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The author picks out the best of literature’s lonely odysseys, from Colm Tóibín’s The Master to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.
“It all began with Crusoe. But it intensified in our time: this is the age of loneliness. The canonical texts are Notes from the Underground, Hunger, L’Etranger, and The Catcher in the Rye. Other presiding spirits are those of Kafka and Beckett. But in my own reading, I’m drawn not only to extreme isolation but to apparently well-integrated individuals who, nevertheless, spend most of their time in their own thoughts. Many of these novels are narrated in the first person, but I hadn’t noticed before how many of them are by anonymous narrators, unaccompanied even by their names. Julius, in Open City, is named, but what he shares with all the protagonists below is a shifting, and shifty, relationship with his author. In writing him, I invented situations, attitudes, beliefs and actions, but a great deal of his solitude came out of mine.”
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