Follow the grass and read more classic poems
I want to tell the reader of this book how the paper in the book was written. While I was in the United States, one day the editor of Red Book magazine asked me to list the top ten best novels in the world. I did as I was told, and then I forgot about it.
I wrote a short commentary along with the booklet: "If a wise reader learns to skip the uninteresting parts of the book over the art of not reading, reading these books will be the greatest enjoyment." After a while, an American publisher suggested that these ten famous books be republished, deleting the parts that ordinary people would not like to read, and attaching a guide to each book that I had written. This proposal aroused my interest, and I proceeded to do so. The abridged guide has been mostly published in The Atlantic magazine, which seems to have aroused the interest of readers, so some people feel that it will be much more convenient for readers to assemble into a single book.
My original bibliography has been slightly changed. In the last book on the list, I initially listed Marcel Proust's Remembrance of a Time like Water, but for a number of reasons it was not included in the list that was later mentioned. I don't regret it. Proust's novel is the greatest novel of the 20th century, so long that even a large deletion is still impossible to delete to a reasonable scale.
This book is an extraordinary achievement, but it is too early to evaluate the evaluation of it by future generations. Proust's avid admirers—and I am one of them—can read every word with gusto, without getting bored. Once, in a moment of exaggeration, I said that I would rather be bored to death reading Proust's works than be half dead in the works of other writers. But I would now like to admit that the values of the various parts of that book are different. In my humble opinion, proust's long chapters influenced by the psychological and philosophical trends of his time are bound to be of little interest to future generations.
Some of these currents of thought have been found to be wrong. I think it will be more obvious then than it is now that he was a great humorist, and that his ability to create new, diverse, lifelike characters was comparable to Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Perhaps only then will a condensed version of his vast masterpiece be released, omitting the parts that have been stripped of value by time, leaving only the essence of the novel, that is, the parts of eternal interest. "Remembrance of The Age of Water" will still be a long novel, but it is a good work.
The bibliography of the ten best novels in the world that I have finally selected is as follows:
Tom Jones
Pride and Prejudice
The Red and the Black
"The Tall Old Man"
David Copperfield
Wuthering Heights
Madame Bovary
Moby Dick
War and Peace
The Brothers Karamazov
But I declare in advance that sifting through the ten best novels in the world for reviews is nonsense. There are only ten best novels in the world, maybe I have to pick a hundred best novels, even this I am not sure. If you were to find fifty well-read people with profound learning and skill to list the best hundred novels in the world, I believe that at least two or three hundred books would have received more than one vote. But if these fifty bibliographies had been proposed by english speakers, I think the ten novels I have chosen would also have a place. I put special emphasis on those who use English because at least one novel in my bibliography, Moby Dick, is still quite unfamiliar to the educated European public. I don't think anyone will read the German, Spanish, or French versions of the book, except for English literature students. In the 18th century, many people in France read English literature, but later the French did not have much interest in works outside their borders, and this was still the case until recently; if the French listed a hundred of the best novels, there must be many works that people in English-speaking countries had never heard or read.
This divergence of views is not difficult to explain. There must be many reasons why a novel is particularly appealing to a certain person (a person with very good judgment) and makes him think that the book is of extraordinary value. Perhaps he read at a particularly touching time or circumstance in his life, or perhaps based on his own preferences or personal associations, the subject matter or context of the book was of extraordinary significance to him.
For example, I can imagine that it would be easy for a music lover to list the Australian writer Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest as one of the best ten novels, and the original inhabitants of the "Five Cities" in Staveshire, England, admired Arnold Bennet 's 1867-1931] faithful depiction of the character and folklore of the Five Cities, and probably the Story of the Old Woman. Listed as one of the top ten novels.
Both of these are good books, but I don't think fair judges will ever list them among the top ten best novels in the world. The nationality of the reader makes him particularly interested in certain books, and he will find them more outstanding than generally recognized. For example, I suppose that any educated Frenchman who lists books like me might include Madame de Lafayette's (1634-1693) Princess Clive. To be fair, the book was of remarkable value, the first psychological novel ever written; the story was moving, persuasive, and the characters were vivid, subtle, well-written, and beautifully crafted. The book describes a social situation that even primary school students are familiar with in France, who have read the works of two French dramatists, Corneille and Racine, and are already very familiar with the moral atmosphere of the book, which deals with the most glorious periods of French history, is very charming, and has made a concrete contribution to the golden age of French literature. But in the eyes of British and American readers, the characters look like wood, behave unnaturally, and their sense of honor, their emphasis on personal dignity, is a bit ridiculous: I am not saying that this idea is correct, but this idea would not list this book as one of the world's top ten best novels.
However, I think that the judgment of the individual value of the novel will be very divergent, mainly because the novel is basically an imperfect literary genre. No novel is perfect. Of the ten novels I have chosen, none of them you cannot fault in a single detail, and I intend to be picky when I write the introduction to each book; indiscriminately praising certain books that are recognized as classics is the greatest harm to the reader.
When reading, the reader finds that so-and-so plot is unlikely to happen, so-and-so character is not real, and so-and-so paragraph description is lengthy. If he is impatient by nature, he will accuse the critics who recommended the novel to him as a masterpiece as a fool; if he is humble by nature, he will blame himself, thinking that the book is beyond his intellect and unfit for him to read; but if he is stoic and has great perseverance, he will read it with conscience, but he still finds it without much pleasure. But the novel is meant to be read with relish, and if it doesn't provide fun, the book is worthless. That being the case, every reader is his own best critic, and only he knows what he likes and what he doesn't like.
Man has no obligation to read novels. The critic can help the reader by pointing out, in his view (which is an important prerequisite), what are the strengths and weaknesses of a great generally recognized novel. I repeat: we would like to remind the reader first not to expect the novel to be perfect.
Before I elaborate on this statement, I would like to say a few words to the readers of the novel. The novelist has the right to demand from them that he has the right to ask the reader to be a little patient in reading a book of three or four hundred pages; he has the right to ask the reader to have enough imagination to figure out the scene in which the author wants to intervene and to fill in the portrait drawn by the author in his mind; and finally the novelist has the right to demand that the reader have the capacity to sympathize, otherwise they will not be able to enter into the love and sorrow, sorrow, danger and adventure of the novel characters. Unless the reader can give a little of himself, he cannot appreciate the best connotation from a novel.
Now I want to point out what qualities a good novel should have in my mind. It should have a wide range of interesting themes—I mean, not just a small group of critics, professors, culturally literate people, truck drivers, or dishwashers who are interested, but topics that are broadly humane and interesting to all kinds of men and women. Let me illustrate what I mean by this: a writer can write a novel about Montessori pedagogy, and the educator must be very, very interested, but I believe that the novel must be mediocre. The story of the novel should be coherent and convincing; it should have a beginning, an intermediate, and an ending, and the end should be the natural result of the beginning. The possibility of each episode is not only a theme, but also derived from the story.
The people and animals created by the novelist should be observed by individual characteristics, and their actions should be generated by individuality, and the reader should never be allowed to say that so-and-so and so-and-so would not have such an action; on the contrary, the reader would have to say: I expect so-and-so and so-and-so to behave in this way. I think it would be better if the characters themselves were interesting. Flaubert wrote a novel called "Emotional Education", which is well known among many outstanding critics, but he deliberately chose a person with no characteristics and no personality as the male protagonist, making it impossible for people to care about what he did or what happened to him, and as a result, although the book has many advantages, it is difficult for people to read.
I think I should explain why I say that characters should be viewed in terms of individual characteristics; it is too demanding to expect novelists to create new characters. His theme is human nature, although people have various categories and situations, but the variety is not unlimited, long novels, short stories, plays, epics written for hundreds of thousands of years, the author has too few opportunities to create new characters. I look at all the novels and come up with only one absolutely original character, Don Quixote, and I wouldn't be surprised if any well-read critic finds out that he also has distant ancestors. If the author can see his characters through his own individual characteristics, and if his individual characteristics are special enough, he can often give the illusion that these characters are original, then the writer is very lucky.
Manners should be derived from character, and so should speech. Fashionable women should talk like fashionable women, street prostitutes should talk like street prostitutes, soda sellers should talk like soda sellers, and lawyers should talk like lawyers. Dialogue should not have a match, but it should not allow the author to take advantage of the opportunity to show off his opinion; it should be used to portray the speaker's character and let the story progress. The passages of the narrative should be vivid and untitled, and the length only needs to make the motivations and situations of the relevant characters clear and convincing. The text should be concise so that it can be easily read by people of average education; the style should be in line with the subject matter, just as the tailored shoes should conform to the beautifully shaped feet. Finally, the novel should be compelling. I put this one last, but it is an indispensable trait, without which the other qualities will not come in handy. A sane person who does not read a novel for the sake of teaching or inspiration. He is a fool if he needs to be taught or inspired and does not read books that are written specifically to teach and enlighten people.
Even if a novel has all these qualities—that is too much to ask for—it is still like a gemstone with flaws, its form itself flawed, making perfection impossible. Short stories can be read in ten minutes to half an hour, depending on their length, dealing with a clearly defined single subject, an event, or a series of closely related spiritual or physical events, and are complete and impossible to add or remove anything. I think short stories can be perfect, and I don't think it's difficult to collect quite a few short stories that have reached this level. But the length of the novel is uncertain, it can be as long as "War and Peace", which deals with a series of events over a period of time, and many, many characters appear, but it can also be as short as Mérime's "Carmen".
In order for the story to be possible and the characters to be reasonable, the author must narrate many examples that are relevant to the story but are not necessarily interesting in themselves. Events often take a period of time to separate, and the author must make up as much content as possible to fill this time in order to balance the work. These segments are called bridge segments. Some writers try to avoid bridges and jump directly from a rhetorical event to another rhetorical event, but I can't think of successful examples. Most writers cross the bridge obediently, and there are some skills, but the process is likely to be a little dull and boring.
The writer is a man, and it is inevitable that he has strange thoughts; the form of the novel is not rigorous, especially in England and Russia, which gives the author the opportunity to elaborate on the subject matter he cherishes in his heart, and his mind or sense of criticism is often not strong enough to understand a subject, although he finds it interesting, unless it is necessary for his novel plan, otherwise it should not be put in the book. In addition, the novelist is almost inevitably influenced by the fashion of the time, after all, he is affected by extraordinary power, so he often writes works that lose their appeal as soon as the fashion passes.
Let me give you an example: before the 19th century, novelists paid little attention to the scene, and one or two sentences were enough to explain the background they were going to describe; but after the Romantics gained popularity, it became increasingly popular to describe for the sake of description. When someone goes out on the street to buy a toothbrush at a pharmacy, the author will tell you what the house the person is passing through looks like and what it sells in the store. Dawn, sunset, starry night, cloudless sky, rising and fading moon, rough sea, snowy mountains at the tip of the mountain, dark forests... Endless descriptions. Some of the descriptions are beautiful in themselves, but have nothing to do with the content!
Writers have discovered after a long time that the characteristics of the scene, however poetically observed and how respectable they are expressed, are futile unless necessary. That is, unless it helps the author to continue telling the story, telling the reader what is relevant to the person in the book and that he must know, it is useless. This is an accidental flaw in the novel, but another flaw seems to be innate. Since it is a fairly long work, it inevitably takes a while to write, at least a few weeks, usually about a few months, sometimes even several years. The author could not have been inspired for such a long time. I don't like to use the word "inspiration" – prose used to refer to sentence freedom is a bit self-exalting, and I prefer to leave it exclusively to poets. The art engaged in by the poet is nobler than that of the novelist; but the novelist compensates otherwise: poetry is easily ignored unless it is of the highest quality, and the novel, even if it has many shortcomings, is not worthless.
Nevertheless, the novelist's writing is influenced by something, and if it were not called inspiration, I would not find a better word, so I had to call it subconscious. Perhaps precisely because it was a vague word with a somewhat ambiguous meaning, it was sufficient to express the author's feeling that he had written in black on white paper, at best an active medium, but in fact he was a transcriber; he found himself writing something he did not know he knew, happy thoughts pouring forth from nowhere, and unexpected concepts as pleasant as the surprise of the guests of the banquet who came to visit without first informing. I suppose there is nothing particularly mysterious about this: the unforeseen concept is undoubtedly the result of a long experience in the past, a happy thought arises from the association of concepts, and the things he thinks he does not know are stored in the secrets of memory. The subconscious mind brings it to the surface, freely flowing from the tip of the pen to the paper.
But the subconscious mind is spontaneous and uncertain; it cannot be forced, nor can any effort of the will motivate it to come alive; it is like the wind that blows wherever love blows, just as rain falls on the righteous and on the unrighteous. Sophisticated writers have all sorts of ways to coax the subconscious to help him, but sometimes the subconscious is always stubborn. If left to the subconscious mind to fend for itself, which often happens in a work as long as a novel, the author can only work tirelessly and rely on his general abilities. If he can use these methods to attract the attention of the reader, it is a miracle.
When I consider how many obstacles novelists must overcome, how many unexpected difficulties and dangers they have to avoid, I am not at all surprised that even the greatest novelists can be perfect, but I am surprised that they can do without "less perfection". For this reason, it's impossible to single out ten novels and name them the best in the world.
I can list another ten masterpieces that are different but comparable to the first ten: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Balzac's Betty's Cousin, Stendhal's Parma Abbey, Jane Austen's Persuasion, Lawrence Stern's Biography of Xiang Di, William Mekbis Thackeray's Vanity Fair, George Eliot's Middlematch, Henry James's Envoy, Lesazzy's Gil Blass. I have a good reason for choosing the first ten books, and I can give equally sufficient reasons for choosing those listed now. My choice was arbitrary.
In the past, readers seemed to like novels to be written at length, and authors often had to give in, providing publishers with more content than the story itself needed. He had the whim to come up with an easy idea: inserting short stories into the novel, sometimes as long as a novella, had nothing to do with the original theme, and at best seemed reasonable and attached. No writer has done this more than Cervantes's don Quixote. These extra additions are often seen as flaws in this monumental masterpiece, and are now only tiresome to read. Contemporary literary critics have attacked him for this, and he has avoided this vice in the second part of the book, giving rise to the phenomenon of what is generally recognized as impossible—that the sequel is better written than the previous one; but this does not prevent subsequent writers (who must not have read the criticisms) from using such a convenient method, handing over a large number of manuscripts to booksellers and making them into a book that can be sold.
In the 19th century, new methods of publishing arose, and novelists were tempted by new ones. Monthly magazines that published so-called light editions of literature in large numbers sold well, giving writers the opportunity to present their works to the public in serial fashion and profitably themselves. Around the same time, publishers found it in their favor to release best-selling authors' novels in monthly installments. In both cases, the writer will sign up to provide a certain amount of content to fill a certain number of pages. This approach encourages writers to be unhurried and nagging. French writers pay writers, and they don't hesitate to write as many lines as possible. They are workers who need to make money, and even if they do, they are not very rich. Once Balzac went to Italy and saw some pictures, he was greatly moved (who is not moved?). Interrupt the narrative of the novel he is writing and insert an article about these drawings.
We know from the writers' own "confessions" that serialized writers, even first-rate writers such as Dickens and Thackeray, sometimes felt that being forced to deliver manuscripts at fixed times was an abominationary burden. No wonder they have to pull together space, no wonder their stories are full of irrelevant interludes. Once the publisher told Dickens that his pile of monthly manuscripts was two large, or sixteen small pages, and he had to sit down and search as much as he could to write them. He was very experienced with this way of writing, and the truth could not be clearer: if what he wrote on these sixteen pages was indispensable to dealing with this part of the story, he would have written it in the first place.
Whether a novel's flaws are innate in the genre, or due to the absence of a writer, the fashion of the times, or the method of publication, there is no reason for the reader to endure patiently. Knowledgeable people don't make reading novels an obligation. He read novels as a pastime. He wanted to be taken out of his own body. He was ready to take an interest in the characters in the book, to see what they would say and do in a particular situation, and what they would encounter; he sympathized with their troubles and rejoiced in their joys; he put himself in their shoes to understand their situation, and more or less experienced their lives. The characters' outlook on life and their attitude towards the subject of human speculation, whether expressed in words or in action, evoke a reaction of surprise, relief, or resentment from the reader. But the reader instinctively knows where his interest lies, and he is as interested as a hound tracking a fox. But sometimes the author fails, and the reader can't find the smell left by the beast's traces, so he has to scramble around until he finds it again. He would jump around and skip the tedious parts to read.
Everyone jumps around, but it's not easy to jump and read without losing important content. As far as I know, this may be a talent, or it may have to be obtained by experience. Dr. Johnson read the book fiercely, and Bowswell told us: "He was gifted to grasp any place of value in a book at once, and did not have to read it from beginning to end without having to painstakingly read it." But What Bowswell is talking about is undoubtedly a book of knowledge; if reading a novel becomes a burden, it is better not to read it. Unfortunately, due to the basic flaws of the genre, the lack of writers or publishing methods, very few novels are always interesting from beginning to finish. Skipping reading may be a bad habit, but it is a bad habit that is forced by the situation. But once the reader starts jumping, it's hard to stop, and he may miss out on reading a lot of things that are good for him.
Readers of the past seem to have more patience than readers of today. There used to be less entertainment, and they had more time to read novels that we now think are too lengthy. Perhaps they are not outraged by interrupting the trivialities and digressions of the statement. But some novels with this shortcoming are among the greatest books of all time, and it would be a shame if they were to be read less and less as a result.
We designed this series of articles to entice readers to read these good books. We try to remove the cumbersome parts of these ten novels, leaving only the story that the author wants to tell, deliberately clarify the concept of holding the theme, and fully display the characters he has created. Some literature students, professors, and critics will lash out at the idea that killing a masterpiece is shocking, and the author should read it as he writes it. But did they really do it? I suggest that they skip what is not worth reading, and perhaps they have developed the art of skimming but benefiting a lot, but most people have not yet done it. Wouldn't it be better for someone with enough appreciation and discernment to omit the uninteresting parts for them? If this is done wisely, it can give the reader a novel that every word is read with relish.
Coleridge said of Don Quixote that it is a book that only needs to be read from beginning to end, and he may mean that some parts are long, dull, even absurd, and that once this is discovered, it is a waste of time to read it again. This is a great and important book, and a student specializing in literature should no doubt read it from beginning to end (I myself have read it three times from beginning to end), but I can't help but think that the average reader—the reader who reads for pleasure—has nothing to lose by completely omitting the dull and dull parts. In this way, he must be able to appreciate the adventures and dialogues of the Sven warriors and secular squires directly related to the story, which is very interesting and very moving. There is another novel, which is indeed very important, but cannot be surely considered a great work, and that is Samuel Richardson's (1689-1761) Pamela, which is very long, and the average person may not be able to read it all except for the most tenacious readers of the novel. If I hadn't seen an abridged version, I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to read it. The abridgements are excellent, and I don't feel at all that something is missing or that there is anything to lose.
Abridgement is nothing to blame. I think any script that has been staged has been more or less completely changed or abridged during the rehearsal phase, and it is still good for the play. I don't know what reason novels can't go through the same process, but seriously, we know that most publishers have editors who specialize in this job, and the books they've worked on are pretty much better because of it. The reader will not read the part of the novel that was originally considered a large pile of dead wood if it is not cut out, and if the reader can be guided to read the great novels of this series, the efforts of the publisher and editors will not be in vain. These great novels do not lose anything of value by abridgement, for these books are now full of treasures, and they can enjoy great intellectual pleasure.
Selected from "Literary Memoirs: The World's Top Ten Novelists and Their Masterpieces"
Translated by Song Biyun, Northern Literature and Art Publishing House