Top Ten Novels about Solitude

'This is the age of loneliness'

Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins star in a film adaptation of The Remains of the Day (1993)

Beginning with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Teju Cole suggests that solitude is a theme that has intensified in our time. 'This is the age of loneliness', he writes, listing famous literary examples of the condition: Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Camus' The Outsider, Knut Hamsun's Hunger and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. On The Guardian website, he lists his top ten favourite examples:

1. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
2. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
3. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
4. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
5. Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
6. Gerald Murnane, The Plains
7. Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August
8. Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
9. Colm Tóibín, The Master
10. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

[Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Lydia Davis on very short stories

Paul Auster, Collected Prose

An expanded edition of the writer's personal essays and memoirs

Biblioklept reviews a new expanded edition of Paul Auster's Collected Prose: 'This month, the good folks at Picador are issuing an expanded edition of Paul Auster’s essays, memoirs, prefaces, true stories, anecdotes, and interviews. Inconspicuously titled Collected Prose and running to just under six hundred pages, the volume includes Auster’s début work The Invention of Solitude in its entirety.' Also included is a series of personal essays on a diverse range of influences, including Knut Hamsun and Franz Kafka, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Art Spiegelman, Salman Rushdie and Samuel Beckett (via Susan Tomaselli).

Source: 'Collected Prose — Paul Auster', Biblioklept, 18 June 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Paul Auster

Disjecta: This week's links

A Piece of Monologue wins 3:AM Magazine's Blog of the Year 2009.
(Image: New Vintage editions of Michel Foucault's work.)

Literature:

Paul Auster: On Stealing Books
J. G. Ballard: Nic Clear's design tribute to Ballard
Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Uncovering Céline's 'tireless' antisemitism
Knut Hamsun: On 'the dark side of literary brilliance'
Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Diurnal versus nocturnal writers
Anaïs Nin: seduction in the diaries
George Orwell: Birthplace to be restored
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Short film of Fitzgerald writing
Haruki Murakami: Quotes the influence of jazz music on his work
E-Books/Kindle: Amazon electronic book sales outsell print for the first time
3:AM Magazine Awards 2009
The Existence Machine: Books Read in 2009
This Space: Books of the Year 2009

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Michel Foucault: New Vintage editions of Michel Foucault's work
George Bataille: An interview on literature and evil

Roger Scruton: A review of a philosophy of wine, I Drink, Therefore I Am
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Why Wittgenstein rejected theories

Music:

Nat Hentoff: A provocative piece on the use of music as a torture method
Jazz: The Nation on a new Thelonious Monk biography
Jazz: Audio interviews with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane

Film:

Werner Herzog: An interview with Slate
Alfred Hitchcock: Hitchcock's influence on the aestheticization of violence
Robin Wood 1931-2009: Hitchcock film critic passes away
100 Best Films of the Decade: The Guardian's pick
10 Underrated Films of the Decade: The Guardian's pick

Television:

The South Bank Show: Melvyn Bragg bows out
David Lynch: Twin Peaks Season 2 to be released in the UK in March 2010

Radio:

Samuel Beckett: The Whole Thing's Coming Out of the Dark

Art:

Mark Glazebrook 1936-2009

Etc.:

Critical Cookie: Now on Twitter
John F. Kennedy: Abraham Zapruder's camera

Tackling Knut Hamsun

The troubling political views of a supreme literary talent

Matthew Shaer on the literary importance of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, and the infamy of the writer's political beliefs:

Hunger, based in part on Hamsun's experiences, traces a man's descent into a madness that is religious in ardor; the man wishes to prostrate himself on the floor of the world. He ponders suicide. He wanders around the streets of Oslo. He starves. He attempts to chew off his own finger and then, a few hundred pages later, he leaves without explanation on a ship bound for foreign shores. There is nothing in the book but madness -- Hamsun skips the periods when his protagonist has food and comfort.

In an 1890 essay, Hamsun wrote that a true portrait of the human spirit could never be conceived linearly or politely. Life was not a story, but a scattershot series of episodic flashes, fast-burning and painful to remember. To thrive, an artist must leave the city for the rough living of the country. He must immerse himself in "the unpredictable chaos of perception, the delicate life of the imagination held under the microscope; the meanderings of these thoughts and feelings in the blue, trackless, traceless journeys of the heart and mind, curious workings of the psyche, the whisperings of the blood, prayers of the bone, the entire unconscious life of the mind."

In his prime, Hamsun always wrote like this -- beautifully, poetically and savagely. Within a decade of the Oslo speech, he had finished two additional novels, the naturalist ode 'Pan' and the disorienting 'Mysteries', which, together with Hunger, count as cornerstones of contemporary literature. "The whole school of fiction in the 20th century stems from Hamsun," Isaac Bashevis Singer once proclaimed, and it is no stretch to say that there would never have been Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' without Hunger. [Read More]

Matthew Shaer, 'Tackling Knut Hamsun'  

Los Angeles Times, 25 October 2009