Is Ulysses, James Joyce's meandering rewrite of the literary rulebook, really the greatest work? Yes, says Penguin editor David Davidar, if the mark of "a creative endeavour is to broaden the scope of the genre, re-establish norms". Hmm, opines veteran journalist Sham Lal: "Unless you have a guide, 999 out of 1,000 readers will not be able to grasp it." What about number two, The Great Gatsby? "Yes, definitely," avers publisher Ravi Vyas, who has read 90 of the 100 books. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano at 11? "Doubtful choice," says professor of English Malashri Lal. "Delighted," differs Davidar.
But as often happens with lists, what is left out is immediately more conspicuous than what, who, is included. J.R.R. Tolkien's tour de force of the imagination, The Lord of the Rings, finds no mention, no matter that it was recently adjudged the novel of the century in a reader's poll. Neither do J.M.
Coetzee, Harper Lee, R.K. Narayan, Patrick White, Truman Capote, P.G. Wodehouse, Nadine Gordimer, Raja Rao, Chinua Achebe, Samuel Beckett, Robertson Davies, Julian Barnes, Thomas Pynchon....
Perhaps, this is too nit-picky, for the undertaking was confined to great works, not great writers who may have penned a commendable corpus but no single towering piece of fiction. That could arguably account for the exclusion of authors like Gordimer, Narayan, Wodehouse. Having conceded that, who can dispute the impact of G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatter, Capote's In Cold Blood, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Ernest Hemingway's
For Whom the Bells Toll, Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird?
Writer Rukmini Bhaya Nair, who too has thumbed through about 90 of the worthies, notes that it is clearly an ethnocentric list weighted heavily in favour of British-American writers. "But the irony," says Davidar, "is that they've left out some of their own greatest writers like Morrison." This disservice has been compounded by the near-blanket omission of contemporary writing; Salman Rushdie (at 90 with Midnight's Children) and V.S.
Naipaul (slightly higher up with A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River) seem token attempts to represent contemporary as well as post-colonial literature. Moreover, why isolate English? Surely, the reading mind cannot be hemmed in by linguistic boundaries? Can such a compilation ever be complete without everyone's favourite writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is said to prefer the English rendition of One Hundred Years of Solitude to the Spanish original? Maybe the over-emphasis on early 20th century Anglo-American writing can be explained by the fact that in recent decades literary innovations have taken place in other lands, in Latin America, in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in India and Japan.
However, back to the list at hand. Nair points to certain themes discernible in the first dozen notables: "There is an emphasis on the futuristic novel (Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, 1984); a Rushdiesque respect for linguistic skill (bright surface and darkness lurking underneath); and a stress on atmospherics (The Great Gatsby). One can see this pattern rolling through the list." Adds Vyas: "All these books have a philosophical subtext, they don't just have a straightforward storyline."
In the end, however, this is a safe list, with hardly a trace of eccentricity and popular literature. And since it has been commissioned by a division of Random House which has 59 of the titles on its current catalogue, Sham Lal detects a distinct attempt at veiled advertising.
But even as Malashri Lal rues the underrepresentation of women, she stresses the value of such assessments. "It is a very useful exercise," she says, "because it generates controversy and draws attention to the continuous impact that the novel has had on the human imagination." Not to mention the fact that while books deemed to be great works acquire an air of requisite classroom reading, there is the enticing personal challenge of elbowing away this constraining judgment, of hopping aside and tracking one's enduring engagement with the printed word.
