Tallis

Best Lit endings (off the dome): >Nabokov - The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, Ada >Tolstoy - War & Peace, Karenina >Pushkin - Eugene Onegin >Joyce - Ulysses, "The Dead" >Melville - The Confidence Man, Moby Dick >Bolano - 2666 >Marquez - Cholera, Solitude >Borges - everything

>Pynchon - V, GR, MD >McCarthy - Blood Meridian >Salinger - Almost everything, he was good >Twain - Huck Finn >Houellebecq- Submisson, Island >Dostoevsky - The Idiot Could keep going. There are still good books that don't really conclude (ex: Dead Souls), but it's a flaw.

There are some great books that you have to apologize for or equivocate over (The Brothers K is always my example)- but I prefer the perfect ones (Pale Fire, for instance, never *really* ends until you read it like 5 times & figure our what's under all the trap doors).

Sometimes a mess made by a genius can be more entertaining than a perfect product of a mediocrity- I still prefer Dostoevsky to O Henry, even though he ends up pissing me off half the time by clumsily knocking shit over with his slapstick soliloquies etc.

The Great Gatsby for instance is often praised for its formal unity, which does exist, & is quite rigorous- but it bores me horrendously compared to, say, Dead Souls which is only one third complete & ends with a great promise of what never arrives.

The authors I love most are ones who do both. Nabokov is the greatest in this way- most of his works are perfect, & he has so many perfect works that it's difficult to categorize them compared to others, as some of his minor novels are better than our inherited "masterpieces."