Someone once said; ‘Everyone has one great novel in them’. I tried to find the origin of this quote on google, but I couldn’t trace it to the original author.
I tend to agree. Every person living to old age is in a way a succesful survivor against the odds and has a black box full of memories and experiences locked up inside of him. Years of thoughts, insights and reflections can – if succesfully distilled – form a beautiful narrative account and story about what it means to be human and to be alive.
I would argue that indeed the best literature are those realistic stories about average people leading average lives. Stories and characters with which we can all identify. Emotions of happiness and tragedy we have all felt.
What changes is the perspective. And we all have our own unique perspective and historical personal narrative. Reading someone else’s unique perspective can be very rewarding.
This is not to say that I think everybody should be able to publish his story. Indeed I deplore the vast amount of crap books written and published nowadays. Most attempts at distillation are a mess and like badly distilled alcohol, can seriously damage public health.
I am talking literature here. And publishers and critics should remain critical of what they publish or promote.
—
I have often thought about my one perfect novel and the form it should adopt. My favourite literary genre is the coming-of-age novel, or bildungsroman. I like the concept because it offers a very personal and psychological glimpse on the development of characters. My favourite character Always was Holden Caulfield from ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, which to me is the most perfect psychological coming of age novel ever written. Other good examples on my all time list must include ‘A portrait of the Artist as a young man’ by Joyce which is interesting because of Joyce’s struggle with his deeply Catholic upbringing and ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ by Remarque because the main character grows up in the trenches of WWI.
The one perfect novel I have in mind is also a coming of age novel. But like Roth’s ‘Radetzky march’ it will span a couple of generations. It might be considered a generational coming of age novel. It will follow the lives of four, maybe five generations of Jews and be partly autobiographical. It will be based on the lives of my Jewish ancestors, my father and finally me. Besides a personal coming of age of the characters, it will also be a coming of age of political Judaïsm or Zionism.
It will start at the beginning of Zionism with my ancestors in the Ukraine and the Habsburg empire and their struggle, through my grandparents and their pioneering work in Palestine and the building of the state of Israel and it will end with my father and me back in the diaspora with desillusion about the Zionist dream in its purest form.
That would be a hell of a narrative. But only God knows if I will ever manage to distill it into a work of art.
Leave a Reply