A friend was asking what Dickens novels he should read, the other day. I had to think a bit. I listed, I think, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations as the novels "I would not want to die without having read." He seemed a little surprised by that way of putting it.
I happily read any Dickens novel, but that's quite different from my sense of their importance. I don't feel that people who aspire to a literary education should read The Old Curiosity Shop or A Tale of Two Cities. But they really should read Great Expectations.
I realize this is a very old-fashioned point of view, and one that is shared by some extremely unpleasant people in the current ideological moment. To be clear -- or maybe to be obscure -- I do not hold the value of these novels to be absolute, which I would consider philosophical nonsense. They are not (importantly) things, they are invitations to spiritual dances, and their value depends on where the dancers start from, what they need, and what steps they already know. It will change. Grow up and get over it. That doesn't mean that all novels are of equal value, or that assessing their value is inappropriate. It just means that you are assessing the readers as well as the writers, to the best of your ability. Which is a piece of staggering effrontery, of course, but it's also what every human being owes to their fellow human beings. We're in this together, kids.
I have devoted much of the last ten years to reading Spanish fiction, and while I've read many rewarding novels I've encountered only two novelists I would not want to die without having read: Gabriel García Márquez and Ana María Matute. You should read Cien años de soledad and El otoño del patriarca; you should read Primera Memoria and Olvidado rey Gudu. Three of these exist in excellent English translations: I'm fervently hoping that Laura Lonsdale will come through with an English Gudu sometime, but she's a busy woman and it's a large project.
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