1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 48
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1900s
Native Son
Richard Wright
Lifespan | b. 1908 (U.S.), d. 1960 (France)
First Published | 1940
First Published by | Harper & Row (New York)
Movie Adaptations Released | 1951, 1986
Richard Wright’s novel leaped onto the American literary scene as a warning to white America of the violence that the country was harboring within it. The novel’s opening presents its central protagonist, Bigger Thomas, beating a rat to death in front of his frightened sister, cowed mother, and admiring brother. Wright’s identification of Bigger with the rat allows us to see him as both perpetrator and victim, and it is from this uneasy position that the reader views the ensuing, disturbing events.
This realist novel is divided into three parts. The first section describes Bigger’s introduction into the middle-class world of the Daltons and his accidental killing of their daughter, Mary. The second sees a desperate Bigger pursued across the Chicago landscape and records the punitive effects of his crime on the wider African-American community. The final section focuses on Bigger’s court case and Wright’s attempt to defend his broken humanity.
The explicit and sexualized violence of the novel, in particular the decapitation and burning of the dead Mary Dalton, brought the book its initial notoriety. Wright was both celebrated for his fearless honesty and castigated for providing white America with the stereotype it most loved to fear. Seeking to avoid a sentimental view of black America, Wright was exploring the meaning of freedom. His commitments to black nationalism and communism are qualified finally by his commitment to the existential desire to truly know oneself. NM
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The Tartar Steppe
Dino Buzzati
Lifespan | b. 1906 (Italy), d. 1972
First Published | 1940
First Published by | Rizzoli (Milan)
Original Title | Il deserto dei Tartari
In this mysterious and disquieting novel, soldiers at a garrison await the attack of the enemy, the Tartars, due to arrive from the north any day. The fortress where the action takes place belongs to an undifferentiated past, and the atmosphere within the fortress, situated at the bottom of harsh and inaccessible mountains at the border of a stony desert, is suspended between reality and dream. The soldiers prepare continuously for that moment, although no one knows how and when the attack will take place. No one even knows who the enemy really is. Destiny is in charge of the lives of these men, especially Lieutenant Drogo, who finds himself at the fortress against his will, after an exhausting journey overshadowed by the enigmatic fortress and the threatening harshness of the landscape. In the surreal atmosphere within the garrison, life is disciplined by strict military routines. Sentries patrol nobody knows what to defend the fortress from nobody knows whom. Military maneuvers have no apparent meaning, while the soldiers’ unreal life is dominated by an absurd wait.
Strongly existentialist in its themes, the novel remains elusive today, but it seems ironic that not long after publication the soldiers’ long wait was ultimately met with a conflict far larger than they could ever have hoped for. RPi
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The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene
Lifespan | b. 1904 (England), d. 1991 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1940
First Published by | W. Heinemann (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1962
The Power and the Glory, with its account of a priest’s desperate flight from arrest and execution, is set against the bleak backdrop of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico in the 1920s. The terrain Graham Greene describes—whether physical, social, or psychological—is suitably desolate. The protagonist, described but never named, is a “whisky priest” and the father of an illegitimate child, whom he briefly and unhappily encounters on his journey. The psychological and spiritual avenues available to him for making sense of his fate seem as unpromising as his options for escaping from the secular authorities. He has a price on his head and his pursuers are liable to execute the villagers who come to his assistance. But through the despair, and despite Greene’s resistance to various weightless forms of redemption (he is much exercised by the fraudulent, pride-sustaining qualities of piety), lies the hazily grasped apprehension of God’s goodness. The priest comes to realize that conditions of suffering and sinfulness are, perhaps, the only means by which God’s presence can be manifested in this world.
There are many triumphs in this novel: the priest’s night-long incarceration in an overcrowded jail; his quest to buy wine for sacramental purposes; and the ideological and personal cat-and-mouse encounters between the priest and the zealous lieutenant. Greene succeeds in fashioning a fallen world marked, strikingly, by the twin poles of intense claustrophobia and unbounded emptiness. RM
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway
Lifespan | b. 1899 (U.S.), d. 1961
First Published | 1940
First Published by | C. Scribner’s Sons (New York)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1954
Set in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls follows the struggles of an American college instructor who has left his job to fight for the Republicans. Robert Jordan has been dispatched from Madrid to lead a band of guerrilleros that operates in a perpetual state of leadership crisis. Pablo, the ostensible head of the group, has lost his robust commitment to the hardships of war and wistfully dreams of living peacefully in the company of his horses. Pilar, Pablo’s superstitious, half-gypsy companion, has kept the group cohesive with her darkly agitated care for both the guerrilleros themselves and the fight that has brought them together. Jordan finds an instant bond with Maria, a young woman who was raped by Fascist soldiers before being taken in by the Republican camp.
Jordan feels a creeping ambivalence toward the Republican cause and a more general self-alienation as he wrestles with his own abhorrence of violence. His inability to integrate his belief systems is dramatized through his relationship with Maria, for whom he bears a painfully intense love, although he shuns her while strategizing the risky bridge-blowing mission. Ultimately Jordan is forced to reassess his personal, political, and romantic values as his insistence on a coherent and orderly hierarchy of beliefs and experiences is shattered. AF
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The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
Lifespan | b. 1902 (Australia), d. 1983
First Published | 1940
First Published by | Simon & Schuster (New York)
Patrick White Award | 1974
“A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.”
Like the book itself, the title of Christina Stead’s masterful novel points toward both emotional honesty and bitter irony. The novel tells the story of the large Pollit family, the product of a disastrous marriage between Sam Pollit, a working-class naturalist, and the querulous Baltimore heiress Henny Collyer. Set in and around Washington D.C. in the 1930s, the novel examines family life through the lens of Stead’s painfully revealing microscope, reflecting the naturalism of writers like Zola, whom Stead admired greatly.
The result is a rich tapestry of scenes that shift from the comic to the gruesome with a rapidity that reflects the swift emotional changes of real life. The characters produced by Stead’s exhaustive technique are both lifelike and fascinating. Sam, the self-proclaimed lover of children, emerges as the dominant force of the book, a charismatic but infuriating mix of egocentric bravado and creativity, leading the reader to watch with fascination his attempts to manipulate and control his children, sisters, wife, and colleagues in the service of what he sees as political and moral good. His
wife, Henny, disappointed in love and forced to live in a declining financial situation, provides her children with a bitter counterpoint to their father’s high spirits.
As the text goes on, a battle develops between Sam and his awkward adolescent daughter, Louie, whose gropings after independence and nascent adult consciousness eventually lead directly to the novel’s shocking conclusion. Clear-eyed and unforgiving, this novel presents a picture of family life as seen from the inside, and spares neither characters nor readers from realizing the often uncomfortable truths that lie behind the innocuous personas we assign to family members. AB
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Broad and Alien is the World
Ciro Alegría
Lifespan | b. 1909 (Peru), d. 1967
First Published | 1941
First Published by | Ediciones Ercilla (Santiago)
Original Title | El mundo es ancho y ajeno
The cover of this 1970 paperback edition suggests the uncertain fate of Indians in the Peruvian highlands.
“Nearer, ever nearer, the explosion of the Mausers continues to resound.”
As the emblematic title suggests, this is the story of endless wanderings of the dispossessed. The Peruvian community of Rumi, consisting of powerless, uneducated, but above all impoverished Indians and half-castes, clashes with the insatiable expansion of big landowners. Constructed from the memories of the elderly Rosendo Maqui, the origin of this forsaken community is described as a prologue to the main story, which concerns the lawsuit brought by the covetous landowner Álvaro Amenábar to seize the community’s lands. The novel presents the legal process as a pure sham that conceals greed and consigns the Indians to a much smaller territory, where, incredibly, they continue to be exploited. Their leaders are systematically destroyed; the peaceable Rosendo dies in prison, while Fiero Vásquez, the bandit who could have led an armed resistance, is beheaded.
Immediately before the brutal end of Broad and Alien is the World the horror increases with the description of the treatment of indigenous communities in other parts of Peru, particularly in the mines and the forest rubber plantations, where oppression is endemic. At the same time, the native cause is expressed increasingly explicitly. The charismatic, messianic rebel Benito Castro is introduced to take up his position in the community and to embark on armed resistance, but, almost inevitably, this proves equally unsuccessful.
In spite of a formal approach that was somewhat archaic even in its own day—an omnipresent narrator spends too long in presenting events and historical parallels—Ciro Alegría has created a whole gallery of characters incorporated in a natural landscape and, overall, a convincing novel about the struggle against injustice. DMG
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The Living and the Dead
Patrick White
Lifespan | b. 1912 (England), d. 1990 (Australia)
First Published | 1941
First Published by | Routledge & Kegan Paul
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1973
“During the early . . . months I hovered between London and New York writing too hurriedly a second novel, The Living and the Dead.”
Patrick White, 1973
Set in London during the 1930s, the plot of The Living and the Dead focuses on the fraught relationship between Catherine Standish and her two children, Elyot and Eden. Having been abandoned by her husband, Catherine is an emotionally distant mother. Elyot is a writer and critic who, while given to ruminating on his lack of belonging in the world, willfully insulates himself from it through books. Eden, his sister, who at first appears to be a more expansive character, seeks fulfillment through her political activism and dalliances with men, only to meet with disappointment on both fronts.
While this summary may make the novel sound an unremittingly bleak affair, it is in those passages where Patrick White so penetratingly inhabits the minds of his characters that he deservedly earns his reputation as a writer of the very first rank. In these truthful yet compassionate glimpses into the self-doubts and self-delusions that motivate each life, White introduces some of the thematic concerns that came to dominate his later fiction: what is the value of self-sacrifice in a world increasingly indifferent to human suffering? What is the purpose of imagination in a universe vacated by God?
Some readers may find the frequent longueurs in the narrative a little cumbersome. Yet White’s loftiness is never contrived in this moving account of how the socially inhibited struggle with, and are imprisoned by, an inability to give imaginative surrender to their own vision. VA
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The Harvesters
Cesare Pavese
Lifespan | b. 1908 (Italy), d. 1950
First Published | 1941
First Published by | Einaudi (Torino)
Original Title | Paesi Tuoi
The Harvesters is a novel in which the plot is closely underwritten by nature—oppressive heat is broken by great storms, burning sunshine is contrasted with eerie moonlight. In the raging, sun-scorched hills of the dry northern Italian countryside, there is a sense that Italy itself, the actual land, is a stable, eternal, natural reality in a shifting world of danger, passion, and death.
Cesare Pavese begins his story in the aftermath of Talino and Berto’s release from a Fascist prison. Talino convinces Berto to accompany him home to his country farm for the harvest. At the farm, Berto finds a world wholly alien to his native Turin, a place where morality is obscured and everything is not as it appears. The plot unfolds in half-truths and falsehoods, with stories, unfinished or never begun, that Berto, as an outsider, can barely comprehend. Upon arriving at the farm, Berto finds a large family, impoverished and brutalized, yet he is quickly attracted to Gisella, one of Talino’s four sisters. They have a brief affair, but Berto only begins to guess at the truth of Gisella and Talino’s relationship before, savagely and abruptly, tragedy strikes.
Pavese moved in anti-Fascist circles, yet always felt torn, wanting to join the fight but incapable of doing so. His writing expresses his inner conflict, perhaps reflecting Italy’s own struggles at that time. Celebrated after the war as a model of anti-Fascist thinking, his work has been hailed as a brilliant depiction of humanity in times of hardship. RMu
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Conversations in Sicily
Elio Vittorini
Lifespan | b. 1908 (Italy), d. 1966
First Published | 1941, by Bompiani (Milan)
Alternate Title | In Sicily
Original Title | Conversazione in Sicilia
The opening of Conversations in Sicily contains emblematic references to the events of 1936 that marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Silvestro, the protagonist and narrator, has plunged into despondency and disillusionment at the realization of his powerlessness when confronted by the loss of humanity. He embarks on a metaphorical journey to his native Sicily. During a rediscovery of his origins and subsequent psychological transformation, Silvestro converses with numerous people. There is the orange picker who, unable to sell his produce, evokes southern poverty. There is the courageous man who feels he has a moral duty to humanity and would be ready to renounce all his possessions to fight in its defense. A knife sharpener laments the indolence of people who do not give him swords, daggers, or even cannons to sharpen.
The abstract words of these conversations are a symbolic incitement to fight against the suppression of liberty and democracy. In the middle of the novel, Silvestro converses with his mother, Concezione, and recalls his youth. A strong woman, unscathed by her husband’s abandonment and unafraid of solitude, Concezione is a symbol of womanly and motherly strength. At the end of his three-day journey, which can be interpreted as a Christian metaphor for inner rediscovery, Silvestro has been “resurrected” to a higher human understanding. The author’s anti-Fascism, therefore, acquires a dimension that is not so much
historical or political as it is moral. RPi
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The Outsider
Albert Camus
Lifespan | b. 1913 (Algeria), d. 1960 (France)
First Published | 1942, by Gallimard (Paris)
U.S. Title | The Stranger
Original Title | L’Étranger
The Outsider is a novel of absolute flatness. The events of the story, despite taking in a murder and subsequent trial, seem to have no weight to them whatsoever, as if they simply float past on the page. This, it becomes clear, is absolutely essential to both the story’s purpose, its much-discussed relationship with the philosophy of existentialism, and, oddly, to its readability. Albert Camus’s careful simplicity roots the story at once in the everyday and in the fable, and it is left up to the reader to resolve this ambiguity.
This is a novel that displays an unwavering discipline in expounding a life where conventional self-conduct is undermined. There is no technical “cleverness” in the illustration of its themes; we are simply presented with a period of time in the life of a blank man named Meursault, a social outcast who chooses to live a private and solitary life. During this period, a number of significant events take place in his life—the death of his mother, the murder of a man, and a judgment that condemns Meursault to death—but each of these fails to rouse the expected emotional response from him.