Here they are:
Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) by Vasily Grossman. Most of these books are extraordinarily funny. This one isn't. Life in Stalin's Soviet Union during WW II. NYRB page. My review.
Excerpt from an essay on Grossman, a WW II Sovier war journalist:
It has proved almost impossible to write about the Holocaust without becoming bathetic or cheap, but Grossman did it as both a reporter and as a novelist, when he once again metamorphosed the material for Life and Fate.
“What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought,” Grossman writes, “but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself,” and the gas chamber sequence in this book is a requiem that rises in rhapsodic detail and intimacy until it becomes virtually impossible to read without weeping. Beginning with the long, agonizing transport in a cattle-car, these chapters hook upon the characters of an educated Red Army doctor named Sofya Levinton and a foundling boy named David and follow their memories and minutest impressions from the train into the “bathhouse” of the death camp. Again each firmly shaped paragraph lends its weight to what follows, culminating in prose of nearly unbearable heaviness and grandeur:
The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofya Levinton want to turn to see what he was looking at.
Her eyes—which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn, and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyl-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss. . . .
The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. His head was turning from side to side; he still wanted to see. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thin stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze’s inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David’s. He still needed his voice—he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a tea-pot was boiling on the gas-ring. . . . This world, where a chicken could run without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet—this world still preoccupied him.
Flashman: A Novel (Flashman) by George MacDonald Fraser. The British anti-hero. More Hilarious, outrageous, anything-but-PC.
The Last Crossing: A Novel by Guy Vanderhaeghe. 2004. My review. Christian Science Monitor review. The Guardian review and excerpt:
The last crossing, the second in Guy Vanderhaeghe's nineteenth-century prairie-lands trilogy, comes heralded with praise from Annie Proulx and Richard Ford. Charles Gaunt's twin brother, Simon, has gone missing in Montana and Charles and his elder brother, Addington, are dispatched by their overbearing father, from his deer-filled estates in nineteenth-century England, to attempt their brother's recovery.
The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie Jr. My review. He won the Pulitzer for the sequel, The Way West in 1950, but start here. Heading West in 1830.
"You can't beat God for bein' picky. No, sir. If he catches you playin' cards or sayin' one swear word...it's to hell with you forever and ever...Even thinkin' is mighty dangerous. As a man thinketh, that's how he is, and to hell with him ag'in. Why you reckon he gave us a thinker then?...God is some busybody."
The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) by Rose Macaulay. This book was outrageously funny as only the late Victorian British can pull off. My review. From the NYRB page:
"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." So begins The Towers of Trebizond, the greatest novel by Rose Macaulay, one of the eccentric geniuses of English literature. In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond, encountering potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists. But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak—as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love.
Friends of pancho villa by James Carlos Blake. My review. I thought I was one of the few people ever to have read this book. Great historical fiction and also laugh out loud funny (really, not just LOL). But, hey ho! Johnny Depp is making it into a moving picture!
Blake's Pancho:
"From now on their books will have to say, 'Nobody ever invaded the United States except for Francisco Villa, the magnificent Mexican patriot who tried so hard to be our friend but who we treated so shamefully because we are such stupid sons of bitches and have no honor.' "
The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry. My review. One of the great spy stories of all time. The Kennedy assassination made simple. A WAPO review from 2005 Passing the Test of Time.
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