Ranking Under Duress

The Guardian recently put out a poll asking readers to nominate the greatest novels of all time: what would occupy the top of your list, the sacred top three, the books you’d take to a desert island or rescue if your house were on fire?

I admit I love this kind of thing. Maybe because after enough exposure to the daily weather system of horrible news, each headline arriving with the by-now familiar atmosphere of low-grade apocalypse, it feels good to remember that life extends beyond the narrow bandwidth of the present tense; that the new order of things, however infernal it insists on becoming, has not yet annexed everything.

So here goes: my top ten novels of all time (three simply wouldn’t do), an almost impossible task – not only choosing but ranking them – liable to change with weather, mood, planetary alignment, and whatever obscure sentence happens to ambush me next time around, but worthwhile all the same. (It was only after writing it down, and with some embarrassment, that I realized I had forgotten one major novel. Since removing any of the others now felt both impossible and faintly disloyal, the list has become an ungainly top eleven instead of a top ten. Statistical purity, it seems, was never really an option.)

11. In Search of Lost Time – I know. I know. I know. By all accepted protocols this should probably occupy the top position, glaring reproachfully downward at everything beneath it. But since I still have not, to this day and age, found the time (yes, yes, the irony remains available to all) to read it in full, it seemed dishonest to place it any higher. Yet even in fragments, and despite prolonged intervals between volumes, it feels impossible to leave out – as if it already carries the rumeur des distances traversées, even when only half-read.

10. The Magic Mountain – Much as I liked Death in Venice (read during a trip to antebellum Syria) and the Doctor Faustus, this was the one that lingered. A novel that somehow converts suspension into movement, where people speak, fall in love, eat (prodigiously!), speculate, fall ill and die, and time itself – stretched into waiting, and waiting into a form of life – becomes the main event.

9. Light in August – During Covid I went through a Faulknerian campaign, reading all of the major novels in succession. Another could have occupied the spot, but this was the one that remained: for its heat, its violence, its tenderness, and because few novels convey so well that people are simultaneously condemned to history, haunted by the impossibility of fully knowing themselves, and yet absurdly free within it.

8. The Scarlet Letter – Amid all the spiritual darkness, surveillance, punishment, and public choreography of guilt, there appears that brief opening in the forest: one of those small utopian clearings literature occasionally grants us before withdrawing the offer. The fact that it doesn’t last only makes it more compelling.

7. The Ambassadors – “I remember the palace...” (burned to ashes by the Communards) and, of course, “Live all you can.” I’ve always liked reading those two lines together, perhaps because they seem to pull in opposite directions and somehow arrive at the same destination: memory and experience, possibility and deferment, the life examined and the life squandered. A socialist’s compromise with luxury.

6. Lord Jim – While Heart of Darkness (though more novella than novel) is without doubt Conrad’s greatest achievement, and while Victory may have given me more immediate pleasure, Lord Jim stayed, particularly the sequence around Stein, the butterflies, and “the destructive element”. Less comfortably, it made me aware of certain Bovarystic tendencies of my own, to the point that, if forced into the old cliché of naming a book that changed my life, this would most definitely be the one.

5. The Charterhouse of Parma – The breathtaking pages describing the coulisses of Waterloo alone would justify its place here, but everything afterward is just pure delight. Like James, Proust, and Mann, Stendhal here deploys a temporality in which duration resists the imperatives of plot, making room for delay, digression, detour, experiential excess – a life not yet fully disciplined into (narrative) efficiency.

4. Under the Volcano – Intoxication, failure, history approaching from a distance (the Spanish Civil War and the spread of fascism looming behind the action and between the lines), revolution raging “in the tierra caliente of each human soul”, and then all at once private ruin and collective catastrophe becoming indistinguishable. Few novels make consciousness feel so crowded, so simultaneously lucid and doomed. And then there is Lowry’s language: incantatory, allusive, endlessly digressive, yet somehow always under exact control. On a trip to Mexico last year, many years after reading it, the Consul – alongside Eisenstein, Rulfo, and Arturo Belano – was constantly with me, as if the book had spilled beyond its covers and carried its feverish logic into the textures of the journey itself.

3. Ulysses – I read it the year my son was born, eleven years ago. What began as another title from the long civilizational checklist of “books one must read before dying”, became unexpectedly one of the great reading pleasures of my life. Every morning before dawn I would advance slowly through a dozen pages: coffee beside me, baby and cat distributed across my body in no particular hierarchy. And somehow Joyce, despite all the noise about difficulty and genius, turned out to be astonishingly companionable. For a while afterward, it became difficult to imagine wanting to read anything else.

2. Huckleberry Finn – First read at twenty, in college, then returned to a few times over the years, most recently aloud to my son. And each time I let myself be seduced by the same passages: the egalitarian raft-community of Jim and Huck, adventurously drifting through the night; smoking, chatting, drinking coffee by day – temporarily exempt from the laws of “sivilization”. One of my favorite images of “utopia amid overall disgrace” in all literature.

1. Don Quixote – Not only for affective reasons (my father used to read parts of it to me when I was a child) but because I increasingly suspect it really is the greatest in almost every register available to the novel: funniest, freest, strangest, most generous, most hospitable to contradiction. Contestatory without dogma, melancholic without resignation, utopian without innocence. Every great novel after it feels, at least occasionally, as though it knows it is arriving late to something already accomplished in the early seventeenth century.

P.S.– No, Dostoyevsky won’t be making an appearance in my top eleven. I realize this may sound like heresy to some, but, for all his greatness, he has never quite been my cup of tea (I’m still to read The Idiot, though). I also remain, somewhat shamefully, outside the orbit of War and Peace and The Man Without Qualities, both of which I intend to enter sooner or later, pending whatever improbable alignment of time, discipline, and planetary indifference makes such entries possible. And yet, once one begins to think in terms of lists, exclusions, and accidental hierarchies, the borders start to loosen. A top eleven is already a kind of compromise with overflow; a top 101 would, of course, dissolve into something closer to a map of compulsions than a canon. In that expanded, and frankly uncontrollable, version, Kafka and Machado de Assis would appear immediately (how did they fail to make the cut at all?) alongside The Savage Detectives (remembered less as a book than as a kind of call to life), Vineland, The Lost Steps, Hopscotch, The Time of the Hero, Father Goriot (read in two days, as if in a fever), The Waves, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (once upon a time my absolute favourite), Journey to the End of the Night (which accompanied me somewhere around my thirtieth year like a kind of diagnostic instrument), The Thief’s Journal (same around my twenty-fifth), Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls (not Hemingway’s finest, perhaps, but the Spanish Civil War always exerts its own gravitational pull upon me)… and so many others that any attempt at closure begins to feel arbitrary rather than descriptive.

In Every Room, Once

Some lives leave something altered in how time is remembered. For nearly eighteen years, she accompanied mine, not as an event, not even as a story, but as a rhythm. Morning began with her; evening settled with her weight nearby. The intervals in between arranged themselves around small, repeated gestures.

She preferred to eat with me beside her, as if the act required a witness. I would stand there, watching, doing nothing. It seemed incidental then, almost trivial. Now it returns with a peculiar clarity: the stillness, the shared attention, the sense that nothing needed to be added.

We crossed borders without marking them. Two countries, four cities, six houses... coordinates that can be named, though they measure very little of what was carried across. She was never mine in the way objects belong to us. If anything, it was I who was admitted into her world: a world of repetition, of modest certainties. Feeding, waiting, beside the computer as I wrote, lying on my lap when I read, listening to Coltrane or Dylan together, watching a movie in the evening.

Meaning often attaches itself to declarations, to turning points, to the drama of change. Here, it remained elsewhere: in the absence of demand, of judgment; in a companionship that did not need to account for itself, that asked for nothing beyond itself. Proximity, without explanation.

Because her presence was woven into these rhythms, her absence does not gather in a single place. It disperses. The kitchen where mornings began. The reading chairs that became hers. The thresholds where she would pause, as if measuring something invisible. Each space now holds a small interruption. Not emptiness, exactly, but something closer to a misalignment, a rhythm that no longer resolves.

In the last few months, as I would lie down to sleep, she would climb onto my chest, close to my face, waiting to be stroked. It happened every night, quietly, insistently. Only now does it begin to resemble something like a gesture of leave-taking, though at the time it remained within the same order of things: repetition, nearness, touch.

On her last day, she lay on top of me almost without moving. Her breathing had grown strained, uneven, but she still found the strength to purr. At one point, while I was stroking her, she climbed down, unsteady, crossed the short distance between us, and pressed her head against my shoulder, once, then again, before returning to her place on my chest. That gesture remains, intact, as if it contained the whole.