NP:Greatest Dead Novelist

[jd]

I would say Dostoevsky would certainly make the list.  Anna "greatest
book ever written" (as some people say, I've not read it) Karenina
would probably cause Tolstoy to be on it as well.  I'd say Gaddis,
too.  It's so much harder to quantify the dead, if only because
there's so many more of them and as soon as you say Dostoevsky then
there's people quoting Homer (if you could count him a "writer") and
Aristotle and any number of others.  Hell, the greatest dead writer's
work probably hasn't survived to this era.  But I'm a pessimist.

One thing I will say about Dostoevsky that would be an argument
against him (even though I like him quite a bit) is - well, Brothers
Karamazov.  He wanted Alyosha to be the hero of the book and yet for
me he's a shadow to Ivan.  Dostoevsky so skillfully skewered religion
through Ivan, intentionally, intending to use Alyosha to rise above
that argument, but even he himself felt (if I remember correctly) that
he failed, hence the unfinished (unstarted?) sequel-that-never-was
(died before he had a chance to finish / start it, I would imagine
"start" to be more accurate as I'd guess that an unfininshed
manuscript would still be circulating these days had it existed).  I
love Brothers Karamazov, but not necessarily for the reason he
intendend people to love it.  Was there any tangible argument that
overcame Ivan's, other than his deus-ex-machina-esque descent to
madness?

On 9/14/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Not sure that I either do, can, or am qualified to,
> but who are the other contenders?  Let me know ...
>
> --- kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
>
> > There's a fair amount of agreement on this list that
> > Pynchon is the greatest living novelist.  But how
> > about the greatest non-living novelist?  I vote
> > vociferously for Dostoevsky.  Anyone disagree?
>
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