This Space's books of the year 2009

Why should one novel be my favourite of the year rather than any other? When I read this list in a comment on John Self's Asylum, I found an answer. If reading a book prompts only Publisherspeak – disturbing, intriguing, insightful – then it can be discounted. Each summary there is like a bullet in the neck of each book. 

I choose Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones as my favourite novel of the year because it was a shock to the literary system; a shock in three ways. First, the intense, almost overpowering gravitational pull of the narrative. It affects not only the reader but the novel itself. It is the furious axe for its own frozen sea. Second, the reception in the mainstream of literary USA was a shock not so much for its cluelessness – such books are necessarily misunderstood – but for the imbecilic, self-blinding character of the reviews.  Michiko Kakutani's contempt probably emerges out of America's repressed awareness of its pressing need for denazification, with Ed Champions' video offering the best argument ever made against literary blogging.

The third shock was to recognise how a contemporary work of such length and about such a subject can also be as intimate as Proust's. My habit-formed assumption that only brief novels engineered like tiny, intricate timepieces could achieve this was shattered. Still, my next two favourite novels were like that: Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 and Jean Echenoz's Ravel. Distance as intimacy.

Of course, my non-fiction choice has to be The Letters of Samuel Beckett, but I'd also like to mention Kevin Hart's The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. It was published five years ago but I re-read it this year and was surprised by how much we had changed. Looking forward rather than back, Hart has edited the forthcoming collection of Blanchot's Political Writings. It's scheduled for April, so take Gary Barlow's advice and have a little patience.