1. Death on the installment plan (Ralph Manheim translation of Celine's Mort a credit). Mind-warping and life-changing. Sick humor. I've never gotten around to reading Journey to the end of the night. The British translation (by John Marks) was off-putting. By the time a Manheim-translated edition was published, I'd moved on the new things. I did sop up the trilogy of Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon.
2. Yukio Mishima's career-ending tetralogy, Spring snow , Runaway horses, The temple of dawn, and The decay of the angel. Also mind-warping. I happened upon Mishima on my own, and began with this series. Later I went back and read pretty much everything he'd had translated into English, some of which I liked a lot better than others (e.g., Temple of the golden pavilion over The sound of waves, for example).
3. Martin Eden, Jack London's autobiographical novel. Suicide seems to be a common thread in this list, for some reason.
4. Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Pan, and Victoria. Whoah. I think I picked up Hamsun's next novel chronologically and wasn't able to get into it. I must have been engaged by his early novels' adolescent angst, or something.
5. Crime and punishment. I read this excitedly in several sittings in one of my hometown college libraries, I think. Later I read Brothers Karamazov without as much enthusiasm (hey, I've also seen the film version with--get this, William Shatner as one of the brothers). Always meant to read: The possessed (I think I have it in two translations).
6. Herman Hesse's novels besides Steppenwolf and Siddhartha. Okay, I read those two, perhaps even first, but I was way more impressed by Beneath the Wheel (suicide again), Demian, Peter Camenzind, Rosshalde, Klingsor's last summer, and Narcissus and Goldmunde. A lot of suicide there, now that I think about it. Ah, youth.
7. Yasunari Kawabata's novels. A recent Library Journal mentioned a new translation of stories which, it was noted, should interest fans of Yukio Mishima. Who was its author? Kawabata, who was older than Mishima and who received the Nobel (in '68--two years before Mishima did hara-kiri). Sheesh. I know I read Beauty and sadness, The master of go, and House of the sleeping beauties and other stories. Not certain about The lake and Snow country offhand. (Kawabata was a suicide as an old man.)
8. Raymond Radiguet was Jean Cocteau's l'enfant terrible. Yet another suicide (at a young age), he produced the outrageously precocious love story Devil in the flesh which I thought was hot stuff, and a precious novel of manners Count d'Orgel that disappointed.
9. Sorrows of young Werther. How did I come to read Goethe? Devoured in one sitting at the Loras College library, I think. The basement stacks there were dim and quiet, and there were study carrels at which to sit.
10. Norman Maclean's A river runs through it and other stories. I happened upon this (at my hometown public library) and read it as if a thirsty plant absorbing water. Only later did I happen to read a glowing review of it. Only much later was it turned into a film and republished.
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