First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Title | L'Arrêt de mort
The reclusive Maurice Blanchot exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century French thought, while at the same time maintaining a scrupulous reserve, both in life and in writing. The original French title can be translated as both “death sentence” and “stay of execution”—both a final, definitive judgment and an indefinite reprieve. This short novel reverberates in the suspension of meaning generated by its title.
The first of two narrative sections details the struggle and treatment of a terminally ill woman known only as “J.” She dies, and mysteriously comes to life only to be killed again by an overdose administered by the narrator. The second narrative documents the narrator’s interactions with three other women against the background of the occupation and bombing of Paris in 1940. Between the two parts occur many parallels and repetitions, which multiply and complicate interpretations.
As the narrator struggles to recount the events he relates, he senses that words always double back, consuming himself and the truth he is attempting to convey. For the narrator, this struggle is the condition of all writing; he feels the acute inability of words to capture adequately an event in all its complexity, and yet is overtaken by the insatiable desire to tell, condemned to explore the limits of what can be said by forever starting again. SS
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1900s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
Lifespan | b. 1903 (India), d. 1950 (England)
First Published | 1949
First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)
Given Name | Eric Arthur Blair
The vibrant cover of the German translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts the all-seeing eye of the sinister Big Brother.
Published in London in 1949, Orwell’s novel reflected the drabness of postwar Britain, beset by austerity and shortages.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of George Orwell’s most powerful politically charged novels, a beautifully crafted warning against the dangers of a totalitarian society, and one of the most famous novels in the dystopian genre.
Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling party in London whose every move is monitored by telescreens. Everywhere Winston goes, the party’s omniscient leader, Big Brother, watches him. The party is trying to eradicate the possibility of political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it from the language, creating sanitized “Newspeak.” “Thoughtcrime” (thinking rebellious thoughts) is illegal. Winston, who works at the Ministry of Truth altering historical records for the party’s benefit, is frustrated and oppressed by the prohibitions on free thought, sex, and individuality. He illegally purchases a diary to record his thoughts and spends his evenings wandering the poor areas where the “proles” live, relatively free from monitoring. Winston starts an illicit affair with Julia, a fellow party employee, but they are caught by a party spy, and, in Room 101, Winston is forced to confront his worst fear. Giving up his love for Julia in terror, Winston is released, his spirit broken and his acceptance of the party complete.
In 1949, at the beginning of the nuclear age and before television was mainstream, Orwell’s creation of a telescreen-monitored world just a single generation into the future was terrifying. This is an important novel not only for its stark warning against abusive authority (and its somewhat ironic contribution to modern television content), but also for its insights into the power of manipulating language, history, and the psychology of fear and control. These issues are perhaps even more pertinent today than when Orwell penned his novel. EF
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1900s
The Man with the Golden Arm
Nelson Algren
Lifespan | b. 1909 (U.S.), d. 1981
First Published | 1949
First Published by | Doubleday & Co. (New York)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1955
“I had a great big habit. One time I knocked out one of my own teet’ to get the gold for a fix. You call that bein’ hooked or not?”
Nelson Algren’s best novel is perhaps first remembered through its cinematic adaptation in the movie starring Frank Sinatra as his hustling junkie antihero, Frankie Machine. This is as unjust a situation as the fact that Algren himself has, thanks to a biography of his lover, Simone de Beauvoir, come to be known principally as the man who helped the author of The Second Sex achieve her first orgasm.
The novel mingles the true-crime titillation of pulp fiction and low journalism with the crusading zeal of sociological investigation: a marketable blend of prurience and high-mindedness, lifted above its many rivals in the field by Algren’s sustained poetic gift. His prose style, with its violently clashing registers, and the enduring resonance of its poetic voice, is indelibly marked by the influence of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.
Chicago was the great subject of Algren’s writing life and he dusted its dilapidated bars, damp flophouses, filthy holding tanks, and drenched sidewalks—all sites of the most harrowing indignity—with a dignified, perceptive language that he knew how to share with his central characters. If Algren’s rhetorical style is occasionally portentous, Frankie Machine, Sparrow Saltskin, Sophie, Molly, and the chorus of weary Chicago policemen survive with their expressive intensities intact, even as the bunch of petty criminals are sent into unsustainable downward spirals by addiction, violence, and inescapable poverty. RP
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1900s
Kingdom of This World
Alejo Carpentier
Lifespan | b. 1904 (Cuba), d. 1980 (France)
First Published | 1949, by Publicaciones Iberoamericana (Mexico)
Original Title | El reino de este mundo
With this book, Alejo Carpentier declared war on the exhausted inheritance of European Surrealism and at the same time produced a defining text for the emergent magic realist movement. The novel is underpinned by a relatively straightforward historical narrative, which follows the major events of the only successful revolution in the Atlantic slave diaspora. Set in revolutionary Santo Domingo, the island that was to emerge in 1803 as Haiti, the first black ex-slave republic, the novel follows the fortunes of the central character, Ti Noël. Initially a servant to one of the grand blanc families before the revolution, Ti Noël forms an intense friendship with the charismatic Mandingo slave leader Macandal, then witnesses his execution and voodoo apotheosis. After the successful slave revolution, Ti Noël is re-enslaved as part of the immense labor force consigned by the black dictator Henri Christophe to erect his unearthly fortified mountaintop palace. The novel ends with a phantasmagoric account of the fall of Christophe, the sacking of Sans Souci, and Ti Noël’s death.
Carpentier wrote Kingdom of This World in a state of near despair at what he saw as the unrelenting formulaic nature of fantasy literature. However, in this short, delicately wrought masterpiece, Carpentier fuses a precisely researched external history with a series of anthropomorphic transformations and metaphoric juxtapositions, which constantly achieve his ideal of a “marvellous reality,” a new fiction of the “marvellous in the real.” MW
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1900s
The Heat of the Day
Elizabeth Bowen
Lifespan | b. 1899 (Ireland), d. 1973 (England)
First Published | 1949
First Published by | A. Knopf (New York)
Full Name | Elizabeth Dorothy Cole Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day is a beautiful novel: immersed in it, you do not want to leave it, but to stay encased in the symmetry and clarity of its vision. It is a love story set in wartime London. Stella discovers that her lover, Robert, is suspected of being a Nazi spy. He himself confesses to sympathy for the German vision of order and rule of law. Stella’s delicately structured world slowly disintegrates.
This story and the strange hues of a summertime city at war
give the novel its momentum and texture. There is, however, another level and another love story also at work, one that generates an intense and painful melancholy. This second love story is inarticulate, felt only as a sense of loss, a grieving for something loved and gone. What The Heat of the Day mourns would not have been mourned by many, nor will many today regret its passing. For it anticipates and lingers over the death of the cultural and social supremacy of the English property-owning class. Many of the sons of this class were slaughtered in the First World War, and in the interwar years the Great Depression had depleted their capital, while the existence of the Labour Party had drained their power and political prestige.
Bowen began writing The Heat of the Day in 1944, one year before the Labour landslide in the British general election of 1945. What enriches the text of this novel, enveloping and enlarging the individual stories of loss, is Bowen’s elegy for an era even then already past. PMcM
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1900s
Love in a Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford
Lifespan | b. 1904 (England), d. 1973 (France)
First Published | 1949
First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)
Original Language | English
“To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.”
Nancy Mitford
Love in a Cold Climate, set in roughly the same time and place as Nancy Mitford’s earlier novel The Pursuit of Love (1945), delves into British aristocratic society between the wars with similarly hilarious results. It is the story of Polly Montdore, an heiress whose unconventional choice of husband not only shocks her own family, but also provides scandal enough to occupy all of her wealthy acquaintances. Told by her friend, Fanny, the sensible narrator of many of Mitford’s novels, Polly’s story expands to become a larger commentary on the comic and tragic elements inherent within society life. Light and witty in tone, the novel describes what would usually appear to be an ordinary round of social engagements in a world in which the ordinary is a surprisingly rare phenomenon. Mitford’s characters often verge on the bizarre; “Uncle Matthew,” modeled on Mitford’s father, typifies the eccentric aristocrat, while the insufferable Lady Montdore, who undergoes a hilariously drawn affair with Canadian nephew and arch-aesthete Cedric, remains a cutting portrait of the domineering but gullible matriarch.
Mitford’s novels, like those of Jane Austen, focus on the small social maneuverings of an exclusive family and their “set”; like Austen, she uses fond but mocking satire to gently send up the family, even while encouraging the reader to care about its fortunes. AB
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1900s
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
Victor Serge
Lifespan | b. 1890 (Belgium), d. 1947 (Mexico)
First Published | 1949, by Editions du Seuil (Paris)
Given Name | Victor Lvovich Kibalchich
Original Title | L’ Affaire Toulaév
The Case of Comrade Tulayev is about totalitarianism and hence is about defeat, enclosure, and the systematization of paranoia. It differs, however, from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Koestler’s Darkness at Noon in its determination to pay respect to the multiplicity and excesses of ordinary life. The novel takes the show trials and purges of Stalin’s Russia as its core material. Serge himself had lived through the optimistic revolution of 1917 and the development of a total system of bureaucratic power in Stalinism. He had fought that development as part of Trotsky’s Left opposition and had been deported to Central Asia between 1933 and 1936. It was at that time that Stalin’s long waves of purges, the Great Terror, began.
There is a dense historical undercurrent in this novel, reaching back beyond Stalinism to incorporate, through memory, anecdote, and association, multiple varieties of Russian life. This is life as lived among the soldiers of the First World War, landless peasants, political activists in exiled or underground parties, the life of scholars, clerks, travelers, and enthusiasts.
Serge’s narrative is rich with voices, while the plot condenses with a shocking coolness and clarity. Yet Serge still manages to keep the narrative poised at a level where Russia is an arena pulsating with life. While terror, death, betrayal, and a painful confusion are pervasive, so, too, are the small rhythms of work, fraternity, conversation, and hope. PMcM
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1900s
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played
Simon Vestdijk
Lifespan | b. 1898 (Netherlands), d. 1971
First Published | 1950
First Published by | Gravenhage (Rotterdam)
Original Title | De koperen tuin
One of the giants among writers to come from the Netherlands, Vestdijk, who trained as a physician and published poetry as well as essays, was as prolific as he was versatile. His work had a major influence on the Dutch existentialists, and, if it were better known outside his own country, might be ranked with that of Joyce, Kafka, and Proust.
This novel, a moody study of the conflict between bourgeois society and the romantic ideal, is set in a fictional small town where Nol, a judge’s son, first encounters enchantment. While still a child, he attends an outdoor concert with his mother and is seduced simultaneously by the music and dancing with the conductor’s daughter. He subsequently takes piano lessons with the maestro, who opens his heart and mind to the mysteries of art. Nol’s fascination and affinity for this way of knowing the world brings him into internal conflict with the milieu in which he has grown up and the class that claims him. His attachment to the musician Cuperus and especially to his daughter Trix, both of whom are quasi-outcasts in genteel society, is emblematic of the author’s preoccupation with the unattainable beloved, and Nol’s story is a sort of romantic quest that pits the ideal against social convention and the loss of innocence this entails. Vestdijk manages to combine rapture and suffering with comedy in a mix that is intensely realistic and completely engaging. ES
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1900s
I, Robot
Isaac Asimov
Lifespan | b. 1920 (Russia), d. 1992 (U.S.)
First Published | 1950
First Published by | Gnome Press (New York)
Original Language | English
The classic image of the robot, as used on this jacket for I Robot, was influenced by 1920s movies such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
“Ninety-eight—ninety-nine . . .”
I, Robot is one of the great classics of science fiction. Ostensibly, it is a collection of short stories, but the fact that they are all linked together as they explore the twin subjects of robotics and philosophy warrants the book’s inclusion in a list of literature’s great novels. In I, Robot, Isaac Asimov coined the term “robotics” and set out the principles of robot behavior we know as the Three Laws of Robotics, followed by science fiction writers ever since. The three rules read: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The stories are connected by robo-psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin, who works for the corporation that manufactures intelligent robots, and her discussions with a reporter who is putting together a profile of her career. Dr. Calvin reflects on robot evolution and discusses how little humanity really understands about the artificial intelligence it has created. Each story illuminates a problem encountered when a robot interprets the three fundamental laws, and something goes awry. Although I, Robot was published in 1950 and includes stories from the 1940s, when computing was in its embryonic stage, Asimov’s vision of the future of software is startlingly accurate and insightful. Asimov’s writing is certainly not top-drawer, and the characterization is often weak, but the scient
ific style, the blend between fact and fiction, and the stunning insights into the world of robotics, from which so much else has developed, make this one of the most important works of science fiction in the history of the genre. EF
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1900s
The Grass is Singing
Doris Lessing
Lifespan | b. 1919 (Iran)
First Published | 1950
First Published by | Michael Joseph (London)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 2007
This paperback edition of Lessing’s novel was published by Heinemann in 1973 as one of its African Writers series.
“I’m not lonely.”
Doris Lessing’s first novel, written in Africa, but not published until she was living in Europe, opens with the murder of the wife of a white Rhodesian farmer by her African servant. The novel’s interest lies, however, in the story suppressed by the community of white farmers of the events that lead up to the tragedy. The retrospective narrative thus moves irrevocably toward an inevitable death.
From the first pages, it is clear that we are being asked to bear witness to a story of human relations that a colonial system of justice will not allow to be heard. Dick and Mary Turner are each possessed by need and a deluded idea of the other person. When they marry, city-girl Mary is brought to live on Turner’s isolated and failing farm. As Mary is gradually disabused of her hopes about Dick and the future, she succumbs to torpor and hysteria in the sweltering heat of the veld. Only Moses, the latest in a series of native servants ill-treated by Mary, seems able to respond to her misery. But Moses’s acts of kindness toward her violate the sacred colonial taboo—that separate races are not allowed to recognize one another as human beings. Desire and fear are inextricably intertwined as Mary feels herself surrendering to the authority of a man she associates with the surrounding bush, which threatens always to reconquer the land taken by the white farmers.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 53