1900s
Zeno’s Conscience
Italo Svevo
Lifespan | b. 1861 (Italy), d. 1928
First Published | 1923, by Cappelli (Bologna)
Given Name | Ettore Schmitz
Original Title | La Coscienza di Zeno
In the life of Italo Svevo, the pen name of Ettore Schmitz, writing never took the place of a profession, but remained the secret passion he pursued when not involved in his office job or playing the violin. Two elements mark his life: his friendship with James Joyce, and his acquaintance with psychoanalysis through Freud, whose Über der Traum he translated.
This novel is protagnoist Zeno’s autobiography, written at the instigation of Doctor S. as part of his psychoanalysis. Zeno’s account of his life is far from a tribute to Freud’s science; rather, it is an opportunity to portray the transient and ephemeral character of people’s desires. A typical anti-hero, Zeno has zero willpower and laughs at his incapacity to retain control of his existence. When he decides that marriage could cure his malaise, he proposes to the beautiful Ada, but accidentally ends up marrying Augusta, her unattractive sister. Zeno’s neurosis becomes apparent in the account of his repeated and frustrated attempts to quit smoking. Helplessly dominated by the habit, Zeno fills his days with thousands of resolutions to ban cigarettes. Significant dates in his life are magical reminders of the possibility of a new smokeless life: “the ninth day of the ninth month of 1899,” “the third day of the sixth month of 1912 at 12.” Zeno needs to give himself prohibitions that he ritually infringes. His volatility and spinelessness always make his last cigarette the penultimate one, while he relishes the pleasure he derives from his own failure. RPi
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
Lifespan | b. 1879 (England), d. 1970
First Published | 1924
First Published by | E. Arnold & Co. (London)
Full Name | Edward Morgan Forster
E. M. Forster’s last novel achieves a seriousness not evident in his earlier works. While he represents the British in India as stuffy caricatures of prejudice, Forster does not make them into the sustained parodies that we find in Howard’s End or A Room with a View. At the heart of this liberal study of Anglo-Indian relations sits the vast emptiness of the booming Marabar caves, which Forster establishes as a site of ambiguity and uncertainty. Visitors to the caves are never sure what it is they have witnessed, if anything at all. Adele Quested, a British woman who is newly arrived in India, is accompanied to the caves by the Indian Dr. Aziz, and what happens between them there is never clearly established. Although the British assume that she was attacked by Aziz, Adele herself never confirms this. In fact, she spectacularly withdraws the allegation in court, and earns herself the opprobrium of her fellow countrymen. However, even this retraction fails to clarify the episode, which remains an example of the indeterminacy that characterizes Forster’s modernist aesthetic.
If the rape trial is the center of the novel’s plot, the friendship between Aziz and the sympathetic British humanists, Mrs. Moore and Cyril Fielding, represents the potential for connection across national lines (a central concept in Forster’s writing). For some, the novel stands as a benevolent portrayal of the early nationalist campaign in India. Others, however, have pointed to Forster’s inability to avoid exotic fantasy in his depiction of Indians. LC
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
We
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Lifespan | b. 1884 (Russia), d. 1937 (France)
First Published | 1924
First Published by | E. P. Dutton (New York)
Original Russian Title | My
The first novel to be banned by the Soviet censorship bureau in 1921, We is a prototypical dystopian novel, bearing similarities to later such fictions. The novel consists of a series of diary entries by D-503, a mathematician and a thoroughly orthodox citizen of the authoritarian, futuristic state to which he belongs. The diary sets out as a celebration of state doctrine, which dictates that happiness, order, and beauty can be found only in unfreedom, in the cast-iron tenets of mathematical logic and of absolute power. As the diary and novel continue, however, D-503 comes under the subversive influence of a beautiful dissident, named I-330. Enthralled by a wild desire for I, D loses his faith in the purity of mathematical logic, and in the capacity of a perfectly ordered collective to satisfy all human needs. Gradually, he finds himself drawn toward the poetic irrationality of 1, and the anarchism of a private love. He no longer identifies with “we,” and starts to think of himself, in an ironic reflection of the name of his guerrilla lover, as “I.”
What sets the novel apart is the intellectual subtlety of his understanding of authoritarianism. The novel is not a straightforward denunciation of communism, but a moving, blackly comic examination of the contradictions between freedom and happiness that state socialism produces. PB
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
Lifespan | b. 1875 (Germany), d. 1967 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1924
First Published by | S. Fischer Verlag (Berlin)
Original Title | Der Zauberberg
“Waiting we say is long. We might just as well—or more accurately—say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such.”
The Magic Mountain opens with Hans Castorp making the journey from Hamburg to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss mountains. The first three weeks of what was supposed to be a temporary visit pass by achingly slowly. But Castorp is soon seduced by the repetitive, strangely enchanted existence of the patients. His imagination is caught by a series of vividly drawn characters who come to recuperate, and to die, on the mountain.
The novel belongs to the Bildungsroman tradition, though Castorp’s initiation is not into the world of action and events—the clamor of the approaching First World War is consigned to somewhere below the quiet of the sanatorium—but into the world of ideas. Thomas Mann uses the debates between patients as a way of exploring the philosophical and political concerns of his time: humanism versus the very real threat of absolutism. Castorp must also struggle to understand what it means to fall in love in a place marked by illness and death—the troublingly intimate memento that Clavdia Chauchat confers upon her lover is an X-ray photograph of her clouded lungs.
The prospect of Castorp’s return to the flatland is deferred, and as the weeks stretch into months and then into years, time seems not to pass by at all. We experience with Hans Castorp the intensity of the formative moments—tragic, erotic, mundane, absurd—of his seven years in the sanatorium, all suspended in a heightened present. KB
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Green Hat
Michael Arlen
Lifespan | b. 1895 (Bulgaria), d. 1956 (U.S.)
First Published | 1924
First Published by | W. Collins & Sons (London)
Former Name | Dikran Kouyoumdjian
The Green Hat tells the story of the seductive Iris Storm—allegedly based on Nancy Cunard—whose forbidden love for her childhood sweetheart, Napier Harpenden, leads her through a series of tragic marriages and disastrous love affairs, culminating in her dramatic suicide. The novel made Michael Arlen a celebrity, but this flamboyantly public figure also had close connections to some major figures of British modernism, such as D. H. Lawrence and Osbert Sitwell. Although The Green Hat remains a popular romance, its modernism is evident, for example, in an affectionate parody of Sitwell’s magazine, The New Age; the novel can also be read as a popular rewrite of Ford’s The Good Soldier, which Iris describes as an “amazing romance.” Arlen’s writing style, with its ambiguous, elliptical descriptions, is clearly influenced by modernism, while the imagery offers some particularly stark, oddly
dislocated depictions resembling imagism.
These modernist elements combine with the conventional features of the romance, particularly where the novel comments on the pace of fashion and the modern age. For instance, Iris commits suicide by driving her car into the tree under which she and Napier declared their love. Clearly the grand romantic gesture is one of the clichés of the genre, but the use of the motor car, which figures as a symbol of high-speed modernity and is described through the image of a giant insect, seems an almost futurist diversion from convention. LC
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The New World
Heruy Wäldä-Sellassé
Lifespan | b. 1878 (Ethiopia), d. 1939
First Published | 1925
First Published in | Addis Ababa
Original Language | Ethiopic
Ethiopia was one of the very few African countries to escape takeover by European colonial powers, and in 1923, it was accepted into the League of Nations. As the director of the government press, Heruy Wäldä-Sellassé was responsible for the promotion of an Ethiopian national culture and Amharic as a printed language, and as a diplomat he sought ideas and aid from the developed world.
The New World, Wäldä-Sellassé’s second novel, is situated unreservedly in the perspective of the desirability of modernization along Western lines. The novel’s central character is an Ethiopian who takes an opportunity to study in Europe, and then returns inspired with a mission to transform his home country. But his aspirations are thwarted by the ignorance and prejudice of the Ethiopian people. They resist his efforts to persuade them to abandon their traditional practices and beliefs. They are hostile to the wonders of modern European technology, and they give allegiance to a traditional priesthood that is corrupt and reactionary.
To today’s reader, Wäldä-Sellassé’s modernizer is almost certain to appear unbearably patronizing and startlingly politically uncorrect in his assumption of the unquestionable superiority of Western civilization. Yet the book describes a significant moment in the evolving relationship between African aspirations and European power, as well as contributing largely to the establishment of a modern Amharic literature. RegG
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Professor’s House
Willa Cather
Lifespan | b. 1873 (U.S.), d. 1947
First Published | 1925
First Published by | A. Knopf (New York)
Full Name | Willa Siebert Cather
“He had never learned to live without delight.”
The opening and closing sections of The Professor’s House are chronologically sequential narratives of history professor Godfrey St. Peter’s current domestic and professional lives. They flank an autobiographical confession made years before to St. Peter by his student, Tom Outland. As Outland describes his discovery of an ancient civilization on New Mexico’s Blue Mesa, a revelation of almost religious intensity, he imparts the dry, luminous clarity of his Southwestern origins. Tom Outland’s seemingly boundless scientific and spiritual potential, and the paternal affection that St. Peter feels for him, sanctify him as a figure of lyrical perfection rendered complete by his early death in the First World War.
The professor’s house is in fact two houses. On the one hand, there is the homely, perennially dilapidated house, now emptied and mostly uninhabited, where St. Peter raised his family and forged his career. On the other hand, there is the house that he had custom-built for his retirement, financed with a prestigious academic prize, which represents a comfortable future he has, until recently, resisted. When he first met Outland, St. Peter was an unorthodox young academic with financial and professional concerns, but by the time of the narrative, he has achieved renown and even wealth by virtue of the same work that, years ago, was deemed unpublishable. St. Peter’s daughter, who was engaged to Outland at the time of his death, capitalizes ruthlessly with her husband on Outland’s tragic story and lucrative inventions. Though Outland has suffered, he has nevertheless been spared the petty indignities St. Peter endures as his sense of self is slowly usurped by institutional forces beyond his influence. AF
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Artamonov Business
Maxim Gorky
Lifespan | b. 1868 (Russia), d. 1936
First Published | 1925, in Russkaia Kniga (Berlin)
Given Name | Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov
Original Title | Delo Artamonovic
“When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.”
Maxim Gorky, 1926
The Artamonov Business, one of Maxim Gorky’s longest and most ambitious novels, tells the story of the merchant Artamonov family through three generations. Ilya Artamonov, a liberated serf, starts his own factory and tries to pass on what he sees as the bourgeois values of hard work and humility to his heirs, his son, Pyotr, and nephew, Alexei. Ascending into the ranks of the middle classes brings only disaster for the Artamonovs, however, as Pyotr’s weakness and Alexei’s cold business sense lack the warmth and humanity that characterized Ilya’s generation. In the third generation, the Artamonovs are visited by what seems to them to be disaster when their factory is taken over by the workers as part of the October Revolution. But as Gorky makes plain, the process of degeneration that has accompanied the family’s rise to bourgeois status ensures the necessity of their downfall and paves the way for the possibility of a better world.
Here Gorky presents a sweeping family saga in the manner of War and Peace, but with Tolstoy’s historical background replaced by a much more urgent and contemporary setting. The characters, both the damaged Artamonovs and the shifting cast of factory workers who coexist with them, are vivid and lifelike. As in all of his novels, Gorky avoids the trap of political propaganda, treating all of the figures—workers and capitalists alike—with a sardonic although ultimately sympathetic eye. Readers of the novel will find themselves catching a glimpse of the fervor of revolutionary Russia that allowed many, including Gorky, to be swept away on a wave of new hope for societal change. The Artamonov Business remains a valuable novel, both for its literary skill and for its value as the product of a poignant moment in Russian history. AB
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Trial
Franz Kafka
Lifespan | b. 1883 (Czechoslovakia), d. 1924 (Austria)
First Published | 1925
First Published by | Die Schmiede (Berlin)
Original Title | Der Prozeß
This Man at Table sketch forms part of a series taken from Kafka’s 1905 lecture notes from the Kierling Sanatorium (Vienna).
“Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.”
As in Franz Kafka’s long story Metamorphosis—which begins with the line “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”—the entire narrative of The Trial emerges from the condition that announces itself in the opening sentence. The protagonist, Josef K., never discovers what he is being charged with, and is never able to understand the principles governing the system of justice in which he finds himself ensnared. Instead, the narrative follows his exhausting determination to understand and to protest his innocence in the complete absence of any doctrine that would explain to him what it would mean to be guilty, or indeed, of what he actually stands accused. In following Josef K.’s struggle toward absolution, the novel presents us with an astonishingly moving account of what it is to be born naked and defenseless into a completely incomprehensible system, armed only with a devout conviction of innocence.
Intimacy with this novel has a peculiar effect on the reader. If the first response to K.’s grappling with the authorities is a sense of familiarity and recognition, there is soon a strange reversal. It begins to seem that our world merely resembles Kafka’s; that our struggles are
a faint likeness of the essential struggle that is revealed to us in K.’s endless plight. For this reason, The Trial, in all its inconclusion, its impossibility, and its difficulty, is a wildly exhilarating book, which takes us to the very empty heart of what it is to be alive in a world of everyday trials pushed to the extreme. PB
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Counterfeiters
André Gide
Lifespan | b. 1869 (France), d. 1951
First Published | 1925
First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Title | Les Faux-Monnayeurs
Significantly, Andre Gide’s only novel worthy of the name is an investigation into the possibilities of the novel. Edouard, one of the many narrative voices in The Counterfeiters, is also a struggling novelist. He, like Gide, keeps a diary documenting the process of novel writing. He, too, is trying to write a novel called The Counterfeiters. In a vertiginous effect of mise en abyme, we are reading a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel . . . This is one of the many devices that Gide employs to wrongfoot the reader. Another is the deception of the title. Just as Gide flirts with recognized genres such as the romance and the Bildungsroman, the possibility of a detective fiction with schoolboys passing off fake gold coins is hinted at but never followed through. Counterfeit coins serve as a metaphor for false values more generally—those put into circulation by the state, the family, the Church, and the literary establishment.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 36