21) Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow
Read this as part of my effort to improve my knowledge of Nobel Prize-winning literature. My penguin edition described the book as “a comic novel…a hilarious, often ribald story”. I confess I missed the joke; there didn’t seem to me a sinlge laugh-out-loud moment in this first-person narrative of an American who atempts to go native in Africa. Plenty of food for thought on the human condition; Henderson’s moral decay is contrasted with his physical vigour, and his unflitered deliberations on the meaning of life in general, and his own in particular, added up to a much more convincing portrait than the central character in The Red Badge of Courage. I enjoyed the book. But I remain worried, not for the first time, that I have failed to grasp American humour.
She’s one of ours.
I don’t actually feel it incumbent on me to be fair. “Fair” would mean that Gollancz would have published more women in the first place and then those women would be better known.
Have you seen their selection of 50? They managed six women and intially got the title of one of the books wrong.
Fair is for equal fights. This one ain’t equal.