But it is more than a polemic; it is a gripping and harrowing tale. Jurgis Rudkus, a recent immigrant from Lithuania, comes to a new and promising land in an attempt to build a family. His life is permeated by the stink of ordure and offal of a primitive meat industry and the struggle for daily bread. Systematically Jurgis’s dreams, along with his family, are annihilated. Embittered by the brutal crimes wrought upon his family, Jurgis gradually descends into crime himself. But Jurgis does return from hell. The novel ends with a beacon of hope in the form of socialism; the last sentence, in upper case, is “CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” A more socially important novel is hard to imagine. GT
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1900s
The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
Lifespan | b. 1857 (Ukraine), d. 1924 (England)
First Published | 1907, by Methuen & Co. (London)
First Serialized | 1906, by Ridgway’s: A Militant Weekly for God and Country
The Secret Agent tells of subversive politics, crime, and detection. The setting is late Victorian London, depicted predominantly as a dank and murky metropolis. In the parlor of Adolf Verloc’s seedy shop in Soho, a grotesque band of revolutionaries meets to pursue futile political arguments. Michaelis is grossly corpulent; Karl Yundt is totteringly decrepit; and Ossipon has the cranial features (including frizzy hair and Mongoloid eyes) that, according to his mentor Cesare Lombroso, signify the criminal degenerate. All these enemies of society are lazy, notes the slothful Verloc; and all, including Verloc himself, are dependent on women for support.
At an embassy clearly intended to be Russian, Mr. Vladimir, an elegant diplomat, urges Verloc to bomb Greenwich Observatory. Vladimir thinks that such an outrage will be blamed on foreigners in England, so that the British Government will be less hospitable in future to refugees, particularly enemies of czarist Russia. Verloc obtains a bomb from the diminutive “Professor” (a nihilistic anarchist) and directs his mentally immature brother-in-law, Stevie, to plant it. However, this ill-measured move sparks a series of cumulatively tragic events, as the story advances toward its conclusion.
This masterpiece of ruthlessly ironic narration looks back to such atmospheric Dickensian works as Bleak House, and forward to Greene’s sleazy It’s a Battlefield. Particularly relevant to present times is its anticipation of the era of the suicide bomber. CW
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1900s
Mother
Maxim Gorky
Lifespan | b. 1868 (Russia), d. 1936
First Published | 1907
Original Title | Mat
Original Language | Russian
“The accumulated exhaustion of years had robbed them of their appetites, and to be able to eat they drank, long and deep, goading on their feeble stomachs with the biting, burning lash of vodka.”
Tracing the life of a working-class woman in late nineteenth-century provincial Russia, Mother powerfully evokes the cruelty, absurdity, and bitterness of life under an increasingly oppressive czarist regime. In an anonymous factory town, a middle-aged mother, Pelagea Nilovna, is left to face what she assumes will be a life of loveless drudgery after the death of her abusive husband. She is slowly awakened, however, to the presence of her maturing son, Pavel, who, in an apparently sober and modest life, spends his evenings reading philosophy and economics. As Pavel and his mother become closer, he begins to let her into his secret world—one in which these apparently harmless texts represent radical new ideas, the spread of which ensures that Pavel is in almost constant mortal danger. Pelagea is gradually drawn into a revolutionary socialist group; and while she is radicalized by Pavel and his friends’ conversation, at the same time she provides them with a valuable human perspective that stresses the value of kindness, mercy, and love.
Often described as socialist realism, such a term does not cover the breadth of Gorky’s skill in a novel that, despite its ideological bent, resists becoming propaganda. Political goals are interwoven with passages of lyrical beauty, occasional humor, and vivid and memorable characters. Moving and often painful to read, it remains an important perspective on the cultural and political extremes that existed in Russia at the time. AB
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1900s
The House on the Borderland
William Hope Hodgson
Lifespan | b. 1877 (England), d. 1918
First Published | 1908
First Published by | Chapman & Hall (London)
Original Language | English
In this elusive novel, a recovered manuscript tells the broken tale of the Recluse and his sister who live in isolation, apparently under constant threat from glowing swine creatures. The Recluse has visions of incomprehensible cosmic landscapes, peopled by immobile ancient gods, menacing and indistinct. He tries to protect his home and his sister, but she does not seem to see the creatures and fears him instead. He barricades the house against attacks. Here the manuscript stumbles. Left open to the elements, several pages are indecipherable. Finally, fragments concerning love and loss give way to a helpless trip into the future, a pre-psychedelic vision of souls in flight and the death of the universe. Then, under renewed attacks, the manuscript breaks off.
“The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader,” William Hope Hodgson suggests. This remains a work of vast imagination, unfettered by logic, plot, or traditional resolutions. In the position of the house, the character of the Recluse, even the recovery of the manuscript, there is an instinctive significance, but none of it is explained. The Recluse’s visions of the future are imbued with a profound resonance that lurks just beneath the threshold of conscious comprehension. We feel he knows more than he will tell us or even admit to himself. Whatever is really going on, we can only try to imagine. There are many wonderful clues but no certainties. JS
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1900s
The Old Wives’ Tale
Arnold Bennett
Lifespan | b. 1867 (England), d. 1931
First Published | 1908
First Published by | Chapman & Hall (London)
Original Language | English
The Old Wives’ Tale shares with many of Bennett’s books its major setting in the Staffordshire potteries, the sleepy “Five Towns.” At the same time it describes in vivid detail expatriate life in mid-nineteenth century Paris during a time of extraordinary political upheaval. This divided setting reflects the general scheme of the novel, which tells the story of the two “old wives,” Constance and Sophia Baines, who grow up as the daughters of a modest tradesman. Their destinies, guided by their marriages, take them in vastly different directions. Demure Constance marries her father’s assistant, outwardly leading the conventional life of a Victorian wife and mother. This is in sharp contrast to Sophia’s disastrous elopement with a traveling salesman, who leaves her abandoned and penniless in Paris. Neither sister’s life is wholly positive or negative; the excitement of Paris under siege is balanced by Sophia’s constant struggle for survival in a hostile foreign culture, while the domestic harmony of Constance’s family life also suffers from smothering boredom.
Overall, The Old Wives’ Tale is a compassionate novel, and the two sisters’ touching reunion shows the importance of family love and loyalty in what might otherwise be seen as blighted lives. AB
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1900s
The Inferno
Henri Barbusse
Lifespan | b. 1873 (France), d. 1935 (Russia)
First Published | 1908, by Mondiale (Paris)
Alternate Title | Hell
Original Title | L’Enfer
“I was thirty years old. I had lost my father and mother eighteen or twenty years before, so long ago that the event was now insignificant.”
Henri Barbusse began his writing career with The Inferno. This absorbing yet disquieting novel is an early modern example of the literature of alienated, disaffected manhood.
Colin Wilson later used it in his introduction to The Outsider (1956), showing The Inferno’s direct influence on existentialist writers.
A nameless man checks into a hotel in Paris. He is thirty years old and is without any ties. Other than this, we only know that he is jaded, disillusioned, indifferent to and weary of life. He writes, “I don’t know who I am, where I am going, what I am doing . . . I have nothing and deserve nothing,” and yet he suffers from an obsessive, almost religious yearning for the unattainable. On his first night in the hotel his attention is drawn to noises emanating from next door. Finding a hole that grants him a view of the adjoining room, he remains transfixed for days, observing the changing occupants. His voyeurism becomes compulsive as he derives a strange feeling of omnipotence and psychosexual fervor from watching the many different aspects of private life that are on display: adulterous couples, single women undressing, homosexuality, childbirth, and death. However, he achieves little real satisfaction from this activity and it is this voyeuristic compulsion that ultimately destroys him.
Scandalous at the time of publication, it still has the power to shock today; candid, explicit, and full of philosophical musings, The Inferno is a fascinating insight into one man’s inner struggle. AL
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1900s
A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
Lifespan | b. 1879 (England), d. 1970
First Published | 1908
First Published by | E. Arnold (London)
Original Language | English
A Room with a View is a classic coming-of-age novel. Forster introduces us to Lucy Honeychurch, who, accompanied by her anxious and over-protective guardian, Charlotte Bartlett, is touring Italy in her first introduction to a wider world far removed from the English countryside of her childhood. Lucy is a spirited piano player and her playing of Beethoven gives the reader the first hint of her real emotional depth. The great question of this novel is what will Lucy choose: a room with a view, or the closed walls of conventional society? This question is embodied by the two rivals for her affection. There is the thoughtful and passionate George Emerson, who understands and fully appreciates what he is seeing, whether it is the Italian people or Lucy herself. The sophisticated and arrogant Cecil Vyse, on the other hand, treats Lucy more as a work of art or a project than as a living, thinking individual. This novel is about the pains and crossroads of growing up—the temptation of self-deception, the pull between family and one’s own desires.
Forster’s novel offers a brilliant satire of early twentieth-century middle England and its rigorously upheld social conventions. The novel is also remarkably sensual—the scenery, both in the Italian and the English settings, is perfectly drawn with exquisite visual detail, and when Lucy plays the piano or the weather turns violent, the reader can almost hear the crescendo of the notes or the thunder. A simply delightful read. EG-G
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1900s
Strait is the Gate
André Gide
Lifespan | b. 1869 (France), d. 1951
First Published | 1909, by Mercure de France (Paris)
Original Title | La Porte Étroite
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1947
There is something irresistible, even seductively perfect about André Gide’s Strait is the Gate. Technically the story is about love; as family comfort is withdrawn from them, two cousins find in each other resources of virtue and of beauty. Jerome loses his father before he is twelve years old. An only child, he watches his mother cherish her grief as he experiences his own in the too-early maturing of an already aged sensibility. His cousin, Alyssa, is despised by her adulterous mother because of her loyalty to her father, whose confidante she becomes. But to summarize thus puts undue emphasis on what is only a beginning; the facts of Jerome and Alyssa’s existence—their high-bourgeois lives in a France that seems an endless round of luxuriantly flowered summers, but also scornful of the crudity of material change—have but a skeletal presence.
It is their doomed, delicate, intense and difficult love that fills the text, and which, establishing itself as the only reality, explains Jerome and Alyssa. As a love that remains unconsummated, indeed that remains devoid of any physical engagement, it therefore remains a yearning, a mutual and declared yet lonely striving for one another. It is the prolonged and seemingly pointless trajectory from youthful uncertainty and caution to considered postponement then denial, that fascinates. With exquisite control, Gide has created an exploration of love that manages to capture the absolute yet open-ended nature of yearning itself. PMcM
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1900s
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke
Lifespan | b. 1875 (Czech Republic), d. 1926 (Swit.)
First Published | 1910, by Insel Verlag (Leipzig)
Original Title | Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge
“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Few of the many champions of Rainer Maria Rilke’s sole novel admit that it is only great in parts; its purely intermittent ability to astonish is forceful enough to help us forget that the work as a whole is an awkward composite of narrative fiction, diary, and commonplace book. Odd passages of aimless depiction or idling histrionics should perhaps be expected, however, in what is, nominally, the journal of a young Danish aesthete of aristocratic stock, now penniless, fragile, and unmoored in Paris. Reports of disturbing encounters in the street (with, for example, an intrusive old woman whose “bleary eyes . . . looked as though some diseased person had spat a greenish phlegm under the bloody lids”) vie with intensely re-experienced memories of Malte’s strange infancy and adolescence. The novel extends itself with Rilkean meditations on themes like faith, illness, and art, and speculations concerning the inner lives of the obscure historical personae with whom Malte is obsessed.
The novel’s prose seldom approaches the sublimity of Rilke’s greatest lyrics, but it sometimes appears to emerge from a similar place. Just as Rilke’s poetry is strewn with questions, rhetorical ones directed toward himself and unanswerable questions aimed at anyone else, Malte’s artistry takes a thin kind of sustenance from his cultivated ignorance about the world and everyone in it. Deliberate nurturing of an insatiable curiosity, and the determined curtailment of the urge to satisfy it, fuels Rilke’s art and his hero’s thought. Despite and because of this lack of knowledge, the novel is extremely beautiful and not much like anything else: the sentences or paragraphs with which Rilke ends each of its sections are often the most remarkable of all. You must change your life. RP
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1900s
Howards End
E. M. Forster
Lifespan | b. 1879 (England), d. 1970
First Published | 1910
First Published by | E. Arnold (London)
Original Language | English
Reflecting on the social upheaval that characterized the Edwardian period, Howards End introduces the reader to two very different families, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. While the Schlegels are idealistic and intellectual, the Wilcoxes are materialistic and practical. The novel documents the connection that develops between these two families and the clashing of their very different worldviews.
The two Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, respond to the Wilcoxes in contrasting ways. While Helen remains idealistic and passionately opposed to the materialism and pragmatism of the Wilcoxes, Margaret hopes to reconcile the two approaches to life and nurture an appreciation for both. In her writing she hopes to “only connect,” in order to exalt both her prose and her passion. Howards End documents Margaret’s attempt to connect, detailing its successes and its failures.
Truly a masterpiece, the novel has moments of real beauty and optimism. As with all of Forster’s novels, the characters are brilliantly drawn, and the dialogue is realisti
c and moving. Although this novel deals with extreme emotions and actions, it never becomes melodramatic or absurd. Instead, it remains all too real a picture of human emotion, and the disasters that can result from pride, anger, miscommunication, and hypocrisy. EG-G
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1900s
Impressions of Africa
Raymond Roussel
Lifespan | b. 1877 (France), d. 1933 (Sicily)
First Published | 1910
First Published by | Librairie Alphonse Lemerre
Original Title | Impressions d’Afrique
The first nine chapters of Impressions of Africa describe a series of seemingly impossible feats against the backdrop of an imaginary African city. A marksman separates the yolk from the white of a soft-boiled egg with a single bullet; a statue made from corset stays tilts back and forth, its mechanism operated by a tame magpie. In the second half of the novel, we learn that a group of shipwrecked passengers has been captured by an African king, and that to entertain him and ensure their freedom, the prisoners must perform elaborate theatrical tasks or build the fantastical machines that we have already seen in the first half.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 31