6/9/2023 0 Comments 1913 dh lawrence novelIt is not like English readers have been averse to Russian novels. At least one more of the century’s greats was published in the same year, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, a novel that is innovative like Proust’s book but has a tense thriller plot, including terrorists and a ticking time bomb. Yet there is something arbitrary to its celebrity. It is one of the great novels of the century. Proust, or Swann’s Way, or at least the “Combray” section of Swann’s Way, deserves the honor of Best Book of 1913, I think, so I have no complaint about the attention it receives. Austen and Proust both have industries around them. Perhaps this tells us something about what these books have become, how their meaning has expanded beyond their texts. It is usually the births and deaths of writers that are commemorated, but this year I noticed a lot of attention to books – two books, I mean, Pride and Prejudice and Swann’s Way (for that matter, the Gettysburg Address fits the pattern). This was a strange year for anniversaries.
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