1900s
Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann
Lifespan | b. 1875 (Germany), d. 1955 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1947
First Published by | Bermann Fischer (Stockholm)
Original Title | Doktor Faustus
The cover of the first English edition carries lines from Dante, beginning: “Day was departing . . .” and calling on the Muses for aid.
“. . . a revered man sorely tried by fate, which both raised him up and cast him down.”
Doctor Faustus tells the story of the rise and fall of the musician Adrian Leverkühn through the eyes of his friend, Serenus Zeitbloom. In this novel, Thomas Mann adapts the Faust myth to suggest that Leverkühn achieves his musical greatness as a result of a pact with the devil. Interwoven with the narration of this bargain and its repercussions is an exploration of how and why Germany chose to ally itself with dark forces in its embracing of fascism through Hitler.
Doctor Faustus engages with the ideas of many European philosophers and thinkers, elaborating its own unique vision. Particularly brilliant are Mann’s meditations on the evolution of musical theory over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the advent of the twelve-tone system of Arnold Schönberg, the composer on whom Leverkühn is partly based. Also in strong evidence is Mann’s preoccupation with the ruthless demands of creative life. Leverkühn suffers excruciating periods of pain, punctuated by short bouts of breathtaking genius. Many of the finest passages are those that explore the relationship between illness and creativity.
The novel’s major achievement is its eloquent synthesis of complex ideas on art, history, and politics, as well as its elaborate meditation on the relationship between the artist and society. The final description of Leverkühn’s fate is tinged with the despair and isolation that Mann himself endured as he pondered the future of his native Germany from the vantage point of his exile in California. CG-G
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1900s
Midaq Alley
Naguib Mahfouz
Lifespan | b. 1911 (Egypt), d. 2006
First Published | 1947, by Maktabat Misr (Kairo)
Original Title | Zuqaq al-Midaqq
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1988
Egypt’s most famous novelist and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz has written forty novels in a prolific, varied, and highly controversial career. He is best known to Western readers for his realist portrayals of life in twentieth-century Cairo, early works whose narrative style and characterization recall European masters of the previous century, such as Dickens, Balzac, and Zola.
Midaq Alley is set in the Old Quarter of Cairo during the Second World War. There is an undeniable charm to its humorous evocation of the daily routines of a backstreet community, but the vision the narrative unfolds is harsh and critical. There is no cosiness to the portraits of individuals such as Kirsha, the homosexual drug-dealing café owner, who abandons his wife at night to trawl for young men, or the sinister Zaita, whose profession is mutilating the poorest of the poor so they can make a better living as crippled beggars.
Mahfouz is depicting a society in crisis, in which the only escape from frustration, poverty, and stagnation lies in the hazardous world of possibilities opened up by modernization—given concrete form in the presence of British and American troops in Egypt. When the heartless local beauty, Hamida, seduced by the lure of modernity, becomes a prostitute for the Allied forces, it precipitates the novel’s tragic climax. Westerners visiting Midaq Alley are given a rare opportunity to view the modern world through Arab eyes. RegG
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1900s
Froth on the Daydream
Boris Vian
Lifespan | b. 1920 (France), d. 1959
First Published | 1947
First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Title | L'écume des jours
This novel is a French surrealist tour de force, where even the original title, L’écume des jours, is fairly untranslatable (it was called Mood Indigo in the United States). The plotline, such as it is (somehow it was turned into a film and an opera), involves Colin, a wealthy young dilettante with a servant and pet talking mouse. All Colin wants is to fall in love. Enter Chloe and love blossoms (literally). Chloe develops “a water-lily on the lung,” the remedy for which is to be surrounded by floral displays, which cripples Colin financially. He has already splashed out 25,000 “doublezoons” for the wedding of his best friends, Chick and Lisa, but the newly marrieds’ lives disintegrate as Chick obsesses about collecting everything about Jean Pulse Heartre (say it out loud). Lisa goes into homicidal mode, the police do the dirty too, and the style becomes distinctly Chandleresque in the denouement—significantly, Vian was Raymond Chandler’s French translator.
This work is a surreal, science-fictionlike, and at times very funny love story, but, above all, it is a poignant take on how young, optimistic, and frivolous daydreams become clouded by orthodoxy and conformity. In translation, some of the original French wordplay may be lost, but much of the poetry remains for the non-French speaker.
Vian also wrote shlock-horror titles, including the infamous J'irai cracher sur vos tombes. He is said to have died of a heart attack watching the movie version of I Spit on Your Graves, which he hated. JHa
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1900s
Journey to the Alcarria
Camilo José Cela
Lifespan | b. 1916 (Spain), d. 2002
First Published | 1948, by Emecé (Buenos Aires)
Original Title | Viaje a la Alcarria
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1989
Journey to the Alcarria refreshed a genre that writers younger than Camilo José Cela were taking up again to denounce the backwardness of the Spanish countryside and its abandonment. What interested the future Nobel laureate, on the other hand, was to preserve the unusual aspects of places and their eye-catching locations in stories and styles that carried literary weight. In the book, there is an abundance of descriptions of local customs, traditions, and legends; of unknown, uncommon people, their behavior, and their extravagant names.
Critics tended to pillory Cela for triviality in preferring the adornment of style to the assessment of the conditions of life of the people, and for not having a more humanist point of view. However, he did not claim to be making a social denunciation, nor to be entering the area of sociology, but to be writing a text with the very marked imprint of his unusual style: “The oilcloth on the table is yellow, with the color worn off in places and the edges somewhat raveled. A ‘girlie’ calendar on the wall advertises anisette.” Written in the third person and deliberately phenomenological in description, the frequent repetition of the rhetorical formula “the traveler” (the person who comes and goes, who reads, and who asks questions) was an effective device to replace the first-person narrative. Read today, the novel can give a slightly tiring and falsely modest point of view, but, in spite everything, this is probably Cela’s best book. M-DAB
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1900s
Ashes and Diamonds
Jerzy Andrzejewski
Lifespan | b. 1909 (Poland), d. 1983
First Published | 1948
First Published by | Czytelnik (Warsaw)
Original Title | Popiól i diament
Opening on the last day of the Second World War in Europe, Ashes and Diamonds traces three men—Szczuka, the district Communist Party secretary; Michael, a reluctant Resistance hitman; and Kossecki, a Nazi collaborator—over the next few days in a small Polish town. Kossecki hopes to forget his concentration-camp past, where he was one of the hated orderlies, wishing to return to his old life as a hardworking magistrate and family man. His elder son has entered the Resistance, which is now fighting Polish Communists, while the younger has joined an anarchist group and become an accessory to murder. Szczuka faces the t
ask of instilling justice and self-respect into a currency-hungry town council, while silently grieving over his wife’s almost certain death in the camps. Michael’s Resistance cell has ordered him to assassinate Szczuka. But can he continue with killing after he falls in love with Kristina, a waitress in the town’s hotel?
Jerzy Andrzejewski creates a vivid, cinematic portrait of Poland flung into chaos, morally stunned and economically shattered in the aftermath of liberation. Everyone is compromised: young people disillusioned and brutalized by war, the older generation implicated by the choices they made for survival. Even Szczuka’s sincere faith in socialist utopia is tested by the grubby power-broking at a mayoral banquet. Meanwhile, the occupying Red Army is the unseen elephant in the room, shadowing Poland’s past, present, and future. MuM
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1900s
Disobedience
Alberto Moravia
Lifespan | b. 1907 (Italy), d. 1990
First Published | 1948
First Published by | Bompiani (Milan)
Original Title | La disubbidienza
One of Italy’s most prominent literary figures of the past century, Alberto Moravia had a prolific and highly successful writing career. A great deal of his work concerns the obsessions and complexes of the Roman bourgeoisie, in particular the twinned themes of money and sex, seen as agents of power, rather than pleasure. It is characterized by an almost clinical clarity of expression, an open approach to sexuality, and a close attention to the psycho logical.
Disobedience is a highly original treatment of the coming-of-age theme. Luca is a disaffected only child of respectable middle-class parents who becomes increasingly dissatisfied with all that he previously cherished. He embarks on a process of what he perceives to be logical, calculated disobedience, relinquishing all worldly goods and love. Eventually he falls ill and is bedridden for several months, during which time he experiences troubling hallucinations. When he recovers, his convalescence is accompanied by a sexual initiation with his nurse. The experience is heavily symbolic, and Luca sees it as a rebirth through which he overcomes his destructive self-denial and gains an almost mythic sense of oneness with reality. A heavily charged, complex work dealing with teenage rebellion, sexuality, and alienation, Disobedience is a fascinating psychological portrait of an Oedipal awakening. AL
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1900s
All About H. Hatterr
G. V. Desani
Lifespan | b. 1909 (Kenya), d. 2001 (U.S.)
First Published | 1948, by F. Aldor (London)
Revised Edition Published | 1972, by Penguin UK
Full Name | Govindas Vishnoodas Desani
All About H. Hatterr is a singular book, unmatched in its sustained comedy of rhetoric and language. Models might be perceived in the idiomatic style and formal play of Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, or Flann O’Brien, but nothing can quite prepare you for this book’s inventive play of rhetoric, innocence, and wit. Part of the joke is that the central character-narrator, the eponymous H. Hatterr, continually reveals an acutely intelligent grasp of the English language, life, and literary artifice, but is perceived as a simple-minded dupe. Linguistic sophistication is blended with quixotic innocence, as if Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, having acquired English as a second language, had learned to write like Rabelais or Laurence Sterne. Exhibit one, the book’s much fuller title: The Autobiographical of
H. Hatterr, being also a mosaic-organon of Life: viz., a medico-philosophical grammar as to this contrast, this human horseplay, this design for diamond-cut-diamond . . . H. Hatterr by H. Hatterr.
The novel relates how the orphaned Hatterr, of multicultural and multilingual background, is adopted into “the Christian lingo (English)” as his “second vernacular” and goes “completely Indian to an extent few pure non-Indian blood sahib fellers have done.” Hatterr’s adventures mostly focus on a variety of unlikely spiritual encounters with the society, sages, and anglo-grotesques of India and England. Rumor has it that this Indo-Anglian classic much influenced Salman Rushdie, but Desani more than has the edge. DM
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1900s
Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton
Lifespan | b. 1903 (South Africa), d. 1988
First Published | 1948
First Published by | Scribner (New York)
Full Name | Alan Stewart Paton
One of the greatest South African novels, Cry, the Beloved Country was first published in the United States, bringing international attention to South Africa’s tragic history. It tells the story of a father’s journey from rural South Africa to and through the city of Johannesburg in search of his son. The reader cannot help but feel deeply for the central character, a Zulu pastor, Stephen Kumalo, and the tortuous discoveries he makes in Johannesburg. It is in a prison cell that Kumalo eventually finds his son, Absalom, who is facing trial for the murder of a white man—a man who ironically cared deeply about the plight of the native South African population and had been a voice for change until his untimely death. Here we meet another father, that of the victim, whose own journey to understand his son eventually leads to his life and grief becoming strangely entwined with Kumalo’s.
The novel captures the extremes of human emotion, and Alan Paton’s faith in human dignity in the worst of circumstances is both poignant and uplifting. The novel shows the brutality of apartheid, but despite its unflinching portrayal of darkness and despair in South Africa, it still offers hope for a better future. The novel itself is a cry for South Africa, which we learn is beloved in spite of everything; a cry for its people, its land, and the tentative hope for its freedom from hatred, poverty, and fear. EG-G
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1900s
In the Heart of the Seas
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Lifespan | b. 1888 (Aust.-Hungary), d. 1970 (Israel)
First Published | 1948, Schocken (New York)
Original Title | Bi-levav yamim
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1966
In the Heart of the Seas established Agnon as one of the most important authors of modern Hebrew literature and earned him the Bialik Prize. Set in the late ninteenth century, the short novella in fourteen chapters carries the reader, in the company of a small group of pious Hassidic Jews, from the city of Buczacz in Eastern Galicia (now Ukraine) through Poland and Moldava to Constantinople and across “the heart of the seas” to Jaffa and Jerusalem. The companions “of good heart” overcome dangers and hardships on the road, as well as the temptations of Satan, by the power of their faith and their vibrant love for the Jerusalem and the land of Israel.
This picaresque novella is also Agnon’s symbolic autobiography. It is written in his original and personal style, a weaving together of traditional Judaism, the language of the Scriptures and the rabbinical texts, and influences of German literature into a modern, intricate, and unique language that is distinctly his own. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature that he was awarded in 1966 (with Nelly Sachs), Agnon succinctly summed up his view of his own work: “It is by the virtue of Jerusalem that I have written all that God has put into my heart and into my pen.” To this day, Agnon remains the most studied author of modern Israeli literature, and In the Heart of the Seas has been translated into numerous languages. IW
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1900s
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Tadeusz Borowski
Lifespan | b. 1922 (Ukraine), d. 1951 (Poland)
First Published | 1948
National Literary Prize | 1950
Original Title | Pozegnanie z Maria
Originally published as Farewell to Maria, the title of the English translation is indicative of the way in which Tadeusz Borowski depicts the existence of those imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.
In the story that provides the title of the collection, a gro
up of prisoners anxiously await the arrival of next transport of Jews, knowing that their role in the Kommando—unloading people destined for the gas chambers—would provide them with food to supplement their grossly inadequate rations. They are repeatedly subjected to physically and morally emaciating conditions. By providing an unemotional representation of the actions of people forced into countless impossible situations, Borowski demonstrates the way in which all those involved with the camps were dehumanized.
The impact of Borowski’s writing is derived in large part from the economy of his style. The stories are loosely autobiographical, as he was himself held at various concentration camps during the Second World War. After his release he embraced Communism, believing it provided the greatest guarantee that the horrors of the Nazi regime would never be repeated. When he came to realize that atrocities were similarly being committed in the name of Communism, he was left utterly disillusioned. Tragically, having survived both Auschwitz and Dachau, he took his own life by gassing himself. JW
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1900s
Death Sentence
Maurice Blanchot
Lifespan | b. 1907 (France), d. 2003
First Published | 1948
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 52