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The first novels to impress me were 1984, read in 1984, and Faulkner's Noise and Fury.
The latter has since been blown to pieces after I read Ulysses. This one is far more subtle, and Joyce's kindness is heart-warming.
Other, lesser impacts, but, well, still :
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, if you can't go through Joyce.
Bulgakov's White Guard, which lead me to read another great book (nic fit told it before) The Master and Margarita.
Dostoîevski's Crime & Punishment.
Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit for its rhythm, the pulsating images of war and chaos, the humanity of the author through the character of Robinson - I know that it's odd to talk about humanity when mentioning Céline, a writer who hated everybody and would be sued for antisemitism after WWII, but you can see that in this book, his first.
Malcolm Lowry's Beyond the Volcano, for apparent chaos brilliantly arranged too.
PKDick's Radio Free Albemuth (I had read in a Lee Ranaldo interview that that book in particular had made the Youth want to pay a hommage to the man on Sister) - there's a chapter there that makes your sanity shiver : the narrator, a writer named Philip stops talking about the current action to claim that he is not a drug addict, that his readers shouldn't trust what people, including his own editor, say about a former book he wrote, the subject of which being something 100% like A Scanner Darkly... After that chapter I closed the book ad listened to the Butthole Surfers USSA and madly laughed out loud.
And recently, among authors whose hearts are still beating, Deadkidsongs by Toby Litt, fot its perversity, and Eugenides' Middlesex for its wideness.
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