20th century, then slowly went further back, and further back. Over the years, those 20th century novels for some reason haven’t had a lasting impression, haven’t been part of my mental furniture—I barely remember much of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Toni Morrison. But it’s not just because I read them in my late teens and early 20s, not just because I read them before finding my favourite writers—since my discovery of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and others, I have read and enjoyed modern books only for them to have caused nothing but a few ripples in my mind—I haven’t found myself thinking about Muriel Spark, R. K. Narayan, or Soseki, for example. Even Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I read only last September and considered highly, has left no imprints. Shouldn’t they resonate more, being more recent? But they don’t, and I don’t know why. My favourite 20th century writer right now is possibly Primo Levi, but that’s non-fiction. 

It’s curious which works of literature speak to us and haunt our minds. 

Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides

1/ Ah, the beginning of it all! Menelaus and Agamemnon are on the way to Troy to retrieve Helen and sack Troy, but their ships are stuck, due to lack of winds. A prophet says Agamemnon has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis (which to me doesn’t make sense, because Helen is Menelaus’s wife and they have a daughter, hello?). The whole play is about the characters struggling with themselves and arguing with each other, and in the end, Iphigenia willingly goes to the altar, doing it for Greece. 

I wish I could claim to have come up with it myself, but I’m stealing the idea from Tom (Wuthering Expectations) that this is the trolley problem: save Iphigenia, or kill her and save many? The irony of course is that Iphigenia is sacrificed, Agamemnon is later killed by his wife Clytemnestra, who is then killed in revenge by Orestes (and in Euripides’s play, Electra); perhaps we can also argue that the sacrifice of Iphigenia allows the Akhaians to travel to Troy and leads to all the deaths in the 10-year war.

But this is why I have a problem with the ending. In the Introduction of my copy, Philip Vellacott says that Euripides died before finishing the play and the ending was written by someone else. I know Euripides himself had written a play called Iphigenia in Tauris, but the irony is that Iphigenia chooses to sacrifice herself to help Greece only for her death to lead to so much suffering and deaths—where is the tragedy, and the irony, if she is replaced with a deer and just whisked off to Tauris? On a personal level, I don’t want young and innocent Iphigenia to die; but for the purpose of the drama—with the way things have been built up—she has to die, so the rescue at the end just feels farcical.    

2/ As I wrote in the previous blog post, I may complain about the beginnings and/ or the endings in the plays of Euripides—this man is odd—but his middles are generally brilliant. The struggle in Agamemnon, the argument between him and Menelaus, the scene between Clytemnestra and Achilles (Akhilleus), Clytemnestra’s confrontation of her husband, the resolution of Iphigenia, etc—all these conflicts make for great drama—we just have one brilliant scene after another (until that farcical ending). 

(I usually write Akhilleus, but I’m using the spellings in Philip Vellacott’s translation). 

“MENELAUS […] Besides, compassion moves me for the unhappy girl, 

Remembering she is of one blood with me, and faces 

Death at an altar for the sake of my false wife. 

What, after all, is Helen to her?” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

The whole thing of course is ridiculous, just like the war(s) going on as Euripides was writing the play. I suppose Euripides is simply fascinated by all the reasoning—and sophistry—that leads to the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the Trojan War. 

“CHORUS […] Where now can the clear face of goodness, 

Where can virtue itself live by its own strength?—

When ruthless disregard holds power, 

When men, forgetting they are mortal, 

Tread down goodness and ignore it, 

When lawlessness overrules law, 

When the terror of God no longer draws men together 

Trembling at the reward of wickedness?” 

Euripides is clearly in a dark, bitter mood. 

This is funny though: 

“ACHILLES […] I’ve said all this, not out of eagerness to marry 

Your daughter—thousands of girls pursue me all the time; 

But King Agamemnon has insulted me.” 

Duh.

3/ Let’s look at the moment Iphigenia decides to accept her face and sacrifice herself. 

“IPHIGENIA […] The power of all Hellas now looks to me; 

All lies in my hand—the sailing of the fleet, capture of Troy, 

And the future safety of Greek wives from barbarous attacks; 

No more forcible abductions from our happy homes, when once 

Paris has been made to pay the price of death for Helen’s rape. 

All this great deliverance I shall win by dying, and my name 

Will be blessed and celebrated as one who set Hellas free…” 

How selfless and noble for a young girl to sacrifice herself for Greece.

“IPHIGENIA […] And if Artemis has laid a claim 

On my body, who am I, a mortal, to oppose a god? 

This I cannot do. To Hellas, then, I dedicate myself. 

Sacrifice me; take and plunder Troy. For me, your victory 

Shall be children, marriage—for all time my glorious monument. 

Greeks were born to rule barbarians, mother, not barbarians 

To rule Greeks. They are slaves by nature; we have freedom in our blood.” 

This is quite disturbing, yes? I don’t think this is me looking at it with modern eyes—Euripides has depicted the perspective, the suffering of the Trojans—he would find this problematic. 

Having now read 13 of his plays, I still find Euripides strange and hard to grasp—I prefer Sophocles—but Euripides is always fascinating and thought-provoking, and often makes me feel uneasy.