Best Reads of 2013: Fiction

It's that time of year when I look at the books I read (48 this year) and talk about those I considered the best.  As it happened, I seem to have read more non-fiction this time--many of them truly excellent.  So rather than try to fit both fiction and non-fiction into the same posting, I'm giving each its own space with non-fiction following next week.

My favorite works of fiction this time happened to be three I'd read many years ago but enjoyed enormously on second reading.  (I've put an asterisk by them.)  In alphabetical order:

1.  *James Agee, A Death in the Family (An autobiographical novel set in Knoxville in 1915 when his father was killed in an automobile accident.  It is beautiful, heart-felt writing that, to me, could not better describe the loss so powerful and immediate to the author as a six-year-old and to the entire family.)

2.  Gerbrand Bakker, Ten White Geese (A dying Dutch woman who renames herself Emily moves to rural Wales to live out the rest of her life and then die in a way that fits Emily Dickinson's poem, "A Country Burial."  Very spare writing by a Dutch author.)

3.  *Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (Set on a single February day in post World War I Paris when two children spend the day together--the girl to go on to visit her grandmother, the boy to meet his mother for the first time.  Intertwined is the boy's story of his parents' lives before he was born.)

4.  Maria Dermoût, The Ten Thousand Things  (Translated from Dutch.  Set in the Dutch East Indies and fictionalized, the narrator tells of her life and the lives of others there.  According to Chinese thought, each of us encompasses a unity of 10,000 things.  Places, too.  Very sparkly writing.  Published in 1951 when she was 63.)

5.  J. G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip (Singapore before and during the Japanese invasion in 1942 as it relates to a few families in the rubber industry.  Amusing, ironic, and warm if over-long.  The general theme concerns the pursuit of self interest over the common interest.  One in this Anglo-Irish author's Empire Trilogy.)

6.  Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment (Translated from Italian.  A woman falls into "a void" when her husband leaves her and then struggles to get herself out, back to normal.  A difficult book, her journey is almost caricatured.  Excellent for showing rather than telling.)

7.  *Graham Greene, The Quiet American (Wonderful.  Early CIA shenanigans in Vietnam and the idealistic, "innocent" Americans who do harm by having no real understanding of the area ... all compared to the sardonic, seasoned, and uprooted English protagonist.)

8.  Penelope Lively, Passing On (After a domineering mother dies, her two still-at-home middle-age children find her only finally receding from their lives when the daughter decides against the wrong man and the son realizes he's gay.)

9.  Wallace Stegner, Remembering Laughter (An early novelette.  Lovely descriptions but a sad Calvinistic tale of repressed love.  One of my favorite authors.)