Thank you for asking this question. You’re a kind person. Thinking about books makes me feel like myself again. It’s not an easy question to answer because these three are among my favorite works of literature. It makes perfect sense to put them together because they are all exquisitely modernist works. I can see from this short list that you really understand literature.
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis wins on the content. The book is a sort of a prophecy of what the 20th century was going to be. Reading it today entails wanting to tear your hair out with screams of, “How did the bastard know all of this so far ahead of time?”
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo doesn’t do much story-wise. But on the formal level, it is a work of absolute genius. There is not a word out of place in the text. The novel shows what an artist can do with words to deliver a devastating punch without needing to come up with a story. It also happens to be the very first book I read in Spanish. I read it 3 months after saying my first words in Spanish, and, as you can imagine, understood nothing. Then I read it again, and on the third reading, started figuring out that something insanely beautiful was happening.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is not about the content or the form. It’s about turning the reader into an artist. Conrad hands the text over to the readers and transforms them into the source of emotion, interpretation, and meaning of his own text. Every introduction to English literature seminar debates afresh what the novel means because, in it, the author shows the extraordinary daring of controlling the readers by giving them the entirety of control.
The funny thing is that I don’t like modernist art. I like gritty realism. Or something extremely postmodern, like Rafael Chirbes. Everything that lies in between 19th-century realists and the postmodernists of the 1990s tends to bore me. But the three novels that you listed are so good that I would not be able to choose which one is best. This is a contest between content, form, and emotion. And it’s hard to pick the winner.
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