1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  The novel is written in almost endless, flowing sentences that are masterpieces of construction. The essence of the style was characterized as “one thought, one moment, one sentence” and it allows the author to move beautifully through intricate, multilayered thoughts, without becoming simply essayistic. It embraces an entire world and an entire discourse with a profound and sensual immediacy that allows the reader to enter into discussions of considerable intellectual complexity. Pushing language to extremes, Broch created an experience for the reader unlike anything else in literature. JM

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  1900s

  Titus Groan

  Mervyn Peake

  Lifespan | b. 1911 (China), d. 1968 (England)

  First Published | 1946, by Eyre & Spottiswoode (Lon.)

  Titus Groan Novels | Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), Titus Alone (1959)

  Packed with delicious grotesques and delirious prose, Titus Groan centers on the dark behemoth of Gormenghast, the walled ancestral home of the line of Groan. Crumbling, malignant, with corridors and towers and forgotten wings housing misplaced occupants, it is a living, seething universe. Its inhabitants—hostage to its mind-numbing routine, the original meaning of which is long forgotten—scurry to perform a ceaseless flow of rituals.

  The players are a delightful menagerie of archetypes and caricatures. Lord Sepulchrave, 76th Earl of Groan, is morose, exhausted by endless duty; his career wife, Gertrude, is increasingly detached, comfortable only with the birds that nest in her hair and the sea of cats that surrounds her. Sourdust and Barquentine, the librarians, are keepers of the ritual, and Swelter, the demonic porcine cook, is despot in the steaming hell of the Great Kitchens. Mr. Flay is Sepulchrave’s major-domo, willing to defend tradition to the death. Driving the narrative is Steerpike, low-born and opportunistic, who wheedles, flatters, and manipulates in his Machiavellian quest for power. He will stop at nothing in his relentless journey upward. To this house an heir is born, Titus, 77th Earl of Groan.

  A novel of superb craft, full of intrigue and humor, it is a scathing allegory of British society, from blind deference, to tradition, to the merciless class system. There are no magic potions, no mythical beasts. The monsters are those we know: the boredom of routine, ruthless self-interest, and foolish vanity. GT

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  1900s

  Zorba the Greek

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Lifespan | b. 1883 (Greece), d. 1957 (Germany)

  First Published | 1946

  First Published by | Dim. Dimitrakou (Athens)

  Original Title | Vios kai politia tou Alexi Zormpa

  A twentieth-century Sancho Panza and Falstaff rolled into one, Alexis Zorba is one of the most exuberant “Everyman” creations of modern fiction. The Greek completely captivates the narrator (probably the author himself as a young intellectual) at a café in the port of Piraeus in Athens, “a living heart, a large voracious mouth, a great brute soul, not yet severed from mother earth.”

  Zorba’s lust for life (and his revelation that he is an ex-foreman of mines) prompts an invitation to take charge of the men working a lignite mine. In the course of their friendship and picaresque adventures on the shimmering island of Crete, the robust Greek wreaks havoc and good feelings in equal measure, and calls the narrator to question his own orthodox and studious approach to life.

  The book is fundamentally a philosophical sparring between Zorba’s tour-de-force spontaneity, and the more rational and restrained “Ancient Greek” outlook adopted by the young narrator regarding what is right or wrong, good or evil. Add a backdrop of the warm and welcoming Aegean light, air, color, and odors, and you have a recipe for a superb alfresco fictional feast. Nikos Kazantzakis, who in 1957 was pipped by Albert Camus by one vote for the Nobel Prize for Literature, had an amazing output, from travel books to translations. But it was his Zorba the Greek, as well as The Last Temptation of Christ (1960), that helped put modern Greek writing into the international arena. JHa

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  1900s

  Back

  Henry Green

  Lifespan | b. 1905 (England), d. 1973

  First Published | 1946

  First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)

  Given Name | Henry Vincent Yorke

  Back is a fascinating war novel, which portrays the consequences of the war on a character who has returned home. Charley Summers is a lost individual, a benumbed and disoriented former soldier traumatized by recent experiences. He finds himself unable to connect with people around him and unable to relate his present to his past. Back depicts the perplexities and anguish of its central character with great subtlety. The loose narrative style adopted by Henry Green cleverly approximates the meandering nature of Charley’s confused thoughts. Rendered childlike by the psychological trauma of war, he is an innocent abroad, a hapless enigma who is incapable of either confronting or making sense of reality.

  Back is, however, an optimistic, almost magical, work, which offers Charley a specific form of personal redemption when he hesitantly begins to fall in love with Nancy, the half-sister of his prewar lover, Rose. Through Nancy, Charley is able not only to relive the past, but also to work through the trauma that shattered it, although there is no naive resolution of the psychological ills that beset him. In fact, he remains an enigma to himself and to others, as Nancy frankly admits toward the end of the novel: “She did not know if he didn’t, or just couldn’t, tell about himself, tell even something of all that went on behind those marvellous brown eyes.” The novel concludes with a tear-stained scene in which love, pain, and self-sacrifice are mingled together in a wonderfully lyrical epiphany. AG

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  1900s

  House in the Uplands

  Erskine Caldwell

  Lifespan | b. 1903 (U.S.), d. 1987

  First Published | 1946

  First Published by | Duell, Sloane & Pearce (N. York)

  Original Language | English

  Erskine Caldwell is best known for Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933). Both were lauded and reviled in equal measure when first published, with Caldwell’s social-realist portrayal of rural life bordering, for many, on pornographic. The publication of God’s Little Acre led to Caldwell’s arrest on obscenity charges; although he was exonerated, the trial simply increased his notoriety and served to sell more books. He was one of the first authors to reap the rewards of the then recent paperback phenomenon, as thousands of cheap copies were snapped up by readers eager to be scandalized.

  Whereas his earlier books had dealt primarily with the working men and women of the American South, Caldwell turned his attention to the land-owning Southern aristocracy in House on the Uplands. The book paints a familiar portrait of rural degradation and despair, although Caldwell’s often grotesque humour is notably lacking.

  The protagonist is Grady Dunbar, the last scion of a formerly well-to-do family. He has drunk and gambled away all his money, and then, his pockets empty, mortgaged his house and land to further fund his debauched flings. Throughout it all, his young and naive wife loyally stays by his side, essentially a slave to her husband’s passions. At the same time, Grady’s field-workers, too, remain trapped, as they till his lands, unpaid but too scared to move on. All linked together, the book follows Grady’s decline and inevitable fall. PH

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  1900s

  The Path to the Nest of Spiders

  Italo Calvino

  Lifespan | b. 1923 (Cuba), d. 1985 (Italy)

  First Published | 1947

  First Published by | Einaudi (Turin)

  Original Title | Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno

  “Your first book already defines you . . .”

  The fact that this is the first novel Italo Calvino wrote, when he was just twenty-three and at the start of a prodigious literary career, should alone be enough to recommend it.
Within are the stirrings of what was later to mature into a unique and inimitable style and sophistication; however, the story also represents the attempt of a young writer to come to terms with the aftermath of the partisan movement in Italy. The precocious Pin is the child whom we follow through the adult world of a rural Italy riven by civil discontent and confusion.

  Pin is an orphan—lazy, foulmouthed, and worldly enough to use local gossip to his advantage. He is also a child who craves adult attention, but only crudely and imperfectly understands how to capture or retain it. The irony is that the two things Pin utterly fails to comprehend—politics and women—are those that equally mystify most of the other characters. When Pin’s home village is occupied by the Germans, the locals join the partisans, although Calvino makes it clear that this is more about resistance to change than the practice of a committed political ideology.

  Interestingly, although The Path to the Nest of Spiders won Calvino a prize, he refused to authorize a re-edition until nearly a decade later, a third and definitive edition being finally published in 1964, along with an invaluably revealing preface. This reluctance, Calvino admits, was to do with how he had used and caricatured the comrades with whom he had formerly fought alongside. The Path to the Nest of Spiders, while it lacks the obsession with symmetry and order of Calvino’s later works, is beautifully written and represents the response from one of Italy’s most famous twentieth-century writers to a singular moment in the country’s history. JC

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  1900s

  Under the Volcano

  Malcolm Lowry

  Lifespan | b. 1909 (England), d. 1957

  First Published | 1947

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  Full Name | Malcolm Clarence Lowry

  The sober jacket of the first U.S. edition, published by Reynal & Hitchcock, carries no hint of the novel’s macabre exuberance.

  “I have no house, only a shadow.”

  Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano catapulted him to international literary fame after years as a struggling novelist. Lowry later claimed that the novel was the first volume of a trilogy based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, Under the Volcano being a vision of hell.

  The story tells of the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, the alcoholic British consul in fictional Quauhnahuac (identifiable as Cuernavaca), Mexico; aptly enough, this day happens to fall on the macabre festival of the Day of the Dead. The novel is narrated in flashback by Firmin’s former neighbor, Jacques Laruelle, who has had an affair with Firmin’s wife, Yvonne. She returns to try to renew her troubled relationship with the consul, and together with her brother-in-law, Hugh, she visits the festival, which is haunted by an increasing threat of violence. When Geoffrey gets separated from Yvonne and Hugh by a terrible storm, the day ends with the deaths of the couple—Yvonne is killed by a runaway horse, and Geoffrey is murdered by fascist thugs, who throw him into a ditch beneath the volcano.

  Lowry’s work is more significant for its powerful symbolism and ornate prose style than for its characterization. The setting of the festival of the Day of the Dead under the volcano points to the inevitable death of the self-destructive protagonist, but it also suggests the wider eruptions of a culture in crisis—the novel is set in 1938 and was written during the Second World War. Firmin’s death at the hands of the fascists anticipates a brutal world order that cannot be easily contained. Equally, like all Lowry’s writing, Under the Volcano is autobiographical, and it charts the end of his relationship with former wife Jan Gabrial, caused largely by his own excesses and obsessions, principally alcohol, which would ultimately lead to his “death by misadventure.” AH

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  1900s

  If This Is a Man

  Primo Levi

  Lifespan | b. 1919 (Italy), d. 1987

  First Published | 1947, by De Silva (Turin)

  U.S. Title | Survival in Auschwitz

  Original Title | Se questo è un uomo

  “It was my good fortune,” writes Primo Levi in his preface to If This Is a Man, “to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944.” It is a stark opening to this classic account of Levi’s ten months in the horrific Nazi death camp, one that strikes the distinctive note of his writing on the Holocaust. Beginning with his capture by the Fascist militia in December 1943, the chapters of If This Is a Man were written, Levi explains, “in order of urgency.” He is acknowledging that this is an attempt both to explain to his readers what life was like in Auschwitz, and to work his own way through the experience of life-in-death that emerges as the reality of the Lager (“The life of Ka-Be is a life of limbo”).

  What is a man in Auschwitz? What does an attrocity such as Auschwitz do to the idea of humanity? Levi delivers what has been described as a prose poem on this “exceptional human state”—thousands of individuals, enclosed together within barbed wire, yet “ferociously alone.” In If This Is a Man, Levi introduces a number of important themes and categories that would return throughout his writing, notably those of The Drowned and the Saved. He reveals the pitiless division that holds sway in the world of the camp: the status of the “Organisator,” the “Kombinator,” and the “Prominent,” and the lowly “musselman.”

  There is no third way—that is, no ordinary life—in the camp, and so Levi finds the image of evil that this book struggles to convey: “an emaciated man—on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.” No thought, and no story: Auschwitz was an attack on the life of the mind against which Levi writes in this book, an attack that generates what he describes as the elemental need to tell the “unlistened-to story.” VL

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  1900s

  Exercises in Style

  Raymond Queneau

  Lifespan | b. 1903 (France), d. 1976

  First Published | 1947, by Gallimard (Paris)

  Revised Edition | 1963

  Original Title | Exercices de style

  When Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style first appeared in 1947, it led at once to his election to France’s prestigious Académie Goncourt. Nothing quite like it had appeared in French or any other language before, nor has Queneau’s feat been repeated successfully since. The book begins with a seemingly inconsequential anecdote. On a bus in rush hour, a man with a felt hat accuses another passenger of jostling him. Eventually, when a seat becomes vacant, the man sits down. Later, the man is encountered again in front of the Saint-Lazare station, in the company of a friend who is telling him to get an extra button put on his overcoat. Queneau spends the rest of the book retelling the story in ninety-nine different ways: as a dream, an ode, a sonnet, in the present, as an official letter, as a telegram, in reported speech, as blurb, in anagrams.

  We tend to take it for granted that style is somehow subservient to story, offering a window through which the reader is able to perceive a given and incontrovertible reality. Queneau reveals that style never can be transparent, that language itself shapes and defines the underlying reality that we perceive. Queneau’s work forces us to come face to face with this perception in many amusing and dazzling ways. It is reminiscent of a whole tradition of the antinovel, from Laurence Sterne to James Joyce to Alain Robbe-Grillet, a tradition that insists that what really matters is not the story, but the way in which you tell it. PT

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  1900s

  The Plague

  Albert Camus

  Lifespan | b. 1913 (Algeria), d. 1960 (France)

  First Published | 1947, by Gallimard (Paris)

  Original Title | La Peste

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1957

  This text has often been criticized for its “bleak existentialism,” yet to do so is to miss the point of Albert Camus’s masterpiece altogether. What stands out in this text, despite its unflinching view of human suffering and despair, is an overriding sense of common humanity. This is far from evident as the narrative o
pens, however, with the death of thousands of rats in the streets of the Algerian city of Oran. When people begin to sicken and die, despite the disorganization and initial denial of the mercenary city authorities, it becomes apparent that it is the bubonic plague that is afflicting the city. Strict quarantine is imposed, and it is in the suffocating claustrophobia of this enforced isolation—brilliantly captured by Camus—that individuals are forced to confront the apparent inevitability of death, and the bonds that bind the community together begin to collapse. Yet even at the darkest point, all hope is not lost. After an initial retreat into their own reflective solitude that would seem to suggest the lonely and unique nature of human despair, the efforts of a number of prominent characters serve to bring the community together gradually, in collective understanding of their plight.

  The sensitivity and understanding with which a citywide cast of individuals is created is remarkably compelling and brings Oran to life. It is this that sets The Plague apart from Camus’s other great work, The Outsider, and that makes it a timely and still relevant work today. MD

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