Trouserpress

A million years ago when I was an impecunious student surviving on only a few grams of speed a day, I contemplated writing porno stories as an easy way of generating cash.
After all, porn stories are merely male sexual fantasies, and as man in his early 20s bursting with hormones, how difficult could it be? I believed I had a talent for writing — so why not prostitute it?
I didn’t get to find out how difficult it could be, because I concluded that playing with the porno makers would be unethical, and that would make it difficult to get a proper PC girlfriend.
Lately, mired in a dull, dead end occupation, very much the salary slave at everyone’s beck and holler, my mind has been traipsing around the hack work options that might at least keep me off the commuter train and buy some proper writing time, I remembered that long-abandoned porno plot. I mulled — as a purely intellectual exercise, you understand — what these sexual fantasies might be that would be so easy to imagine and write.  Since I was on the train, I placed my bag on my lap just in case and let my mind wander.
It occurred to me with some surprise and absolutely no disturbance to my bag that I don’t have sexual fantasies. Or more accurately, I have only one and a number of slight variations on it.
The fantasy starts with dinner for two at one of those terribly nice and creative restaurants in Islington or Camden (C’mon, this is a fantasy!). There is conversation about books and music and art — and Wittgenstein might even be mentioned because the word Tractatus sounds great at any dinner table whether or not you can understand proposition one. There is a very nice bottle of red wine.
I manage to pay the bill without awkwardness for either of us and one of us takes the other home, where there is more pleasant chat, some nice music (preferably Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man’s Out of Time) and possibly some more wine.
Until just at the point where it is getting a bit late in the night but not too late and … well, I can’t tell you about the next bit because it is something just for she and I to share. But it would be terribly warm and respectful and possibly even a bit beautiful. And there would be tea in bed the next morning.
Try selling that to Hustler.
I could possibly go for being indefinitely locked up with 27 naked teenage nymphomaniacs chained to the wall and smothered in guacamole, but only if we had regular breaks to get to know each other and establish common interests.

By two votes out of two (or three out of three, I am not too sure) Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is currently judged by Psipook readers to be the best work of fiction since 1945.

I have moved the postings to http://psipook.forumco.com/default.asp so you can register there and vote for your best fiction. Or continue the debate here. Whatever.

Well, it seems that our literary journalists have too much time on their hands and have been compiling utterly meaningless lists of the best novels. The New York Times polled about 200 writers and ‘literary sages’ and came back with the answer that the best American (does that include Canadian or Mexican?) novel of the last 25 years was Beloved by Toni Morrison (What? Who?). The Observer thought this was a terribly wizard wheeze and asked 150 (smaller country) of its own sages (including at least one American who had probably been polled by the NYT but not me) the same question about British and Commonwealth novels. The winner was Disgrace by JM Coetzee, which I have to confess to not having read.

Fascinating. So now I have to do the same thing. Yes, I know: what is the point, what does this achieve, aren’t lists essentially meaningless, how can you compare writers of different styles, intents and themes, and don’t we all have better things to be doing with our time, like writing for instance?

Who cares?

My poll is: what is the best work of fiction in any language since 1945? Why 1945? The answer to that is obvious, surely — get on with answering the question.

My own vote, without further ado, goes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which by a meaningless coincidence was first published the year I was born.

Runners up have to be:
Crash, JG Ballard
Wind up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino
1984, George Orwell

… and all the ones I have forgotten to mention

Now, what about you? In your entirely subjective opinion, what is the best work of fiction in any language since 1945?

Your responses will go up here, so make sure your literary taste is well polished.

Big news. I just had to stop what I was doing to put on a sweatshirt. This must be the first time since April that it has been cool enough that I need clothes.

Autumn has arrived: yaroo!