Vineeth Chintala

Where Proust excels, perhaps more than any other writer I know, is in the intensity of the narrative focus. There is always something that the narrator is observing so intimately, and so precisely, like a biologist who probes a single type of organism in a series of experiments, though their ultimate goal might be something as universal as understanding the laws of memory, learning or habit.

Many writers are good at capturing a particular emotion, a specific moment. Proust gives us not just a snapshot but the full story of a feeling, decoded in a meandering, hypnotic prose.

While there is not much plot, the novel keeps surprising us with the hero contemplating the boundaries of crime and morality. And every time he observes such a boundary, we wonder how he will react to it. Even more, we wonder how he will define it. This is the greatness of the book - the cold possibilities for an individual imagined, the equilibrium of society analyzed. Somehow even suicide and murder don’t seem to disturb the dusty corners of our minds, as the tension between two best friends or the casual questioning of social values.

A thinking novel, baked with huge ambition and a big creamy layer of lightness. Musil spent the last 20 years of his life writing it and it remains unfinished.

In my world, this is the best type of novel - short, deep and playful. With exquisite timing, Pushkin can keep you waiting with anticipation, or pass a few comments to make clever transitions that other writers use pages to develop. In short, Eugene Onegin is never boring! (Check out the James Falen translation.)

The form, the transitions, the range of emotions, the storytelling; There is nothing like it. I delayed submitting my math PhD thesis so that I can include a poem written in the same rhyme pattern. Vikram Seth, when he was a graduate student in Economics, liked Eugene Onegin so much that he read it five times in one month and went on to write The Golden Gate.