Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. I imagined myself a future of writing back in my youth, and this novel was the first one I read that demonstrated the writer could say whatever the fuck he/she/they wanted. You could be you, you could be authentic, literature didn’t have to be artificial. You could tell it as you saw it, the good, the bad, the ugly, the filthy, the shameful, the hateful. You could also exaggerate it for effect, if that was warranted, but just tell it your way, no matter how hard it goes against the grain.
The Stranger, by Albert Camus. This one showed me that the only plot worth a damn is the narrator trying to make sense of human experience.
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. This one told me there’s a difference between an author and a writer. Nabokov was an author. Lolita was an immense intellectual construction. Nabokov was a literary architect. He created colossal literary edifices, built on symbol, metaphor, myth and narrative hocus-pocus. James Joyce was another author. These guys could devote their entire lives to the pursuit of literature, the study of literature. They were scientific, formulaic, their books were almost equations. Whereas an author was somebody like Jack Kerouac, a literary painter, an impressionist or expressionist.
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