Guardian

“Overlooked Masterpieces” from The Guardian

Lost, but not forgotten? Our writers pick out their favourite overlooked masterpieces
Saturday March 2, 2002
Source: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,660300,00.html

• Cheese, by Willem Elsschot

Written in Dutch, first published in 1933, and described by its English publishers as “Edam’s great moment in world literature”, this is a minor comic classic. Frans Laarmans, the archetypal “little man”, becomes the agent for a Dutch cheese company, takes leave from his work as a shipping clerk, and attempts to shift 10,000 Edams. Elsschot was the pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder. He worked in advertising. — Selected by Ian Sansom

• A Modern De Quincey, by Captain H.R. Robinson

Robinson was a British colonial administrator who went native in Burma in the 1920s, becoming a Buddhist monk and then an opium addict. His addiction finally drove him to shoot himself, but he only blew his eyes out. This vivid, moving autobiography is unaccountably rare (it hardly ever turns up secondhand) and so extraordinary that you might suspect it was fabricated. But Robinson was real. — Selected by Phil Baker

• Pseudodoxia Epidemica, by Sir Thomas Browne

Browne was a physician, and a man of weird learning. He is best known for Urn Burial, a study of funerary customs, and Religio Medici, about the faith and doubts of an ordinary man. He practised medicine in Norwich while writing these works, which are filled with antiquarian lore and arcane literary research. Published in 1646, written in witty, strangely ornate prose, the Pseudodoxia is a compendious encyclopedia of human delusions and superstitions. — Selected by John Mullan

• From Scenes Like These, by G. M. Williams

A prolific novelist in the 1960s and 1970s, Williams collaborated with football manager Terry Venables on his novel They Used to Play on Grass. He also wrote The Siege of Trenchard’s Farm, on which Sam Peckinpah based Straw Dogs. But his greatest work is From Scenes Like These, a densely realised account of west Scottish life in the early 1950s that made the first ever Booker shortlist. All kinds of rumours attach to this author, who fell off the literary map nearly 20 years ago. His present whereabouts – alive or dead – are completely unknown. — Selected by D.J. Taylor

• Reunion, by Fred Uhlman

Written in 1960, this is set in 1932, in Germany, and tells the story of a friendship between the middle-class Jewish Hans Schwarz and the aristocratic Conrad von Hohenfels. Less than 100 pages in length, it is a profound meditation upon the nature of friendship. The first line alone is enough to send a tingle up your spine: “He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again”. — Selected by Ian Sansom

• Poems, by Mary Leapor

This was published in 1751 after Leapor’s death. The daughter of a gardener, she was a Northamptonshire kitchen servant who died of measles five years earlier, in her mid-20s. Her verse was promoted by genteel local acquaintances and she enjoyed brief posthumous fame. Surprisingly, given her lowly station, her writing is witty, polished, and often wryly literary. — Selected by John Mullan

• History of Great Britain, by David Hume

David Hume is today known as a an Enlightenment philosopher, notorious for doing without God. In his own time, he was most read not for his philosophy but for this great work of history, now almost disregarded. Published between 1754 and 1762, it was a bestseller. It’s a kind of history that can no longer be written: all elegance and poised phrase-making on the surface, but underneath a satirical sense of the vanity of human wishes. — Selected by John Mullan

• Tales of Victorian Norfolk, by Mary Mann

A Norfolk farmer’s wife from the Reepham area (“Dulditch” in her books), Mary Mann wrote a stack of forgotten three-decker novels and these grim short stories from the frontline of the late-Victorian agricultural depression that out-Hardy Hardy. Look out, in particular, for “Little Brother”, in which a scandalised parish visitor realises that the object being dandled by the band of children on the floor is not a doll but a dead baby. — Selected by D.J. Taylor