2006/12/12 New York
Nearly
Again
There they are again: the classics. In TLS of December 1 George Steiner picks his books of the year. He writes: “Would that an editor had excised the parts of prolixity and self-indulgence in Neil Belton’s ‘A Game with Sharpened Knives’ (Phoenix). But even as it stands, this novel about the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger in Austria and wartime Dublin comes very close to being a classic.”
Finally we have the genre I was waiting for a long time already: the near-classic.
I nominate Thomas Bernhard for the status of coming very close to having written a classic.
Other suggestions are welcome. Maybe Updike? Sartre?
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5 comments 
A modest contribution: I am reading now Gyorgy Konrad ‘Feast in the Garden’ and I like it. Nevertheless, I still have a childish weakness for Joseph Conrad ‘Heart of Darkness’. I also remember ‘The Treatment’ by Mo Hayder being a very good thriller. But classics and even near classics, by God, I do not know (OK, I liked Sartre too, a long time ago). I feel like a literary shrimp, sorry. Now let us hear from you, dear bloggers.
I was browsing in my literary mind, but I only could come up with classics and books that can be near-classics within some decades. This near-classic within fifty years, could be Jonathan Safran Foer. But I can't call him a near classic just now, I'm afraid I'm too biased by the hype. (Allthough I did cry while reading Extr Loud and Incr Close, but is that a criterium?)
I guess if I h ave to nominate anyone, I'll nominate Max Barry www.maxbarry.com for his Huxlian way of portraying the world we live in today.
I guess if I h ave to nominate anyone, I'll nominate Max Barry www.maxbarry.com for his Huxlian way of portraying the world we live in today.
Crying can be a criterium, why not?
But I have no suggestions about the classics. I am too young to have one.
I don't like the whole 'being too young for something', but this time I like it more than ever.
Just as an excuse for knowing little.
But I have no suggestions about the classics. I am too young to have one.
I don't like the whole 'being too young for something', but this time I like it more than ever.
Just as an excuse for knowing little.
How do we define a near classic? Is it necessary for the author to be dead? Can it be a book that is too young to be called a classic already, but does have the potential or should it be a book that could have been a classic by now, but is just not quite good enough? Should it have been turned into a movie (European for a near classic, Hollywood for a classic? Or the other way around?)... Anyway, my nominations: Mystiek lichaam (dutch) by Frans Kellendonk and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. And of course all book by Arnon Grunberg (or are they classics already?)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; the Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde; The Belljar by Sylvia Plath; Atonement by Ian McEwan; American psycho by Bret Easton Ellis; White Teeth by Zadie Smith; the Andy Warhol Diaries.
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