The Guardian's Blog, page 162

Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world

Why do we keep returning to Proust's masterpiece? A century after its publication, his towering achievement encompasses the world around us

I pulled my copy of À la recherche du temps perdu off the shelf just last week. There – I've said it. I was looking for the passage right at the beginning where he conjures up that feeling of waking in the middle of the night and not knowing where you are, or indeed at first who you are. It's a feeling which – as the narrator confesses around nine pages into his exploration of this fleeting sensation – never lasts more than a few seconds, but which he finds so unsettling it calls into question the stability of the entire world. As Scott Moncrieff's translation has it:

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years

One hundred years after the release of the first volume – published by Grasset on 14 November 1913 at the author's expense after André Gide advised Gallimard to turn it down – this 10-page opening sequence reveals something of both Proust's method and of his enduring appeal: the precision with which he anatomises our inner life, the seriousness with which he examines how our personal experience shapes the world around us, the finesse with which he conjures up his luxurious surroundings.

Despite all of these obvious qualities, despite the fact that it's one of only a handful of books that I find myself returning to again and again, it's not a book I ever recommend. It's such a giant cultural artefact, such a pinnacle of achievement, such a perfect expression of a certain aesthetic, and so very, very long that even admitting I've read it feels like the worst kind of literary one-upmanship – let alone admitting I read it in French (long story). But this bulk, the very heft which makes it such a bookish status symbol is not only central to Proust's artistic project but one of its greatest pleasures.

The memories that the narrator recalls over the course of seven volumes include childhood anguish in the country, an intrigue with a courtesan, a portrait of high-society entertaining, an exploration of fin de siècle gay life, a relationship doomed by jealousy and more and more and more. It's a novel so voluminous, so capacious, so complete you can spend weeks, months or even years submerged in its crystalline waters. When you surface – gasping a little from the spectacular dénouement – you find that the world you have just left seems big enough, mighty enough to encompass the world around you, to measure up to life itself. For about a year or so after I finished Le Temps retrouvé I couldn't read another novel without thinking Proust had written it already.

It's a universe that you are obliged to explore at the languid pace of Proust's serpentine prose, snaking from enumeration towards explication, from description into deviation. And this is the other reason why I never find myself pressing a copy into someone's hand. After all, I read it in French (did I mention that?), so that page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word my experience of reading À la recherche was bathed in the glow of Proust's voluptuous prose, drenched in the rare perfume of a second language. Quite apart from the difficulties in reproducing the temporal subtlety of Proust's "Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure", neither Moncrieff's "For a long time I would go to bed early," nor Lydia Davis's "For a long time I went to bed early," really cuts it.

And yet, and yet … there I was, just last week, pulling it off the shelf, because nothing else I've ever read really gets that experience of a midnight waking, really understands that sense of total emptiness – nothing else I've ever read really nails it. Proust is more than just an inspirational self-publisher, a fine stylist of French prose or a badge of literary honour. One hundred years after the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, maybe I should get over my mild case of literary embarrassment and start recommending À la recherche after all.

ClassicsFictionRichard Lea
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The best books on Mexico: start your reading here

Our literary tour of Mexico starts with its bloody revolution and ends with political disappointment and the fight for a better future

The Years With Laura Díaz by Carlos Fuentes

Fuentes's epic novel uses one woman's life and loves to sweep through 100 years of Mexican history. Laura Díaz – daughter, sister, wife, mother, lover – comes of age during the long, bloody Mexican revolution (1910-20). The execution of her half-brother Santiago (from one of four generations of Santiagos in the novel) by firing squad at the start of the revolution launches her political journey.

Laura has hardly a dull moment as Mexico heads towards becoming a modern nation. She witnesses, chronicles, discusses or participates in all the country's seminal political and cultural events of the 20th century, through to the early 1970s. Real-life luminaries such as artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo are also woven into the rich tapestry of Laura's life.

Fuentes's grand project encompasses Mexico's political upheavals, its union movement, the Spanish civil war, the Holocaust, McCarthyism and the massacre of students in Mexico City on the eve of the 1968 Olympics (Laura's grandson, Santiago, is one of the victims).

Its intelligence, emotional power and bold ambition make this a memorable book.

Diplomat, Harvard professor and one of Mexico's most famous writers and polemicists, Fuentes was often mentioned as a Nobel contender, but never won. He died in 2012.

Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos

In Villalobos's small but perfectly formed 2011 debut novel, reality and surreality overlap in a darkly comic tale that offers a fresh take on Mexico's nasty narco-wars.

Tochtli ("rabbit" in Nahuatl, an indigenous language), the precocious, seven-year-old narrator, tells us about his life as the son of a drug kingpin called Yolcaut ("rattlesnake" in Nahuatl). They live in an isolated and well-guarded palace ("the thing is we have a lot of money. A huge amount"), where the boy's every whim is indulged but he is lonely. He knows only "13 or 14 people … [But] if I counted dead people, I'd know more".

He has a passion for hats, samurai, guillotines – and Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. Tochtli reads the dictionary every night, and among the words he likes to use are "pathetic", "devastating", "disastrous" and "sordid".

His father sees him as part of the gang and doesn't shield him from violence. As a result, the child is chillingly knowledgeable about bullets, knives and the disposal of corpses. "I think at the moment my life is a little bit sordid. Or pathetic," says Tochtli.

Although easily devoured in one sitting, this clever little book is to be contemplated at length afterwards.

Mexico: Democracy Interrupted by Jo Tuckman

A well-informed overview of Mexico today, in which Tuckman argues that the country missed a chance to fully embrace democracy after the oxymoronic Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) was voted out in 2000 after 70 years in power (it has since returned).

The rightwing National Action party (PAN), in its 12 years of rule, failed to deliver on the hopes it had raised for more transparent and participatory governance, beyond political plurality and generally free and fair elections.

Tuckman investigates the key dimensions of Mexican life and the challenges the country faces: a violent drugs war (and the US role in it); a flawed judicial system and much-abused laws; rampant corruption; poverty and extreme inequality; racism; and environmental concerns. She also examines the infighting that has stymied the ambitions of the left, and the role played by the Catholic church and religion.

History, personal stories and political analysis are interwoven to reveal what makes this fascinating and diverse country tick.

Despite some seemingly intractable problems, she sees reasons to be optimistic, with brave and energetic citizens, along with sections of the media, stepping up to fight for a better future.

Tuckman, the Guardian's Mexico correspondent, has been living in, and reporting on, the country for more than 10 years.

MexicoAmericasFictionCarlos FuentesPoliticsHistoryPushpinder Khaneka
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Impac longlist goes further than other prizes

Dublin award lineup has room for novels from 17 languages, opening window on best world literature, says judge Tash Aw

As a reader, I've always felt that the real thrill of prize nomination lists lies not so much in the winner they produce, but in the surprises they throw up along the way – the discovery of writers and novels who might otherwise have remained outside our fields of vision. And it is for this reason that the announcement of the Impac Dublin International Literary Award longlist is a gift for readers in search of unexpected delights.

First things first: the Impac longlist is not like other longlists; it is not a handful of carefully selected books that will be further winnowed to achieve the shortlist. Rather, it is a full list of the books competing for next year's prize: every single title nominated by 110 participating libraries across the world. Each library can select up to three titles published in English (including translations), but many end up nominating the same novel – Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies and Richard Ford's Canada received nine nominations each – and so the list consists of a formidable 152 titles rather than a truly gargantuan 300.

It is this lack of pre-selection – no limit on publishers' entries, no pre-selection of titles – that makes the Impac longlist so interesting and varied, if not slightly idiosyncratic. Nobel, Booker and Pulitzer Prize-winners (Herta Müller, Peter Carey, Pat Barker) sit alongside determinedly commercial novels (Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Ian Rankin's Standing in Another Man's Grave). Giant New York Times bestsellers (JK Rowling, Richard Ford) jostle for the judges' attention with writers published by small independent presses in Ethiopia or Bosnia (Tariku Abas Etenesh, Selvedin Avdić). Libraries are free to nominate whatever novel they wish, as long as they consider their choice representative of "excellence", but it is clear from the list that libraries interpret this differently, which results in its unpredictability and democracy.

For me, the real attraction of the huge scale of the Impac longlist is the inclusion of translated works, which creates a feeling that literature is universal, and that readers all over the world are somehow participating in a joint exercise of discovering what people are reading elsewhere. Over the past two years, I've been devoting much time and energy to the art of translating fiction, and have been struck by just how much readers in English are missing out because of the lack of commercial support for titles in translation – so the inclusion of 41 novels drawn from 17 languages on the Impac list is a way of opening a window to the vast wealth of non-Anglophone literature. So far, seven translated titles have won the Impac Dublin award, so these novels are not on the list for mere decoration.

The award has a reputation for producing quirky, if not downright obscure, winners. That may be to do with the fact that some winning authors have been little known to English-speaking readers – Michel Houellebecq, Javier Marias, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Per Pettersen were already well-established in their own countries and indeed elsewhere, but winning the Impac certainly boosted their reputations. However, the last three winners have been Anglophone (City of Bohane by Kevin Barry, Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann), and it's also true that reading books from so many different literary cultures and genres helps the reader think about fiction in different, less rigid ways – this too might explain the unconventional results. Reading a Nobel Prize winner followed by a Scandinavian crime novel is not something most readers will be in the habit of doing, but I'm looking forward to the experience.

The shortlist will be announced next April

The longlist in full

The Book of Emotions by João Almino (translated from Portuguese by Elizabeth Jackson)

Waiting for the Monsoon by Threes Anna (translated from Dutch by Barbara Potter Fasting)

No One Is Here Except All Of Us by Ramona Ausubel

Swimming to Elba by Silvia Avallone (translated from Italian by Antony Shugaar)

Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdić (translated from Bosnian by Coral Petkovich)

The Voyage by Murray Bail

The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker (translated from Dutch by David Colmer)

The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne

Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco (translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)

Toby's Room by Pat Barker

In the Kingdom of Men by Kim Barnes

Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles by Fabio Bartolomei (translated from Italian by Antony Shugaar)

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron

The Woman Who Dived into the Heart of the World by Sabina Berman (translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman)

Miss Fuller by April Bernard

Kaltenburg by Marcel Beyer (translated from German by Alan Bance)

HHhH by Laurent Binet (translated from French by Sam Taylor)

The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

Lola Bensky by Lily Brett

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Spilt Milk by Chico Buarque (translated from Portuguese by Alison Entrekin)

The Literature Express by Lasha Bugadze (translated from Georgian by Maya Kiasashvili)

Léon and Louise by Alex Capus (translated from German by John Brownjohn)

The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Gold by Chris Cleave

Finton Moon by Gerard Collins

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

Questions of Travel by Michelle De Kretser

The House I Loved by Tatiana de Rosnay

70% Acrylic 30% Wool by Viola Di Grado (translated from Italian by Michael Reynolds)

A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer DuBois)

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Sufficient Grace by Amy Espeseth

Eyes and Mist by Tariku Abas Etenesh

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan

A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks

The Intentions Book by Gigi Fenster

419 by Will Ferguson

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante – translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein

Absolution by Patrick Flanery

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Canada by Richard Ford

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

Follow the Spinning Sun by Leandro Thomas Gonzales

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Green

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn

Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding

Axolotl Roadkill by Helene Hegemann (translated from German by Katy Derbyshire)

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

The Elephant Keepers' Children by Peter Høeg (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken)

May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes

In One Person by John Irving

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

The Open World by Stephanie Johnson

A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar by Suzanne Joinson

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (translated from Swedish by Rod Bradbury)

The Illicit Happiness of Other People by Manu Joseph

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits

The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken)

The Cannon was Red Hot by Vladimir Kecmanović (translated from Serbian by Sofija S̆Korić)

The Daughters of Mars by Tom Keneally

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett)

Lost Voices by Christopher Koch

The Dinner by Herman Koch (translated from Dutch by Sam Garrett)

The Headmaster's Wager by Vincent Lam

Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan

Capital by John Lanchester

Anna From Away by DR MacDonald

People Park by Pasha Malla

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

A Blessed Snarl by Samuel Thomas Martin

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

The German Lottery by Miha Mazzini (translated from Slovenian by Urška Zupanec)

In the Absence of Heroes by Anthony McCarten

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Railsea by China Miéville

Heft by Liz Moore

Home by Toni Morrison

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller (translated from German by Philip Boehm)

Island of A Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera

Three Strong Women by Marie Ndiaye (translated from French by John Fletcher)

Phantom by Jo Nesbø (translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett)

Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman (translated from Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia)

Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates

Flying Leap by Ralf W Oliver

The Light of Amsterdam by David Park

The Forrests by Emily Perkins

Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

Persecution – The Friendly Fire of Memories by Alessandro Piperno (translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)

Freeman by Leonard Pitts, Jr,

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

True by Riikka Pulkkinen (translated from Finnish by Lola Rogers)

Standing in Another Man's Grave (by Ian Rankin)

The Cove by Ron Rash

Above All Things by Tanis Rideout

Ignorance by Michèle Roberts

The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan

The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling

The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan

The Brothers by Asko Sahlberg (translated from Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah)

Dominion by CJ Sansom

Light Falling on Bamboo by Lawrence Scott

Umbrella by Will Self

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Honour by Elif Shafak (translated from Turkish by Elif Shafak)

The Perfect Landscape by Ragna Sigurdardottir (translated from Icelandic by Sarah Bowen)

The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva

Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

NW by Zadie Smith

This Bright River by Patrick Somerville

The Purchase by Linda Spalding

Risk by CK Stead

The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman

The Canvas by Benjamin Stein (translated from German by Brian Zumhagen)

A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson)

The Garden of Evening Mists by Twan Eng Tan

The Guard by Peter Terrin (translated from Dutch by David Colmer)

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

The Lower River by Paul Theroux

Ru by Kim Thúy (translated from French by Sheila Fischman)

Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler

Night Dancer by Chika Unigwe

Dirt by David Vann

The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa (translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman)

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated from Spanish by Anne McLean)

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas (translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean)

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Mesmerized by Alissa Walser (translated from German by Jamie Bulloch)

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Skagboys by Irvine Welsh

Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White

Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles

An Available Man by Hilma Wolitzer

The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood

The Rent Collector by Camron Wright

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (translated from Spanish by Lucia Graves)

The Method by Juli Zeh (translated from German by Sally-Ann Spencer)

Impac prizeAwards and prizesFictionAnne TylerJeet ThayilWill SelfGillian FlynnRichard FordMario Vargas LlosaNobel prize for literatureNew York Times
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Sympathy for The Outsider – Reading group

Much has been made of Mersault's indifference, but there's plenty of evidence for other readings of his character

"I was reading The Outsider one lunch whilst on a work placement at a steel stockholders in Sheffield. One of the salesmen asked me, "What do you read books for?" I was so taken aback, the best I could come up with was enjoyment."

That's a comment from last week's Reading group discussion by a contributor called Pazza. "Enjoyment" is a funny response, of course, because there is so much more to The Outsider. You don't need to be told about its impact on European thought and just how many books and article have been written about it as a work of philosophy. That doesn't mean to say, however, that Pazza's answer isn't actually a good one. As I read through The Outsider this time around the thing that struck me was the simple pleasure of reading it. It might be seen as a landmark in philosophy, but it's also a damn good novel.

There's a famous Camus quote that "saying things badly increases the unhappiness of the world". I set that down both as an insight into his attitude to writing and as a good reason for me to avoid going into a practical criticism-style essay into his prose. My French isn't up to it, and it's no particular insight to point our that his writing is vivid, and elegant. It may be plain, but only in the way of a well-turned piece of wood, where the surface is smooth, yet also reveals all the undulations of the grain.

Anyway, anyone who has slogged through Sartre's Nausea will appreciate Camus' qualities as a storyteller. My own battle with Camus' frenemy's famous book took place quite a few years ago, and I came out the loser. So I should preface this remark by admitting I may be doing Sartre an injustice – but from what I can remember, another big difference between Nausea and The Outsider is a refusal to preach. His book is more complete as a novel. Mersault's story isn't a simply framework for a philosophy, it is something in and of itself. It is full of novelistic possibility. It is rich in ambiguity. It is ripe for interpretation. It is full of doubt. This is no screed setting out the rules of existentialism, or even absurdism. Camus doesn't claim to know all the answers, or even all the questions, but he does have the novelist's ability to make you wonder what those questions might be, and to reveal all the complex mess of human psychology.

Take the trial. One possible interpretation is that Mersault is killed because he failed to do what society expected of him at the time of his mother's funeral. On this interpretation Mersault is largely a victim of circumstances; of the bad fortune of walking back onto that part of the beach when he did; of the hot sun; of the irrational mores of the people who oversee his trial. His head is going to be removed from his body not so much because of the crime he committed, but because he refuses to bow to convention, and refuses to be dishonest. Mersault is a kind of martyr – which may explain why Camus once described him as "the only Christ that we deserve".

I don't think there's anything wrong with that interpretation – it is probably the most obvious, and possibly the most likely. But it isn't the only one. That Christ quote may also point the way to something bleaker. If Mersault is the only Christ we deserve, what does that make us? Especially in light of the following passage, the crucial moment at the end of the first part of the book:

Then I fired four more times into the lifeless body, where the bullets sank without leaving a trace. And it was as if I had rapped sharply, four times, on the fatal door of destiny.

"Fatal door of destiny" is Sandra Smith's smart translation of "la porte du malheur". The "door of misfortune" would be the weaker literal rendition, I suppose. It suggests – possibly – that it it was these four shots that sealed Mersault's fate. It might even suggest that Mersault knows as much, even if he presents things differently later on in his account of the trial. In spite of Mersault's protestations, might the prosecution's focus on his mother be irrelevant to the outcome? We never hear the jury's deliberations, and there's no summary from the judge. We, like Mersault, only hear the verdict.

Maybe that's an extreme reading. But it's there. Camus allows for ambiguity. Like plenty of the best novelists, he refuses to make up our mind for us. He is not afraid of contradictions. It is a book where more than one thing can be true at once, more than one thing can be false, where some things can be both true and false and where nearly all are uncertain.

To go back to those four shots. They also demonstrate another aspect of Camus' talent. Just as they may change everything that comes afterwards, they also call into question a great deal of what has gone before. They made me wonder, for instance, if I had got Mersault all wrong.

He is flawed from the off. We can question, for instance, whether he should have helped Raymond write the letter that enabled him to beat his girlfriend. We might even, like the French state, feel that he is heartless towards his mother. We certainly don't have to endorse all his actions. Nevertheless, there's still something essentially amiable about him. Mersault is a man who delights in swimming in the sea, who describes his simple meals with relish, who makes us laugh about his neighbour Salamano and his mangy dog and who also makes us pity Salamano when the dog disappears. He is a man who says the following:

"The street lamps made the damp pavements glisten and every few minutes the headlights of the trams lit up someone's hair, a smile or a silver bracelet. A little while later, as the trams passed by less often, the night grew even darker above the trees and lights, and the streets below began to empty little by little, until the first cat slowly crossed the road, deserted once more."

I could have picked dozens of similar passages. They also would have been fairly simple, and even apparently inconsequential. But they too would have shown a similar fascination with the stuff of life, and a similar enjoyment of just being. This idea was neatly summed up in Phil Baines' notes on our recent Camus slideshow, with Cyril Connolly's suggestion that The Outsider is not a work of gloomy existentialism – but a "violent affirmation of health and sanity" whose hero "is sensual and well-meaning, profoundly in love with life".

And just as he loves life, we respond to him. Which makes his crime all the more shocking. You can understand that Mersault might have felt threatened by the man on the beach. That he might have been confused by the sun. That firing might have been an unlucky instinct. But to follow up with four more bullets? What was he thinking? How are we supposed to read this? We might see it as a continuation of his indifference to fate. Assuming we accept that he is indifferent at all. Or we might see it as something more primal, more animal, more horrifying.

After maligning Sartre, I should acknowledge that he put this aspect of Camus brilliantly: "He is a classical Mediterranean. I would call his pessimism 'solar' if you remember how much black there is in the sun."

It's this feeling for darkness that distinguishes him as a novelist more than a philosopher. Camus is the heir to Conrad and to Dostoevsky, just as much as Heidegger.

Albert CamusJean-Paul SartreSam Jordison
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Choose the best and worst 21st-century novels – open thread

A new survey has selected the best and worst fiction of the century so far from Harry Potter to Fifty Shades. What's your verdict?

The magic of Harry Potter is apparently as potent as ever, with Order of the Phoenix being named as the best book of the 21st century, and Angel, by Katie Price, as the worst, in a survey conducted by TV channel Dave. A poll of 2,000 people chose the boy wizard's fifth adventure as the best 21st-century read, followed by Yann Martel's Life of Pi and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, with honourable mentions for Ian McEwan, Lionel Shriver and Cormac McCarthy.

But which two titles would you pick as the best and worst books of the new millennium? The poll's choices are listed below, but feel free to differ from Dave …

Dave's 10 best books of the 21st century...

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
• We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• Pompeii by Robert Harris

... and five worst

• Angel by Katie Price
• Fifty Shades Trilogy by EL James
• A Whole New World by Katie Price
• Learning to Fly by Victoria Beckham
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

FictionLiz Bury
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The end of realist stories

The limitations of mimetic storytelling are ever more apparent, but what should come next is less clear

Literary fiction is dead – or if not dead then finished, according to the Goldsmiths prize-shortlisted writer Lars Iyer, who argues it has become a "repertoire, like The Nutcracker at Christmas" and suggests that novelists should spread the word that "the time for literary novels is over". But literary fiction has always been dead, has always needed the mould-breaking writing which the Goldsmiths prize celebrates.

Ever since its birth, writers have been suspicious of the novel, reaching for the authenticity of the real – often presenting their work as memoir, à la Robinson Crusoe. For Scheherazade, storytelling is, literally, a stay of execution. For the rest of us, it is merely a pastime; a distraction from our ultimate destruction. Ashamed of its frivolity, fiction drapes itself in the gravitas of non-fiction.

If literature needs to be something more than just storytelling, then perhaps one could argue with Maurice Blanchot that it only truly becomes grown-up when it "becomes a question" hanging over the space separating it from the world. By showing its sleight of hand, the novel can live up to Adorno's definition of art as "magic delivered from the lie of being truth", but it loses its innocence in the process. No longer is it possible for a serious novelist to go back to the "good old days" when – as Gombrowicz put it – one could write "as a child might pee against a tree".

But things were never as simple as that. The original realist novel was no straightforward attempt to describe the world; rather, an attempt to dismantle off-the-peg representations of reality already present in literature of the time. For Fredric Jameson, realism only exists dialectically, when it is in contention with some opposite it harbours. Madame Bovary , for instance, carries romance in its narrative in order to kill it off, and turn into its antithesis.

Jameson sees the rise of realism as part of the secularisation of society; a process that ran counter to the "universalising conceptions of life" propagated by religion. Increasingly, novels sought to focus on the singular, contingent, and therefore unliterary aspects of reality that had no prior linguistic expression. More specifically, Jameson detects a growing "autonomisation of the senses" post-Balzac. Emotions – already classified "conscious states" – were shunned in favour of "affects", those nameless "bodily feelings" that could be shown, but not told.

The realist novel was a product of this tension between telling and showing; between an age-old "storytelling impulse" (the narration of a tale that has happened "once and for all") and fragments through which the "eternal affective present" was explored in increasingly experimental ways. The outcome is that "one of the two antithetical forces finally outweighs the other and assures its disintegration". Narrative convention frequently broke down as a result of the novel's linguistic imperialism – its quest for the "unique phenomenon which bears no recognisable name". Gradually, however, the unnamed would get named, and the novel would beget new conventions, sub-genres, and stereotypes, which would have to be deconstructed in turn. Jameson contends that the one genre realism cannot dissolve is realism itself, which, in my view, speaks volumes about the state of fiction today. With a nod to Mark Fisher's idea of capitalist realism, one could speak of fictive realism to describe the widespread belief that the 19th-century novel - or a variant thereof - is fiction's unsurpassable horizon.

Literature only coincides with itself when it claims to be what it is not. As soon as it acknowledges its made-up nature, the novel looks back at itself in anger; becomes its own worst enemy. The best authors, in my book, , sense that the hocus-pocus spell cast by storytelling threatens to transform their works into bedtime stories for grown-ups. As Borges warns, "A book that does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete".

The history of the novel could thus be reinterpreted as a product of fiction fatigue: an inner struggle between book and counterbook. Don Quixote perceives the mundane reality he inhabits through the prism of chivalric romances, which leads him, famously, to mistake windmills for giants. Emma Bovary is a desperate housewife, whose shopping-and-fucking daydreams are fuelled by the sentimental literature she consumes, and is eventually consumed by. Leonard Bast, in Howards End, fills his head with the "husks of books" instead of the "real thing", and ends up crushed by a bookcase.

Cervantes, Flaubert, and EM Forster all fought fiction with fiction, in the name of the "real thing". Similarly, the realist novel attempted to dissolve whatever smacked of literariness. As Alain Robbe-Grillet pointed out in his nouveau roman heyday, serious writers always "believe they are realists", and "literary revolutions" are all made "in the name of realism". Whenever a given mode of writing becomes "a vulgar recipe, an academic mannerism which its followers respect out of routine or laziness, without even questioning its necessity, then it is indeed a return to the real which constitutes the arraignment of the dead formulas and the search for new forms capable of continuing the effort".

Robbe-Grillet accused the Balzacian novel of propagating an outdated, anthropocentric worldview. Its rounded characters were an expression of triumphant bourgeois individualism; its lifelike plots mirrored readers' "ready-made idea of reality". Such works were designed to convey the impression of a stable, "entirely decipherable universe", and the novelist's task was, precisely, to do the deciphering; to unearth "the hidden soul of things". For his part, the nouveau romancier was convinced that the "discovery of reality" through literature would only continue if these "outworn forms" were jettisoned, along with "the old myths of 'depth'" that supported them. In the new novel he called for, the presence of the world – "neither significant nor absurd" – prevails over any attempt to project meaning on to it. Reality is no longer a given, but a taken; something that each novel must create anew. As a result, the primacy of substance over style is reversed. Style is what "constitutes reality" in such a novel, which ultimately "expresses nothing but itself".

The nouveau roman may not be very new any more, but there's no shortage of writers lining up alongside Iyer to call time on the traditional novel. For David Shields, novels are "antediluvian texts that are essentially still working in the Flaubertian mode". JM Coetzee is "sick of the well-made novel," while Zadie Smith says she suffers from "novel-nausea". Even the thought of fiction is enough to make Karl Ove Knausgaard "feel nauseous".

Tim Parks is the latest to confess he shares "Shields's changing reaction to traditional novels," but he's less convinced that Shields's hunger for reality is the answer. Writers such as Beckett or Lydia Davis may have avoided the trap of the traditional novel, he argues, but "this kind of writing … seems to derive its energy by gauging its distance from the traditional novel, by expressing its disbelief and frustration with the form, and there is a limit to the pleasures, comedy and wisdom of negative energy and deconstruction".

If the novel is dead - always already - as Iyer suggests, then it'll take more than a dose of reality to infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing lying at our feet.

FictionGustave FlaubertMiguel de CervantesEM ForsterAndrew Gallix
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers

Tracing Downton Abbey's lineage: the novel that inspired a TV hit

Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party, published in 1980, is an acknowledged influence on Julian Fellowes's ratings monster. But what can we glean from it about where the story will go?

With the arrival of news that Downton Abbey is to return for a fifth series, speculation rises over what Julian Fellowes has in store for us. How long can Mary's vision withstand the punishing regime of never-ending eye-rolling over Edith's love life? Will Carson ever recover from Mrs Hughes installing an electric toaster? Has Daisy finally learned to breathe through her nose? For those starting to wonder if Downton is in danger of going on so long that it catches up with the 21st century, there is one book that reveals Fellowes's motivations, intentions and predilections: The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate.

Set in 1913, the novel comprises one day in the life of a large country house. The men are guffawing and shooting, the ladies are frostily lunching and servants dart hither and thither like beleaguered nymphs as Colegate meditates on Fellowes' favourite themes: frustration, friction between the classes, tradition v progress, and the imminent disintegration of an aristocratic world. The day culminates in a moment of tragedy that tugs at the tightly woven lives of the masters and their servants and forces both groups to realise the extent of their dependence on each other.

When The Shooting Party was published in 1980, the popular representation of the aristocracy was as a bunch of bungling toffs: weak chins and weak morals abounded, while servitude was either mocked or ignored. Colegate, however, chose to dispense with these tropes and present everyone as humans instead of saints or villains. The book, written at the height of Thatcherism, is a precursor to Fellowes's forelock-tugging that shows both poor and rich characters in a sympathetic light.

In his introduction to the 2004 edition of The Shooting Party, Fellowes was quick to acknowledge that his screenplay for Gosford Park owed a great deal to the film adaptation of Colegate's novel: "without it the seed of the idea behind my script would never have been allowed to germinate". However, at the time of writing Gosford Park Fellowes had not yet read the book, and in Robert Altman was working with a director notorious for his fractious relationships with screenwriters. As a result of Fellowes's novice status and Altman's heavy hand on the tiller, Gosford Park ended up owing far more to Agatha Christie's whodunnits than to Isabel Colegate.

Once Gosford Park had hoovered up its Oscar nominations and Fellowes had completed the transformation from actor to respected screenwriter, he finally got around to actually reading The Shooting Party. The result is that Colegate's influence runs throughout the four series of Downton: the aristocratic family, the restless young women, the grouchy cook; entire scenes hanging on missing cufflinks. Kemal Pamuk, who vigorously romanced Mary in the first series, has a Colegate counterpart in Count Rakassyi, while Robert's overreliance on tradition echoes that of The Shooting Party's beleaguered host, Sir Randolph.

The similarities between Downton and The Shooting Party are most apparent in the final scene of the novel, when the landowner Lord Hartlip endangers the life of one of the gamekeepers by deviating from "the rules of the game". Fellowes, in turn, has developed all four series around Robert's well-meaning but near-disastrous mismanagement of Downton Abbey. Critics have griped about the amount of time spent discussing entails and dodgy overseas investments, but the series is largely powered by Robert's repeated gambling of the estate on shares and his constant hope that some woman, somewhere in his family, will produce a son.

It is the suggestion of dry rot within their protagonist families that links Fellowes and Colegate as writers and offers an insight into the eventual demise of Downton. Colegate is concerned with characters who are unable to break away from the established traditions, often at the expense of their own happiness. Everyone is trapped in the role assigned to them at the beginning of the book, and the result is a novel powered by nostalgia and pathos.

In his introduction, however, Fellowes takes this doomy outlook as a rallying cry: "If we cannot defend our own values against the trivial, fluctuating fashions in morality, then we are lost." While Lord Fellowes valiantly defends a life that was built upon the subjugation of the many and the profit of the few he is simultaneously steering Downton Abbey towards the same conclusion as The Shooting Party. With Robert reacting to Matthew's death and relinquishment of the estate in the manner of Augustus Gloop confronted with a chocolate river, Downton is once again in danger. The fun remains in deciding if Fellowes will stay true to Colegate's novel or if he will keep Downton afloat long enough for George Osborne to move in.

FictionDownton AbbeyTelevisionPeriod dramaJulian FellowesBeulah Maud Devaney
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Poem of the week: Returning, We Hear Larks by Isaac Rosenberg

Soldiers reaching camp after a nighttime mission are surprised by birdsong in this classic poem by the first world war great

This week's poem, Returning, We Hear Larks, is one of Isaac Rosenberg's most popular war poems, but I often wonder if he'd have made further revisions, given time. It's among the last handful of poems he wrote, working on scraps of paper in circumstances that would have silenced a less motivated artist. Yet the piece is typically his own, while laying bare the diverse influences integral to his style.

Rosenberg's life and work are a fusion of conflicting energies. To begin with the obvious ones: he was a painter and playwright as well as a poet. His first language was Yiddish; his first literary inspiration the Old Testament. Some of his best prewar poems are in the style of Blake – and not shallow imitations, either. Symbolist, realist, modernist, Romantic: Rosenberg could be selectively anthologised to embody any of these movements.

Most critics have favoured those of his war poems that use a vernacular idiom and free-verse structure to expose the misery and grotesqueness of everyday soldiering. You might argue that, like Owen, Rosenberg was released by war from self-conscious literariness. But you'd only be partly right. His finest war poem, Dead Man's Dump, is highly literary, a fused montage of the biblical, the Blakean and the Whitmanesque. Returning, We Hear Larks comes from a similar mould.

One revision we know about comes in the first line, which originally read, "Sombre the night hangs." Changing "hangs" to "is" shows good judgment: simpler is stronger. But simplicity is only one aspect of Rosenberg's method. The line's grammatical inversion is good judgment working in a different direction. That trochaic opening bell-stroke of "Sombre" is a dramatic, mood-setting call to attention. Although the thought continues in the next two lines, a full-stop after the assertion ensures a resonant pause. Another simple verb, "have" in "we have our lives" suggests these "lives" are like solid objects, to be grasped and owned in the face of the "sinister threat" that "lurks there" (ie in the sombre night), waiting to snatch them away.

From the next tercet we learn the men are returning to camp at dawn after a nocturnal sortie. Rosenberg is probably recalling an occasion from his time in the works battalion servicing the Hindenburg Line, in February 1917. The irregular, almost ragged tercets convey the limping, shambling gait of exhausted men. Adjectival phrases such as "anguished limbs" may seem overdone, but they help retard the rhythm, and accentuate the sense of relief, the clarity and lightness of getting back to camp and "a little safe sleep".

Linguistic excess can pay off. Rosenberg loved inventing compound words, and the coined adjective "poison-blasted" seems a brilliant stroke. The poet never deluded himself about the war: he viewed it as "a demonstration in vast and tragic forms of the stupidity and ineffectiveness of our species". War's blasts and poisons are moral as well as literal, and this compound detonates an array of meanings.

Rosenberg's challenge in the poem is to lend combat-credibility to a subject bathed in Romantic luminescence. It doesn't deter him from using the biblical language of "hark" and "lo" or the repetition of "joy", however, and in lines seven and eight, his speaker might have stepped out of one of his Old Testament plays.

Shelley's To a Skylark is echoed in the metaphorical description of the birdsong as rain-showers: "Music showering our upturned list'ning faces." But Rosenberg needs a stronger objective correlative than rain to express his sense of the miraculous. He finds the solution in a magnificent phrase: "heights of night ringing with unseen larks". This has a muscular musicality unlike the finespun ethereality of Shelley. "Ringing" achieves a piercing and reverberating sound effect, and just possibly hints at the urgency of communication signalled by field telephones. It visualises the larks gathered invisibly round, like an ambush, or a protective fortress. That the birds are "unseen" contrasts tantalisingly with the loud nearness of their voices. And beneath them, the men are also perhaps enclosed by their shared experience, forming a ring of "upturned list'ning faces". As Rosenberg biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson says, the image relates to a charcoal drawing he made in 1912, entitled Hark, Hark the Lark. She tells us there was also a painting, now lost, which Rosenberg submitted to a Slade School competition. It was called Joy, and concluding the prose description Rosenberg had written: "Joy – joy – the birds sing joy". Writing his "lark" poem in 1917, under desperate pressures, he's surely not merely recycling earlier material but asserting the continuum of his creative identity.

The last section begins abruptly, with a statement of stark truthfulness, which then turns complicated. "But song only dropped" is interestingly ambiguous. "Dropped" is a word more applicable to bombs and rain than birdsong. It makes sense to apply "only" to the noun rather than the verb, but the qualifier's positioning casts doubt. It can also be read as a faintly sardonic reference to the frailty and incompleteness of the experience: the song simply dropped away and disappeared.

This reading may be borne out by the ensuing similes. The blind man's dreams are swept away, or dropped, "By dangerous tides". The girl is an unwittingly predatory sexual figure, perhaps related to the war goddess Rosenberg imagines elsewhere – a traitor and devourer of men.

Neither impressionistic sketch nor realist narrative, though drawing on both, partly rhymed and partly free, haunted by an antithesis of innocence and experience almost too painful to translate into language, the poem seems to look into the heart of Romantic epiphany and find an abyss. Less than a year later, on 1 April 1918, Private Rosenberg was killed at dawn after a night patrol.

Returning, We Hear Larks

Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp –
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! joy – joy – strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list'ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song –
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

PoetryFirst world warCarol Rumens
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Branded with our love of books

Fifty Shades of wine may not appeal to the discerning consumer, but what are the literary products you'd passionately embrace?

There's nothing new about literary wearables. In 2011, a pair of "directional" Catcher in the Rye sneakers caught Lindesay Irvine's discerning eye. He's not wearing them now – apparently, they don't match his Jane Eyre hoody. Just as well. It seems book-themed fashion is like no longer lust-have. In other words, basically, no longer ferosh. You know?

It's what inside that counts. At least, that's what the vendors of the Fifty Shades of Grey wine – no, not whine – are hoping. On their relentlessly grey website the canny entrepreneurs (aka EL James) point out that "Wine plays an important role in Fifty Shades of Grey, reflecting the sensuality that pervades every encounter between Anastasia and Christian". I'm guessing they also get drunk on it. But why simply read about drunk sex when you can indulge in Red Satin or White Silk wine (provenance unknown) and … sit alone in your onesie, reading about drunk sex?

Of course the text, and perhaps the sex, may become blurry. But how much vision does it take to read (much less write!) a line like this: "If you spill the wine, I will punish you, Miss Steele"? An example of pervasive sensuality, this. It pervades Ms. James's bank account, filling it with liquid gold.

But maybe something that smells nice would appeal instead. I hadn't heard until just now, but it seems that Wallpaper* magazine has been publishing a perfume entitled Paper Passion. Found in "concept stores" the world over, this "perfume for book lovers" is the result of a collaboration between the German publisher Gerhard Steidl, an "avant garde perfumer", and Karl Lagerfeld, who designed the alliteration.

Creating the substance itself "was hard", according to the parfumier. "The smell of printed paper is dry and fatty; they are not notes you often work with." I couldn't say whether it will work well with a glass of Red Silk, or White Satin, but if neither is to your taste, worry not. Literature's branding potential is an endless well. If I could lay my hands on my Marcel Proust fob watch – I seem to have lost it someplace – I'm sure it would show I've run out of time. But as I head off I'll just light up one of Papa's Fiestas. With any luck, the robust, manly Spanish tobacco will take away the taste of all that wine.

Fiction
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