4 writers to invest in

1.Trollope and Beckett

In Trollope, no one stands alone.

In Beckett, who learned much from Trollope ('he noticed everything'), all stand alone, aloneness is as good as it gets.

The difference between them: Trollope always looking for the right words to say as much as he can: Beckett always getting rid of as many words as possible.

Trollope: Till we can become divine we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower. (Barchester Towers)

Beckett: At the center of this enclosure stood a small rotunda, windowless, but well furnished with loopholes (Molloy)

Reading Trollope, serves some teleological purpose; there's some end to be come to. Reading Beckett, nothing ever comes to an end, everything's already reached the end at the beginning.

2. Orwell and Atwood

The problem with dystopian writers is that they put forth only one point of view.

Orwell is not dystopian, Margaret Atwood is.

Orwell's too good a journalist to be dystopian; he doesn't really want to write fiction, he has to; journalism can't contain what he has to say.

Atwood's a poet; it seems (to me) that she writes fiction because she can no longer write poetry, or has lost interest in it, or her faith that poetry can change anything. Yet she can't not write.