Karel Capek was well known in his native Czechoslovakia for his journalism, plays, and novels. War with the Newts is generally considered to be his best narrative tale. At a time when Europe was watching with dismay the developments in Germany, Capek was a committed anti-Nazi but also had an antipathy to the Communist Party. The novel parodies both movements, as well as commenting on the selfishness inherent in nation states and their dealings with each other. Capek handles human interaction and political machinations with a combination of warm interest and distinctly comic irony. Poignant, funny, and politically astute, Capek’s novel presented a twentieth-century moral warning that still has resonance today. JC
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1900s
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
George Orwell
Lifespan | b. 1903 (India), d. 1950 (England)
First Published | 1936
First Published by | V. Gollancz (London)
Given Name | Eric Arthur Blair
“Suddenly a double knock deep below made the whole house rattle. Gordon started. His mind fled upwards from the abyss. The post! London Pleasures was forgotten.”
The changes George Orwell was forced to make by his publisher, together with the weaknesses he himself saw in it, left him disappointed with this novel. But for all that, it is still a powerful and savagely satirical portrait of literary life. Very much a London novel, and perhaps even more a 1930s one, Keep the Aspidistra Flying describes the struggles of hapless Gordon Comstock. In Comstock’s indictment of capitalism, access to culture is seen as inseparable from the possession of wealth and privilege, while the domination of contemporary life by advertising points to an all-embracing commodification of the everyday. These are the signs of a futile existence, a dying civilization; the threat of an impending cataclysm—a theme Orwell would develop further in Coming Up for Air—hangs over the action.
Comstock, however, appears to be trapped as much by his own weak character as by the system he deplores. He refuses to accept the respectability of middle-class life, represented by the potted plants of the novel’s title, which, in Comstock’s eyes, symbolize “mingy, lower-class decency.” Yet he rejects revolutionary politics as a means of bringing about change, and his own attempt to embrace poverty by living like an anchorite among the destitute merely assuages his sense of guilt. Moreover, the novel nags away at Comstock’s ambiguous character, asking whether his anger and despair should be read as a self-pitying drama or as a genuine rejection of capitalist exploitation. AG
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1900s
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
Lifespan | b. 1900 (U.S.), d. 1949
First Published | 1936
First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (London)
Pulitzer Prize | 1937
A poster advertising the novel in 1936 is surprising, as the iconography of Gone with the Wind is set by the 1939 movie.
Gone with the Wind’s romanticized setting in Civil War and Reconstruction-era Georgia, as well as its central characters, the fiery Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara and her dashing husband, Rhett Butler, have become the stuff of American mythology. Although David O. Selznick’s 1939 film helped to immortalize Mitchell’s novel, the book had already enjoyed phenomenal sales on first publication and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, a year later, in 1937.
A sweeping historical saga, it follows Scarlett and her friends and relatives through a period of major upheaval in American social and economic history. The novel traces the transition from the agricultural society of the early 1860s, represented by Tara, the family plantation, to the beginnings of Southern industrialization in the 1880s. While it is famously a tale about Scarlett, Rhett, and Ashley’s love triangle, Gone with the Wind is also a love letter to a place, the city of Atlanta, Georgia. Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta and grew up hearing stories of the antebellum city and the battles fought by the Confederate army. She lovingly details Atlanta’s expanding and changing society in carefully constructed passages that reveal the extent of her historical research.
However, Gone with the Wind is not an uncontroversial novel, and Margaret Mitchell’s own sympathies with Southern slave owners and idyllic portrayal of pre-war plantation society have exposed the book to an expansive cultural debate, producing critical analysis, protest, and even parody that continues today. Nevertheless, it remains an ambitious, gripping novel, and, far more importantly, an undisputed cultural phenomenon that not only helped to shape the direction of the American novel, but that has had a significant effect on America’s popular conception of its own history. AB
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1900s
The Thinking Reed
Rebecca West
Lifespan | b. 1892 (England), d. 1983
First Published | 1936
First Published by | Hutchinson & Co. (London)
Given Name | Cicily Isabel Fairfield
“Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only . . . between different parts of a person’s mind.”
Rebecca West, “The Art of Skepticism,” 1952
Rebecca West was well known throughout the twentieth century for her progressive and feminist politics, and her fifth novel, The Thinking Reed, sensitively examines the limitations of the life led by many middle-class women during the 1920s.
It follows the fortunes of Isabelle Torrey, an intelligent young American widow who is prematurely thrust onto the European social scene. Disappointed in a love affair, she impulsively marries the immensely wealthy Marc Sallafranque, only to experience emotional swings from love to hate and back again over the course of their violent and passionate marriage. Charting an evolving relationship against the background of the decadent social scene of the very wealthy, The Thinking Reed, like Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, highlights the disintegration of not only a class but an entire way of life. Strikes and industrial unrest grow daily more violent at Marc’s automobile factory outside of Paris, while the stock market crash looms across the ocean. Marc and Isabelle’s carefree lifestyle is clearly doomed, but in losing their fortune, the novel implies, they will gain the human dimension missing from their increasingly desperate and empty social maneuverings. Eventually Isabelle comes to feel only revulsion for the vapid and cruel social circle that she once embraced so enthusiastically.
The Thinking Reed remains an important and thoughtful exploration of relationships, class, and marriage for today’s reader. AB
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1900s
Eyeless in Gaza
Aldous Huxley
Lifespan | b. 1894 (England), d. 1963 (U.S.)
First Published | 1936
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Original Language | English
The title, which quotes Milton’s Samson Agonistes (“Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves”), inaugurates Aldous Huxley’s partly autobiographical narrative of Anthony Beavis’s quest for enlightenment. The novel traces his life from his English boyhood in 1902 to his risky commitment to pacifism in 1935. We encounter his predominantly upper-middle-class and highly articulate friends, relatives, and partners. The novel is chronologically experimental, moving to and fro in time, creating a range of ironic links between past and present. It is experimental, too, in the boldness with which customary plot development gives way to intellectual meditations, providing a range of witty or provocative reflections on topics such as sociology, democracy, and totalitarianism, particularly the problem of reconciling individual freedom with social harmony. In the most notorious passage in the novel, a live dog is dropped from an airplane and hits the flat rooftop where Anthony and his partner, Helen, are lying naked in the sun. It bursts, spraying them with its blood. Typically, the well-read Anthony says to Helen: “You look like Lady Macbeth.” Ironies multiply: he feels tenderness, while she decides to leave him. Huxley’s sense of the tragi
comedy created by the entrapment of the human self is brilliantly encapsulated here.
Huxley’s writing in Eyeless in Gaza may in places appear prolix and didactic. Nevertheless, in his lifetime, Huxley, like Lawrence and H. G. Wells, was for many readers an emancipatory influence. CW
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1900s
Summer Will Show
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Lifespan | b. 1893 (England), d. 1978
First Published | 1936
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Original Language | English
How does one tell the story of revolution, when writing in the early 1930s? The Soviet revolution is too close and too unmanageable, yet there has been no revolution in Western Europe since the nineteenth century. Sylvia Townsend Warner—not yet a Communist—turns back to the year of revolutions, 1848, specifically to Paris, when a popular revolt removed the Orléanist Louis Philippe. Her heroine is Englishwoman Sophia Willoughby.
Personal tragedy prepares Sophia for revolution when she loses her children to smallpox, her home to legal trickery, and her husband to adultery. Following her husband, Frederick, to Paris, she falls in love with his mistress, Minna Lemuel. But in the violent summer of 1848, Minna is killed at the barricades by Caspar, whom Sophia has brought up in England. Sophia kills Caspar, yet refuses to believe Minna is dead. These melodramatic events are dissolved in a detached but involving prose.
Sophia is then employed by the revolutionary Ingelbrecht, a version of Engels, to distribute a mysterious pamphlet—The Communist Manifesto. The defeat of the summer of 1848 has shown that she will live on as a revolutionary. Summer Will Show tells three stories: Sophia as a flâneuse on the streets of radicalized Paris; Sophia in love with Minna, a subtle, almost impalpably sensitive lesbian romance; and Sophia’s gradual discovery of what it means to be a revolutionary. Autobiographically speaking, the last two are Warner’s own stories. AMu
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1900s
Rickshaw Boy
Lao She
Lifespan | b. 1899 (China), d. 1966
First Published | 1936, by Renjian Shuwu (Beijing)
Given Name | Shu Qingchun
Original Title | Luotuo xiangzi
This socio-critical novel describes the physical and moral decline of its young protagonist, the rickshaw-puller Xiangzi. It was praised both for its depiction of Xiangzi’s struggle in an unjust society and its lively language, which captured the Beijing vernacular.
Arriving in Beijing from the northern countryside, Xiangzi becomes an aspiring rickshaw-puller with the sole ambition of owning a rickshaw. His zeal is soon rewarded, but before long his rickshaw is snatched away by marauding warlord armies that draft him as a coolie. When Xiangzi escapes, he manages to steal and sell three camels, a feat resulting in his being nicknamed “Camel.” But the theft also marks the first step in his moral and physical decline: he is robbed by a crafty detective; cheated into marriage by Tiger Liu, the tyrannical daughter of a rickshaw renter; abuses his health and succumbs to drinking and gambling after Tiger’s death in childbirth; and finally betrays the rickshaw union organizer to the secret police. His tragedy is accentuated by the suicide of Fuzi, a girl forced into prostitution whom Xiangzi had decided to marry.
Some Chinese post-1949 editions censored the ending, and the first English translation was even given a happy ending. Yet it is precisely Lao She’s uncompromising and realistic depiction of the working man’s plight—partly self-inflicted, partly brought about by a hostile society—that allows Rickshaw Boy to be read as a parable of the fate of the Chinese people in the twentieth century. FG
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1900s
Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
Lifespan | b. 1885 (Denmark), d. 1962
First Published | 1937, by Putnam (London)
Given Name | Karen Christence Dinesen
Original Title | Den afrikanske Farm
Karen Blixen only narrowly missed out on the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Out of Africa is her most famous novel, both a memoir of her time on a coffee farm in Kenya and a vivid portrait of the beginning of the waning of European imperialism.
Dinesen recounts her struggles to make a success of the coffee plantation in the years before and after the First World War, fighting poverty and natural disasters to keep her farm, with the ghost of failure always a step behind her. Her reminiscences are peppered with references to God, lions (believed to be symbolic of nature’s aristocracy), the violence of Africa, racism, and decency. Dinesen was in love with the African landscape and the descriptive passages in this book are at times exquisite, although some of her references to Africans will make modern readers uncomfortable. She hints at the differences between European and African culture—believing that men exist in a truer form in Africa—and recounts how she, as a woman, tried to bridge the chasm between them. In the end, she loses the farm and leaves for Europe, but she never stops loving the country she called home for twenty years. This is a novel about the death of imperialism and displacement, savagery, beauty, and the human struggle. Hailed as perhaps the greatest pastoral elegy of modernism, most of all, it is a book about Africa. EF
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1900s
In Parenthesis
David Jones
Lifespan | b. 1895 (England), d. 1974
First Published | 1937, by Faber & Faber (London)
Full Title | In Parenthesis: Impressions, in a fictitious form, of life on the Western Front
Often heralded as the unsung classic of the First World War, this lyrical tale is written from the point of view of an ordinary Welsh private. Jones’s tale follows the journey of one man into a baffling, dangerous but often frighteningly beautiful world. Jones was also attempting to universalize the war experience; to portray his “truth” of the war in a new voice that gave it proper tongue and moved it away from the pretensions of modernism and the rhetoric of high diction. He did so within a form that has had a lasting impact on the understanding of the First World War: poetry. His work also encompasses long sections of lyric prose, and perhaps in these respects he was no different from writers such as Brooke, Sassoon, Brittain, and Graves, all of whom looked for new ways to describe the war they saw in a manner befitting their experiences.
Critics have often had positive things to say about the work, from Stephen Spender, who thought the text was “probably the World War I monument most likely to survive,” to Julian Mitchell in 2003, who extolled In Parenthesis as a classic waiting to be rediscovered. What they often forget is the sheer inaccessibility of the novel. This is not a recent trend; Jones’s work has always been marginalized because so few people are able to survive its depths. Yet it has always had its champions. Whether this makes it a good book that will endure as long as predicted remains to be seen, but it is certainly not, nor is it ever likely to be, a popular one. EMcCS
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1900s
Ferdydurke
Witold Gombrowicz
Lifespan | b. 1904 (Poland), d. 1969 (France)
First Published | 1937
First Published by | Rój (Warszawa)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1991
This extraordinarily funny, crude, and subversive novel was banned by the Nazis, suppressed by the Communists, and has since become a set text in most Polish high schools. It is a novel about identity, the power of time and place, adolescence, and the brutality of childhood.
Joey Kowalski narrates the story of his transformation from a thirty-year-old man into a teenage boy, or a man seen by the rest of society as a teenage boy. For, while he is taken by a strange professor to a local school and becomes part of that world, he still maintains his adult memories and opinions. This gives him a unique perspective on the social, political, and cultural complexities present in the colliding worlds of students and teachers.
He is frustrated by his desires, patronized by the adults around him, and forced to take part in the games and rituals of the playground.
The dark, repressed, and often damaged areas of the human psyche that exist in the boundary between “maturity” and “immaturity” are explored in a narrative of great power, wit, and philosophical sophistication. The novel is almost celebratory in its use, and abuse, of language and in its pastiche of the rose-tinted, nostalgic novels of childhood. It was written at a time of great change and crisis for Poland and for Europe, and reflects the uncertainties and frustrations of that time. Witold Gombrowicz is now recognized as one of the greatest Polish authors of the twentieth century. JM
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1900s
The Blind Owl
Sadegh Hedayat
Lifespan | b. 1903 (Iran), d. 1951 (France)
First Published | 1937 (Iran)
First Serialized | 1941, in the newspaper Iran
Original Title | Bouf-e Kour
This claustrophobic novella is narrated by a tormented young artist who feels himself trapped in a hypnagogic limbo between sleep and wakefulness, sanity and madness. He describes a world of vivid and disturbing hallucinations, fueled by wine and opium, evoking the images from the classic Persian miniatures that he paints on pen-boxes for a living. A sensuous and intimidating woman, who is at once his life’s inspiration and the source of all his despair, is juxtaposed with a dark cypress tree, a winding brook, and a squatting yogi. Morbidly fascinated by these endlessly recurring motifs, and helpless to escape his obsessive desire and terror, he can now only communicate with his shadow, cast like an owl on the wall.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 45