Stranger Than Fiction | Thornfield Hall

I have read many remarkable books this year, too many to list, but here are five favorites.

At our house we find NYRB Classics irresistible. I belong to the NYRB Classics Book Club, which sends me a new book every month. Talk about great 20th century literature: I really enjoyed Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity, and wrote earlier this year, “Dino Buzzati’s satiric dystopian fable, published in 1960 and translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel, is an AI dramady, reminiscent of the satire of Gogol or Bulgakov.” You can read the rest of the post here.

I also am a passionate fan of Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing (NYRB). I wrote earlier this year: “The German writer Walter Kempowski’s last novel, All for Nothing, is partly autobiographical, partly based based on his compilation of letters, diaries, and memoirs of World War II experiences. During World War II, the rebellious Kempowski was forced to join Hitler’s Youth, and in 1948 he was accused of espionage and served eight years in prison.” This poignant novel is grim but has moments of optimism.

While I’m here, let me not neglect the novella. Rachel Ingalls, an American who lived in England, is one of my favorite writers. Best-known for Mrs. Caliban, a novel about a neglected housewife who falls in love with a monster, Ingalls also wrote edgy, funny short stories and novellas. In her 1987 novella, In the Act, Ingalls writes a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the age of robots and sex toys. The wife is furious when she breaks into her husband’s lab and discovers he is in love with a doll. This is available in an ND Storybook hardback edition. Check out the gorgeous cover.

This year Everyman’s Library published a new edition of The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov. You probably know Bulgakov’s best-known novel, The Master and Margarita, which is wickedly satirical and surreal. But I prefer his realistic first novel, The White Guard, set in 1918 in Kiev during the Civil War. Bulgakov contrasts everyday life with the horrors of war, and it reads like a miniature War and Peace.

Before I leave, I have one urgent recommendation. I loved the Italian novel, Her Side of the Story, by Alba de Cespedes. Published in 1949, this elegant novel was reissued in a new translation this year. De Cespedes’s dreamy sketch of the lives and loves of Italian girls and women seems almost mythic: reality inevitably disappoints these romantics of the 1930s and ’40s.

And for the TBR: I have not yet read Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, but am looking forward to it. Frank, the founder of NYRB Classics and the Editorial Director of The New York Review of Books, is a brilliant writer and fluent in the language of criticism, and he has an unconventional approach. As a twentieth-century “veteran,” I love the mix of genres and styles: modernism, post-modernism, minimalism, maximalism, not to mention old-fashioned realism and naturalism. And I plan to curl up with this book and a cup of a tea that solemnly claims it is Christmasy.