CHOICE CLASSICS – A pick from the enduring classics

A worthy winner of the ‘Booker of Bookers’, Midnight’s Children (1981) is a fantastic achievement in fiction by British Indian Salman Rushdie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie and http://www.salman-rushdie.com/ and  http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie.html), this is already deemed a classic. It is a sophisticated blend of magical realism and historical fiction setting before us the (un)reality of post-colonial India. The tale is delivered in gloriously witty and […]

On first reading this at school in 1977, it took me a while to get fully involved in the narrative. By half way through I wondered if there could ever be a more subtle and penetrating novelist than Mary Ann Evans. 40 years later I’ve not read any fiction finer than that of George Eliot

‘… None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs’, Gustave Flaubert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaubert) observes in what must be the Madame Bovary’s most celebrated quotation, ‘or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the

Charles Dickens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens) managed to conjure up in his fiction a world which is so quintessentially British that practically all subsequent literary works from these islands fall under his shadow. His characters are so memorable that they remain gloriously fixed in our imagination, whilst versions of his narratives are permanently being screened in cinema, performed on stage, or aired on television to this

There was a day and age when rural peasants in England scarcely journeyed outwith the sight of their local parish church spire. Young beauty Tess Durbeyfield’s village is Marlot in Dorset. In order to escape her rural poverty Tess (whom Hardy describes as ‘a pure woman’) follows a clue that the family might be connected to nobility. In

Nausea (La Nausée, 1938) is the diary of one Antoine Roquentin whose systematic introspection leads him into a frame of mind in which he senses himself absolutely free in a meaningless world. He is overcome with a dizzying nausea to understand that with the radical contingency of freedom comes responsibility – a responsibility to invest

We find the following words in William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence. (1803) ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour’. As a comparable thought, would it be possible to embrace all the themes of human life

OK, it’s possible to live as a hermit in some desert hideout and subsist on locust and wild honey. For most of us, though, we live in communities and are surrounded by people. This means we live in a moral context. All our actions, either by commission or omission, send out ripples of consequence like

A Passage to India (1924) concerns the ‘disconnects’ between Indian natives and British colonials played out around Chandrapore and the Marabar Caves in the days of the Raj. Forster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Forster) delicately but resolutely sticks the knife into the whole idea of colonial presence in India. The narrative is engaging and the characters memorable, particularly perhaps Miss Adela