‘Stranger Than Fiction’ explores how the novel has changed in the 20th century

Edwin Frank is a legend. The editor-in-chief of New York Review Books and founder of the New York Review Books Classics series, his insights have helped create a high literary taste over the past few decades. After all, if you give the book sleek and instantly recognizable NYRB Classics treatment, you can pretty much guarantee that viewers will consider one.

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Now Frank has written his own book, “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel.” Taking Alex Ross’s 2007 book “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” as a model, Frank’s book (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the same imprint as Ross’) makes the case for what, exactly, 20th. novel of the century, what is the method and purpose of the author, and how the unprecedented events of the world never more interconnected form it.

It was a tall order, and Frank knew it; for one thing, the novel has different forms, traditions and sensibilities between different languages ​​and cultures. But thinking about how these differences became accessible to more readers because the translation of contemporary fiction began to develop in the 19th century is how he found his approach: “‘In translation’ is the key, it opens the way to the story of the novel, which is (…) the story of translation in the largest sense, not only from language to language and place to place but more broadly as a translation of living reality into written form.

Then, too, there is a great deal of hubris in defining the main features of a century’s worth of novels, a century in which the number is increasing, but Frank is well aware of this. He freely admits his book is not – and indeed cannot be – comprehensive, and the works he chooses to explore are limited, focusing mainly on the main European languages, and when combined, are neither specific nor comprehensible. literary tradition. “My own formulation, the novel of the twentieth century,” he wrote, “is perhaps best considered a useful fiction to consider how fiction responds to the reality of the century, and although the books collected and juxtaposed here can be seen as a constellation. , it the limits of the constellations (…) are only in the eye of the beholder.”

Actually, that’s why stargazing is so much more fun when you’re with an astronomer who can help you identify not only Ursa Major but also Cassiopeia and Pegasus and can explain the myths behind them to boot. Moreover, “Stranger Than Fiction” is a pleasure to read, in part, because of Frank’s passion and love for the novel as an artistic medium, and his ability to draw clear and sometimes unexpected connections between various writers and texts.

He began with Dostoevsky’s “Notes From the Underground,” published in 1864, which he said introduced “a conception of reality, and the relationship of author and reader, which is very different from reality as it has been represented before.” Without a plot, without a story, “Notes” introduces a narrator who does and does not give a map to its author, expressing opinions that are at times divided and contemptuous (sometimes both), fluctuating between despair and ecstasy, and deliberately questioning its own truth . These qualities, says Frank, are to define the voice of the novel in the 20th century.

Another feature that emerges again and again is the novel’s newfound self-awareness and the sometimes obsessive narrator, who uses one life experience as a container to understand everything. This approach can be found in books like André Gide’s “The Immoralist,” Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.”

Another recurring note, Frank finds, is the desire of the 20th century novel to, as HG Wells put it, “get the frame into the picture” and thus explore its own artificiality. Instead of trying to only describe a certain bourgeois reality, the novel of the 20th century came to question and perhaps change it, and reflected this through experiments with form, language and time, which is seen in, for example, Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses ” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Some readers may already know – or even have heard of – all the books covered in “Stranger Than Fiction,” which are mostly works of translation and not clear classics of the era. It hardly matters, though; Frank does a good job of summarizing the plot and themes, and introducing the style and tone of each novel where possible. He also explores the biographies of authors and how they mine their own lives for use in their creative work. And, perhaps most strikingly, he shows how each novel relates to the world in which it is conceived, written and published, and how the authors’ awareness and understanding of their own social and political environment has a profound effect on what they attempt. and why.

The epigraph for “Stranger Than Fiction,” taken from the French philosopher Guy DeBord’s “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle” (a follow-up to his previous book “Society of the Spectacle”), in a sense, Frank’s broadest thesis: “Our unfortunate times are forcing I, once again, to write in a new way.” The 20th century was full of unparalleled events – world wars, of course, but also colonial ventures that preceded and retreated imperial empires – and many recognized them as paradigmatic and historical shifts even in their own time, and for that reason. the author felt the need, consciously or not, to match that time. Living through our own unfortunate times, there is much we can learn from them, and what a gift to have a certain lens Edwin Frank through which we can do it.

Ilana Masad is a book and culture critic and author of “All My Mother’s Lovers.”