What's your favorite work of modern classical fiction?

[Crowler]

It's my favorite genre but I've had a few false starts lately - I just (kind of) finished Madame Bovary and hated it, and am now struggling through Nausea.

Any Evelyn Waugh fans about?

And I'm also reading the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but am finding it intermittently dull.

I like Waugh. Don't like Madame Bovary. Did like Miss Brodie.

What are you defining as 'modern' then? And are you thinking dates or genre?

I suppose late 19th century onward?

I don't think I mean genre but rather just "substantial".

I found MB shockingly bad, to be honest.

A Handful of Dust is my favourite Waugh, but I have a big soft spot for Vile Bodies, which is hilarious.

I really love MB, personally, but then I wouldn't see it as 'modern', and I'm not sure what 'modern classical' really means so maybe you are expecting it to be something it's not.

I do however like Vile Bodies.

How are you with Aldous Huxley?

MB deffo not modern, although modern for its time I suppose.

I really liked Brave New World. Haven't read any of his others, apart from Chrome Yellow (which I can remember precisely nothing about!).

I haven't read Mme Bovary. I read Nausea a couple of years ago and read Darkness Visible by William Golding at the same time, and it's that book that has stayed with me - it made Nausea seem quite cheerful in comparison . I really like Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt. Also I read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing a couple of months ago and it's really stayed with me. I want to read more of her stuff.

I do love Brave New World.

I started Handful of Dust (this is the one with the mother as decorator right?) and then got side-tracked.

My MIL has suggested Golden Notebook- I've had a hard time with Doris Lessing.

What would MB be considered in terms of genre?

For another Huxley try Point Counter Point? Liked it when I read it though that was years ago now.

Is it Lessing's science fiction you have tried before? The Golden Notebook is hard going in some ways but it is very definitely substantial. I read it again a few years ago and thought it was amazing - having read it in my early 20s I don't think I fully got it. Women's lives in the 60s, struggles with motherhood and feminism - I can relate to it more closely now... But you would have to be in the mood.

I would say MB is classic nineteenth-century realism moving towards modernism.

Virginia Woolf? Jean Rhys?

Crowler I felt the same when I read Miss Jean Brodie, I enjoyed Spark's economic writing style, but found the flash forwards difficult. I read it again after moving to Scotland and reading a lot of Scottish literature, i(ncluding my favourite piece of 20th century fiction Alasdair Grey's Lanark.)
It is very Scottish in its themes (Calvinism and the notion of predestination) which I didn't get first time around. It was only then I thought 'ahhh that's what the fuss is about'

I didn't like MB either. Is Nausea Sartre? I read that years ago do can't really remember it but read his Roads to Freedom trilogy more recently and LOVED them.

Compos I started Lanark last month but kind of gave up over Christmas. I'm about 100 pages in, can you convince me to persevere as I hate giving up on books?

Yes Nausea is Sartre and I find it a bit beatnik? Stream of consciousness?

Thanks everyone for your great suggestions. I will download Roads to Freedom, Lanark, Point Counter Point.

I really love sweeping gorgeous/tragic novels i.e. Anna Karenina. I also loved Middlemarch. And Brideshead Revisited. And, I love Henry James across the board. And Iris Murdoch (sp?). And, Kafka although that's probably a departure.

And, possibly one of my all-time favorites is A Suitable Boy. I just read this one and it was so hard for me to finish it.

Crossing over categories for certain.

Thanks again everyone.