On first impression, there appear to be certain parallels with Kafka, in the suggestion that vast complexities lurk behind a visibly spare style and in the general dreamy detachment that surrounds it. But there is nothing of the surreal and everything of the mundane in Meursault‘s world, over which he has little control. Dislocated from others as well as from his own life, Meursault’s character demonstrates the meaninglessness of life, beyond the meaning one is willing to ascribe to it. It is the realization of and resignation to this essential meaninglessness that for Camus constitutes the absurd, a theme that he went on to develop more fully in his later work. SF
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1900s
Embers
Sándor Márai
Lifespan | b. 1900 (Hungary), d. 1989 (U.S.)
First Published | 1942
First Published in | Budapest
Original Title | A gyertyák csonkig égnek
Embers is a rediscovered jewel of Central European literature—originally published in Budapest in 1942, but virtually unknown to a wider audience until its translation into English in 2001. Against the odds, the novel has gone on to become an international bestseller, although its author, who committed suicide while in exile in the United States in 1989, will never bear witness to its unexpected popularity.
Set in Hungary just after the outbreak of the Second World War, in a remote castle at the base of the Carpathian mountains, Henrik, a 75-year-old retired general, dines with an old friend, Konrad, who he has not seen for over forty years. There are many unresolved issues between the pair, and what follows is a wonderfully controlled standoff—an unfolding series of anecdotes, reminiscences, silences, rebuttals, denials, and obfuscations. Sándor Márai paces his work with skill and precision, allowing each new revelation to emerge just as one feels some kind of reconciliation may be possible. Years of smoldering resentment are condensed into a single night.
Embers is a brief and remarkably intense work, a novel still steeped in the lore and atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It is a novel of long shadows and vintage wine, of candlelight, ancient forests, and creaking mahogany. Márai maintains this atmosphere without ever resorting to cheap theatrics. For all its old-world charm, the novel remains an intricately observed study of class, friendship, betrayal, and masculine pride. SamT
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1900s
Chess Story
Stefan Zweig
Lifespan | b. 1881 (Austria), d. 1942
First Published | 1942, by Bermann-Fischer (Sthlm)
Alternate Titles | Royal Game; Chess
Original Title | Schachnovelle
Chess Story is set on an ocean liner, where a young and illiterate—but amazingly talented—chess world champion plays for money with a complete unknown. The stranger’s knowledge of chess is extensive, but his practical ability is almost untested at the board. The reason behind this imbalance is what drives the unfolding of the story, and sets the backdrop for a tense and surprising tournament.
Published posthumously in 1943, a year after his tragic double suicide with his wife, Chess Story is one of Stefan Zweig’s best-known pieces of fiction. The author was also popular as a biographer, essayist, playwright, and poet, and was known to Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, and Romain Rolland. As an Austrian Jew, the growth of Nazi influence caused him to leave his homeland in 1934; he subsequently gained British citizenship, but died in Brazil, hopeless and disillusioned about the state of Europe.
Chess Story is a small, powerful text, confidently staging large themes, including Gestapo torture, the nature of obsession, the foolishness of hubris and greed, and political manipulation. In this tale, chess operates as a poison, a dangerous psychological addiction, but also as a cure for the mental barrenness of solitary confinement and as a ticket to fame. Zweig’s narrator is never named, but it is through his eyes that we observe the match, and it is to him alone that the stranger reveals his curious secret. Chess Story is a short but fast-paced and fascinating narrative gem. JC
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1900s
The Glass Bead Game
Hermann Hesse
Lifespan | b. 1877 (Germany), d. 1962 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1943, by Fretz & Wasmuth (Zürich)
Alternate Title | Magister Ludi
Original Title | Das Glasperlenspiel
“[T]he Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going . . .”
The Glass Bead Game purports to be the biography of Joseph Knecht, a member of an elite group of intellectuals in twenty-third-century Europe who live and carry out their work in isolation from the rest of society. The novel follows Knecht from his early schooling to his eventual attainment of the revered title of Magister Ludi, or “Master of the Game.” This Glass Bead Game is the raison d’être of the intellectual community of which Knecht becomes the head. Although the game’s exact nature is never fully explained, it becomes clear that it involves the synthesis of diverse branches of human knowledge; from philosophy, history, and mathematics, to music, literature, and logic. Despite the exquisite nature of the game, Knecht grows increasingly discontent with its players’ complete detachment from worldly affairs.
Written amid the events of early 1940s Europe, The Glass Bead Game is an eloquent and powerful meditation on the relationship between the spheres of politics and the contemplative life. Hermann Hesse’s novel is a passionate argument for a more symbiotic relationship between thought and action. Powerfully illustrating this very union, Knecht leaves the enclosed community in order to experience those aspects of life neglected by his studious existence. This novel is thus a continuation of one of Hesse’s enduring themes: the importance of self-reflection as a means of discerning the ever-changing path toward self-growth and renewal. CG-G
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1900s
Joseph and His Brothers
Thomas Mann
Lifespan | b. 1875 (Germany), d. 1955 (Switzerland)
First Published in four parts | 1933–1943
First Published by | S. Fischer Verlag (Berlin)
Original Title | Joseph und seine Brüder
Thomas Mann intended this retelling of the Old Testament story of Joseph to be the monumental culmination of his distinguished writing career. By the time its first volume appeared in October 1933, however, the Nazis had taken power in Germany and Mann had been forced into exile. Largely denied an audience in his home country, he found few foreign readers for a Biblical epic with no obvious relevance to the political or intellectual issues of the day.
The four volumes of the work—The Stories of Jacob, The Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider—follow faithfully the outline of the familiar tale from Genesis. Joseph, eleventh son of Jacob, is driven out of his family, rises to be the right-hand man of the pharaoh of Egypt, and returns at last to lead his people. Mann’s epic version expands brief Biblical episodes into richly detailed stories, illuminated with emotional insights, character sketches, and flashes of humor. The author’s dense meditations on myth and history lie dauntingly across the reader’s path, but fresh narrative delights are always only a few pages away.
The work is a vast compendium of information about ancient civilizations, but the author achieves a complex statement about life that is timeless rather than historical. Joseph ultimately emerges as Mann’s image of a fully enlightened human being, blending sophisticated intelligence with respect for tradition, the visionary inspiration of the dreamer’s imagination with critical scientific realism. RegG
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1900s
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Lifespan | b. 1900 (France), d. 1944 (in the air)
First Published | 1943
First Published by | Reynal & Hitchcock (New York)
Original Title | Le Petit Prince
This charming fable tells the story of an adult’s encounter with his inner child. Set in the heart of the Sahara, the tale unfolds after Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s pilot-narrator finds himself stranded with a “broken” engine, facing the prospect of“life or death.”The very largest question of all lies at the heart of the tale: one’s life and how one spends it. The relationship between adult and child unfolds against a backdrop of human emergency, and its nature is one of acute questioning: the inimitable questioning of a child in the form of the “little prince,” who asks his adult mentor so “many questions.” The dialogue between narrator and child is a form of self-address: the adult engaging with his inner child through the unfettered imaginings and demands of a young child. The little prince and our narrator initially engage through the act of drawing, when the little prince first appears with his demand, “If you please, draw me a sheep.”
Saint-Exupéry’s tale is a surreal one, defying the conventions of reality and entering into the realm of dreamscape, where the imagination can run riot. The narrator is gently led into a rediscovery of his capacity for imagining. And so the role reversal begins, and the child tutors the adult in the sacred art of wondering. Written during the final year of his life, Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince reads as a manifesto on how the adult life can and should be lived. SB
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1900s
Dangling Man
Saul Bellow
Lifespan | b. 1915 (Canada), d. 2005 (U.S.)
First Published | 1944
First Published by | Vanguard Press (New York)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1976
Published in 1944, Dangling Man reflected contemporary intellectual preoccupations with the nature of freedom.
Dangling Man was Saul Bellow’s first novel, and it established him as one of the major American writers of the period. The novel is written in the form of the diary of its protagonist, Joseph. Having given up his job at the Inter-American Travel Bureau, Joseph, a “dangling man,” is confined to a Chicago boarding house while he waits to be drafted for the Second World War. He rarely leaves the confines of his room, immersing himself instead in the writing of the Enlightenment. His increasingly solipsistic lifestyle alienates both his wife, Iva, and his other intellectual friends. The novel ends with Joseph finally being called up and leaving his friends and family to begin life in the army. He hopes that his new regimented life will relieve his current mental suffering; a hope that one assumes will be in vain.
In Joseph’s search for the meaning of his “dangling” life, the novel testifies to the influence of French existentialism on the intellectual life of 1940s America. Sections of Joseph’s diary are given over to a dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor, which he calls the Spirit of Alternatives or Tu As Raison Aussi (“You Are Also Right”). The existential concerns of Dangling Man can perhaps be thought of in the context of Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’s L’Étranger. It also prefigures Bellow’s later writings in its juxtaposition of low life and high culture; Joseph’s diary mixes the banality of everyday life with references to Goethe and Diderot.
In Joseph’s lonely wanderings through the city streets, we see Bellow beginning to combine the concerns of European literature with an authentically American urban experience. Dangling Man has been described as an “apprentice” work, as it bears witness to the birth of one the most important and influential voices of the modern American novel. BR
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1900s
The Razor’s Edge
William Somerset Maugham
Lifespan | b. 1874 (France), d. 1965
First Published | 1944
First Published by | W. Heinemann (London)
Original Language | English
Social satire, philosophical novel, and saint’s life, The Razor’s Edge describes the spiritual quest of an extraordinary young American. After seeing his best friend die in order to save his life while serving as an airman during the First World War, Larry Darrell questions the meaning of his life. He returns to America with the need to find out more about the nature of good and evil, and leaves behind his home, his fiancée, and his social set. After meeting a venerated maharishi high in the mountains of India, Larry experiences enlighten ment. Maugham’s narrator reports on his quest as observed from afar, “at long intervals,” and sometimes secondhand. In the process he also follows the lives of a number of characters who are connected to Larry, travelling from America to India and France.
The Razor’s Edge should preferably be read not only before you die, but also before you turn twenty and while you are still capable of truly falling in love with a fictional character. As you get older, you may appreciate Maugham’s art more: the subtle, sharp, yet kind irony with which he, or rather his narrator, treats his characters and their social setting—with the exception of Larry, who is described simply and forthrightly. You may be in a better position to understand the cultural and philosophical background to the novel’s discussions on the nature of God, the existence of good and evil, and the meaning of life. But you are less likely to feel actual yearning for the protagonist and the quality Maugham admirably seeks to recreate in his portrait of him: his goodness.
To be fully appreciated, this is a work of fiction that presupposes the reader has faith, or at least a longing for it. There are certainly worse things that can be said of a novel. DG
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1900s
Transit
Anna Seghers
Lifespan | b. 1900 (Germany), d. 1983
First Published | 1944
First Published by | Nuevo Mundo (Mexico)
Given Name | Netti Reiling
Transit, one of the greatest treatments of flight and exile in modern German writing, is a powerful blending of documentary with fiction. Written on Anna Seghers’s own flight from the Nazis (she was Jewish, as well as a member of the Communist Party), it was begun in France and finished in Mexico, where it was first published in Spanish (the German version was not published until 1948). This experience is mixed with a dramatized account of the fate of the Austrian writer and doctor Ernst Weiß. Weiß, unaware that a U.S. visa had been prepared for him, through Thomas Mann’s intercession with President Roosevelt, killed himself in his hotel room, where Seghers attempted to visit him just afterward. Lines are blurred, and it is never clear how much of the real Weiß is present in his fictional counterpart.
The narrator of Transit, Seidler, flees a German concentration camp, only to be interned in France; he escapes again, this time to Marseille, outside the occupation. Joining the throng of those scrambling for passage to America, he attempts to get a message to an acquaintance, a writer named Weidel: on arrival at Weidel’s hotel, Siedler learns that he has killed himself the night before. Among the dead man’s effects is a transit visa to America; Seidler assumes his identity in order to make use of it. Complications arise when Weidel’s wife arrives on the scene. At last Seidler comes to realize that his own identity is being eroded, and he turns down his chance of passage, opting instead to join the French Resistance. MM
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1900s
Pippi Longstocking
Astrid Lindgren
Lifespan | b. 1907 (Sweden), d. 2002
First Published | 1945
First Published by | Rabén och Sjögren
Original Title | Pippi Långstrump
Pippi Longstocking demonstrates her superhuman strength on this Swedish cover of Lindgren’s subversive children’s classic.
Pippi is a nine-year-old with definite “attitude.” With her red braids sticking out sideways, a strength “that no policeman in all the world can match,” and her total lack of parental supervision, the children’s book heroine Pippi Longstocking sets up home at Villekulla Cottage by a beautiful orchard. She is rich (with a big suitcase full of gold pieces), independent (her mother i
s in heaven, her father shipwrecked with the cannibals), and has her monkey, Mr. Nelson, her horse, and her neighbors for company. The next-door children, Tommy and Annika, are well brought-up and never fuss or bite their nails—so they are quite unlike the anarchic, assertive, adventure-seeking Pippi. Not surprisingly, they are completely mesmerized by the heroine in their various escapades as she leads them to defy conventions and poke fun at the grown-ups they encounter.
Astrid Lindgren was prompted to write Pippi after making up the story to entertain her daughter in bed with pneumonia. Published in 1945, when straitlaced, “seen-and-not-heard” attitudes to children were beginning to be questioned by Swedish society, Pippi burst onto the children’s fiction scene, her outlook as unconventional as her clothes. Lindgren told her story from a child’s-eye view but above all she instilled in Pippi a fiery and quirky spirit that kids latched onto in droves. JHa
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1900s
Loving
Henry Green
Lifespan | b. 1905 (England), d. 1973
First Published | 1945
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 49