"Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century polled from hundreds of "literary luminaries" offering ten choices each, and while it is both of those things, "parochial" is the first word that comes to this non-American mind, and not only in the predominance of books written by Americans. The word also applies to "best", quietly amended in the standfirst to "the most important, influential books of the era", which is something else entirely.
A discussion of how "the best" may be defined would have led to a far more interesting feature, but of course it is the business of newspapers like the New York Times to contain critical thought, hence a billion social media responses such as "I agree with many choices, disagree with many others", a statement whose crippling banality highlights the crisis of authority hidden beneath such lists, with "the best" finding its foundation in the infinite shallows of personal taste. "It's all subjective, isn't it" an anxious friend of mine often said to shut down discussions of the merits of various books. Well, if reading is an encounter with something other than oneself – even if the other is within and there is an uncanny homecoming – reading then becomes a dislocation of the subject, so perhaps a book can be judged according to the quality of dislocation, something lacking in the home comforts of the New York Times list. The person who made the banal comment goes on to suggest as much:
nobody picked a reviled book—a disturbing book—a book that is only loved by a few—a book that might resurface in 20 years as an unheralded and forgotten classic.
Such a large poll makes this impossible. Even when an individual's choices are revealed, the selections are conservative (or hilarious in Sarah MacLean's case, demoralising in Karl Ove Knausgaard's). Many years ago James Wood was right to decline to take part in a poll to find "the best novel" in the final 25 years of the 20th century as he said people tended to choose the book they assumed worthy of such an accolade – a serious book with a serious subject – rather than apply some independent thinking to the question (Beloved came top). Especially shocking here is that the "literary luminaries" have chosen not only worthy books but those they merely enjoyed or admired – someone has chosen a novel published so recently they may not have even finished reading it. Imagine instead if someone from another time had written the email:
Hi, the New York Times here. Hope you're well. We'd like you to list ten books from this century that affected you like a disaster, that grieved you deeply, like the death of someone you loved more than yourself, like you were banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. By Thursday if possible.
Kafka's proclamation is easily dismissed as teenage angst or, with more attention given to the historical conditions, an expression of the confusion and despair of a society metamorphosing from one world into another, but it raises the spectre of a book alien to a literary professional compiling a list. The same media that produces Best Book lists celebrates Kafka's novels as definitive of a certain time and assumes that by asking around like this it can recognise the books that define our own, except Kafka was only a peripheral figure in 1924, with his friends Franz Werfel and Max Brod much more likely to have made a Best Books of the 20th Century list in that year but whose work is more or less forgotten now. What this suggests is that the writing of such significance is untimely.
Apart from the enjoyable and admiring kind of reading – industry-friendly reading – how might we recognise the untimely? In the book of fragments known as The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot described three possibilities:
◆ There is an active, productive way of reading which produces text and reader and thus transports us. Then there is a passive kind of reading which betrays the text while appearing to submit to it, by giving the illusion that the text exists objectively, fully, sovereignly: as one whole. Finally, there is the reading that is no longer passive, but is passivity’s reading. It is without pleasure, without joy; it escapes both comprehension and desire. It is like the nocturnal vigil, that "inspiring" insomnia when, all having been said, "Saying" is heard, and the testimony of the last witness pronounced.
We can see the first two kinds of reader – the connoisseur and the consumer – competing in the New York Times list, often difficult to distinguish one from the other, but what of the third? The experience of the list may be its revelation: overwhelmed by possibility, exhausted before even having begun to read, stalled in sleeplessness, the consumer can consume no more, not even a wafer-thin novella. We experience it elsewhere as the stack of 800-page novels grows a book higher every week, each an apparent summit and summa of art and civilisation, heralded by one and all as the incontrovertible refutation of The Death of the Novel and yet, in its maximal, long, approaching shadow, its terminal desire. The third is the testimony of a silence from and to which these books lead, and us its mute, impatient witness. The open, silent spaces of Blanchot's fragmentary writing may be their correlate, each novel straining to share the testimony of eternity – the untimely – in a merciful surplus of strength Blanchot calls the disaster.
In the next entry, Blanchot says:
To write in ignorance of the philosophical horizon—or refusing to acknowledge the punctuation, the groupings and separations determined by the words that mark this horizon—is necessarily to write with facile complacency (the literature of elegance and good taste). Hölderlin, Mallarmé, so many others, do not permit this.
We see a great deal of elegance and good taste on the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, but is there a glimmer of those that do not permit it?
Without commitment, without wishing to speak of "the best", and only out of propriety, I would point to the example of books written this century in which the philosophical horizon presents itself in form and content: well-known works like Jon Fosse's Septology, perhaps more accurately an anti-work seeking its own end, Coetzee's Jesus trilogy, and Knausgaard's My Struggle, all untimely in their way and one of which appears on the list, and lesser known works of fiction such as Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee, Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18, Josipovici's Infinity, Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co, Sam Pink's The Ice Cream Man and other stories, and non-fiction books presenting the horizon in more formal terms: Jeff Fort's The Imperative to Write, Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren, and Willem Styfhals' No Spiritual Investment in the World. Not one here, I suppose, that may be reviled or disturbing, so perhaps comment with your own suggestions of those otherwise unheralded, loved by a few.
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