02/13/2007 permalink
After reading Norman Lock’s excellent, understated The Long Rowing Unto Morning, a list of my other favorite short, melancholy novels about old age and loneliness:
- Thea Astley, Coda
- Lars Gustafsson, A Tiler’s Afternoon
- Lars Gustafsson, The Death of A Beekeeper
- Gustaf Sobin, The Fly-Truffler
- Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape (okay, so it’s not a novel, but still)
- That other one that’s on the tip of my memory…
- Yours?
Unfortunately, I don’t suppose many undergraduates would be much enthused by a course on “short, sad stories about being old.”
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Walter Mosley’s RL’s Dream qualifies. The story of a dying bluesman taken in by a tough young woman. Not a great novel, but it captures the desperation of Robert Johnson’s music & I’ve never read better descriptions of being drunk out of your mind with happiness or grief, which in the blues may amount to the same thing. If I can say such a thing without being thought glib. I’m going to be teaching it to undergraduates next week. Wish me luck.
All of your links except Beckett are broken for me.
They must have aged badly. :)
Thanks, Norm — it was those cursed semi-colons I tried to use. I always knew no good would come of them. Should be fixed now.