This is Sadegh Hedayat’s best-known work of prose. Originally banned from publication in his homeland during the oppressive rule of Reza Shah, it appeared in Tehran only after the Shah’s abdication in 1941, as a serial in a daily newspaper. Hedayat was a scholar of Persian history and folklore, but his writing was also influenced by the works of de Maupassant, Chekhov, Edgar Allan Poe, and Franz Kafka. He spent the last ten years of his life as an exile in Paris, studying philosophy with Sartre.
The Blind Owl is Hedayat’s legacy, a masterly exploration into the very darkest inner landscapes—clouded with horror and sinisterly mocking momento mori, but illuminated with flashes of dazzling description and deeply moving insight. TS
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1900s
The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
Lifespan | b. 1892 (South Africa), d. 1973 (England)
First Published | 1937
First Published by | G. Allen & Unwin (London)
Full Title | The Hobbit: or, There and Back Again
Although it stemmed from stories he had been writing about his fictional world, Middle Earth, for a decade, The Hobbit was J. R. R Tolkien’s first published work, which was to be followed, over a decade later, by its sequel, The Lord of the Rings. The plot and characters combined the ancient heroic Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian epics Tolkien studied at Oxford University with the middle-class rural England in which he lived and felt comfortable.
Bilbo Baggins, the hero of the story, is a hobbit—a race of small people about half the size of humans with hairy feet and a passion for food and drink. Encouraged by the wizard Gandalf, Bilbo leaves his village, Hobbiton, for the first time and sets off on an adventure with a group of dwarves seeking to reclaim their treasure from a dragon. When Bilbo meets the tormented Gollum, he finds himself the bearer of a magic ring that makes the wearer disappear. After a series of adventures, Bilbo and Gandalf return to the village, but Bilbo is no longer accepted, his adventurous behavior being deemed unhobbitlike. Bilbo is an unlikely hero, who achieves metamorphosis through pools of inner strength he did not know he possessed. Some critics have tried to read metaphors for England’s heroism during the war or the inherent evil in some nationalities. But Tolkien was known to dislike allegory, and it is more likely simply the heroic story of a small, charming person who has no idea how resourceful he is until his abilities are put to the test. EF
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1900s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Lifespan | b. 1903 (U.S.), d. 1960
First Published | 1937
First Published by | J. B. Lippincott Co. (Philadelphia)
Movie Adaptation | 2005 (Harpo Studios)
“They sat in company with the others. . . . They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
Brutal experiences of slavery prompt sixteen-year-old Janie’s maternal grandmother to marry her off to a respectable man. She hopes to insulate Janie from the potentially ruinous burdens she and other black women have had to bear. Yet Janie’s fearless idealism leaves her feeling unfulfilled, and she abandons her emotionally stingy husband for Joe, an extravagant dreamer with whom she heads farther south to build a thriving, all-black town out of little more than overwhelming ambition and some roadside land. Joe elevates Janie’s socio-economic status, but she becomes a trapping of his success rather than a respected partner. By the time of Joe’s death, Janie is a middle-aged woman confident enough to withstand the town’s persistent, speculative gossip and trust her instincts with Tea Cake, a mysterious younger man. By the novel’s end, though she has lost everything, Janie has realized her vision of love like a blossoming pear tree in the intense, volatile bond she and Tea Cake shared.
Zora Neale Hurston was the mayor’s daughter in America’s first incorporated black town, where her social and political experience of African-American autonomy afforded a unique perspective on race. She eventually trained as an anthropologist, researching African-American folklore and oral culture in her native Florida. The dialogue in Their Eyes Were Watching God is written primarily in the strong Southern African-American dialect (framed by a standard English narrative), the pronunciation, rhythm, and playfulness of which Hurston renders in rich detail using almost phonetic spelling. This celebration of colloquial language and life was harshly criticized by contemporaries such as Richard Wright, but Hurston is now regarded as a highly significant figure in African-American literature. AF
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1900s
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
Lifespan | b. 1902 (U.S.), d. 1968
First Published | 1937
First Published by | Covici Friede (New York)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1962
“Might jus’ as well spen’ all my time tellin’ you things and then you forget ’em, and I tell you again.”
The title of quite possibly John Steinbeck’s best-known work refers to a line from a Robert Burns’s poem, To a Mouse, hinting simply at the tragedy of the tale. The novella tells the story of George and Lennie, two migrant workers who have been let off the bus miles from the California ranch where they work. George is a small, sharp man with dark features, and Lennie a mentally subnormal, shapeless giant who is deeply devoted to George and relies on him for protection and guidance. Camped out for the night, this unlikely couple share a dream of starting a farm together. Back on the ranch, the men meet Slim, the mule driver who admires their friendship. He gives Lennie one of his puppies and convinces the two men to include him in their dreams of buying a piece of land and setting up home. But the dream is shattered when Lennie accidentally kills the puppy and, without meaning to, breaks the neck of a woman on the ranch. Fleeing a terrible death at the hands of a lynch mob, Lennie encounters George, who gently reminds him of the idyllic life they will share together, before shooting his friend in the back of his head. When the mob arrives, Slim realizes that George has killed his friend out of mercy and leads him away to safety.
This is a story about brotherhood and the harsh reality of a world that refuses to allow such idealized male bonds to be nurtured. George and Lennie’s unique relationship approaches that ideal, but it is misunderstood by the rest of the world, who cannot comprehend true friendship, instead undermining one another and exploiting weakness wherever it can be found. But perhaps the real tragedy of the novel lies in the depiction of the death of the great American dream as a reality, exposing it as exactly what it purports to be: merely a dream. EF
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1900s
Murphy
Samuel Beckett
Lifespan | b. 1906 (Ireland), d. 1989 (France)
First Published | 1938
First Published by | G. Routledge & Sons (London)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1969
“Let our conversation now be without precedent in fact or literature . . .”
In a writing career that produced many masterpieces, Murphy is perhaps the most continuously delightful and engagingly disengaged Samuel Beckett ever wrote. Almost a conventional novel, lacking the rigorous austerity and reflexivity of Beckett’s later novels, Murphy is closer in spirit to the play and pseudo-erudition of Tristram Shandy, with more than occasional hints of Joycean wit and Rabelaisian materialism. From the off, the novel takes lapidary strikes at the lazy pomp of the omniscient narrator. Dead phrases are turned over with amused scorn—“And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.” Between arcane referentiality and lexical flicks, the jokes come thick and fast, so fast that thick is not the word.
The novel describes the adventures of Murphy in London, with a particularity of specified urban geography unusual in Beckett’s work. Aspiring to freedom and a quality of stillness in a rocking chair, Murphy resolutely attempts to avoid getting caught up in anything remotely resembling a plot,
but nevertheless finds himself propelled into misadventures with sundry implausible creations. Among other escapades, Murphy runs away from his betrothed, shacks up with a prostitute, and finds relatively gainful employment in a mental institution, where he plays a peculiar brand of pacifist chess. Murphy dies in an accident, the revelation of which would only spoil what little suspense and final uplift the novel can offer. Notably buoyant among many bits of bravura narration is the description of Murphy’s “mind,” but perhaps the most lasting glow to emanate from this comic romance is the brio with which it resists the temptations and literary tedium of its darker leanings. A great way into Beckett, and a great way out. DM
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1900s
U.S.A.
John Dos Passos
Lifespan | b. 1896 (U.S.), d. 1970
First Published | 1938, by Constable & Co. (London)
Trilogy | The 42nd Parallel (1930); 1919 (1932); The Big Money (1936)
“non nein nicht englander amerikanisch americain Hoch Amerika Vive l’Amerique” [sic]
The three novels collected as U.S.A. are the most successful of many twentieth-century attempts to write the inclusive story of American life. Dos Passos covers the years 1900 to 1930, describing the rise of the labor movement, the inner workings of capitalism, life at sea, the American experience of the First World War, the rise of Hollywood, and the decline into the great Depression. These events are skillfully evoked in the lives of the novels’ twelve main characters, six men and six women. The centrality of violence to American life is firmly established, particularly in the accounts of attacks on the Wobblies (International Workers of the World) as they attempt to organize a union.
“But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people,” Dos Passos writes, and his impeccable ear for the many voices of America puts these voices into conflict, or collusion, or concurrence, building up an overview that is also a socialist critique. Dos Passos is not a nineteenth-century naturalist but a modernist, and the speech of the people is embedded in a narrative that derives from James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. The autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections are in the style of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist, and the “Newsreel” sections quoting actual newspaper headlines are a satirical documentary device. Stein’s continuous present is here the model for the main text. This method works to convey equally the political hopes of working people, the social innocence of young women and men, and the inevitability of events when power intervenes. It also allows skips and jumps in consciousness that Dos Passos uses to push the narrative forward. The irruption of American voices into this process-language makes for a complex but unquestionably successful mix. AMu
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1900s
Brighton Rock
Graham Greene
Lifespan | b. 1904 (England), d. 1991 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1938
First Published by | W. Heinemann (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1947
The two main characters in Graham Greene’s gripping reflection on the nature of evil are the amateur detective Ida and the murderous Pinkie, a Roman Catholic who chooses hell over heaven. Responsible for two murders, he is forced to marry the hapless Rose to prevent her from giving evidence. A good Catholic, Rose seems to represent Pinkie’s lost innocence. Although Ida is ostensibly the heroine of the novel, her heroism belongs to the blank morality of the detective novel, where the measure of goodness is in the ability to solve the mystery. By contrast, through his contemplation of his own damnation, Pinkie’s evil achieves a sense of moral seriousness that Ida’s agnosticism can never obtain. Rose is Pinkie’s counterpart here, sharing his Catholic faith and prepared to corrupt herself in order to protect a man that she believes loves her. For Pinkie, the part he plays in Rose’s corruption will ensure his damnation much more clearly than his role in the murders that punctuate the novel.
Brighton Rock began life as a detective novel, and the mark of that genre remains in Ida’s pursuit of Pinkie. However, the structure of the detective novel merely contains the moral framework seen here. The contrast between Pinkie’s theological morality and its insubstantial counterparts is reinforced using various narrative techniques. Principally, the language through which Pinkie’s contemplation of hell is expressed contrasts vividly with the comparatively frivolous considerations of Ida and the other characters. What finally distinguishes Pinkie’s tragic mode from the generic patterns of the detective story is a critique of commercialized popular culture in which, with the exception of Pinkie, almost every character is associated with the limited imaginative potential of mass culture. LC
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1900s
Cause for Alarm
Eric Ambler
Lifespan | b. 1909 (England), d. 1998
First Published | 1938
First Published by | Hodder & Stoughton (London)
Postwar Pseudonym | Eliot Reed
In the late 1930s, Eric Ambler reinvented the British thriller, a genre that had been teeming with unconvincing villains pitted against, as he put it, heroes of “abysmal stupidity.” His first novel, The Dark Frontier (1936), began as a parody. A scientist regains consciousness after a car crash believing himself to be a tough hero, and foils a charismatic Countess’s dastardly plan for world domination. Five more followed in the next five years, of which the best is Cause for Alarm.
Nicholas Marlow—an engineer, as Ambler himself was—loses his job on the day he proposes to his girlfriend. Ten weeks later, still unemployed, he accepts a position in the Milan office of a British company that manufactures machines for making artillery shells. In Italy, he is approached by various spies of ambiguous affiliation, eager for information about how the Fascist government is arming itself. Caught up in a tangle of espionage and counter-espionage, Marlow eventually falls foul of the authorities. Trapped on the wrong side of a continent rolling toward war, with a price on his head, he has to flee. The last third of the novel is taken up by an impressively sustained and exhilarating chase across northern Italy. Cause for Alarm is the extremely exciting story of an innocent abroad who finds that his innocence is a kind of culpability, of a man who is forced to recalibrate his loyalties to his employers, to his country, to science, and to the world at large. TEJ
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1900s
Alamut
Vladimir Bartol
Lifespan | b. 1903 (Italy), d. 1967 (Slovenia)
First Published | 1938
First Published by | Modra ptica (Ljubljana)
First English Edition | 2004, by Scala House Press
The Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol languished out of print and unpublished for many years. A man so much of his time as to transcend his time, he was savagely censored in the Soviet era. Yet Alamut, his masterpiece, is one of those rich works that acquires new meaning as it journeys into its futurity: what was, in part, a satire on the rising fascist movements that would envelop its author only a year after publication acquires new and deeper levels in a world of militant Islam.
Alamut reimagines the story of the eleventh-century Ismaili leader Hasan ibn Sabbah, the “Old Man of the Mountain” who created the original assassins—elite suicide attackers motivated by religious passion and a carefully nurtured vision of the paradise that awaited them. Set in Alamut, Sabbah’s hilltop fortress, and seen primarily through the eyes of the young slave girl Halima and the elite, if naive, warrior Ibn Tahir, the narrative raises potent questions about faith, belief, rhetoric, and the nature and purpose of power.
Yet there is much, much more to this novel than politics and religion. The life of the girls and ageing women in the initially idyllic harem are explored; the moral complexities at the heart of Sabbah’s ascent to power are painfully exposed; the contrasting landscape of medieval Iran and the savage beauty of isolated Alamut are intensely imagined. The whole, despite the occasional longeur, still
has the power to shock, to move, and to provoke. TSu
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1900s
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
Lifespan | b. 1907 (England), d. 1989
First Published | 1938
First Published by | V. Gollancz (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1940
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me.”
Rebecca still captivates readers today, nearly seventy years after its first publication, when it became an immediate best seller, spawning many adaptations, serializations, movies, stage shows and copycat narratives. The novel’s resilience lies in Du Maurier’s combination of fairy-tale elements with aspects of gothic romance and thriller.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 46