The largest novel in literature. The longest works in the world

Not all writers agree with the statement "Brevity is the sister of talent." In addition, many of us prefer that our favorite book or story never ends. Below is a list of the ten longest novels in the world, based on estimated word count.

Sironia, Texas is a novel by American author Madison Cooper that describes life in the fictional city of Sironia, Texas, at the beginning of the 20th century. The book contains about 840,000 words and over 1700 pages, making it one of the longest novels in the English language. It was written over 11 years and published in 1952. Received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Prize.

Women and Men is a 1987 novel by Joseph McElroy. Has 1,192 pages and 850,000 words. It is considered the most difficult novel in the world.

Poor Fellow My Country is a novel by Australian writer Xavier Herbert that won the Miles Franklin Award for it. Was published in 1975. Consists of 1,463 pages and 852,000 words. It is the longest Australian fiction ever written. The theme of the novel includes questions about Aboriginal rights, and also describes the life and problems of Northern Australia.

Son of Ponni (Ponniyin Selvan) is a Tamil historical novel written by Kalki Krishnamurthy. It is one of the greatest works of Tamil literature. Tells the story of Prince Arulmozhivarman (later crowned as Rajaraja Chola I), one of the prominent kings of the Chola dynasty who ruled in the 10th-11th centuries. The novel was published in the 1950s. Has 2,400 pages and 900,000 words.

Kelidar is a monumental novel by Mahmud Doulatabadi. One of the most famous Persian novels and definitely one of the best. It has 2,836 pages in five volumes, consists of ten books and 950,000 words. Describes the life of a Kurdish family from an Iranian village in the province of Khorasan between 1946-1949, which faces the hostility of their neighbors, despite the similarity of their cultures.

Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady is a 1748 epistolary novel by the English writer Samuel Richardson. Consists of 1,534 pages and 984,870 words. Included in the list of the 100 best novels of all time. It tells the tragic story of a heroine whose pursuit of virtue is constantly thwarted by her family.

Zettel's Dream (Zettels Traum) is a work by the West German writer Arno Schmidt, published in 1970. Has 1,536 pages and 1,100,000 words. The story is told here in the form of notes, collages and typewritten pages.

Venmurasu is a Tamil novel written by Jayamohan. This is the author's most ambitious work, which he started in January 2014 and later announced that he would write every day for ten years. The total volume of the novel is expected to be 25,000 pages. As of December 2017, 15 books have been published online and in print. So far they have 11,159 pages and 1,556,028 words.

In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is a French epic novel, the main work of the writer Marcel Proust, created by him during 1908/1909–1922 and published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927. Describes the author's childhood memories and teenage experiences in aristocratic France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, examines the waste of time and the lack of meaning in the world. The novel consists of 3,031 pages and 1,267,069 words.

Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus) is a French river novel originally published in ten volumes in the 17th century by Madeleine de Scuderi and her brother Georges de Scuderi. In total, the original edition has 13,095 pages and 1,954,300 words. It is considered the longest novel in the history of world literature. It is of the type of secular novels (with a key), where modern people and events are thinly disguised as classical characters from Roman, Greek or Persian mythology.

"Tokugawa Ieyasu" by the Japanese writer Sohachi Yamaoka - about 40 volumes in a book version. Yes, I decided not to make a secret, to which the reader would make his way through the jungle of various information and comments, and immediately named the winner. Those who are interested in the nuances and terminological subtleties are welcome to the following study.

Speaking about the longest novel, we, of course, first of all think about the volume. And the question of how to calculate the length of a product seems naive at first glance. We can copy the text of a work in electronic form and see how many words or characters it contains. But the mere mention of a Japanese author leads to a sound observation that in languages ​​with hieroglyphic graphics, one character is one word. This means that the Japanese text will contain fewer characters than its translation, for example, into Russian. But in the paper version, both options can be approximately the same due to the size of the hieroglyphs, which are usually printed larger than letters.

The book version is a completely separate issue. Some editions fit "War and Peace" in one book, while others - in two. The number of pages may also vary due to different fonts and sheet sizes. But already twice mentioned Sohachi Yamaoka, as it were, hints that really long novels are calculated in dozens of volumes.

Question 2. What is a novel?

It also seems like a stupid question. We all intuitively understand that Crime and Punishment and The Master and Margarita are novels. And that "Eugene Onegin" is also a novel, in verse. And here is the "Horse Name" - a story. And the point here is not only in volume, but also in the essential features of the novel, which distinguish it from other prose forms: the presence of several storylines, a certain number of main and secondary characters, etc.

By the way, in terms of length, there is an example in the history of literature of a very long work that is technically a short story. Irish writer James Joyce's Ulysses is almost a thousand pages long, but it has one storyline and one main character - Leopold Bloom, so it's still a story.

But for us, another nuance is more important. Can we consider a novel an essay in which new adventures take place with the main characters in each chapter? The adaptation of The Idiot in ten episodes is a serial film. And "Secrets of the Investigation" is a series. I think the cinematic analogy is clear. Can we consider the stories of Don Quixote and Sancho Panso a novel, or is it a collection of stories summarized in one book? I hope now it will be more clear that terminological research is given for a reason.

"Tokugawa Ieyasu"

Let's finally deal with our winner, especially since he is just from the category of endless stories put together. The novel by the Japanese writer Sohachi Yamaoka "Tokugawa Ieyasu" is unlikely to be found in a bookstore. The thing is that this work can only conditionally be called a novel. Yamaoka published chapters of his essay in a daily newspaper beginning in 1951. Nobody made a special edition. However, it is understandable: it's no joke, if all parts of the work are put together, you get a weighty 40-volume edition.

It is unlikely that there will be at least a dozen people in the world who have read the novel from beginning to end. But we know the name of the main character - this is the first shogun from the Tokugawa clan, who united the land of the rising sun and established peace in it.

Yamaoka's novel was published as a separate edition, and before that it was distributed in many editions of Japanese newspapers, which is why it can deservedly be called published twice. The novel by the American writer Henry Darger "The Story of Vivian Girl" was not only never published - it was found after the death of the author. In the novel, the Earth is only a satellite of another, larger planet, and the plot describes the military resistance of child slaves to cruel enslavers. Of course, you are intrigued and want to know the scope of the work. I answer: 10 weighty volumes, which in total contain more than 15 thousand pages! No one has yet calculated the number of words, but scientists suggest that there are about 10 million of them.

"People of Goodwill"

Let's move on to published novels that you can get, open and read. Albeit not in Russian. The record holder here is the French writer Romain Jules (real name - Louis Henri Jean Farigul). He set the task of understanding in detail the causes of the troubles of the inhabitants of France for a quarter of a century, from 1908 to 1933. The result turned out to be large-scale - 27 volumes, which occupied 5 thousand pages. The table of contents alone is 50 pages long!

Interestingly, "People of Goodwill" was translated into English. Publishing house "Peter Davis" published the novel in 14, even more weighty, volumes. The number of words in both cases exceeds 2 million.

"Astrea"

Created over 21 years, the novel by another French writer, Honore d'Urfe, was also published. In addition, its volume is even larger: the love story of the shepherdess Astrea and the shepherd Celadon has 5400 pages. However, we mention "Astrea" after Romain Jules because the publication dates back to 1607 and today this novel is unlikely to be obtained in its entirety. But you can read the dissertation of the candidate of philological sciences Tatyana Kozhanova “The problem of the comic in the novel “Astrea” by Honore d'Urfe” (Moscow, 2005).

"In Search of Lost Time"

Not a novel, but a whole cycle of 7 novels - "In Search of Lost Time" by another Frenchman, the refined Marcel Proust, is slightly inferior to "People of Good Will": 3200 pages and 1.5 million words. If, instead of working, you read 8 hours a day at a speed of, say, 40 pages per hour (that is, 320 pages daily), then reading the Proust cycle will take you 10 working days, or 2 calendar weeks. If you read 40 pages a day with days off on Saturday and Sunday, then In Search of Lost Time will “take away” 4 months from you.

Graphomaniac outsiders

Let the titans of literature forgive me for the sporting term, but the writers whom we considered incredible graphomaniacs find themselves, if not at the bottom, then somewhere in the middle of the impromptu table of the longest novels. If we talk about Russian writers, it turns out that the first “War and Peace” that comes to mind is by no means the leader of the list. In the creation of Count Tolstoy, there are about 1400 pages of the modern edition. While "Quiet Don" by Mikhail Sholokhov takes 1500 pages. The researchers also calculated that there are 982 characters in the novel of the Nobel laureate, of which 363 are real historical figures.

But we also had authors who decided on multi-volume epic descriptions. Most of them are hardly heard by the modern reader. So, for example, the writer Georgy Grebenshchikov will be familiar with his last name. Being under the significant influence of Roerich, who managed to paint 7 thousand canvases in his life, the musician's namesake wrote an epic novel in 12 parts "Churaeva", published in Paris and New York in 1937.

Morality

Services have recently appeared on the Internet in which you can throw a literary challenge to yourself: I will read so many books this year. And you need to enter the number yourself. In order to check in a year whether you have coped with the word given to you.

Figuring out the longest novel is, of course, good, interesting and entertaining. But do not forget that in life quality can be more important than size. For example, at my parents' house I came across a 12-volume collected works of F. M. Dostoevsky, which I bought as a student, as it turned out from the surviving check - July 3, 2004. The collection includes all the works of Fyodor Mikhailovich in large and medium forms. Having devoured the first volume, I thought that it would be nice to finally fulfill my student's dream - to read all of Dostoevsky. I do not take on any obligations, because you should not give a word if you can not keep it. But, God willing, I myself will read much more than the longest novel of a great writer embodied in his novels!

In conclusion, I urge you to devote at least 20 minutes a day to a book, and you will remember what an indescribable pleasure it is to read.

Not all writers agree with the statement "Brevity is the sister of talent." In today's selection, we offer longest novels in literary history. The authors spent years on their creation. But it will take a lot of time to read them.

By the way, the novel "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy hit the top ten, so every Russian schoolboy can proudly say that he is familiar with one of the longest books firsthand.

10. "Tokugawa Ieyasu", S. Yamaoka

This novel was published piecemeal in Japanese newspapers. If you collect all the parts into a single work, you get at least 40 volumes. The plot of the novel is dedicated to the first shogun of the Tokugawa clan, who united the country and established peace in it.

9. Quiet Flows the Don, M. Sholokhov

All four books that make up the novel are about 1,500 pages long. There are 982 characters in the novel, of which 363 are real historical characters. For "Quiet Don" Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize with the consent of Stalin.

8. Les Misérables, V. Hugo

Hugo created one of his main works over the course of eighteen years - from 1834 to 1852. Then the author revised the text several times, adding and removing various fragments.

7. "In Search of Lost Time", M. Proust

This is a whole cycle of 7 novels, in which there are more than two thousand characters. Books abound with emotional outbursts, bizarre twists in the story. In total, "In Search of Lost Time" has more than one and a half million words, which occupy about 3,200 pages.

6. The Forsyte Saga, D. Galsworthy

The novel of the Nobel laureate strikes with clearly defined images of the characters. The work covers the history of the family from 1680 to the 1930s. "Saga" formed the basis of 6 adaptations, the most recent of which has a duration of 11.5 hours.

5. "War and Peace", L. Tolstoy

Anyone who has read War and Peace can be divided into two categories. Some are completely delighted with the novel, others cannot stand it. But the landmark work in three volumes does not leave anyone indifferent.

4. Quincanx, C. Palliser

This work is a modern pastiche of a Victorian novel. Each of the two volumes has a volume of 800 pages, depending on the edition. The plot is full of mysteries, symbolism and unexpected twists.

3. Ulysses, J. Joy

The novel is considered one of the finest works of English-language prose. Ulysses was written over the course of seven long years, and tells of one day in Dublin, a Jew, Leopold Bloom. The novel was first published in installments between 1918 and 1920.

2. "Astrea", O. d'Urfe

The novel was written in 21 years of hard work. The work in the first edition fit on 5,399 pages. Published in 1607, the novel tells about the love between the shepherdess Astrea and the shepherd Celadon. The book contains a lot of false novels and poetic inclusions.

1. "People of good will", R. Jules

The novel by the French playwright, writer and poet has been published in 27 volumes. The work has more than two million words on 4,959 pages. The table of contents of the longest novel in the world has about 50 pages. It is noteworthy that the book does not have a single and clear storyline, and the number of characters exceeds four hundred.

It's amazing how much time an author spends writing the longest novel of his life. Most likely, writing a novel takes many years of the author's life: separate passages and parts of the book need to be put together, then published and presented to the public.

However, no one blames the authors for such a protracted process of creating a book, since everyone is well aware that not every story can be put into a couple of chapters, moreover, the author must take into account all the details in order to convey his idea to the reader. Many of us prefer our favorite book or story to never end. Below are the longest novels in the world. You will be interested in this list.

1. Vikram Seth "A Suitable Groom"

If you had to choose the longest novel in the world based on the number of words, surely Vikram Seth's A Suitable Groom would be in the top ten, as it has a whopping 593,674 words! The book describes the life of four families, and, in parallel with this description, the author highlights the historical and social events that took place in that era. The novel is full of many different details and is rich in bright, colorful, lively descriptions, which helped the author to carefully and thoroughly convey to the reader the atmosphere of the time in which the events of this story unfolded.

2. Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged

In the novel "Atlas Shrugged" there is a story about Dagny Taggart - this is the main character who is trying with all her might to save her transcontinental railway from crisis and death. Against the backdrop of unfolding events, Dagny learns to think and act regardless of the foundations of the time. There are 565,223 words in the book! This is truly a story that should be read, as it perfectly describes how to fight for what is dear to you and for what you believe in.

3. Carl Sandburg "Stone of Memory"

The 532,030-word historical novel The Memory Stone by American writer Carl Sandburg. The author tells the reader about the long development of the American Dream, which lasted more than three centuries. The book covers a very long period: it describes the colonization of America, the events of the Revolution in America, the Civil War, as well as the Second World War. The novel itself meant a lot to Carl Sandburg, given the fact that even the red tombstone of Sandburg's grave is named the Stone of Remembrance.

4. James Clavell "Gaijin"

"Gaijin" tells about the events of 1862 that took place in Japan. It was a time when foreigners traveled to Japan in search of new markets for trade, but eventually everything turned into the Opium Wars (two 19th century wars initiated by Britain and France against imperial China). The novel has romance, history, and drama, the total number of words is 478,700. The only logical explanation for such a large volume of pages is that the author had to describe the material that was too difficult to understand.

5. Hubbard L. Ron "Mission Earth"

Believe it or not, there are a whopping 1.2 million words in Mission Earth! Many people think that in fact this is not one novel, but a collection of short stories, but the author still insisted that "Mission Earth" is one holistic novel published in ten volumes. The plot of the book is based on a story about an alien invasion and a war between planets; events unfold either on Earth or on the planet Voltar.

6. Madison Cooper "Sironia, Texas"

"Sironia, Texas" by Madison Cooper is not far from "Mission Earth" at 1,100,000 words! The author describes the life of the most ordinary American town in the first twenty years of the 20th century, in the novel thirty main characters! The book is not easy to read, as it is difficult for a modern reader to perceive the style of the author.

7. Samuel Richardson "Clarissa, or the story of a young lady"

This novel by the English writer Samuel Richardson contains 969,000 words. It tells about the unfortunate fate of a girl named Clarissa Harlow, whom her parents forcibly, solely in their own interests, want to marry a man she does not love. Having guessed their intentions, Clarissa runs away from the house with a man who promises to protect her, but the girl does not even suspect what he really intended. This is a very heavy book with a long, sad, dramatic plot.

It seems that there are some similarities between these long novels. All books reveal topics that are very difficult to perceive, which is why the authors of these novels had to describe the events so carefully and in detail in order to convey to the reader the whole meaning of the stories.

Here are the top 12 longest works in the history of literature, which prove that not every catchphrase should be blindly believed.

James Joyce (1882-1941)
"Ulysses" (1922)

The main character is Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew. The day is filled with events - Bloom manages to visit a funeral, on the bay, in a maternity hospital, in a brothel, and in several other places in between. The plot of the novel revolves around the infidelity of Bloom's wife. However, it is impossible to describe this work in such a flat and everyday way.

In the semantic depths of "Ulysses" one can see analogies and allusions to many works and heroes of world literature, to the archetypes of the feminine and masculine principles, and to the relations of generations. The most obvious, of course, is the reference to Homer's Odyssey, which Joyce considered one of the most universal myths.

1926

The novel does not have a single style - the author parodies or imitates different styles and different authors, as if playing with all layers of the world literary heritage. This novel is a mirror, which reflects the whole world, merged into one city and all times, united in one day.

Stream of Consciousness, the style of Joyce's novel, allows you to see the characters from the inside, as if trying on someone else's life, which, it turns out, is not so different from your own.

The plot is the boy's search for his father and an attempt to unravel the reasons for the series of events that haunt the hero and his mother. The novel, despite its rather large volume (from 800 pages, depending on the edition), has a very clear and rigid structure in which every word and action, even at first glance trifling, is in its place.

Each of the narrators inside the novel has his own subjective view of what is happening, which does not help the reader to figure out where the truth is hidden. She, as they say, is always somewhere nearby.

A very atmospheric and multi-layered novel in which the author managed to keep the intrigue to the last word.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
"War and Peace" (1865-1869)

Americans call "War and Peace" one of the main works of mankind. Well, those who read in the original are divided into two groups: some are delighted with the novel, and the latter cannot stand it. This is not counting those who did not master the text at all.

To some, the language of Lev Nikolaevich seems cumbersome and clumsy, some even call him a graphomaniac. And, for example, Boris Strugatsky believes that: “language can be clumsy and filled with gallicisms (like Leo Tolstoy), clumsy, incorrect and even unnatural (like Dostoevsky), abstruse and unreadable (like Platonov or Velimir Khlebnikov) - and all while being able to exert a strong, sometimes inexplicable, purely emotional impact on the reader.

Everyone who was forced to study Tolstoy's novel as part of the school curriculum has his own opinion and vision. As a rule, this reading is difficult for a teenager. Maybe the secret is to read "War and Peace" at the right time, that is, when you can already realize what a family, duty and love for the Fatherland are. In general, when abstract concepts become real things.

John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
The Forsyte Saga (1906-1921)

Generation after generation of Forsytes pass before the reader in three large cycles of novels - The Forsyte Saga, Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. Each of the Forsytes is an extraordinary personality, the characters of the characters are written by the author so subtly that over time it begins to seem as if they are not only alive, but also people you know well. Family ties, which are difficult to track at first, become clear and familiar, each figure of the family takes its place and one overall picture is formed.

And the scenery for the life of the Forsytes is the events that take place in the world. And, of course, money. After all, the Forsyte money is a kind of refrain to this story. They love, fight, die and are born against the backdrop of capital.

“The Forsytes, you know, are people who dispose of their capital in such a way that their grandchildren, if they had to die before their parents, were forced to make a will on their property, which, however, becomes their possession only after death their parents. Do you understand this? Well, neither do I, but be that as it may, it is a fact; we live according to the principle: “as long as it is possible to keep capital in the family, it should not leave it” ”

Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"In Search of Lost Time" (1913-1927)

Proust did not have time to edit the last three volumes, they were published after his death. The first volume of the cycle - "Towards Swann" was not too favorably received by critics, but this did not bother Proust, because he considered the main goal of this novel to be self-knowledge through associative perception - emotional outbursts, quirks of memory.

This quote, as the leitmotif of the work, is the most correct definition of the lost time that Proust himself, or anyone else, has ever found:

“The past is out of reach, in some thing (in the sense that we get from it), where we least expected to find it. Whether we find this thing in our lifetime or never find it is pure chance.”

Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
"Les Miserables" (1862)

The writer himself spoke of him as follows:

“As long as poverty and ignorance reign on earth, books like this cannot be useless. I wish to destroy the evil fate that weighs on humanity; I stigmatize slavery, I persecute poverty, I eradicate ignorance, I cure diseases, I illuminate darkness, I hate hatred. That's what my beliefs are, and that's why I wrote Les Misérables."

Indeed, this novel is about the fact that nothing is unambiguous, that not a single person can be stigmatized, that judges will decide who is right and who is wrong much more fairly than us. The characters are alive and voluminous, they live outside the time and space of the novel, although modern Hugo France plays an important role in the work.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Dostoevsky conceived The Karamazovs as the first part of The Great Sinner, but did not have time to realize his plan. However, even without continuation, this, without exaggeration, a great work provides many topics for reflection.

You can believe or not believe in the special faith of Russians, share or not share the attitude towards the “mysterious Russian soul”, you can be critical of the detective component of the novel - it is unlikely that Dostoevsky’s competitor to Agatha Christie is not the point.

The essence of the Karamazov family, with all its background and background, is the psychological roots of the behavior of each of the members of this family and the root common to all - provincial Russia, the Orthodox faith.

Twenty-seven volumes, more than four hundred characters, twenty-five years of the life of the country is a lot. There is no unity of action or plot - this novel is like a journey through the layers of French society of the early twentieth century - lawyers and officials, workers and artists, bankers and teachers pass before the reader.

What is especially interesting is that each hero of Roman, like a living person, develops, changes, reacts to the events of external and internal life - this is not a faceless series of characters, this is a community of individuals, people of good will.

Sohachi Yamaoka (1907-1978)

(published in Japanese dailies since 1951)

This is the story of the shogun who united Japan into a single country. A reformer who brought peace to his country, and problems to the foreigners who inhabited it.

It was Tokugawa Ieyasu who began the mass repression of Christians, and also banned the Japanese from navigation and even the construction of ships capable of long voyages. And this despite the fact that his adviser was the Englishman William Adams.

The longest American novel. This book cannot be found in Russian, perhaps because it is a specifically American work, or perhaps it is simply too much work for translators.

Sironia, Texas is one of those American novels that celebrate small towns and their simple lives. Where everything is slow, everyone knows everyone, the main line of life for everyone is Main Street, and all visitors, even after twenty years of living side by side, remain a little stranger.

First edition

The heroine - the girl Clarissa - dies, dishonored by the society lion Robert Lovelace. The surname of the anti-hero has become a household name, although today not many people know where, in fact, the name “Lovelace” came from.

This novel, not too "driven" for modern tastes, was a breakthrough not only in Richardson's work, but also generally significant against the background of other works of that time - the tragic death of an innocent victim, the noble revenge and punishment of a scoundrel - an exciting plot for a leisurely eighteenth-century audience, not spoiled by events in novels. The public was especially struck by the lack of a happy ending. The writer was even offered to rewrite the work, but he insisted on his own and the “History of a Young Lady” has come down to us in the same form in which it was first presented to readers.

Honore d'Urfe

At one time, she made a splash and enjoyed a rush of popularity among the aristocrats of France and Germany. By the way, the images of many of the heroes of the book were written from famous people contemporary to the author. This novel was highly regarded by many writers and playwrights - for example, Moliere, Corneille and La Rochefoucauld.