I found this book in the early eighties, while living in New York. I loved Anthony Burgess for his erudition, his musical background, his love of Joyce, his brilliant, playful writing (Clockwork Orange) his knowledge of history and his ability to go on talk shows in the seventies and be smarter then anybody else but also completely down to earth. In the pages of 99 Novels are just those qualities.
This book -- a kind of "minute history" of literature since 1939 -- sent me scurrying into used book stores like a field mouse. His brief, paragraph long summaries of the "most influential" books since WW2 (starting with Finnegan's Wake) are provocative,funny, opinionated with a look to the long view as well. How broad was his taste? The Joyce scholar makes an argument for Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye as the best American Novel of the nineteen fifties. He also covers Norman Mailer, Brian Aldiss, Mary McCarthy, Brian Moore, Ian Flemming, Orwell, Ballard, Huxley, Murdoch, Roth, Greene...etc.
In short, you can take this as a brilliant and unpretentious field guide from a writer who loved and knew literature and the English language quite unlike anybody else around. Burgess never lost sight of the fact that the novel is one of mankind's greatest inventions,and he proves it with this book.
This book -- a kind of "minute history" of literature since 1939 -- sent me scurrying into used book stores like a field mouse. His brief, paragraph long summaries of the "most influential" books since WW2 (starting with Finnegan's Wake) are provocative,funny, opinionated with a look to the long view as well. How broad was his taste? The Joyce scholar makes an argument for Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye as the best American Novel of the nineteen fifties. He also covers Norman Mailer, Brian Aldiss, Mary McCarthy, Brian Moore, Ian Flemming, Orwell, Ballard, Huxley, Murdoch, Roth, Greene...etc.
In short, you can take this as a brilliant and unpretentious field guide from a writer who loved and knew literature and the English language quite unlike anybody else around. Burgess never lost sight of the fact that the novel is one of mankind's greatest inventions,and he proves it with this book.