In its depiction of Sensei’s malaise the novel is not only a testament to the rapid modernization of Japan, but also an examination of a tortured sense of failure and responsibility. Natsume, who established the form of the first-person novel, is one of the greatest writers in modern Japanese literature. KK
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1900s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
Lifespan | b. 1875 (Scotland), d. 1940 (Canada)
First Published | 1915
First Published by | W. Blackwood & Sons (London)
Original Language | English
A forerunner of the modern spy thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps revolves around a German plot to declare war on an unprepared Britain through a secret invasion. Although this storyline was clearly topical and drew on the brutal conflict of the First World War, it also reflected Buchan’s deep distaste for German culture. The narrative centers on Richard Hannay, an almost superhuman and ridiculously lucky South African engineer who rescues a hunted British spy, only to find himself the focus of a manhunt orchestrated by agents of the German state. Believing himself to be too visible in London, Hannay escapes to the Scottish Highlands in the hope of hiding out in what he takes to be an unpopulated wilderness. But Hannay is quickly disabused, when he finds that the “isolated” Highland landscape is overpopulated by motorcars and German agents posing as pillars of British society.
The novel is important in establishing a formula for the spy thriller: car chases, elaborate disguises, and an urgent quest to avert disaster. The dramatic turns of the plot rely upon a sense of paranoia, where every potential ally is also a potential enemy. Buchan’s own war work involved running the newly formed Department of Information, responsible for producing propaganda to support the war effort, and his novels clearly complement this work. LC
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1900s
The Rainbow
D. H. Lawrence
Lifespan | b. 1885 (England), d. 1930
First Published | 1915
First Published by | Methuen & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
Central to D. H. Lawrence’s break from well-established fictional conventions is his conviction that human subjectivity could no longer be described in terms of what he called “the old stable ego,” and that a different way of presenting character was required in art. He considers the “realism” with which fictional characters had hitherto typically been presented as, paradoxically, essentially unrealistic, and in The Rainbow he moves to a presentation of human individuals and their vexed relationships that draws on unconscious impulses.
Written in the shadow of the First World War, the novel contrasts the stretches of time in which the Brangwen family was rooted to the soil, against the far-reaching changes to human life (especially the inexorable destruction of communities) now occurring. Issues such as adolescent sexuality, marital relations, intergenerational conflict, exile, colonialism, national identity, education, upward social mobility, the New Woman, lesbianism, and psychological breakdown (the precursor of a necessary rebirth and regeneration) are woven together. Sexually explicit and brutally honest about relationships, The Rainbow delineates the breakdown of an established social order; focusing on the shifting balance of power in parent–child and male–female relations; at the same time it situates epochal transformations within a mythic frame of reference, which is indebted to Lawrence’s rendering of biblical cadences and pantheistic traditions. AG
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1900s
Of Human Bondage
William Somerset Maugham
Lifespan | b. 1874 (France), d. 1965
First Published | 1915
First Published by | W. Heinemann (London)
Original Language | English
“It is cruel to discover one’s mediocrity only when it is too late.”
One of the most well known and influential writers of his time, William Somerset Maugham’s experiences as a miserable, stuttering medical student ultimately shaped his fiction. His best-known novel, Of Human Bondage, is squarely based on his own life. An Edwardian Bildungsroman, the novel utilizes the technique of third-person narration, but filters everything through the presiding consciousness of its central character, Philip Carey. Characterized by a leisurely pace and an episodic structure, the novel traces Carey’s history from childhood to young adulthood. It describes his difficult early years, the harsh conditions of his life at school (where he is relentlessly tormented because of his clubfoot), the gradual loss of his religious faith, and his experiences as a young man hungry to encounter the world on his own terms.
The novel is preoccupied, above all, with the search for meaning in a human existence that appears to have none. Carey is convinced, through his glimpses into the lives of other people around him, that their existences are mostly full of suffering, frequently sordid, and generally futile. His own experiences, in turn, seem only to confirm his cynical diagnosis. Yet he does not lose his desire to confront life’s vicissitudes nor to search for a personal philosophy. The viewpoint he develops refuses the limiting categories of virtue and vice in favor of a Darwinian view of life. The terms “good” and “evil” are seen as labels deployed by society to make the individual conform—existence is in itself insignificant and futile. Carey’s stoical conclusion, explored through loosely linked episodes in the novel, is that the thinking individual can only really find a measure of freedom by rejoicing in the aesthetic pattern of life’s random events. AG
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1900s
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
Lifespan | b. 1873 (England), d. 1939 (France)
First Published | 1915
First Published by | The Bodley Head (London)
Given Name | Ford Hermann Hueffer
“I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.”
Critical opinion on The Good Soldier is divided. Some regard it as a wholly improbable novel, in which substance is sacrificed to style, and others see it as one of the most finely crafted novels of the twentieth century, in which Ford Madox Ford examines whether it is possible to create a narrative of the modern world through aesthetic experimentalism. Ford was a chief exponent of the literary style known as impressionism, in which an emphasis is placed on the way a narrator experiences events, and on how this impression shapes our understanding of reality. This book is the best example of this style.
In The Good Soldier, Ford aims to demonstrate how thoroughly our experience of reality is shaped by the limits of our knowledge. Narrated solely from the point of view of an idle, rich American, John Dowell, The Good Soldier illustrates the extent to which Dowell’s consciousness of reality alters as he acquires new knowledge and understanding of past events. Through the course of the novel, we realize that Florence, Dowell’s wife, has been conducting a long affair with the “good soldier” of the title, Edward Ashburnham. Dowell is the ultimate unreliable narrator, unaware of his wife’s true nature and the passionate coupling that has been taking place. He describes his idyllic friendship with the Ashburnhams, but following his realization of the affair, he must begin again, and attempt to retell the story of this friendship. The first section of the novel is in a sense rewritten, since everything that Dowell believed to be true is the product of his lack of understanding. Throughout the novel, Dowell tries and fails to conceive of a narrative method that can faithfully recount these contradictory perspectives: one of self-deluding innocence and one of tortured enlightenment. LC
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1900s
Rashomon
Akutagawa Ryunosuke
Lifespan | b. 1892 (Japan), d. 1927
First Published | 1915 in Teikoku Bungaku magazine
Alternate Title | The Rasho Gate
Real Name | Chokodo Shujin
The demon of R
ashomon, disguised as an old woman, carries off his arm that had been severed by the hero Watanabe no Tsuna.
Rashomon and Other Stories comprises six short stories, written by Akutagawa in the early and middle period of his career between 1915 and 1921. “Remaking” or imitation is an important element in his work; in this collection he retells a number of historical fables. Akutagawa defends imitation against the ideology of the original, considering it not as a mere reproduction but as a subtle process of digestion and transformation.
Akutagawa applies a parabolic style and tone to these stories, which contrasts with their unexpected endings and creates curious emotional effects. Some of the stories are simply delightful, while others suspend our simplistic moral judgment and invite us to reflect further on the impulsive nature of human beings. Akutagawa is also a master of structure. “Dragon” and “Yam Gruel” effectively use the report form and create an amusing atmosphere by contrasting the narrow perspective of the characters with a broader perspective of the world as a whole. “Kesa and Morito” and “In a Grove” cleverly juxtapose multiple quasi-Dostoevskian monologues without background explanation, creating a faltering sense of reality. Akutagawa is one of the most widely read modernist writers in Japan. His timeless stories are perceptive and witty investigations into the very nature of literature itself. KK
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1900s
Under Fire
Henri Barbusse
Lifespan | b. 1873 (France), d. 1935 (Russia)
First Published | 1916
First Published by | Flammarion (Paris)
Original Title | Le Feu
The members of the squad celebrated in Henri Barbusse’s story of front-line fighting in the early years of the First World War, are the French army’s poilus or “hairy ones,” and there is not a liberal or an intellectual present among them. Yet Barbusse was a journalist with a purpose. His voluntary two years in the trenches led him to pacifism and Communism, and Under Fire is an early step on that road.
As the experience of war is primarily one of disintegration, it is difficult to construct the purposive narrative required for a pacifist polemic, and Barbusse does not try. Chapters describe life behind the lines or on leave, or express poilu anger at the “Rear,” where soldier-administrators are able to avoid the bloodbath at the front. There are anecdotes within anecdotes, stories of crossing accidentally into enemy lines to return with a box of matches taken from a slaughtered German. Above all, there is the fighting, in which men die in so many appalling ways: crushed, shot, split open, rotting, buried, unburied. The stories are orchestrated by a participant narrator who directs the reader from above the struggle. In the final chapter, the squad—now much diminished—begins a discussion that disparages nationalism, exalts the soldiers’ latent political power, and recognizes the need for equality and justice. This “dream of fumbling thought” is the beginning of a learning process for these ordinary working men, which is validated by the novel’s unforgettable accounts of the front line. AMu
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1900s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Lifespan | b. 1882 (Ireland), d. 1941
First Published | 1916
First Published by | B. W. Huebsch (New York)
First Serialized | 1914–1915, in The Egoist (London)
“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
First published in serial form between 1914 and 1915, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the novel that established James Joyce as one of the most innovative literary talents of the twentieth century.
Portrait traces the development of Stephen Dedalus from childhood, through adolescence, to the first flushes of manhood. Over time, he gradually begins to rebel against his devout Catholic upbringing—questioning the values of his family, church, history, and homeland. At the same time, Stephen’s interest in art and literature intensifies as he struggles to come to terms with his adult self. This, however, is no ordinary coming-of-age story. The language used at each stage of the narrative is skillfully manipulated in order to reflect Stephen’s age and intellectual maturity. Portrait begins with “moocows” and ends with Stephen expressing his desire to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
Portrait remains a work of startling invention and imaginative richness, in which Joyce began to hone his revolutionary “stream of consciousness” technique. It is the work in which the hallmarks of Joyce’s writing are truly established: the broad sexual humor, the blasphemous fantasies, the erudite wordplay, the simultaneous eradication and exposure of authorial personality, the infinitely complex push–pull relationship with Ireland and Irishness. In Portrait, Joyce redefines both himself and the parameters of modern writing. SamT
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1900s
The Underdogs
Mariano Azuela
Lifespan | b. 1873 (Mexico), d. 1952
First Published | 1916, by El Paso del Norte (Texas)
First Serialized | Cuadros de la Revolución Mexicana
Original Title | Los de abajo
This picture of the Mexican revolution inaugurated a genre of fiction that still flourishes today. A chronicle of historical events, written within a very short time of their occurrence, it is also an epic poem of the dispossessed, with its main character a fictitious, idealized hero, Demetrio Macías. A victim of the abuse of power, he abandons home and family and launches himself into a revolt that only ends with his death. For two years, he harasses the army as the leader of a gang of renegades. What at first is a disorganized rebellion is quickly given ideological justification and collective protection as a result of the speech (cynical and self-interested, however) of the doctor and journalist Luis Cervantes. With this mentor, Maías becomes a legendary revolutionary leader, but soon the coexistence of the two men is degraded by jealousy and greed. Abandoned by his backer and having lost the support of the peasants and the meaning of the struggle, which only continues through inertia, culminating in revenge, he finds his family again, only to die immediately.
Within the novel’s linear, realist approach, direct interventions by the narrator denounce some issues of the nineteenth century. But the agility of a dialog that changes register according to the situation of each character; the alternations of verbal pace that give each scene an appropriate rhythm; and the impressionistic description of nature and the characters give the novel a modernity that influenced the best of later Mexican fiction. DMG
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1900s
Pallieter
Felix Timmermans
Lifespan | b. 1886 (Belgium), d. 1947
First Published | 1916
First Published by | Van Kampen (Amsterdam)
Original Language | Flemish
During the period between the two World Wars, Felix Timmermans was one of Flanders’ most successful authors. He made his debut with Schemeringen van de dood (Shimmerings of Death) in 1910, a collection of mysterious and melancholy stories. After a serious illness he changed his style with Pallieter, a novel that can be interpreted as an ode to life. In it he also dealt with the social and religious establishment of his day, but not without consequences; the Roman Catholic Church compelled Timmermans to adapt the sexually tinged passages. It was not until 1966 that the unexpurgated version was published.
The novel follows the mental evolution of Pallieter who, after having fallen in love with a young woman, experiences various disillusionments and disappointments. He chooses to turn his back on both city and society in order to dedicate himself completely to nature. Gradually he starts to enjoy life, and joyfully he accepts each day as a gift from God. And that is what makes Pallieter, above all, a hymnal ode to all the good things on earth.
Timm
ermans himself expressly warned readers against interpreting his novel as a faithful rendition of reality. Rather, it should be seen as an expression of desire. Pallieter is a work of imagination and its emphasis on metaphors, distorted reality, and a lyrical worldview, also marked the beginning of Expressionism. At first glance, the novel is a marvel of simplicity, but behind the images lies a rich layer of a still fascinating, archetypical world. JaM
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Home and the World
Rabindranath Tagore
Lifespan | b. 1861 (India), d. 1941
First Published | 1916
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1913
Original Title | Ghare Baire
Played out against the backdrop of Swadeshi (part of India’s home-rule movement, Swadeshi involved setting up a self-sufficient state and boycotting British products), The Home and the World charts the relationship between love, nation, and revolution. Nikhil, an enlightened landlord who has progressive ideas about women and nationalism, marries Bimala, a local girl. The couple live happily together until Nikhil’s childhood friend, Sandeep, arrives, bringing with him the radical fervor of Swadeshi. Hypnotized by Sandeep and his passionate beliefs, Bimala contemplates deserting her husband for Sandeep and the promotion of Swadeshi. Nikhil becomes aware of the attraction between his wife and his friend but, being a liberal thinker, he allows Bimala the freedom to decide for herself.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 33