1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 15
Like the works of his English contemporary Charles Dickens, Beets’s book is never entirely free of sentimentality. However critical of its characters, it never strays far from sympathy; the flashy parvenu Kegge or the stilted student Pieter Stastok are ridiculed, yet without malice. There are true villains—such as van der Hoogen in the Stastok family stories—but these always get their due reward, for Beets’s comfortable moral universe has no place for unrewarded virtue or unpunished vice.
Camera Obscura has established itself as a classic of Dutch literature because it is sharp and shrewd in its observations of human behavior and is written in a prose that fulfills Beets’s declared aim to present the Dutch language in its everyday clothing instead of its Sunday best. Beets’s rich cast of characters may have dated, but they can still inspire amused affection and offer fodder for reflection. RegG
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A Hero of Our Times
Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov
Lifespan | b. 1814 (Russia), d. 1841
First Published | 1840
First Chapter Published | 1839
Original Title | Geroy nashego vremeni
A collection of five tales connected by an intricate narrative structure centering on one protagonist, this work simultaneously exemplifies two recurrent themes of Russian nineteenth-century literature—the Caucasian adventure story and the “superfluous” antihero. Pechorin, Lermontov’s “hero,” is a young Russian officer disillusioned with life and mankind, who describes his own soul as half-dead and happiness as the ability to have power over others. Unlike Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, who suffers from the absence of a meaningful spiritual life, Pechorin’s disappointment stems from a failure of the world to live up to his high ideals. In consequence, his egotism is of a more active and more vengeful kind—he abducts a young Circassian girl and then tires of her; he makes a young Russian noblewoman fall in love with him to spite an acquaintance; and he kills that same acquaintance in a duel.
Set in Russian “frontier” country, populated by smugglers, wild mountain tribes, marvelous horses, and drunk Cossacks, Pechorin’s adventures are told against the backdrop of a spectacular Caucasian landscape, beautifully evoked by Lermontov. This landscape and the effect it has both on his characters and his readers contradicts the jadedness with which Pechorin regards his life, and the men and women around him, and is one source of vital tension in the work; another is the contrast between Pechorin’s spiritual and metaphysical yearnings and his callous and even vicious behavior. DG
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Dead Souls
Nikolay Gogol
Lifespan | b. 1809 (Ukraine), d. 1852
First Published | 1842 (Russia)
Original Title | Myertvye dushi
Original Language | Russian
The writing of Dead Souls drove Gogol mad. It started off as a humorous idea for a story, the conceit being that Chichikov, a scheming opportunist, would travel through Russia buying up the rights to dead serfs (souls), who had not yet been purged from the census and could therefore—like all chattels—still be mortgaged. As the novel grew, so did Gogol’s aspirations; his goal became no less than to rekindle the noble yet dormant core of the Russian people, to transform the troubled social and economic landscape of Russia into the gleaming great Empire that was its destiny. He no longer wanted to write about Russia: he wanted to save it. He was driven into messianic obsession and, having burned Part Two—twice—after ten years of labor, he committed suicide by starvation.
Chichikov’s travels across the expanse of Russia in a troika provided the opportunity for Gogol to shine as a satiric portrait artist, a caricaturist of the panoply of Russian types. He makes Russian literature funny—tragically funny. In Chichikov he created a timeless character, a huckster not unrecognizable in today’s dotcom billionaires, able to exploit the stupidity and greed of landowners eager to get even richer themselves. Although Gogol was unable to deliver the key to Russian salvation he had envisaged, with what remains he has inarguably succeeded in writing his “great epic poem,” which, hauntingly, did finally “solve the riddle of my existence.” GT
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Lost Illusions
Honoré de Balzac
Lifespan | b. 1799 (France), d. 1850
First Published | 1843
First Published by | G. Charpentier (Paris)
Original Title | Illusions Perdues
This title page of Les Illusions Perdues—Lost Illusions—bears the author’s own comments and annotations scrawled in ink.
A kind of westernized Arabian Nights, Lost Illusions is one of the central works of Balzac’s seventeenvolume Human Comedy (1842–46), set during the period of restored monarchy in France. As selfappointed record-keeper of his epoch, Balzac was interested in “all of society,” but, most significantly, the upheavals related to money. Balzac’s fictions draw our attention to the many contrasts that define different cultural domains: between the royalists and the liberals, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the hoarders and the squanderers, the virtuous and the depraved, Paris and the provinces.
Steeped in the imagery of the theater, the three parts of Lost Illusions tell the story of the provincial poet Lucien de Rubempré, who languishes in provincial Angoulême in the company of his alter ego, David Séchard, nurturing his ambitions. He is initiated into the Parisian literary, journalistic, and political world, and suffers successive disillusions. Marcel Proust praised the way in which Balzac’s style aims “to explain,” and is marked by its beautiful “naiveties and vulgarities.” Some critics, on the other hand, while they celebrate Balzac’s powers of observation, denigrate his “clumsy and inelegant style.” From the first pages to the last, Lost Illusions provides ample opportunity to share Proust’s admiration for the writer. CS
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The Pit and the Pendulum
Edgar Allan Poe
Lifespan | b. 1809 (U.S.), d. 1849
First Published | 1843
First Serialized | The Gift for 1843 (Philadelphia)
Original Language | English
An illustration of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum represents the victim’s hallucinations as well as his horrific predicament.
“The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.”
This claustrophobic tale of horror and suspense has earned Edgar Allan Poe a prominent place at the forefront of the Romantic tradition, alongside Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. As one of America’s first serious literary critics, he was dismissive of art and literature that was preoccupied with the mundane or the everyday, preferring to deal with the unexpected and the puzzling in his own narratives—specifically, the terrifying and the supernatural.
Poe was highly regarded as a writer of poetry and prose, but his life was plagued by ill health, money problems, and bouts of depression and mental illness that were aggravated by alcohol. Two years after the death of his wife (he had notoriously married his thirteen-year-old cousin), he fell into a state of despair and, at the age of forty, died after drinking himself into a coma.
It is therefore not surprising to find that so many of his stories feature the plight of desperate protagonists brought by terror to the brink of insanity. However, much of the popular criticism of Poe and his work, including attempts to seek out symbols for psychoanalytical interpretation, has confused the writer’s own torment with that of his narrators. In The Pit and the Pendulum there is an overpowering atmosphere of dread—the dark chamber reeking of putrefaction and death, the frenzied rats, the immobilized victim’s horror of the descending razor-edged pendulum—that has prompted much discussion about the writer’s mental state. But this masterpiece, which draws on so many of the distinctive and recurring motifs spawned by writers of the horror g
enre, should be read as the finely wrought and compelling work of a gifted imagination. TS
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The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Lifespan | b. 1802 (France), d. 1870
First Published | 1844
First Published by | Baudry (Paris)
Original Title | Les Trois Mousquetaires
The Musketeers display their swashbuckling skill with the sword in an early twentieth-century illustration of Dumas’s romance.
The Three Musketeers is the most famous of around two hundred and fifty books to come from the pen of this prolific author and his seventy-three assistants. Alexandre Dumas worked with the history professor Auguste Maquet, who is often credited with the premise for, and even the first draft of, Les Trois Mousquetaires, although the text, like all his others, plays very fast and loose with the historical narrative.
D’Artagnan, the hero, is a Gascon, a young man who embodies in every aspect the hotheaded stereotype of the Béarnais people. Armed with only a letter of recommendation to M. de Tréville, head of King Louis XIV’s musketeers, and his prodigious skill with a sword, this incomparable youth cuts a swathe through seventeenth-century Paris and beyond, seeking his fortune. The enduring quality of Dumas’s texts lies in the vitality he breathes into his characters, and his mastery of the roman feuilleton, replete as it is with teasers and cliffhangers. The Three Musketeers is a romance par excellence, and the pace of the narrative carries the reader on a delirious journey. The strength of the characters, from the “Three Musketeers” themselves, to Cardinal Richelieu and the venomous “Milady,” need scarcely be highlighted, so entrenched have they all become in Western culture. The charisma of Dumas’s swaggering young Gascon certainly remains undimmed. DR
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Facundo
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
Lifespan | b. 1811 (Argentina), d. 1888 (Paraguay)
First Published | 1845, serialized in El Progreso
Original Title | Civilización y Barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga
Facundo; or, Civilization and Barbarism in the Argentine Pampas—the title of the last edition published in the author’s lifetime—is not a novel. But this hybrid of biography, history, geography, recollections, Utopian accounts, diatribes, and political programs has greater narrative strength than any Spanish-American fiction of its time.
The life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1793–1835), a Caudillo gaucho during the civil wars that marked the independence of Argentina, is used by Sarmiento as a vehicle for his interpretation of the state. An imaginary Argentina is turned into the main protagonist: visualized as oriental, medieval, and African (models that must be given up), but also as Roman and French (models to aspire to). Argentina is a heroine fought over by two colossi: that of civilization (the city, the future, Europe) and that of barbarism (the pampas, the present, America). Facundo represents the second and he is a disguised version of Rosas, the dictator in power when the book was written, who forced Sarmiento into exile in Chile. The book’s main literary value lies in Facundo himself, a fascinating, monstrous creature, thanks to the skill of Sarmiento’s writing. The complex additions that surround the text (titles, epigraphs, and notes), the symbolic and allegorical depth of many passages, the powerful and often self-aware style, which seeks to win the agreement of the reader, reveal a modern quality that still nourishes the best Argentine novelists. DMG
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The Devil’s Pool
George Sand
Lifespan | b. 1804 (France), d. 1876
First Published | 1845, by Desessart (Paris)
Given Name | Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin
Original Title | La mare au diable
“To tell the truth, this chant is only a recitative, broken off and taken up at pleasure.”
In her lifetime, George Sand was a cultural celebrity, known as much for her liberated lifestyle as for her novels. After a failed early marriage, she had a number of highly scrutinized affairs; Chopin and De Musset were among her lovers. Her most famous early novel, Indiana, was a graphic proto-feminist depiction of the fate of a woman abused as much by her husband as by her lover.
In the 1840s, however, Sand turned to writing a series of novels of rural life, set in the countryside of Berry, where she lived on her country estate of Nohant. The hero of The Devil’s Pool is Germain, a widowed ploughman. Left by his wife’s death with sole responsibility for three young children, he reluctantly accepts the logic of courting a rich widow, Catherine Leonard, in a neighboring region. He travels to meet the widow in the company of a young shepherdess, Marie, who has found work on a farm in the widow’s neighborhood. On their journey, they stop by the pool of the title and bond under its magical influence. Both Germain and Marie find disillusion on arrival—the widow is vain and proud, and Marie’s employer attempts to abuse her. After many vicissitudes, ploughman and shepherdess recognize their mutual love.
The tone and intention of the novel is idyllic. Sand consciously serves up the countryside for a sophisticated readership as an escape from urban complexity and corruption. Although she never flinches from country life’s harsher realities—this is a world of endemic poverty and low life expectancy—these are implicitly accepted as part of the unchanging natural order. Sand’s rural novels were immensely popular in her own day, and they have retained a real freshness and charm as an authentic expression of the Romanticism of their era. RegG
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The Count of Monte-Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Lifespan | b. 1802 (France), d. 1870
First Published | 1845–1846
First Published by | Pétion (Paris)
Original Title | Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
“Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.”
Alexandre Dumas’s very well-known serialized novel begins with the incarceration of the hero, Edmond Dantès, in the Château d’If, as a result of the denunciation by his rivals of his purported Napoleonic allegiance, just before Napoléon’s return from Elba in 1815. During his fourteen-year imprisonment, the hero fortuitously meets the Abbé Faria, who educates him and reveals to him the secret of the great wealth hidden in the Island of Monte-Cristo. Edmond is able to make a dramatic escape, substituting himself for the Abbé’s dead body, which—enclosed in a bag—is thrown into the sea. The transformation of Edmond into the Count of Monte-Cristo begins.
Now wealthy, the Count is able to make those whose denunciations condemned him to prison suffer for their evil slander. Each of them will be subjected to a series of imaginative punishments, as the setting of the novel moves from Rome and the Mediterranean to Paris and its surroundings. The ingenious plots involve concealment and revelation, sign language, use of poisonous herbs, and all manner of other things. But beyond the exciting narrative, Dumas focuses on the corrupt financial, political, and judicial world of France at the time of the royal restoration, and on the marginal figures, such as convicts, that infiltrate it.
Finally, the Count wonders if his program of retribution has not led him to usurp God’s power in order to see justice done. This apparently fantastic and passionate tale of revenge is a historical narrative in the manner of Sir Walter Scott; that is, one that is not wholly accurate. Unfolding gradually, The Count of Monte-Cristo offers an unusual reflection on happiness and justice, omnipotence, and the sometimes fatal haunting return of the past. CS
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Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Lifespan | b. 1816 (England), d. 1855
First Published | 1847
First Published by | Smith, Elder & Co. (London)
Pseudonym | Currer Bell
This is the first page of the original manuscript of Jane Eyr
e, which was published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.
“Reader, I married him.”
Charlotte Brontë’s first published novel tells a story common to her later novel, Villette, of a young woman who must struggle for survival, and subsequently fulfillment, without the support of money, family, or obvious class privilege. The orphaned Jane is caught between two often conflicting sets of impulses. On the one hand, she is stoical, self-effacing, and self-sacrificial. On the other, she is a passionate, independently minded, and dissenting character, rebellious in the face of injustice, which seems to confront her everywhere. As a child, Jane Eyre suffers first as the ward of her aunt, the wealthy Mrs. Reed, and her abusive family, then under the cruelly oppressive regime at Lowood School, where Mrs. Reed finally sends her. As a young governess at Thornfield Hall, questions of class thwart her course toward true love with the Byronic Mr. Rochester, with whom she has forged a profound connection while caring for his illegitimate daughter.
Class, however, is less of a barrier to their union—and both characters are in any case contemptuous of its dictates—than the fact that Mr. Rochester already has a wife. She is the infamous madwoman imprisoned in the attic (the Creole Bertha Mason from Spanish Town, Jamaica, whose story is imaginatively reconstructed by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea). Bertha’s plight has been seen to offer a counterpoint to Jane’s, as well as raising questions about the representation of women in nineteenth-century fiction. Strong elements of coincidence and wish fulfillment lead ultimately to the resolution of the central romantic plot, but Jane Eyre still speaks powerfully for the plight of intelligent and aspiring women in the stiflingly patriarchal context of Victorian Britain. ST