CAAF: 5×5 Books with Elderly Protagonists by Matthew Sharpe

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from Matthew Sharpe, whose perverse and wonderful novel Jamestown is the Lit Blog Co-op’s Read This! Selection for summer. Join the LBC discussion of the novel happening this week, which features a podcast, entries from Sharpe and Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash, and other shenanigans.
When I think of the novel as it blossomed in the nineteenth century, I tend to think of plucky, independent-minded young men and women who, despite a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, succeed in marrying above their station in the closing pages; or, alternatively, languid, morbid-minded young men and women who, succumbing to a series of insurmountable obstacles, succeed in being crushed to death by love or fate in the closing pages. But defying this identification of novels with youth are what I like to call geezer novels, a sub-genre wherein the protagonists are old, or nearly so, and the adventures that befall them therefore all that much more surprising. So here is my mini-celebration of five geezer novels, in alphabetical order by author, more or less.
1. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. This fantastical novel whose author is probably better known as a painter concerns a 90-year-old woman whose family cannot distinguish between her, a rooster, and a cactus. She dies and comes back… as a 90-year-old woman.
2. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Whose protagonist is the OG (Original Geezer).
3. Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf by Paul Fattaruso. My fellow Soft Skull author’s novel is wise and beautifully written and its protagonist, being an unfrozen dinosaur, is way older than any of the others on this list.
4. All the Names by Jose Saramago. An epic journey undertaken by a lowly late-middle-aged filing clerk in an unnamed European city that may be the same one where Kafka’s The Trial takes place.
5. Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett. “…waiting for the joy to end, straining towards the joy of ended joy.”