The cover illustration of the British first edition, published by Jonathan Cape, depicts the novel’s Cuban fishing village.
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
Critical opinion tends to differ over The Old Man and the Sea, which moves away from the style of Ernest Hemingway’s earlier works. Within the frame of this perfectly constructed miniature are to be found many of the themes that preoccupied Hemingway as a writer and as a man. The routines of life in a Cuban fishing village are evoked in the opening pages with a characteristic economy of language. The stripped-down existence of the fisherman Santiago is crafted in a spare, elemental style that is as eloquently dismissive as a shrug of the old man’s powerful shoulders. With age and luck now against him, Santiago knows he must row out “beyond other men,” away from land and into the deep waters of the Gulf Stream. There is one last drama to be played out, in an empty arena of sea and sky.
Hemingway was famously fascinated with ideas of men proving their worth by facing and overcoming the challenges of nature. When the old man hooks a marlin longer than his boat, he is tested to the limits as he works the line with bleeding hands in an effort to bring it close enough to harpoon. Through his struggle he demonstrates the ability of the human spirit to endure hardship and suffering in order to win. It is also his deep love and knowledge of the sea, in her impassive cruelty and beneficence, that allows him to prevail.
The essential physicality of the story—the smells of tar and salt and fish blood, the cramp and nausea and blind exhaustion of the old man, the terrifying death spasms of the great fish—is set against the ethereal qualities of dazzling light and water, isolation, and the swelling motion of the sea. And the narrative is constantly tugging, unreeling a little more, pulling again. It is a book that demands to be read in a single sitting. TS
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1900s
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Lifespan | b. 1914 (U.S.), d. 1994
First Published | 1952
First Published by | Random House (New York)
National Book Award | 1952
“I am an invisible man.”
Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison’s only novel and is widely acknowledged as one of the great novels of African-American literature. The invisibility of Ellison’s protagonist is about the invisibility of identity—above all, what it means to be a black man—and its various masks, confronting both personal experience and the force of social illusions.
The novel’s special quality is its deft combination of existential inquiry into identity as such—what it means to be socially or racially invisible—with a more sociopolitical allegory of the history of the African-American experience in America. The first-person narrator remains nameless, retrospectively recounting his shifts through the surreal reality of surroundings and people from the racist South to the no less inhospitable world of New York City. While Invisible Man bears comparison with the existentialist novels of Sartre and Camus, it also maps out the story of one man’s identity against the struggles of collective self-definition. This takes the narrator-protagonist through the circumscribed social possibilities afforded to African-Americans, from enslaved grandparents through southern education, to models associated with Booker T. Washington, through to the full range of Harlem politics. Ellison’s almost sociological clarity in the way he shows his central character working through these possibilities is skillfully worked into a novel about particular people, events, and situations, from the nightmare world of the ironically named Liberty Paints to the Marxist-Leninist machinations of the Brotherhood. In the process, Ellison offers sympathetic but severe critiques of the ideological resources of black culture, such as religion and music. Fierce, defiant, and utterly funny, Ellison’s tone mixes various idioms and registers to produce an impassioned inquiry into the politics of being. DM
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1900s
The Judge and His Hangman
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Lifespan | b. 1921 (Switzerland), d. 1990
First Published | 1952
First Published by | Benziger (Einsiedeln)
Original Title | Der Richter und sein Henker
“The more human beings proceed by plan the more effectively they may be hit by accident.”
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, 1957
Written while he was flourishing in postwar Germany as a playwright, novelist, essayist, theater director, and painter, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Judge and His Hangman weaves a suspenseful tale of murder in a remote part of Switzerland. The stark minimalism of the author’s Brechtian theatrical work is counteracted in this atmospheric novel, in which words paint foreboding and thrilling backdrops to the tale of Police Commissioner Bärlach, who is investigating the murder of a fellow police officer, Schmied. Bärlach, an ageing and dying man whose investigative faculties have not yet taken a backseat to his physical frailties, hands over the bulk of the detective work to his colleague, Tschanz. The two of them launch into a harrowing investigation (Bärlach is brain; Tschanz is brawn), but there are very few clues: a bullet on the side of the road, beside the car in which Schmied, dressed in evening clothes, was murdered, and an entry—a single “G”—in the victim’s diary on the night he was killed. This last clue leads Bärlach and Tschanz to the home of the cold, mysterious, and brilliant Gastmann.
This novel, the first of Dürrenmatt’s books to be published in America, addresses the theme of modern detective work in a way that is far from secondary to its mysterious plot. Critiquing policing methods is bound up inextricably both with the plot and with an equally important study of human imperfection. It is this last aspect, in particular, that truly distinguishes this piece of crime fiction. JuS
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1900s
Excellent Women
Barbara Pym
Lifespan | b. 1913 (England), d. 1980
First Published | 1952
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
Original Language | English
Excellent Women is set in postwar London. Housing shortages bring handsome naval officer Rockingham Napier and his anthropologist wife, Helena, to a Pimlico flat. Here they share a bathroom with the narrator, Mildred Lathbury. Convinced of her own dreariness, Mildred lives in a modest world of jumble sales and charitable good works. As she becomes involved in the Napiers’ very different lives, a disturbing hint of romance brings her frustrations to the surface. An emotional upheaval at the vicarage complicates the plot, while an odd relationship develops between Mildred and Helena’s fellow anthropologist, the splendidly named Everard Bone.
All of Barbara Pym’s early novels—six were published between 1950 and 1961—sparkle with wit and invention. She has a superb ear for the absurdities of everyday speech and her characters are observed with a sharp eye. What makes Excellent Women her finest work is the emotionally engaging first-person narration. Exploited and ignored by the selfish, insensitive individuals around her, Mildred spurns self-pity. It is hardly surprising that Pym became unpublishable in the 1960s. There is no place in her world for inflated gestures of liberation (even if Mildred allows herself to purchase an unsuitable shade of lipstick—“Hawaiian Fire”). Mildred endures her limited fate with decency and humor, drawing comfort and amusement from the minutiae of everyday life. Therein lies the poignancy and comedy of this exquisitely crafted work. RegG
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1900s
A Thousand Cranes
Yasunari Kawabata
Lifespan | b. 1899 (Japan), d. 1972
First Published | 1952, by Kodansha (Tokyo)
Original Title | Sembazuru
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1968
The first Japanese novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata in this novel weaves a delicate web of sexual relations behind the veil of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. After his father’s
death, Kikuji is lured into his world, becoming involved with his father’s mistress, Mrs. Ota, as well as being controlled by his father’s spurned lover, Chikako. In reliving the memory of his father through his women, Kikuji refuses to choose a young woman for himself, although an elusive girl and Mrs. Ota’s daughter linger as potential partners.
As possessions are passed from one generation to the next, affections and passions are also transferred through the same hands, albeit through illicit relations and tainted ambitions. Kawabata noted that he did not intend to evoke the beauty of the ceremony, but rather the “vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen.” The line between clean and unclean, desire and disgust, is constantly raised and erased in a futile search for purity in this world.
The irony of the title encapsulates Kawabata’s lament at the erosion of tradition and the difficulty of physical and spiritual fulfillment. A thousand cranes, traditionally signifying a long and prosperous marriage, is an unattainable illusion. Tragically, Kawabata suffered the same fate as one of his characters when he committed suicide, but his legacy introduced Japanese aesthetics to a wider Western audience and contributes to the shaping of a modern identity in Japanese literature. HH
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1900s
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
Lifespan | b. 1924 (U.S.), d. 1987 (France)
First Published | 1953
First Published by | Knopf (New York)
Full Name | James Arthur Baldwin
“. . . I ain’t going to have that boy’s blood on my hands.”
This semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman focuses on the complex and often fragile social bonds surrounding protagonist John as he celebrates his fourteenth birthday and, that night, falls to the “threshing-floor” of his stepfather Gabriel’s Harlem church in a climactic adult initiation. Gabriel, whom John believes to be his biological father, is a volatile, domineering force who ran wild as a very young man before experiencing an early religious epiphany that prompted him to preach the wrath of God. Gabriel married John’s mother to rescue her from the trials of single motherhood, but condemns her loving acceptance of John, which to Gabriel shows an unconscionable shamelessness over John’s illegitimacy and her relationship with his father, her first love. Gabriel himself fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage—a fact that he has continually guarded under the guise of repentance. He holds his silence regarding his orphaned son, who grew up hard and died violently and young.
While most of this history is not known to John, he is an intuitive boy who senses exactly the sorts of hazard that Harlem presents to black adolescents, especially those unprotected by an institution, usually the church. The loving support that John receives from Elisha, one of the church’s young leaders, vibrates with an intensely joyful homoeroticism on which John can imagine building a fulfilling future in the church. Insofar as his stepfather is the figure responsible for doctrinal exegesis and enforcement, however, there is only a cruel vindictiveness that works to frighten and shame its believers into unquestioning obedience. The basic physical and emotional exhaustion of John’s hallucinatory conversion allows him an early morning moment of triumphant respite, however brief. AF
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1900s
Casino Royale
Ian Fleming
Lifespan | b. 1908 (England), d. 1964
First Published | 1953
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
Full Name | Ian Lancaster Fleming
“Vodka dry Martini . . .”
We have been let down, badly, by Cubby Broccoli’s James Bond films. Sean Connery may have caught something of the thin-lipped coldness of Ian Fleming’s creation, but there was, from the very first film, a refusal to take things too seriously, and Connery’s arch one-liners found their camp culmination in Roger Moore’s arched eyebrow. Casino Royale, Ian Fleming’s first Bond story, was originally filmed only as a spoof, with David Niven as Bond, but it received a more serious interpretation with a 2006 version starring Daniel Craig. Everything in the novel—from the black-and-white of Cold War ideology, to Bond’s then impossibly exotic choice of avocado and vinaigrette as a starter in the faded casino towns of northern France—is redolent of the early 1950s in which it was written.
The plot is simple, even elemental. The villain is Le Chiffre, a Russian spy operating in France, who has misappropriated KGB funds and turned to gambling to make good the loss. Bond, as the Secret Service’s most accomplished gambler, is sent to Royale-les-Eaux to defeat Le Chiffre at the tables, thereby ruining him and his French network. There is an attempt on Bond’s life, a game of baccarat over twenty-five pages, a car chase, a lovingly described scene of grotesque torture, and a rescue. The final chapters are a curiously distended account of Bond’s convalescence with Vesper Lynd, the first “Bond girl”; the novel ends in a gratuitous burst of betrayal and misogyny. The prose is hard and unsparing, the detail minutely fetishistic (along the way we learn how—exactly—to make Bond’s signature Martini). Only in the descriptions of gambling and flagellation—two of Fleming’s most treasured pursuits—does the writing run away with itself. Otherwise, the book takes on the same aspect as its hero’s face: “taciturn, brutal, ironical and cold.” PMy
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1900s
Junkie
William Burroughs
Lifespan | b. 1914 (U.S.), d. 1997
First Published | 1953, by Ace Books (New York)
Original Title | Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
“. . . he kept it for himself.”
William Burroughs is well remembered for a variety of reasons: the literary iconoclast, revered for the perceived experimentalism of his writing and art; his “coolness” in influencing a generation of artists, filmmakers, and musicians; and his legendary drug use. As a result, he has become reduced to a two-dimensional image. In today’s environment, his legacy has inevitably been boiled down to so much aimless psychedelia and pottering “experimentation”; the actual breadth of his writing becomes almost irrelevant. Burroughs remains a writer who, far from simply employing surface-level gimmicks, writes about his life using whatever seems to be the most appropriate technique. Where The Naked Lunch employs a high degree of abstraction to describe both the polyglot, paranoid environment of middle-of-the-century Tangier and the process of opiate withdrawal, other works, notably Junkie and the later Queer, use far more simplistic narrative methods.
What Junkie seems to do is present the interior world of The Naked Lunch as a contemporary, exterior reality. A semi-autobiographical work, it outlines the author’s relationship with opiates from early experiences to full-blown long-term addiction. In fact, Burroughs found the discipline required to write the novel with the help of a daily morphine injection. The Burroughs of Junkie is inescapably a man rather than the cartoon outlaw of hipster folklore. He openly describes addiction’s vicious circle, while high lighting the way in which society holds addicts up as scapegoats to conceal its chronic failings and addictions. The book’s real importance is in this candor; the way in which it props up the Burroughs canon with a truthful simplicity that stubbornly undermines attempts to position its author as the Mickey Mouse of a marketable “counterculture.” SF
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1900s
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
Lifespan | b. 1922 (England), d. 1995
First Published | 1953
First Published by | V. Gollancz (London)
Somerset Maugham Award | 1953
C. P. Snow, who gave this ringing endorsement to Amis’s novel, had published his own campus novel, The Masters, two years earlier.
“Doing what you wanted . . .”
Kingsley Amis had already published several collections of poetry when he achieved popular success with his first novel, Lucky Jim, which was influential in definin
g the direction of English postwar fiction. Lucky Jim is iconoclastic, satirical, and disrespectful of the norms of conservative society, and very funny. It tells the story of Jim Dixon, a mediocre but sharp-witted assistant lecturer at an uninspiring provincial university who realizes that he has made a terrible career choice. He decides that what he studies—medieval history—is dull and pedantic, and he can no longer stand the awful pretensions he encounters at his institution and in the grim town where he is forced to live. Jim pushes his luck more and more, barely disguising his contempt for his colleagues, especially the absurd Professor Welch, until he manages to lose his job when he delivers a lecture on “Merrie England,” unprepared, blind drunk, and keen to parody the university authorities. Despite this, he leaves academia for a better job, and he manages to get the girl.
Lucky Jim has usually been seen as a very English novel. Jim Dixon has intellect, but, unwilling to fit in with the expectations of his social superiors, he is quite prepared to misuse it. The novel is really a story of frustrated ambition and talent, which exposes England as a drab wilderness that is ruled and run by colorless charlatans. Lucky Jim is written with considerable verve and a keen satirical eye. It contains numerous magnificent comic descriptions and sequences, especially at the start of the novel, when Jim reflects on the value of his utterly worthless research. The most celebrated passage is an account of a cultural weekend at Professor Welch’s house, which ends with what is probably the best description of a hangover in English fiction. AH
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 56