Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Locals take us on a literary spin through the century’s best

Friday, Jan. 14, 2000 | 9:01 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at 990-2446 or dickens@vegas.com.

Anyone remember the 20th century? It seems like something that happened so long ago; it's a blur to me now. Before it fades completely from memory -- which is to say, this very instant -- let's look back from the superior perch of the 21st century. Let's sum up, take stock; most important, let's lash together a quick and easy column from a survey of writers' favorite books from the last 100 years. It's my gift to myself.

This isn't a Great Books list in the uppercase sense -- I'm not assembling a syllabus. Rather, I surveyed an eclectic handful of local novelists and scribes about more personal choices, the five books that meant the most to them as readers and writers. Since it's my picture at the top of this thing, me first:

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," by Hunter S. Thompson: Blew my head clean off. Perhaps alone among this book's devotees, I couldn't care less about its dope fiendishness; I love the muscular swoop and zoom of its language. Until I read this, I had my heart set on being an obscure underground cartoonist. "Fear and Loathing" changed my direction entirely.

"Gravity's Rainbow," by Thomas Pynchon: This is a grad-student sort of selection, a book you put on these lists to show how avant you are of the garde, how intellectually cool. Not me; regular readers know better anyway. This book is here because in it, Pynchon created a buoyant language that can contain everything -- from high philosophy to the lowest humor, from scenes of exquisite melancholy to the most disgusting acts imaginable, from changes in voice to shifts in perspective -- without losing traction. Wish I could do that.

"Geek Love," by Katherine Dunn: This is a distinctly American brand of magic realism, enormously moving. Using a family of freaks to plumb the depths of the human heart, Dunn fuses a tough lyricism with a generosity of spirit ... ah, heck, that's book-review code for this is a damn good book. I felt kicked in the stomach for weeks afterward. (That's good.)

"Psychotic Reactions and Carborator Dung," by Lester Bangs: This posthumous gathering of Bangs' miscellaneous writing -- mostly about rock 'n' roll -- reveals him to be a writer as committed to engaging the real world through accessible yet moral language as we're likely to see.

"Travels With Dr. Death and Other Unusual Investigations," by Ron Rosenbaum: Literary journalism of the highest order. Acting as a kind of investigative philosopher, the author plumbs the intellectual complexities of big issues: nuclear religion, the mechanics of desperate faith, identity, conspiracy, JFK -- the issues that define modern America. But he never forgets he's a reporter, not a pontificator, so he gets all the details and scene-settings in there, too. A remarkable body of work.

Richard Wiley

Richard Wiley, a novelist ("Soldiers in Hiding," "Fool's Gold," "Ahmed's Revenge" and others) and director of UNLV's creative writing MFA program, writes: "Well, hell, this is tougher than I thought."

Wiley's selections:

I was influenced and loved, as a young man, the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, "Justine." Its mood and sensuality took me by storm.

And at around the same time Ernest Hemingway's story, "The Big Two Hearted River," taught me about spare style. I read the story a dozen times in a month; it helped make me want to be a writer.

Evan S. Connell's great and underread American novel, "Mrs. Bridge," captured a woman who was so much like my mother and about a zillion other women of the middle part of the century, that I still read it and teach it, and Vladmir Nabokov's "Lolita" taught me about beauty and experimentation with language.

That's four. The fifth is the one that's influenced me the most and it is "The Makioka Sister," by Junichiro Tanizaki. It takes place in Japan during the half decade or so just before World War II, and is brilliant for its evocation of a Japan coming from the traditional to the modern. It is quite simply a masterpiece whose style and texture is something I have tried to emulate.

Lee Barnes

Lee Barnes' book of Vietnam-related short stories, "Gunning for Ho," comes out in March from University of Nevada Press. He is an instructor at Community College of Southern Nevada. "Most of these novels," he says of his selections, "are a combination of fine language, interesting storytelling and important ideas." If he were allowed a longer list, he says, "I would add that Richard Wiley's 'Soldiers in Hiding' and 'Fool's Gold' are two of the best novels I've read that were written in the past 20 years." Sorry, Lee, you only get five choices:

"One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez: The most imaginative work I've ever read.

"Absalom, Absalom," William Faulkner: If Faulkner wrote anything finer than this, I've not read it.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey: Escapes labels. A brilliant metaphorical novel that certainly makes the politically correct group even more uptight when they read it.

"The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck: Steinbeck remains the writers' writer, and this is his magnum opus.

"Love in the Time of Cholera," by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and "Surfacing," by Margaret Atwood: I know this is cheating, but Marquez would have been on my list for this one if he hadn't written "One Hundred Years of Solitude," and Atwood's wonderfully symbolic novel of the female artist emerging through the floods of her past is too fine to be ignored.

Bill Fox

Bill Fox is a Los Angeles writer who spent nine years heading the Nevada State Council on the Arts (now the Nevada Arts Council) and who has written extensively on Las Vegas. His recent books include "Mapping the Empty" (University of Nevada Press), about selected Nevada artists, and "Driving by Memory" (University of New Mexico Press), about driving to Las Vegas from different directions. Forthcoming from the University of Utah Press is "The Void, the Grid and the Sign," about the human relationship to the desert. He made his selections according to categories:

Fiction: "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez: Often cited as the foremost example of magical realism, and as the single most important book to writers of the 20th century, its effect is to limber up considerably one's own imagination.

Nonfiction: "The Songlines," by Bruce Chatwin: One of the most original travel books in literature, Chatwin roaming the Australian Outback showed that magical realism also belonged in nonfiction. His scholarship is highly speculative, but his style opened the door a bit wider for everyone from Barry Lopez to Pico Iyer.

The other pivotal book of nonfiction was "Desert Solitaire," by Edward Abbey, which continually forces us to question whether or not wilderness exists.

Poetry: "The Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda" (translated by Nathaniel Tarn): Neruda's piercing clarity of language and imagery so influenced me as a young poet that I named my firstborn son, Tarn, after the translator.

Memoir: "A Moveable Feast," by Ernest Hemingway: This is the book that still gets young writers through the night, a fictionalized memoir about the writing life in Paris of the 1920s.

Geoff Carter

Geoff Carter is the Sun's music columnist and a man who puts the bon in bon vivant:

"The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Yeah, I know it's on everyone's list. But I can't deny it.

"The Sirens of Titan," by Kurt Vonnegut: Pre-"Neuromancer" cyberpunk tamed by romance.

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," by Hunter S. Thompson: You know why.

"A Fan's Notes,' by Fredrick Exley: Some of the best narrative I've ever read. His next and last novels weren't as good combined; writing this book burned him up.

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," by Haruki Murakami: I love this novel. It reads exactly like a dream. It's still working its voodoo on me, in ways I never expected and cannot begin to explain.

Bruce Isaacson

Bruce Isaacson is an award-winning local poet and onetime student of Allen Ginsburg. He will host a 12-week writers' workshop on Las Vegas and the literature of place beginning Saturday (call 869-4813):

"Alcools," by Guillaume Apollinaire: Inaugurated 20th-century poetry, 1913, with the classic surrealist poem "Zone," the sublime lyric "Mirabeau Bridge" and the modernist epic "Song of the Poorly Loved."

His relations with artists and poets such as Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, Blaise Cendrars, Marc Chagall, Modigliani, and Gris formed artistic Paris of the teens and '20s. Translated in English by half-time Las Vegas poet Don Revell.

"The Idiot," by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Written in the 19th century, his influence falls so greatly over the 20th century I wonder if the gnostic coterie of lovers of the books of Fyodor Dostoevesky aren't rather like the English Romantic poets introducing a Shakespeare to the ages.

The whole genre of confessional novel -- Sartre, Camus, even such as Hemingway, "Catcher in the Rye" or "Catch 22" -- is impossible without his groundwork. When Dostoevsky says, "Let me tell you a poem," in the middle of "The Brothers Karamazov," or tells you his dream in "Dream of a Ridiculous Man," or begs to tell you his self-justification in "The Meek One" ... you cannot be the same person after listening.

Every modern writer has a passionate obsession on the problem of Evil, but only Dostoevsky has successfully tackled the problem of Good, such as in the masterwork "The Idiot." The survival of Good -- of competence, of purity, of justice, of faith-- in our modern world -- this is the central problem of our age.

"The New American Poetry," edited by Donald Allen: This anthology unified American poetry of the '50s and '60s and announced a new generation that formed the moral, political and aesthetic framework we live in today. Contains samples of the best work of Beat figures such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, together with New York Schoolers like Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson and Denise Levertov, North Beachers and eclectics like Meltzer, Welch, Helen Adam, Brother Antoninus, etc. ... Subsequent editions added more worthies, and defined poetry for a generation and more.

"Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness," by Bob Kaufman: A personal favorite, one of the best achievements of American verse of the century, laughably unknown today, yet forming the backbone of the North Beach poetry movement.

Kaufman brought lyricism, surrealism and humor to American verse, mixing highbrow and pop culture in a way unique to the poets of his time, but which has since become the postmodern mainstream. Inspirationally structured jazz life improvisations, one of the highest verse achievements of the wind through the aeolian harp of our current American Romantic era.

And this one isn't even a book of poems, though it haunts the poet in us all. "Arthur Rimbaud," by Enid Starkie. This single classic biography made The Boy intelligible to English readers. It inspired even Francophiles like Henry Miller in "Time of the Assassins," his classic study of Rimbaud.

To comprehend the life and death of Rimbaud is to grasp the predicament of the writer in our times, the dilemma of emotion in a material age. It is the ultimate depiction of the life we learn with, and the life we must live with after that. As the poet Andy Clausen once said: Today, you not only have to surrender, you have to keep fighting after that.

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