20C Lesser-known Classic Novels

This is a selection of lesser-known classics from the twentieth century. Great writers such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and D.H.Lawrence are covered elsewhere. Here you might find some pleasant surprises.

Alain Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes translated as The Lost Domain, (1913) is an idyllic evocation of boyhood and adolescence - a novel of teenage self-discovery. Two schoolboys stumble upon a semi-mythical realm set deep in the French countryside and fall in love with a girl who they can never re-trace. A charming, lyrical, and atmospheric novel which evokes a fin de siecle innocence and romanticism which would be wiped out by the first world war - which was just around the corner.

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Yevgeny Zamyatin's, We (1920) is a very original and futuristic dystopia which prophesies Stalinism and the failure of the revolution to be truly revolutionary. In a totally regulated society where people are known by numbers, two lovers embody irrational urges towards which the state is hostile. Written in a dazzlingly poetic and experimental style, this novel was reviewed by Orwell and heavily 'influenced' his Nineteen Eighty-Four. This, the original, is far superior.

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John dos Passos is an unjustly neglected master of experimental realism from the modernist period. He writes in a manner which combines multiple characters and perspectives, fragmented narratives running in parallel, stream-of-consciousness passages, the insertion of contemporary newspaper reports, potted biographies, popular songs, flash-backs and flash-forwards. The result is an expressionistic mosaic which captures the speed and chaos of modern life. His story is always one of ordinary working people struggling to make a living and a life in the modern city, which is under the control of monopolising capitalists. And his setting is almost always the city - New York City. Start with Manhattan Transfer (1925), which is less demanding and more coherent. If you like that, move on to his chef d'oeuvre USA, which is three novels rolled into one.

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Elias Canetti's Auto da Fe (1935) is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished scholar and obsessive bibliophile who ends up setting fire to his own library. The novel was inspired by the burning of the Palace of Justice in Vienna in 1927, and is partly a parable of Nazi book burning. The figure of Kien is losely based on Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who was famous for his invariable habits. Kien deviates from his own with disastrous results. Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981.

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Nathaniel West's, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) is the name given to a newspaper columnist who deals with the problem letters from readers - most of them bordering on the humanly tragic. He innocently and for the best motives begins to take them seriously, tries to help the people who send them, and is destroyed as a result. West is a much underrated master of black comedy. The Day of the Locust (1939) is his greatest novel - a searing critique of the movie business in which West briefly worked. It focuses on the lonely misfits and cranks drawn by Hollywood and the American Dream, and ends in an apocalyptic frenzy of hatred, self-destruction, and the burning of Los Angeles.

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Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940) is one of the classic novels capturing the madness and tyranny of the Stalinist purges in the 1930s. Comrade Rubashov, an old Bolshevik, is accused of betraying the State he helped to create. The novel follows his physical and psychological torture until he finally agrees to make a false confession against himself and following a completely corrupt show trial he is executed as a traitor. Grim; not for the faint-hearted; and politically spot-on in the light of everything we have learned since.

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Mikhail Bulgakov's, The Master and Margarita (1940/1973) is a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy which offers a satirical view of communist Russia. The story involves the arrival of the Devil into Moscow, interspersed with chapters dealing with Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, plus other sections related to an artist and his relationships with his art and his lover. All three layers of the story are blended with spellbinding imaginative force.

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  20C Lesser-known Classic Novels 1950-2000