Gustave Flaubert, 1857
Sentimental Education is surely one of the greatest novels yet written, possibly even the greatest triumph in literary realism ever accomplished. It is a novelist’s novel: though at first condemned as immoral by the Parisian reviewers on its publication in 1869, it was greatly admired by younger aspiring novelists. In the early twentieth century it stood as the measure to be matched by James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Gustave Flaubert was a tremendous laborer in his craft, obsessively preoccupied with the exactitude of every detail of social observation, as well as with literary style. He was the mythical master novelist, devoted beyond comprehension—the modern novelist, writing to a commercially imposed deadline, is the complete antithesis.
Sentimental Education follows Frédéric Moreau, an idle young man living on a grand inheritance. His ambitions and principles are discarded and dimmed in a thrillingly observed satire on the mentality of affluent consumers in a mid-nineteenth-century Paris defined by its ubiquitous exhibition of luxury goods and attitudes. But this is also the Paris of the July revolution of 1848. Frédéric drifts through the uprising, scintillated by death on the barricades as much as he is by a proprietorial relationship with a courtesan chosen to help him forget his true passion for another man’s wife. The novel is at once gigantic in its historical perception, and minutely attentive to the slow suffocation of emotional and political idealism in a single heart. KS
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1800s
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Lifespan | b. 1828 (Russia), d. 1910
First Serialized | 1865–1869, in Russkii Vestnik
First Published | 1869, by M. N. Katkov (Moscow)
Original Title | Voyna i mir
“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyse it by encumbering it with remedies.”
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is one of those few texts—James Joyce’s Ulysses is another—that are too often read as some kind of endurance test or rite of passage, only to be either abandoned halfway or displayed as a shelf-bound trophy, never to be touched again. It is indeed very long, but it is a novel that abundantly repays close attention and re-reading. Like the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky, who was greatly influenced by Tolstoy, once you enter into his Russia, you will not want to leave: and in this sense, the length of the text becomes a virtue, since there is simply more of it to read.
Based primarily on the members of two prominent families, the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs, War and Peace uses their individual stories to portray Russia on the brink of an apocalyptic conflict with Napoleon Bonaparte’s France. Events swiftly move the central characters toward this inevitable confrontation. No other writer surpasses Tolstoy in the scale of his epic vision, which encompasses the mood of whole cities, the movement of armies, and the sense of foreboding afflicting an entire society. The skirmishes and battles are represented with astonishing immediacy, all crafted from interlinked individual perspectives. The interconnected nature of the personal and the political, and of the intimate and the epic, are masterfully explored. As Tolstoy examines his characters’ emotional reactions to the rapidly changing circumstances in which they find themselves, he uses them to represent Russian society’s responses to the demands of both war and peace. One final note: if you are going to read War and Peace, then opt for an unabridged version. Tolstoy may be unjustly famed for his ability to digress, but to compromise the unity of the full version is to undermine the reading experience. MD
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1800s
King Lear of the Steppes
Ivan Turgenev
Lifespan | b. 1818 (Russia), d. 1883 (France)
First Published | 1870 (Russia)
Original Title | Stepnoy korol Lir
Original Language | Russian
King Lear of the Steppes, a little-known novella, is Ivan Turgenev’s literary appropriation of Shakespeare. It begins, in a narrative framing device, with a group of old friends discussing types of people they have known: everyone has met a Hamlet; someone once knew a potential Macbeth. But one speaker grabs their attention by saying that he once knew a King Lear—as though this were the ultimate impossibility and the ultimate storytelling challenge.
Turgenev’s Lear, Martin Petrovich Harlov, is a plain-speaking, aristocratic country landowner who commands fear and respect from his peasants. He is mythically enormous, with a back that is “two yards long,” and “as Russian as Russian could be.” Among the symptoms of his Russianness are his bouts of superstitious gloom; he spends hours in his study pondering his mortality. This belief that death is imminent is his motive for dividing his estate between his two daughters; his only requirement for himself being that they look after him in his dotage. He is, of course, betrayed by both daughters and their scheming husbands, first manipulated and cowed, then driven out into the night.
The story represents the ideal mythic vehicle for Turgenev’s visual imagination, and it enables him to experiment with a narrative that fluently combines onstage set pieces with the sense of Russian history progressing behind the scenes. DSoa
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1800s
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Lewis Carroll
Lifespan | b. 1832 (England), d. 1898
First Published | 1871
First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (London)
Given Name | Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
In 1871, six years after Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll returned to the Alice character with a new idea: to follow her into the world behind the mirror. Having recently taught the real Alice (Liddell) how to play chess, he used the game as a narrative device. The Looking Glass world is set out like a chessboard; Alice begins as a pawn and becomes a queen, with each chapter of the story dedicated to a move toward this end. As events progress, a chess problem, shown in a diagram at the start of the book, is solved correctly.
More schematic than Wonderland, this novel is nevertheless equally full of memorable characters and ideas, many of which involve contradiction and inversion. In order to get anywhere in this topsy-turvy place, Alice must walk in the opposite direction. Memory does not only go “backward”; the White Queen remembers things “that happened the week after next.” We meet the “Contrariwise” twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Language also seems slippery, and meaning is elusive. Most famously, in the poem “Jabberwocky,” we find Carroll’s “portmanteau words,” running together associations and meanings: “frumious,” “mimsy,” “slithy,” and “brillig,” among many others. DH
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Middlemarch
George Eliot
Lifespan | b. 1819 (England), d. 1880
First Published | 1871–1872, by Blackwood & Sons
Full Title | Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life
Given Name | Mary Ann Evans
“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbours.”
In Middlemarch, George Eliot focuses on the minutiae of ordinary lives led in a provincial English town, mapping in intricate detail the interior worlds of her many characters as a scientist might examine the tiny, interconnecting veins of a leaf through the lens of a microscope. It is through such insight and precision that Eliot achieves the measured realism for which Middlemarch is acclaimed, considered at the time of its publication, as it is today, to be one of the greatest English novels.
Middlemarch’s impassioned heroine, Dorothea, is, like Lydgate—the young doctor whose story connects in vital ways with her own—an idealist. Convinced that a form of heroism can be found in even the smallest of gestures, she mistakes her first husband’s intellectual pursuits for a work of such grandiose proportions. But Mr. Causabon’s deathly project aspires to reduce to a single, simplifi
ed principle the Darwinian diversity that constitutes the very life force of the novel.
One of Middlemarch’s central concerns is the way in which women adapt to the roles they have been allotted by society. We feel for Dorothea, painfully aware of her lack of education and financial dependency, as she strives bravely for heroism while her sister tinkles away contentedly on the piano. Struggling with their failings and wrong choices, trying to live well and to love well, the stories of Dorothea and Lydgate, interwoven with so many others, are at once intensely moving and acutely real. Eliot deftly spins her web of densely plotted suspense, and manages to lay bare the basic motivations of her characters with such compassion and understanding that we find ourselves soon caught up in the narrative, as their overlapping lives become entwined with ours. KB
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Spring Torrents
Ivan Turgenev
Lifespan | b. 1818 (Russia), d. 1883 (France)
First Published | 1872 (Russia)
Original Title | Veshniye vody
Original Language | Russian
“To desire and expect nothing for oneself . . . is genuine holiness.”
Ivan Turgenev, 1862
The tone of Spring Torrents is perfectly poised between bitter regret for youth’s lost passions and ironic awareness of their largely illusory quality. Dreading the approach of old age and the end of his rather aimless life, Dimitry Sanin finds “a tiny garnet cross” packed away in a drawer of his desk. The discovery evokes the wonderful, shameful story of his double love affair thirty years ago, when he was in Frankfurt, on his way back from the Grand Tour.
His intimate memories return in a series of vivid tableaux. First he recalls falling in love with Gemma, the daughter of an Italian pastry cook, who has a devoted brother and protective widowed mother, an operatically loyal family servant, Pantaleone, and a dull German fiancé. Sanin fights a ridiculous duel with an officer who has spoken insultingly about Gemma, displaces the dull fiancé, and even overcomes the mother’s doubts. All seems set for a happy ending. But then, seeking a buyer for his estate to raise money for the wedding, Sanin falls into the company of decadent Russians: an old school friend, Polozov, and his magical, dominant wife, Maria Nikolaevna. Soon Maria, riding some way ahead of Sanin, is leading him deep into the woods: “She moved forward imperiously, and he followed, obedient and submissive, drained of every spark of will and with his heart in his mouth.”
Sanin is a commonplace man, and his romance, with its ingenuous virgin and experienced femme fatale, replays a familiar tale. Turgenev’s theatrical treatment brings to the foreground the affair’s predictable and almost absurd aspect. But his precise, lucid, and sympathetic observation makes us aware at the same time that to Sanin, who is young, this is intolerably real, and that nothing in his later life will count for anything in comparison. MR
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1800s
Erewhon
Samuel Butler
Lifespan | b. 1835 (England), d. 1902
First Published | 1872
First Published by | Trübner & Co. (London)
Full Title | Erewhon; or, Over the Range
“When I die at any rate I shall do so in the full and certain hope that there will be no resurrection, but that death will give me quittance in full.”
Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912
As with many good science fiction texts, particularly utopian ones, Erewhon is more a comment on its own time that goes on to reflect prophetically on events of the future, than a genuinely futuristic text. Like More’s “no place” of Utopia, Erewhon’s reversed “nowhere” is a reflection on social unease and political development in the Victorian era, and its meditations on extreme and often contradictory social practices have as much currency today as they did then. As an allegory, Erewhon is at once reflective and disturbing, more so perhaps, as its dominant fears still lie at the heart of contemporary unease.
Butler’s traveler Higgs finds himself in the world of Erewhon where everything is turned on its head. No machines are allowed—it is feared they will take over the world, a common science fiction theme. Criminals are sent to hospitals to recover from their misdeeds, education consists of studying anything as long as it has no relevance, and the sick are incarcerated.
Erewhon is a book that reflects directly on the implications of Darwinism, registering the shock that followed the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) among the reading public. Erewhon transposes these evolutionary ideas into a social context, once again identifying them with fear and distrust. Butler himself was profoundly influenced by Darwin’s text, but, like many science fiction writers, also saw the potential for development of such themes along unsettling lines. EMcCS
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1800s
The Devils
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Lifespan | b. 1821 (Russia), d. 1881
First Published | 1872 (Russia)
Original Title | Besy
Original Language | Russian
Though The Devils is quite possibly the most violent of Dostoevsky’s novels, it also brims with buffoonery and trenchant social satire. Set in the late 1860s, the story concerns the fortunes of a group of insurgents committed to unleashing anarchy in Russia. As a series of betrayals inevitably consumes the group, the novel portrays the catastrophic consequences that can ensue from abstract political theorizing.
The orgy of destruction depicted in the closing pages has often been cited as an example of the author’s proneness to sensationalism. As its title suggests, however, this is a novel about purgation, and in the Dostoevskian universe, the recuperation of society often comes at a heavy price. For example, the life is spared of the most dangerous character of the story, Peter Verhovensky (a psychopath who was loosely based on the ringleader of the so-called Nechaevists brought to trial in Russia). The fact that the innocent sometimes have to be sacrificed in order to regenerate society is only one of a series of provocative moral positions taken up by the novel.
The Dionysian frenzy that grips the action not only erases any easy understanding of the relationship between good and evil, it also points to the essential fragility of a society increasingly estranged from the moral certainties of the church. Within a generation Russia would surrender to convulsive social change; the novel offers a prescient and terrifying glimpse into the future of a society that has collectively lost its soul. VA
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In a Glass Darkly
Sheridan Le Fanu
Lifespan | b. 1814 (Ireland), d. 1873
First Published | 1872
First Published by | R. Bentley (London)
Original Language | English
These five short stories of malign and supernatural forces were originally brought out in periodicals, but were later published together, united by the guiding narrative of the “German physician” Martin Hesselius, from whose casebooks the tales are drawn. His function, and hence that of the collection as a novel, could be regarded as regulative, bringing coherence and clarity—“the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration”—to the darkness he observes.
If this truly is Sheridan Le Fanu’s intention in this work, we must regard the book as a failure. Nobody is cured, no theory identified, no line of meaning uncovered. The stories are united instead by the lurid and persistent, figures of the preying imagination. These range from the avenging victims of a cruel judge to a small, black monkey of “unfathomable malignity,” maddeningly singing through the head of the clergyman he tracks and corrupts. Whatever their origin, they all follow their targets with inexplicable determination. Yet they also have the power exemplified by the vampiric lesbian seductress Carmilla, perhaps the book’s most memorable visitant. A specter of the body, not the soul, she absorbs the tale’s narrator with “gloating eyes” that combine pleasure and hatred, physical excitement and disgust in equal mea
sure. In confronting us with our own hitherto unapprehended fears and desires, Le Fanu shows these apparitions of ourselves to be the most modern, and enduring, of ghosts. DT
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Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne
Lifespan | b. 1828 (France), d. 1905
First Published | 1873
First Published by | P. J. Hetzel (Paris)
Original Title | Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours
This dramatic cover image for Verne’s novel was created by illustrator Louis Dumont for the first English edition in 1876.
Around the World in Eighty Days won Jules Verne worldwide renown, and was a fantastic success for the times, selling 108,000 copies, with translations into English, Russian, Italian, and Spanish as soon as it was published. The book’s new subject was bound to cause a great sensation: making a bet with the members of the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg, a rich British eccentric who lives as a recluse, lays his entire wealth as a wager that he can go around the world in eighty days.
Accompanied by his valet, Passepartout, he sets out on a journey that first takes him to Suez, and on to meet a series of characters—cruel Hindus, a company of Japanese acrobats, Sioux Indians, and so on. Much of the richness and poetry of the novel depends on the antagonism between the characters Fogg and Passepartout. The geometric and impassive Phileas Fogg, a man of the “fog,” who does everything as regularly as clockwork, and for whom the world is reduced to twenty-four time zones, contrasts with the emotive and lively Passepartout, who is forever in sympathy with places and people whom he meets. Yet numerous accidents and unpredictable events will finally get the better of the bachelor’s little quirks. JD
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 20