My Literary Top 10: Jeff Noon |
|  | 1 | Best short story I’ve ever read:
‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges, about a man who can’t forget anything ever, and the effect this has on his life and mind. Funes experiences every single leaf on a tree as being a separate entity and therefore in need of a name of its own. The word “leaf” does not suffice. Language itself overwhelms him.
| | 2 | Book that should be on the national curriculum:
The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Words overflowing into life, joy, pain, death, the whole damn thing.
| | 3 | Best film of the book I’ve seen:
Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Boileau and Narcejac’s d’Entre les Morts (From Amongst the Dead). In other words: Vertigo. Best plot ever: obsessive love, doppelgangers, Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. What more do you want?
| | 4 | Best ever novel about trout fishing in America: Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. One of the early Picador novels; for my generation, the first time we felt that a literature really belonged to us.
| | 5 | My favourite opening line of a novel:
“Call me Ishmael.” Imagine: beginning such a massive book (Herman Melville’s Moby Dick), about such a massive subject (hunting for a giant white whale), with such a note of doubt. What does Melville mean by saying “Call me Ishmael?” Isn’t that the narrator’s real name? It’s an alias? He’s keeping secrets, from sentence one. Why? So then, a great start.
| | 6 | My favourite novel that no-one else seems to have heard of:
The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus. Amazing, bizarre, poetic, experimental, post-modern fragmented novel could only be written by one person. It has in spades exactly what I’m looking for in a work: a unique, personal vision.
| | 7 | The book I’d most like to reread, if I could find it again:
I very rarely reread books, but if can change the question to: “The book I’d most like to reread, if I could find my way back into it again,” then one answer would be Ulysses. I’ve found myself lost in this labyrinth of words a few times already. Perhaps one day…
| | 8 | My favourite bookshop:
City Books, Hove. The large bookshops seem to be selling more and more of less and less, whereas little shops like this one keep the flame alive.
| | 9 | Author I’d like to nominate for the Nobel Prize for literature:
JG Ballard. He was the first writer to really understand the post-modern condition, years before we even had that term. And he also that quality mentioned above, a style that belongs to him and him alone, through which the world is filtered and seen anew.
| | 10 | Deceased author I’d most like to meet at a bus stop late at night when the last bus is nowhere to be seen:
Samuel Beckett. I’d ask him the time and he’d reply, “Time, time, have you had done with your abominable time! One day we are born; one day we die. Is that not enough for you?!” And I’d say in reply, “Hey, Sam, I was only asking.”
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