'The Immortals'

The French and Swedish academies name their literary "immortals," so here is my list of 18 for a hypothetical American Academy. With some, I've read nothing they've written but recognize their reputations. Any writer -- novels, songs, poems, nonfiction, plays -- is eligible. According to the traditional rules, you're in till death, then a replacement is named.

• Edward Albee
• T.C. Boyle
• Don DeLillo
• Bob Dylan
• Joan Didion
• David Mamet
• Cormac McCarthy
• Larry McMurtry
• Toni Morrison
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Annie Proulx
• Thomas Pynchon
• Philip Roth
• Sam Shepard
• Stephen Sondheim
• Gore Vidal
• Garry Wills
• Tom Wolfe

Mornings in Mexico

D.H. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico is less a travel book, as the title might imply, than a work of anthropology and metaphysics. He observes the Mexican and American Indian rituals and dances, attends their fiestas, walks their streets, and draws his conclusions. A trip to the market, where he haggles over fruit and sandals, produces the observation that the real purpose of all the buying and selling is not money but human contact. "Only that which is utterly intangible, matters. The contact, the spark of exchange. That which can never be fastened upon, forever gone, forever coming, never to be detained: the spark of contact."

Mocking Desire

The experiences of a Slovene writer on a teaching fellowship in New Orleans make up this sly and comic novel by Drago Jancar. Many of the scenes are impressionistic and dreamlike -- a striking account of Mardi Gras is especially good -- creating a strange world that is both New Orleans and another place, entirely original, out of the author's imagination.

The Death of Ahasuerus

Par Lagerkvist picks up the tale, begun in the The Sibyl, of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. Ahasuerus stands in for modern man in his ambivalence toward Christ and his ultimate rejection of God. By reimagining and reinterpreting biblical themes, the author sheds a brilliant, strange light onto ancient questions. He does not, however, write prescriptively. Characters grasp their way in the dark -- sometimes hopeful, more often confused. Ahasuerus's release, his Holy Land, comes at last, and the reader may find comfort that it is through a fate that eludes no one.

Out Stealing Horses

With his well-made sentences, Per Petterson looks with perception at families and their traumas. There are echoes of Faulkner and O'Neill in Out Stealing Horses. Giving an example of his fine writing is probably the best approach:

What I do, which I have never let anyone know, is I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that's what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves toward the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work, in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside a veil so it all can be read by the person observing. And the person observing is me, and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever. To me he will never be older.

Mario Vargas Llosa

The Nobel Prize in literature is awarded this week, and no one deserves it more than Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa. He proved in 2001 with The Feast of the Goat that he was still going strong into his 60s; it was easily his best book in years -- harrowing, canny, and poignant. I need to re-read his works from the beginning, but I can say from memory that there are few literary experiences more powerful than The War of the End of the World, an epic masterpiece. On top of it all Vargas Llosa has shown in several novels a sparkling sense of humor. The Nobel is an honor he deserves, and more importantly it would give thousands of new readers a writer to treasure.

Before You Sleep

Before You Sleep is Linn Ullmann's first novel, translated into English in 1999. Like her three later efforts, all of which I've enjoyed, it is worldly-wise and a bit strange (not too much), and filled with the kind of honesty about people and families that is all too rare in contemporary fiction. The story is unimportant; it is the characterizations that are key: of three generations of a family, split between New York and Norway. There are hidden nuggets strewn through the book, for example when Karin Blom, the narrator, says that she "read somewhere" about all the different kinds of thunder: rolling, crackling, echoing, and so on. I am quite certain that she is referring to Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, where those descriptions occur. For someone not so old, Ullmann gives the impression of have seen, read, and lived much. Being the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman seems to have served her well in becoming a novelist.

Strait is the Gate

Andre Gide's novel has moments of great power and beauty, but its earnestness can wear on a reader. A story of human love thwarted by the desire for spiritual perfection, Strait is the Gate presents its two main characters in all their dimensions and frailties, but with barely a lightening touch. Thus a book so slim, and with such elegant writing, feels uncomfortably heavy.

The Ministry of Pain

This novel by the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic examines the lives of exiles without a country to return to: the former Yugoslavia. Set in Holland, a flat land that absorbs pains of the past like a blotter, as the author neatly puts it, the story follows a Croat language and literature teacher and her Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian pupils as they attempt to navigate a limbo in which they cannot be truly at home anywhere. This is the type of novel -- sincere yet knowing -- that reconfirms to me that the best literature is being practiced far from American shores these days.

Scum of the Earth

At the lowest point of Arthur Koestler's account of his confinement in France at the outset of World War II -- he is imprisoned by the French as an alien and then, after his release, goes on the run from the Nazi advance -- he wonders, "Will we ever be on the winning side?" He is speaking of himself and his allies on the Left, hounded from place to place throughout Europe. The Soviet Union was not yet any help, having signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis and calling the war against Germany a fight for "imperialism." It was a bitter irony that those who were the most anti-Nazi in France in September 1939 were those most likely to be punished by France. Scum of the Earth is an indictment of the old men like Petain but also the whole bureaucracy down to the lowliest clerk. Koestler details his days at the infamous Vernet camp, where he and his comrades slept on straw in barracks with no heat. Throughout his entire ordeal, enountering hundreds of Frenchmen, he finds maybe one or two who could be called, at a stretch, admirable.