2025 Favourite Fiction Part 2
5. SAMUEL BECKETT - MOLLOY (1951)
The best way to get through this relentless wall of text is to read it aloud - to mutter and mutter till one becomes inseparable from Beckettâs feverish hobo. Last post I spoke of the appeal of being trapped, of being kept prisoner in someoneâs skull. You can exit the skull if you stop reading, but soon you realise you are trapped again, trapped back in the skull in side your head. I prefer Molloyâs skull. His skull is more amusing.
âWatch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, buried by the worms.â Whatâs one do with a sentence like this? A sentence like this in every sentence. Nothing but to whistle, underline, and keep on muttering..
I have a lot of love for picaresques - those aimless episodic novels that follow the adventures of a cheeky bugger, rude boy or dunce. Don Quixote, Child of God, A Confederacy of Dunces and The Magic Pudding are all a rollicking good time. Molloy is on the list too, but the book is difficult to summarise. There are no chapters separating his adventures. Just an 80 page-long paragraph in which it is impossible to separate the bumâs reality from his muddled head. Real stuff does happen, but at aberrant speeds and intervals. To keep track of the action it helps to write a short summary at the bottom of every page:
Pg. 31 - Molloy runs over dog on bike.
Pg. 32 - Dog didnât matter. It was on its way to get put down.
Pg. 33 - Owner asks Molloy to bury dog. Molloy doesnât want to.
Pg. 34 - Molloy goes to bury dog anyway.
Pg. 35 - Owner buries dog instead.
Sometimes there are stretches in which I cannot write notes. Sections in which nothing really happens. Just the hobo trying to think a thought but not really getting anywhere. Sometimes a single action lasts a handful of pages.
Pg. 60 - Molloy sucks rocks.
Pg. 67 - Molloy stops sucking rocks.
I say a single action, but a single action is many actions. If one were to really describe the sucking of rocks, as Molloy does, the description looks like this.
I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocketâŚ
I was disappointed by the second half where the protagonist switches to a detective named Jaques Moran. Unlike Faulknerâs Sound and Fury, where the different character perspectives work to fill each otherâs gaps and shape an epic narrative, there is no real story to tell Molloy. Just two parallel journeys that lead to nowhere. Stuff happens but it doesnât matter. What else would you expect?
4. DORIS LESSING - THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK (1962)
If you asked me why this is so high up on the list, I wouldnât be able to answer. It is too big and boundless to describe. It took me several months of steady reading and half the time it felt like work. But my work is okay. When it is good it is bliss and when it is bad it is still alright. That is what this book was to me. What it means I can hardly tell. I just know I spent the whole thing being impressed.
As I said about Sleepless Nights, The Golden Notebook has you trapped in the head of a hyper-intelligent woman, and being a guy who mostly reads from the perspectives of really dumb men (see half the books on this list), the change of scenery was very thrilling.
It is about a writer called Anna who is all cracked up. The different parts of her life have become so separated and incongruous that she has lost any cohesive sense of self. To ward off the chaos, yet adding to the problem, she compartmentalises her life into four separate notebooks. One is a kind of memoir in which she remembers her twenties spent working for the Socialist Alternative in apartheid Rhodesia. Her descriptions of her champagne communist friends, all jaded and cynical, feel really perceptive. Another notebook records her involvement with the British communist party, which she struggles to keep believing in as the situation in Stalinist Russia gets worse. Another is for writing about her relationships, in which we hear about several sub-par to barbaric men. Then there is the overarching novella Free Women which breaks up the notebooks and ties them all together.
None of these sections are particularly gripping, but the writing is so clever you keep going. Like one of them tricky puzzle movies, the structure of the book is so mathematical and metafictional it hurts my head to figure out. It can be done, but I watch Memento for the story, not for the tricks.
Why read it? Because it feels real. Most books simplify the human experience into something that can be streamlined and packaged. Some experience life like that, all neat and tidy with the occasional hurdle, but for others, life is a sprawling and tangled mass of chaos that throbs and shifts and slips away whenever one tries to pin it down. A lot of the time, living feels like drowning. I like that this book puts it into words - the struggle of not just staying afloat, but in trying to stay ahead of the ocean. To get it mapped out and under control. To give a form to the formless.
3. ELENA FERRANTE - MY BRILLIANT FRIEND (2011)
Normally, wrongly, I avoid whatever I see around too much. This is a bad habit. All those years in the 2010s I avoided Game of Thrones; all those years in the 2020s I tried to find someone, anyone, to talk to me about how good it was. I have learned my lesson. Now, about once a year, I read some contemporary literary fiction. It feels so good to go to a party and be able to weigh in on Normal People or A Little Life. Perhaps I have missed the boat on Ferrante. Her quartet is finished and so is the HBO series. But what made me read it was I saw it was set in Napoli, the city I love the most. I say Napoli, not because Iâm an Italophile but because I really really hate the sound of its english name, Naples. It sounds like a rubbery piece of flesh, a lost prosthetic earlobe, something found swimming laps at an indoor public pool. But the city itself is both Napoli and Naples, beautiful and grotesque in equal parts. The city is poor and grimy but the people suffer jubilantly, yoloing in the squalor. One wades through cigarette butts up its half-vertical streets, its streets layered atop apartments, its bridges one looks over and sees there was a whole nother city beneath them, Roman ruins beneath that, and Greek ruins even further down. Napoli is Gormenghast with the colour-scheme of a piĂąata.
But Ferranteâs book is not set in the crazy city centre, but the bleaker outer suburbs; think somewhere on the Joondalup line. The series follows a group of neighbouring families over the course of their lives, the first book beginning with the main characters as small children and finishes with them at sixteen, right at the climax of the book. What I like is that even the minor characters - friends of friends, grocery-sellers, obscure older brothers - dip in and out of the narrative and develop into major characters at points, just like real life. One has to keep track of about 30 characters, who are all connected to one another in complex entanglements. It is both overwhelming and claustrophobic, and reminds me of my own city, Perth, in which everyone you meet has either lived with, fallen out with, or slept with someone you have either lived with, fallen out with, or slept with. It is truly suffocating, but at least the people here are not so prone to argument, vengeance and violence. In Ferranteâs Napoli, the social ecosystem is always on the verge of collapse.
Although the book sounds rather plotless - just the experience of a girl as she ages from six to sixty over four big books, it does have long sagas of drama where you are propelled to keep reading, as something bad is forever looming. Iâve only finished the first book, but somehow, without beating you over the head, Ferrante explores all the big themes, the shackles of living - poverty, history, gender, politics, relationships, ambition, and most of all, the utter alien unknowableness of others.
I havenât had a book in a while that I was so excited to get home and read. Everytime I picked it up, I kept stopping to think: if this ainât an ideal time, what is?
2. GERALD MURNANE - A LIFETIME OF CLOUDS (1976)
I had loosely known of Gerald Murnane as the one weird Australian writer, the Australian writer with a cult following, whose works seemed so strange and intimidating. Then I saw that the foreword for this book was written by Andy Griffiths, the guy who wrote Just Tricking and Zombie Bums from Uranus. What the heck? But unlike The Plains (which I spoke of in the last list), his comic novel A Lifetime of Clouds shows a very clear influence on all those boyishly stupid Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton books that I loved as a kid.
The book is about a fifteen year-old schoolboy named Adrian Sherd who lives a quiet life in the rural outskirts of Melbourne. Like the author, he is a boy who, in the days before mass DSM diagnosis, you would call âa bit weirdâ. The book largely consists of his bizarre sexual fantasies, which are perverse in their innocence, and his subsequent Catholic guilt. For a long time I found the book rather tedious. â250 pages left. Is this whole book gonna be about wanking?â But the book became genuinely good in the second half when [spoiler] Adrian sees a girl on a train, falls in love and vows to sin no more. Then without ever talking to her, he fantasizes the rest of their lives together, a wholesome, lawful, Catholic existence where they have eleven children and grow into their old age. The mechanisms Adrian devises for sustaining this fantasy are amazingly elaborate and absurd in their detail, and it is impressive how far Murnane can take a simple idea.
Murnane explores the psychology of sexual fantasy in a way I havenât seen before, ignoring a century of Freud and devising his own methodology. I once heard an interview where he said he doesnât believe in the id, ego, and superego. To him, the unconscious is just a field with a thin line of trees on the horizon, and when you go past those trees, you see another field with trees on the horizon. I am not sure if I agree, but I sure find this vague, open ended theory more appealing than the fast smart-alec answers of psychoanalysis.
I get a kick out of folk empiricism - of the weird metaphysical systems devised by outsider artists, conspiracy theorists and the religiously aberrant. All writers, especially fantastical writers, speak of drawing from unconscious pools of imagination. But what I like about Gerald Murnane is that he doesnât just draw from the imagination - he explores it with a compass, chart and measuring stick, mapping out the boundaries and writing what he finds.
1. SOPHOCLES - THE THEBAN PLAYS (442-405 BCE)
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone
For all their worth, these critical theorists canât talk about anything for two minutes without namedropping Antigone or bringing up the Oedipus complex. But forget about Freud, forget about Lacan; forget all your MILFs and castrations and anal phases - forget that whole dumb puerile semiotic system. You should read these ancient plays for what they are - really really good stories. I am really not trying to try too hard when I say that these Oedipus plays are as tense and cruel and unpredictable as anything on HBO. I laughed, I weeped, I said âwoahâ, I thought about them for months.
Written about 2400 years ago, Oedipus Rex is about a guy who is doomed from birth to kill his father and marry his mother. His parents know about the prophecy, donât want it to happen, and try everything in their power to stop it from happening. They order a servant to take him off and kill him, but the servant instead abandons him on a mountain in another country. Taken in by a shepherd, Baby Oedipus grows up and learns of the prophecy. Doing everything he can to make it not happen, he leaves the country, and sure enough, the prophecy happens anyway. By the start of the book, it has already happened long ago. The play is about what happens to Oedipus when he discovers what has happened and how it came about. When the truth comes out, no one is happy about the situation one bit, least of all Oedipus.
That is just the set up, and it is a lot more interesting and complex than that. Oedipus is the worldâs first detective story, the worldâs first cancellation scandal and one of the most pessimistic stories ever written. It is really really good, and really really horrible.
Then there are two sequels which are both incredible too. The sequel follows what becomes of Oedipus after his ruin, and the third is about what becomes of his children, which is equally grim as the first book.
In the week before Christmas I read about ten other greek tragedies; five from Euripedes and five from Aeschylus. I enjoyed them, but compared to Sophocles they are not very interesting. For them, the most shocking idea in the world is murder - the murder of a parent, spouse or child. And while I agree that killing oneâs family is very bad and I donât condone it, it is not all that interesting in a work of fiction. Compared to Sophocles, the plays of Euripedes and Aeschylus come off as naive. Sophocles knows there are fates in life that are worse than death. To not be allowed to die. To have to keep living when you really canât stand it.
The fate of Oedipus is more horrible than Sisyphus or Prometheus, because at least they know what to expect - they probably get used to the boulder pushing and disembowelment. They are just myths and legends. What frightens me about Oedipus is that he is real.
That is my ten favourite fiction books of this year! I am glad to finish writing it. Next I will maybe write about my favourite non-fiction books. I am also considering writing a few reviews at the end of each month. Weâll see. I very much doubt anyone reads these things, so I am doing it as a way to practice expression and punctuation. I accuse myself in my head all the time of being self indulgent, but, if I canât indulge myself, who will?