Monday, January 15, 2007

Kiran Desai's list

Kiran Desai, author of the 2006 Man Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss, came up with a list of favorite books for The Week magazine.

Two of titles on her list:
Herzog by Saul Bellow

The dark grapplings one associates with Russian authors transported to America, where they become hilarious viewed through the lens of college politics and batty girlfriends instead of peasant uprisings. And there’s the remarkable Bellow sentence.

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki

Tanizaki’s slow patience and his ability to do melodrama without being melodramatic (whereas I can only do melodrama by being melodramatic) makes me very jealous. The Makioka Sisters also has one of the most memorable last lines in literature: “Yukiko’s diarrhea persisted through the 26th, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo.”
Read about the other four books on Desai's list.

--Marshal Zeringue