Who Else Should I Read?

• Read Trollope. For decent feelings, she said. In her own novels she references He Knew He Was Right and Orley Farm. I'm not keen on either. I love the later works, not all of which are the gloomy old things of repute. I think the likes of Ayala's Angel are among my favourite novels of any writer.
• Read Roth and Updike. And the rest of the great American warhorses. Brookner always made a thing of her devotion to these most unBrooknerian writers. She was putting it on a bit, no doubt; but she made a good case.
• Read Wharton. Brookner made a case for Wharton too. But I'm not sure she was right. She said she thought of herself as much more like Wharton than James. Again, I don't think she was right.
• Read Sebald. She valued Sebald's sudden emergence, fully formed, on to the literary scene. She liked especially his evocation of old-style life and feelings.
• For much the same reason, read Mann. The bourgeois past, European angst - and Switzerland.
• Read Stendhal. I reckon he wasn't so much her favourite writer as her favourite person. His style, his attitudes, his insouciance.
• Read Goncharov. Brookner said Oblomov was her favourite novel, and she quoted from it twice in her own novels. She liked it, she said, because it was about a man who failed at everything. This was probably something of the truth, but also a bit of a posture. I found Oblomov a dull read, and that line about the meads and kvasses brewed at Oblomovka was a lucky find of Brookner's, but not really representative.
• Read Chekhov. For true Brooknerian sadness and nostalgia, that is. Not that Brookner recommended any particular Chekhovs, though she approved of his life. She approved in particular of his death - in Switzerland, wasn't it, and after a glass of champagne? A stylish way to go, at least in imagination. Brookner wasn't herself a drinker, and champagne gives a number of her characters a headache.
• Read James. Well, of course. She loved The Portrait of a Lady, with its depiction of the passage from innocence to experience. She loved, of the later novels, The Spoils of Poynton, but found The Golden Bowl a little too redolent of the madness of art. For my part, I love that early late period of James's typified by Spoils: short brief astonishing novels, made for the future.
• And of course, of course, read Dickens. She read one a year, having been introduced as a child. Her father saw the author as the key to Englishness. An only and perhaps lonely child, she was surprised when she went to school to find not everyone had a funny name.

Brookner, Goncharov, Chekhov

Goncharov's Oblomov is referred to twice in the novels: memorably at the opening of Visitors and also (I think) in A Friend from England. In interview Brookner called it her favourite novel. This was possibly a posture. It is a weird contrarian comedy about a Russian aristocrat who deliberately mucks up his life, failing at everything.

'Brookner is in the Chekhov league,' said A. N. Wilson of Undue Influence. (For more on A. N. Wilson, see an earlier post, 'Anita died. I read it in The Times...')

'More memorable than any fiction was Chekhov's Last Moments by Leo Rabeneck, published in the TLS for 2 July 2004,' wrote Anita Brookner in the Spectator's 'Books of the Year' that year. 'Rabeneck was present at this most iconic of deaths, and his account of how it took place - after that glass of champagne - is more than consoling: uplifting.'

(As you might expect, I sought out the piece. It describes Chekhov’s stylish death, after that glass of champagne, at the Hotel Sommer at Badenweiler in the Black Forest. In fact it’s a rather undistinguished piece, so why did Brookner love it? Perhaps because what was being telegraphed, as ever, was the sort of behaviour of which Brookner approved: the sort of person, the sort of world. One could imagine Brookner in such an hotel: in middle-Europe, among over-dressed, over-civilised, neurasthenic folk. I have seen them myself. I have holidayed many times in Germany and Austria and Switzerland. One is much more likely there than in deadly England to come across Brooknerians. I like to watch them as they sip coffee on sun-terraces, or wander around art galleries, or take a turn about a lake – and I feel at home, I feel I have come home. It is not a feeling I’m in the habit of experiencing very often.)