1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  First Published | 1922

  First Published by | Shakespeare & Co. (Paris)

  First Serialized | 1918–21, in The Little Review (N. Y.)

  The original manuscript of the Circe section of Ulysses shows the extensive revisions to which the author subjected his first draft.

  Ulysses is one of the most extraordinary works of literature in English. At the literal level, it explores the adventures of two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, over the course of a single day in Dublin. But this is merely a peg onto which to hang all manner of streams-of-consciousness, on topics ranging from such generalities as life, death, and sex through to the contemporary state of Ireland and Irish nationalism. Threaded through this work is a continuing set of allusions to the Odyssey—the original Homeric account of Ulysses’ wanderings. Occasionally illuminating, at other times these allusions seem designed ironically to offset the often petty and sordid concerns which take up much of Stephen’s and Bloom’s time, and continually distract them from their ambitions and aims.

  The book conjures up a densely realized Dublin, full of details, many of which are—presumably deliberately—either wrong or at least questionable. But all this merely forms a backdrop to an exploration of the inner workings of the mind, which refuses to acquiesce in the neatness and certainties of classical philosophy. Rather, Joyce seeks to replicate the ways in which thought is often seemingly random and there is no possibility of a clear and straight way through life.

  Ulysses opened up a whole new way of writing fiction that recognized that the moral rules by which we might try to govern our lives are constantly at the mercy of accident, chance encounter, and byroads of the mind. Whether this is a statement of a specifically Irish condition or of some more universal predicament is throughout held in a delicate balance, not least because Bloom is Jewish, and is thus an outsider even—or perhaps especially—in the city and country he regards as home. DP

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  1900s

  Babbitt

  Sinclair Lewis

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

  First Published | 1922

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

  Original Language | English

  After the enormous success of his novel Main Street, Sinclair Lewis turned to another icon of American life, this time the archetypal middle-class businessman, immortalized in the figure of George F. Babbitt. Babbitt is a real-estate salesman who lives and works in the fictional Midwestern town of Zenith. His story is that of suburban life in a city that is filled with “neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.” Lewis’s novel satirically but lovingly details Babbitt’s routines and rituals as he goes to and from work, socializes, plays golf, goes to the club, and becomes involved in local politics. In the midst of his contented and prosperous life, however, an event occurs that turns Babbitt’s world upside down and forces him to examine his comfortable existence. Babbitt’s resulting lurch from one uncertainty to another allows the reader to see beyond the shining office towers of Zenith to a grittier, more sobering but ultimately more human kind of American life.

  Lewis’s triumph here lies in taking a character that no one could possibly like—the self-important, conformist, and aggressively bigoted American businessman—and evoking not only barbed humor but vivid human feeling. Babbitt works as a political critique, piercing the smug veil worn by interwar American capitalism, but transcends mere amusing satire. Life in Zenith has a surprising depth; as such, it reminds us of the redemptive power of looking past ideology to the human relations beneath. AB

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  1900s

  Claudine’s House

  Colette

  Lifespan | b. 1873 (Italy), d. 1954

  First Published | 1922, by Ferenczi (Paris)

  Alternate Title | My Mother’s House

  Original Title | La Maison de Claudine

  In this semiautobiographical tale, France’s most adored female author reminisces on her rural upbringing as a child with her wise and wondrous mother and Mother Nature. It is a beautiful observation of a girl on the cusp of innocence and knowingness set in a magical woodscape. Colette’s evocation of nature’s enigmatic goings-on is very much in evidence: the cat purrs like “the rumble of a distant factory,” tame swallows land on her hair, and a spider regularly climbs down from its web to collect sipfuls of drinking chocolate from her mother’s bedside bowl. But the world of adults is never far away, be it local villagers or more urbane visitors, and Colette describes both worlds with her trademark sensuality, recalling the sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and colors of her past.

  Ironically, this idyllic childhood was also a world away from her real life at the time of writing. The innocent girl had been a libertine in the Paris demimonde, a music-hall dancer performing transvestite pieces, and a woman more at home with gossip, pleasures of the flesh, and scandal. Her writing career began bizarrely when her first husband forced her to ghostwrite four incredibly popular “Claudine” novels (1900–04) under his pen name “Willy.” However, despite its title, Claudine’s House is not one of that series. JH

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  1900s

  Life and Death of Harriett Frean

  May Sinclair

  Lifespan | b. 1862 (England), d. 1946

  First Published | 1922

  First Published by | W. Collins & Sons (London)

  Given Name | Mary Amelia St. Clair

  Brief, bare, and cruelly ironic, this novel marked a turning point in Sinclair’s career, reflecting her engagement with psychoanalysis as a (then new) theory of the unconscious mind, and the conflict between sexuality and social identity. On one level, it is a case history, inviting the reader to share the consciousness of Harriett Frean literally from cradle to grave. As the story opens, Harriett is in her cot, her parents amusing her with nursery rhymes, and wondering at her laughter: “Each kissed her in turn, and the Baby Harriett stopped laughing suddenly.” It is a foreboding moment in a book that returns compulsively to the destruction written into parental love, to the demand for self-sacrifice embedded in their wish for their daughter to “behave beautifully.”

  Enraptured by the image of herself reflected by her parents, Harriett embarks on a life of renunciation. Its destructiveness is Sinclair’s key theme, a critique of virtue that uncovers the fundamental attack on desire, on life itself, at work in the conventionally beautiful behavior of the Victorian middle classes. Sinclair’s complex relation to modernity, and to literary modernism, is at the heart of this novel, which she uses to explore the “life” of a woman who cannot bring herself to destroy her parents’ child. VL

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  1900s

  The Forest of the Hanged

  Liviu Rebreanu

  Lifespan | b. 1885 (Romania), d. 1944

  First Published | 1922

  First Published by | Cartea româneascä (Bucharest)

  Original Title | Padurea spânzuratilor

  The Forest of the Hanged is the first psychological novel of Romanian literature. It examines the painful position of Romanian Transylvanian soldiers in the First World War: politically still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, they were forced to fight against their own co-nationals. The novel is based on the true story of Emil Rebreanu, brother of the writer, hanged in 1917 for trying to defect to the Romanian side. The literary hero, Apostol Bologa, lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army, meets a similar fate; through his experience, Liviu Rebreanu illustrates the struggle between allegiances and the call of duty.

  Hanging, seen as the vilest and most humiliating death, was the punishment for deserters in the war, and the image of the gallows, often improvised from trees, haunts Rebreanu’s book. Bologa changes radically throughout the novel. At first totally devoted to his military duty, he serves on the jury that convicts a deserter to death; but, filled with inexplica
ble guilt at the sight of the hanged man, his Romanian nationalistic conscience awakens and his military ideals are exposed as void. Unable to take arms against his co-nationals when moved to the Transylvanian front, Bologa chooses the gallows, becoming the deserter he initially despised.

  The Forest of the Hanged is a war testimony of universal relevance that will still makes a strong impression on the modern reader. AW

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  1900s

  Siddhartha

  Hermann Hesse

  Lifespan | b. 1877 (Germany), d. 1962 (Switzerland)

  First Published | 1922

  First Published by | S. Fischer Verlag (Berlin)

  Nobel Prize | 1946

  As the son of a Brahmin, Siddhartha enjoys comfort and privilege while sequestered in his home village. However, as he grows older, his heart is moved by a burning desire to acquire wisdom and new experiences. Telling his father his intentions, Siddhartha and his childhood friend, Govinda, leave the safety of home to join the Samanas, a group of wandering ascetics. As Hermann Hesse’s novel unfolds, we follow Siddhartha in his search for meaning and truth in a world of sorrow and suffering.

  Drawing on both Hindu and Buddhist teachings, Siddhartha expertly explores the tension between the doctrinal dictates of organized religion and the inner promptings of the soul. As Siddhartha grows older, a fundamental truth gradually becomes apparent both to him and to us: there is no single path to self-growth, no one formula for how to live life. Hesse challenges our ideas of what it means to lead a spiritual life, to strive after and to achieve meaningful self-growth through blind adherence to a religion, philosophy, or indeed any system of belief. We should, rather, seek to seize hold of the reality of each moment, which is always new, alive, and forever changing. Hesse uses the potent symbol of a river to convey this sense of vibrancy and flux.

  The particular brilliance of this novel is the way in which its profound message is delivered through a prose that flows as naturally and shimmeringly as the surface of the river beside which Siddhartha spends the final years of his life. CG-G

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  1900s

  The Enormous Room

  e. e. cummings

  Lifespan | b. 1894 (U.S.), d. 1962

  First Published | 1922

  First Published by | Boni & Liveright (New York)

  Full Name | Edward Estlin Cummings

  This autobiography came about because cummings and his friend B. (William Slater Brown) preferred, when in France, in 1917, the company of French soldiers to that of their fellow Americans. They were working as volunteer drivers for the Norton-Harjes section of the American Red Cross when they were arrested and detained in Normandy. B. had written home to his family in Massachusetts indiscreet letters concerning rumors of French mutinies that the authorities had intercepted, and cummings was implicated. The eponymous room is where these interim prisoners live and sleep.

  cummings celebrates the oddity and sheer peculiarity of his fellow detainees. They are given extraordinary names. He likes the Wanderer, Mexique, the Zulu, and, above all, Jean Le Nègre. He does not like The Sheeney With the Trick Raincoat or Bill the Hollander. Against these individuals, liked or not, stands (in irony) “the inexorable justice of le gouvernement français.” This classic anarchist structure sets individuals against all authority. cummings asserts the values of a new, modernist art, which will require “that vast and painful process of Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling. Which minute bit is Art.” For the rest of his life, a more focused cummings was to remain in his art an instinctive anarchist. AM

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  1900s

  Kristin Lavransdatter

  Sigrid Undset

  Lifespan | b. 1882 (Denmark), d. 1949 (Norway)

  First Published | 1920–1922

  First Published by | H. Aschehoug & Co. (Oslo)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1928

  “Lavrans and Ragnfrid were more than commonly pious and God-fearing folk.”

  The proud and independent Kristin Lavransdatter (meaning Laurence’s daughter, surnames not being much used in fourteenth-century Norway) is the heroine of this door-stopping saga steeped in ancient folk tales, royal power struggles, and courtly, old-worldy language. Her father Lavrans is a rich farmer and devout Christian who adores Kristin. She is expected to marry Simon Darre, heir to the neighboring estate, but she falls in love with the handsome but irresponsible Erlend Nikulausson who owns the great manor Husaby. In true soap-opera style he has a lover, Eline, with whom Kristin vies for his attention—in one scene Kristin suggests, “Shall we throw dice for our man, we two paramours?” Murder, marriage, plots against the monarchy, and trials and tribulations encircle Kristin, who is driven by love and loyalty. She emerges through all this a strong but self-sacrificing woman.

  Originally published in three volumes (The Garland; The Mistress of Husaby; The Cross), Kristin Lavransdatter evokes the medieval milieu strikingly (Sigrid Undset’s father was an archaeologist and the family home steeped in folklore and legend). The author became a Roman Catholic in 1924 and religion is a constant theme in this and her other novels. The subarctic Scandinavian landscape is painted beautifully, but Undset’s greatest achievement is in the characterization of a woman for all times. Kristin Lavransdatter has been compared with Anna Karenina, Tess, and Emma Bovary as one of the great characters of female literature. She is certainly a woman of universal and timeless appeal and the trilogy remains Undset’s lasting masterpiece. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, Undset’s work was labeled “an Iliad of the North” for its faithfulness to early Scandinavian culture. JHa

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  1900s

  Amok

  Stefan Zweig

  Lifespan | b. 1881 (Austria), d. 1942 (Brazil)

  First Published | 1922

  First Published by | S. Fischer Verlag (Berlin)

  Original Language | German

  “We are all criminals if we remain silent . . .”

  Stefan Zweig, 1918

  Stefan Zweig was a prolific novelist, biographer, translator, and world traveler. A notable pacifist, he fled his native Austria in 1934 to London and then Brazil, where, disillusioned by the rise of fascism, he and his wife committed suicide. Amok is a short, intense story of a troubled doctor who loses his mind in the tropics. It is narrated by a worldly passenger who meets the mysterious doctor on board a ship returning to Europe from Calcutta. The doctor is in desperate need of human contact and has a chilling secret to confess. Written as reported speech that, like the colonial setting, recalls Joseph Conrad, it is a gripping tale of passion, moral duty, and uncontrollable unconscious forces.

  The doctor has been forced to travel to Asia following a misdemeanor committed at a German hospital, where he was in thrall to a beautiful but domineering woman. Having set off full of romantic ideals of bringing civilization to the indigenous people, he finds himself isolated in a remote station, and his condition slowly deteriorates as the tropical torpor and solitude become too much for him. He becomes estranged from his European self and utterly dispirited. When an English lady arrives at his station requesting an abortion, he is provoked by her arrogance and domineering manner to such an extent that he loses control of his conscious will. At first he struggles to gain the upper hand in a veiled sado-masochistic scenario, but when she laughs in his face he can do nothing but pursue her in a manic attempt to appease his infatuation.

  A Freudian exploration of the power of the unconscious and latent sexuality, Amok is a finely wrought story full of psychological insight. As such, it is an ideal introduction to Stefan Zweig’s impressive body of work. AL

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  1900s

  The Devil in the Flesh

  Raymond Radiguet

  Lifespan | b. 1903 (France), d. 1923

  First Published | 1923

  First Pu
blished by | Grasset (Paris)

  Original Title | Le Diable au Corps

  Written only five years after the First World War, the story of a love affair between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier fighting on the front shocked public sensitivity. Raymond Radiguet himself added to the polemic by publishing an article on the novel just days after its appearance, in which he calls his “false autobiography” all the more real for not being real. The youth of the author, his great promise, and the scandalous content of the story brought quick success to The Devil in the Flesh.

  Because of his tempestuous life and early death, Radiguet is often linked to Rimbaud. Radiguet denounced the label of “child prodigy” in his characteristically terse style, admitting, however, to an artistic affinity with both Rimbaud and Baudelaire. The anonymous protagonist of the story and his lover are thus initially brought together by their liking of Les Fleurs du Mal. Despite association with the Surrealists and his love relationship with Jean Cocteau, Radiguet’s influences can be traced back to French classicism. Consequently, The Devil in the Flesh is elegant and compact, often presenting psychological insight into the workings of ill-fated love in the form of short maxims. The novel is also an indictment of the petit-bourgeois morals that left generations of young men and women tragically unprepared for the logic of both love and war. IJ