Lists of the elite

Literary Criticism A professor at the University of Paris has recently had an unusual popular success with the publication of…

Literary CriticismA professor at the University of Paris has recently had an unusual popular success with the publication of a book in which he admits to the world the shocking gaps in his own literary education and proffers advice to readers on how they too can pass themselves off in the fashionable world with the minimum of dull page-turning labour.

Comment Parler des Livres que l'on n'a Pas Lus? (How to talk about books you haven't read), by Pierre Bayard, sounds like a splendid wheeze, which could be a boon not just to the middle-class partygoer but also of considerable value to the professional reviewer ("Master these simple golden rules and treble your income overnight!").

It is quite possible, writes Prof Bayard, "to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it". This is certainly true, particularly of those weak moments when drink, lust and vanity intertwine. As your by now quite beautiful fellow dinner guest leans confidentially over her Pinot Noir and asks: "Isn't it in The Spoils of Poynton that . . . ", here is your opportunity - but it must be grabbed instantly - to blurt it out bravely: "Do you know, that's one of the very few of the Master's works I haven't actually read?"

Of course another professor has been over this ground before, as many British commentators on Bayard's book have noted. David Lodge, in his academic comedy Changing Places, invented a delicious literary parlour game called Humiliation, in which players score by naming major literary classics they have not read, the points accumulating according to how many of the other players have read the work (or claim to have read it). In Lodge's novel the game is given an extra piquancy in that the players are all university literature professors. The comic climax builds with the dilemma of Howard Ringbaum, a humourless American post-structuralist who is torn between natural shame and his compulsion to win any contest he enters. Eventually the latter impulse triumphs and he scores maximum points - with Hamlet. Unfortunately, news of this victory seeps back to his academic review committee.

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The Top Ten, the fruit of an invitation to 125 mainly British and American writers to supply a list of what they consider "the 10 greatest works of fiction of all time", might not have helped Howard Ringbaum much, but given that it also includes potted descriptions of a few hundred of the leading runners, it could prove of immeasurable help to the anxious dinner guest.

The chosen authors go about their tasks in different ways, some even bravely defying their riding instructions to include non-fiction. Most, however, keep their minds focused on that problematic but indispensable word "great", so it is little surprise that Tolstoy, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust and Cervantes figure strongly, as do Austen, Eliot and Dickens from the great 19th-century tradition. Twain, Fitzgerald and Faulkner are among the Americans, and among the oldsters are Homer, Dante, Chaucer and God (the Bible).

READING A LONG succession of these lists can be an uncomfortable, even shaming, experience. Who are these superhumans who have read everything? One almost feels nostalgic for that omnipresent figure of 30 years ago, The Young Man Who Has Read One Book (normally Steppenwolf, On the Road or The Third Policeman).

Of course we all know that we should read Tristram Shandy, The Brothers Karamazov and The Divine Comedy, but how then are we expected to recoup that large investment we have made in the TV licence? As a lazy but largely tolerant person, my response to someone who tells me they have not read Moby-Dick would be: "I can see the problem." To someone, on the other hand, who has not read Middlemarch I can only say: "Why the hell not?"

Of more interest, perhaps, than the repetitive lists of anointed classics, are the outsiders, dark horses and surprise favourites. It came as a surprise to me, at least, though not necessarily an unpleasant one, to find that Nabokov is now considered the fourth greatest writer (in the world, ever) or that Lolita is the greatest novel of the 20th century. The selection will also certainly prove useful for the reader who wishes to know which particular novel, out of a writer's large body of work, should be tackled, or tackled first.

Full marks, too, to those who insisted on including works of history, film scripts (Preston Sturges) and pure pulp (Tom Clancy). Had I been asked I might have had a more difficult, desert island discs-type request: a copy of Bleak House, but with the sickly Esther Summerson narrative boiled down to a third of its length.

Taken as a whole, the selections tell us a good deal about who is in and who is out, who is read and who everyone still agrees should be read (Márquez still in, I see). They also tell us, if we couldn't guess, that the cultural horizons of American and English writers are somewhat limited. Genuflection to the Russian 19th-century tradition apart, it would seem that precious few novels worth reading have ever been written east of the Elbe or south of the Po.

LISTS OF THIS kind are something of a modern plague, and academics are almost universally sniffy about "literary beauty contests" of any kind (more sniffy than writers, I think). It has to be said, however, that The Top Ten is hugely enjoyable. Finally, anyone who gives it a chance is almost bound to end up wanting to make their own list. So here is mine: not the greatest books, not even necessarily my favourite books, but let us say "10 books that if you read them it wouldn't do you any harm". They are not in any order. Herzog, by Saul Bellow; The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth; the stories of Heinrich Böll; the Essays of Michel de Montaigne; Native Realm, by Czeslaw Milosz; The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell; Solomon Gursky Was Here, by Mordecai Richler; The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth; If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi; and Middlemarch, by George Eliot.

Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist

The Top Ten Edited by J Peder Zane Norton, 352pp. £9.99