1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 10
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Reveries of a Solitary Walker
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Lifespan | b. 1712 (Switzerland), d. 1778 (France)
First Published | 1782
First Published in | Oeuvres Complètes (Poinçot)
Original Title | Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire
Jean-Jacques Rousseau—philosopher, social and political theorist, novelist, and proto-Romantic—was one of the eighteenth century’s leading intellectuals. Reveries of the Solitary Walker, the last book he wrote, is a wonderfully lyrical, heartfelt, and somewhat obsessive account of an aging man’s reckoning with his past. Rousseau achieved a great deal of notoriety during his lifetime from a succession of popular and hugely important works. By attacking the state religion and denouncing contemporary society as morally corrupt, he not only challenged the establishment but also the Enlightenment thought that prevailed in the Parisian salons. Rousseau became the subject of a long-lasting campaign of derision and humiliation, and eventually was forced into exile.
The Reveries of the Solitary Walker finds Rousseau, “alone and neglected,” torn between his love of solitude and his yearning for company, trying to assuage his crippling self-doubt and irrepressible need to address his persecutors. The novel’s lasting appeal stems from this compelling tension between his sober, meditative philosophizing and his impassioned rage against the ills of society. Rousseau wants to show that he is at peace with himself, blissfully disengaged from society, and yet he is also constantly betrayed by his sense of injustice and pride. The combination of his circumstances and his inner turmoil make him one of the first—and most fascinating—modern examples of the prototype of the literary outsider.
Reveries is therefore a vital precursor to the great works of isolation and despair by writers such as Dostoevsky, Beckett, and Salinger, which have had such an enormous impact on the development of the novel in the twentieth century. AL
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Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Lifespan | b. 1741 (France), d. 1803 (Italy)
First Published | 1782
First Published by | Durand (Paris)
Original Title | Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Laclos’s novel, illustrated here by Georges Barbier, presents a harsh vision of savage relationships conducted in civilized tones.
A recent series of successful film, theater, and ballet adaptations suggest that this gripping tale of love, deceit, and the art of seduction still holds a powerful grip on our collective imagination. Written by a lieutenant in the French army, Dangerous Liaisons manages to shock and delight in equal measure. The action takes place among the aristocratic circles of pre-revolutionary France and centers on the ruthless, charming libertine Valmont and his rival, one-time lover, and partner in crime, Merteuil. Valmont is gifted with wealth, wit, and intelligence, and leads an idle life guided by a self-imposed code of conduct: to seek ever-greater glory in his seduction of unsuspecting society women. Merteuil is a sexually liberated young widow but, unlike Valmont, she has to play the role expected of her by society. Together, they create a complex web of relationships based on betrayal, lies, and sexual misconduct. Their attempts to outdo the other have disastrous consequences as jealousy and hubris undermine their own deeply flawed principles.
Laclos makes exemplary use of the popular epistolary form, because it is precisely in the delicious recounting of the events that his two leading characters derive their pleasure—a pleasure shared by the reader as we indulge in the eloquence and exquisite cruelty of this captivating masterpiece. AL
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Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Lifespan | b. 1712 (Switzerland), d. 1778 (France)
First Published | 1782, in Oeuvres Complètes
First Published by | Poinçot (Paris)
Part 2 Published | 1788, by P. Du Peyrou
Unpublished until after his death, Rousseau’s Confessions are a landmark of European literature, and perhaps the most influential autobiography ever written. This is a work that had a defining impact not only on the novel, but on the development of the autobiography as a literary genre. Although Rousseau predicts having no imitators in this vein, he was seriously mistaken. Goethe, Tolstoy, and Proust all acknowledged their debt to Rousseau’s pioneering attempt to represent his life truthfully—warts and all.
Rousseau famously argued that man’s innate good nature was corrupted by society. Yet in Confessions Rousseau acknowledges that he often behaved appallingly. One incident in particular stands out. When working as a young servant in the household of a wealthy Geneva aristocrat, Rousseau describes how he stole valuable old ribbon and then blamed the theft on a servant girl, Marion. Rousseau comments that he was “the victim of that malicious play of intrigue that has thwarted me all my life,” simultaneously accepting responsibility for his actions and denying it.
Rousseau freely admits the contradictory nature of his character, one he felt was forced on him by circumstances beyond his control. Indeed, in line with his desire not to mislead the reader, he undoubtedly exaggerates his own sins and misdemeanors just to prove his point, which serves as yet another paradox of this compelling, frustrating, and vitally important work. AH
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The 120 Days of Sodom
Marquis de Sade
Lifespan | b. 1740 (France), d. 1814
First Composed | 1785
Original Title | Les 120 Journées de Sodome, ou l’École du libertinage
The Marquis de Sade composed The 120 Days of Sodom while confined in the Bastille, and his only manuscript was lost to him forever when the revolutionary mob stormed the prison on July 14, 1789. Without his knowledge, it passed into the hands of an aristocratic French family and remained there until a corrupt German edition appeared in 1904. The first accurate publication was printed in several volumes between 1931 and 1935.
The book’s stated intention is to appall propriety, morality, and the law. It is set at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, a time when war profiteers were gathering vast fortunes quickly and covertly. A group of wealthy libertines decides to pool the female members of their families as sexual resources to be held in common, and they minutely plan an immense and prolonged debauchery. Cycles of suppers devoted to a particular sexual vice are inaugurated, before the participants formalize their perversions in a festival of absolute criminal licence in a remote, impregnable, and luxurious château. A complex set of statutes are formulated to preserve order in the midst of myriad acts of rape and murder, and it is the arithmetical and permutational aspect of the sexual violence that is perhaps the novel’s key. Alone in his cell, de Sade worked out a meticulous, purely imaginative, masturbatory economy of gradual gratification, fixated on images of debasement and cruelty that have been studied as much by clinicians as by gourmands of extremity. RP
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Anton Reiser
Karl Philipp Moritz
Lifespan | b. 1756 (Germany), d. 1793
First Published | 1785
First Published by | Friedrich Maurer (Berlin)
Last Part Published | 1790
In many ways, the autobiographical protagonist of Anton Reiser can be seen as a less fortunate “brother” of Wilhelm Meister, the hero of Goethe’s famous 1796 novel, The Apprenticeship Years of Wilhelm Meister. Both young men are theater enthusiasts and have unrealistically high hopes of what they will achieve as actors on the stage; but, while Wilhelm, the son of a wealthy patrician, wins friends for his theatrical enterprise quite easily, Anton Reiser has to struggle against poverty and real and imagined humiliations that undermine his self-confidence.
The first two parts of Moritz’s “psychological novel”�
�as he called it himself—deal with Anton’s unhappy childhood: how he is sent off to work for a pietist but ruthlessly exploitative hatter; and how, even after he is allowed to attend a grammar school in Hannover and makes good progress there, he is tortured by thoughts of having to depend on public charity and being made fun of by the other pupils. The last two parts show Anton seeking consolation in solitary reading, but also yearning to make a name for himself as an actor, for which he sacrifices the less glamorous prospects that studying at university would have opened up for him.
Anton Reiser provides valuable insights into a world that was previously neglected by literature—that of the town artisans and apprentices, and their working and living conditions. It is also a moving account of an individual’s struggle against obstacles outside of, and within, himself. LS
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Vathek
William Beckford
Lifespan | b. 1760 (England), d. 1844
First Published | 1786, by J. Johnson (London)
Original Language | French
Original Title | Vathek, Conte Arabe
“Being much addicted to women and the pleasures of the table, he sought by his affability, to produce agreeable companions . . .”
Originally written in French, when its author was only twenty-one, Vathek was inspired in part by William Beckford’s sumptuous coming-of-age celebrations at his magnificent country estate of Fonthill in 1781.
Vathek is at once a comic farce and a tragic parable, drawing on a prodigious body of learning in order to both revel in and parody the “oriental tale” popular in England since the translation of the Arabian Nights. The tale follows the exploits of the Caliph Vathek and his variously grotesque associates on an inexorable journey to damnation—a gloriously inevitable fate given the excesses of his court and his complete disregard for conventional morality. Beckford consciously fabricates a fantastical “eastern” setting to explore individual freedoms in a way that parallels his own controversial predilections—his sexual intemperance culminated in European exile soon after completing the text, following a scandal with a young aristocrat.
Described on its publication in England as a combination of “the sombrous grotesque of Dante” with “the terrific greatness of Milton,” Vathek influenced numerous literary figures including Hawthorne, Poe, Swinburne, and Byron. While it offers a remarkable insight into early orientalist fantasies of the “east,” it is this quality, perhaps, that ensures its longevity; the potent combination of sexual and sensory inquiry with a prevailing sense of childlike wonder offers potentially instructive parallels with our own contemporary obsessions. MD
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Justine
Marquis de Sade
Lifespan | b. 1740 (France), d. 1814
First Published | 1791
First Published by | Nicolas Massé (Paris)
Original Title | Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu
De Sade’s unfortunate and virtuous heroine prepares to submit to one of a series of acts of violent abuse and sexual degradation.
It is in this novel’s full title, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, that we can perhaps find the most cogent definition of its continuing power to shock and absorb. De Sade’s heroine is good, and because she is good, she suffers without redemption. Like Rochester’s earlier poetry in England, De Sade’s novels take human bodies and transform them into components within a copulating machine. In the case of Justine, it is a device that mathematically converts virtue into suffering with a remainder of readerly pleasure. Justine declares her scruples, flees, pleads for the lives of others, and professes her faith. In return, she is stripped, bitten, slapped, whipped, and penetrated, orally, anally, and vaginally.
In this way, de Sade makes explicit what is only implicit in the eighteenth-century novels of sentiment such as Richardson’s Clarissa, and Rousseau’s Julie; or, the new Héloïse. The woman’s capacity to feel purely and empathetically makes her an object of fascination and degradation, perpetually brought down and renewed. This violent eroticism in the relationship between reader and heroine is properly named “sadistic.” As Roland Barthes observed, where we wish to imply, to suggest, to create meaning through metaphors, de Sade asserts, combines, exposes. Yet, in doing so, he draws us into a desirous complicity: we feel the compulsive rhythm of what is performed on Justine’s body, even as she does not. The signs of our spiritual existence, our religion, morality and self-governance, are relentlessly translated into our corporeal body: limbs, lips, breasts, and buttocks. That radical reduction saw de Sade committed to an asylum and his texts destroyed; the continuing challenge Justine offers to the comforts of our authority will not so easily be erased. DT
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A Dream of Red Mansions
Cao Xueqin
Lifespan | b. c. 1715 (China), d. 1764
First Published | 1791
Original Title | Hóng lóu mèng
Given Name | Cao Zhan
Considered the greatest masterpiece of traditional Chinese fiction, this huge, largely autobiographical novel chronicles in detail the decay of an aristocratic family in eighteenth-century Beijing. Also known as The Story of the Stone, it is, all at the same time, a Bildungsroman, a novel of sentiment, a repository for Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions, and, with its more than 400 characters, a mosaic of society at the height of the Qing dynasty. Its author, Cao Xueqin, died after completing only eighty chapters, but although this left most strands of the complex plot unresolved, the unfinished manuscript soon gained considerable popularity.
The novel begins with a prologue telling of a sentient stone that enters the mortal realm with the help of a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest, and which is reincarnated as Jia Baoyu, the capricious heir of the mighty Jia clan and protagonist of the novel. The stone’s fateful entanglement with a crimson flower is mirrored in Baoyu’s relationship to his frail cousin Daiyu, who later dies when Baoyu is married to a different cousin against his will.
The novel and especially its twelve main female characters have widely featured in poetry and painting. More recently, a theme park, feature movies, television series, and computer games have paid homage to the lasting popularity and cultural significance of this novel in China. FG
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The Adventures of Caleb Williams
William Godwin
Lifespan | b. 1756 (England), d. 1836
First Published | 1794, by B. Crosby (London)
Alternate Title | Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams
William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, one of the most important and widely read novels of the 1790s, offers readers a potent mixture of personal history and political commentary. As a young man, self-educated and orphaned, Caleb finds himself in the employ of an enigmatic but apparently honorable local aristocrat, Falkland. Caleb’s curiosity, however, leads him to uncover an unsavory fact about Falkland, namely that he had been the murderer of a tyrannous neighboring noble, a crime for which he allowed two innocent members of the local peasantry to be tried and executed. The stories of all these men illustrate the novel’s central critique of an ossified class system that sanctions oppression and makes a mockery of the law. Falkland’s response to Caleb’s discovery of his secret is to follow, frame, and persecute him. This had its historical analogue in the suspension of civil liberties when England declared war on Revolutionary France, including those of writers suspected of holding seditious views.
Readers have sometimes felt that the novel suffers to the extent that it is a fictional vehicle for Godwin’s radical political philosophy, articulated in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Yet because of the psychological drama at the center of the plot, it has also been received as a gothic novel. For modern readers, the extreme nature of Caleb’s
persecution has distinctly Kafkaesque overtones. ST
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The Interesting Narrative
Olaudah Equiano
Lifespan | b. 1745 (Nigeria), d. 1797 (England)
First Published | 1794, by T. Wilkins (London)
Full Title | The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African
This portrait of the ex-slave author as an impeccable eighteenth-century gentleman appeared in the first edition of the book.
“I offer . . . history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant.”
Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative is a landmark text and a crucial read for anyone seeking to understand the complex issue of race in Britain and the lineage of Afro-British writing. This is the earliest first-hand account in English of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, presenting the full horror of the experience in order to justify and promote the abolitionist agenda. In a hostile political and literary climate, the success and popularity of Equiano’s text succeeded in furthering this agenda.