![]() The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner.If you’re looking for more epic novels that very clearly define the nostalgia and life of a time that has past, then take a look at these suggestions. ![]() Though there is a lot of controversy surrounding the novel, it is undeniable that Gone With the Wind is a masterpiece. Somehow, it will get you rooting for one of literature’s most unsympathetic protagonists from one of America’s most shameful periods. However, there are still many people who love the novel for its glimpse into a society lost and the harrowing journey of survival in a changing world and it has many people looking for books like Gone With the Wind.ĭespite its numerous problems, Gone With the Wind still remains a pinnacle of American literature and cinema and it is a book that, despite its epic length, certainly wants you to read it. Because of these aspects, there is substantial debate about whether we should still be reading (and watching) Gone With the Wind at all. Gone With the Wind certainly has some incredibly problematic elements, however, and it shamelessly glorifies the antebellum south and even paints organisations like the KKK as simple men’s “political” organisations. Though it is perhaps most famous for the 1939 film adaptation starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, the novel still continues to transport its readers to Georgia plantations during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 epic novel Gone With the Wind was met with almost immediate success upon its publication and it continues in notoriety to this day. In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren. The Last Picture Show, by Larry McMurtry. Crooked River Burning, by Mark Winegardner. I read it over the course of a long, dark winter, and I was grateful for the bad weather. The book is remarkable for Undset’s work as an historian for her prose, which (in Tina Nunnally’s translation) is magnificently sharp and for her ability to draw you into the life of her headstrong heroine. Kristin defies her father to marry Erlund, with whom she has seven sons and a stormy relationship, and we follow her through her middle age to her death, in the plague of 1349. Over the course of nearly twelve hundred pages, Undset unfurls the story of Kristin, the daughter of a farmer named Lavrans, who lives in Norway in the fourteenth century. It was written by the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset (whose essays and criticism I also love), was first published in the early nineteen-twenties, and is just so good. My pick is the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (a trilogy is cheating a bit, I know, but you can buy a big, fat omnibus edition, and it does read like a massive novel). They’re loose and shaggy, like the world, and like the world, you can get lost in them. ![]() Ultimately, of course, this is part of what makes big, engrossing novels so engrossing. Perhaps every big book is a leap of faith: it can take a hundred pages or so for the story to pick up, or for the reader to acclimate to the writer’s language and there are sometimes passages that lag, requiring confidence on the part of the reader that the writer knows what he's doing-that despite the detours, he'll bring the journey to a satisfying end. By the time we finish college, or at least by the end of our twenties, we’ve read many of the standbys (“Moby-Dick,” “Anna Karenina,” “Bleak House,” “In Search of Lost Time,” “Middlemarch,” etc.), and taking leaps of faith on new big books becomes necessary. ![]() It’s an experience that gets increasingly difficult to recapture as we age, both because we read much faster than we used to, and because we take on novels of increasing complexity, like “Ulysses” or “Gravity’s Rainbow,” which are not, precisely, page-turners. It’s a desire that goes back to that time in childhood when we’re just discovering long fiction, just beginning to refuse to turn off the light and go to sleep, those years that turned us into lifelong readers. I am often asked whether I’ve read anything good lately, and when I say, “Yes, there’s this great little book about the demise of print that I’ve been enjoying,” the asker always replies, “No, I want something good.” By which he means a novel that will take him places. ![]()
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