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“A few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend Ulysses, James Joyce’s new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it — even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it — save bewilderment and a sense of disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a glossary.”
– Dr. Joseph Collins, in The New York Times, May 28, 1922
My wife stumbled upon a fantastic feature buried in the Times archives – the Top 100 novels, with links to their original reviews (where available). I love stuff like this. So here are a few more excerpts.
The Great Gatsby
(Reviewed by Edwin Clark, April 19, 1925)
“The philosopher of the flapper has escaped the mordant, but he has turned grave. A curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been essayed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well — he always has — for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected.”
1984
(Reviewed by Mark Schorer, June 12, 1949)
“It has always seemed to the present writer that the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels is a great work of static art; no less, it would seem to him that George Orwell’s new novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, is a great work of kinetic art. This may mean that its greatness is only immediate, its power for us alone, now, in this generation, this decade, this year, that it is doomed to be the pawn of time. Nevertheless it is probable that no other work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fullness.”
The Grapes of Wrath
(Reviewed by Peter Monro Jack, April 16, 1939)
“There are a few novelists writing as well as Steinbeck and perhaps a very few who write better; but it is most interesting to note how very much alike they are all writing: Hemingway, Caldwell, Faulkner, Dos Passos in the novel, and MacLeish in poetry are those whom we easily think of in their similarity of theme and style. Each is writing stories and scenarios of America with a curious and sudden intensity, almost as if they had never seen or understood it before. They are looking at it again with revolutionary eyes. Stirred like every other man in the street with news of foreign persecution, they turn to their own land to find seeds of the same destructive hatred. Their themes of pity and anger, their styles of sentimental elegy and scarifying denunciation may come to seem representative of our time.”
Explore the others here.
Interesting site and I enjoy the contemporary reviews, but I have to wonder how the NY Times can justifying a list of the 100 Best “Modern Classics” (20th century per their definition) and not include a single Ayn Rand novel.
Now, I’m not a rabid Randian, who think that Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem should be #1 through #4…. there are plenty of folks like that. Nonetheless, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each belong SOMEWHERE on that list — they are monumental works. The Times is really showing its liberal / snooty elite colors here.
posted by Sid Morrison on 5-11-2007 at 1:41 pm
Ah yes, Sid, who doesn’t love some objectivist doorstops? Except the NY Times didn’t come up with the list, which you could have learned without casting asperions about snooty liberal elites, if you’d bothered to read the article.
The list was devised by “a jury of scholars and writers” on behalf of “the editorial board of Modern Library, which has been publishing classic English-language literature at affordable prices since 1917 and is now a division of Random House.”
posted by Muffy on 5-13-2007 at 8:23 pm
Mea culpa, mea culpa.
OK, so is it better to have a publisher with a very narrow 10 member “review board” come up with a list of “greatest books”? And, the kicker is that the board could only choose from Modern Library’s own titles!!!!!
From the Wikipedia article about “Modern Classics”:
“The list was compiled via approval voting, by sending each board member a list of 440 pre-selected books from the Modern Library catalogue and asking each member to place a check beside novels they wished to choose.”
So the list the board had to choose from was pre-selected from the publisher’s catalog? What kind of list is that????
Hey, I don’t advocate the “readers’ web poll” method they tried out either (opening it up to ALL books and taking unlimited votes from everyone) — they wound up with 4 Ayn Rands and 3 L.Ron Hubbards (!!) in the top 10. That’s clearly ballot box stuffing.
Something tells me there should be a happy medium somewhere — maybe part “academic/author board” and part readers, but don’t limit to only the books that the company published itself. That is clearly bogus.
posted by Sid Morrison on 5-14-2007 at 9:23 am
Three Hubbards? Now THAT’s some suspect methodology!
Isn’t any effort to quantify something that is ultimately subjective bound to have limitations?
Take the IMDb Top 250, for instance, which comes from the entire pool of films and uses both total number of votes and cumulative total. (Plus some other secret things like prioritizing certain users’ votes.) You still end up with a disproportionate number of boyish favorites at the top, with purposeful efforts to push certain films out of the Top 250 by giving it one star to keep others on the cherished (and thus ultimately meaningless) list. Hey, I love Luke Skywalker, too, but “Star Wars” really isn’t the 12th best movie in history.
What would be interesting to me are lists compiled WITH obvious bias - since some be-all end-all best of list is basically futile. So give us the NY Times snobby list. The 12th grade English teacher’s list. The totally spurious Scientologist ballot-stuffing list. What-have-you. It would be interesting to see the overlap!
posted by Muffy on 5-15-2007 at 3:43 pm