1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 43
1900s
Murder Must Advertise
Dorothy L. Sayers
Lifespan | b. 1893 (England), d. 1957
First Published | 1933
First Published by | V. Gollancz (London)
Adapted for Television | 1973
In Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy L. Sayers sends her private detective hero Lord Peter Wimsey into an advertising agency to investigate the death of one of its employees. Wimsey, working under the alias Death Bredon, adopts with gusto the role of a copy writer, as he uncovers a plot involving a cocaine-dealing ring. The chief pleasure of the novel is its vivid realization of the advertising world, for which Sayers drew on her own years of experience as a copywriter. Sayers, like Joyce, was entranced by this language of persuasion, which allowed her fascination with word games full play, yet discomforted by a culture that had recourse to the easy slogan. “Advertise, or go under,” are the last words of the novel.
Advertising, too, becomes the means through which the drug dealers operate, so that Sayers is able to intertwine her detailed depiction of the office world with her detective plot. Wimsey (the name fully intended to conjure up “whimsy”) is a chameleon figure in this as well as Sayers’s other detective novels. He is a monocled and rather effete aristocrat with shades of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, a champion cricketer and athlete, and a detective whose involvement with crime and death is part of a moral universe. Sayers, for all her wit and whimsy, rarely lets her readers forget that the discovery of the murderer, at the heart of the detective novel’s game, was at that time shadowed by the state hangman’s noose. LM
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1900s
Miss Lonelyhearts
Nathanael West
Lifespan | b. 1903 (U.S.), d. 1940
First Published | 1933, by Liveright (New York)
First Translation | French, 1946
Given Name | Nathan Weinstein
Miss Lonelyhearts, the male protagonist of Nathanael West’s novel, answers newspaper readers’ despairing questions about how to handle their lives, which range from the mildly amusing to the genuinely grotesque. Known around town as a male “Dear Abby,” Miss Lonelyhearts feels emasculated. The vast chasm between his ambivalent aspirations to Christianity and the Depression-weary hedonism of 1930s New York, precludes him from offering anything more than the feeblest clichés to inspire his readers. He would like to offer a vision of meaningful living through the redemptive power of Christ, but is silenced by his editor, Shrike, who mocks religious belief and sarcastically recommends alternatives such as art, sex, and drugs. Miss Lonelyhearts’s own behavior throughout the novel swings between extremes. He makes halfhearted attempts to stabilize his life—for example, through a marriage proposal to his dependable girlfriend, Betty (whom he then avoids for weeks)—but also engages in ridiculously ill-advised escapades, including personal involvement with his readers.
The protagonist’s lack of empathy for his readers exposes his failure to emulate Christ, while the extent to which suffering believers are able to confess their darkest secrets and fervent requests in the prayer of their letters is diminished to a function of the journalism market. Miss Lonelyhearts is an interesting examination of the problematic role of Christianity in the modern world. AF
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1900s
Call it Sleep
Henry Roth
Lifespan | b. 1906 (Ukraine), d. 1995 (U.S.)
First Published | 1934
First Published by | R. O. Ballou (New York)
Original Language | English
Long overlooked until it was reissued in the 1960s, at a time when issues of cultural identity were highly prominent in American life, Call it Sleep is now widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century American fiction. The novel is an exuberant, visceral portrait of a slum childhood and the immigrant experience in New York’s Lower East Side at the start of the century. It is written from the perspective of the developing consciousness of David Schearl, a young Jewish boy recently arrived from Austria-Hungry with his mother to join his previously settled father. The novel charts the early years of his childhood as he learns to live in a foreign culture and deal with his personal fears, troubling family relationships, and challenging social adjustments. A key element of the narrative is the drastic change between speaking Yiddish and English, the associated problems of assimilation, and being caught between two cultures. This is reflected in the combination of gritty urban realism and a modernist focus on consciousness. Henry Roth’s virtuoso prose brilliantly captures the child’s confused but magical view of his strange surroundings and constant fear.
One of the most authentic, moving accounts of childhood terror in literature, Call it Sleep is a poignant, lyrical, and compelling tale of a child’s rude awakening to a radically new world and an essential contribution to our understanding of American social history. AL
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1900s
The Street of Crocodiles
Bruno Schulz
Lifespan | b. 1892 (Austria-Hungary), d. 1942
First Published | 1934
First Published by | Rój (Warszawa)
Original Title | Sklepy Cynamonowe
In this collection of short stories, Bruno Schultz reworks memories of his childhood in Drohobycz, Galicia, into a series of labyrinthine narratives that bring together the captivatingly prosaic and the fancifully absurd. The dilapidated decadence of his home in Market Square—with countless rooms let to lodgers and countless more left unoccupied and forgotten for months on end—serves as the backdrop for his recollections of an unconventional upbringing by an indolent mother and disengaged father.
The lengthy and convoluted “lectures” delivered by his mentally wandering father to bemused but intrigued household audiences, appear to anticipate many of the concerns of postmodernism. And, while the lectures progressively degenerate in terms of their own internal coherence, they function as a unifying narrative thread that is picked up at various points in the stories. Throughout the book, Schultz depicts his father’s failing mental and physical health, and the impact that this has upon the family; however, the gentle comedy with which he does so allows an unsentimental realism to sit congenially alongside a rather more surreal sensibility.
Schultz was influenced by Surrealism and Expressionism and as such can rightly be considered alongside writers such as Gogol and Kafka. A Polish Jew, he was killed by the S.S. in 1942. He left only two published collections of stories, which, until recently, have not received the widespread attention and critical acclaim they richly merit. JW
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1900s
Thank You, Jeeves
P. G. Wodehouse
Lifespan | b. 1881 (England), d. 1975 (U.S.)
First Published | 1934
First Published by | H. Jenkins (London)
Full Name | Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
The comic butler, a stock figure in fiction, reaches its supreme realization in Wodehouse’s most famous creation, Jeeves.
“I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.”
P. G. Wodehouse, 1956
People seem not to know how to read Wodehouse. Readers tend to see him as a comic writer and expect jokes—but there are none, just as there is little as regards an engaging plot or interesting characterization. P. G. Wodehouse is now somewhat unfashionable, as the world that he created, an everlasting midsummer England untouched by either of the World Wars, peopled with characters endowed with the psychology of a prepubescent, has long gone—even in the realms of fantasy. The reactionary politics of his novels have not stood the test of time. However, to go to Wodehouse for politics, plot, characterization, or jokes is to miss the sheer wonder of his prose. He was a writer of fine and peerless talent whose literary creativity spoke to a popular audience in a way that no other novelist could. His ability to weave from nothing a supremely c
omic metaphor or simile is still unmatched in the novel form.
He is of course most famous for the Jeeves and Wooster series (of which Thank You, Jeeves is the first full-length novel). The condescending butler Jeeves had appeared in short stories since 1917. Wodehouse was to have great success with Jeeves in the novel form, but the plots of the novels are practically indistinguishable from one another. The stories seem to turn upon Jeeves’ dislike of Wooster’s clothing or music. Wooster always seems to get mistakenly engaged to someone frighteningly serious and intelligent, whereupon he is then victim to the violent suitor whose place he has usurped. All such events will be set in train by the unpleasant combination of purple socks and red cummerbund, or ownership of a stolen cow creamer. Floating serenely on the surface of all this silliness, though, is Wodehouse’s utterly inimitable prose. VC-R
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1900s
Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lifespan | b. 1896 (U.S.), d. 1940
First Published | 1934
First Published by | C. Scribner’s Sons (New York)
Revised Edition Published | 1948
The first-edition cover reflects the beauty of Tender is the Night’s Riviera setting, with no suggestion of the book’s darker themes.
“If you’re in love it ought to make you happy.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald is recognized as the ultimate chronicler of the American post-war boom and Jazz era, drawing on his own life to describe the extravagant nonstop, alcohol-fueled party of the pre-Depression years. Tender is the Night sold well and was generally well received, attracting praise from Fitzgerald’s peers, Ernest Hemingway among them.
Set in the 1920s, the book tells the story of beautiful eighteen-year-old movie star Rosemary Hoyt, who is on holiday with her mother on the French Riviera when she meets Dick Diver, an American psychologist, and his wealthy wife, Nicole. Nicole had been abused by her father, commited to a sanitarium, and subsequently rescued by her doctor, who is now her husband. Entering their sophisticated, high-society world, Rosemary falls in love with Dick, and he with her. They are blissfully happy for a while, but tragedy soon strikes when a friend of the Divers kills a man in a drunk-driving accident, and Nicole has a nervous breakdown. At this point in the novel, the Divers’s idyll disintegrates as a series of unfortunate events begins to unfold.
This is Fitzgerald’s most autobiographical work, drawing on his own experiences living with the expatriate fast set in the south of France. The Divers were based on Gerald and Sara Murphy, a glamorous American couple that he and his wife Zelda knew. The novel also features the same sort of psychological treatments that the schizophrenic Zelda sought in Switzerland; the high costs of the treatment drove Fitzgerald away from novel writing and into the life of heavy drinking and Hollywood screenwriting that led to his early death. And, unlike the novel, real life doesn’t have a happy ending—in contrast to Nicole, Zelda never recovered, remaining institutionalized until her death in 1948. EF
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1900s
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller
Lifespan | b. 1891 (U.S.), d. 1980
First Published | 1934, by Obelisk Press (Paris)
First Published | 1961
Original Language | French
Henry Miller’s infamous autobiographical novel was first published in the 1930s by the risqué Parisian press Obelisk. Because of its sexually explicit themes and language, the book was banned for the following thirty years in both America and Britain. When it was finally published, in America in 1961 and in the UK in 1963, the novel gained cult status. In the book, Miller explores the seedy underbelly of Paris, where he lived as an impoverished expatriate in the 1930s, with a unique sensuality and freedom. Unshackled by moral and social conventions, Miller peppers his book with philosophical musings, fantasies, and a series of explictly described anecdotes about his sexual encounters with women.
The novel is, as Samuel Beckett remarked, “a momentous event in the history of modern writing,” and undoubtedly did much to break down societal taboos about sex and the language used to talk about sex. The novel inspired the Beat generation, whose rejection of middle-class American values led to a search for truth through the extremes of experience. However, feminist critics, most notably Kate Millet, have identified the irrepressibly misogynistic character of the work. Women are frequently represented as passive and anonymous receptacles, whose only role is to satisfy men’s physical desires. It is certainly true that the sheer violence of Miller’s prose overshadows any putative eroticism or titillation that the novel’s reputation may lead the reader to expect.
Although Miller’s work has achieved great popularity, this is perhaps a result of his reputation as a writer of “dirty books” rather than as a writer of good literature, and, indeed, there has been a good deal of critical disagreement about the “literary” quality of his work. JW
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1900s
The Postman Always Rings Twice
James M. Cain
Lifespan | b. 1892 (U.S.), d. 1977
First Published | 1934
First Published by | A. Knopf (New York)
First Adapted for Screen | 1946
This pulp masterpiece is a doomed gothic romance, an account of the grim conditions of life in Depression-era California. Cain asks to what extent his protagonists, Frank and Cora, are able to act independently of the larger sexual, political, and economic forces that appear to determine their lives. Frank’s self-knowledge is severely limited; although he would like to see himself as unattached and free, he quickly becomes embroiled in a passionate and destructive relationship. Cora’s petit-bourgeois aspirations involve murdering her “dirty” Greek husband and thereby “inheriting” his roadside café. Bereft of all morality and even any sense of self, Frank readily agrees to assist Cora in her plans. On a clifftop road they ply Cora’s husband with alcohol, place him in his car, and dispatch him to his death.
As Frank and Cora turn on each other, both are placed at the mercy of the law, which is shown to be even more amoral and skewed than the two lovers. The novel’s ending underlines the extent to which human existence, and indeed happiness, is both fleeting and arbitrary. Though The Postman was filmed three times, Cain’s cinematic influence extends well beyond this, and it is hard to imagine the Coen brothers, for example, without him. AP
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1900s
On the Heights of Despair
Emil Cioran
Lifespan | b. 1911 (Romania), d. 1995 (France)
First Published | 1934, by Editura “Fundatia pentru Literatura si Arta” (Bucharest)
Original Title | Pe culmile disperarii
Written at twenty-two years old, after months of debilitating depression accompanied by insomnia, On the Heights of Despair is more a cry than a work of philosophical reflection. In sixty-six short essays, sometimes only a paragraph long, with suggestive titles such as “On Not Wanting to Live,” “The World in Which Nothing is Solved,” “On Individual and Cosmic Loneliness,” “Ecstasy,” and “The Beauty of Flames,” Emil Cioran explores topics such as futility, irrationality, and the downright agony of existence.
This series of poignant ruminations functions as a stay in the narrator’s seeming drive toward suicide, a death wish that is, paradoxically, a result of too much plenitude: “I could die of life.” The solution lies in confession—one is driven to expression by necessity. Writing, as life, is the contrary of systematic thought. A philosopher turned poet therefore writes to mislead, not to organize understanding but to expose its sordid underbelly, the relentless, dull affair of day-to-day existence. In the course of such a shift from philosophical (un)concern to poetic expression, this “drama” opens up paradoxes, which offer, in turn, a kindly region in which it is possible to live both earnestly and ironically. Despite being an ostensibly gloomy book about the me
rits of life and suicide respectively, On the Heights of Despair is tinged with a most unlikely humor that cherishes, above all, life’s incomprehensibility. IJ
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1900s
The Bells of Basel
Louis Aragon
Lifespan | b. 1897 (France), d. 1982
First Published | 1934
First Published by | Denoël et Steele (Paris)
Original Title | Les Cloches de Bâle
“Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude.”
Despite its title, most of the action of Louis Aragon’s The Bells of Basel takes place in Paris. The title is more than appropriate, however, because it is the passionate and fiery last chapter, set in Basel, Switzerland, at the 1912 International Congress Against War, that gives the novel its emotional and political energy; telling us, in effect, how to interpret its earlier depictions of life in bourgeois Paris.
The Bells of Basel focuses on two strong female characters whose lives are loosely connected: Diane de Nettencourt, the elegant, seemingly amoral wife of the financier Brunel and mistress to the capitalist automobile magnate Wisner; and Catherine, a beautiful Georgian emigrée torn between her bourgeois upbringing and a rising consciousness of social injustice. Through the lives of Diane and Catherine, Aragon paints a picture of pre-war Paris society as corrupt, depraved, and desperately cynical, where human relationships function as a mere façade for the more important ebb and flow of capitalist profit and loss. Aragon sets this scene against the background of a humane workers’ movement that is in the process of gradually gaining in both consciousness and militancy, culminating in the congress in Basel and the appearance of the middle-aged communist character Clara. In this heroine’s revolutionary posture and unapologetically militant stance, so different from the manipulative beauty of Diane and Catherine, Aragon triumphantly discovers the modern woman.