The saddest story is, of course, *The Good Soldier* by Ford Madox Ford.
Willa Cather's *My Mortal Enemy* is extremely sad.
The funniest books are by P.G.Wodehouse, who commands the purest verbal
art to make them so. If you can read German, then Bernstein, Eilert &
Henscheid's radio Hörspiel working over of Eckermann's conversations
with Goethe as *Eckermann und sein Goethe* is sublimely funny - not a
word spoken (OK, the written performance directions are by the above)
in it is by anyone but Goethe and the whole thing is hilarious - nobody
should ever say again that the Germans have no humour; which other
nation has laughed so richly at the expense of its greatest writer?
But now I'm dying to read *Tristram Shandy* again? (Anyone seen
Winterbottom's film of it, *A Cock and Bull Story*? It has its moments.)
mj
Frederick Pollack wrote:
> Funniest novel I ever read, apart from Tristram Shandy, was Snow
> White, by Donald Barthelme. Runners-up: The Ginger Man, by J. P.
> Donleavy. Chapel Road, by Louis Paul Boon (Flemish); mordantly funny,
> deeply melancholy, sharply critical.
>
> Since we're talking about novels, I recommend in the strongest
> possible terms a short novel from around 1900 by Hjalmar Soderberg
> (umlaut over the o) called Doctor Glas. One of the great classics of
> Swedish literature. Definitely falls into the "sad" category, but goes
> way beyond it. Recently translated and published here, with a good
> intro by Susan Sontag.
>
> Most profoundly sad (and moving) modern novel I know is also Swedish -
> Finno-Swedish: Axel, by Bo Carpelan. Who is also a noted poet. Sort
> of book that, once you've finish it, makes it hard to get your life
> started again.
--
A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandrie, and not goe to plough: or of witches, and be none: or of holinesse, and be flat prophane. - Giles Fletcher the Elder.
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