26 Books Like The Guermantes Way

The Victorians were scandalized by Sterne’s hilarious account of his childhood and his family, retaliated by calling it “satire.” There’s no shortage of humor, from Tristam’s explanation of how he knows when he was conceived to his narrow childhood escape to misundertstandings about the location of his uncle’s war wound. But it’s a brilliant interpretration of Locke’s argument about how the mind works, specifically in the association of ideas. The same deep insight that was the basis of the methodology of psychoanalysis conceptualized Sigmund Freud. The former isn’t an inference: Tristram explains it perfectly in the novel, and the complexity of his account is up there with Proust’s, Every time I re-read it, it gets not just funnier, but more profound.

Musil’s novel, like Proust’s, is at top off the world’s greatest modern novels, as well as being an extended meditation on the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like War and Peace, it takes us a while to get into it, and by the same token, Musil, like Tolstoy was deeply interested in how history happens., and if anything, his insights are more profound. Like Goethe, Musil was a master of the complexities of the German language. So both pose the translator with immense difficulties. But it’s a pleasure to recommend this translation, which is not only remarkably good at untangling Musi;’s complex sentences, but making them eminently readable.

Where to begin? Proust’s gigantic masterpiece is the proverbial gift that keeps giving, none more so than in its explication and then repeated “demonstration” of the very thing it describes, the sensory triggers of what Proust calls involuntary memory but that here become the emotional propulsion for this book about writing the very beautiful book (or books—it comes in six volumes) you are reading.

At age 15, I was captivated by Ernest Hemingway and his depiction of Paris in the 1920s. This book today reignites the enchantment of those years. Hemingway's profound influence shaped my aspirations as a writer. Through his eyes, I can vividly see Paris's cafés, salons, and vibrant social scenes, which ultimately became the backdrop of my dreams.

This book, rich with lovemaking, drinking, writing, betting at the track, and the bohemian lifestyle of so many young artists in Paris, reawakens my desire to immerse myself in that world. Hemingway's narrative voice and his novels continue to speak to me in a language that feels intimately mine, reminding me of the undying impact of his work on my life and aspirations.

I loved the voice of this book–it’s the voice of Stephen King, clever, yes, and a brilliant novelist, of course, but also absolutely down-to-earth. King is a perfectionist, continually going back through his writing to hone it–a useful reminder to all of us not to be satisfied with a first or second draft.

The book shows how, in the best writing, both dialogue and plot arise out of character. And I particularly valued his emphasis on cutting, cutting, cutting–dialogue and everything else. He’s made me do that more than ever!

In his tragicomic novel The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s thickheaded narrator John Dowell trolls, over and over again, through the detritus of his life, searching vainly for the origins of his predicament—namely, that he has been duped by his wife and her lover, his supposedly best friend and the “good soldier” of the novel’s title. When Dowell finally succumbs to the utter hopelessness of his situation, he turns away from his audience in a brash attempt to bargain with a misbegotten universe, and his dreams of an impossible reconciliation with the world become our own: “Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?” In his greatest moment of anguish and uncertainty, Dowell grasps for the poetry of language to sate his weary soul.

I was immediately struck by the quality of the writing. Atwood is a writer's writer - she understands how to use language to its full effect and how to arrange the words on the page so they do more than we expect of them.

When it comes to finding inspiration in our memories, Marcel Proust is literature’s gold standard. The French novelist devoted the balance of his life to the art of refracting his memories through the lens of his writerly self. Proust understood implicitly that our memories are triggered by sensory experiences—sights, sounds, smells, and touch, to be sure—but most especially through the pleasures of the text. In Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of his epic À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust interrogates the ways in which memory is catalyzed by the senses, while comprehending, at the same time, the manner in which the reality of our memories becomes shaped by the ruinous work of nostalgia, of a sentimentality that exists beyond our ken.

This book is so intelligent that it gave me chills, but it’s also a literary page-turner. I adored the married couple at the center of the story for trying to use their very big brains to solve the problem of the emptiness they were feeling, which, spoiler alert, didn’t work, but it did lead to clever dialogue and some profound observations.

One of the themes in the book has to do with time, and the quote that haunts me the most is, “How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” Somehow, this nihilistic book left me marveling at the preciousness of life.

I first read Lolita when I was 14 and have read it every few decades since, learning something new each time.

I love the first-person immediacy of it and the way it is a crime novel in reverse: the narrator is already imprisoned but not for the crime he describes. It is a love story turned on its head: what the narrator says is love is in fact abuse.

It is a road trip across the vastness of the US, like one I took when I was a student.