Although now considered by some critics to be Svevo’s great masterpiece and often regarded as being a more consummate and balanced work than The Confessions of Zeno, this novel was a failure when it was first published. Written in a simple, sometimes clumsy language that is a mixture of old-fashioned vocabulary and dialect expressions (Svevo learned Italian as his second language), it passed almost completely unnoticed before its “rediscovery” decades later. Characterized by a deep humanity, as well as by its humor, and profound psychological insight, As a Man Grows Older (the English title was the suggestion of Svevo’s friend and admirer James Joyce) is a brilliant study of hopeless love and hapless indecision. LB
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1800s
Dom Casmurro
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Lifespan | b. 1839 (Brazil), d. 1908
First Published | 1899
First Published by | H. Garnier (Rio de Janeiro)
Founder of | Brazilian Academy of Letters
By the time Machado de Assis wrote Dom Casmurro, he was the acknowledged master of Brazilian literature, who had been teasing his respectable public with a subtly hostile depiction of their vices and hypocrisies for more than three decades. This funny, innovative, disturbing novel is the consummation of his idiosyncratic art.
The novel’s eponymous hero and narrator is an elderly man telling his life story. He is building a house like the one in which he grew up, and his narrative has a similar function: to join the beginning of his life satisfyingly to its end. But the reader becomes aware that the missing middle of his existence poses some serious problems. The focus of the story is supposedly the narrator’s love for Capitu, the adored childhood sweetheart whom he marries and who bears his son. Gradually, though, Capitu begins to appear as a monster of infidelity, the focus of her husband’s jealousy.
Dom Casmurro is the most unreliable of narrators. Insinuating and confiding, he addresses his readers directly at every turn, at one moment begging them to believe his every word, at the next admitting to yawning lapses of memory. At times, Dom Casmurro imagines his reader tossing the book away in boredom or disgust. But Machado knows the hypnotic power of his own creation. Hooked by that sly, elusive conversational voice, readers may throw the book down, but they will always pick it up again. RegG
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1800s
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Lifespan | b. 1851 (U.S.), d. 1904
First Published | 1899
First Published by | H. S. Stone & Co. (Chicago)
Given Name | Katherine O’Flaherty
The Awakening was initially met with condemnation and outrage, forcing its author into financial crisis and literary obscurity. Coming back from this apparent literary death-at-birth, the effects of this novel live on, inveterate and relentless. Now widely read, The Awakening is critically acclaimed as an American version of Madame Bovary. When Edna Pontellier finds her position as young wife and mother in New Orleans unbearably stifling, her refusal to go by the laws and mores of society drives her up against a world at once disapproving and uncannily precognizant of her struggles, in a provoking and often progressive critique of marriage and motherhood in Creole society.
Chopin provides a startling account of what it might mean to “awaken” into a better understanding of one’s position. The novel invites us to wonder if it might not be better to carry on “sleeping” through life, as well as dealing with the complicated ways in which different kinds of “production” and “destruction” merge with one another. Chopin’s subject matter and observations are engrossing and, in many respects, ahead of their time. But what is most remarkable about The Awakening is the way in which it forces us to think about the very notion of time, of being ahead or outside of one’s time, and of the time of reading. Reading, like awakening, is identified with a strange present; here the reader is left uncertain whether the awakening is still happening or, perhaps, has not yet begun. JLSJ
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1800s
The Stechlin
Theodor Fontane
Lifespan | b. 1819 (Germany), d. 1898
First Published | 1899
First Published by | F. Fontane & Co. (Berlin)
Original Title | Der Stechlin
“Books have a sense of honor. If they are lent out, they will not come back.”
Theodor Fontane, 1895
“In the end, an old person dies, and two young people get married; that’s about all that happens over five hundred pages”. This is Theodor Fontane’s own laconic comment on the novel of his old age. In contrast to Effi Briest’s intricate psychological motivation, there is a new type of realism, where a technique of extensive dialogue is used to characterize a society on the brink of profound changes.
The old person is Major Dubslav, called “the Stechlin,” owner of a castle as well as lake Stechlin—the latter is, according to myth, said to boil whenever a major catastrophic event occurs anywhere in the world. The two young people are Woldemar, the Stechlin’s son, and Armgard, the slightly colorless sister of the brilliant and lively Melusine. The Stechlin, warm, humane, and skeptical toward radicalism of any kind, is persuaded to stand as Conservative candidate for the Reichstag, though his phlegmatic approach to politics means that he is easily defeated by his Social Democrat rival. As the crumbling of the old elites, makes it necessary for the relationship between individual and society to be redefined, the Stechlin welcomes the changing times, even though the approach of democracy will do away with the privilege of those such as himself. It is left to Melusine, who shares the name of the seductive water fairy of legend, to point out the connection between the lake, so mysteriously linked to the rest of the world, and the importance of keeping in touch with a changing world. MM
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1800s
Eclipse of the Crescent Moon
Géza Gárdonyi
Lifespan | b. 1863 (Hungary), d. 1922
First Published | 1899
First Published by | Légrády (Budapest)
Original Title | Egri csillagok
A compulsory text in Hungarian high schools until this day and re-read by many throughout adulthood, Eclipse of the Crescent Moon was voted the nation’s favorite book in a 2005 survey. Set in the years following the Hungarians’ defeat by the Turks at the Battle of Mohács (1526), the novel interweaves meticulously researched historical detail with romance, adventure, and skullduggery, not to mention fictionalized events from the author’s life, into a masterpiece of patriotic prose.
The novel opens in 1533 with our heroes Gergely Bornemissza, an orphan boy, and Éva Cecey, the daughter of a wealthy family, frolicking in a stream. Kidnapped by Yumurdjak, a one-eyed Turk, they escape capture and return to defend their village. Gergely’s strategic command and skill with explosive devices bring him under the wing of the nobleman Bálint Török but later land him in jail, while his love for Éva takes them both to Constantinople incognito, to free Török from the Sultan’s imprisonment. Following the siege of Eger in 1552, in which the people of the city successfully fought off the numerically far superior Turks, Gergely and Éva are reunited together with their son.
Gárdonyi’s research took him from Vienna to Constantinople. His grave lies inside the fortress of Eger, honored for his unforgettable narrative of one of Hungary’s battles to remain free. GJ
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1800s
Some Experiences of an Irish R. M.
Somerville and Ross
Lifespan (Somerville) | b. 1858 (Greece), d. 1949 (Ire)
Lifespan (Ross) | b. 1862 (Ireland), d. 1915
First Published | 1899
First Published by | Longmans & Co. (London)
A series of comic tales of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish life, dealing largely with hunting, shooting, and horse riding, might seem unlikely to have many attractions for readers t
oday. The poorer characters play minor roles, while the foreground is occupied by the elite and their hangers-on. The authors were members of the landowning “Ascendancy,” and the artifices and conventions of the storytelling reflect the angle, and the limits, of their vision. The fictitious narrator, Major Sinclair Yeates, is resident magistrate at Skebawn. Being “of Irish extraction,” Yeates is not quite English—but he is certainly not Irish. We hear the wit and music of English as it was spoken in rural Ireland, and west Cork is pleasantly evoked in descriptions of rivers, coasts, bogs, and fields.
One of the best stories among these witty, well-observed tales, “Lisheen Races, Second-hand,” recounts the visit to Skebawn of Yeates’s college friend Leigh Kelway, an Englishman and a well-intentioned bore. When Yeates takes him to some “typical country races,” Kelway (much to the reader’s delight) endures countless indignities and disasters, culminating in a collision with a mail coach. Yeates will always remain an outsider in Cork, but he knows and loves it as a foreigner in a way that Kelway never can. MR
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1900s
Contents
Sandokan: The Tigers of Mompracem
Sister Carrie
None but the Brave
Kim
Buddenbrooks
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Heart of Darkness
The Wings of the Dove
The Immoralist
The Ambassadors
The Riddle of the Sands
The Call of the Wild
Memoirs of my Nervous Illness
The Way of All Flesh
Hadrian the Seventh
Nostromo
The House of Mirth
Professor Unrat
Solitude
Young Törless
The Forsyte Saga
The Jungle
The Secret Agent
Mother
The House on the Borderland
The Old Wives’ Tale
The Inferno
A Room with a View
Strait is the Gate
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Howards End
Impressions of Africa
Fantômas
Ethan Frome
The Charwoman’s Daughter
Death in Venice
Sons and Lovers
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Platero and I
Tarzan of the Apes
Locus Solus
Kokoro
The Thirty-Nine Steps
The Rainbow
Of Human Bondage
The Good Soldier
Rashomon
Under Fire
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Underdogs
Pallieter
Home and the World
Growth of the Soil
The Return of the Soldier
Tarr
The Storm of Steel
Women in Love
Main Street
The Age of Innocence
Crome Yellow
Life of Christ
Ulysses
Babbitt
Claudine’s House
Life and Death of Harriett Frean
The Forest of the Hanged
Siddhartha
The Enormous Room
Kristin Lavransdatter
Amok
The Devil in the Flesh
Zeno’s Conscience
A Passage to India
We
The Magic Mountain
The Green Hat
The New World
The Professor’s House
The Artamonov Business
The Trial
The Counterfeiters
The Great Gatsby
Mrs. Dalloway
Chaka the Zulu
The Making of Americans
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
One, None and a Hundred Thousand
Under Satan’s Sun
The Good Soldier Švejk
Alberta and Jacob
The Castle
Blindness
The Sun Also Rises
Amerika
The Case of Sergeant Grischa
Tarka the Otter
To the Lighthouse
Remembrance of Things Past
Steppenwolf
Nadja
Quicksand
Decline and Fall
Some Prefer Nettles
Parade’s End
The Well of Loneliness
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Orlando
Story of the Eye
Retreat Without Song
Les Enfants Terribles
Berlin Alexanderplatz
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Time of Indifference
Living
I Thought of Daisy
A Farewell to Arms
Passing
Look Homeward, Angel
The Maltese Falcon
Her Privates We
The Apes of God
Monica
Insatiability
The Waves
To the North
The Thin Man
Journey to the End of the Night
The Return of Philip Latinowicz
The Radetzky March
The Forbidden Realm
Cold Comfort Farm
Brave New World
Vipers’ Tangle
The Man Without Qualities
Cheese
Man’s Fate
A Day Off
Testament of Youth
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Murder Must Advertise
Miss Lonelyhearts
Call it Sleep
The Street of Crocodiles
Thank You, Jeeves
Tender is the Night
Tropic of Cancer
The Postman Always Rings Twice
On the Heights of Despair
The Bells of Basel
The Nine Tailors
Auto-da-Fé
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
The Last of Mr. Norris
Untouchable
Independent People
Nightwood
At the Mountains of Madness
Absalom, Absalom!
War with the Newts
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Gone with the Wind
The Thinking Reed
Eyeless in Gaza
Summer Will Show
Rickshaw Boy
Out of Africa
In Parenthesis
Ferdydurke
The Blind Owl
The Hobbit
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Of Mice and Men
Murphy
U.S.A.
Brighton Rock
Cause for Alarm
Alamut
Rebecca
Nausea
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
On the Edge of Reason
The Big Sleep
Goodbye to Berlin
The Grapes of Wrath
Good Morning, Midnight
At Swim-Two-Birds
Finnegans Wake
Native Son
The Tartar Steppe
The Power and the Glory
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Man Who Loved Children
Broad and Alien is the World
The Living and the Dead
The Harvesters
Conversations in Sicily
The Outsider
Embers
Chess Story
The Glass Bead Game
Joseph and His Brothers
The Little Prince
Dangling Man
The Razor’s Edge
Transit
Pippi Longstocking
Loving
Animal Farm
The Bridge on the Drina
Christ Stopped at Eboli
Arcanum 17
Brideshead Revisited
Bosnian Chronicle
The Tin Flute
Andrea
The Death of Virgil
Titus Groan
Zorba the Greek
Back
House in the Uplands
The Path to the Nest of Spiders
Under the Volcano
If This Is a Man
Exercises in Style
The Plague
Doctor Faustus
Midaq Alley
Froth on the Daydream
Journey to the Alcarria
Ashes and Diamonds
Disobedience
All About H. Hatterr
Cry, the Beloved Country
In the Heart of the Seas
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Death Sentence
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Man with the Golden Arm
Kingdom of This World
The Heat of the Day
Love in a Cold Climate
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played
I, Robot
The Grass is Singing
A Town Like Alice
The Moon and the Bonfires
Gormenghast
The 13 Clocks
The Labyrinth of Solitude
The Abbot C
The Guiltless
Barabbas
The End of the Affair
Molloy
The Rebel
The Catcher in the Rye
The Opposing Shore
Foundation
Malone Dies
Day of the Triffids
Memoirs of Hadrian
The Hive
Wise Blood
The Old Man and the Sea
Invisible Man
The Judge and His Hangman
Excellent Women
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 27