The Forbidden Realm belongs alongside Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as one of the novels of the agony of colonialism, the disintegration of European self-confidence and morals in an alien environment. But it is a disintegration that Slauerhoff embraces rather than deplores. The novel is short on characterization and its plot sometimes wanders, but Slauerhoff’s identification with his subject gives it a haunting, hallucinatory quality. RegG
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1900s
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Lifespan | b. 1902 (England), d. 1990
First Published | 1932
First Published by | Longmans & Co. (London)
Femina Vie Heureuse Prize | 1933
Cold Comfort Farm is a viciously funny novel and by far the most famous of Stella Gibbons’s numerous works. Published in 1932, it is a parody of the rural novel, and in particular the work of Mary Webb, but also of many writers now considered part of the canon of great “English literature.”
It tells the story of Flora Poste, a young London socialite who finds herself confronted with a long-estranged branch of her family, the Starkadders, after her parents’ death. The novel is peopled with a cornucopia of fantastic characters, from the brassiere-collecting Mrs. Smiling, to the tiresome Mr. Mybug, and the wonderful menagerie that is Cold Comfort Farm itself. The Starkadders are a truly remarkable creation, from Judith’s obsession with her son, the smoldering Seth, to Elfine’s wildness and the sermons of Reuben—and, of course, that something nasty in the woodshed. Far from being intimidated by the stern rusticity of her new location and family, Flora sets about transforming them, one by one, and the scenes that these various processes encompass are, without exception, delightful.
The targets of Cold Comfort Farm’s biting satire range from the social machinations of Austen to the melodramatic doom of Hardy and the overblown romanticism of Lawrence. The irreverence and sheer wit of the book are endlessly engaging. DR
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1900s
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Lifespan | b. 1894 (England), d. 1963 (U.S.)
First Published | 1932
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Inspired by | Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells (1921)
The bold jacket design for the first edition of Brave New World reflects the author’s dystopian vision of fractured futurity.
Aldous Huxley’s futuristic dystopia depicts a world in which state power has grafted itself so thoroughly and so effectively to the psyche of its citizenry that the boundaries of exploitation and fulfillment seem irremediably blurred. The World State’s professed ideal of social stability has been achieved through the proliferation of consumption and myriad sophisticated technologies. These include the State’s monopolistic manufacture of human beings, enforced by making contraception mandatory and promiscuity a virtue. Each of five hierarchically arranged social castes undergoes its own complex pre- and post-natal conditioning to encourage self-satisfaction. The desire for unattainable social mobility within the lowest castes is eradicated, allowing the controlling upper class to maintain its power.
This hybridized philosophy of the World State draws on aspects of Plato’s stratified Republic, and utilitarianism’s focus on the concept of “happiness.” The State facilitation of no-strings-attached pleasure may strike some readers as counterintuitive, given the vehemence with which sexuality is marketed today as the ultimate expression of individuality. Yet the uncoupling of sex from taboo and reproduction dismantles its emotional significance, which aids the World State in eliminating all private allegiances that do not contribute to tightening its stranglehold. In the end, the indiscriminate cultivation of what we might consider “adult” pursuits like drugs and sex renders them completely innocuous. For the childlike denizens of Brave New World, order is an end in itself, codified by the organized consumption of goods and services. But it is their conviction that they have been successful in achieving the fullest expression of human aspiration that should give contemporary readers everywhere the deepest shudder of recognition. AF
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1900s
Vipers’ Tangle
François Mauriac
Lifespan | b. 1885 (France), d. 1970
First Published | 1932, by Bernard Grasset (Paris)
Original Title | Le nœud de vipères
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1952
“Ask those who know me . . . why, malevolence is my leading characteristic!”
The snakes in the title of François Mauriac’s novel Vipers’ Tangle (also known as The Knot of Vipers) refer both to the tangled and vicious emotions in the heart of its narrator, Louis, and to the struggles and machinations of his grasping family, with whom he is locked in a seemingly never-ending combat. No one is guiltless in this text, which has been called the “classic example” of the Catholic novel.
Set in Paris and the beautiful vineyard country surrounding Bordeaux, the novel takes the form of a two-part confession, written by Louis as he lies dying from heart disease, describing the progressive decline of his family relationships toward what appears to be certain tragedy. Mauriac’s novel is a skillful examination of the devastating effects of societal disapproval and the resulting insecurity of the sensitive human soul. Louis, wounded early in his marriage by what he perceives to be the disregard of his new wife and her family, embarks on a self-defensive campaign of cruelty that inevitably spreads from his wife through his children and eventually to his grandchildren, poisoning his family life through several generations.
For Mauriac, however, this coldly-calculated suffering—horrible as it is—serves to suggest the possibility of Louis’s salvation. As he confesses his transgressions to the reader, Louis is forced to consider the feelings and motivations of others, gradually leading to a change of heart that is all the more moving because of its origins. Written in spare, elegant prose, Vipers’ Tangle is a novel that deftly exposes the seemingly limitless and infectious spread of the effects of a cruel action, but also holds out the possibility of eventual redemption and peace, offering, at the end, a moving portrait of both divine mercy and human fallibility. AB
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1900s
The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil
Lifespan | b. 1880 (Aust.-Hungary), d. 1942 (Switz.)
Last Completed Volume Published | 1933
First Published by | Publikationsvermerk (Zurich)
Original Title | Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
“Ultimately a poem, and the mystery of it, cuts the meaning of the world clear . . .”
Although Robert Musil’s unfinished, multivolume novel, The Man Without Qualities, is a staggering 2,000 pages long, it is written in short, digestible chapters, and amply repays the reader willing to invest the time. It was undoubtedly Musil’s most important body of work and is frequently ranked in the same stratum as the masterpieces of Marcel Proust and James Joyce. It is considered a definitive portrait of fin-de-siècle Austrian society, as well as of the political situation leading to the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Considering the novel’s length, Musil’s plot is surprisingly insubstantial. Ulrich, the protagonist, is a trained mathematician who lacks any purpose in life. He is being pushed by his father to find a useful place in society; Musil reminds us that just because a man has no “qualities” of his own, it does not mean that his family and friends will not try to impose their own qualities on him. Ulrich consistently fails to make any progress in this quest for societal standing, and instead he catches a succession of new lovers in the way that one catches successive colds. Through the intervention of his father, he joins the Parallelaktion, an attempt to find a suitable way of celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the emperor’s reign. The deliberations of the planning committee, in their utter vacuity, reflect
the wider vacuity at large. Ulrich finally forms an incestuous relationship with his sister, Agathe, and enters into a different plane of existence, which has variously been labeled as opening the door to totalitarianism, or as an immoralist critique of totalitarian rationalism.
Whatever the judgment, Musil’s style is unique and mesmerizing, and the novel is nothing short of the embodiment of an entire philosophy. DS
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1900s
Cheese
Willem Elsschot
Lifespan | b. 1892 (Belgium), d. 1960
First Published | 1933, by P. N. Van Kampen & Zoon
Given Name | Alfons-Jozef de Ridder
Original Title | Kaas
Willem Elsschot is the pseudonym of Alfons-Jozef de Ridder, the head of a successful advertising business who wrote his bestselling novels and short stories secretly in his spare time. Elsschot considered Cheese, written in less than a fortnight, to be his masterpiece. It is the tragicomic tale of a fifty-year-old clerk, Frans Laarmans, who decides to leave the job he has held for decades and go into the cheese business. Laarmans’s obsession with what people think of him dictates his every move, from whether to sit or to stand at his mother’s deathbed to his ill-fated venture into business.
Ignored by friends of his new acquaintance, the lawyer Van Schoonberg, Laarmans seeks to improve his status by accepting Van Schoonberg’s offer to establish him in the cheese business. Laarmans throws himself into the details of setting up his office, ordering the right stationery, and deciding on a name for his enterprise. But when the first large batch of Edam arrives, he is taken by surprise and has no idea what to do with the cheese. Laarmans’s hopelessly inadequate attempts to succeed in a business he knows nothing about, selling a product he finds disgusting, are related with masterly comic pacing and understated pathos. In prose often so laconic as to appear artless, Elsschot has created a convincing portrait of the 1930s, from the status-obsessed middle classes to the desperate people applying to be cheese salesmen, as well as a succinct satire on the perils of social climbing. ClW
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1900s
Man’s Fate
André Malraux
Lifespan | b. 1901 (France), d. 1976
First Published | 1933
First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Name | La condition humaine
In the 1930s, André Malraux was the quintessential politically committed intellectual. Man’s Fate, winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1933, belongs firmly to that heroic period of revolutionary politics, before a full understanding of the horrors of Stalinism diminished wholehearted left-wing commitment.
The book is set amid the complex political upheavals that rocked Shanghai in 1927—from a Chinese Communist insurrection to the repression and massacre of the Communists by their supposed allies, the Nationalist Guomindang. Malraux deploys personal knowledge of China and of the workings of international communism to good effect. His characters are endowed with complex inner lives, especially the political assassin Ch’en, haunted by a sense of alienation generated by his murders. Yet each character perhaps too clearly exemplifies a particular attitude to life and the revolution.
The climactic moment of the book has the Communist agent Katow, in the hands of Guomindang torturers, compassionately pass his cyanide suicide pills to two terrified Chinese prisoners and accept with unwavering courage an agonizing death in the boiler of a steam train. Such heroics mark Man’s Fate as, in essence, an intellectual version of a boys’ action-adventure story. It is hardly the profound examination of the human condition that Malraux intended, but, packed with dramatic incident and powerfully evoked detail, it remains a highly readable and informative period piece. RegG
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1900s
A Day Off
Storm Jameson
Lifespan | b. 1891 (England), d. 1986
First Published | 1933
First Published by | Nicholson & Watson (London)
Full Name | Margaret Storm Jameson
Having “a day off” from working in the gritty, impersonal, urban world of Storm Jameson’s interwar fiction scarcely affords any kind of lasting consolation or reprieve from everyday toil. Haunted by the “gaunt Yorkshire valley” from whose memory she seeks distraction in the “colored dusty circus of London,” the pitiable heroine shifts about the streetscape clutching at chance re-encounters that rekindle the flame of past relationships. Over the course of one afternoon’s wandering London’s commercial West End, events resolutely testify to all that this woman cannot possess in her own domestic isolation—mean, cramped, and perpetually on the brink of psychological exhaustion. Jameson shadows her with a sense of crystalline immediacy, referring to this character anonymously with “she” and “her”: abstracted pronouns complementing the alienation this woman feels unrelievedly at the bustling heart of that world-metropolis.
Jameson advocated a new, central role for the social novelist as a silent witness, for whom stylistic economy should always prevail over needless embellishment. In A Day Off, it is her depersonalized commentary that so pervasively implicates the reader, constantly testing the reader’s capacity for empathic comprehension of the protagonist’s inner world. Jameson makes us continually aware of our implied position as observers participating in her heroine’s futile quest for belonging. DJ
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1900s
Testament of Youth
Vera Brittain
Lifespan | b. 1893 (England), d. 1990
First Published | 1933, by V. Gollancz (London)
Full Title | Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925
Vera Brittain quickly became the spokesperson of her generation for this emotive account of her experiences in the First World War, during which all of her close male friends—brother, fiancé, and best friend—were killed in combat.
At first it might seem odd that a female pacifist should produce the definitive literary account of the First World War, until Brittain’s forward-thinking perspectives are considered. During the rethinking of the First World War in the 1960s, Brittain’s writing appeared to reflect perfectly the changing attitudes to war, which correlated more with the Peace Movement than the ideals of 1914–18. Testament of Youth collects all the ideas of the war “mythology,” imaginatively presenting “the pity of war,” the Lost Generation, and the idea that after 1918 nothing was ever the same again. Historical detail is then combined with these highly charged, emotive perceptions. Her intention was to inform a generation who still lacked the tools to describe war. But Testament of Youth has been instrumental in encouraging a negative perception of the war as unrelentingly grim, especially in the latter stages of the twentieth century, when the role of women during wartime was given greater attention. As an active participant who served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and as a woman, Vera Brittain brings a valid alternative perspective to the “horror of the trenches.” Her evolution from naïve patriotism to disillusion is compelling. EMcCS
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1900s
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein
Lifespan | b. 1874 (U.S.), d. 1946 (France)
First Published | 1933, by J. Lane (London)
First U.S. Publisher | Harcourt Brace & Co. (N.Y.)
Original Publication Source | The Atlantic Monthly
“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”
This is Gertrude Stein’s best selling and most accessible work. An “autobiography” written in the voice of her long-time companion, it is a work of sublime modernism, experimenting with voice and point of view, the nature of objectivity, and, above all, a superlative act of unabashedly unreliable narration.
Alice, or Gertrude, claims to have met only three geniuses in her life; the foremost, of course, is Gertrude herself. This is an astonishing
claim, considering that the women’s lives crossed with virtually every great and influential figure of the early twentieth century. Stein was at the forefront of modernism, arguably its midwife. Her atelier on the Rue de Fleurus in Paris was the centerpoint of art and ideas at a time when, in the mornings, you could choose between buying a new Gauguin or a pot of jam. Picasso and his varying wives are ever-present, as is the young Hemingway. Juan Gris also wanders in, puppy-dogging Picasso. Guillaume Apollinaire (who coined the term “Surrealism”) is an intimate, and Jean Cocteau, Lytton Strachey, Erik Satie, Ezra Pound, and Man Ray—to name a mere few—make appearances. It is a delirious time, and this ringside account by an unreliable witness, with all its various contradictions, paradoxes, and repetitions, is captivating. Gertrude was there as den mother to the birth of Cubism and the Fauves. She nurtured a renaissance of letters, was there for the birth of Dadaism, and when the Futurists came to town. She was also there when Nijinsky first danced Le Sacre du Printemps and created a scandal.
This is a mischievous act of ventriloquism, capturing the breathless, slightly dotty rambling of Alice, companion to the wives of geniuses. But, like the couple themselves, there is very little of Alice and a whole lot more of Gertrude. GT
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1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 42