1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 25
1800s
Down There
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Lifespan | b. 1848 (France), d. 1907
First Published | 1891, by Tresse & Stock (Paris)
UK Title | The Damned
Original Title | Là Bas
A cynical aesthete of the late nineteenth-century “decadence,” Joris-Karl Huysmans was inexorably led by his disgust at bourgeois materialism to an interest in spiritual life and the occult. Down There, his most commercially successful novel, handles the sensational topic of satanism with a light, sardonic touch, while sparing the reader none of its horrors or vileness. The result is a multilayered work rich in imagination and humor, abstruse information, and lurid detail. Durtal, the author’s alter ego, is researching a book about Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century “Bluebeard,” satanic criminal and companion of the saintly Joan of Arc. This leads him to investigate at first hand the cult of satanism in contemporary Paris. Gilles’s tortured search for spiritual powers is contrasted with the vulgarity of a Parisian black mass at which society ladies degrade themselves with the sinister Canon Docre.
Despite the dark material, there is plentiful humor, especially in descriptions of the indignities and everyday miseries of Durtal’s bachelor existence. But Gilles’s descent into horror at his chateau in Brittany ultimately dominates the book. A startling passage in which the Breton countryside is obscenely eroticized by Gilles’s sex-obsessed gaze, prefigures Dali and Surrealism. For Huysmans, satanism was a step on the road to religious belief. Down There ends with Durtal failing to commit to Catholicism, but the author himself embraced the monastic life before his death in 1907. RegG
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1800s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Lifespan | b. 1840 (England), d. 1928
First Published | 1891, by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co.
Full Title | Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented
Tess of the D'Urbervilles is as famous for its heroine as for its notoriously tragic plot. Originally shunned by critics upon its publication in 1891 because of “immorality,” the novel traces the difficult life of Tess Durbeyfield, whose victimization at the hands of men eventually leads to her horrific downfall. Tess spares the reader none of the bitterness inherent in English country life, and Hardy’s often romanticized love for the landscape of Wessex is balanced by the novel’s grimly realistic depiction of social injustice.
When Tess’s father discovers that his own family, the Durbeyfields, are related to a prominent local dynasty, he agrees that his daughter should contact the heir, Alec D’Urberville, with tragic results. He seduces her, and soon abandons her, leaving her an unmarried single mother. While she briefly finds happiness with another man, the seemingly upright Angel Clare, he too rejects her upon hearing of her sexual past, leaving her in poverty and misery. Forced back into the arms of Alec, Tess must sacrifice her personal happiness for economic survival, but when her feelings of injustice overwhelm her in a moment of passion, the consequences are tragic.
In Tess, Hardy presents a world in which the human spirit is battered down by the forces, not of fate, but of social hierarchy. Tess’s eventual death, one of the most famous in literature, is a direct result of human cruelty and as such represents one of the most moving indictments of the lives of nineteenth-century English women in all of literature. AB
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1800s
Gösta Berling’s Saga
Selma Lagerlöf
Lifespan | b. 1858 (Sweden), d. 1940
First Published | 1891, by Hellberg (Stockholm)
Original Title | Ur Gösta Berlings Saga: Berättelse från det gamla Värmland
“For what is a man’s soul but a flame? It flickers in and around the body of a man as does the flame around a rough log.”
Selma Lagerlöf
In 1909, Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although written at the dawn of the modern era, her Gösta Berling’s Saga, steeped in the local lore and legend of the mountainous and sparsely populated province of Värmland in the Swedish midwest, represents a return to traditional storytelling about glorious manor houses, beautiful women, gallant men, and extraordinary and romantic adventures.
In the bachelors’ wing at Ekeby Manor, the generous and hospitable major’s wife gives refuge to twelve homeless “cavaliers” led by Gösta Berling, a defrocked priest who is also a handsome and romantic Don Juan. These men represent old-fashioned, traditional values of chivalry and romance, but are also weak characters, dangerously devoted to bohemian living and reckless revelry. In a pact with the evil Sintram, the devil’s local representative, the major’s wife is evicted and the cavaliers take over Ekeby for a year, threatening to run it to rack and ruin. Fantastic events take place, and the Great Ball at Ekeby, in particular, is a classic episode of eventful drama.
The wish to recapture a golden age is offset by an interest in the nature of memory and reality. The novel is written in an old-fashioned, allegorical, and slightly mannered style, but the beginning, where the protagonist’s state of mind and his dependence on the bottle is described, anticipates the modern novel in its intense focus on the human mind. UD
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1800s
New Grub Street
George Gissing
Lifespan | b. 1857 (England), d. 1903 (France)
First Published | 1891
First Published by | Smith, Elder & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
Among the earliest and best novels about the business of authorship, New Grub Street draws a map of the late-Victorian publishing industry. George Gissing highlights the split between literary writing and popular journalism, typified in magazines such as the newly launched Tit-Bits, anticipating a hundred years of subsequent debate about art and mass culture. He gives a coolly realistic appraisal of the market, but still affirms that fiction can express its own kind of truth. Among a memorable, psychologically convincing cast of characters, the most fully drawn is Edwin Reardon, whose struggles to complete his novel Margaret Home are shown in detail. Desperate work gets the book finished, but it is feeble and full of padding, and Reardon, marked for failure, dreads seeing it reviewed. Jasper Milvain, by contrast, a shrewd, breezily assured literary operative with no aesthetic scruples, prospers. Harold Biffen is a garret-dwelling perfectionist who lives on bread and dripping. Biffen’s novel Mr. Bailey, Grocer, a hyperrealist study of “ignobly decent” everyday life, is Gissing’s intriguing guess at what twentieth-century avant-garde fiction might be like. Minor characters include, among others, the irascible Alfred Yule and his daughter, Marian.
Gissing was a cannier author than Reardon or Biffen, and a more serious writer than Milvain. New Grub Street, commercially and artistically his most successful book, shows that good fiction sometimes thrives in the marketplace. MR
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1800s
News from Nowhere
William Morris
Lifespan | b. 1834 (England), d. 1896
First Published | 1891, by Reeves & Turner (London)
Full Title | News from Nowhere; or, an Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from a Utopian Romance
The art nouveau cover of an issue of Art Journal magazine devoted to William Morris reflects his wide-ranging interests.
As prophecy, William Morris’s dream of a utopian future, in which there is no private property, no government, no legal system, no penal system, and no formal education, can seem comically unlikely. Morris imagines a future London that has been reforested, and in which the clothes, the crockery, the buildings, and the bridges have all been designed by William Morris. The ideal that Morris is imagining here belongs much less to the future than it does to a specifically nineteenth-century fantasy steeped in an agrarian past. But the value of this dream is not found in its re
presentation of an imagined future, so much as in its characterization of the limits of contemporary political imagination. Morris’s vision of a life that is not governed by an oppressive state-apparatus brings a sharp, satirical focus to bear on the irrationality and the contradictions of his own time, and indeed present-day political conditions. Morris leads us to see with a new clarity the rank injustices that are produced by an unequal distribution of wealth.
The novel’s bright, witty prose makes it just as much an entertaining tale as it is a socialist manifesto. It is also surprisingly sensual. An image of social justice is here entwined with an erotic delight in the possibilities of human beauty. PB
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1800s
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Lifespan | b. 1859 (Scotland), d. 1930 (England)
First Published | 1892
First Published by | G. Newnes (London)
Original Language | English
Illustrator Sydney Paget was responsible for establishing the original appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
Between 1891 and 1893 twenty-four of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were published in The Strand, of which the first twelve were republished in book form as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
“To Sherlock Holmes she is always ’the woman.’” So begins “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first story in the collection. Irene Adler is “the” woman because she is the only person ever to have outwitted Holmes. The King of Bohemia fears that he will be blackmailed by Adler, his former lover, who has kept some compromising love letters and a photograph. However, she manages to turn the tables on the detective, retaining the photograph to ensure her own safety. Other highlights in the collection are the eerie “The Red-Headed League,” where a red-headed man is offered employment by the League as a ruse to keep him occupied while criminals dig a tunnel from the cellar of his premises to a bank. In “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Holmes’s help is enlisted to solve the mystery of the disappearance of Mr. Neville St. Clair. His wife has seen him at a window in a rougher part of town, but the police are unable to find anyone but a beggar. A number of enigmas follow before Holmes is able to reach a conclusion.
The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in 1887 is particularly interesting in historical terms. For the first time, European cities had proliferated to the point where it was impossible to know more than a small percentage of their inhabitants. Yet the London that features in these stories manages to resist the idea that the city is sublime, that it is too large for any one person to be able to comprehend. Holmes and Watson represent Conan Doyle’s bourgeois remedy to the terrifying and seemingly endless late nineteenth-century expansion of urban and industrial civilization. VC-R
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1800s
Diary of a Nobody
George and Weedon Grossmith
Lifespan (George) | b. 1847 (England), d. 1912
Lifespan (Weedon) | b. 1852 (England), d. 1919
First Serialized | 1892, by Punch magazine (London)
First Published | 1892, by J. W. Arrowsmith (Bristol)
In one of Weedon Grossmith’s original illustrations, Pooter is surprised by the maid while executing an impromptu polka.
“He left the house, slamming the door after him, which nearly broke the fanlight; and I heard him fall over the scraper, which made me feel glad I hadn’t removed it.”
One of the great English comic novels, Diary of a Nobody bridges the world of Dickens to that of Waugh and Wodehouse. Straitlaced London clerk Charles Pooter records his daily life, both in the office and at home in suburban Holloway: a life involving insolent junior employees, his long-suffering wife, Carrie, and the serial amours of his son, Lupin. The masterstroke of the novel is the ironic distance between Pooter’s sense of himself and the world, and his dim recognition that matters might be otherwise; readers will enjoy tracing how events conspire to outwit Pooter’s attempts at maintaining a certain kind of genteel English decorum.
Both Grossmith brothers had strong theatrical connections, and stage comedy certainly influences the Diary’s best set pieces. The more neurotic Pooter becomes about the smallest matters of domestic order, the more life seems to fling banana skins in his path, as when the new boots he buys for a dance send him sliding over the dance floor. Like Dickens’s Micawber, Pooter is a comic figure who transcends his immediate context, largely through the Diary’s surreally funny style; a reader does not need to know much about the 1890s to luxuriate in Pooter’s absurd obsession with red enamel paint, which even leads him to repaint the spines of the family Shakespeare. At the same time, he is a supreme example of anxious Englishness, and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones and John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty might not exist without his example. BT
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1800s
The Viceroys
Federico De Roberto
Lifespan | b. 1861 (Italy), d. 1927
First Published | 1894
First Published by | Galli (Milan)
Original Language | I viceré
“The Viceroys” is the nickname by which the aristocratic Uzeda family is known in Catania, because their forebears were viceroys of Sicily during the era of Spanish government. Their personal history, characterized by ferocious clashes of interests and an irreducible family pride, mirrors around thirty years of the history of Sicily, from the Bourbon period until the unification of Italy.
When the novel was published, it was far from successful. Reasons for this include the decline of verismo—De Roberto applied its principles rigorously, taking such devices as the impersonal narrator and a meticulous observation of facts to their extreme consequences, to the effect of slowing down the narrative rhythm. Also, the novel’s pessimism and deliberately inelegant language had become unfashionable at a time of aestheticism.
Despite all this, The Viceroys is a novel of the first rank for the psychological subtlety of its characterization, the vastness of its scope, and the vividness of its descriptions. The author undertakes a lucid, acute critique of Sicilian society and thus distinguishes his work from other contemporary Sicilian novels. In De Roberto’s narrative there is no room for good sentiments or the elegiac praise of patriarchal life. Its ultimate message, which anticipates Tomasi di Lampedusa’s celebrated novel The Leopard, is that a principle of tragic fatalism inheres in the things and the people of Sicily to the effect that nothing can change. LB
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1800s
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
Lifespan | b. 1840 (England), d. 1928
First Published | 1895
First Published by | Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. (Lon.)
Original Language | English
Jude the Obscure is the angriest and most experimental of Hardy’s novels, preoccupied with themes of desire and displacement. When Jude Fawley leaves rural Marygreen and Alfredston behind him for the spires of Christminster City, a university town, he chooses to walk rather than ride the last four miles. He is physically pacing out the distance he is traveling, a distance only accurately measured in ambition and hope, or in the beautiful enthusiasm of one who knows not the obstacles on the path ahead.
When the stonemason Jude enters the city, he brings with him his class and its history. At first it enriches him; when he reads the monumental architectural pages of the college buildings, he does so through an artisan’s eyes. Gradually, his class works to define limits for his ambition—the letter from the Master of “Biblioll College” warning Jude to remain “in your own sphere” provides one cruelly pragmatic moment of discovery. Jude’s own broken marriage and his unconventional relationship with a free-spirited cousin ends in cruel tragedy, and the nature of Jude’s response is telling.
Interwoven with despair, resentment, anger, and pride is a sense of exile all the more painful for being inarticulate. Forb
idden access to the “world of learning,” yet knowing such a world exists, Jude Fawley is doubly exiled, displaced by his desires from his social roots and hobbled by those roots in achieving his desires. PMcM
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1800s
Effi Briest
Theodor Fontane
Lifespan | b. 1819 (Germany), d. 1898
First Published | 1895
First Published by | F. Fontane & Co. (Berlin)
Original Language | German
Thomas Mann declared Effi Briest among the six most significant novels ever written. Even more powerful testimony to its power comes from Krapp in Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape: “Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again, a page day, with tears again.” Effi Briest is indeed scalding and anyone worried about appearing red-eyed should take appropriate precautions.
Widely thought the finest of Theodor Fontane’s novels, Effi Briest exemplifies the realist novel, combining acute and moving characterizations with a critical portrait of social dynamics. Free of judgmental moralism, the novel—loosely based on a true story—nevertheless focuses its sympathies on the plight of the eponymous Effi, married too young to a much older man. In an otherwise conventional tale of love and adultery, Fontane weaves a beautiful and allusive sense of personal and social tragicomedy. Contrasting nature and culture, the naïvety of Effi shines through the troubling world she inhabits. Worthy of comparison with Eugénie Grandet, Emma Bovary, or Anna Karenina, Effi’s character acts as a vehicle for exploration into the historical and social structure of society. The disruption of Effi’s fragile humanity by the sexual and political undercurrents of the novel’s social critique is particularly subtle. Sensitive to the risks of anything approaching melodrama, this novel, although told directly and with symbolic concentration, is built of oblique hints, acidic tangents, and dramatic ironies. DM