Beckett is the great master of every possible shade of decline and its unrivalled comedian. Molloy is probably the funniest of all his writing. It is made up of two stories, each the doppelgänger of the other. In the first, the wretched cripple Molloy stumbles through a lost thread of episodes peopled by his insensible mother, a litter of comic citizens, a policeman, and a grotesque feminine captor named Lousse, before ending up dumped by Beckett in a ditch. His place is then surrendered to Moran, whom Beckett dispatches, together with his son, on a quest to find his predecessor, a quest that Moran pursues with furious inertia only to find that Beckett has declined to contrive a meeting between them. He trudges home to find his bees turned to ash.
Beckett nails all the perks of fiction (all the events, sympathies, and glitter of fiction’s “real life”) into their smorgasbord and buries it. His stories are all the confessions of a syntax addict whose phantom fix is total disagreement with himself. KS
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Rebel
Albert Camus
Lifespan | b. 1913 (Algeria), d. 1960 (France)
First Published | 1951
First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Title | L’ Homme révolté
The Rebel recalls the dispute between Camus and Sartre in 1952. It also represents the dispute between metaphysical freedom and actual revolution. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the French yearned for social change and activism. The verdict of the day favored Sartre. The Rebel was accused of supporting the vision of right-wing reactionaries. But does it really? In the cultural context of our time, The Rebel appears to question the foundation of collectivist ideology and to present us with an acute insight into the preconditions of “being political.” The thesis of the book can be summarized in the statement: “I revolt, therefore we are.” However, in Camus, the absolute solitariness or freedom of the individual never allows the emergence of “we” to be the objective of individual revolt. Metaphysically speaking, we are already engaged with a political situation before the actual intended revolution. In the eyes of Camus, Sartrian left-wing existentialism dismisses the freedom of the individual. For Sartre, revolt means an actual engagement with politics so as to bring about changes, while for Camus it is a metaphysical condition of the inner life of the individual. Camus stands back from Sartrian activism, which promotes solidarity. How do we read The Rebel today? The way we read it will point to the political condition in which we live. KK
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
Lifespan | b. 1919 (U.S.)
First Published | 1951
First Published by | Little Brown & Co. (Boston)
Full Name | Jerome David Salinger
“. . . I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff . . .”
The Catcher in the Rye presents the dazzling mock-autobiographical story of an American teenager, Holden Caulfield, charting his rebellious encounters with the “phoney” world around him. Shadowed by apocalyptic anxieties (“I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it.”), it is also an extraordinary study of refused or impossible mourning, above all Holden’s for his dead younger brother, Allie. Once asked “who was the best war poet, Rupert Brooke or Emily Dickinson,” Allie said Dickinson. Salinger’s novel is itself a kind of war poetry. It is at war with “phoney” adult (affluent, middle-class, white, patriarchal, American) values, but also with itself: Holden brilliantly ridicules those around him, but in the process inevitably also makes himself ridiculous.
Hilarious and disturbing, satirical and strangely poignant by turns, The Catcher in the Rye is written in a deceptively simple and colloqiual style: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Novels to read before you die are novels like that. How phoney is this phone? Salinger’s voice is enigmatically concealed in Holden’s. There is the captivating ease and intimacy of someone directly speaking to us. At the same time, the reader is left with the remarkable sense that the tone of the entire work is perhaps really audible only to the dead brother. NWor
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Opposing Shore
Julien Gracq
Lifespan | b. 1910 (France)
First Published | 1951, by J. Corti (Paris)
Original Title | Le Rivage des Syrtes
Given Name | Louis Poirier
A strangely moody and distilled piece of writing, The Opposing Shore is set in decadent Orsenna, a fictional country long engaged in a phoney war with Farghestan, the neighboring barbarian state. In a permanently sus pended stalemate, all battles having ceased some 300 years earlier, neither side can afford either to concede or to continue, or is prepared to negotiate terms of peace. Yet legends of the war have stimulated the poets to an output far beyond what the situation might be expected to inspire.
Aldo, a young and dissipated man, scion of an aristocratic family, is disappointed in love and weary of the pleasures of the capital; he longs for exile and asceticism. So he takes on the position of Observer at the military post on the frontier, where the Admiralty, a long-disused fortress, maintains a purely symbolic presence. There Aldo, poet and loner, attempts to shake off his torpor and invigorate his fatherland by launching a naval maneuver that regenerates the hostilities to disastrous effect.
The novel follows a graceful path of sumptuous imagery that slows the action to a timelessness that reads like myth. Gracq’s writing has a strong affinity to the Surrealism of André Breton, although he was never part of this or any other literary movement.
Gracq, like his protagonist Aldo, disdained the effete cultural milieu of urban centers—in this case, Paris. Had he not categorically rejected the honor, The Opposing Shore would have been awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1951. ES
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Foundation
Isaac Asimov
Lifespan | b. 1920 (Russia), d. 1992 (U.S.)
First Published | 1951, by Gnome Press (New York)
Trilogy | Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), Second Foundation (1953)
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, of which this is the first book, is one of his earliest and best-known works, which he began when he was only twenty-one. It helped to redefine the science fiction genre with its seamless interweaving of science fact with fiction.
Foundation is set in the future, when the world is barely remembered, and humans have colonized the galaxy. The book introduces Hari Seldon, a brilliant visionary and psychohistorian whose job is to use mathematics and probability to predict the future. Seldon does not have the ability to prevent the decline of humanity that he predicts. Instead, he gathers together the galaxy’s top scientists and scholars on a bleak outer planet and sets out to preserve the accumulated knowledge of humankind, and begin a new civilization based on art, science, and technology. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation and designs it to withstand a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare he predicts will last for 30,000 years. But not even Hari has foreseen the intense barbarism lurking in space or the birth of an extraordinary creature whose mutant intelligence will destroy all he holds dear.
With his scientist-populated Foundation, Asimov became one of the first writers to theorize that atomic power would revolutionize society. In addressing the ways in which the Foundation responds to the problems Seldon has predicted, the author raises issues about traditional religion as the controlling drug of the masses, and the rise of science as the new faith for humankind. EF
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
Lifespan | b. 1906 (Ireland), d. 1989 (Paris)
First Published | 1951
First Published by | Les Editions de Minuit (Paris)
Original Title | Malone meurt
For those readers who easily tire of colorful fiction, Malone Dies will be as revitalizing as anything in the language. It is Samuel Beckett’s attempt to winnow down still more violently the nib of his fiction. The stories are what the language uses to get away from itself, and they are all going nowhere. Early on in Malone Dies, we are spoon-fed the story of the sorrows of young Sapo Saposcat, a fake and abortive Bildungsroman in a suite of ludicrously colorless episodes. Later he tries his hand at a love story, where the protagonists manage at great effort and discomfort to act out what are surely the most repulsive sex scenes in any comedy.
When the language of Malone Dies begins to resemble a novel, it is always faking it. As each consecutive excuse for a story is dumped, we are dragged back into the scene of syntax addiction and the parody of mystification over life and death, endlessly knocked on the head by casual remarks such as “ideas are so alike, when you get to know them,” and endlessly restarted. So it goes until the book’s brutal finish, in which Beckett is perhaps more nearly terrified than anywhere else in his fiction by the corner he has crushed himself into and by his failure to lose control of language even there. The horror and optimism of Beckett are that true claustrophobia is possible only in paradise. KS
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham
Lifespan | b. 1903 (England), d. 1969
First Published | 1951, by Michael Joseph (London)
Full Name | John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris
Published in 1951 to moderate acclaim, this novel was later to become a science fiction classic (as well as a low-budget movie in 1963) and a defining novel of the post-disaster genre. The action opens with biologist Bill Masen in the hospital, bandages draped over his eyes after a poisonous plant (triffid) sting. Nurses describe to him the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen, but when he awakens the next morning, the hospital routine he expects never starts. Overcoming his fear of damaging his eyes, he removes the bandages to find thousands of sightless people wandering the streets. He meets Josella, another sighted survivor, and the two leave the city together in an attempt to survive in a postapocalyptic world. The triffids, which can grow to seven feet, walk on their roots, and kill a man with a sting, have made their first attack and are now poised to prey on humanity. Masen eventually convinces other survivors to band together to try to defeat these intelligent plants. It is essentially the story of a normal man who must alter his social values in order to survive.
On the face of it, this seems to be a reasonably straightforward survival adventure, but it was the first of its time to anticipate disaster on a global scale. Wyndham predicts the technologies of biowarfare and mass destruction, offering a sophisticated account of Cold War paranoia that was well before its time in terms of its exploration of the psyche of individuals in the face of social change. EF
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar
Lifespan | b. 1903 (Belgium), d. 1987 (U.S.)
First Published | 1951, by Librarie Plon (Paris)
Original Title | Mémoires d’Hadrien
Given Name | Marguerite de Crayencour
Marguerite Yourcenar will always be distinguished by becoming, in 1980, the first woman ever elected as a member of the Académie Française. And it is largely on the strength of work such as Memoirs of Hadrian that her literary reputation was built. The book is constructed as a long letter from the dying emperor to Marcus Aurelius, who was then an adolescent (and who succeeded as ruler of Rome following the intervening reign of his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius). The account relates the professional and historical aspects of Hadrian’s two decades as Emperor, distilling from his worldly experience what he can transmit to the younger man of the judgment and insight he has attained. His reflections on the fundaments of life—the mysteries of love, the demands of the body, the question of human destiny—shared by all of us make this novel far more accessible to a contemporary reader than might be expected of the thoughts of a second-century titan.
Yourcenar’s achievement is the thoroughness of her research; it is easy to forget that this is fiction written in a philosophical style, its tone that of a man of action examining and evaluating his existence. Memoirs of Hadrian has been admired equally by scholars of classical antiquity as by arbiters of literary art, and secured the author’s international reputation when it appeared. ES
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Hive
Camilo José Cela
Lifespan | b. 1916 (Spain), d. 2002
First Published | 1951
First Published by | Emecé (Buenos Aires)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1989
The title of The Hive refers to the teeming variety of Madrid, the great city where people looking to make a life congregate, like bees in a hive. The novel has no subject or main character; there are about 300 characters, most of them from the middle classes who have been ruined by the severity of the postwar period. Their lives are ordinary, beset by illness (tuberculosis) or debt, or they are falling into prostitution. They are obsessed by sex, and their conversations allude to wartime topics—firing squads, prison—or to conservative principles (that “class” comes with blood, that one must be Spanish, or Catholic). It is a Spain obsessed by denunciation and distrust. The structural connection of the episodes, told by “the narrator” with alleged objectivity, is rooted in the repetition of places and characters—the main ones are the Café of Doña Rosa and the fugitive “intellectual” Martín Marco.
This novel influenced writers of the so-called mid-century generation, who carried out the work of criticism and social denunciation that Cela did not attempt. Cela did not describe the essential sordidness of the inhabitants of the beehive, nor did he point to causes or culprits; he tended to see everything in a fatalistic way, seeing the piety that occurs as compatible with betrayal or cruelty. With a supreme command of language, Cela limits himself to relating the facts of a degraded reality, and thus he achieves a devastating statement that, in spite of its lack of censoriousness, was avidly read. M-DAB
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Wise Blood
Flannery O’Connor
Lifespan | b. 1925 (U.S.), d. 1964
First Published | 1952
First Published by | Harcourt, Brace & Co. (N. Y.)
Full Name | Mary Flannery O’Connor
Wise Blood was O’Connor’s first novel—on the jacket of the first edition, the unknown author’s name is given little prominence.
“Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”
Since its publication in 1952, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood has become one of several American novels that have gone on to define the so-called “Southern Gothic” genre. It is a work deeply embedded in the intense humidity and religious fervor of the old South.
The story centers on a young man named Hazel Motes. Raised by an uncompromisingly conservative family, Hazel returns home after a spell in the military with his religious faith destroyed by the experience of war. As a way of coming to terms with his newfound sense of loss, Hazel creates his own church: the Church without Christ. It is a church where “the deaf don’t hear, the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk, the dumb don’t talk, and the dead stay that way.” Hazel becomes a kind of heretical antipriest, a renegade street preacher driven by an urge to save those around him from Christianity. The further away he tries to push himself from faith, however, the deeper his need for redemption becomes.
Wise Blood is populated by an eccentric collection of misfits, thieves, con artists, sc
umbags, and false prophets. It is partly a theological allegory, a meditation on the place of God in modern culture, and partly a grotesque, madcap comedy. It is a novel of miracles and murder, of lustful flesh and pure spirit, of blindness and vision, of violence and healing. O’Connor presents a complex vision of the rural South in which she was raised. The novel unravels many of the South’s myths and prejudices, yet at the same time pays homage to its traditions, heritage, and defiance. The spare, economical prose finds insight and wonder in the smallest detail, acutely sensitive to the transformative power of both faith and doubt. The world of Wise Blood is tough, tarnished, and visceral, but it is also brushed with grace. ST
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
Lifespan | b. 1899 (U.S.), d. 1961
First Published | 1952
First Published by | C. Scribner’s Sons (New York)
Pulitzer Prize for Literature | 1953
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 55