1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  The novel is an honest examination of the contradictory promises that twentieth-century America held out to women. Helga Crane is socially vulnerable, yet she is also able to hesitatingly articulate a desire for pleasure and self-fulfillment. The novel makes clear the particular tribulations faced by the “mulatto” woman who can claim no community. The promise of the future is suggested by depictions of the pleasures of urban anonymity and of the relations between gender and desire. But it is this future’s utter failure to materialize, and Helga’s acceptance of a blind sacrifice in its place, that makes the ending so bitterly damning. NM

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  1900s

  Decline and Fall

  Evelyn Waugh

  Lifespan | b. 1903 (England), d. 1966

  First Published | 1928

  First Published by | Chapman & Hall (London)

  Full Name | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

  Evelyn Waugh’s debut novel, Decline and Fall, introduced the world to the acerbic and hilarious style for which he became famous. The story is of the “mysterious disappearance” of Paul Pennyfeather, a young middle-class everyman, into “extraordinary adventures” that are as absurd as they are arresting. The appeal of the book, however, lies not in its plot, but in its relentless and caustic wit, and the biting satire it aims at swathes of British society.

  Among the abysses that pepper Paul’s “disappearance” are a ludicrous expulsion from Oxford, an appointment as a master at a carnivalesque boarding school in North Wales, an engagement to a wealthy socialite, and a spell in prison. Surrounding the roller-coaster rise and fall of this hapless protagonist are a cast of recurring characters that are intoxicating in their colorful absurdities. From a pedophilic lush with a peg leg, to a “modern churchman” destined to have his head hacked off by a crazed religious visionary, Decline and Fall teems with a host of unforgettable characters.

  Underneath this incredible abundance lies a not-so-thinly veiled attack on a variety of targets. From the vicissitudes of modern architecture to the moral turpitude of the upper classes, Waugh casts satirical barbs with ruthless accuracy. Although a sense of hopelessness seems to underlie these critiques, it is impossible to criticize the direction of the moral compass of this novel, which remains unremittingly superb in its comic intensity. DR

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  1900s

  Some Prefer Nettles

  Junichiro Tanizaki

  Lifespan | b. 1886 (Japan), d. 1965

  First Published | 1928

  Original Title | Tade kuu mushi

  Imperial Prize in Literature | 1949

  Often compared to Junichiro Tanizaki’s own failed marriage and his retreat from Tokyo to the more traditional Osaka-Kyoto region after the great earthquake of 1923, this novel tells the story of Kaname, a man whose own domestic rupture stems from his sensual desire for the Western “other” embodied in a Eurasian prostitute. Meanwhile, his wife, Misako, also eschews her traditional role and turns outward for emotional fulfillment by taking a lover, subscribing to Western ideals of beauty, and listening to jazz. In this seemingly unbridgeable gulf that defines the crisis of modernity, Misako’s father, a traditionalist, attempts to resolve the situation by turning the couple inward, back to the classical art forms and Japanese aesthetic values that connect them to a larger inner and historical meaning.

  Through the display of bunraku, traditional Japanese puppetry, and the precise gestures of the father’s geisha, O-hisu, Tanizaki paints an alternate landscape within modern Japan and offers a return to the past as an option for reinventing the present. Through glimpses at theaters, reflections on walks, and an evocation of nature, Tanizaki gestures at a possibility of reconciliation between two people and two traditions. Some Prefer Nettles is known as a hallmark of Tanizaki’s sparing prose style, a treatise on beauty, and a revaluation of Japanese culture. Above all, it is a meditation on the fragility of relationships, the difficulty of letting go, and the paralysis of indecision. HH

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  1900s

  Parade’s End

  Ford Madox Ford

  Lifespan | b. 1873 (England), d. 1939 (France)

  Last Volume of Tetralogy Published | 1928

  First Published by | Duckworth & Co. (London)

  Tetralogy Published as Single Volume | 1950

  Ford Madox Ford’s gargantuan Parade’s End, one of many First World War classics, is frequently hailed as the “best war book.” This may be because it is both one of the most comprehensive and yet most understated of the war books, using Ford’s characteristic modernism to subtly portray a world falling into deceit. Civilian concerns and activities are subtly investigated, as Ford charts the passage of Christopher Tietjen’s wartime service and the breakdown of his marriage to the villainous Sylvia.

  As with so many of the war books, it is often difficult to separate the author from their fictional counterpart, and Ford, who was blown up and partially deafened by a shell in the trenches while shaving, is no exception. The last of the Parade’s End books were published slightly before the more aggressive diatribes against war formed a seemingly cohesive voice. As such, Ford’s is perhaps a more well-mannered war. Tietjen’s shock and lack of comprehension of his circumstances is symptomatic of the confused responses of veterans, and the quartet’s impressionist atmosphere adds to this inability to fully comprehend the impact of the war on even one person. Yet Ford’s work now stands as a rather dense investigation, and his indirect war message is less clearly received by the present generation, accustomed as it is to a more stereotypical vision of mud, guts, and poppies. “No more hope, no more glory, not for the nation, not for the world I dare say, no more parades.” EMcCS

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  1900s

  The Well of Loneliness

  Radclyffe Hall

  Lifespan | b. 1880 (England), d. 1943

  First Published | 1928

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  Given Name | Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall

  On its publication in 1928, The Well of Loneliness prompted one of the most famous legal trials for obscenity in the history of British law, resulting in a twenty-year ban. At the same time, it brought the existence of lesbians to the attention of the public and each other in an unprecedented way.

  The Well of Loneliness tells the story of the “invert” Stephen (named by a father desperate for a son) who is painfully aware of her “queerness” from an early age. Following her first love affair, Stephen is thrown out of her beloved family home in the secure and wealthy Midlands, and travels to London and then Paris, becoming a successful writer. Serving with the ambulance corps on the front line in the First World War, Stephen meets and falls in love with a young girl called Mary—the final part of the novel tells the story of their relationship.

  For some modern readers, the novel is outdated with its almost gothic melodrama, its nineteenth-century theories of sexual orientation, and its deep pessimism with regard to the fate of those who choose lovers from their own sex. But there are others for whom the novel still strikes a painfully resonant chord. The book’s power derives from its unerring and possibly unnerving perception of heterosexual society, and the devastating effects of both its prejudices and its norms. SD

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  1900s

  Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  D. H. Lawrence

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

  First Published | privately in 1928 (Florence)

  First English-Language Publication | 1932

  Published by | M. Secker (London)

  Penguin’s jacket for the first 1960 edition bears the emblem of the phoenix, which beckons to Lawrence’s Phoenix Essays.

  The publication history of Lady Chatterly’s Lover provides a plot itself worthy of a novel. Published privately in 1928 and long available in foreign editions, the first unexpurgated edition did n
ot appear in England until Penguin risked publishing it in 1960. Prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, Penguin was acquitted after a notorious trial, in which many eminent authors of the day appeared as witnesses for the defense.

  Due to this infamous history, the novel is most widely known for its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse. These occur in the context of a plot that centers on Lady Constance Chatterly and her unsatisfying marriage to Sir Clifford, a wealthy Midlands landowner, writer, and intellectual. Constance enters into a passionate love affair with her husband’s educated gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Pregnant by him, she leaves her husband and the novel ends with Mellors and Constance temporarily separated in the hope of securing divorces in order to begin a new life together.

  What remains so powerful and so unusual about this novel is not just its honesty about the power of the sexual bond between a man and a woman, but the fact that, even in the early years of the twenty-first century, it remains one of the few novels in English literary history that addresses female sexual desire. It depicts a woman’s experience of the exquisite pleasure of good sex, her apocalyptic disappointment in bad sex, and her fulfillment in truly making love. As if all this were not enough to mark Lady Chatterly’s Lover as one of the truly great English novels, it is also a sustained and profound reflection on the state of modern society and the threat to culture and humanity of the unceasing tide of industrialization and capitalism. SD

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  1900s

  Orlando

  Virginia Woolf

  Lifespan | b. 1882 (England), d. 1941

  First Published | 1928

  First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)

  Original Language | English

  “The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing . . .”

  For a demonstration of the sheer vitality of Virginia Woolf’s writing, Orlando is unsurpassed. The novel is a provocative exploration of gender and history, as well as of the nature of biography itself; perhaps surprisingly, given these highly intellectual concerns, it was highly popular when first published.

  Following Orlando over a 400-year life full of adventure, love, and a shift in gender, the character was apparently based on Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. In the court of Elizabeth I, Orlando is a dazzlingly handsome sixteen-year-old nobleman. There follows a frost fair on the Thames, at which a love affair with a Russian princess begins, only to end in heartache. Later Orlando is sent by Charles II as ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople, where he becomes a woman, before returning to England to reside in the company of Pope and Dryden. A marriage in the nineteenth century leads to a son and a career as a writer, and the story ends in 1928, as Woolf’s text was published.

  This extraordinary tale is augmented by a series of writerly flourishes, questioning our conception of history, of gender, and of biographical “truth.” If these are constructs, then who constructs them? What do they mean for individuals living and telling their lives? Woolf uses a series of devices to facilitate this kind of speculation: clothes are prominent, as is their role in shaping perceptions of gender; the narrative voice, too, is brilliantly conscious of itself, and of us as readers. It is a remarkable text. MD

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  1900s

  Story of the Eye

  Georges Bataille

  Lifespan | b. 1897 (France), d. 1962

  First Published | 1928

  Original Title | Histoire de l’oeil

  Pseudonym | Lord Auch

  This classic of literary pornography also happens to be a significant surrealist novel. Georges Bataille—French librarian, sometime Marxist thinker, and literary critic—also wrote a classic, non-fictional study of eroticism. Story of the Eye synthesizes traditions of French literary-pornographic writing, abandoning the complications of libertine plotting or the notorious encyclopedia of body parts and orifices associated with de Sade. Bataille instead offers a quicker, more associative kind of pornographic dream. There are sexual acts and various defilements, but Bataille’s erotic novel is as much dominated by death, language, and literary analysis as it is by action. Here we have pornography, but pornography for intellectuals.

  Told in the first person, this short novel’s plot moves between fantasies and the subsequent acting out of various erotic obsessions involving an array of objects, ranging from a cat’s saucer to an antique wardrobe. The story invests more meaning in objects than in characters, while narrative situations emerge as rhetorical conceits linking objects to contexts in a string of metaphorical displacements, characteristic of literary Surrealism. Bataille’s prose poetics, however, have a stringency and clarity very different from the arbitrary reverie characteristic of other Surrealists. Overall, the novel is rounded off by Bataille’s remarkable analysis of the book’s confessional account of coincidences between memories and obscene images. DM

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  1900s

  Retreat Without Song

  Shahan Shahnoor

  Lifespan | b. 1903 (Turkey), d. 1974 (France)

  First Published | 1929

  First Published by | Tparan Masis (Paris)

  Original Title | Nahanje arhants ergi

  Retreat Without Song first appeared in serialized form in the Parisian daily Haratch, to violent protests from the newspaper’s mainly Armenian readership. Shahan Shahnoor’s critics objected to what they regarded as the novel’s pornographic character, to the perceived distortion of Armenian values, and to the defeatist tone predominating in the descriptions of the Armenian diaspora. The writer, then barely twenty-six years old, almost lost an eye in a brawl with disapproving co-nationals.

  For anyone reading Shahnoor’s novel today, it is hard to see what could have provoked such upheaval. Bedros is a young Armenian who makes a living in Paris as a fashionable photographer. As is common in artistic circles, he has a rapidly changing sequence of girlfriends, all actresses, models, or singers. This rhythm is interrupted when two women enter his life: Madam Jeanne, or Nenette, the woman he loves, and little Lise, the girl who loves him. Caught in the thoroughly Parisian lures of the one, and careful to spare the innocence of the other, Bedros finds his way back to an unadulterated self, more oriental in its passion and depth.

  Even though it takes up most of the narrative, the love story functions as a backdrop for the fate of exiles who are parted from their previous existence and their families. Little by little, their non-European selves and national identity succumb to the assimilating pressures of European sophistication until little remains but café patriotism. MWd

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  1900s

  Les Enfants Terribles

  Jean Cocteau

  Lifespan | b. 1889 (France), d. 1963

  First Published | 1929, by Grasset (Paris)

  Alternate Title | Children of the Game

  U.S. Title | The Holy Terrors

  “Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.”

  Les Enfants Terribles is a claustrophobic tale of love and attraction transformed into jealousy and malice, a comment on the potentially destructive and unstable nature of human relationships that was written in the wake of discoveries about the unconscious inaugurated by Freud and others. The book can also be read as a child’s nightmare. Virtually all the story takes place within one room, after the book’s famous opening scene when Paul, a sensitive young man, is injured by a snowball thrown by the sexually charismatic bully, Dareglos, with whom he is infatuated. He is forced to take to his bed in the cluttered and oppressive room that he shares with his sister, Elisabeth. Here they play a series of games, alternately arguing and making up. When Elisabeth brings Agathe to stay with them, Paul develops a crush on her because of her resemblance to Dareglos, wh
ich inflames Elisabeth’s jealousy.

  Many find the novel’s portrayal of damaged and obsessive adolescence prophetic of the roles played out by young Europeans and Americans after the Second World War. Paul and Elisabeth have few connections with life outside, retreating into a fantasy world in which they consume each other with their over-heated emotions and unrestrained needs. They are simultaneously tragic figures who stand for the fate of humanity and irritating, immature youths whose behavior is both comic and ridiculous. Cocteau also wrote the screenplay for Jean-Pierre Melville’s celebrated film (1950). AH

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  1900s

  Berlin Alexanderplatz

  Alfred Döblin

  Lifespan | b. 1878 (Poland), d. 1957 (Germany)

  First Published | 1929

  First Published by | S. Fischer Verlag (Berlin)