As we all have different ideals as writers (and readers), I'd be curious to know which writers you consider to be 'perfect', or at least close to perfection.

I can honestly say that the best works by these writers are such that I would not change a word in them:

Tolstoy, Austen, Chekhov, Barrett Browning, Donne, Shakespeare, (Katherine) Mansfield, Dickens, (Thomas) Mann, (Dylan) Thomas, Keats (with reservations)... to name a few.

Mind you, this isn't really about 'favourite writers' -- for example, I enjoy Dostoevsky just as much as Tolstoy, and Woolf even more than Mansfield, but the latter's aesthetics are much closer to mine. The writers I named give me a sense of 'completeness' that is extremely satisfying. I read them and say to myself, 'Now, that is something to aim at.'

So who are yours?

Well, some people have heard this before, but I think Stendhal's Scarlet and Black is The Perfect Read.
It has everything: history, adventure, inner drama, satire, romance, humour, family drama, politics high and low, and above all for me, a narrator's voice so perfectly pitched between irony and sincerity that it becomes one of the major entertainments of the book.

Yes, banging on.

Pete

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As to 'completeness', I think William Maxwell has that quality.

Papillon and Banco, by Henri Charriere. Pure.

Ste

Most of Austen. Some of Henry James. Chekov plays as well as stories, some of Mansfield, Macbeth. The Leopard. The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart). Actually, the best of Wodehouse and Heyer are perfect of their kind - minor masterpieces.

Didn't get on with Red and Black, at all - terrific novel, but found him too irritating to give that sense of utter satisfaction that we're talking about.

Emma

Emma

The character or the narrator?

Pete

Julien, I think, but he's so central that I couldn't shake free of him enough to enjoy it, even though I was admiring the writing tremendously, and was fascinated by the world, which I didn't have much feel for before then.

Emma

Emma

Julien is in many ways despicable, tho I know that's not what you mean exactly, when you say you are irritated. But I like the way Stendhal presents that as a challenge to us. It's a world that's been turned on its head twice by Napoleon's rise and fall, and so the ambiguous morality of the book is a refelction of that... God there's so much to talk about. It must be one of the most provocative of books.

This is a dangerous topic for me. Grrrr.

Pete

Carson McCullers is pretty damn perfect I reckon. The simplicity and beauty of her prose, her lightness of touch and her extraordinary characters. Amazing. I love TS Eliot too.

Doris

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is one of those books that really stays with you, and her style is like no-one else's. She wrote that aged 22! Unbelievable.

Pete

Yes, it's been on my must-read for years.

Emma

What a title.

Yes, what a title. As is Reflections In A Golden Eye.
Some of you were talking about Brighton Rock, on another post I think. I can't praise it highly enough. The whole hot summer of bustling holdiay-makers etc on the surface with this dark nasty undercurrent going on underneath, it's stuck in my head for years. It's genius. A perfect example of menace done very simply but utterly chillingly. One of the best books I've ever read.

Julien is wonderful!

Love, love that book too!

Sorry, will try to curb the enthusiasm(!)(and the exclamation marks)

Going slightly off thread? I never did say "The Dud Avocado" when we were on favourite titles...

Love that final sentence, "Its the last word, it's zymotic!"

Sarah

Coming to this a bit late, i know, but...

Off the top of my head, I'd have to choose the school stories of Antonia Forest, (Autumn Term, the Cricket Termt, etc) which are small masterpieces of the genre - brilliantly characterised and refreshingly free of plot cliche. All the elements of the traditional girls-at-boarding-school are there, but with a twist that makes them remarkable and longlived in the heart. I've never understood why they aren't ten times more popular than the Chalet School and the Trebizon (?) series. No sport fan, I even read 11 pages of a ball-by ball account of a cricket match on the edge of my seat - that's some achievement - just goes to prove that 'good writing transcends genre'. I want my characters to live and breathe like hers, and I want to make my readers carry on reading avidly, even if my subject is something they have no interest in.

On a different level, Nabokov's Lolita is an amazing piece of writing. His irony and humour, the insight and the elegance of each line make me sigh with envy. Even more remarkable because I believe English was not his birth language? I envy his way with words and his neat and polished phrases that stab you in the heart.

I can't do 'deep' very well and write mainly humour myself, and an author who has certainly shaped my style and the whole way I view life is Betty MacDonald. Not perfect, well-turned prose a la Nabokov, perhaps, but in wit and the funny side of human nature, unsurpassed. You don't see her books around much these days but Onions in the Stew and Anybody Can Do Anything are for me thoroughly inspirational on 'how to laugh at yourself and make your reader's stomach hurt along the way'.

Aha! Another Antonia Forest fan. Yes, I don't know why she isn't better known, unless it's just that she didn't write enough of them? A couple of the non-school ones have been re-printed, but I don't think they're as good. And have you ever read her two Shakespearean ones? They were among my favourite historical novels as a child.

And I'm with you on Lolita.

Can I add William Golding's Rites of Passage?

Emma