Cletham Classics – serie

Anton Chekhov’s short stories are an extraordinary record of life in nineteenth-century Russia. Encompassing small-town coffin-makers, socially mobile Orthodox bishops, and wealthy Muscovite adulterers, the tales featured in Love and Other Stories are at once bleakly ironic and profoundly humane in their depiction of their subjects. These beautifully translated works demonstrate why Chekhov’s short fiction has achieved universal acclaim: when it comes to pathos, suggestiveness, and sheer narrative economy, these stories have never been bettered.

In the essays collected in Fancies versus Fads, G. K. Chesterton positions himself as an assailant of “the nonsense of the world”: a sworn enemy of fashionable doctrines and the excesses into which they lead their adherents. While sometimes dismissed as a fogeyish reactionary—an image to which he at times gleefully plays up—Chesterton emerges from these essays as a witty and perceptive critic possessed of a profound generosity of spirit. Ranging in its preoccupations from psychoanalysis and the temperance movement to child-rearing and free verse, Fancies versus Fads is a brilliant introduction to one of the most distinctive voices of twentieth-century literature.

Joseph Conrad’s last completed novel is a masterpiece of narrative tension and psychological insight. Set in the late eighteenth century and centred around the morally ambiguous figure of Captain Peyrot—a seafarer returning to France in the wake of the revolutionary Terror—The Rover presents a compelling vision of a life lived outside of law and social convention. Like much of Conrad’s greatest work, this once-neglected text is shot through with its author’s hard-won insights into the drama and tragedy of life at sea and his extraordinary sensitivity to ethical and political complexities. It deserves to be recognised at last as one of the major novels of the early Modernist period.

Pharos and Pharillon is one of E. M. Forster’s most unusual works, and also one of his most personal. It takes the form of a series of impressionistic “sketches” of the Egyptian city of Alexandria: beginning with brief, deftly drawn narratives of Alexandria’s ancient origins and its central role in the development of Christianity, it then proceeds to give a vivid account of Forster’s own experience of the city during the First World War. Imaginative, erudite, and powerfully evocative, Pharos and Pharillon is a brilliant work of travel writing by one of the last century’s great observers of human affairs.

Victoria is among Knut Hamsun’s best-loved works—an incisive study of the coercive power of economic and social forces that is also renowned for its innovative and psychologically probing narrative techniques. Hamsun stages in riveting detail the ill-fated relationship between the novel’s hero, Johannes, and the eponymous Victoria. When Victoria is driven to make a financially advantageous marriage to the son of a wealthy dignitary, the ground is laid for a subtly devastating conclusion that has haunted readers for well over a century.

The essays that appear in On the Margin are a testimony to the polymathic reach of Aldous Huxley’s intellect, as well as to the relish with which he entered into some of his more surprising enthusiasms. As perceptive and assured in discussing the art of the advertisement and the limericks of Edward Lear as he is in expounding on the “gorgeous spiritual measles” of the European Renaissance, Huxley also writes with genuine warmth and charm about the pleasures of everyday life—about the satisfactions to be derived from a properly bound book or the maddening euphony of a dripping tap. This is an indispensable collection from an underrated master of the essay form.

Virginia Woolf’s third novel is an unconventional literary portrait of its title character—an awkward but strangely fascinating young man coming of age in the years leading up to the First World War—that is pervaded throughout by a sense that “nobody sees any one as he is”. Jacob’s Room marks a radical departure from the conventions of realist fiction by seeking to evoke the experiential texture of human cognition and urban modernity in an entirely new way. Endlessly surprising and inventive in its handling of narrative perspective, this is one of the central achievements of modern English literature.