Beloved (1 of 4) & The Old Curiosity Shop (13 of 18)
Snake charmers, Bible salesmen and a haunted house
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s chambered silver temple (see The Old Curiosity Shop, chapter 35) you will find:
The announcement of our 2026 read-along: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky;
R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days;
A round-up of new classics, published this week;
The next instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop – with a note on lawyers’ clerks;
And our first discussion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved – with some thoughts from Jane Smiley.
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The Brothers Karamazov
This week I was very excited to announce – in this note – our long-term read-along for 2026.
We’re going to read ‘the most magnificent novel ever written’, as Sigmund Freud described it: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
We’ll start in January and finish in December 2026.
It’s the perfect follow-up to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – it’s another of the very greatest novels of world literature, yet serialised in the same periodical, The Russian Messenger, just a few years after Anna Karenina finished. They are equally brilliant but extremely different novels and the comparison is going to be fascinating.
More details to follow soon. I look forward to reading and discussing Dostoyevsky next year!
Happy Birthday Rasipuram
In other news, today, 10 October, was R. K. Narayan’s birthday. He would have been 119 years old today.
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan was raised in Madras (now Chennai) by his grandmother, who taught him maths, mythology, music and Sanskrit. His closest childhood friends were a peacock and a monkey.
As a young man he became a journalist and began writing tales in English, rather than his native Tamil. His stories were set in the fictional South Indian city of Malgudi and were first collected in 1943 as Malgudi Days. ‘The material available to a story writer in India is limitless,’ Narayan said. ‘[. . .] The writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character.’
Graham Greene was instrumental in getting Narayan’s first four novels published: ‘Since the death of Evelyn Waugh,’ Greene wrote, ‘Narayan is the novelist I admire most in the English language.’
Malgudi Days by R. K. Narayan (1943)
‘Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of colorful teeming that Narayan’s fictional city of Malgudi conveys,’ wrote John Updike; ‘its population is as sharply chiseled as a temple frieze, and as endless, with always, one feels, more characters round the corner.’ These stories feature an astrologer, a snake charmer, a postman, a chapatti wallah and a blind dog.
[US] Penguin Classics | 256 pages | introduced by Jhumpa Lahiri
What’s new this week?
There were several new classics published this week, including a centenary selection of Flannery O’Connor stories and a new translation of ‘the great World War I novel you’ve never heard of’.
The Professor’s House by Willa Cather (1925)
The Professor’s House depicts the mid-life crisis of Godfrey St. Peter, a history professor at a midwestern state university who is disillusioned with his wife and daughters, his university, and the materialism of American culture. He longs for Tom Outland, his most brilliant student, who died on a World War I battlefield. At the same time, Tom’s recollection of discovering hidden cliff dweller ruins in New Mexico interrupt Godfrey’s narrative. Cather’s own experiences of travel in the Southwestern US with her partner, Edith Lewis, shadow and enrich her depictions of Tom’s New Mexican experiences. Cather’s sixth novel is a compelling modernist work of art that raises questions that are still compelling a century later. What is the purpose of a university education? Are the sacrifices of war worth the outcome? To whom do the American past and the country’s future belong? A daring experiment in form, the novel is haunted by war and love.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 224 pages | introduced by Melissa J. Homestead
A Certain Lucas by Julio Cortázar (1979)
A kaleidoscopic novel, A Certain Lucas contains a series of brilliant, eccentrically interlocking pieces, by turns comic, philosophical, allusive, and always a pleasure to read. In short takes, we are plunged directly into the life of Lucas, learning about his patriotism, his friends (‘a list of cronies large and varied’), his shopping routines (always in his pajamas), his favorite pianists, his battles with the Hydra (‘now that he’s growing old he realizes it’s not easy to kill it’) . . . his world is described in multiple quick parodies, with hilarious evocations of the latest trends: physical fitness, semiotics, cool pornography, and animal ESP. We are given glimpses and ultimately offered a strange, yet rounded portrait of a complete man, but not just any man. . . . This is a certain Lucas.
[US] New Directions | 144 pages | translated by Gregory Rabassa
By Horror Haunted by Celia Fremlin (1974)
This collection of spine-chilling Gothic miniatures from Celia Fremlin (‘Britain’s Patricia Highsmith’ Sunday Times) is a showcase of macabre domesticity: controlling husbands rub shoulders with manipulative wives, parasitic visitors meet fatal accidents, there are nervous breakdowns, toxic relationships, sinister villagers and mob justice. With an unerring nail, Fremlin picks the scabs concealing domestic fault lines.
[UK / US] Faber & Faber | 208 pages
Ginster by Siegfried Kracauer (1928)
Siegfried Kracauer’s Ginster is the great World War I novel you’ve never heard of. Here, the sheer horrors are kept offstage, as in Greek tragedy, and merely reported from time to time. The setting is the German home front. Its Chaplinesque antihero –Ginster – spends the war gumming up the German war machine as he maneuvers to stay out of its clutches and save his own skin. Which he does; however, there is a deeper struggle going on between Ginster’s dreamy self-absorption and the pitiless organization of society, war or no war. Ginster has no wish to do anything. Alas, his reveries are forever being interrupted by the demands of an other-minded world.
[UK / US] NYRB Classics | 336 pages | translated by Carl Skoggard | afterword by Johannes von Moltke
Wolf Moon by Julio Llamazares (1985)
Spain, 1937. The Civil War is not yet over, but for the Republicans, it is already lost. Franco’s army is scouring the country for their remaining enemies, and four fugitive soldiers are in hiding, deep in the Cantabrian mountains. Surrender means execution. Winter means starvation. There is no way out - and yet they endure. A taut and thrilling story of pursuit and evasion, Wolf Moon is also a testament to undying loyalties: to a cause, to justice, and to brothers-in-arms.
[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 192 pages | translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles
Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor (1949-65)
The American South. A turbulent world, fraught with the Civil Rights struggle and toxic religious tensions. Against the backdrop of mountainous sunsets and backwater shacks, deserted highways and small-town gas stations, people forge their own lives. We encounter murderers, escaped convicts, dysfunctional families, conmen, fanatics, farmhands, Bible salesmen, troubled children, gangsters, hypocrites, misfits and outcasts. These are characters marked by grotesque flaws, darkly humorous and oddly beautiful. Their complex humanity is revealed in apocalyptic moments of Gothic horror, absurdity and violence that transform all who witness them – and us, too, as we realise that nothing in our moral universe is black and white.
[UK] Faber & Faber | 304 pages | introduced by Lauren Groff
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, 1848-1861
& More Leaves, 1862-1882 by Queen Victoria (1848-82)
Queen Victoria (1819-1901) wrote a diary nearly every day of her life. Originally intended for private circulation, later expanded to appeal to a wider public, these published diary entries cover not only the family holidays at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands which the Queen and Prince Albert enjoyed up until his death in 1861, but also the Queen’s journeys - as sovereign and as “Royal Tourist” - around Scotland, Ireland, and other regions within the British Isles. The books offer intimate views of the most important woman of her time as she shares her love of her family and of the Highlands, and demonstrates her intense interest in all corners of her realm and in the lives of individuals from all classes of society.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 608 pages | edited by Margaret Homans, Joanna Marschner & Adrienne Munich
And finally, I couldn’t resist adding this title too, which was also published yesterday. It’s not a classic, but it might well appeal to lovers of Jane Austen.
I am proud of it – and somewhat prejudiced – because I worked with the author Emma Campbell Webster on this revised edition when I was an editor at Faber. It would make a great Christmas present for any Jane-ites you know.
You are Elizabeth Bennet by Emma Campbell Webster (2007, revised 2025)
You are in the world of a Jane Austen novel. As the events of Pride and Prejudice - and Austen’s other novels - start to unfold around you, you must choose your own path, avoiding social scandal and unsuitable engagements, and write your own destiny, whether it’s to marry a single man in possession of a good fortune or to become a famous author yourself. A witty and irreverent celebration of Jane Austen and her novels, this literary game will test all your powers of propriety and prudence.
[UK] Faber & Faber | 240 pages
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
The Old Curiosity Shop (13 of 18)
This month we’ve read another four issues of Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock – the next instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop.
Here are my thoughts on Sally Brass and the single gentleman . . .
Do let me know yours!
In four weeks’ time, on 7 November, we’ll discuss Chapters 40-47.
These chapters were published in weekly issues of Master Humphrey’s Clock as follows:
No.28 (10 October) Chapters 40-41
No.29 (17 October) Chapters 42-43
No.30 (24 October) Chapters 44-45
No.31 (31 October) Chapters 46-47
Our glimpse behind the curtain of Sampson Brass’s legal establishment – and the light it sheds on early nineteenth-century law in London – is not unique to The Old Curiosity Shop.
As a former court reporter, Dickens was familiar with the baroque organisation of the London legal system and lawyers feature in many of his novels, particularly so in his masterpiece, Bleak House, which revolves around a complex legal case.
For interest, here is David Sugarman, former Professor of Law at Lancaster University, writing about lawyers’ clerks in The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens:
Dickens’s novels contain many lawyer’s clerks. These include the conscientious and ambitious cockney, William Guppy (Bleak House), the aged and eccentric Jack Bamber (The Pickwick Papers), the ’umble Uriah Heep (David Copperfield), and the mannish Sally Brass (The Old Curiosity Shop). Here, as in his depiction of law stationers, such as Snagsby and Tony Jobling, and copyists, such as Nemo (Bleak House), he communicates their sordid employment conditions, their drudgery, and threadbare clothes.
Dickens’s descriptions of courts, their offices, and lawyers’ dwellings are rich in detail and humour. They uniquely convey the topography of legal London prior to the unification of the higher courts (epitomized by the opening of the Royal Courts of Justice at the Strand in 1884), when the courts were dispersed all over London and its maze of buildings, squares, gardens, and alleys. He depicted the atmosphere of the unreformed legal system with its complex and fragmented court structure, where courts competed with one another for business, and where judges and court officials were frequently dependent on court fees and bribes for their incomes. Dickens portrays the self-importance, the dust and disorder, the bear garden, the noise and smell, the accumulation of paper and parchment, the theatre and the farce, that characterized the operation of the law.
I look forward to reading the next eight chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop and discussing them in a month’s time, on Friday 7 November.
Here are links to our previous Old Curiosity Shop posts:
The Schedule (14 March 2025)
Charles Dickens (28 March)
0. Forster’s Life of Dickens (4 April)
1. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.1 – and Gog and Magog (11 April)
2. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.2 – and G. K. Chesterton (18 April)
3. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.3 – and Edgar Allan Poe (25 April)
4. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.4 – and the Old Curiosity Shop (2 May)
6. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.6 – and St. Dunstan-in-the-West (16 May)
7. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.7 – and Jack Bamber’s tale (23 May)
9. Chapters 6-8 – and Master Humphrey, from His Clock-Side in the Chimney Corner (20 June)
10. Chapters 9-16 – and Punch and Judy (18 July)
11. Chapters 17-24 – and Old Giants and Dwarfs (15 August)
12. Chapters 25-32 – and Jarley’s Wax-Work (12 September)
