A saga novel is a genre encompassing the wide scopes of stories and narratives such as religious saga, national saga, family saga , human saga, or other.
6-492: Earthly Powers is a panoramic saga novel of the 20th century by Anthony Burgess first published in 1980. It begins with the "outrageously provocative" first sentence: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." On one level it is a parody of a "blockbuster" novel, with the 81-year-old hero, Kenneth Toomey (allegedly loosely based on British author W. Somerset Maugham ), telling
12-692: Is another example. In the United States, Pearl S. Buck 's The Good Earth and Margaret Mitchell 's Gone with the Wind belong to the category of saga novels. In China, Luo Guanzhong (Lo Kuanchung)'s Sanguo zhi yanyi ( Sankuo chi yen-i ; Romance of the Three Kingdoms ) is the most representative and well-known saga novel since the 14th century. This article about a novel is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . See guidelines for writing about Novels . Further suggestions might be found on
18-473: The best work of British and Commonwealth fiction of the last 25 years (along with Ian McEwan 's Atonement , Penelope Fitzgerald 's The Blue Flower , Kazuo Ishiguro 's The Unconsoled , and Salman Rushdie 's Midnight's Children ). On his eighty-first birthday, retired homosexual writer Kenneth Toomey is asked by the Archbishop of Malta to assist in the process of canonisation of Carlo Campanati,
24-494: The late Pope Gregory XVII and his brother-in-law. Toomey subsequently works on his memoirs, which span the major part of the 20th century. The novel includes coverage of: Since it is an integral theme of the novel that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator , the work highlights the fallibility of memory by including many deliberate factual errors, as explained by Burgess in the second volume of his autobiography, You've Had Your Time . These may be found on almost every page of
30-535: The novel, and vary in subtlety from inaccuracies of German grammar to deliberately contrary re-writings of history. Saga novel The saga novel as a genre originates from the Icelandic history of family sagas A major example of a saga novel in English literature is George Eliot 's Middlemarch . In Russia, Leo Tolstoy 's War and Peace is a representative saga novel. In Korea, Kyunglee Park's Lands ( Toji )
36-526: The story of his life in 82 chapters. It "summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness", according to Malcolm Bradbury . The novel appeared on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in the year of its publication but lost out to William Golding 's Rites of Passage . In an October 2006 poll in The Observer , it was named joint third for
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