The best books to understand experimental and literary fiction

I received my first copy of this iconic book, a Bodley Head hardcover edition for my eighteenth birthday from a girl who worked in libraries and knew I liked books. I found the novel tough going initially, having been enraptured earlier by Joyce’s short stories Dubliners which were far more straightforward and accessible. But I went back to Ulysses at different stages in my life, reading different editions, determined to finish the book which I did three times and was glad I did as I learned more about the workings of this novel, loosely based on Homer’s epic, the more often I entered between its covers. In Ulysses, James Joyce paved a new way of looking at the world as it experimented with different modes of narrative, non-linear and without being enslaved to plot, and through his ‘epiphanies’ he saw and showed us the extraordinary in the ordinary things of life.

I remember buying a Penguin paperback of To the Lighthouse at a Boy Scout book fair and being bowled over by the beauty of the prose. This is what a novel should be, I felt— a work of art. Here is a prose writer writing poetic prose of such lyrical beauty and still able to encapsulate the essence of life in something so simple as a protracted holiday visit to a lighthouse. In so doing Woolf captures the longing of a small boy by means of a stream of consciousness of painterly and lilting prose. It also trawls the memories of various characters under the watchful eyes of the aspiring artist Lily Briscoe as she ponders the meaning of life. Outlining her view of writing in her wonderful Writer’s Diary, Woolf claims she was merely a ‘sensibility,’ a conduit to the world. Nevertheless, to transfer such sensibilities to the novel required a great deal of artistic talent and fortitude.  

I have to admit it was Anthony Minghella’s wonderful film of The English Patient that drew me to the book. With a crush on Juliette Binoche I was trying to figure out how her brilliant interpretation of the role of Hana the nurse who attends the bedbound war victim matched with the original character as created by Michael Ondaatje in his novel. Ondaatje, like Woolf, is a poet in prose, but he is also a poet in his own right and this talent transfers well into beautiful writing and an intriguing story. He is an artist using brush strokes of words like the chiaroscuro of light and dark. Perhaps it is not serendipitous that one of his characters should be named Caravaggio:

"She [Hana] lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulfur. She imagines she also breathes in light."

I was so moved when I read The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne that it inspired me to write my novel with my protagonist Laurence J Benbo as a male equivalent of Judith Hearne, an innocent exploited by an uncaring world. The quotidian details of Judith’s life are delineated brilliantly by Moore in all her wretchedness reminiscent of some of the characters in Joyce’s Dubliners which Moore would have read and which possibly influenced him. The dark surroundings of Judith’s life lead her into a fantasy world aided by her one necessary weakness—alcohol. But, as Moore points out, it doesn’t have to end tragically. There is a glimmer of hope with life going on, but nothing as before.

Love in the Time of Cholera like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is about memory. The sense of hope redolent throughout this novel inspires one. Love can endure despite ageing. The book gives hope to romantics without being romantic. This story of Márquez is ageless, as old as ancient Greek and legends and chivalry and heroic, selfless acts. True love will help us overcome all the storms that life in its longevity throws at us. Márquez in beautiful prose and experimental narrative takes risks with reader credibility and succeeds as he did in the magic realism of his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This Colombian writer and Nobel laureate is a consummate artist who gets to the heart of true emotions in people.