Sydney Morning Herald - Best Books of 2010

Authors and critics have been entertained, intrigued and enlightened by their reading in 2010.


CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS

I discovered Margaret Yourcenar. Her Memoirs of Hadrian, written across decades, made me truly see the ancient world for the first time. A stunning book. I rediscovered John Updike's Couples, one of the great novels of the suburbs. It makes me want to be so much better at my craft. Fiona McGregor's Indelible Ink and Brendan Cowell's How it Feels both showed me a Sydney I have never known. Max Schaeffer's debut novel Children of the Sun bravely examined the fraught contradictions of masculinity and homosexuality, how desire complicates our political correctness. Colm Toibin's The Empty Family is a wonderful collection, unflinching about the pettiness of our cruelty to one another and, in the final story, unapologetic about the transcendence possible through something called love. Karl O. Knausgaard's A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven is masterful, breathtaking.

COLM TOIBIN

The two novels I liked best were David Grossman's To the End of the Land and David Malouf's Ransom. Both books deal with fear and bravery, violence and forgiveness, parents and children. But more than anything, both understand that rhythm and texture in language and the space around words have an almost tactile quality and must be handled as a painter handles paint. In poetry, Seamus Heaney's The Human Chain has a hushed, elegiac tone and is his most beautiful book in many years. I have been getting nothing but pleasure and amusement from Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica. He was a big, sad old softie.

LLOYD JONES

The German writer Hans Fallada spent the war years in Berlin and his experience of living under the Third Reich were distilled in 10 months of frenetic writing to produce a masterpiece in Alone in Berlin. The novel examines the lives of several families, but in particular the heroic and understated resistance of a couple who are radicalised after losing their only son on the Russian front. The novel was first published in German in 1947 and only recently translated into English.
Everyone must have read 2666 by the late Roberto Bolano; in which case, move on to Nazi Literature in the Americas. Here, the egos of the artist and fascist tendencies sit uncomfortably close to one another. Milan Kundera's Encounter is as concise and illuminating as his last book of essays, The Curtain. For a clear-eyed view of a civilian population debased by occupation, Norman Lewis's wonderful Naples '44 is the book.

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