Peter Dann
22 books read for LibriVox
- The third Parade's End novel splits between Valentine Wannop on Armistice Day and Christopher Tietjens in the trenches months earlier, fussing over drainage while the shells fall. Dense interior monologue, and it assumes you've read the first two books.
- Conrad wanders through his memories in no particular order: starting Almayer's Folly in a London lodging, his Polish uncle's household, the first English ship he touched. A selective, self-shaping memoir, more interesting for its voice than its facts.
- Willems, a Dutch clerk caught embezzling in Macassar, is parked by his patron Lingard at a remote Borneo trading post and becomes infatuated with Aïssa, a blind old pirate's daughter. Slow, humid and morally rotten, with Almayer from the earlier book sulking nearby.
- Driven half mad by chivalric romances, an old gentleman rides out as a knight with the peasant Sancho Panza beside him, attacking windmills and inns. Long, rambling and funny, and the second part, where everyone has read the first, grows stranger and sadder.
- An Athenian general's account of Athens's long war against Sparta, including Pericles's funeral oration, the plague, the Melian dialogue and the disaster at Syracuse. Thucydides is cold, exact and political; slower than Herodotus and much harsher.
- Emma Bovary, married to a dull country doctor in Normandy, feeds on romantic novels and wants the life they promise. Flaubert writes her with exact, unsparing detail, and the town of Yonville, with its pompous pharmacist Homais, is as sharply drawn as she is.
- Christopher Tietjens, a decent, overburdened Tory officer, runs a base camp in France while his malicious wife Sylvia turns up to make trouble. The second of Ford's Parade's End novels; fractured, demanding and sharp.
- In the South American republic of Costaguana, a silver mine drives politics, revolution and the fate of Nostromo, the admired Italian foreman of the docks. Conrad tells it slowly and out of order; demanding, large and political.
- Christopher Tietjens, a Tory statistician who won't divorce his cruel wife Sylvia, meets the suffragette Valentine Wannop on a golf course in 1912. Ford tells it out of order, through half-finished thoughts and talk, which takes some getting used to.
- Running guns by sea for the Carlists in Spain, a young sailor in Marseilles, Monsieur George, falls for Doña Rita, a former model with a fortune. Conrad's most openly romantic book, talky and full of smoke and candlelight.
- Fabrizio del Dongo, a young Italian aristocrat, wanders across the battlefield of Waterloo without quite knowing he's in a battle, then lands in a tower prison at Parma. Stendhal's novel about court intrigue and love is fast, ironic and fond of its hero.
- Captain Whalley, old and nearly penniless, keeps commanding a ship in the East to support his daughter while hiding that his eyesight is going. Conrad's long story about pride and duty is slow and sad, set aboard a steamer in the Malacca Strait.
- The Man of Property opens the saga: Soames Forsyte builds a country house at Robin Hill for his unhappy wife Irene, and hires the architect Bosinney. Galsworthy satirizes the whole money-minded Forsyte clan, and the house becomes a war between husband and wife.
- In Chancery, the second Forsyte volume: Soames wants a son and a divorce, Irene has made a separate life, and young Jolyon is drawn in. Set around the Boer War and the death of Queen Victoria, with two marriages coming apart in the courts.
- To Let, the last Forsyte volume: in 1920, Soames's daughter Fleur and Irene's son Jon fall in love, knowing nothing of what their parents did to each other. Galsworthy makes it a tender story about how the past keeps its grip.
- John Dowell, an American, tells of nine years of friendship between his wife Florence and the Ashburnhams, Edward and Leonora, at German spas, and only slowly lets on what he missed. Ford's narrator is unreliable and the time jumps constantly; short, cool and very sad.
- Tom Jones, a foundling raised by Squire Allworthy, is kind, impulsive and often in some woman's bed, and he loves Sophia Western, whose father wants her married elsewhere. Fielding narrates in a teasing, chatty voice, with an essay before each book, and the whole is long, bawdy and good-natured.
- The Trojan War, from Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon to the funeral of Hector. Samuel Butler's prose translation is plain, Victorian and very readable, so it suits anyone who wants the story without the verse.
- The last of Ford's Parade's End novels: Christopher Tietjens, now living quietly in the English countryside after the war, barely appears, and the book is told through the minds of those around his paralysed brother Mark. Elliptical and difficult; read the other three first.
- Tristram Shandy sets out to tell his life and does not manage to get himself born until volume three, distracted by his father's theories, Uncle Toby's model fortifications, and black and marbled pages. Sterne's novel is a long joke about digression; it suits patient readers.
- Tom Lingard, an English trader in the Malay archipelago, has promised to put a young prince back on his throne when a stranded English yacht drags him into the orbit of the cool, unhappy Mrs. Travers. Conrad took twenty years to finish it, and the long brooding passages show it.
- Peyrol, an old French gunner home after decades as a sea rover, settles on a farm near Toulon during the Napoleonic wars, alongside the damaged young Arlette and a hard old revolutionary. Conrad's last finished novel is quiet and autumnal, and Peyrol's final errand gives it its shape.
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