Are we ready for another week of incredibly varied literature, encompassing centuries' worth of stories in multiple forms, embodying multiple themes? Week 7 of the Banquet of Books reading challenge is here to broaden your literary horizons, and it starts today! Here's what's coming up...
My experience of the formidable 19th- and 20th- century English realist, novel and poet Thomas Hardy so far has been one of his earlier novels, Under the Greenwood Tree, a somewhat flimsy pastoral romance, so to explore the great man's work further, I'm going to be turning to his poetry, specifically the Wessex Poems and Other Verses, set in the fictional southern English county of Wessex for which he is well-known. Set against the bleak and desolate rural landscape of Dorset, the poems were written over several decades and represented his first foray away from prose when published in 1898. If you've already read it, I've got some of Hardy's best bits in various media - you could read his short story The Three Strangers, or his celebrated novel The Mayor of Casterbridge.
There's something seductive about the idea of a banned book. Who banned it? And what, in particular, so aroused their dislike of it? Banned books may be in some way dissident, riotous or downright shocking - today, I'll be sampling them. My top pick is the American novelist Toni Morrison's Beloved, which has managed to be banned by several American high schools despite winning the 1988 Pulitzer Price; concerned parents argue that the tale, inspired by escaped African-American slave Margaret Garner, is too explicit, a view shared by Republican senator Richard H Black who labelled it "smut". If you're not in the mood for Morrison's work, there's also Radclyffe Hall's lesbian romance The Well of Loneliness, destroyed by the UK government whilst its American publisher was arrested, or George Orwell's dystopian tale Nineteen Eighty-Four, banned by the USSR for 40 years!
Truth be told, I've never really explored the rich and diverse fiction emanating from South and Central America before, so for the third course of this week's literary banquet I'll be diving face-first into Cuban writer José Lezama Lima's only novel Paradiso. It is widely regarded as one of Cuba's first novels, is written in an elaborately baroque, semi-autobiographical style and follows the early stages of José Cemí's life as he struggles with a mystery childhood illness, a family death and his sexuality. Although I won't be reading that far, the later chapters incorporate narrative experiments which gradually link disparate stories to the protagonist's life. My alternate picks are Gabriel García Márquez's landmark novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gabriela Mistral's poem Decalogue of the Artist, which lays down 'the ground rules' for being a successful artist!
As with the banned novel, dystopian fiction has a thrilling atmosphere about it that excites the reader's anticipation. Telling tales of dissidents rallying against an often oppressive homogeneous society, these kinds of stories flourish in times of political turmoil or moral conflict. I'll be settling down to the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 novel We, written in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and describing the totalitarian One State and its enforced harmony as it builds the spaceship Integral to conquer other planets. Exciting stuff! If it's not sounding like something that'll float your boat, why not try Aldous Huxley's seminal 1932 dystopia Brave New World (incidentally, another banned book, this time in India and Ireland!) or, for a more modern twist, Tanith Lee's 1976 novel Don't Bite the Sun, set in an ostensible utopia where teenagers are expected to live hedonistic lives.
Ah, here's this week's obligatory medieval text! I've had better success with the medieval era then I'd ever have imagined before starting this blog, tucking into de Pizan, Spenser and Chaucer like an ancient picnic! (Since the medieval era was so long ago, the sandwiches would be mouldy, but who cares?) Looking to repeat the trick, in comes Sir Orfeo, so old that it's anonymously-written. It reframes the story of the ancient Greek poet and religious figure Orpheus as a king rescuing his wife from the fairy king who has stolen her. Even if it doesn't seem like your kind of thing, there's no escape from medieval poetry! - your back-up reads are Langland's 14th-century allegory Piers Plowman, a precursor to Robin Hood, and 11th-century Georgian (although read the translated version, for God's sake!) epic The Knight in the Panther's Skin.
There seems to be a particular vogue nowadays for adaptations of past literary triumphs - perhaps we're now at a point of collectively taking our breath and looking back on the rich literary history we've amassed, reimagining texts through new prisms and creating hybrids of new and old. My top pick to examine this phenomenon is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (no prizes for guessing the source material!) - credited to Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, this horror-inspired reinterpretation of the original, which Grahame-Smith saw as 'ripe for gore and senseless violence,' was adapted into a 2016 film. If senseless violence isn't your thing, I offer alternatives: Maryse Condé's Windward Heights, a postcolonial rewrite of my favourite book, and the excellently comedic Twitterature by Alexander Aciman & Emmett Rensin, which retells classic literature in 140 characters or fewer!
Apologies for the slightly delayed start to this week - but let's make it a good one! I hope you have a wonderful time with these texts - don't they look a fun bunch? - and I'll be back towards the tail end of next week to share all of my thoughts on them all! In the meantime, remember to follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all the latest updates and notifications on when new posts go up! Happy reading!
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