Introduction
By Peter Boxall, General Editor
There is an ancient connection between death, storytelling, and the number 1001. Since The Thousand and One Nights, the number has had a mythical, deathly resonance. Sheherezade, the storyteller of the Nights, recounts her tales, over a thousand and one long Arabian evenings, to her king and would-be executioner, as a means of staving off the moment of her own death. Each night the king intends to kill her, but Scheherezade conjures such succulent fragments of prose that he is compelled to let her live another day, so that he can steal from her another, subsequent night, and another instalment in her endless, freewheeling fiction. The infinitely open, unresolvable quality of Scheherezade’s storytelling continues to lend the number 1001 something of the mathematical sublime, of the countless or the unlimited. But at the same time, the number also maintains the mortal urgency of Scheherezade’s plight. As much as it suggests endless expanse, the number speaks also of precision, and of a cramped, urgent brevity. Scheherezade’s stories are still often translated as The Thousand Nights and One Night, emphasizing this uneasy proximity, in the number itself, between the expansive and the contracted, the many and the one. Over the great stretch of the thousand and one nights, Scheherezade always has only one night to live; as the evenings glide smoothly away, death is a constant companion, lending to each passing night the peculiar vividness of the final moment, lending the whole, living, proliferating work the unmistakable savor of last things.
In compiling the following list of 1001 books you must read before you die, I have found myself very much in the grip of this Scheherezadian paradox. The story of the novel, as it is told here, is a long and rambling affair, full of surprising turns, and unlikely subplots. Weaving this multi-layered tale through reference to 1001 titles has seemed, from the beginning, to be a gargantuan task, and a task that could never end. The final list, including all the novels that one must read and excluding all the ones that it is safe to leave unread, could of course never be drawn up, just as Scheherezade’s stories still have not ended, and will never end, this side of the knowable. But at the same time, the limits that the number has pressed upon me are cruel and narrow. One thousand and one is after all such a small number, given the extent of the subject matter. Each title here has to fight for its slender berth, and each entry is fueled by a certain concentrated energy, a struggle to make room for itself as desperate as if life depended upon it. Each novel is a work that you must read before you die, and while death is always a distant prospect, it is also always imminent, lurking in the shadows of every instant. Something you must do before you die might feel like a lazy aspiration, but it is also something you have to do in a hurry, or even now.
This contradiction between the roomy and the constricted can be felt moving throughout this book. The novel is represented here in all its variety, its inventiveness, its wit, as it stretches from the ancients—from Aesop, Ovid, Chariton—to the contemporary fiction of Amis, DeLillo, or Houellebecq. But at the same time the novel as a complete entity is forever beyond our grasp, refusing to be fully systematized, always something more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, it might be argued that the novel, as a stable, recognizable object, does not really exist. There is no consensus among readers and critics about when the novel as a form came into being; there is no definite boundary that separates a novel from a short story, from a novella, from a prose poem, from autobiography, witness testimony, or journalism, from a fable, or a myth, or a legend. And there is certainly no consensus concerning how one distinguishes between the trashy novel and the literary masterpiece. Rather, the novel as a form, and as a body of work, is an inspired idea that we can only grasp fleetingly, fragmentarily; an idea that makes prose fiction possible, but that is also itself something of a fiction.
The list that is offered here, then, does not seek to be a new canon, and does not claim to define or exhaust the novel. Rather, it is a list that lives in the midst of the contradiction between the comprehensive and the partial. It is a list that is animated by the spirit of the novel, by a love for what the novel is and does, but which nevertheless does not hope or aim to capture it, to sum it up, or put it to bed. Prose fiction lives in so many guises and different languages, across so many nations and centuries, that a list like this will always, and should always, be marked, formed, and deformed by what it leaves out. Rather than defending its borders against that which it excludes, this book offers itself as a snapshot of the novel, one story among others that one can tell about its history. The book is made up of entries from over 100 contributors—a cross-section of the international reading community, including critics, academics, novelists, poets, literary journalists—and the list is generated to a large degree from what this diverse group of readers tells us about what the novel looks like today. As such, this book reflects a set of priorities that are shared by today’s readers, a certain understanding of where the novel comes from, a particular kind of passion for reading. But it does so in a spirit of love for the diversity and endlessness of the possibilities of fiction, rather than in any desire to separate the quality from the rabble, the wheat from the chaff. It speaks of a thousand and one things, but with a breathless urgency that derives partly from the haunting knowledge of how many other things there are to be said, how many other novels there are to be read, how short even the longest story can feel when faced with the endlessness of storytelling.
This combination of the long and the short, the exhaustive and the partial, is perhaps nowhere more evident in this book than at the level of each individual entry. There is clearly something insane about writing 300 words—the approximate length of each of these entries—on something as many-mansioned and multi-textured as a novel. Even a thin slip of prose, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, surely cannot be condensed into 300 words, so what of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, or Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or Proust’s À la recherche—novels that run into thousands of pages? What can 300 words hope to do in the face of such monsters? This is a question that vexed me, somewhat, at the start of this project. But as the book goes to press, it strikes me that the brevity of each of these entries is this book’s greatest strength. What these entries seek to do is neither to offer a full critique of each title, nor to give us a flavor of the prose, nor even simply to provide a canned plot synopsis. What each entry does is to respond, with the cramped urgency of a deathbed confession, to what makes each novel compelling, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it. There is no other format that I can think of that could deliver this kind of entreaty more effectively, or with a more thrilling intensity. One contributor, in discussing with me what these entries might hope to achieve, hit upon a phrase that for me has come to define what this book does. He said that each entry might be thought of as a “micro-event,” a miniaturized but complete reading experience that contains within it something of the boundlessness of the novel.
I have many people to thank for their help over the last months. Working on this project has been an extraordinary pleasure, mostly because of the incredible enthusiasm and goodwill shown by everybody who has been a part of it. My first debt of gratitude is to all of the contributors. I have been moved by how promptly and willingly all of the contributors have responded to the demands of this book, and I have been staggered by the sheer quality and imaginative exuberance of the work that has been produced. This really has been a labor of love and friendship, so thank you. There are also many, many people who contributed to the production of this book, but who are not listed as contributors. Maria Lauret was unable to be in the book, but I thank her for her help, and remember Paul Roth with love and sorrow. I have had countless discussions, over unnumbered kitchen tables, about what titles should be in this list, and I thank everybody who has made suggestions to me. I would particularly like to thank Alistair Davies, Norman Vance, Rose Gaynor, members of my family in Cardiff and London, in the U.S. and Turkey, and the ent
irety of the Jordan family. I am deeply grateful to Liz Wyse, whose clear intelligence and calm good humor made even the difficult moments a pleasure. Jenny Doubt saw this book through to publication with an extraordinary, unflappable professionalism, and with imaginative flair. Witnessing her ability to deal with the manifold pressures that a project like this produces in its final stages has left me gasping with admiration. The Art Director Tristan de Lancey and Picture Researcher Maria Gibbs have done an incredible job, and I am grateful to everybody at Quintet, in particular Jane Laing and Judith More. As always, my love and thanks go to the Boxall Jordans; to Hannah, who has been a central part of this project from the beginning, and to Ava and Laurie, for whom reading is a transformative pleasure that is only now beginning.
Working on this book has taught me a great deal about the novel. It has also taught me something about how contagious the love of books is, how much excitement, friendship, and pleasure they produce. I hope that some of the excitement, and some of the love and friendship, that went into making this book will be communicated in the reading of it.
Contributors
Vance Adair (VA) is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling. He has written on critical theory and early modern drama.
Rhalou Allerhand (RA) is a journalist who studied English at the University of the West of England. She also writes fiction.
Jordan Anderson (JA) is a postgraduate student at King’s College London and a graduate of Harvard University. He has published on the work of Thomas Hardy.
Carlos G. Aragón (CA) is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham. He is working on a dissertation about Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s “Cycle of Havana Centre.”
Susanna Araujo (SA)
Derek Attridge (DA) has published books on the works of James Joyce. He is a Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at University of York.
Sally Bayley (SB)
Lorenzo Bellettini (LB) is completing a PhD on Arthur Schnitzler at Cambridge University. He is president of Cambridge University Creative Writing Club.
Alvin Birdi (ABi) is a former economist and has held lecturing posts at the Universities of Manchester and Middlesex. He is completing a DPhil on Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee at the University of Sussex.
Laura Birrell (LBi)
Andrew Blades (ABl) is undertaking a DPhil on masculine identity in AIDS literature. He reviews theater for the Stage newspaper.
Maria-Dolores Albiac Blanco (M-DAB) is Professor of Spanish Literature at the Univesity of Zaragoza and has published works mainly on eighteenth-century subjects.
María del Pilar Blanco (MPB) is completing her doctorate on American literature and film in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University.
Vicki Blud (VB) received a Masters degree in English Literature from King’s College London. She will now specialize in medieval literature and critical theory.
Anna Bogen (AB) is a DPhil candidate at the University of Sussex. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis on early twentieth-century fiction and women’s education. She has published extensively on children’s literature, the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, and the work of Virginia Woolf.
Dr. Peter Boxall (PB) is a Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on twentieth-century fiction and drama.
Dr. Kate Briggs (KB) is a Research Fellow in Modern Languages and Literatures at Trinity College, Dublin.
Marko Cindric (MCi)
Monika Class (MC) is a doctoral student at Balliol College, Oxford, working on a thesis on nineteenth-century British writers.
Liam Connell (LC) teaches literature at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests are in postcolonial writing, modernism and popular literature.
Clare Connors (CC) is Lecturer in English at the Queen’s College, Oxford, where she teaches and writes about Victorian and modern literature and literary theory.
Philip Contos (PC) studied English and Italian literature at Columbia and Oxford universities. He currently works as an editor in London.
Jennifer Cooke (JC) is completing a thesis on the plague in texts and culture.
Ailsa Cox (ACo)
Vybarr Cregan-Reid (VC-R)
Abi Curtis (AC) is completing a PhD at the University of Sussex. She has published fiction and poetry and was awarded an Eric Gregory Award for poetry in 2004.
Ulf Dantanus (UD) is Director of Studies for the Gothenburg Program at the University of Sussex. He has postgraduate degrees from Trinity College Dublin and Göteborg University.
Jean Demerliac (JD) is a writer and editor who has written and translated Herman Melville. He has contributed to many publications and multimedia projects at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Sarah Dillon (SD)
Lucy Dixon (LD) studied English literature and Afrikaans at Stellenbosch University.
Margaret Anne Doody (MD) is John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She has written six novels and many critical works.
Jenny Doubt (JSD) completed her MA at the University of Sussex in postcolonial literature. She is one of the Founding Editors of Transgressions, a twentieth-century interdisciplinary humanities journal.
Karen D’Souza (KDS)
Lizzie Enfield (LE)
Fabriano Fabbri (FF) is lecturer in contemporary art techniques at the University of Bologna. He has always been interested in the connections between art and mass culture.
Anna Foca (AF)
Seb Franklin (SF)
Daniel Mesa Gancedo (DMG) is a Lecturer in Latin American literature at the University of Zaragoza. His works include Similar Strangers; the Artificial Character and the Narrative Contrivance in Latin American literature (2002).
Andrzej Gasiorek (AG) is a Reader in twentieth-century English literature at the University of Birmingham, where he has been teaching for the last twelve years. He is the author of Postwar British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2004), and J. G. Ballard (2005).
Diana Gobel (DG) Having completed her DPhil in Russian History at Oxford, Diana Göbel has worked as a freelance copy editor, researcher, and translator.
Richard Godden (RG) teaches American Literature in the Department of American Studies at the University of Sussex. He has published Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer (1990), and Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (1997).
Jordi Gracia (JGG) is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Barcelona and works mainly on twentieth-century Spanish literature. Among his works is The Silent Resistance: Fascism and Culture in Spain (Anagrama Essay Prize, 2004).
Reg Grant (RegG) is a freelance writer. He has an extensive knowledge of modern European literature, especially post–Second World War French fiction.
Frederik Green (FG) is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. His main interests are in Chinese and Japanese literature. He is currently writing a dissertation on the Republican-period writer Xu Xu.
Christopher C. Gregory-Guider (CG-G) teaches twentieth-century literature and culture at the University of Sussex. He has published articles on W. G. Sebald, Iain Sinclair, photography, trauma, and memory. Other interests include narrative and filmic representation of mental illness and the cultural history of walking.
Eleanor Gregory-Guider (EG-G) currently lives in Sussex. She received a BA (Hons) in English and History from the University of Texas at Austin and a MA in eighteenth-century studies, focusing on literature and art history from the University of York.
Agnieszka Gutthy (AGu) is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Southeastern Louisiana University. She specializes in comparative literature, Basque, and Kashubian studies. She also writes on Polish and Spanish literature.
Andrew Hadfield (AH) is Professor of English at
the University of Sussex where he teaches Renaissance literature and contemporary literature and theory. His most recent book is Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005). He has written essays on Saul Bellow and T. H. White, and is a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.
Friederike Hahn (FH) has an MA in Shakespearean Studies from King’s College London and is currently completing her PdD there. She also volunteers at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
Esme Floyd Hall (EH) is a writer who lives and works in Brighton. She has published three nonfiction titles with Carlton Books and has contributed to various newspapers and magazines, including Sunday Times Style, Observer, She, and Zest.
Philip Hall (PH) was born in New Zealand, where he earned a degree in English literature and a Masters degree in Law. He currently lives and works in London, and writes on a variety of subjects.
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