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1001 literary snapshots

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Picture: Supplied

irst and foremost, this updated edition of the provocatively titled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, first published in 2006, is pure fun. Listophobes and other animals wary of injunction, dogma or certitude will (unjustifiably) give it a wide berth.

But those of us who love to browse while being challenged can look forward to many pleasurable hours between its nearly 1000 fully illustrated pages, reacquainting ourselves with old friends and making new ones.

As editor Peter Boxall writes in his introduction, the list “does not seek to be a new canon and does not claim to define or exhaust the novel. Rather, it is a list that lives in the midst of the contradiction between the comprehensive and the partial”. Furthermore, he positively hopes “people will disagree with the selection in this book passionately and vocally”.

Given the mixed fortunes of a concept as relative as a literary “canon” — that is, according to the Oxford English dictionary definition, “the list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality” — Boxhall’s hopes are surely not in vain.

So what have the 100-strong team of contributors picked for possible posterity? There are the usual suspects: Moby Dick, David Copperfield, War and Peace, Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Farewell to Arms, Ulysses, 1984, Les Miserables, Remembrance of Things Past, Crime and Punishment, Wuthering Heights, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Catcher in the Rye ...

But more contemporary authors are also well represented, with Ali Smith’s There But for the, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad joining novels by Iris Murdoch, Milan Kundera, Alice Walker, Iain Banks, Philip Roth, J.G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess, William Gibson and Paul Auster.

There are also left-of-centre books such as Roberto Bolano’s brilliant Savage Detectives and 2666, Gore Vidal’s outrageous Myra Breckinridge, David Foster Wallace’s lethally funny Infinite Jest and a fair swag of crime (Raymond Chandler, Dorothy L. Sayers) and erotica courtesy of authors such as Anais Nin (no contributor has seen fit to include Fifty Shades of Grey).

Each entry usually includes cover art, a movie still, poster, author portrait or other illustration, contextual and biographical information, a brief discussion of the book’s plot and themes and some kind of justification for its inclusion. For example, of Franzen’s Freedom, Boxell himself writes, “Reading Freedom is an effortless experience, like reading air ... (the book) helps us to see how the fields of force that are producing world politics in the new century are also reshaping our most private experiences, both of our personal freedom and of our loving commitment to others.”

Which Australian novels made the cut? Well, there are plenty, including Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, Patrick White’s Voss, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children.

But why no Tim Winton or Randolph Stow or Gerald Murnane or Christos Tsiolkas or Kate Grenville? Boxell again: “Prose fiction lives in so many guises and different languages, across so many nations and centuries, that a list like this will always, and should always, be marked, formed, and deformed by what it leaves out.” The list, he writes, is a “snapshot of the novel”.

In 1994 the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom published a book called The Western Canon: the Books and Schools of the Ages. His selection was informed by ideas expounded in his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence and elsewhere — that books are brought into being as their authors grapple with the anxiety of being too influenced by what has gone before.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is something else entirely. It’s a cabinet of curiosities, its contents organised alphabetically and chronologically, in which the imagination is indulged without being straitjacketed by theory. There are such things as key works — Shakespeare’s plays and the Kings James Bible are two — because they hold the key to understanding much of our subsequent literature in English. And if we accept such concepts as craftsmanship, originality and sheer longevity, then there is such a thing as a canon. But such considerations need not concern the reader of this book and any compendium that includes The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Casino Royale has my vote.