Your novels and stories.

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What is narrative made for? to entertain (the adventure story)? to teach (the moral fable)? to explain and describe life (War and peace?), to do many of these things together?. Is there a novel or a a tale which have left a mark on you? And why? Does this have anything to do with our experience of failure and frustration?
I will cite some of my stories.
The Catcher in the Rye. All characters here are “phoney”, social life is unlivable like the water in the pond at Central Park for the ducks in winter. It’s winter for us.
The Trial, by Kafka. Mr K. is accused of some mysterious action. He pretends to be innocent, but it is only pretence and he ends up helping his executioners and thinking the “he would be survived by his shame”.

I like the Canterbury Tales, especially the Miller's Tale. That kind of humor is the kind I like--ribald and vulgar.

Tim

When I write it's usually about the stupidity of the concepts of "Good" and "Evil". Or the stupidity of having "Heroes" and "Villains". All of my characters are balanced people with wants and needs, noble and bad sides.

In "The Call Of Eternity" the main charater is a version of myself but much more extreme - a sociopath painter with Bi-Polar issues. In "Vicarious Memories" it's a Cardinal slowly losing his faith in God.

Mostly i read to enjoy fantasy worlds with no allusions to reality. As neil gaman said, i believe an author has a obligation to tell the truth with nothing hidden beneath the surface of the story. Occasionally though i don't mind reading a morality tale or two.

To kill a mockingbird is a good one. Poor old black dude is accused of something he didn't do but the accusation is enough to send him to prison.

The crucible is similar again it's about the salem witch trials. Lots of people got burnt at the stake simply because of a couple of people starting stories... though the accusers later recounted their accusations when called upon for their inconcistencies.

I love, love, love this novel, although his novel the Castle is even better for an aspie to read. It's been a few years since I've read it but it's about a land surveyor who's called to a village that turns out not to need his services, but he has nowhere to go back to. The story centers around his attempts to reach this gigantic castle that governs the small village, but he's lucky if he can manage to find a person who's actually been inside it that will talk to him. I think you can see the analogy I picked up there.

Oh, yeah, and my namesake, Les Chants Des Maldoror. I can't describe it very well, but it's a very surrealistic poetic novel about a shapeshifting misanthrope. The quote in my sig is one of god's lost hairs whom he left in a brothel explaining his story to Maldoror.

The Idiot - Dostoevsky.
Most of what is viewed as idiocy is merely truthfulness and honestly, but not social convention.
Like most Dostoevsky there is no happy ending, the idiot is broken, a failure.

Women In Love - Lawrence.
An attack on the whole range of British society.

Tropic Of Cancer - Miller.
Miller's seminal work set in 1930s Paris, the experiences of a struggling writer.
Some great passages, where despair turns to ecstacy sentence to sentence.

Mysteries - Knut Hamsun
Community thrown into turmoil by a mysterious visitor. Peoples motivations and behaviour are a complete mystery to me, beautifully depicted by Hamsun.
A truly great writer, would probably be recognised as being so, if it wasn't for his affiliations with the Nazi party.

Many others, but all for now.

Kafka is all about aspieness and autism. With humour in his way, and a desperate longing for life.
In “The Burrow” the last story he wrote there is a kind of obsessive repetitive research (kind of musical motif) for every mean possible to ban any possible intrusion in his burrow.
In a letter he writes to one of his unfortunate lovers, Milena, he says ”it’s like if you were defended by a circle of guards armed with lances aimed at me, and there is also a circle of guards around me, but their lances this time are not aimed at you but at me again!”. What better way do describe the impossible situation?

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS - Dave Eggers

Self-consciousness, rage, hope, intelligent, ferocious, restless energy

Robert Walser “The Assistant”. Walser was a very queer fellow. The last novel he wrote, some 350 pages long in print, he put it in 25 pages in such minuscule handwriting, that it took 25 years for the editors to decipher it. He is considered an Asperger, always lived alone and spent his last decades in a mental home. He was greatly admired by Kafka, who died 25 years before him. Asperger aside (but is it possible?) I like him very much, People who like Kafka will like him, but not everybody.

My writing is almost always about the internal drama of the mind. It's usually limited to a couple of characters and they both end up decimated or dead. I can write really terrible and horrific dream sequences which I love to write.

I like a wide range of writers. I like Ovid's Metamorpheses, Chaucer, most of Shakespeare, Dante, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Poe, Dickens, Kate Chopin, Faulkner, Hurston, Borges, de Lillo, Dillard, Conrad, Carver, Coetzee and the list just goes on. I'm not much for Russian authors. That's my husband's thing.

Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was the first book I read which actually moved me to tears. I like books where I can share what the characters are feeling, and which reveal the human spirit. I like D H Lawrence very much, more his poetry than his novels, because although I think he understands women very well, he often idolises them in his novels which I find rather irritating. I think his poetry is underrated.

Which books stick in my mind - well, Heller's Catch 22, for one. I thought was a masterpiece.

Thomas Hardy, any of his novels. In his work I look not just at his characters, which he paints very warmly, but the man himself. Hardy is so visible in his books, and I like him very much. Not all writers show so much of themselves in their works. Dickens I enjoy, e.g.Pickwick Papers (I read that when I'm ill because it cheers me up) and also his melodramas 'Old Curiosity Shop' for example.With Dickens though, I always get the feeling that he is 'directing my emotions', which puts up a barrier between myself and him, if that makes sense

Celine, Mort a Credit (I think a must, and also terribly amusing in his way)
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
F.S.Fitzgerald, The Great Gasby
Ellison The Invisible Man
I have read all Thomas Bernhard’ novels. Not every one likes Bernhard but for me it was a kind of addiction
Jane Austen (every page)
Dostoevski: I liked very much "The Gambler" which I tend to associate to a short novel by Schnitzler "Night games". They both narrate two colossal misunderstandings by men in their love stories or affaires with women.
Carver
Gogol
I think Salamov, "Kolima Tales " is superb literature going far beyond the denunciation of the Gulag system.

"The waves" by Virginia Woolf (I love "Mrs Dalloway" too, but "The waves" is a masterpiece). That book speaks to me in more ways than one. When I first got it, it was like a shock. I had never read anything that would have all kinds of feelings, and ways of relating to the world, written out for me in such a tangible and moving way. I "get" emotions in writing best of all when they're described through imagery, be it descriptions of the things that surround one, or some sort of metaphor for the emotion itself. So the imagery in "The Waves" was striking to say the least. I kept thinking while I was reading, dear goodness, this is *me*, this is the way I may have put it myself. It was one great experience and still is, when I pick that book up again.

In general, there's something about the very quality of Woolf's writing that I can relate to; something like the feeling one gets during moments of great joy, when everything suddenly seems significant, and somehow changed, different, as if things were swelling with light on the inside, and it's so intense one wonders whether one will endure it. It permeates all of Woolf's books that I've read, so when I'm told by others that her writing is depressing, I find myself staring at them - it has never seemed that way to me.

I like many other writers as well. But "The Waves" is about the only book to which I could relate so totally.

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss - No, seriously. As a person that never got to experience a lot of life...finding and experiencing true love, going to different places, getting my ideas out there, speaking my mind and standing up for myself...I've held myself back a lot further than I should have. My friends tell me that I actually don't have a need to. GE&H tells us that we can't truly say anything bad about certain experiences until we've actually gone through them. Whether it's actually asking a member of the opposite sex out on a date, refusing to back down, or actually sampling Green Eggs and Ham, when it all boils down, it's it's almost never as bad as we thought, and often times, it's better.

I've played out scenarios in my head zillions of times and it always psyches me out. Maybe it's the Asperger's, maybe it's just my own lack of believing in myself. But, if I just DO it, the outcome is usually more pleasing than not having done it.

This is a heart felt recommandation, and, I assure you, not dictated by chauvinism. I know that the Italian authors known abroad are Calvino, Pavese, Eco, Primo Levi and some others. Calvino was very good, together with the other writers of the oulipo (Queneau, Perec, Boris Vian). Much less known were some others whom I put on a very top place for at last three pieces of narrative. They are:
Silvio d’Arzo, “The House of Others”: it’s a novella about a priest who is asked by an old woman, tired to live, to be absolved for her will to die. D’Arzo died young and is little known even in his home country. It’s translated in English (Marlboro).
Beppe Fenoglio is more known but his A Private Affair (Independent Publishers) is a masterpiece, perhaps superior to The Great Gatsby.
Third author is Guido Morselli. “Divertimento 1889”, also translated in English (Dutton)

When I write there's good and evil. That's not stupid at all because their is evil and good in this world. I have characters with dreams, hopes, love. My novels are a lot like spin offs of Final Fantasy. Basically the style of my writing comes from Final Fantasy.