First, J. Peder Zane has assembled the top ten books lists from 125 famous authors and put them into a book called The Top 10 (Norton; 352 pages). Then Lev Grossman reviewed that book for Time magazine.
Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. Look at Michael Chabon's. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer's writer.) He follows that up with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. (Hm. Does he really think it's better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first round of guessing.
There's plenty of canon fodder on the lists. Zane, who's the books editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, has done a statistical breakdown of the results, so we know, for example, that Shakespeare is the most-represented author (followed by Faulkner, who ties with Henry James; they're followed by a five-way tie, which you can read about for yourself). But I'm more interested in the dark horses, the statistical outliers, which lay bare the secret fetishes and perversions of the literati. Douglas Coupland puts Capote's unfinished Answered Prayers at number one, blowing right by Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, too. Jonathan Franzen begins straight up the middle, with The Brothers Karamazov, but turns a sharp corner at #9 with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and another at #10 with Independent People by Halldor Laxness. The quintessentially American Tom Wolfe starts by reeling off four French classics in a row. Norman Mailer revives John Dos Passos's out-of-fashion U.S.A. trilogy for his #6 (and shows uncharacteristic forebearance by leaving his own works off the list). And so on. (At times one reads in the knowledge that one is being messed with. There's an outside, screwball chance that David Foster Wallace really reveres C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters above all other books, but I feel comfortable asserting—having read Infinite Jesttwice—that Wallace does not feel that way about Stephen King's The Stand (at #2) or The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy (#10).)
In the end, you end with the following consensus list of the top ten books of all time, not from a critics point of view, but from a writer's point of view:
1. Anna Karenina by Leo TolstoyNo James Joyce, no Faulkner, No Dostoevsky? Well, I guess that's what happens when you let writers make the list.
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot
Anyway, the second book item makes me a lot happier because it includes some of my favorite reads. The good folks at screenhead have assembled their list of the most impossible books to film, and which directors might be able to pull it off if they tried.
With the release and critical success of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, an adaptation of a novel once considered impossible to film, what better time to look into the process of adaptation. Most movies these days are based on literary sources. Which is ironic, considering the increasing lack of interest in books these days as opposed to the spoon-fed thoughts offered by Hollywood.While many novels can be almost directly translated to screen, especially pre-20th century novels such as Jane Austen’s gossip columns, more recent novels can prove difficult. There have been bad novels turned into good films (pretty much everything Hitchcock Made, The Godfather), and plenty of dull adaptations of good books (Dune, The Unbearable Bore of Being in a Cinema to Watch This). There’s also a few oddities, such as Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre self-referential adaptation of ‘The Orchid Thief’. But despite the film industry’s frenzy in snapping up adaptation rights, there remains a few novels many fear.
By the way, Perfume, according to all the reviews I have seen, remains unfilmable -- it's horrible. Anyway, here are the ten books -- you'll have to go to the site to get their insight on the book and who might direct each of these.
1. Ulysses, James JoyceAnd there you have it. Great books that no one should try to film.
2. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonegut
3. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
4. The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
5. 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
6. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
7. Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
8. The Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
9. Any Thomas Pynchon Novel, Thomas Pynchon
10. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
11. The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard
12. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
13. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, Samuel Beckett
Hey Bill,
ReplyDeleteEbert liked "Perfume". Hannah saw a pre-screening of the film at Columbia College Chicago, and the director Tom Tykwer was there; and anyway she liked it, although opinion was mixed among her friends.
md
Hi MD,
ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised -- Roeper hated it. I'll be glad when Ebert is feeling well enough to go back to his show. I like that he and Roeper often disagree -- it gives a better sense of the film.
Peace,
Bill