Clairvoyant says:

For me, there are 2:

1. Roy's "The God of Small Things"
2. Wolff's "Three Guineas"

#1 Posted 1 years ago

cedarwaxwing says:

I cannot think of an answer to your question off the top of my head, but I'd be interested in hearing more about your answer - especially The God of Small Things. What makes the author's voice so unique?

#2 Posted 1 years ago

bluecat says:

As soon as I spotted this question I thought of Alisdair Gray.

Then I saw the title of this group and - yes, this is the right place for him.

All his books look very distinctive. He designs them and they are not like any others. They tend to have decorated colophons, winged skulls, flying amazons, medieval coracle riders, mad machinery and varied typefaces. They often finish with the word GOODBYE printed diagonally across a page. It makes me feel as if the copy I am holding was designed purposely as a message from him just to me and nobody else. His short stories "Ten Tales Tall and True" and "Unlikely Stories, Mostly" are illustrated by the author, and the author blurb on the cover tends to be written/designed by him.

Sexuality - well, where to begin? 1982 Janine and Something Leather are most overtly about patriarchy and its discontents, the first terrifyingly dark and acute. I've never read a better exploration of the slippery slope between sexual fantasy, isolation and despair. It also has an incredibly mimetic presentation of the experience of being drunk: it makes you feel drunk reading it.

I've just been re-reading "Five Letters from and Eastern Empire" - a short story from one of the collections which I found in a Penguin 60 (small independent booklet). He's very good on exploring the distributions of power - between genders, between classes, between roles.

He's the most interesting and original living British writer that I know of (he's Glaswegian and might prefer to be defined as a Scottish writer though) and quite elderly. I hope he stays well and writes more. He turned up on the radio the other morning though.

Just looking through Amazon it seems not much is in print, which is a great shame.

Couldn't get on with the God of Small Things at all. At the time I was fed up with constantly reading about twins with spooky abilities: such a cliche. Should give it another go?

#3 Posted 1 years ago

ptero27 says:

Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. This is truly the most original work I had ever read. You never know if the narrator is a male or a female and after awhile it ceases to matter. It is incredibly sensual and gave me a completely different perspective. Feel free to read my review for more details. I have read several other works by Jeanette Winterson, and they are very good - but this is the best.

#4 Posted 1 years ago

Clairvoyant says:

I would add three of my favorite reads, Pat Barker's "Regeneration," "Regarding the Pain of Others", by Susan Sontag, and an Irish play, "Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme."

All are snapshots of wartime trauma and the vicious cycle haunting the wounded. These works are unified in so many ways-- by inescapable psychologies, and parapsychologies. By the main characters' dissociation of mind from body, or in Sontag's late work (which, in effect, provided the forum in which Sontag recanted an element of her earlier, brilliant work, "On Photography&quot) by the photographer's necessary dissociation through a deadening aperture.

#5 Posted 1 years ago

harryhaller says:

Two. The first is Hermann Hesse and his brilliant but confounding novel 'The Seppenwolf'.This book focuses on the inner spiritual and psychological being, with several themes of the duality of human nature being explored: the need to be different and unique, and the need to conform and be like others, the need to enjoy social interaction and the desire to rebel against social conventions.
The second is Milan Kundera and his sensual 'The Unbearable lightness of being'.Set in communist run Czechoslovakia spanning the 1960s to 1980s, while speaking to the contemporary ear, this is the story of four people in four interconnected relationships. Their world is caught between the demands of society and state, and love and politics. A world where existence loses its substance and weight within "the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return". Kundera’s themes of repetition and weight are quite deep, along with his unusual way of unfolding the positives and negatives of fidelity and betrayal. It is certainly a book to read twice!

Karen

#6 Posted 1 years ago