In an age of information overload, lists – like this one – are the ultimate quick fix. A kind of therapy and addiction all in one, the list is appealing because of the way it neatly puts things in order, seemingly curating life’s contingency. Fictional lists have their own special charge. They can describe or prescribe, and, in the right hands, summon magic or malevolence.
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Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Chie’s days on the International Space Station are itemised. There are smoke detectors to change, supply tanks to check and mice to monitor. Then there are Chie’s own lists – “in some ways, she hardly notices herself writing them, they’re like nail-biting, or teeth-grinding, they bring a reflexive comfort … they waft slightly on their pegs in her sleeping quarters while she dreams”. Structured not by plot but by description, Harvey’s Booker-shortlisted novel is itself lyrically governed by lists and loops. Flickering between its six astronauts, Orbital asks how any of us might shape our allotted time and space.
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Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn
“‘I really need you to write this story down for me,’ he was saying … ‘Really, I do.’” So begins Evan, tormented hero of Gunn’s wonderful novel. Emily becomes Evan’s amanuensis, meeting to gather information about his unrequited love for his landlady, Caroline. Evan’s passion is far surpassed by Emily’s obsession with writing about it, as she scrutinises the papers Evan prepares. There are lists of “facts and practicalities”, lists of furnishings in Caroline’s house, lists of conversations had (or not had), and lists of lists. Lists, though, are a bit like bikinis: they never cover everything. Beats from the modernist hitlist (Joyce, Woolf, Beckett) are audible in this quest to “really” capture the real.
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High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
If Eliot’s Prufrock measured things in coffee-spoons, then record-shop owner Rob does his in Top 10s. For him, “conversation is simply enumeration”. Others “have opinions. I have lists”. This cult 90s novel traces Rob’s breakup and his realisation that some things escape the catalogue. High Fidelity may not be the most likable of that long tradition of tragicomic account-keepers (Pepys and Pooter, Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones), but, for better or worse, it captured, and shaped, an era of lad mags and listicles.
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Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally
Published in the US as Schindler’s List, Keneally’s Booker prize-winning historical novel tells of the German industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jewish factory workers from Nazi death camps. Oskar Schindler used the medium by which the Nazis worked – the dehumanising list – to save lives, writing a list of his own by which he extricated his employees: “Oskar’s list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation … It was a sweet chariot which might swing low.” The novel also focuses on the tragedy of those not carried to safety. Schindler’s list “is life”, but “all round its cramped margins lies the gulf”.
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Lists of Note by Shaun Usher
The 125 lists in this visually rich book range from an ancient Egyptian list of workmen’s absences to a “list of murder suspects” scribbled by John F Kennedy’s secretary just after his assassination. We’re also given Georges Perec’s inventory of everything he ate in one year (categorised by type – cheese aplenty and a surprising amount of kebabs), and a copy of Galileo’s shopping list. Definitely one to add to your TBRs.
• Loss, a Love Story by Sophie Ratcliffe is published by Northwestern University Press
