The shy narrator is chosen for marriage by a wealthy, mysterious, upper-class widower and thus saved from her life as the paid companion to an ill-mannered European woman. She moves to Manderley, an ancient English mansion filled with forbidden rooms, shrouded furniture, and labyrinthine passageways, only to find that both house and owner, the aristocratic Maximilian de Winter, are haunted and oppressed by the memory of the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca. Maxim himself bears a distinct literary resemblance to Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, and as with Rochester, Maxim’s “secret self” masks the revelation around which the plot of the novel revolves. In a subtle twist, Du Maurier’s novel is named after the first, rather than the second wife. Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic is replaced here by the body of a murdered woman bobbing in the sea, refusing to be washed away. Rebecca’s unnamed narrator breaks the Victorian mold of the novel with her neurotic, Oedipal fantasies, and she raises more questions than she answers. One of Du Maurier’s achievements is to secure readers’ loyalty to this jealous, insecure narrator. SN
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1900s
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
Lifespan | b. 1905 (France), d. 1980
First Published | 1938, by Gallimard (Paris)
Original Title | La Nausée
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1964 (declined)
Sartre was an editor for the journal Les Temps Modernes, first published in 1945, which he used to develop his ideas.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea is that rare thing in literary history—a “philosophical” novel that succeeds in both of its endeavors. The novel is at once a manifesto for existentialist philosophy and a convincing work of art. In fact, it succeeds to such an extent that it blurs the distinction between literature and philosophy altogether. Nausea details the experiences of thirty-year-old Antoine Roquentin, a researcher who has settled in the French port of Bouville (a thinly disguised Le Havre) after several years of travel. Settling down, however, produces a series of increasingly strange effects. As Roquentin engages in simple, everyday activities, his understanding of the world and his place in it is fundamentally altered. He comes to perceive the rational solidity of existence as no more than a fragile veneer. He experiences the “nausea” of reality, a “sweetish sickness,” a ground-level vertigo. He is appalled by the blank indifference of inanimate objects, yet acutely conscious that each situation he finds himself in bears the irrevocable stamp of his being. He finds that he cannot escape from his own overwhelming presence.
This is a delicately controlled examination of freedom, responsibility, consciousness, and time. Influenced by the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the literary stylings of Dostoevsky and Kafka, Nausea is the novel that announced existentialism to the world—a system of ideas that would go on to become one of the most significant developments in twentieth-century thought and culture. The notion that “existence precedes essence” is writ large for the first time here, several years before Sartre “formalized” his ideas in Being and Nothingness (1943) and before the horrors of the Second World War had intensified their impact. SamT
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1900s
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Winifred Watson
Lifespan | b. 1907 (England), d. 2002
First Published | 1938
First Published by | Methuen & Co. (London)
Radio Adaptation Released | 2000 (BBC Radio 4)
“Miss Pettigrew pushed open the door of the employment agency and went in as the clock struck a quarter past nine. She had, as usual, very little hope . . .” So begins Winifred Watson’s recently rediscovered, enchanting tale. The story unfolds over twenty-four hours in the life of neglected spinster Guinevere Pettigrew. Sent to the wrong address by her employment agency, Miss Pettigrew, a governess, is mistaken for the new housekeeper by the glamorous and rather amoral nightclub singer Miss La Fosse. Thrown into a world of cocktails before noon, cocaine that must be disposed of, and fistfights between dangerously handsome suitors, perhaps most shocking of all to Miss Pettigrew is the wicked thrill of makeup. As first-time readers, we worry for the frightened and sheltered Guinevere, but there is more to her than meets the eye. Over the course of the day, in a series of deft interventions, witty misunderstandings, brilliant repartee, and enough gin to sink a lesser woman, Guinevere is revealed not only to her newfound friends, but more importantly to herself, as a lifesaver, in more ways than one. A delightful, intelligent, and naughty novel, which reminds us that it is never too late to have a second chance; it is never too late to live. MJ
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1900s
On the Edge of Reason
Miroslav Krlezˇa
Lifespan | b. 1893 (Croatia), d. 1981
First Published | 1938
Original Title | Na rubu pameti
NIN Prize | 1962
Miroslav Krlezˇa’s novel delivers a brilliant critique of contemporary bourgeois society on the southern brinks of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the period between the two World Wars. It exposes the social hierarchy of a nameless Croatian town ridden by corruption, dishonesty, conformism and consumerism, from the petit bourgeois shopkeepers, civil servants, aspiring “intellectuals,” and “torchbearers” to the industrial magnates at the top of the Austro-Hungarian socioeconomic elite.
The novel concerns the downfall of an unremarkable, middle-class, middle-aged legal adviser leading a dull life in an unhappy marriage and unsatisfactory job, yet unable to escape the general apathy and small-mindedness of his surroundings. One day he stirs these stagnant waters when he accidentally insults a local potentate, rousing scandal across the entire society.
Erudite, picturesque, and with a keen eye for detail, Krlezˇa’s style has been described as baroque, rendering his characters with great mastery, sensitivity, and imagination. On the Edge of Reason remains in the forefront of socially conscious and innovative literature comparable to that of Joyce, Zola, and Svevo. The novel represents the world with uncompromising realism, although bearing some traces of Krlezˇa’s romantic infatuation with the Marxist idealism of his earlier literary career. JK
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1900s
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Lifespan | b. 1888 (U.S.), d. 1959
First Published | 1939
First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1946
The Big Sleep represents some major departures in the nature of the detective genre, changes that necessarily reflect the world in which it was written. Corrupt networks map out Raymond Chandler’s post-Prohibition era, be they explicitly criminal or nominally official, and it is the gray areas in between that allow the detective Philip Marlowe to exist. The gray, claustrophobic urban space is a major constituent of the novel; set in Southern California, the location could really be any major city given that exteriors are almost entirely absent. Rooms, cars, and even phone booths represent a series of divided compartments in which the story develops, a series of points with no connections.
This is Chandler’s first Marlowe story, but there is no introduction to the character; rather, we leap straight into the investigation as it gets underway. This is essential to the nature of the world and the character, a new kind of “hero” who seems only to become active when there is a crime to solve. We know nothing of his background and only ever see him return to his office, and this only when a trail is exhausted. Like Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name, Marlowe combines a kind of shabby fallibility—a hard drinker who seems to be constantly beaten up by men and women alike—with an almost supernatural authority whereby he seems to serenely coast over the jumbled twists and turns of the case, observing and randomly following leads and providence, until a solution is finally reached. That this is in such contrast to the Sherlock Holmes school of detective work—where central to the plot is the immense intellectuality of the
detective that allows him to simply consider at length the facts in order to succeed—is perhaps the most significant factor in the novel’s literary importance. SF
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1900s
Goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood
Lifespan | b. 1904 (England), d. 1986 (U.S.)
First Published | 1939
First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)
Compiled as | The Berlin Stories (1946)
”I am a camera,” Christopher Isherwood writes, “with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” What he offers us are snapshots and newsreels of Berlin during the last days of the Weimar Republic. The city is caught in the eerie calm of an apocalyptic hurricane, the brief gap wedged between the First World War and the distant thunder of the all-powerful Third Reich.
Isherwood, the narrator and observer, is detached and numb as though shell-shocked—what he is witnessing has never been witnessed before. The demimonde he inhabits is a fatalistic free-for-all, fueled by a growing despair so great that the only recourse is a dance of abandon, the last and most memorable song of the dance band on the Titanic as the iceberg looms. It is a world of lost souls, where the great have fallen, where the good do what they can to make ends meet, where everything is for sale and virtue is an unaffordable luxury. Former socialites must take in lodgers, prostitutes mingle with opera singers, and Isherwood stumbles through opportunities with his fellow expatriate and co-lodger, the aspiring nightclub singer, Sally Bowles. Sally is a perfect emblem of the time: tragic and blind to consequences, capricious and predatory, and deadened by alcohol and sex. This is a melancholic though unsentimental novel about a world that will soon no longer exist. The hedonism of the Weimar is fading and soon will be eradicated. Sally grows distracted and disagreeable. The Jewish Landauers’ tenuous safety will soon be destroyed. Rudi, the communist youth, will have his idealism prove fatal. Innocence will be lost.
With his understated and dispassionate prose, Isherwood throws the massive and terrifying events of 1930s Berlin into relief; his genius is chilling. GT
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1900s
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Lifespan | b. 1902 (U.S.), d. 1968
First Published | 1939, by Viking (New York)
Pulitzer Prize | 1940
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1962
It is something of a commonplace these days to talk of The Grapes of Wrath as a novel that has become profoundly ingrained in the consciousness of America, and yet no other writer chronicled the catastrophic period of the Great Depression in the 1930s with the same passion and political commitment. As John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, its place in the canon of great American literature is confirmed by the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded in 1940 (the same year it was adapted for film) and the Nobel Prize for Literature that the author received in 1962. It is concerned with the Joad family, who lose their Oklahoma farm and head west with dreams of a better life in California. As the journey unfolds, they and thousands of other “Okies” flocking westward converge along Highway 66, telling each other tales of injustice and relishing the plenty that lies ahead. What they find in California is exploitation, greed, low wages, hunger, and death. In a stunning indictment of the savage divisions that those with money seek to extend and exploit, Steinbeck represents the desperation of the family as the threat of violence, starvation, and death begin to eat away at them. It is only wrath, a defiant solidarity, and constant sacrifice that allow them to maintain their dignity.
Steinbeck has been criticized in the past for a perceived sentimentality in his characterization of the Joads, but while a reader is inevitably drawn into their plight, they are only ever actors in a tragedy that is bigger than they are. This is, above all, a political novel, and the defeats, the mud, the hunger, and the maltreatment all carry a political charge, a condemnation of injustice (and of those in positions of power who create the injustice), and a validation of the quiet anger and dignified stoicism of the common man in response. MD
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1900s
Good Morning, Midnight
Jean Rhys
Lifespan | b. 1890 (Dominica), d. 1979 (England)
First Published | 1939
First Published by | Constable & Co. (London)
Given Name | Ella Gwendolen Rees William
“I’m a bit of automation, but sane, surely—dry, cold and sane. Now I have forgotten about dark streets, dark rivers, the pain, the struggle, the drowning . . .”
The title of Jean Rhys’s somber fifth novel is taken from an Emily Dickinson poem. Good Morning, Midnight is set between the World Wars and centers on Sasha, a middle-aged woman who has returned to the Paris of her youth. The fragmented narrative slips between Sasha’s past and present in exploring the paradoxical limitations of the life of a woman who has sought to free herself from convention.
As the novel opens, and Sasha attempts to locate herself among Paris’s familiar landmarks, we are deluged with the bittersweet memories of her youth. We learn how she escaped from the strictures of a working-class London life by marrying the artistic Enno and moving with him to Europe. But Enno’s reluctance to protect his wife from degrading social and economic transactions makes her profoundly aware of how “cheap” she is to society, and how vulnerable she is. As we move further into the novel and into Sasha’s past we learn of the trauma—the death of her child in early infancy and her subsequent abandonment by her husband—that led to her rejection by even unconventional society. It is Sasha’s rapid and poignant decline, her steady drinking and drifting between jobs that seem to value feminine youth and beauty above all, that offers a continuity between the novel’s past and the present. As the novel ends, we see Sasha stumbling to accept how the inevitable and harsh combinations of poverty and age have rendered her only more vulnerable. NM
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1900s
At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O’Brien
Lifespan | b. 1911 (Ireland), d. 1966
First Published | 1939
First Published by | Longmans & Co. (London)
Given Name | Brian O’Nuallain
Ireland in the 1930s, with its censorship and church domination, was hardly a hotbed for the avant-garde or experimental novel. But it was precisely the pieties and stifling atmosphere of Ireland at the time that impelled this delightfully transgressive, antiauthoritarian, and satirical experimental novel. Literary exuberance contrasted with the mundanity of social life is one of the anomalies within the novel that gives it such potent comic power.
This is a novel about a novelist writing a novel about the writing of novel. The frame story is narrated by a student living sullenly under his nagging uncle’s roof, while engaged in writing a book about an author called Dermot Trellis. The student has firmly democratic and revolutionary ideas on the form: the novel should not be confined to one beginning and ending, nor should the characters be under any compulsion to be good or bad. They should, rather, be “allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living.” Furthermore, the “entire corpus of existing literature” is simply a storehouse from which an author can draw whatever characters he wishes. The narrator and Trellis draw on cowboy stories, popular romances, folklore, and (mercilessly lampooned) figures from Irish mythology. Eager for revenge against his despotic creator, one character begins his own novel in which Trellis becomes trapped as a fictional creation. If ever a novel was before its time, undoubtedly this was it. RM
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1900s
Finnegans Wake
James Joyce
Lifespan | b. 1882 (Ireland), d. 1941 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1939
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
Extracts Published | 1928–1939
James Joyce’s last book is perhaps
the most daunting work of fiction ever written. Yet it is also one of the funniest, bringing pleasure to generations of readers willing to suspend the usual assumptions that govern the novel. Instead of a single plot, Finnegans Wake has a number of kernel stories, some of them occurring in hundreds of versions, from a word or two long to several pages. The most ubiquitous is a story of a fall that turns out not to be entirely negative, including the Fall of Man; an indiscretion in Phoenix Park, Dublin, involving an older man and two girls; and a tumble from a ladder by an Irish builder, Tim Finnegan.
In place of characters, the novel has figures who go by many different names, each figure consisting of a cluster of recognizable features. In place of settings, it merges place names from around the globe. Joyce achieves this condensation through the “portmanteau”: the fusing together of two or more words in the same or different languages. Thus “kissmiss” is both the festive season and something that might happen during it, with a suggestion of fatefulness; the Holy Father becomes a “hoary frother”; and an old photo is a “fadograph.” Reading Finnegans Wake—best done aloud and if possible in a group—means allowing these suggestions to resonate, while accepting that many will remain obscure. The work’s seventeen sections have their own styles and subjects, tracing a slow movement through nightfall and dawn to a final unfinished sentence that returns us to the beginning of the book. DA
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 47