Prose by foreign writers. Genre "modern prose"

This book, translated into many languages, is the confession of a woman with a unique and tragic destiny. At the age of seventeen, she was sentenced to death by those closest to her for a “crime against the honor of the family”. About her miraculous salvation, about the people who came to her aid - this documentary story, which has become a world bestseller.

Somewhere on the opposite bank of the Jordan River from Israel, there is a Palestinian village in which men are allowed everything and women nothing. A woman there is valued much lower than a ram or a cow. Mothers, sisters, daughters and wives work there from dawn to dusk, like slaves, and in return receive only beatings and abuse. If there are too many daughters in the family, female babies are simply strangled there shortly after birth. A girl who looked at a man or exchanged a couple of phrases with him is called a whore there. The family is obliged to kill her, otherwise the public opinion of the whole village will revolt against them.

It was in such a village that a girl named Suad grew up. The only joyful event in the life of a Palestinian villager is a wedding. According to local customs, married women gain relative freedom - they can paint and go to the store. And since Suad did not have the right to marry before her older sister, the girl took a desperate step - she began secretly dating the man who was wooing her. When Suad became pregnant, her boyfriend fled, and her parents sentenced her to death.

The story of Suad is real, according to the publishers and activists of the Swiss humanitarian foundation "Emergence", whose forces managed to save from death not only Suad, who was doused with gasoline and set on fire by her relatives, but also her unborn son. Suad's face was practically not hurt, but she is photographed wearing a mask, as she fears that her relatives will see her alive and want to kill her a second time - such cases are known, advocates of misogyny morality found their victims even in Europe.

The memories of a saved woman of the East about her childhood and youth in a remote Muslim province can deprive a civilized girl spoiled by equality of sleep and appetite. The life that Suad describes is, of course, not life, but living hell. And the worst thing is that, as the heroine testifies, local women do not even think to protest, at least until their own family tries to kill them.

Nevertheless, somewhere in the backyard of consciousness there is a vague discomfort: somehow everything is too hopelessly black, and somehow too ideologically beneficial to all those who are against Muslims. Do not rush to make quick and unambiguous conclusions - be that as it may, we, the readers, are not aware of what actually happened there, and we judge the situation from the words of other people.

And remember, domestic violence against women is a reality not only in Palestine.

In the days of Ancient Greece, fiction was created mainly in poetic form, since then the artistry of a work was determined by the presence of rhythm and euphony in it. Prose was considered not fiction literature, but journalistic and everyday literature. The situation changed with the advent of the Middle Ages, and by the 19th century, prose won an unconditional primacy over poetry in foreign literature. And what genres of foreign prose are characterized best of all - read on.

novel

The most popular genre of foreign prose is undoubtedly the novel. It represents the largest form of epic - one of the genres of foreign literature.

The main feature of the novel is that it presents to the reader's judgment not a short episode or excerpt, but a full-fledged, logically formed story. The narrative in the novel covers a long period of time and can describe the entire life of the characters or even the fate of several generations.

As a rule, in a classic novel, attention is paid to the everyday experiences of the main characters. This differs the novel from such prose genres as, for example, allegory or fable, in which the characters are usually endowed with some kind of abstract qualities.

Classical foreign prose is rich in all kinds of adventure, love, historical novels and many others. "Jane Eyre" by the English writer Charlotte Bronte, "The Conjuring of Frau Sorge" by the German writer Hermann Suderman, "The Count of Monte Cristo" by the Frenchman Alexander Dumas, "Don Quixote" by the Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes - the list goes on for a very long time.

Epic

The epic is notable for its special monumentality and scale of events. Its main feature is a complex and ornate plot, with a huge number of characters. Previously, epics were most often written in verse, in the form of poems, but then they embraced prose as well, transforming into the genre of the epic novel. Most often this is a collection of several works, or one particularly large one, divided into several volumes. Unlike an ordinary novel, an epic novel covers not only a large time period, but is also closely tied to some specific historical events.

Foreign prose of the twentieth century is famous for the seven-volume cycle "In Search of Lost Time" by the French writer Marcel Proust, who belonged to the literary trend of modernism. This cycle is considered one of the most significant works of literature of the last century. Other famous foreign epic novels: "Enchanted Soul" by the French writer Romain Rolland, "Ten Swordsmen" by the Japanese writer Eiji Yoshikawa and, of course, the fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings" by the Englishman John Ronald Ruel Tolkien.

Story

One of the most popular prose genres in foreign literature is the story. The story is distinguished from the novel by a small amount of writing (for foreign prose - no more than 7.5 thousand words) and its content - usually it is dedicated to one event in a person's life, a certain episode from his life, that is, the narrative has clear time limits unlike the novel. As a rule, there are not many characters in the story either.

The main distinguishing feature of the story is the number of actions that develop in the plot: in contrast to the larger genres, no more than one conflict should be laid down in the story and resolved by the end of the work.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe, "Diamond the Size of the Ritz" by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, "South" by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Nightingale and the Rose" by Oscar Wilde and others - classics of foreign prose among stories.

Novella

Unlike Russian literature, for which the short story is a rather rare genre, foreign prose clearly divides the concepts of the short story and the story; moreover, in Russian and European literature, these terms mean completely different things, which quite often confuses readers. What is considered a short story in Russian literature is defined by foreign prose as a short story. The novella ("novella") resembles something close to the Russian genre of the story, which in foreign prose is called a "short novel" ("short novel") or does not differ from the novel ("novel") at all.

Foreign prose suggests that the volume of the novel is 17.5-40 thousand words. Compared to the story, the short story is characterized by a deeper disclosure of the psychological background of the characters' actions, and also has more time for the development of the plot. It assumes multiple storylines and more conflicts (but still less than the novel needs).

The most famous examples of short stories in foreign prose: "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway, "The Outsider" by Albert Camus, "The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Stevenson, "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka and others.

Memoirs

Memoirs are considered by many to be a subgenre of autobiography. But while the autobiography focuses more on the inner, personal development of a person, memoirs seek to capture the outer part of his life - memories of certain events in which the author participated himself or heard from eyewitnesses. An autobiography fully describes the path of life, and memoirs are always written about some moments from the past.

A distinctive feature of memoirs is subjectivity. This happens because the main character of memoirs should always be their author, who most often seeks to show himself better and more interesting than he really is, and as a result retells events only through the prism of his own worldview.

It can be argued that foreign prose was replenished with this genre in ancient times, for example, according to all the laws of memoirs, the work of Guy Julius Caesar was written under the title "Notes on the Gallic War", where he described the battles with the Gaul armies that took place over nine years. During the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance, memoirs continued to be written by military leaders, for example, the French Geoffroy de Villardouin ("The Taking of Constantinople") and Blaise de Montluk ("Commentaries"). And in the 19th century, American writer Henry David Thoreau (Walden, or Life in the Woods) wrote a memoir about two years of his life spent in a forest house.

If, in addition to foreign prose, you are interested in other types of literature and its genres, then pay attention to the following video lecture:

Contemporary foreign prose

Edited by A. V. Tatarinov

For students, graduate students and teachers of the philological faculties of universities.

2nd edition, stereotyped

© FLINTA Publishing House, 2015

"Contemporary foreign prose" as a single text

A. V. Tatarinov

It is not an easy task to keep track of current and unfinished, fix the formation of new ideological and aesthetic models and draw conclusions about the current state of the literary process, about its prospects.

Two years ago, such a task was set at the Department of Foreign Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies of the Kuban State University. It is not the first year that the courses "Modern Foreign Literature" and "Modern Literary Process" have been taught. Meetings of the XXI Century club were held regularly to discuss the latest prose. Subjects requiring attention to the literature of our days appeared in the curricula of the specialist, bachelor's, and master's degree. There were no tutorials.

Of course, this is not about thick textbooks that remove all historical and existential questions in the student's mind. We are far from overestimating the works that transform literature into a system of classifying formulas. What is important here is not the result, not an unambiguous result, but a volitional decision to present the latest foreign prose as a complex space in which it is possible to single out the dominant names, ideas and images. It is important not to forget that each historical epoch (and the turn of the millennium is always Time!) Has its own literary universe. And motives that are directly related to philosophy and religion, psychology and politics are built in it. That is why this book ends with the article “ Nowadays as a literary era ”.

We have abandoned the standard-elitist approach to the creation of textbooks, which are written by highly experienced professors capable of any conceptualization. Modern requires youth, or rather, a combination of experience, a mature view of the movement of literary matter and healthy youthful arrogance, justified insolence in interpreting non-canonical facts of literature. The authors of Modern Foreign Prose are doctors of sciences and undergraduates, candidates and postgraduates. There were also students who, by the time the book was published, had managed to obtain a different philological status. Talent and willingness to speak out were the criteria for selecting the authors of the articles. The interest of young hermeneutists was predetermined by the presence in the textbook of M. Cunningham and A. Notomb, W. F. Gibson, J. Littell and A. Baricko.

This does not mean that there was no unified strategy. It manifests itself in the plot-compositional organization of our project - research and educational at the same time. British, American, French- separate sections. In them, each writer is presented in its entirety: from a brief biography to the dominant features of poetics. With the obligatory description of the creative path, the main artistic achievements and, as a rule, with a detailed analysis of the novel, which the author of the article considers key in the writer's work. Somewhat more complicated - with German: We did not succeed with works about K. Wolf, G. Müller, G. Grasse. This significant absence is partially compensated for by the review article "Contemporary German Prose".

In the section "From Italy and Portugal to Argentina and Japan" we also adhere to the monographic principle of biography, portraiture and analyticism in relation to the current creative path of the writer. There are articles about the recently departed classics, without which it is difficult to imagine the literary process of our time (G.G. Marquez, J. Saramago), and about the living masters of the word, not very well known to the Russian reader (R. Galanaki, for example).

The presence of JL Borges may cause doubt. Does the Argentine writer who died in 1986 have anything to do with modern literature? For Borges, we decided to make an exception: this classic of the 20th century, with the meanings of his artistic system and moral philosophy, remains one of the influential participants in literary modernity, an apologist for versions, intertextual games and hypotheses that are so important for rhetoric, which finds its foundations on the border of modernism and postmodernism.

The last section is “The Authors' World in Selected Works”. Let's be frank: about M. Pavich, O. Pamuk or K. McCarthy, the editor would like to see complete works that meet the requirements of the first and second sections. But it turned out what we see in front of us. This approach is also possible in the presentation of artistic worlds. These writers, as well as D. Covelart, D. Coe, D. Fforde, M. Shalev and H. Luntiala are present in separate texts - quite appropriate for solving the problem of the author's individuality.

And the last thing. The voices of professional and ordinary readers are often heard denying the quality of modern literature. No, they say, of the former greatness, there are only personal games of not too talented dreamers who are preoccupied with their own complexes and sensational stories that allow them to win a potential consumer. Our book shows that this is not the case. There is a literary process! Achievements in it are no less than falls and losses.

British prose

Julian Barnes

V. V. Bogdan

In one of his interviews, Julian Barnes mentioned Faulkner's statement that the best obituary for a writer is: “He wrote books and he died,” and then remarked that this is precisely the kind of anonymity that should be sought, although in our time it is almost impossible. Still, Julian Barnes has almost reached his goal, and with infallible certainty we can only say about him what he wrote about himself on his official website on the Internet. Namely: he was born on January 19, 1946 in the city of Leicester in central England, received a good education - from 11 to 18 he studied at the City of London School, then entered Magdalena College, Oxford University. In 1987 he graduated from the university with honors. After graduation, Julian Barnes worked for three years as a lexicographer and compiler of the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1977 he began working as a columnist and literary editor for the magazines New Statesman and New Review, and from 1979 to 1986 worked as a television critic. What follows is a long list of literary awards and prizes, including the Booker Prize for Foreboding the End (2011), the Somerset Maugham Prize for the debut novel Metroland (1981), the Medici Prize for Flaubert's Parrot (1986), and See also Order of Arts and Literature (1995, 2004). Julian Barnes wrote many short stories, novels and essays, and also translated the diary of Alphonse Daudet from the French. The closing phrase of Julian Barnes's short autobiography is: Barnes lives in London. In other words, if you discard the numerous dates (which, by the way, Julian Barnes himself does not like) and a somewhat impersonal listing of jobs, you get exactly what Faulkner taught: Julian Barnes lives and writes books. According to Barnes, this knowledge is enough for readers: "I would prefer that people read my books, and not try to understand what kind of person I am."

But Julian Barnes also has a downside - a fascinating biography for those readers for whom the avaricious truth is not enough. At the beginning of his literary career, he wrote several detective stories under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, which were positively received by critics as good examples of the genre. On the back of these books, Barnes presented a completely different biography - fictional, but very "hot": Dan Kavanagh was born in County Sligo in 1946. Having devoted his youth to idle vacillation, promiscuous sexual relations and petty theft, he left home at the age of seventeen and signed up as a deck sailor on a Liberian tanker. Deserting from a ship in Montevideo, he crossed America, moonlighting as a cowboy, as a roller-skating waiter in a diner serving customers directly in the car, as a bouncer at a gay bar in San Francisco. He currently works in London, but with whom - he would prefer not to specify, and lives in North Islington. Moreover, from book to book, Kavanagh's biography changed very significantly, without losing, however, its blatant absurdity. Of course, these descriptions are a joke. Reading them, we can almost hear Julian Barnes laughing at us. In the third chapter of Flaubert's Parrot, he writes: "What are the chances of even the most experienced of biographers that the object of his attention, looking at the author of a future biography, will not take it into his head to play him?" These author's fictions are an example of such a joke.

Julian Barnes paradoxically fully compensates for the intractability of his personal life with his style of storytelling, involving the reader in dialogue, forcing him to follow the thread of his reasoning and see and imagine what he sees and represents himself. Julian Barnes, seemingly reserved, turns out to be an outspoken writer. He wants the reader to be as close to the author as possible: “I like to imagine that the writer and the reader are not sitting together face to face, but side by side and looking in the same direction, for example, through the window of a cafe. And according to my script, the writer asks the reader: “What do you think of her? He looks weird, doesn't he? I wonder why they are quarreling? " The reader's gaze is directed parallel to the writer's gaze; the writer simply notices everything first. "

Britt-Marie is a true fanatic of cleanliness and tidiness. She lives by her own rules: do not wake up later than six in the morning, do not eat after six in the evening, use decent dishes, do not make a mess on the desktop, write only with a pencil, and so on. Britt-Marie has created an ideal world for herself and is not ready for anything to compromise at least one point from the set of her own "laws". But not everything depends on her ...

After forty years of married life, the heroine learns that her husband has cheated on her. Now living with this person is simply unbearable. Betrayal destroys everything Britt-Marie has built over the years. There is no more stability, everything is mixed up and is moving in an unknown direction ... Plucking up courage, the heroine packs a suitcase and sets off to look for a new life in the old roadside village of Borg. This is a sloppy, slowly fading place with no prospects ... But what if this is where Britt-Marie is destined to finally become happy?

Alaska is an amazing place. This is a beautiful picturesque country with incredible nature, but at the same time - a land full of deadly dangers. When little Leni, at the age of thirteen, came with her family to Alaska, the local places and people seemed incredible to her. But the tale passes too quickly. When winter comes, even the most resilient and strong can stagger. As, for example, her father, decimated at one time by the war in Vietnam. And life in a new place because of this turns out to be no better than the old one.

As you know, it is human nature to adapt. Year after year, Leni grew up, got used to her new life, became truly her own here. But I never learned to breathe deeply. And even though here, at the very edge of the world, people are not prone to excessive vulnerability and sentimentality, Leni herself cannot get rid of the ghosts of the past.

In this novel by the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it is simply about the main thing: that you need to be able to say goodbye to the past and let go of loved ones.

Aaron is a shy man who, since childhood, suffers from the overprotectiveness of an overbearing mother. Despite his physical disabilities, the main character tries to live a full life. One day he meets a girl named Dorothy. Falls in love with her, proposes and becomes a loving spouse. But happiness does not last long: as a result of an absurd accident, Dorothy dies.

First, Aaron tries to cope with his mental pain. But nothing happens. And then ... He meets Dorothy again. The ghost of the deceased wife accompanies Aaron almost everywhere. They talk again, discuss important things and even quarrel.

But a pleasant illusion cannot last forever. Aaron will have to come to terms with the loss and learn to live on ...

The Financial Times wrote: “With her previous books, three of which were shortlisted by the Booker, Sarah Waters set the bar for quality very high. And even against such a background, Dear Guests is the apotheosis of her talent. " So, meet Frances Rae and her mother. In London, which had not yet recovered from the Great War, they were left completely alone in a large dilapidated house: their father and brothers are dead, and the means do not allow them to keep a servant. Desperate, Frances and Mrs. Ray rent half of the house to complete strangers - the young spouses Barber, Leonard and Liliana, from the "clerk class." And the whole life of the Ray family is changing, but not at all in the way they expected. “This is a book about a moody old boiler, porcelain cups and rotten floorboards. This is a book about love and passion, amazing to the core and maddening. And it is also a real detective story, with a corpse, police and whipping up the atmosphere in the spirit of Dostoevsky. "

We read less. There are many reasons for this: from an abundance of various gadgets that take time to a large amount of useless literary husk filling the shelves of bookstores. We have compiled the top 10 best books of modern prose, which will surely please the reader and will make you look at literature with different eyes. The rating was compiled taking into account the opinions of readers of major literary portals and critics.

10. Bernard Werber “The Third Humanity. Voice of the Earth "

The book is in 10th place in the ranking of the best works of modern prose. This is the third novel in the Third Humanity cycle. In it, the writer discusses the ecological future of the planet. Werber's books are always fun to read. In Europe, the genre in which he works is called fiction, and in South Korea, many of the writer's novels are considered poetic works. Werber became famous for his novel "The Ants", which he had been creating for 12 years. An interesting fact - readers fell in love with the writer's novels long before critics started talking about him, as if they had deliberately ignored the author for many years.

9.

- another book by a famous blogger on the 9th line of the top 10 best books in the genre of modern prose. Under the pseudonym of Slava Se is the Latvian writer Vyacheslav Soldatenko. When his short stories and notes from his personal blog became popular, a large publisher invited the author to release a book based on them. The circulation was sold out in a matter of days. "Your knee of mine" is another collection of the writer's notes, written with humor. Se's Glory Books are a great way to deal with sadness and bad mood.

Few people know that Slava Se worked as a plumber for about 10 years, although he is a psychologist by profession.

8.

Donna Tartt with the novel "The Goldfinch" in 8th place in our top 10 best works of contemporary prose. The book won the highest award in the literary world - the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. His admiration was expressed by Stephen King, who said that such books are extremely rare.

The novel tells the reader the story of thirteen-year-old Theo Decker, who, after an explosion in a museum, received a valuable canvas and a ring from a dying stranger. An old painting by a Dutch painter becomes the only consolation for an orphan wandering among foster families.

7.

The novel is on the seventh line of our top 10 best books in the genre of modern prose. Readers will see a world in which wizards live side by side with people. They are subordinate to the supreme governing body - the council of white witches. He strictly monitors the purity of the blood of magicians and preys on half-breeds such as Nathan Byrne. Although his father is one of the most powerful Black sorcerers, this does not save the young man from persecution.

The book is one of the most exciting novelties in modern literature of 2015. It has been compared to another famous series of wizard novels, Harry Potter.

6. Anthony Doerr "All the light we cannot see"

On the 6th position in the rating of the best books in the genre of modern prose - another Pulitzer Prize nominee. This is a novel . The plot revolves around the touching story of a German boy and a blind French girl who are trying to survive in the difficult years of the war. The author, who tells the reader a story taking place against the background of World War II, managed to write not about its horrors, but about the world. The novel develops in several places at once and at different times.

5.

novel Mariam Petrosyan "House in which ...", ranked fifth in the top 10 best books, can scare the reader with its considerable volume of a thousand pages. But once you open it, time seems to freeze, such an exciting story awaits the reader. In the center of the plot is the House. This is an unusual boarding school for disabled children, many of whom have amazing abilities. The Blind Man, the Lord, the Sphinx, Tobaccos and other inhabitants of this strange House live here, in which one day can accommodate a whole life. Each newcomer must decide whether he deserves the honor of being here, or whether he is better off leaving. The house keeps many secrets, and its own laws operate within its walls. The boarding school is a universe of orphans and disabled children, where there is no way for the unworthy or weak in spirit.

4.

Rick Yancey and his first novel from the trilogy of the same name "5th wave"- on the 4th line in the rating of the best works of modern prose. Thanks to numerous science fiction books and films, we have long formed an idea of ​​what the plan for the conquest of the Earth by alien beings will be. The destruction of capitals and large cities, the use of technology unknown to us - something like this is seen. And humanity, forgetting about the previous differences, unites against a common enemy. One of the main characters of the novel, Cassie, knows that everything is wrong. Aliens, who have been observing the development of earthly civilization for more than 6 thousand years, have thoroughly studied all models of human behavior. In "5th Wave" they will use their weaknesses, best and worst character traits against people. Rick Yancey paints an almost hopeless situation in which human civilization finds itself. But even the wisest alien race can make mistakes in assessing the capabilities of people.

3.

Paula hockins with her amazing detective novel "Girl on the Train" ranks third in the top 10 best books in the genre of contemporary prose. More than 3 million copies were sold in the first months after its release, and one of the famous film companies has already begun work on its adaptation. The main character of the novel day after day watches the life of a happy married couple from the window of the train. And then Jess, Jason's wife, suddenly disappears. Before that, Rachel manages to notice something unusual and shocking from the window of a passing train in the courtyard of a married couple. Now she must decide whether she should go to the police or try to figure out the reason for the disappearance of Jess herself.

2.

In second place in our rating is the novel, filmed in 2009. Susie Salmond was brutally murdered at the age of 14. Once in her personal paradise, she observes what happens to her family after the girl's death.

1.

The first place in the rating of the best books in the genre of modern prose is held by Diana Setterfield and her novel The Thirteenth Tale. This is a work that opened for the reader a long-forgotten genre of "neo-Gothic". The most amazing thing is that this is the first novel by the author, the rights to which were bought for a lot of money. In terms of sales and popularity, it has overtaken many bestsellers and has been translated into other languages. will tell the reader about the adventures of Margaret Lee, who receives an invitation from a famous writer to become her personal biographer. She is unable to refuse such luck and comes to a gloomy mansion, in which all subsequent events will unfold.