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Trend One: Globalization
We say “world literature,” we mean “Anglo-Saxon. National literatures are getting murkier for international readers every year, and we have less and less idea what’s going on with the Poles, the Germans or the Chinese. In fact, the Nobel Prize becomes the main way to peek behind this veil, and the Nobel Prize has lately forgotten the need to open the reader to Syrian Adonis or Hungarian Redhorns.
It is clear why this is happening: the world of the Anglo-Australo-Canadian-American novel is not just open to almost anyone who has studied English in school, but we measure up and down.
Trend Two: Historical Novels
More and more writers are trying to talk about topics that concern everyone. That’s why contemporary novels are very rarely contemporary. Nine times out of ten they turn to the past, trying to cover entire centuries or going back to pain points in world history. Again, almost the only exception last year was Salman Rushdie’s novel The Golden House, the life of a New York family, compactly packaged into eight years of Obama rule with the specter of Trump ahead. That said, it made far less of an impression than the second novel by writer Arundhati Roy, who twenty years later “God of Trivia” released The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a book about India’s split, told from the perspective of a hermaphrodite. As in Ali Smith’s Autumn, and Rushdie’s, for Arundhati Roy the personal story becomes more important than the political, and is at least as dramatic. This is the emotional power of these novels, their mastery.
Trend Three: The Female Perspective
Another such book about the historical through the personal is Pachinko (Pachinko) by writer Min Jin Lee, which tells through a personal story about the oppression of Koreans in early 20th century Japan: the heroine becomes pregnant, goes to Japan, hoping that there her illegitimate child will live without shame, and the characters’ personal history becomes a fascinating family saga with a historical background. But the attempt to retell history through a female protagonist can also be considered a trend of the time – from recent ones we can remember at least “Swing Time” by Zadie Smith about the life of two girls in swinging London, “Manhattan Beach” by Jennifer Egan, who invented an active heroine for the era of the Great Depression.
Trend four: multiculturalism and white wine
And yet the favorite and main theme of the “world” English novel is the clash of cultures. Above all, immigrants with America. For example, Vietnamese Viet Tang Guen, author of “Sympathetic,” a major novel for many last year, this year released “Refugees” (“Refuges”), stories about Vietnamese who ended up in America during the Vietnam War. Lena Dunham, who opened her own editorial office at Random House, was the first to publish Jenny Chang’s Sour Heart: a book about the children of Chinese immigrants: accepting the “sacrifice” of their parents, trying to find themselves in a strange new world.
Trend Five: Sentimentality
In general, the modern novel is a sentimental novel. In the history of literature we can trace how periods of sentimentality and experimentality alternate. Sometimes the man becomes the center of the novel, then society, and then the novel itself, literature itself and its modes of expression and existence.
Today, undoubtedly, the man is at the center of the novel. That is why, for example, novels about the future are so rare today and novels about the past are so common. Writers are engaged in recreating different conditions of human existence and trying to understand how he lived there. What was he thinking, feeling, experiencing? The future tells us about society, the past tells us about the soul.
Sixth trend: complexity and polyphony
Irony, which until recently was the main virtue of the writer, is now necessarily seasoned with sentimentality. But here, too, there is room for experimentation. The most interesting novels of the last year are interesting precisely for their approach, a kind of neo-postmodernism with sentiment. This is Paul Auster, in his novel “4, 3, 2, 1,” who told four alternative versions of one Jewish boy’s life in America. In each version, not only the hero’s life changes, but also the political events in the background. Or “Lincoln in the Bardo.” George Saunders, the 2017 Booker Prize winner, where Abraham Lincoln’s life and the death of his young son are echoed by a dozen voices of the dead telling their stories.
