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1900s
The Trusting and the Maimed
James Plunkett
Lifespan | b. 1920 (Ireland), d. 2003
First Published | 1955
First Published by | The Devin-Adair Co. (New York)
Given Name | James Plunkett Kelly
The stories that make up The Trusting and the Maimed, originally published in the Dublin magazines The Bell and Irish Writing, share characters and locales to create an elegiac yet satirical portrayal of postindependence Ireland. Dublin is prominent, but it is a Dublin of dilapidated suburbs and of longed-for trips to the country, as much as it is a city of streets, offices, and pubs. A combination of evocative lyrical moments and precisely defined vignettes of everyday life build up a memorable account of a stagnating, crippled country. It is the harshness of the novel’s conclusion and the gentleness of its method that constitute James Plunkett’s achievement.
Ireland in the 1940s and the 1950s was a depressed, inward-looking, wounded place, and Plunkett captures this melancholy beautifully. While the stories’ episodic structure needs no center, there is a dominant tone set by the recurrence of the lives of city clerks. Young, frustrated, and restless, they rot in their safe jobs from nine to five. They could be whitecollar workers in any city. They save for “sin,” for the weekends of liquor, sex, and bawdy humor they use to endure the working week. The book is steeped in an atmosphere of palpable decay, a religion reduced to self-parodying remnants, and a patriotism shrunk to disciplinary fetishes and pub songs. It eloquently expresses the pity and resentment that were the cultural hallmarks of post-colonial Ireland. PMcM
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1900s
The Tree of Man
Patrick White
Lifespan | b. 1912 (England), d. 1990 (Australia)
First Published | 1955
First Published by | Viking Adult (New York)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1973
The Tree of Man was the novel that established Patrick White as the most significant Australian novelist of the postwar period. White’s chronicle of the lives of pioneers in the new country was a deliberate attempt to give Australia a work that would stand alongside Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, or Thomas Hardy.
The Tree of Man tells the story of the Parker family. Stan Parker, a young penniless man sets up a camp in the wilderness with his wife, Amy. Their settlement grows into a prosperous farm and they have children and grandchildren. By the time both die the once isolated dwelling is part of suburbia, surrounded by brick houses. The novel concludes as Stan’s grandson walks through the trees that survive on the farm, a link to the nature out of which this obscure society was created: “in the end there were the trees. . . . Putting out shoots of green thought. So that, in the end, there was no end.” Life goes on, as the experience of the Parker family shows, and men and women adapt to whatever life throws at them. The Tree of Man, the title alluding to the tree in the Garden of Eden and the genealogies sketched out in the ancient world of the Bible, is an attempt to show how important and moving the lives of forgotten and ordinary people can be, how heroic their struggles against the elements invariably are, and how poetry can be discovered in the least likely places. AH
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1900s
The Last Temptation of Christ
Nikos Kazantzákis
Lifespan | b. 1883 (Greece), d. 1957 (Germany)
First Published | 1955, by Diphros (Athens)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1988
Original Title | Ho teleutaíos peirasmós
This novel is a retelling of the life of Jesus Christ. Although Kazantzákis was a Christian, he was also a Nietzschean and a worshipper of nature, and his Jesus is intensely alive to his physical surroundings in Palestine and fully a man of flesh and blood. He is as much tormented by the divine call to become the Messiah as by his desire for Mary Magdalene.
The descriptions of Jesus’s life are largely based on the New Testament. The full-blown prose of the narrative spills over into a sort of magic realism at times, as, for example, when flowers blossom around the feet of the Messiah. At the climactic moment of the crucifixion, Jesus is rescued, as he thinks, by an angel who leads him to an earthly contentment in which he marries both Martha and Mary, has children, and lives a good human life. Years later, he realizes that the angel is, in fact, Satan and that this earthly paradise is a dream. Waking up, he finds himself back on the cross and dies. This seems to be where the author finds Jesus’s value: in a spiritual not a natural dimension. In spite of this, the Vatican condemned the novel, finding its Jesus too carnal and self-doubting, placing it on the index of forbidden books, while in Greece, Orthodox authorities sought Kazantzákis’s prosecution, delaying the book’s publication. PM
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1900s
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
João Guimarães Rosa
Lifespan | b. 1908 (Brazil), d. 1967
First Published | 1955
First Published by | José Olympio (Rio de Janeiro)
Original Title | Grande Sertão: Veredas
While practicing medicine in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and having later become a diplomat and a politician, João Guimarães Rosa became acquainted with the harsh reality of those inhabiting that vast territory. As Riobaldo, his novel’s protagonist, narrates his life, the reader becomes both listener and viewer of the rhythm of the backlands. The novel’s characters form a tapestry of human relations, and both individual and collective experiences are lyrically scrutinized. These are men that love and kill with the same intensity. Riobaldo himself is torn between not only the classical dichotomy of carnal and platonic love, but also of impossible affection in the shape of his companion in arms.
Language is immediately striking in this novel. Even when describing shocking episodes, poetic licence is granted by its vivacious originality. In making abundant use of neologisms, aphorisms, archaisms, onomatopoeias, and alliterations, the author generates a musical, quasi-undulating mood that confers on the prose a cinematic character.
This is a novel that simultaneously presents what is most specific about life in the backlands of Minas Gerais and what is most universal about the human condition. In bearing witness to the plight of individuals forced to look introspectively into their own existence, it becomes a metaphysical journey in which we cannot but participate. ML
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1900s
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Lifespan | b. 1899 (Russia), d. 1977 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1955
First Published by | Olympia Press (Paris)
Original Language | English
The first publication of Lolita, by risqué Parisian press Olympia, caused widespread outrage. The violent erotic passion of the novel’s protagonist and narrator, Humbert Humbert, for the twelve-year-old Lolita, and the intensity and extent of Humbert’s abuse of her, remain genuinely shocking, particularly in a culture preoccupied with child abuse and the sexualization of children.
Written in Nabokov’s characteristic immaculate style, this violent and brutal novel poses fascinating questions about the role of fiction. Is it possible for us to find beauty, pleasure, and comedy in a narrative that is ethically repugnant? Can we suspend moral judgment in favor of aesthetic appreciation of a finely tuned sentence or a perfectly balanced phrase? The answers to these questions remain unclear, but in pitting substance against style, in balancing the ethical so delicately against the aesthetic, Nabokov invents a new kind of literary fiction.
Humbert’s abduction of Lolita, and his fleeing with her across America in a crazed attempt to outrun the authorities, make this novel an inaugural work of postmodern fiction, as well as a kind of proto-road movie. Humbert is an old-world European, a lover of Rimbaud and Balzac, who finds himself displaced in the shiny world of corpora
te 1950s America and entranced by the lurid charms of gum-chewing, sodadrinking Lolita. The story of this encounter between venerable age and crass youth, between Europe and America, between high art and popular culture, is the story on which many of the novels and films that come in the wake of Lolita are based. Without Lolita, it is difficult to imagine Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 or Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. It is a mark of its originality and power that, after so many imitations, it remains so troubling, so fresh, and so moving. PB
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1900s
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith
Lifespan | b. 1921 (U.S.), d. 1995 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1955
First Published by | Coward-McCann (New York)
Given Name | Mary Patricia Plangman
As indicated on this 1955 first edition jacket, Patricia Highsmith’s preferred term for her genre of writing was “suspense fiction.”
“There was no doubt the man was after him.”
Tom Ripley is one of the great creations of twentiethcentury pulp writing, a schizophrenic figure at once charming, ambitious, unknowable, utterly devoid of morality, and prone to outbursts of extreme violence. Indeed, the line that Highsmith draws between psychosis on the one hand, and class envy and sexual yearning on the other, means that it is possible to read his deviant behavior both in relatively straightforward terms as a symptom of mental illness and as a complex manifestation of bourgeois ambitions and repressed homosexual desire. At the story’s center is the relationship between Tom and Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy socialite who has taken up residence in the quiet Italian coastal village Mongibello with his girlfriend, Marge. Tom is at once appalled by Dickie’s clumsy attempts to paint and by his “inexplicable” attachment to Marge, whom he clearly does not love, and attracted by his style, affluence, and good looks. This uneasy mixture of sentiments is brought into explosive conflagration when Tom murders Dickie and assumes his identity in a calculated bid to benefit financially.
In the hands of a lesser writer, The Talented Mr. Ripley might simply have been an enjoyable tale of “cat and mouse,” as Tom is hunted down by the Italian police, Marge, and Dickie’s father across a series of attractively rendered Italian settings. But Highsmith infuses her story with all kinds of moral, psychological, and philosophical complexities. How can we distinguish between different categories of desire—sexual and material? How can we talk about identity as something fixed or essential, if Tom can “become” Dickie with such effortlessness and success? How is sexual desire related to sexual disgust? And, for readers, is it morally aberrant to cheer quietly for a cold-blooded murderer? AP
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1900s
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
Lifespan | b. 1892 (South Africa), d. 1973 (England)
First Published | 1954–1956, by Allen & Unwin (Lon.)
Trilogy | The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1955), The Return of the King (1955)
Tolkien’s academic grounding in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Norse mythology helped shape his personal imaginative world.
“Even the wise cannot see all ends.”
The Lord of the Rings is actually three books—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. It follows on from the story of The Hobbit, which J. R. R. Tolkien had published well over a decade earlier, further exploring the world of Middle Earth and war that would determine the fate of all men. Like The Hobbit, it is the story of an unlikely hero—a childlike, unassuming hobbit, Frodo—whom fate has destined for greater things. At the beginning, elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men come together under the wizard Gandalf’s watchful eye to set off on a journey to destroy the magic ring, which Bilbo Baggins had found in The Hobbit. The ring holds inside it the essence of evil and therefore must be destroyed before Lord Sauron can find it and plunge Middle Earth into darkness. Through a series of misadventures, the fellowship either die or become separated. Only Frodo, his loyal friend Sam, and the wasted creature Gollum—who had fallen for many years under the ring’s power and is now its slave—are left to return the ring to the fires of Mount Doom, which is the only way to destroy it.
The book is about power and greed, innocence, and enlightenment. Ultimately, it describes an oldfashioned battle of good against evil, of kindness and trust against suspicion, and of fellowship against the desire for individual power. Tolkien’s evil is an internal force—most evident in the “good” and “bad” sides of the character Gollum, who epitomizes the struggle to be good. This is also a story about war, no doubt drawn from Tolkien’s own experience, and how enemies in life are united in death, the one great equalizer. If there is a message, it is that there is little point to war and that the search for ultimate power is futile in a world where togetherness will always (justly) win out. EF
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1900s
The Lonely Londoners
Sam Selvon
Lifespan | b. 1923 (Trinidad), d. 1994 (Canada)
First Published | 1956
First Published by | Allan Wingate (London)
Original Language | English
Often identified as part of Sam Selvon’s Moses cycle of novels, The Lonely Londoners was one of the first attempts to narrate the life of black Caribbean men in London during the wave of mass migration to Britain during the 1950s. The novel takes the form of a modern picaresque, with an episodic structure where blackness is normalized and where the few peripheral white characters that we encounter are seen as exotic or strange. This is achieved primarily through the novel’s innovative use of language—the book is written almost wholly in a version of Trinidadian Creole. Selvon never attempts to translate the language into standard English, and in this sense it can be felt to anticipate later novels such as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. The novel also centers on black experience through its construction of monumental London as a fantasy, projected through the colonial imaginings of Britain’s imperial subjects.
While the central characters are overwhelmingly male and lower class, the book does attempt to raise challenging questions about gender politics. Issues of domestic violence and of women’s roles within Caribbean family structures are vital to the way that Selvon seeks to represent the dizzying effects of migration, and the relative absence of black women in the novel is intimately connected to a pervasive sense of loss and longing for home. LC
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1900s
The Roots of Heaven
Romain Gary
Lifespan | b. 1914 (Lithuania), d. 1980 (France)
First Published | 1956
First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Title | Les Racines du ciel
This fifth novel by Romain Gary, which brought him his first Prix Goncourt (he won the second under a different name to confound the prize’s restrictions), conveys the author’s ardent support of dignity and compassion with wry humor and brilliant insight.
Curiously contemporary, almost prescient, the story is set in French Equatorial Africa. Morally complex and compromised characters—doubting priests, aspiring revolutionaries, big-game hunters, colonial administrators, arms dealers—all revolve around the mysterious figure of Morel, who launches a campaign to save the elephant herds, the only free creatures on earth, from total destruction. The elephants represent the companionship that Morel craves in the absence of God, when a dog is simply no longer adequate to satisfy the need for friendship and comfort. His fight to conquer the despair of the human condition, his “Jewish idealism”—as the Nazi commander of his war camp had termed the belief in noble conventions and the primacy of spirituality—attracts pragmatists, eccentrics, men of good will and understanding, as well as schemers of all descriptions, who try to exploit Morel’s defense of nature to further their own causes, projecting onto him the reflection of what is essential in themselves.
Richly deserving its great distinction, The Roots of Heaven pays tribute to an ancient, imperishable, and desperate gaiety that is itself a form of subversion and means of survival. The movie adaptation of the book was released in 1958. ES
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1900s
The Floating Opera
John Barth
Lifespan | b. 1930 (U.S.)
First Published | 1956
First Published by | Appleton Century Crofts (N. Y.)
Full Name | John Simmons Barth Jr.
At the age of fifty-four, narrator and protagonist Todd Andrews, a successful small-town lawyer with a heart condition, a grumbling prostate, and an increasing penchant for “Sherbrook rye and ginger ale,” reflects on the events seventeen years earlier that led him to contemplate suicide and works through the reasons why he subsequently decided not to carry out the act. He also recalls the protracted love affair that he pursued with the wife of his best friend and his unsuccessful attempts to discover why his father mysteriously hanged himself.
Such a simple plot outline of The Floating Opera cannot do it justice, however, because everything else that happens in John Barth’s extraordinary debut novel is unpredictable, subversive, and riotous. The constantly shifting, unraveling, and reconfiguring narrative generates an unstoppable energy, unfolds a sequence of spectacles, calamities, and melodramas, and introduces a cast of characters drawn from a tidewater Maryland setting. When entertainment for the townspeople aboard the glittering showboat Floating Opera rapidly descends into chaos and disorder, we are provided with an appropriate metaphor for this postmodern “nihilistic comedy.”
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 59