I read in the magazineThe New Yorker about a book that is not yet on sale but which already tempts me enough to put me on the waiting list; is called Stranger than fiction: lives in the twentieth-century novel (“Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the 20th Century Novel”) and basically, from what the note says The New Yorkerasks if there is a 20th century novel. According to what he also says, the book answers yes, and that the novel more or less dies with the 20th century: for Edwin Frank, author of the aforementioned book and of the magazine’s collection of classics New York Review of Booksthe 20th century is the one that brings the novel to its revolutionary stage; It was the authors of this era who completed the path that led the novel from entertainment to art, sometimes producing novels that were almost unreadable, but always courageous. This same century, says Frank, exhausts the novel. Frank says he was inspired for this book he wrote by The eternal noisemusic critic Alex Ross’s excellent essay on 20th-century music. For me who has read several times The eternal noise and I consider it one of my favorite essays, the data helps me understand where his hypothesis is going. I don’t think novels are dead, any more than academic music, but what he means is clear to me: the cultural relevance of a contemporary composer today is incomparable to that of Shostakovich. Nor will any novelist today have a cultural weight comparable to that of Philip Roth or Gabriel García Márquez a few decades ago. We can love music and literature, but all of that is undeniable. And it is perhaps equally undeniable that the vitality of an art form is linked, albeit indirectly, to its place in the culture of its time. It’s not that it’s not possible today to write an excellent novel or a chamber play; but the conditions for these works to be vibrant and to dialogue with the present are less met than fifty years ago.
Louis Menand, the author of the note The New Yorkerdevelops a relativist thesis which I do not quite understand if it is his or if he takes it from the book (we will know after November 19): the novel actually no longer fulfills the role it played in the 19th century nor the one he played in the 20th century. This space, says Menand, is today occupied by series: you are no longer asked what you read, but what you watch. Menand then wonders how this influences 21st century novels; if, for example, 21st century novels are already written with the sale of audiovisual rights in mind (and are therefore written to “be filmable”). Personally, I think the question is more complex, or more triangular: surely a lot of fiction is already written with the cinematographic adaptation on the horizon, at a more or less conscious level, but I think there is an advantage missing from this way of thinking. The real problem, it seems to me, is that the novels that are successful are generally those that most closely resemble the experience of watching a film or series: short, visual, built around characters that ‘one can follow with love or hatred. Ana Karenina It’s a novel that has been adapted numerous times, but reading it hardly resembles the experience of watching a series or a film. The central plot has a lot of it, but you have to eat pages and pages of unintelligible discussion about running a field to get to it; There’s hardly an editor who wouldn’t remove these crazy things today if they thought you had a book on your hands. bestseller (If you are lucky enough not to have it, you can however put whatever you want). There are exceptions to what I say; I wrote last week about Fortuna, by Hernán Díaz, a series which has a lot of “adaptability” (and whose rights have surely already been sold), but which also works with very purely “textual” tools which precisely shine because it’s a novel. . I mean, with all that: it’s not just that the writers have their minds formatted by the series; Perhaps the most important thing is the fact that the public owns them, and then, among all the novels that appear each year, they overwhelmingly choose the one, the most “visual” of all, to make it a modest success.
