1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

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1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 54

by Boxall, Peter


  The portrait of lives destroyed is mitigated in its painful intensity only by the descriptions of the stark beauty of the African veld. The Grass is Singing is the first publication of a major literary figure, an angry denunciation of the hypocrisies of the colonial power known to Lessing from her youth in southern Africa, and a dissection of colonial mentality and the deformations it performs on both the colonizer and the colonized. VM

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  1900s

  A Town Like Alice

  Nevil Shute

  Lifespan | b. 1899 (England), d. 1960 (Australia)

  First Published | 1950

  First Published by | Heinemann (London)

  Given Name | Nevil Shute Norway

  Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice received international acclaim and became an Australian classic. A love story set against the backdrop of the Second World War in the Far East and the postwar Australian outback, it is a tale of shifting societies and changing times, brought about by the impact of war. The novel is based on a real event, when the Japanese invaded Sumatra and captured eighty Dutch women and children, who were then forced to trek around the island for the next two and a half years.

  The narrator tells the story of Jean Pagett, an English secretary in Malaysia. Captured along with other English women and children, she spends the next three years on a grueling “death march” around the Malay Peninsula. During this forced march, Jean strikes up a friendship with an Australian prisoner of war, Joe Harman, but later believes he has been killed. After the war Jean revisits Malaysia and discovers Joe is not dead. She travels to Australia, their romance is rekindled, and they turn the one-horse town in which Joe lives into a thriving community, based on Alice Springs. A Town Like Alice has all the elements of a great love story and was written when the British-born author had just embarked upon a love affair of his own—with his new country, Australia. LE

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  1900s

  The Moon and the Bonfires

  Cesare Pavese

  Lifespan | b. 1908 (Italy), d. 1950

  First Published | 1950

  First Published by | Einaudi (Turin)

  Original Title | La luna e i falò

  Cesare Pavese’s last novel has been acclaimed as his best, a lyrical walk through the Langhe region of Piedmont. The story is minimal, as the author did not want to create a complex plot or explore the psychology of the characters.

  After Italy is liberated from Fascism, Anguilla, who has spent twenty years in America, returns to his native village. He has traveled enough to know that all countries in the world are similar and one needs to settle somewhere. Consequently, he returns to the Langhe because “those villages were waiting for him.” In a narrative that alternates between present and past, Anguilla—accompanied by his friend and guide, Nuto—rediscovers his homeland. Anguilla’s desire is to find himself through the physical appropriation of Gaminella, the place where he spent his childhood, and Mora, where he worked during his adolescence. His idealized village has acquired the symbolic colors of an earthly paradise, but he soon finds that the trees have been cut down, and Santa, who was a young girl when he left, has been killed. Nuto shares with Anguilla the same faith in the value of the Resistance and the necessity of a social revolution and helps him to become aware of the deceptiveness of his search. He introduces Anguilla to the mythical essence of social revolution by affirming his belief in the peasants’ traditions and superstitions, and in the regenerative power of the bonfires. RPi

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  1900s

  Gormenghast

  Mervyn Peake

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

  First Published | 1950

  First Published by | Eyre & Spottiswoode (London)

  Full Name | Mervyn Lawrence Peake

  “Oh, wonderful. He’s behaving his damn self.”

  This is the second volume of Mervyn Peake’s extraordinary Gormenghast trilogy and inarguably the apex of the series. It is also an outstanding feat of literature. Gormenghast takes up where Titus Groan left off. Lord Sepulchrave is dead, Swelter has been vanquished by Mr. Flay, and Steerpike, bald from his own arson—his disfiguring scars reflecting his progressive inner rot—continues his vicious ascent through the hierarchy. He has become a force to be reckoned with. Titus is approaching restless adolescence. As he closes in on manhood, he becomes a worthy adversary to the machinations of the increasingly powerful Steerpike. And Gormenghast itself, huge and malevolent, wheezes on.

  The carnival of characters from Titus Groan returns with exhilarating vibrancy, coursing through the labyrinth of Great Halls and bedchambers, the dusty cellars and libraries. There are the lovelorn Fuschia, the nattering twin aunts having tea parties in the boughs outside their window, the toadying Dr. Prunesquallor, and his sister, Irma, with her preening, unearned vanity. Peake takes his original scathing allegory of British life and expands it with new targets for his sublime wit: an excoriating and hilarious examination of Titus’s education in a system that is eerily familiar. The novel culminates with an apocalyptic flood, as Steerpike and Titus do battle for the very heart of Gormenghast. With an awareness of the outside world and the itch of adolescence, Titus finally decides to leave the craggy battlements of his home and sets out for the world beyond the crumbling walls.

  Peake’s prose is masterful; his characters so strange they become hyperreal. Gormenghast is as complex and dark as a Bosch triptych. It is a fairy tale without sugar, leaving only the skeletal nightmare. GT

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  1900s

  The 13 Clocks

  James Thurber

  Lifespan | b. 1894 (U.S.), d. 1961

  First Published | 1950

  First Published by | Simon & Schuster (New York)

  Full Name | James Grover Thurber

  “He called himself Xingu, which was not his name . . .”

  The 13 Clocks contains all the essential ingredients of a thrilling fairy tale. There is a prince disguised as a ragged minstrel, a tragic princess trapped in a castle by an evil duke, and the prospect of a daring task that must be completed within an impossible time frame. This constraint is a key element in the story because the duke claims to have “slain” time, and the thirteen clocks in the castle are frozen at ten minutes to five. The prince must find a priceless treasure and deliver it up as the clocks strike the hour. His only hope is the Golux, a tiny wizard possessed of a strange logic and an indescribable hat.

  The castle is a dangerous place, noisily patrolled by huge metallic guards, silently controlled by the duke’s velvet-hooded spies. Nightmarish creatures lurk in the darkest corners of the deepest dungeons. Playful counterpoints to these horrors are provided by touches of absurdity. Brightly colored balls come bouncing downstairs at unlikely moments—are there ghosts of murdered children playing above? Chimes of distant laughter hint at the possibility. There are also elements of parable: love conquers all, time is unfrozen, and evil meets inevitable nemesis. In the final pages the duke is pursued by “a blob of glup, that smells of old unopened rooms and makes a sound like rabbits screaming.”

  The language is dazzlingly inventive and the tone wickedly ironic—hallmarks of the most admired and controversial humorist of the first half of the twentieth century. At the time of writing The 13 Clocks, Thurber was rapidly losing his sight, and the descriptions of half-perceived figures moving in shadows, of shafts of sunlight piercing darkened rooms, and thickets of night lit by flashes of lightning, create hallucinatory landscapes that suggest a great preoccupation with encroaching blindness. TS

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  1900s

  The Labyrinth of Solitude

  Octavio Paz

  Lifespan | b. 1914 (Mexico), d. 1998

  First Published | 1950, by Cuadernos Americanos

  Original Title | El laberinto de la soledad

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1990 />
  “Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake.”

  A book made up of nine individual essay-chapters on aspects of Mexican national character might seem an odd choice in a list of indispensable novels, but The Labyrinth of Solitude also marks an advance in prose fiction. It is an analytical and intensely poetic Bildungsroman showing the formation not of an individual, but of a nation’s identity.

  Octavio Paz was already among the greatest Mexican poets of the twentieth century when he wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude in 1950. He was also a significant public figure: he traveled to Europe in the 1930s, fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; he was an esteemed diplomat; and he went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Labyrinth proved controversial with the Mexican establishment, because it held up a mirror to a nation that did not always like what it was shown. The book describes Mexico at a crucial moment of self-realization, but it is also often critical of aspects of Mexican identity: its machismo, dissimulation, harshness, and immovable gender roles.

  In this work, Paz is part anthropologist and art semiologist, reading the signs through which Mexican culture was constructed, from the dress codes of disaffected Mexican-American youth gangs to the public rituals of the famous Day of the Dead. But he also brings all of his profound eloquence as a poet to bear on his subject, and the book resonates on every page with instinctive insights, connections, and verbal finesse. MS

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  1900s

  The Abbot C

  Georges Bataille

  Lifespan | b. 1897 (France), d. 1962

  First Published | 1950

  First Published by | Les Editions de Minuit (Paris)

  Original Title | L’Abbé C

  George Bataille’s short novel The Abbot C follows the dangerously entangled relationship between twin brothers: Robert, a priest, who lives a life of such virtue that he has earned the sobriquet “the abbot,” and his antipathetic brother Charles, who leads a dissolute life devoted to pleasure. The novel is comprised of various narrators and opens with the narrative of a mutual friend, who finds Robert in a state of anguish on account of his brother’s grave ill health. As the story unfolds, the extent of the brothers’ overlapping emotional lives becomes clear. Charles’s involvement with Eponine, a woman who shares his decadent and licentious lifestyle, is complicated by her sexual desire for the abstemious Robert and, more sensationally, by Robert’s uneasy physical desire for her. This painful triangulation puts unbearable strain upon the sibling relationship and causes the steady breakdown of Robert’s sanity and simultaneous deterioration of Charles’s physical health.

  Fusing Bataille’s familiar fascination with the relationship between eroticism, death, and sensuality, the novel explores the thin line between sexual desire and morbidity. In its concentration on the fissure between the moral code demanded by religious observance and the truth of individual conscience, it explores an intriguing dimension of human experience. Readers may find the treatment of this issue somewhat excessive and the contrived intention to shock rather heavy-handed, but this is still an engaging and unusual piece of writing. JW

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  1900s

  The Guiltless

  Hermann Broch

  Lifespan | b. 1886 (Austria), d. 1951 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1950

  First Published by | Willi Weismann (Munich)

  Original Title | Die Shuldlosen

  A loosely connected set of short stories much like Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, Hermann Broch’s The Guiltless paints a picture of interwar European society that is similarly bleak and ominous. Ranging in time between 1913 and 1933, the stories that make up The Guiltless describe characters not only destroyed by the impact of the First World War, but themselves seemingly intent on destroying any remnants of moral certainty.

  Loosely focused on the fortunes of “Mr. A,” a seemingly rootless young man living as a boarder in the run-down palace of an ageing baroness, the novel details a series of social failures that he either provokes or witnesses. Sexual relations turn to betrayal and violence; love for nature mutates into an inhuman indifference; family life becomes a grotesque parody of nonexistent prewar conventions. Broch inserts “explanations” preceding each group of stories, making it increasingly clear that the distorted values of this decadent society foreshadow the much more menacing norms of looming Nazism. None of the characters is overtly political but their inhuman actions lay the groundwork for the passive acceptance of fascism.

  Arrestingly written in a mixture of understated prose and satiric verse, The Guiltless remains today a haunting and powerful novel that forces the reader to concede that, as one of the characters belatedly notes, “Our responsibility, like our wickedness, is bigger than ourselves.” AB

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  1900s

  Barabbas

  Pär Lagerkvist

  Lifespan | b. 1891 (Sweden), d. 1974

  First Published | 1950

  First Published by | Bonniers (Stockholm)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1951

  Condemned as a thief but released in place of Christ, Barabbas appears only fleetingly in the New Testament. In the skillful hands of Pär Lagerkvist, however, he becomes an enigmatic, haunted figure, an outcast compelled by a bewildering inner force to seek out a God whom he can neither fully accept nor reject. Unable to settle into his former existence after witnessing Christ’s death, he becomes a drifter, then a slave, all the while encircling Christians wherever he finds them, in a dangerous dance of mutual incomprehension. Structured around three crucifixions, Barabbas offers an array of shifting parallels and contrasts—between Barabbas and Jesus, doubt and faith, darkness and light.

  Having lost his own faith as a young man, Lagerkvist was profoundly interested in the anguish of those who, having no certainties, seek a sense of purpose in an apparently meaningless world. In Barabbas we find the perfect setting for these themes, where the unquestioning, peace-giving faith of the early Christians sits alongside the fearful loneliness of one man’s nagging doubt.

  In 1951, Lagerkvist was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, principally for this novel. That Barabbas should have moved the Nobel Committee so deeply is unsurprising; in the aftermath of the Second World War and its horrors,“What does all this mean?” was a timely cry. Barabbas is a work of profound modernity, placing in the foreground man’s growing sense of existential anguish. RMa

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  1900s

  The End of the Affair

  Graham Greene

  Lifespan | b. 1904 (England), d. 1991 (Switzerland)

  First Published | 1951

  First Published by | Heinemann (London)

  Full Name | Henry Graham Greene

  Set in London during and after the Second World War, this is the tortured story of an affair between Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, and the married Sarah Miles. The lovers meet at a party and proceed to liberate each other from the confines of duty and unhappiness. After several years, the affair is still continuing, against the backdrop of London during the Blitz. The building in which the lovers meet is hit by a bomb, and Bendrix is knocked unconscious. Terrified that he is dead, Sarah makes a deal with God that if he lets him live, she will give up her lover. Bendrix recovers, and Sarah—true to her promise—ends the affair with no explanation, leaving Bendrix unhappy and confused. It is only years later that he finds out about her passionate vow to God.

  Graham Greene is known for his Catholicism, and also for questioning religious faith in the light of his own adulterous affairs. This is the most autobiographical of Greene’s novels, probably based on his own wartime affair. It is a story of love, passion, and religious faith, and how love of self, love of another, and love of God collide. The tension that pervades The End of the Affair comes from the interplay of doubt and faith, and Greene’s underlying message that human love a
nd passion are inadequate for relieving suffering—for that, he believes, one must turn to the love of God. EF

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  1900s

  Molloy

  Samuel Beckett

  Lifespan | b. 1906 (Ireland), d. 1989 (France)

  First Published | 1951

  First Published by | Les Editions de Minuit (Paris)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1969

  Samuel Beckett is better known for his plays than for his novels, but his novels are the greater achievement. They are the funniest prose alive. Molloy, written initially in French, then translated into English by Beckett and Patrick Bowles, is the first novel in the trilogy finished off by Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Although they complete the trilogy, these two later novels proved inadequate to the job of putting an end to the decline begun in Molloy, which extends into everything that Beckett would go on to write.

 

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