BookTalk.org

Anyone can name a classic, must read, great novel from the nineteenth century or the twentieth century. But, are there any truly great novels from the twenty first century?

Here are a few possibilities I culled from a couple of web sites. I haven't read most of these:

No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)
Atonement (Ian McEwan)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon)
Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) – PEN/Faulkner Award
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (Mark Haddon)
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers)
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hossein)

oh dear me... do they really qualify as "truly great" novels? I know you haven't read them geo, but the five I've read certainly don't match up for me.

I think a truly great novel has to capture the spirit of the age well enough to project the reader into it. Thus, I have a few which may be extremely good candidates although I'd probably stop short of the epithet "truly great:"

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga

Each of these deals with an issue which is central to identity in the 21st century. However, I'm only recommending things I've read and there's relatively little I've read from the 21st century.

I've read Never Let Me Go which was good, but not great. Cormac McCarthy's The Road was very good, but perhaps not great. Same with the Kite Runner and Kavalier and Klay which won the Pulitzer I think. Maybe it's difficult to see what's going to stand the test of time?

geo wrote:I've read Never Let Me Go which was good, but not great. Cormac McCarthy's The Road was very good, but perhaps not great. Same with the Kite Runner and Kavalier and Klay which won the Pulitzer I think. Maybe it's difficult to see what's going to stand the test of time?

It's really hard. We're reading Moby Dick, which would get a fair number of votes from lit professors, I think, as greatest American novel. But at its publication, or even 30 years afterwards, very few regarded it highly. Maybe part of the problem is that we don't know what our own times are really about. Many years later, it becomes clearer what those times were about, and the writers that seemed to get it back in the day, are then judged the best.

Some good suggestions here for our June fiction read

So hard to know what will last, but it seems a book would have to have genuine human intereaction, serious character development, and deep truths to go on being of interest. Recent 21st Century books I've read that I think have the potential to become classics include...
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Atonement, by Ian McEwan
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Harry Potter series, by JK Rowling

Appreciate your question, as some of the best books I've found have been discovered in forum discussions with questions like this. Thanks!

Sue Salisbury
Maui Hawaii

Interesting that no one has mentioned Freedom by Frazen, which had so much press hype. I wasn't impressed. Did anyone else read it? Your thoughts?

Yes, I consider Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart to qualify for the nebulous category of "truly great." I certainly enjoyed it!