The Novel: an Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 by Steven Moore

I don’t know about you, but when I think of early novels the books that come to mind include Cervantes’s Don Quixote or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  Boy was I wrong.  Steven Moore’s first volume—what he describes as an alternative history—is a history of the novel from the earliest days of writing.  It includes a descriptive history of the novel from the ancient, medieval and Renaissance eras.  But Moore doesn’t just describe the novel in the West.  It is in the East, in particular the Far East, that readers begin to discover some of the earliest gems in novel writing including works such as Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji and and Luo Guanzhong’s Three Kingdoms.   Erudite, irreverent, exhaustive, hilarious—all describe this encyclopedic work on the early novel.  If you like literature, the introduction alone is worth your time.  But I dare you to stop there.  I couldn’t.  This book is like a literary carnival ride or a courtly feast.  Before I knew it I had plowed through the rest of the book’s nearly 700 pages.   Wow!  I can’t wait for the next volume.