1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 37
The Counterfeiters does not make things easy for us: we are deprived of a reassuringly impersonal narrative voice, we are introduced to characters who turn out to have no role to play, and the threads of the novel’s many different plots are left hanging. But this is also why it is so important. Reading The Counterfeiters, all of our certainties as readers of nineteeth-century novels are called in question, which means that we are also uncertain of Gide: in the midst of all this inauthenticity, what actually guarantees the value of The Counterfeiters? KB
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lifespan | b. 1896 (U.S.), d. 1940
First Published | 1925
First Published by | C. Scribner’s Sons (New York)
Full Name | Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby is an American literary classic. Nick Carraway’s enraptured account of the rise and fall of his charismatic neighbor during a single summer came to evoke the pleasurable excesses and false promises of a whole decade. The novel’s extraordinary visual motifs—the brooding eyes of the billboard, the ashen wasteland between metropolitan New York and hedonistic Long Island, the blues and golds of Gatsby’s nocturnal hospitality—combined the iconography of the “jazz age” and its accompanying anxieties about the changing social order characteristic of American modernism. Gatsby, infamously created out of a “platonic conception of himself,” came to be synonymous with nothing less than the American Dream.
Gatsby’s lavish and hedonistic lifestyle is a construct, we quickly learn, erected in order to seduce Daisy, the lost love of his youth who is now married to the millionaire Tom Buchanan. Fitzgerald’s easy conjuring of Gatsby’s shimmering fantasy world is matched by his presentation of its darker and more pugnacious realities. The novel frequently hints at the corruption that lies behind Gatsby’s wealth, and Tom is shown to be a crude and adulterous husband. The novel’s violent climax is a damning indictment of the careless excess of the very privileged, yet it concludes ambivalently. NM
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1900s
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Lifespan | b. 1882 (England), d. 1941
First Published | 1925
First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)
First U.S. Edition | Harcourt, Brace & Co. (N. Y.)
Woolf’s draft notes for Mrs. Dalloway explore the experience of a reality she found “very erratic, very undependable.”
Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway takes place over the course of a single day, and is one of the defining texts of modernist London. It traces the interlocking movements around Regent’s Park of the two main protagonists: Clarissa Dalloway is a socialite, and wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative MP, while Septimus Warren Smith is a veteran and shell-shocked victim of the First World War. The passage of time in the novel, punctuated by the periodic striking of a giant, phallic Big Ben, ultimately takes us to a double climax; to the success of Mrs. Dalloway’s illustrious party, and to the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, who finds himself unable to live in the post-war city.
Much of the effect of this novel derives from the irreconcilability of its two halves, an irreconcilability that is reflected in the space of the city itself. Different people go about their different lives, preparing for suicide and preparing for dinner, and there is no way, the novel suggests, of building a bridge between them. Septimus and Clarissa are separated by class, by gender, and by geography, but at the same time, the novel’s capacity to move from one consciousness to another suggests a kind of intimate, underground connection between them, which is borne out in Clarissa’s response to the news of Septimus’s death. A poetic space, which does not correspond to the clock time meted out by Big Ben, underlies the city, suggesting a new way of thinking about relations between men and women, between one person and another. Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of contradictions—between men and women, between rich and poor, between self and other, between life and death. But despite these contraditions, in the flimsy possibility of a poetic union between Septimus and Clarissa, the novel points toward a reconciliation we are still waiting to realize. PB
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Chaka the Zulu
Thomas Mofolo
Lifespan | b. 1875 (Lesotho), d. 1948
First Published | 1925
First Published by | Morija Sesuto Book Depot
Original Title | Chaka
Thomas Mofolo, a native of Basutoland in South Africa, wrote Chaka the Zulu, an undisputed masterpiece of Sesotho literature, in 1910. The novel tells the story of Chaka, the illegitimate son of a minor South African chief and the man who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, created the Zulu nation through ten years of continuous war.
Sent away from his father’s palace along with his mother, Chaka is bullied as a child. The rejection by his father and his peers causes Chaka to see life as nothing more or less than the exercise of might. Banished from his tribe, Chaka encounters a witchdoctor, Isanusi, in the desert. With Isanusi’s help Chaka wins the chieftainship of his tribe and the love of a beautiful woman. But his desire for fame and ambition are too strong and Chaka, in a diabolical pact with Isanusi, kills the woman he loves in order to become the greatest chief of all time.
Mofolo, a Christian writer with a keen eye for sin, methodically chronicles the deterioration of his protagonist’s soul. Chaka is, in the end, unable to distinguish war and murder; he has sacrificed his conscience to become a dictator. But, given that Chaka’s story began in his troubled childhood, we are able to see Chaka as a brilliant and alienated teenager as well as a savage tyrant. Mofolo, blending historical truth with romance, creates a fascinating novel that sheds light on pre-colonial Africa. OR
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The Making of Americans
Gertrude Stein
Lifespan | b. 1874 (U.S.), d. 1946 (France)
First Published | 1925
First Published by | Contact Editions (Paris)
Original Language | English
Gertrude Stein’s innovative prose has a measured beauty that is best enjoyed with the rhythm and pace of the spoken word. This epic novel reinvents and simultaneously challenges the form of the traditional family saga, as it follows several generations of four families, but to summarize it in such a way fails to do it justice. Moving back and forth in time with fluidity, Stein traces the internal, emotional development of people as they mature, as they relate to their spouses and their community, and, ultimately, as they become American; this is done with an almost cubist desire to show the events in all their facets and from many angles. The Making of Americans also takes time to comment on its own composition, and contains some of Stein’s most comprehensive comments upon her conception of writing and her unique style.
Somewhat underrated as a modernist classic, the novel certainly has all the hallmarks of a text that forges a new and idiomatic use of language while challenging the previous Victorian concept of realism. It is also an epic interpretation of the Americans’ psychological development, reaching back to the founding families and the generations they produce and nurture. Challenging, beautifully written, and rightfully a literary masterpiece, The Making of Americans deserves to be ranked among the forefront of modernist achievements. JC
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1900s
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie
Lifespan | b. 1890 (England), d. 1976
First Published | 1926
First Published by | W. Collins & Sons (London)
Full Name | Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie
All detective novels have twists, but the masterpiece of Agatha Christie’s extensive oeuvre trumps them all, reverting on some of the fundamental principles of the genre in its startling denouement.
This novel conta
ins many of the ingredients for which Christie became famous: a couple of bodies, a country-house setting, a small group of suspects, and the moustache-twirling Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. As narrated by the local doctor, Sheppard, there is a veritable profusion of possibilities as to who murdered Roger Ackroyd: is it the parlormaid, the retired major, Ackroyd’s stepson, or a mysterious stranger seen lurking about the grounds? This (partial) list suggests some of the incidental interest of Christie’s novel, which conveys social and class structures in rural 1920s England. Everyone, as Poirot says, has a secret, and the novel teasingly unveils an illegitimate son, a secret marriage, blackmail, and drug addiction as possible motives for the stabbing.
Red-herrings and dubious alibis abound: the actual time of the murder has been ingeniously concealed, Ackroyd’s voice being heard from beyond the grave, recorded on a dictaphone, the disappearance of which provides Poirot with a vital clue. For the reader, deducing the true criminal is almost impossible; this is one of the few detective novels that compels a second reading, to see how the murderer’s tracks are so masterfully obscured. CC
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1900s
One, None and a Hundred Thousand
Luigi Pirandello
Lifespan | b. 1867 (Italy), d. 1936
First Published | 1926, by R. Bemporad (Florence)
Original Title | Uno, nessuno e centomila
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1934
Being the object of a friend or relative’s close scrutiny may, at times, come as a surprise, especially if the observer is cruelly right in highlighting some of our minor physical imperfections. But for Moscarda, the protagonist of Luigi Pirandello’s novel, his wife’s unexpected comment about his nose, slightly bent to the right, triggers a sensational change in his life. His wife sees Moscarda totally at variance with his self-image. Moscarda suddenly realizes that he lives with an inseparable stranger and that for others—his wife, his friends, and his acquaintances—he is not at all who he is for himself. Moscarda is forced to live with a thousand strangers, the thousand Moscardas that others see, who are inseparable from his own self and yet whom, dramatically, he will never know.
Pirandello’s favorite theme of the relativity of perception and the fragmentation of reality into incomprehensible pieces is his philosophical core. Closely connected to it is the reflection on language and the impossibility of objective and satisfactory communication between speakers, due to the fact that we all charge words with our own meanings. As Moscarda obsesses over the painful realization that he is only what others make of him, he tries to subvert others’ reality by reinventing himself as a new, different, Moscarda. But his attempt to possess his own self is in vain, and his only way out is self-denial, starting with a refusal to look at mirrors. RPi
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1900s
Under Satan’s Sun
Georges Bernanos
Lifespan | b. 1888 (France), d. 1948
First Published | 1926
First Published by | Plon (Paris)
Original Title | Sous le soleil de Satan
French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos’s first novel is a passionate statement of belief, the intensity of which is barely contained within the fictional frame.
The novel opens with the story of Mouchette, a teenage girl in rural France revolted by the hypocrisy and stupidity of her social environment. Among other heinous sins, she murders her rakish lover. Bernanos then introduces his hero, Father Donissan, a clumsy and uncultivated young priest who practices self-flagellation and has a strangely inspirational impact on local people. His extremism is naturally disapproved by the Catholic hierarchy. On a road at night, Donissan tussles with Satan incarnated as a horse dealer. He also encounters Mouchette and recognizes that she is under Satan’s power. The girl’s subsequent fate involves Donissan in an extreme reaction, which provokes church and secular authorities to unite in diagnosing him as suffering mental illness. By the end of the novel, Donissan has achieved a subtly martyred sainthood.
Bernanos succeeds in endowing these supernatural events with a concrete imaginative reality. His aggressive rejection of the complacent “bourgeois” world has recommended him to many non-believers as a fellow spirit. However, although Bernanos’s own political beliefs at one time veered to the far right, his books explicitly deny any connection between an assertion of Catholic faith, even in an almost medieval form, and support for the existing social order. RegG
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1900s
The Good Soldier Švejk
Jaroslav Hašek
Lifespan | b. 1883 (Czechoslovakia), d. 1923
First Published | 1926, by A. Synek (Prague)
First Published in four volumes | 1921–1923
Original Title | Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka
Illustrator Josef Lada’s original images of Švejk’s misadventures have imposed his vision of the characters on readers ever since.
The Good Soldier Švejk is, in the original, a monumental and unfinished collection (Jaroslav Hašek died before he could complete the last two volumes) of comically epic adventures, involving an accidental soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. The brilliance of the novel depends on the hapless but well-meaning central figure Švejk—walking on the margins of history, yet somehow constantly altering its outcome. This he achieves by doggedly doing precisely what is required of him, while frustrating the system’s expectations by being always and entirely himself.
In Švejk, Hašek—who had himself variously been a soldier, dog-stealer, drunkard, and cabaret performer—invented and perfected a fictional type. A prototypical Forrest Gump, Švejk was taken up in Czechoslovakia as a national hero, capable because of his (apparent) artlessness of exposing the assertive lies of power. The batman to a Czech lieutenant, Švejk was dragooned into service for idle remarks uttered in a tavern about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Throughout his adventures, and perhaps because of their multiplicity, it is never clear how much of Švejk’s character is calculation and how much wide-eyed innocence. Along the way he manages to attack propaganda, bureaucratic self-servingness, and an all-pervading secret state. DSoa
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1900s
Alberta and Jacob
Cora Sandel
Lifespan | b. 1880 (Norway), d. 1974 (Sweden)
First Published | 1926, by Gyldendal (Oslo)
Given Name | Sara Fabricius
Original Title | Alberte og Jakob
The first part of Cora Sandel’s “Alberta” trilogy, Alberta and Jacob was hailed as a masterpiece by the women’s emancipation movement. Set in a small provincial town in northern Norway, the novel focuses on Alberta, a girl from a middle-class family in financial difficulties. Unable to go to school or to go south for the gay social life of the city of Christiania, Alberta has nothing to do but dust and mend, or attend dull social events. The novel probes the stifling emptiness of Alberta’s life, her hopes and fears, her secret yearnings and inner rebellion.
The narrative is framed by evocative descriptions of the intense contrasts of Norway’s seasons, starting in the constantly dim light of early winter, when Alberta’s world shrinks to the confines of her own house. As the days lengthen, rich young people appear in her town, and her world expands and is filled with parties and outings. However, trapped by her sense of unattractiveness and social inadequacy, Alberta stands on the outside of almost all the events, an observer, unable to act. When the days grow shorter again, Alberta is left trapped.
In contrast, Alberta’s outgoing and rebellious brother, Jacob, openly fights for his right to go to sea, and eventually manages to escape the family. Finally, as even her outspoken friend, Beda Buck, is forced to conform, Alberta contemplates suicide. But at the last moment she feels the life within her assert itself, and she drags herself home, determined “to live in spite of it all, to live on as best as she could.”
ClW
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1900s
The Castle
Franz Kafka
Lifespan | b. 1883 (Czechoslovakia), d. 1924 (Austria)
First Published | 1926
First Published by | K. Wolff (Munich)
Original Title | Das Schloss
It stands as testament to the achievements of Franz Kafka that the unfinished state of The Castle is in no way detrimental to its effectiveness. Unlike The Trial and The Metamorphosis, the literal entirety of the story is not contained in the first line; whether this is due to the unfinished nature of the novel is impossible to know, but The Castle is certainly a more miasmic, elusive work than even these. In this respect it seems somehow right that there is no ending, that the events recounted seemingly form part of an infinite series, of which a small segment has found its way onto the pages of a novel.
The arrival of the land surveyor K in the village that surrounds the castle, and the discovery that he is not wanted, and cannot stay, constitutes the total narrative, but the progression through the relatively straightforward points is typically nightmarish. Kafka’s integration of absurdity and realism is at its most subtle here; events never veer from the apparently literal, but somehow remain totally alien. Despite the apparent fixedness of characters on a page, the feeling of detachment, that everyone is self-consciously playing a part, is inescapable. More than it tells a story, The Castle evokes an atmosphere of perpetual unease. There is a suggestion of fear lurking just out of sight, with all else obscured by the interminable obstacles of bureaucracy. The entirety of the novel is akin to that final moment in a dream when you try to speak and find no air to carry your voice, time slowed to a crawl. SF