We continue Underrated Week, noting that this entry is sure to inspire philosophic debate. Can it plausibly be argued that Michael Jordan is an underrated basketball player? That Wayne Gretzky is an underrated hockey player? Yes, I say.
When it comes to the Western classics, I hold a few works above all others, and by an order of magnitude: Homer, the Hebrew Bible, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Shakespeare, Proust, Moby Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses (shriek if you wish), and the two major novels of Tolstoy.
Yes, those are the most underrated classics. There are simply too many people who lump them in with Rabelais, Stendhal, Twain, Mann and other totally splendid but slightly less than divine works. If I could read Italian, Dante might also make the list.
Next in line would be Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Goethe’s Faust (German language version only), and of course Bleak House of Charles Dickens; read the latter carefully and you will see plot twists that very few if any critics catch. If you’re simply listing the best novel whose wonders most educated people have no clue of (one extreme form of underrating), Bleak House is the clear winner (loser?) on the entire list.
Bleak House was the centerpiece of senior English in my public-magnet high school education. I buy all the arguments about its greatness, but when you get to page 30 and Dickens is still describing the fog, well, a seventeen-year-old mind turns against the book rather quickly.
I still have my copy; one day I’ll finish it.
Nostromo-Conrad?
It isn’t strictly a novel – but I believe that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is hugely under-rated.
Once you begin to recognize that Tolkien was one of the most intelligent people to have lived (I’m talking Einsteinian brain power) you gradually begin to see how much is in there.
Ulysses? Drivel. But something from Dickens is always good. I have gone through Bleak House but I would substitute something else – Bleak House, while the story is good, is a bit long. The pointless lawsuit could have been condensed. But give me Copperfield or a Christmas Carol and I would be happy. Both have great characters and a universal story. What does Ulysses have but insufferable prose and a convoluted story? Is the point of classics like castor oil or should there actually be value in the reading?
The Three Musketeers. Unfairly dumped in the bin of juvenile fiction, because it happens to be a swashbuckling adventure.
I agree on Austen–The plot in Emma is subtle perfection.
Oh, and handwave explanations of Joshua Bell’s experience in performing for a public not already biased to
think he’s the greatest thing ever, are welcome.
Most under-rated novel – or novella- ever: ‘Hadji Murat’, by Tolstoy, which is the single most compressed, most vivid, most cinematic
most concise piece of prose fiction in existence. Actually better, in some ways, than ‘War and Peace’.
Runner-up: ”Puddn’head Wilson’ by Mark Twain, which is far darker than ‘Huckleberry Finn’. No happy endings,
no consolatory B.S. with the slave getting released in the end, hence unread by Americans. Frankly, Twain was too good for you guys.
I wince when people ask me about what I like to read. Should I try to impress them or just be honest? I like to read John Grisham and Michael Crichton. That said, I loved Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (a forced read in college). The three books that really have stayed with me are sleepers: The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson, The Spear by Louis DeWohl, and The Forgotten Soldier(which some history buffs regard as fiction and not a “true” account).
Most of the suggestions are squarely in “Great Books of the Western World” territory.
Having said that, the most under-rated piece of fiction in the Western Canon: “Tartar Steppe” by Dino Buzatti.
Wind in the Willows, for the same reason as Wodehouse.
I love Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Chekhov’s short stories and plays, Ibsen’s plays, Lampedusa’s The Leopard, but the are not really underrated.
What about Jünger’s Storm of Steel?
I would argue that Kipling’s Kim is an excellent and very underrated classic.
The so called middle dialogues of Plato – The Symposium, The Phaedo, The Republic.
I would partially agree with the weigting against works which were spoonfed to students in grammar and high school, but you must then up weight works which those, such as myself, went back and re-read voluntarily in our adulthood and really loved, such as Dickens Tale of Two Cities, Tolstoys War and Peace, and, yes, some Shakespeare (although it is much, much better performed).
What, Homer and Cervantes but not Dante?
Meep & Dan have good taste.
They already nominated my two picks: The Moviegoer & Our Mutual Friend. However, I think the Moviegoer did win a National Book Award. Walker Percy taught an occasional english seminar at my high school before his death. It is a great regret of mine that I never had the chance to participate.
I’ll nominate the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. Everyone I have recommended it to has liked it. Short stories are underrated as a genre as others have pointed out.
I have to protest the Bible. Also Gulliver and Faust. Germans just have to pretend that they have top caliber literature, and they simply don’t.
I second Paradise Lost.
The Importance of Being Ernest is probably the best comedy in any medium ever.
Outside the western cannon, Genji is REALLY good.
More recently, Jorge Borges stories. and Haruki Murakami are noteworthy. Death on Credit by Seline.
Pale Fire and The Trial are obvious choices.
My black swan bets for future cannon.
Hitchhikers Guide and the Far Side.
If anything, I’m biased against the books I was forced to read in school. Nothing takes the joy out of reading like a deadline and a busywork report. So I’d say the ones that I liked despite all that should get a bonus, not a penalty.
When you think deeply about it, and when you have sufficient experience, you will come to the realization that the most underrated writer in the world is, by a great margin, William Shakespeare.
I’ll second “The Importance of Being Earnest” and add the sequel “Earnest Saves Christmas.”
Since I’m in the business of literature, I’d venture to say that within the literary canon itself, both Dante and Cervantes are very nicely featured. As they should. Dante’s Divina Commedia is simply one of the best medieval theory-informed literary texts and had it not been for Don Quixote where would modernity be?
Anyway. If I could suggest one title to your list, it’d have to be the medieval narrative entitled The Nibelungenlied.
Though I enjoy his writing, Murakami is overrated.
I couldn’t stand Les Miserables.
Josh – very funny!
It doesn’t rate with Shakespeare or Cervantes, but Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus is an underread underrated classic. It’s historical fiction, not history, and was widely read until recently. Xenophon was probably one of the most widely read authors of the 19th century, at least in England.
Most of these novels are relatively well known, so, in what way are they “underrated”?
Looking through the list provided by the commenters, I would have to second the listing of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. Certainly a great novel, in my opinion, that almost no one has heard of.
heimskringla
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Excellent books, and really thought-provoking, but somehow no one seems to talk about them. Especially on the Web.
Kawabata was the model for the latest Garcia Marquez novel.
Where are Proust, Musarakis Gengi, Flaubert and Balzac?.And Dostoiesky?Dumas is really underrated by critics not by the public
We continue Underrated Week, noting that this entry is sure to inspire philosophic debate. Can it plausibly be argued that Michael Jordan is an underrated basketball player? That Wayne Gretzky is an underrated hockey player?
How about Kobayashi as hot dog inhaler? (Looks like the end of his reign tomorrow though.)
Curious to see the division of the Bible — do you think the New Testament is highly enough rated as to not merit inclusion on an ‘underrated’ list, or find it to not be of as meritorious as the Hebrew Bible, or (random other option so as not to hand you a binary)?
The fact that no one has mentioned Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is in itself terrifying.
I would say Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.
Yes.
Take a look at Julio Cortazar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch).
By the way, since you don’t include Dante because you don’t read Italian, are we to assume that you read the other classics you mention in Russian, Hebrew, Spanish and French, among others? Or is the Italian of Dante more important because it’s poetry?
Schiller’s ‘Wallenstein Trilogy’.
Wodehouse is one of the unacknowledged giants of English Literature.
Most of his Jeeves and Psmith novels ought to rank on par if not ahead of the likes of Tom Jones and Nicholas Nickleby
I love Wodehouse’s novels – I think I’ve read just about everything he’s written – but I don’t think they are under-rated as *literature*. They are hugely entertaining, he is a master craftsman, but we don’t learn much about the world from them. Maybe that’s not quite the right way to put it, but it seems to me something becomes literature when, besides being entertaining (and maybe in some cases despite not being entertaining), we learn from it, we see the world differently as a result of reading it.
Who decides what is literature and what is not? I think that’s a more interesting question than identifying underdog classics.
I love this list. I’ll be looking for these books.
My nomination: Stendahl’s “Charterhouse of Parma.”
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