NP:Greatest Dead Novelist

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I'm only partway through Proust, but so far "In Search of Lost Time" qualifies on all 5 counts. Unlike Ulysses (humor, intellectually challenging but quite the chore to follow all those disparate threads) or Infinite Jest (nearly, but not quite, more trouble than it's worth), "Swann's Way" and "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" flows like water and often leads to dropping the book and drifting into reveries analogous to the thoughts of the young narrator. In fact, "Lost Time" leads to this drifting state more than anything else I can recall.
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: kelber at mindspring.com
> We all have our own criteria for what makes a novel great.  For me, for a novel 
> to be among the greatest, it has to:
> 
> 1. Be intellectually thought-provoking.
> 2. Cause me to stop reading now and then to drift into emotional reveries.
> 3.  Be enjoyable to read, i.e it shouldn't feel like a chore or a duty to get 
> through it.
> 4.  Have memorable characters.
> 5.  Have humor.
> 
> Gravity's Rainbow and Brothers Karamazov fulfill all of these for me.
> 
> Canterbury Tales misses 1 and 2.  Ulysses misses 3.
> 
> Laura
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> >From: mikebailey at speakeasy.net
> >Sent: Sep 15, 2006 2:47 AM
> >To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> >Subject: NP:Greatest Dead Novelist
> 
> >
> >Do I become a lightweight if I see them as a sweet spot of 20th century lit, 
> humanistic but not nihilistic, not fanatic, usually not terribly depressing, and 
> full of humour, imaginative but not intrusively experimental?  Smooth like a 
> good scotch.
> >
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