MILAN – The classics have their own charm. But let’s face it, how difficult they are to read. It is true that for every book it takes the right moment and spirit, but, be honest: how many great classics are there that, to date, you have not yet been able to read or you have not fully understood
Or again, which books do you have? read but to finish them you have been forced to skip a few pages, or a few chapters
. We offer you the 19 most complicated books of classical literature, proposed by the Bookriot site . You, with which of these titles, did you find it more difficult
. WAR AND PEACE by Lev Tolstoy –It took at least seven years for Tolstoy to compose one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature. The backbone of the novel, against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars – from 1805 to the overwhelming insurrection of all the Russian people in 1812 – is given by the events of two great families of the high nobility, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskij, custodians of authentic and genuine values, intertwined with those of the corrupt and dissolute Kuragin. Among the multitude of characters, the figures of Natasha, a young girl and later a woman of extraordinary purity and a strong and impetuous nature, stand out; of Prince Andrei, who takes his pride in war, imprisonment and unhappy love for Natasha; of the enigmatic and complex Pierre Bezuchov, capable of authentic adherence to the “pain of the world”.
. ANNA KARENINA ofLev Tolstoj – The center of the story is Anna’s tragic passion, lovelessly married to a senior official, for the brilliant but superficial Vronsky. Parallel to this unhappy and happy love of Kitty for Levin, a grumpy and tormented character to whom Tolstoy has provided his own traits. ‘In Anna Karenina – writes Natalia Ginzburg – guilt is represented as an obstacle, indeed as an insurmountable barrier to the achievement of happiness. Among the first readers the book had Dostoevsky who wrote about it: ‘Anna Karenina is an absolutely perfect work of art. There is in this novel a human word not yet understood in Europe … and which would also be needed by the peoples of the West.
. ULYSSES by James Joyce –Joyce’s Ulysses is a fundamental work of the European literary twentieth century. The novel overturns the epic canon of tradition, telling not the fate of a hero, but the common day of a modern man in his daily wanderings. An odyssey into the reality of every day that knows how to open doors to the truth of every man, through gashes and descents into the psychic abyss of the characters.
. MOBY DICK by Herman Melville –‘Moby Dick’ is the most famous work of the American nineteenth century. This great novel of the sea narrates the dramatic challenge of Captain Ahab to the White Whale, a marine colossus but also a metaphysical creature, a figuration of the unknowable. On board the Pequod, the doomed ship, men of profoundly different faiths and cultures are dragged towards a single destiny, in a tragic epic that is also one of the most intense poetic works of all time.
. INFINITE JEST by David Foster Wallace –In a not too distant future and one that looks worryingly to our present, merchandise, entertainment and advertising have now also occupied the interstices of everyday life. Canada and the United States are a single supernation called ONAN, Quebec pursues independence through terrorism, drugs are used in order not to die, of boredom and despair. And a lost and mysterious film, ‘Infinite jest could become a weapon of mass destruction.
. THE LORD OF THE RINGS by JRR Tolkien – Si is about a novel out of time. It is a book of adventures in remote and terrible places, episodes of inexhaustible joy, fearful secrets that are revealed little by little, cruel dragons and walking trees, cities of silver and diamonds not far from the dark necropolises in which they dwell beings that frighten only to name them, gigantic collisions of luminous and dark armies. All this in an imaginary world but reconstructed with meticulous care, and indeed absolutely plausible, because behind its symbols hides a reality that lasts beyond and in spite of history: the struggle, without respite, between good and evil.
. THE KARAMAZOV BROTHERS by Fedor Dostoevsky –Freedom, guilt, atonement. The stories of the four Karamazov brothers investigate the darkest folds of the human soul, constantly searching for the boundary between good and evil. To give voice to the most radical ethical dilemmas, Dostoevsky stages a patricide, as did Sophocles in “Oedipus the King” and Shakespeare in “Hamlet”. Thus the killing of the old Fedor serves to outline unforgettable characters and to give space to the legend of the ‘Grand Inquisitor’, the undisputed peak of Dostoevsky’s political and religious thought. And the reader can only be thrown into the whirlwind of events, inevitably penetrated by the painful humanity of a work that has the dignity of the sacred.
. THE MISERABLE by Victor Hugo –In this great novel, one of the most important in French literature, Victor Hugo pours out most of his human and social experience to build a story of toil, exile, love and poverty. An epic of misery and an imposing period fresco that, in the Paris of the 1800s, sees some unforgettable characters as protagonists, such as Jean Valjean, the sunny Cosette, Fantine, the gloomy inspector Javert: anti-heroes full of lights and shadows, capable of wicked gestures but also of generous and moving actions. A story with a fast-paced, masterful and unrepeatable rhythm due to the authenticity of the emotions and the complexity of the narrative plot.
. Jane Austen ‘s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE –The most popular and most famous work of Jane Austen, a real ‘long-seller’. Through the story of the five Bennet sisters and their suitors, the writer’s acute gaze, supported by an irony that is all the more merciless the more subtle, notes and analyzes facts, accidents, words of a microcosm populated by characters who will have much to teach to Dickens and Thackeray. Of Jane Austen’s six novels, this is the first in chronological order and at the same time her masterpiece. When she wrote it she was only twenty-one and a friend of her family had called her ‘the most graceful, foolish, prettiest husband-seeking butterfly ever to be met’. Frivolous and ironic, she was indistinguishable from the country and bourgeois world to which she belonged, made up of you, dances, flirtations of good society, minute and ridiculous incidents of everyday life. But on these reasons he knew how to play with a unique grace and depth. And it is in this way that, narrating the story of the five Bennet sisters and their suitors in Pride and Prejudice, she manages to evoke, with sober and precise touches, the whole, enchanting, penetrating picture of the English province at the end of the eighteenth century.
. THE DARK BEYOND THE HEDGE by Harper Lee – In a small town in the ‘deep’ South of the United States, the honest lawyer Atticus Finch is in charge of the public defense of a ‘Negro’ accused of rape; he will be able to prove his innocence, but the man will still be sentenced to death. The story, which is only the central episode of the novel, is told by little Scout, the daughter of Atticus, a Huckleberry in a skirt, who scandalizes the ladies with an unorthodox language, witness and protagonist of facts that in their atrocity and violence never manage to be greater than her. In her telling of her lightly and quickly, ironic and pitiful, she relives the world of childhood that is a little bit of all of us, with its myths, its emotions, her discoveries.
.IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust – A man decides to undertake a crazy undertaking: the search for ‘lost time’. The result will not be a second life but a book, in seven volumes, entitled ‘in search of lost time’. Marcel Proust takes leave of life prematurely to embrace it whole again in a great novel. A suicide tactic, you say. Yes, writers are a suicide club, but life is that nonsense in which the whole lost world of youth, at times, can suddenly re-emerge in the taste of a biscuit dipped in tea. And then, a novel, only a great novel can straighten this’ perpetual error that is exactly the way ‘.’ (Antonio Scurati)
. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov –The violent erotic passion of the protagonist-narrator Humbert Humbert for the 12-year-old Lolita, together with the intensity and scope of his abuse of her, are genuinely shocking, especially for a culture still seriously concerned with violence against children. Written in the author’s signature immaculate style, this violent and brutal novel raises fascinating questions about the role of fiction. Beauty, pleasure and comedy can be found in an ethically repugnant story
. Moral judgment can be suspended in favor of the aesthetic appreciation of a finely chiseled phrase or a perfectly balanced expression
. GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell –Set in the South of the United States during the Civil War, the novel is a powerful historical-melodramatic fresco, which combines the stories of the protagonists with the tragic reality of American history, seen from the side of the Southerners. One of the criticisms leveled at the book and the film, in fact, concerns the all too successful attempt to support the values ​​of a world that disappeared during the civil war, cloaking history with a mythical and undoubtedly romantic aura. Gone with the Wind represents – in a broad sense, even symbolically – the nostalgia for all that is lost and the difficulty of living the harsh reality of every day, expressed in the story itself of the love story of the protagonists. There is a supposed critique of modern American society,
. THE RAINBOW OF GRAVITY by Thomas Pynchon – In the England of the Second World War, threatened by V2 missiles, the American lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is endowed with a very special faculty: he warns in advance the fall of the rockets thanks to sexual arousal. For this prerogative it is kept under control by the secret services and scientists. Sensing that something is being worked out against him, he runs away from London. The book, a parable on war and technology, contains a profound philosophical and existential meaning .
. THE BIBLE –The Bible is the most widely used book in the world, but a recent survey reveals that many struggle to read it because they find it difficult and too voluminous. However, there are many editions designed to measure for those who want to live a new experience of the Bible, taking it with them in their backpack, on the road, in the office. Targeted reading paths allow you to immediately read the most important parts of the sacred text.
. JANE EYRE by Charlotte Bronte– Many of the author’s experiences recur in the novels she wrote, of which ‘Jane Eyre’ is the most famous. Jane, the writer’s explicit alter ego, after years of hardship and loneliness, becomes a governess with the Rochester family. The cynical landlord is won over by the girl’s personality. But when she discovers that Rochester’s wife, believed dead, and still alive, a prisoner of her insanity, Jane escapes, abandoning the man who had asked her to marry him. It will be an enigmatic premonition to make her go back and prepare the final development of the novel.
. HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez –It is the centennial history of the Buendia family and of the city of Macondo. In an intertwining of fabulous events, according to the premonitory design traced in the parchments of a soothsayer, Melquiades, the destiny of the city is fulfilled from the moment of its foundation to its momentary and disordered fortune, when the North Americans planted a banana plantation there, up to the its ruin and final decay. The parable of the family follows the parable of loneliness and defeat that is written in the fate of Macondo, hinging on the 23 civil wars promoted and all lost by Colonel Aureliano, father of 17 illegitimate children and describing the events and deaths in a paradoxical succession of the various Buendia.
. PARAGRAPH 22 by Joseph Heller –The expression Paragraph 22, has become, thanks to this book, an emblem of absurdity and military insanity. The protagonist and the anti-heroic American bomber Yossarian, obsessed with the fact that thousands of unknown people, to whom he personally did nothing, continually try to end his days. The novel is populated by extravagant and irreparably maniacal characters, who in the zealous application of martial discipline ridicule the iron and mad logic of Paragraph 22
.. TEMPEST HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte –This is a completely isolated work in the English narrative tradition. In it, the harsh realism of everyday life lives on mysterious and disturbing dream-symbolic tensions and dark emotional flames, within a narrative structure of great solidity and effectiveness. It is dominated by the figure of Heathcliff who, animated by a destructive passion, plays in the book the ‘fatal’ function of the ruthless avenger, a true ‘replicant’ of many devastating figures in the British gothic novel; but his tyrannical position as the inflexible dark hero stems from a desperate underlying unhappiness and leads him to vivify his own death with that of his beloved woman, in a sort of erotic-pantheistic aspiration that gives his figure absolutely unprecedented dimensions. .
