Well, there are an almost endless number of literary connections, depending on whether one is looking at self-professed connections between authors or only ones that the reader draws from personal (and sometimes very idiosyncratic) experience(s). I'm generally more interested in the latter than the former, and I'll sketch out a few that have been on my mind lately. However, one of the more intriguing formal connections is that Joseph Conrad apparently wrote Under Western Eyes under the influence and as a partial response to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Anyway, I picked up a Dover edition of Under Western Eyes super cheap at a bookstore on Bloor (not the one I used to haunt, I think that one is gone, but it is a reasonable substitute -- I'll definitely have to watch it as the used bookstore scene is just so much better in Toronto than in Vancouver, and possibly better than NYC simply because so many have closed over the years due to high rent). While I am planning on getting around to Conrad's The Secret Agent (which I've somewhat shamefully never tackled) before Under Western Eyes, when I do get to that one, I'll go ahead and read Crime and Punishment in the newish Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, which I've also wanted to read for quite some time. So many books, not enough time. After having tackled quite a few longish books, I think I'll take up some shorter books for the next month or so, even if it means distorting the TBR pile a bit.
While both Two Solitudes and The Tin Flute have WWII in the background, and both have conflicts that are essentially resolved by men going off to war, Grass's The Tin Drum is a lot more drenched in WWII and its suffering, as well as the medium-term impacts of the war. That isn't terribly surprising: Canada's suffering was an order of magnitude less than that faced by Germany or Russia for that matter.
However, this constellation isn't really the one I want to focus on. Instead, I am really amazed at how much Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children draws on The Tin Drum. (I am hardly the first to point this out. Actually, in a few essays, Rushdie mentions Grass as a major influence on his work.) The narrator is incarcerated or at least incapacitated, and is looking back over their lives. For about 1/3 of the book, Oskar has a male nurse that has a complicated relationship with him, not so different from the one that Saleem has with Padma (aside from the occasional sex). They both have truly prodigious memories (something that bugs me in general in retrospective fiction) and tell family stories/legends from before their births. They both have odd powers. They both witness momentous events in their countries, both touched by war. They even are both unlikely leaders of gangs, and Rushdie's account is a bit more realistic in that Saleem is not able to keep the in-fighting under control. They are both epic in scope,* and at this point in my life, both exhausted me (I fairly recently reread Midnight's Children and definitely enjoyed it less on the second go-around). Both novels would have been far better served by being cut down by at least 100 pages. The Tin Drum is more generally chronological, aside from the switching back and forth to Oskar in the hospital, whereas Midnight's Children jumps around a bit, at least at first. On the other hand, both feature lots of foreshadowing and the characters sometimes circle back around to key events in their lives, allowing them to be reinterpreted as the reader has more information (honestly, a little of this goes a long way, and both authors are too self-indulgent in this respect). As far as the really unreliable narrator (in the hospital or madhouse) goes, I would also mention The Studhorse Man as another prime example.
That is the main example I wanted to cover, but I may come back around with another before the week is out. While I would love to keep going, I have a fair bit of work to do before I can crash tonight.
Edit: Now that I have caught up ever so slightly on my sleep, I have come up with two other linkages. The first falls in the more formal category, and the second is more of a personal linkage. I've been somewhat interested in the NYRB reprint series, going a bit out of my way to pick them up if cheap enough, though I've already decided I cannot possibly acquire the whole set. Anyway, one that came to my attention recently was completely new to me -- G. V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, which is a bit of a wild ride, somewhat Joycean in its playfulness around language. Not surprisingly Anthony Burgess was a huge fan, as was Rushdie, though Rushdie seems to imply that he was more influenced by Western literature. Anyway, on the back cover, it turns out that T.S. Eliot was fairly blown away by the book, and Saul Bellow chimes in that this is one of the few times he agreed with Eliot on anything. Then the quote continues that Hatterr was one of the few books that Bellow allowed himself to read while working on The Adventures of Augie March. I wonder if I did read them back to back would I see any meaningful connections. It's not a bad idea, but it is one that I don't think I can take on until roughly 2016!
The other that is more personal is that it is odd just how many novels have been reminding me of Fuentes' Christopher Unborn. No question the situation of a child just waiting, waiting to be born reminded me most closely of Tremblay's The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant (the parallels gain prominence when the reader realizes that the unborn baby will essentially become Michel Tremblay -- chronicler of the neighbourhood). Well, it also reminds me of my real estate agent whose baby was roughly a week late. I mentioned briefly that the street gang that is a bit of a Greek chorus reminded me of the Vancouver gang in Doretta Lau's title story from How Does A Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun. And how could I have forgotten the huge debt that Christopher Unborn owes to Tristram Shandy? There are other minor flashes here and there, and no question I would like to reread Christopher Unborn some day, but I don't know where I will find the time.
* Actually both are epic in length but The Tin Drum seems to be intentionally anti-epic in scope. Oskar's story is cramped and not really that interesting. It's bare outlines could be told in about 10 pages. I still have 100 more to go and can't say I am too excited about reading more about Oskar, though I'll be glad to be moving on to something else (some shorter novels for a while perhaps).
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