Refining to five

If anybody's reading this... You can see I've hit a lull in my reading of Vanity Fair. It should be a 500 page novel. Yet there is, in my edition, 389 pages beyond the 500 page mark. (Deep sigh.) It's not a waste of time, though. Thackeray is very good at the, as they say, bon mot. Also the mot juste. When describing human nature and types. He really is very timeless and on-the-mark. It's all very modern. Classics are like that, mostly, though. They transcend their time. No modern, in fact, has anything on Thackeray. In any area.

The novel moves more in some parts than in others though. Inevitable. I'll read it to the end.

A truly remarkable novel is Moby Dick. Truly an epic novel. Because it's set in probably the most otherworldly setting known to man - the open sea - and because that world affords so much metaphor for all and everything (kind of like agriculture does in its own realm) Melville tapped into some otherworldly meaning.

War and Peace, Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Vanity Fair, and Brothers Karamazov probably cover what novels can cover. Those five, if you really want to refine it down. (And notice no 'modern' work is more modern - in any way - than Cervantes, Melville, or Dostoevsky...in the ways and categories that modern works claim to be different I mean. Even Tolstoy is doing weird things - I've mentioned it before but he incorporates non-identifying into his narrative style which, to use a word coined by a Soviet critic, creates estrangement. And Thackeray, as I stated above, is as modern in his understanding of human nature and the world in general as any modern.)