Ten immortal works in the history of the novel

1

Don Quijote de la Mancha

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

Edited and annotated by Francisco Rico, additional volum of studies and illustrations. Madrid, Real Academia Española. Barcelona, Espasa – Círculo de Lectores, 2015

Among many other things, the Quixote is also a homage to all readers in a time when this role in literature was implemented passively. Cervantes manages to give readers an overriding position, for the first time, and so the modernity of this masterpiece rests on its anticipation of proposals that such 20^th century essayists, from Blanchot and Barthes to Hans Robert Hauss, would underscore.

 

2

La educación sentimental

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Alianza Editorial. Madrid, 2004. Translation and preface by Miguel Salabert

Flaubert’s masterpiece marked a stylistic milestone in universal literature, Sentimental education, a sublime and melancholic novel is always an unforgettable reading. The scenario –as in many of the great novels by Balzac or Maupassant– is an avid and bubbly Paris in the mid-19th century –with art, politics, journalism, social and love life–, where a social class, the middle class or bourgeoisie, shines with all its splendour.

 

3

La muerte de Ivan Ilich

LEÓN TOLSTOI

Translated by Víctor Gallego. Ilustrated by Agustín Comotto

While from Anna Karenina to War and Peace, death cuts through the most memorable pages of Tolstoi’s novels, not often does literature concentrate in one single work and all its harshness and magnificence, the experience of imminent death in the mind of a character. Magistrate Ivan Illich confronts it on his own and experiencing for the first time the mediocre, miserly and nonsensical void that he has maintained with life until then.

 

4

La conciencia de Zeno

ITALO SVEVO

Editorial Gadir. Madrid, 2007. Translated by Carlos Manzano

Joyce’s friend spotted by Montale, Trieste-born Italo Svevo was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, not always considered as such. The story of a rich, hesitant, apathetic and hypochondriac Zeno Cosini, inhabitant of the Austro-Hungarian Trieste of the late 19th century, who embarks on psychoanalysis as he tries to give up smoking, becomes a subtle masterpiece of irony and introspection.

 

5

David Golder

IRÈNE NÉMIROSVKY

Editorial Salamandra. Barcelona, 2006. Translated by José Antonio Soriano Marco

This opera prima threw her into the limelight in the France between the two world wars, the superb writer Irène Némirovsky, killed in Auschwitz thirteen years later, would start her career with a relentless and ruthless style, she never abandoned. The novel narrates the story of a ruthless bankrupt Parisian financier, formerly a Jewish immigrant who escaped poverty in Russia to follow one single and stubborn objective: building wealth.

 

6

El hombre sin atributos

ROBERT MUSIL

Editorial Seix Barral. Barcelona, 2004. Translated by Feliu Formosa and Pedro Madrigal

Masterpiece of a lifetime, like Proust’s In search of Lost Time or Joyce’s Ulyses, Musil’s The man without Qualities is a novel closer to essay writing, left unfinished after his death in 1942, set shortly before the Great War and the collapse of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire –referred to “Kakania” in the novel– ironic and philosophical reflection centre of the extraordinary Musilian work.

 

7

Bella del señor

ALBERT COHEN

Editorial Anagrama. Barcelona, 2006. Translated by Javier Albiñana

The main literary works are generally –as is the case in Sentimental Education– constructed around the impossibility of love, its test, its tragedy, its separation and its eventual end. Few novels narrate married life and happiness. On this issue, with a lush style, revolves around Belle du Seigneur, by Jewish Corfu-born writer Albert Cohen, who wrote his magnificent work in French.

 

8

Ada o el ardor

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Editorial Anagrama. Barcelona, 2006. Translated by David Molinet

Comparable to a ravishing filigree, with several reading levels, of multiple references and labyrinthine development, already tackled in his no less splendid Pale Fire, Nabokov’s genius shines here in all its splendour and his most inimitable style. No story has been so prohibited and so piercing as that in Lolita, the persevering incestuous love between Van Veen and Ada will last through the lives of its protagonists..

 

9

Fiasco

IMRE KERTÉSZ

Acantilado. Barcelona, 2003. Translated by Adan Kovacsics

Hidden behind a half-veiled autobiography, peppered with black and devastating humour, Fiasco has become one of the best grotesque, or tragicomic charade of the great author Imre Kertész. Belonging to the trilogy made up of Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Fiasco itself. The plot narrates the difficulties of a Jewish author on his way back from the death camps and published his memoirs during Stalin’s Hungary.

10

Expiación

IAN MCEWAN

Anagrama. Barcelona, 2002. Translated by Jaime Zulaika

Novel that plays with the narrator’s and the readers’ dilemmas at the same time, Atonement, by magnificent author McEwan, narrates the drama of two young lovers branded by social prejudice, slander and the fatality of war. The novel returns McEwan to one of his favourite archetypes: false innocence at ages, between childhood and adolescence, prone to fantasy, perversion and unleashed jealousy.