Guide to Modern World Literature

by Martin Seymour-Smith

Good; pages lightly discolored . former library book with normal library markings.

Genres: Reference

1206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Karen Witzler · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1978 - I virtually memorized it. So much of what I know of books comes from this book and that moment.

[Monty Milne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary achievement: the writing fizzes with erudition and with the author’s own entertainingly forthright opinions. Very often I am in wholehearted agreement, as when he says “Gorky has neither style nor imagination.” Sometimes my enjoyment of his skewering had an uncomfortable edge. On Tom Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead”, which I greatly enjoyed as a schoolboy, we are told this is “pseudo-profound, crass pastiche.” Well, I didn’t think so at the time, but then my own juvenile scribblings could have had the same adjectives justly applied.

I often found myself making notes as I read this to look up obscure authors who caught my fancy, and whom I had never heard of before. This, and the entertaining rudeness of the writing (another critic is “a toad gulping for mosquitoes”) makes it all worthwhile.

But...I have reservations. The first is not the author’s fault: this edition came out in 1973. “La Regenta” by Leopoldo Alas he correctly says is a masterpiece, but he also bewails the lack of an English translation. That is one problem that time has happily rectified. But of course one will look in vain for anything written in the last fifty years.

But even within his time scale there are some curious omissions. In the Hungarian section, there is no mention of the two most glittering stars in the constellation of Magyar literature – Peter Nadas and Miklos Banffy. The omission of the first is understandable (he was born in 1942 so didn’t really get going till the 1980’s), but the omission of the second is not. And the only thing by a Uruguayan anyone on Goodreads is likely to have read is Lautréamont’s “Maldoror:” this omission is also hard to understand when obscure Uruguayan poets are mentioned. (Although maybe Seymour Smith just thought Maldoror was crap – I certainly did).

There are other minor niggles, such as an inconsistent use of Polish accents, and a section on minor western literature near the end of the book which abounds in errors of fact (Stalin could not have sent anyone to Siberia in 1954 – he was dead by then). But the biggest niggle of all is my growing suspicion that there is no way the author could have read everything he pontificates about, and yet he likes to give the impression that he has. When he talks magisterially about stuff which had not been translated into English he is trying to pull the wool over our eyes and imply he has read it in the original, but I just do not believe that he had a reading knowledge of Mongolian and Albanian (amongst many others)...so I am not sure how far to trust his judgements. (And I must admit that I sometimes get confused between the Geg and Tosk dialects of Albanian, and my knowledge of Mongolian irregular verbs is somewhat rusty...). But, taken as a whole, I derived huge profit and enjoyment out of this, and it is a worthy (though flawed) addition to anyone’s library.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you find this second-hand (it's out of print) as I did, buy it: there's no other author I know who has read so much modern literature IN THE ORIGINAL which in my book gives him great cred: I use the book to read up on anything modern written before the 80s, when this was published.