1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  Originally written in Bengali, and composed as three first-person narratives, the novel creates an objective account of differing political ideals and a marriage under threat. The Home and the World (as the title suggests) is a meditation on the invasion of the private sphere by the public and political world; it also discusses the relationship of women to the nation. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1919, Rabindranath Tagore criticized nationalistic arbitrary drawing of divides between countries. This belief is illuminated in The Home, where Tagore, decrying the hubris of Swadeshi and the limitations of Indian nationalism, suggests through Nikhil’s serenity a wiser route toward political freedom and unity. LL

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Growth of the Soil

  Knut Hamsun

  Lifespan | b. 1859 (Norway), d. 1952

  First Published | 1917 by Gyldendal (Oslo)

  Given Name | Knut Pederson

  Original Title | Markens grøde

  Growth of the Soil, which led to Knut Hamsun’s Nobel Prize win in 1920, strives for a plain and uncomplicated prose suitable to the simplistic lifestyles of the farming community it describes. Beginning with one man’s lone arrival in the Norwegian wilds, the narrative follows him as he clears the land, builds up his farm, marries, and has a family. This sense of the solitary hero forging his life gives an epic trajectory to a novel that seeks to explore the hardships facing those who live on the land, and to portray the isolation felt in small, rural communities.

  Although no paean to rural idylls, Hamsun’s narrative gently prizes the qualities of hard-working, plain-thinking people whose lives follow the rhythm of nature’s cycles. Repetition is indeed one of the keys to the novel, which is not without its dark underbelly of selfishness and even infanticide. In following two generations, it tracks the alterations wrought by man upon the land, and records the inevitable technological changes that slowly come to transform farming methods. As a family saga, it also traces the troubles, tensions, and love within familial life, as the younger generation matures and the parents age. Growth of the Soil evinces an almost romantic nostalgia for the slow-changing earthy lives of the rural wilderness; this came at a time when the culture and celebrity of city living had come to make such communities seem archaic. In this winning, if strangely sad, novel, it is a now obsolete way of life that Hamsun portrays. JC

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Return of the Soldier

  Rebecca West

  Lifespan | b. 1892 (England), d. 1983

  First Published | 1918

  First Published by | Nisbet & Co. (London)

  Given Name | Cicily Isabel Fairfield

  “She was not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of children.”

  West’s short novel, published when she was twenty-four, is one of the most compelling literary responses to the horrors of the First World War, told from the perspective of those left at home. At its opening, the narrator, Jenny, and her cousin Chris’s decorative but vacuous wife, Kitty, are living in a beautiful English house, Baldry Court, awaiting Chris’s return from the Front. He comes back suffering from memory loss brought about by shell shock. Everything that has happened in the last fifteen years is erased from his mind, including his marriage and the death of his infant son, and Baldry Court and its inhabitants have become meaningless to him. He is infatuated with a working-class woman, Margaret, whom he had known when she was a girl, and who becomes the only figure who can give him solace, as both a lover and mother figure. At the close of the novel, he is cruelly “cured” by being forcefully reminded of his dead child, a dead son in a society now full of dead sons. The “return” of memory will return him to the Front, and we must assume, to an almost certain death in the trenches, in “No Man’s Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead.”

  The novel is bitterly ironic and yet lyrical, particularly in its representation of the lost world in which Chris’ amnesia, the “hysterical fugue” brought about by shell shock, has enabled him to take refuge. It is a love story of a kind, through which West explores some of the most complex and difficult questions arising out of the war experience. LM

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Tarr

  Wyndham Lewis

  Lifespan | b. 1882 (Canada), d. 1957 (England)

  First Published | 1918

  First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)

  First Serialized | 1916–1917, in The Egoist (London)

  “He must get his mouth on hers; he must revel in the laugh, where it grew. She was néfaste. She was in fact evidently ‘the Devil.’”

  Like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Tarr was originally serialized in The Egoist magazine before its publication as a book. Alongside Joyce’s work, Tarr signaled a new era in English literary writing. Wyndham Lewis stands a long way removed from the modernism of more “accepted” writers. Nevertheless, Tarr equals (if not exceeds) anything the period has to offer in terms of stylistic radicalism and imaginative scope. Although the novel was later rewritten, in 1928, the 1918 version remains definitive—retaining the experimental punctuation that gives the work such a distinctive appearance. Drawing heavily on Lewis’s own experiences in Montparnasse between 1903 and 1908, Tarr is an account of expatriate bohemian life in Paris before the First World War. The novel dismantles the ideals of European art by tracking the decline of its central character, Otto Kreisler, whose pretentious gestures, frustrations, and sordid sexual conquests are the basis for an iconoclastic critique of the modern intellectual world.

  What makes Tarr so striking is its emphasis on exteriority (as opposed to the interior life that so preoccupied the likes of Joyce and Woolf), on ways of seeing, and images of language. The novel is an exercise in “visual writing,” an attempt to employ the principles of “Vorticist” painting in print. Lewis’s characters are rendered as strange, abstracted forms—as gargoyles chiseled out of human matter. Tarr is a difficult, provocative, and extraordinarily crafted work, outside the familiar modernist canon. SamT

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Storm of Steel

  Ernst Jünger

  Lifespan | b. 1895 (Germany), d. 1998

  First Published | 1920

  First Published by | Verlag Robert Meier (Leisnig)

  Original Title | In Stahlgewittern

  “I had to leap into a water-filled, wire-laced mine crater. Dangling over the water on the swaying wire I heard the bullets rushing past me like a huge swarm of bees, while scraps of wire and metal shards sliced into the rim of the crater.” You might expect this slice of trench warfare vérité to be the relatively recent work of Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, or Niall Ferguson, but you would be wrong. It comes from the pen of a German who joined up on the first day of the First World War (1914–18) as a teenager, kept a diary of all four years of ritual slaughter in sixteen notebooks, and survived. Two years later, Ernst Jünger self-published his experiences, and the novel later appeared in myriad revised editions.

  Effectively a memoir (though Jünger does not mention his rank or name), Jünger writes a German soldier’s account of out-and-out warfare on the Western Front. It is all here: the camaraderie, the patriotism, and the bloody, harrowing tests of bravery and foolhardiness against the “Britisher” that are as much a personal challenge as a nationalistic struggle. It is a brutally honest take on life in the dugouts and death in the craters, told with fascination, pace, and ultimately a feeling that Germany’s tribulations are a precursor to rebirth and victory. Undoubtedly the war made the man and the man created Storm of Steel, which has survived and outclassed many rivals in a crowded genre by its powerful handling of the “normality” of modern warfare’s mechanistic violence. JHa

  See all books from the 1900s


  1900s

  Women in Love

  D. H. Lawrence

  Lifespan | b. 1885 (England), d. 1930 (France)

  First Published | 1920 (private subscription only)

  First Published by | M. Secker (London) in 1921

  Full Name | David Herbert Lawrence

  Women in Love, one of the greatest English twentieth-century novels, was written in a mood of rage and despair against an increasingly decadent, mechanical civilization. It offers an apocalyptic reading of English society in which a cleansing cataclysm is positively desired. A dream of annihilation animates this pessimistic text, which is very much a war novel, even though the war is not ostensibly its subject.

  A profoundly unsettling work, Women in Love was refused publication for four years after it was completed. This was due to the candid appraisal of sexuality, the violence endemic to relationships, the instability of identity (portrayed as prey to unconscious drives and motives), and the seeming cynicism of several of the characters. In the novel, D. H. Lawrence continued to develop his modernist style, evolving an imagistic language to evoke the ineffable nature of human subjectivity, as well as a fragmented form to depict the chaos of contemporary social existence. The text is a heartfelt exploration of the struggle toward a new mode of being—one that would reject alike the dead hand of obsolete cultural traditions and the iron cage of modern rationality in favor of openness to what Lawrence called “the creative soul, the God-mystery within us.” Women in Love is an unresolved text that nonetheless boldly avers the writer’s conviction that “nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.” AG

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Main Street

  Sinclair Lewis

  Lifespan | b. 1885 (U.S.), d. 1951(Italy)

  First Published | 1920

  First Published by | Harcourt, Brace & Howe (N. Y.)

  Full Title | Main Street: the Story of Carol Kennicott

  Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street presents a searing portrait of small-town America. The premier satirist of his day, Lewis delivers a scathing social commentary that also becomes, through the story of protagonist Carol Kennicott, an urgent humanist manifesto that cries out for change in the American way of life.

  Carol, a new bride, finds herself locked in a new relationship and trapped in the stifling world of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Confronted by suspicion and hostility, Carol at first tries to change the town through many of the “improvement” schemes typical of the era, including the Chautauqua (a summer adult education school). As she struggles, the town itself inevitably changes with the expansion of modern suburban culture and the coming of the First World War. Main Street is filled with incidents of exaggerated social hypocrisy and downright cruelty; however, despite Lewis’s satiric tone, the human relations within the world of Main Street manage to retain a dignity and pathos that are intensely moving. Carol’s eventual defeat by the forces of small-minded convention urges the reader to contemplate the dangers of isolationist thinking, but at the same time acknowledge the strength of the flawed human ties that bind her to Gopher Prairie.

  Lewis’s prose is by turns caustic and emotionally charged, making the novel at once very funny and extremely serious. Main Street demonstrates Lewis’s power as an important chronicler of American society in the early twentieth century. AB

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Age of Innocence

  Edith Wharton

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

  First Published | 1920

  First Published by | D. Appleton & Co. (N.Y.)

  Pulitzer Prize | 1921

  Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Age of Innocence was written in the fragmented aftermath of the First World War, which Edith Wharton experienced first-hand in Paris. Newland Archer, the ambivalent protagonist, represents the apogee of good breeding. He is the ultimate insider in post-Civil War New York society. His upcoming marriage to young socialite May Welland will unite two of New York’s oldest families. From the novel’s opening pages, however, May’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, imports a passionate intensity and mysterious Old World eccentricity that disrupt the conventional world of order-obsessed New York. Ellen’s hopes of being set free from her past are dashed when she is forced to choose between conformity and exile, while Newland’s appointment by the Welland family as Ellen’s legal consultant begins an emotional entanglement the force of which he could never have imagined.

  Drawing on the distinct observational style of anthropology, then a burgeoning science, Wharton narrates a romance doomed by duty in 1870s “Old New York.” Though Wharton’s is a critical eye, mindful of the suffering often inflicted by the unimaginative, oppressive enforcement of arbitrary mores, the equation of greater liberty with unqualified happiness does not go unquestioned. AF

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Crome Yellow

  Aldous Huxley

  Lifespan | b. 1894 (England), d. 1963 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1921

  First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)

  Original Language | English

  “The proper study of mankind is books.”

  Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley’s first and highly successful novel, would probably be better loved and more often read if it were not for the dystopian Brave New World. Crome Yellow is an altogether lighter, wittier, more amusing book, which takes up with the novel the country-house literary satire pioneered by Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey. Huxley’s thinly disguised satirical portraits of his contemporaries fall somewhere between D. H. Lawrence’s romances of exploratory sincerity and the more acerbic asperity of Wyndham Lewis.

  The plot is pleasingly perfunctory, but also functional, seeing the reader through the hopeless love muddle of one rather shy Dennis Stone, sensitive plant, aspiring poet, and his clumsy amours for Anne Wimbush. Anne’s uncle hosts a party on his country estate, Crome Yellow, and this theater allows Huxley to introduce a variety of more or less ridiculous characters, among them Priscilla Wimbush, the hostess with the mostest and occult leanings; the painters Gombauld and Tschuplitski, whose work verges on blank canvas; and the self-help guru Mr. Barbecue-Smith. A distinguishing feature of Huxley’s early satire, a prototype for Evelyn Waugh’s early novels, is its relaxed but verbally acute derision of the pretensions of Huxley’s peers, not least their clumsy emotional entanglements and “modern” sensibilities. Where satire often tends to foster reactionary contempt, Huxley’s stylized mockery allows a sense of social wit, existential exploration, and verbal play. This, then, is a novel of high spirits lightly deflated. Crome Yellow has the edge on Huxley’s subsequent and similar novel Antic Hay (1923), perhaps because the comedy is rougher, and more deliberately absurd, but both are entertaining. DM

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Life of Christ

  Giovanni Papini

  Lifespan | b. 1881 (Italy), d. 1956

  First Published | 1921

  First Published by | Vallecchi Editore (Florence)

  Original Title | Storia di Cristo

  “There are those who have a desire to love, but do not have the capacity to love”

  Hailed as a great master by Henri Bergson, and praised as a friend and disciple by William James, Giovanni Papini was a journalist, vitriolic critic, poet, and novelist, whose avant-garde polemics made him one of the most controversial Italian literary figures in the early and mid-twentieth century. After years of religious turbulence and vocal atheism, this enfant terrible of the Florentine avant-garde sprung the ultimate surprise on those who thought they had him safely pigeonholed by turning to the simple faith of Christ. In 1921, Papini officially announced his newly found Roman Catholicism, publishing a book that became Italy’s best seller in the 1920s and an international best seller after having been swiftly translated into more than thirty languag
es.

  Papini’s Life of Christ was in part a religious novel, in part a historical essay, and in part an exquisite example of dramatic literature. Its overwhelming theme is the poetic plea for the human race to return to a simple religion of brotherly love—a plea that won international fame for the book and its author. It is also important, however, to recognize Papini’s achievement in stripping away the layers of embellishment and ceremony with which literature, theological systems, and skeptical critics had obscured the picture of Christ’s life and times. He wrote with a simplicity that makes the story clear to every mind, and with a burning passion that brings it home to every heart. What also contributed to the success of the novel was its extraordinarily rich language. Papini’s energetic, vibrant, and colorful tone, his love of images, and his penchant for paradoxes and provocations distinguished his prose from that of any other academic writer of his time. LB

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Ulysses

  James Joyce

  Lifespan | b. 1882 (Ireland), d. 1941 (Switzerland)