1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  Buck’s adaptation is not just a matter of learning to cope with new situations, but an atavistic rekindling of wild instincts within him. In the most anthropomorphic moments of the book, Buck has visions of men in animal skins cowering by a fire in the dark. These visions make Buck’s transformation seem more than just instinctive. The call of the wild becomes a mystical, spiritual force. CW

  1900s

  Memoirs of my Nervous Illness

  Daniel P. Schreber

  Lifespan | b. 1842 (Germany), d. 1911 (Italy)

  First Published | 1903

  First Published by | Oswald Mutze (Leipzig)

  Original Title | Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken

  Schreber’s description of the world as interpreted by a psychotic mind influenced Sigmund Freud’s formulation of psychoanalysis.

  “The sun has for years spoken with me in human words and . . . reveals herself as . . . the organ of a still higher being.”

  In 1884, Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber, a distinguished judge, suffered the first in a series of mental collapses that would mark his life with psychosis and eventually lead to his permanent committal to a psychiatric hospital. Throughout his trials Schreber kept a diary, which he then, in his more lucid periods, turned into a book of memoirs.

  Because of a rift in the miraculous structure of things, Schreber tells us, he is now the only man left alive and thus has sole attention of an ignorant God, who can neither learn nor understand, and so deals with people as if they were “corpses.” This brutal God wants to “unman” Schreber in order to repopulate the world from his womb. Schreber’s account is as much an autobiographical story written from the margins of madness as a primer in the work of a creative mind unraveling—layer after layer—the fabric of the ordinary world. It does this through a poetic vision that insists on the correspondences between the world and man, who is presented as being at once victim and miracle worker.

  Finally, this work is also a historical document on modernity. Moritz Schreber, Paul’s authoritarian father, was an eminent expert on child-rearing who, among other things, advised ignoring the cries of babies, bathing them in cold water, and touching children as little as possible. The Memoirs are thus a tragic testimony of a whole generation raised in absence of contact, any contact—with psychosis as its only recourse to touch and poetry. IJ

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  1900s

  The Way of All Flesh

  Samuel Butler

  Lifespan | b. 1835 (England), d. 1902

  First Published | 1903

  First Published by | Grant Richards (London)

  Original Language | English

  Most critics of The Way of All Flesh note, with surprise, the savagery of its satirical bite. It is, after all, a thinly veiled autobiography, based on Butler’s relationship with his overbearing father. What’s more, the book was written between 1873 and 1883, when Victorian values of decorum and hierarchy were arguably strongest. All in all, you might expect some restraint.

  Far from it: Butler delights in revealing the self-righteous hypocrisy of those who say they hold traditional values dear. Little wonder he insisted the manuscript remain unpublished until after his death; until 1903, The Way of All Flesh remained locked in a drawer. V. S. Pritchett famously described the book as a time bomb. “One thinks of it lying in Samuel Butler’s desk for thirty years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel.”

  The story follows three generations of the Pontifex family, focusing on the aptly named Ernest. Ernest’s father and grandfather are both prominent clergymen, and it is expected that Ernest will follow suit. However, a crisis of faith sees him abandon this career for an altogether less certain future; his father, who excels in pompous moralizing and little else, is particularly dismayed. Ernest’s attempts to build a new life repeatedly founder—an alcoholic wife, broken marriage, and failed business bring him to near collapse. Despite this, he perseveres and eventually escapes from the malign influence of his past to become a new—and modern—man. PH

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  1900s

  Hadrian the Seventh

  Frederick Rolfe

  Lifespan | b. 1860 (England), d. 1913 (Italy)

  First Published | 1904

  First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)

  Original Title | Hadrian The Seventh: A Romance

  Frederick Rolfe shortened his first name to “Fr” because he wished to be thought a priest; in this novel, he imagines himself appointed Pope. Hadrian is the first English Pope since Adrian IV, and he is also a version of Rolfe, an eccentric and penurious Catholic convert. As Pontiff, Hadrian sets Europe to rights, merging religious authority with political skill in a skewed but sometimes grimly prescient way. Pro-German in an anti-German period, the novel imagines a federal Europe under German hegemony. Hadrian is pursued by Jerry Sant, a member of a combined Liblab (Liberal and Labour) political group. Snubbed in his hope that the Pope will support Socialism, Sant shoots Hadrian: “The world sobbed, sighed, wiped its mouth; and experienced extreme relief. . . . He would have been an ideal ruler if He had not ruled.”

  These concluding ironies show that Hadrian is a peculiar but not a deluded fiction. A delightful, innocent, but unmistakably male sensuality, mitigates the novel’s puritan impulse to clean up the Catholic Church. In an episode of unexpected charm, he teaches one of his lithe young guards the key to color photography (then unknown). This hints at the novel’s interest in new technologies, such as the Marconigraph. Above all, Hadrian is obsessed by the new journalism; he regularly consults thirty-seven newspapers, and organizes his political moves to satisfy them. For all its archaism, Hadrian identified significant components of modernity. AMu

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  1900s

  Nostromo

  Joseph Conrad

  Lifespan | b. 1857 (Ukraine), d. 1924 (England)

  First Serialized | 1904, by T. P.’s Weekly

  First Published | 1904, by Harper & Bros. (Lon. & N.Y.)

  Full Title | Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

  Experimental in its shifting perspectives, Nostromo describes the turbulent history of a South American region as it develops through an unstable period of predatory dictatorships to a modern era of democracy and flourishing capitalism. The fictional state of Sulaco fights to secure its secession from Costaguana, becoming an apparently independent state. This brilliantly prophetic novel shows how economic imperialism, led by the United States, proves a mixed blessing in Sulaco.

  Thanks partly to Joseph Conrad’s friendship with R. B. Cunninghame Graham, well-traveled in those regions, and partly to his assiduous reading of memoirs and histories, he was able to confer vivid realism on his fictional Sulaco, despite having visited South America himself only briefly, and twenty years prior. Conrad interweaves large matters with small, political struggles with familial tensions, and the global with the intimate. As we follow the experiences of Nostromo, the foreman of the dock-workers, and of the diversity of people whose lives are connected with his deceptive character, we see the price exacted in human terms by historical evolution. Like Higuerota, the snow-capped mountain that dominates the region, this novel provides “the utmost delicacy of shaded expression and a stupendous magnificence of effect.” CW

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  1900s

  The House of Mirth

  Edith Wharton

  Lifespan | b. 1862 (U.S.), d. 1937 (France)

  First Published | 1905

  First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (London)

  Original Language | English

  Part love story, part social critique, The House of Mirth begins hopefully with a flirtation. Lily Bart, while settling her serious matrimonial sights on a more lucrative target, allows herself the pleasure of an infatuation with Lawrence Selden, a shabbily genteel intellectual. With a lightness of touc
h and arch wit reminiscent of Austen, Edith Wharton creates a heroine at the height of her sexual power: beautiful, fashionable, and well connected.

  While retaining the external elements of a traditional romance, however, Wharton has an altogether less comforting vision to offer. The feminine power that Lily represents is cast as a barrier to intellectual freedom. Lily’s perfection as an object of desire, beautifully imagined in an episode where she displays herself to an enraptured audience as the tableau vivant of a Reynolds painting, is presented as a futile waste of female creativity and becomes, rather than a triumph, an emblem of women’s commodified status.

  The novel’s strength lies in Wharton’s deft control of the versions of Lily as alternately architect of her own destiny and hapless pawn in a society governed by capital, power, and sexual inequality. Lily’s love of surface and luxury is reflected in the fabric of a novel that delights in producing one of fiction’s most enthralling heroines, whose potent mixture of power and powerlessness, poise and vulnerability, breathes life into the very myths it seeks to undermine. HJ

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  1900s

  Professor Unrat

  Heinrich Mann

  Lifespan | b. 1871 (Germany), d. 1955 (Switzerland)

  First Published | 1905, by A. Langen (Munich)

  Original Title | Professor Unrat, oder das Ende eines Tyrannen

  Elder brother of the great German writer Thomas Mann, Heinrich, an equally prolific novelist and essayist, differed from his brother in his commitment to political rather than aesthetic issues. Exiled by the Nazis for his attacks on their militarist-nationalist ideology, he was also a passionate critic of imperial bourgeois capitalism and a staunch supporter of democracy and various forms of socialism. Professor Unrat is his best-known novel, having been successfully adapted for screen, most famously as Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 movie The Blue Angel, with Marlene Dietrich in the lead role, which launched her into international stardom.

  The novel concerns an authoritarian, repressed, socially inept schoolteacher who falls in love with a young dancer named Rosa Frohlich. After an arbitrary meeting, Professor Unrat is soon enthralled by Rosa’s compelling charm, and he determines that no one else shall have anything further to do with her. Unrat’s close association with such a woman scandalizes the small-town community and he loses his job at the school. But he is unperturbed and with Rosa’s help reinvents himself as a high-society player. They establish a successful salon and he delights in watching the downfall of former pupils and enemies, as they lose their fortunes at the gambling table or their reputations in inappropriate liaisons. But the greatest downfall will be Unrat’s own as he gradually learns the full extent of Rosa’s suspect behavior, losing control of his all-consuming rage.

  Professor Unrat is a fascinating examination of the social values of imperial Germany and of the power of desire to transform and control even the most iron-willed of men. Unrat’s slow demise under the influence of one of literature’s great femme fatales is a captivating cautionary tale. AL

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  1900s

  Solitude

  Víctor Català

  Lifespan | b. 1869 (Spain), d. 1966

  First Published | 1905, by Publicació Joventut

  Given Name | Caterina Albert i Paradís

  Original Language | Solitut

  In the case of Caterina Albert i Paradís, the adoption of “Víctor Català” as a pseudonym for her works of fiction was a daring concealment, and it also gave her an opportunity to masculinize her authorial voice. During her time, the fashionable literary treatment of the rural environment was to present it as bucolic and idyllic—that is, fundamentally false. Víctor Català was aiming for exactly the opposite with novels such as Rural Dramas of 1902 and her little masterpiece, Solitude, of 1905, which were far from the sugary taste of the middle classes. Nature lacks compassion and makes demands on people without forgiveness or mercy: it establishes human fates at the limits of desire, as if every person is subject to the rule of a superior, insensitive power.

  Caterina Albert was herself a landowner, but a good education brought her close to the literary naturalism of Zola. She came to favor the direct reality of the narrator’s voice, and was disinclined to sweeten the harshness of rural life by falsifying it. On the contrary, both the solitude of her characters and their feeling of powerlessness before fate emerge undisguised in dramatic personae who are almost always primitive, basic, and integrated like animals in the dominant space of nature. Víctor Català applied a crude perspective to the rural environment and its pain that she knew so well. Her work is the origin of the extraordinary wealth of the idiom used in reflecting the morality of remote regions implacably subject to the superior laws of nature. JGG

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  1900s

  Young Törless

  Robert Musil

  Lifespan | b. 1880 (Austria), d. 1942 (Switzerland)

  First Published | 1906, by Wiener Verlag (Vienna)

  Original Title | Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (The Confusions of Young Törless)

  Caught in an ominous spiral of introspection and experimentation, Törless and three of his fellow cadet pupils at a military academy move from pondering and playing with abstractions to the creation of situations in which they push the abstractions into a feverish life. A sense of power is already alive, but mute, in the structures of the academy and in the pupils’ unquestioning assumption of their social destiny as rulers. The thoughtful sadism practiced by the boys turns power inside out, makes it feral and pungent and intoxicating. Their exploration of power in the ritualized humiliation of one of their peers spreads also to encompass an unfolding of the ideas of pity, honor, superiority, justice, will, and desire as the boys use each other to test out and shape their undefined identities. The coldness and clarity of cruelty becomes the raw material and the medium of their self-fashioning.

  The beauty of Robert Musil’s writing is its capacity to infuse the novel with a duality that allows events their stark brutality while simultaneously existing as anxieties, possibilities, desires, precisely as perplexities (the “Verwirrungen” of Musil’s original title) in Törless’ mind. This is the power of Young Törless, and the mindset and world it so memorably describes. The reader comes away possessed not with the trite conclusion that we are all capable of terrible things, but with an enriched sense of how difficult it is to know what it is to be human. PMcM

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  1900s

  The Forsyte Saga

  John Galsworthy

  Lifespan | b. 1867 (England), d. 1933

  First Novel of Saga Published | 1906 (The Man of Property)

  Compiled as Saga | 1929 (entitled A Modern Comedy)

  “But no Forsyte had as yet died . . . death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it.”

  First published in 1922, The Forsyte Saga comprises three novels: The Man of Property (1906), In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). Keenly ironic, deeply engaged in the “state of England” from the 1880s to the 1920s (though tellingly withdrawn during the First World War), The Forsyte Saga is also John Galsworthy’s exploration of “the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men.” Beauty is a counter to, and incitement of, the urge to possession, to property, at the heart of the Forsyte family story. This tension is embodied by Soames Forsyte, in whom the quest for beauty dovetails violently with the passion to possess (passion that culminates in the rape of his wife).

  Chronicling three generations of the Forsyte family, the Saga is a monument to the Edwardians, and was received as a quintessentially English book by enraptured readers. Its vision of the “tribal instinct,” of the “swarmings of savage hordes” embedded in the everyday lives of a respectable middle-class family, sustains the tension and dramatic conflict of Galsworthy’s narrative: the Forsyte family is a spectacle of “almost repugnant prosperity,” a “rep
roduction of society in miniature.” As such, the Forsytes are also Galsworthy’s means to pursue, in extraordinary and patient prose, the creative violence of family life: the “deprivation and killing of reality” at the heart of family intimacy, its imposition of a shared history, and a spirit of ruthlessly collective enterprise. VL

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  1900s

  The Jungle

  Upton Sinclair

  Lifespan | b. 1878 (U.S.), d. 1968

  First Published | 1906

  First Published by | Doubleday, Page (New York)

  Original Language | English

  The Jungle was not the first muckraking novel, although it is easily one of the most influential books of the twentieth century—Roosevelt used it to push through the stalled Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act. It is a raw and sometimes nauseating chronicle based on the real incidents of the 1904 stockyard workers’ strike in Chicago. A manifesto for social change, it savagely reveals the American dream gone sour. Sinclair strips away the myth of America as a boon to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Instead, the golden land of manifest destiny is shown to be a Dickensian nightmare, where wage slaves can barely survive, where powerless immigrants are chewed up by a capitalist machine oiled by corruption and bald greed.