Underlying the perfectly sustained pitch of absurdity and ambiguity, and the sliding scale of humor from ribaldry and slapstick to dark chuckling cynicism, there is an inquiry into the arbitrary nature of existence and Barth’s “tragic view” that its ultimate boundary is fragmentation and death. TS
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1900s
Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
Lifespan | b. 1924 (U.S.), d. 1987 (France)
First Published | 1956
First Published by | Dial Press (New York)
Full Name | James Arthur Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room explores a struggle with the need for social approbation, in which the protagonist must ultimately abandon his dependence on conventional norms of success and worth. The white, middle-class narrator, David, quietly flees his home environment to live aimlessly in Paris, far from his father’s wordless pressure to settle down. Facing financial difficulties, however, he proposes to another traveling American, Hella, who leaves Paris to think it over. While she is gone, David accompanies a friend to a gay bar, where he forms an instant, ecstatic connection with Giovanni, the mysterious Italian bartender. David immediately takes up residence in Giovanni’s tiny room, but secretly longs for Hella’s return, which he thinks will free him from his desperate love for Giovanni. When David leaves their room to continue his heterosexual charade, the consequences are tragic for all three points in his surreptitious love triangle.
Baldwin’s spare prose unsentimentally exposes the cruelty and cynicism animating David’s abject terror in the face of desire. Giovanni locates David’s self-aversion in the American cult of cleanliness and distaste for the body. In the end, David’s willingness to shield himself using the overwhelming authority of white American maleness, no matter how forged and self-destructive his claim to it may be, isolates him as much as the empty room in which he writes. AF
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1900s
Justine
Lawrence Durrell
Lifespan | b. 1912 (India), d. 1980 (France)
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
U.S. Edition Published by | E. P. Dutton (New York)
Lawrence Durrell’s novel, the opening gambit of his Alexandria Quartet, should be highly regarded for its extended passages of remarkable prose poetry. The author’s impressionist treatments describe parts of a city that refuses to become a whole for its protagonist. The narrative appears to assume a suspect but romantic theory of physical causes, detecting a symbiosis between the landscape, the weather, and the city’s women: sultry, enigmatic, and perhaps ultimately disappointing. Its first-person account of the dissatisfaction of an indolent déclassé English intellectual trying to make sense of a Mediterranean city and its citizens has him attributing their readable histories and personalities to the influence of the place they inhabit. The natives of the Egyptian city are seen as a set of intrinsic predispositions determined by racial inheritances, whereas his actions and emotions are put down to his mostly dire economic situation and a shameful lack of motivation.
Sexual promiscuity, the smoking of hashish, constant reference to Cafavy, and nods to decadent French novels of the fin de siècle make this a very different book from most English novels of its time. Essentially it is a superior kind of travel writing, constructed in often extraordinarily vivid and painterly language, but hobbled every once in a while by its dated sexual and racial politics. RP
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1900s
The Glass Bees
Ernst Jünger
Lifespan | b. 1895 (Germany), d. 1998
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Klett (Stuttgart)
Original Title | Gläserne Bienen
The Glass Bees has been claimed as a major contribution to the science fiction genre and as a precursor of magical realism, but Ernst Jünger’s dense, reflective work is in truth too idiosyncratic for any categorization. The chief protagonist, Captain Richard, is an ageing war veteran—exactly like the author, who fought in both World Wars—and much of the book is a grim reflection on the veteran’s alienation from the modern world.
The reader’s interest quickens when Jünger turns from these obsessions to the corporation where his hero seeks employment. Run by the sinisterly benign Zapparoni, the business is a global communications and cybernetics empire making miniaturized robots and virtual reality entertainment. Some of the robots perform domestic tasks such as cleaning, while others are linked to sinister military programs. The book’s climactic episode occurs in the garden of Zapparoni’s establishment—a sort of idyllic Silicon Valley. In a passage that owes much to Junger’s experiments with hallucinogenic drugs in the early 1950s, Captain Richard minutely observes the shiny, transparent, robotic bees of the title in action and is horrified to discover a pool scattered with severed ears. As a story, this is almost derisory. But the text crackles with ideas that fascinate us by their prescience, seeming to foresee the Internet, nanotechnology, and global warming, as well as a world discreetly dominated by technologically hip, morally ambivalent plutocrats. RegG
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1900s
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Lifespan | b. 1890 (Russia), d. 1960
First Published | 1957, by Feltrinelli (Milan)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1958 (declined)
Original Language | Russian
When this English paperback edition appeared in 1960, Pasternak’s novel was hailed in the West as an attack on the Soviet system.
Boris Pasternak’s epic story of the love affair between Lara and Yuri, set against the historical and geographical vastness of revolutionary Russia, was banned in the USSR from its first publication in Italy until 1988. While Pasternak was silenced by the Soviets, he won extravagant plaudits in the West, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.
It is a bitter irony that this divergence between Soviet and Western responses to Doctor Zhivago has had such a profound influence on the way that the novel has been read. Pasternak has been caricatured by both the West and the East as a writer who prioritizes a romantic Western concept of individual freedom over the iron cruelties of the socialist state. In fact, rather than being in any simple sense counter-revolutionary, the book is a subtle examination of the ways in which revolutionary ideals can be compromised by the realities of political power. The relationship between Lara and Yuri, one of the most compelling in postwar fiction, grows out of a fascination with the possibilities of revolutionary justice and is closely interwoven with it. The novel is driven by the struggle to achieve some kind of perfect truth, in both personal and political terms, but its drama and pathos are found in the failure of this striving toward the ideal and in the extraordinary difficulty of remaining faithful to a personal, political, or poetic principle.
One of the most striking things about the novel is the Russian landscape itself, which emerges with a wonderful spaciousness and an extraordinary beauty. It is from its elegiac encounter with the vast landscape on which this drama is played out that Doctor Zhivago produces an extraordinary sense of happiness and a sense of the boundlessness of historical and human possibility. PB
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1900s
Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov
Lifespan | b. 1899 (Russia), d. 1977 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Doubleday (New York)
Original Language | English
This short comic novel brought Vladimir Nabokov his first National Book Award nomination, widespread popularity, and first commercial success. An early example of the 1950s campus novel, it follows the experiences of the hapless Russian émigré Professor Timofey Pnin. As a teacher of Russian at Waindell College, he inhabits the rather strange and detached world of academia, and he struggles to a
dapt to American university life. Physically awkward and an implacable pedant, Pnin’s greatest misfortune is his inability to marshal English idiom, and much of the comedy of the book arises from his idiosyncratic use of the language. However, his ultimately dignified conduct ensures that his character cannot be reduced to the pared-down stereotype offered by the somewhat uncharitable narrator, and in comparison with his other non-American colleagues he is an undeniably decent man.
Evolving out of a series of short stories originally published in the New Yorker between 1953 and 1955, the book has been criticized for appearing more as a series of discrete sketches than a novel. This criticism is unfair, however, as—in keeping with Nabokov’s concern for thematic rather than plot-driven cohesion—the novel returns to Pnin’s inability to feel physically or linguistically “at home” in North American culture. Above all, the unmistakably deft Nabokovian style, with its extended linguistic digressions and offbeat humor, make this novel a comic masterpiece and a real joy. JW
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1900s
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Lifespan | b. 1922 (U.S.), d. 1969
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Viking Press (New York)
Screenplay by | Russell Banks
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road has become a classic text in American literary counterculture. Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, Sal Paradise’s account of his travels across America has become emblematic of the struggle to retain the freedom of the American dream in a more sober historical moment. Paradise’s journey with the free and reckless Dean Moriarty (based on fellow Beat adventurer Neal Cassady) from the East to the West Coast of America is a celebration of the abundance, vitality, and spirit of American youth. The pair’s rejection of domestic and economic conformity in favor of a search for free and inclusive communities and for heightened individual experiences were key constituents of the emerging Beat culture, of which Kerouac—along with literary figures such as Ginsberg and Burroughs—was to soon to become a charismatic representative.
Reputedly written by Kerouac in a three-week burst of Benzedrine and caffeine-fueled creativity on a single scroll of paper, the production of this loosely autobiographical novel became a legend of the sort that occurred within it. Yet the novel also holds within it an acknowledgement of the limitations of its vision, and Dean’s gradual decline slowly reveals him to be something of an absurd and unlikely hero for Sal to follow into maturity. NM
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1900s
The Manila Rope
Veijo Meri
Lifespan | b. 1928 (Finland)
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Otava (Helsinki)
Original Title | Manillaköysi
The Manila Rope introduces Joose, a naive, working-class soldier fighting in the Second World War, who is allowed some leave from the front to visit his family. Before leaving, he finds a manila rope in his camp and decides to take it home for a clothesline. He hides the rope by wrapping it around his body, but during his long journey by train, the rope tightens around his body and almost kills him.
This novel paints a wholly original picture of war. Little account is given of the war itself, more specifically the Finnish Continuation War (1941–44), which in the novel appears shapeless and incomprehensible. Instead, different narrators sharing Joose’s train journey tell of their emotional and physical wartime experiences. The tone of the narration is humorous and hilarious, but the events in the stories are often terrifying and macabre. War is portrayed as destructive and pointless, with the soldiers passive, unheroic, and seeing themselves as merely “slaughter waste.” Almost all of them are trying to gain from the war in one way or another, but invariably their attempts are failing. The suffering Joose has himself become a victim, his anguish and nausea caused by his own attempt to profit, however trivially, from war.
The black humor and absurdity of this work of metafiction recall Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, and Jaroslav Hasek. The Manila Rope asks questions not only about war and human fate but also about narration and history writing, fact and fiction. IP
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1900s
The Deadbeats
Ward Ruyslinck
Lifespan | b. 1929 (Belgium)
First Published | 1957, by A. Manteau (Brussels)
Given Name | Raymond Charles Marie De Belser
Original Title | De ontaarde slapers
In a small house on the edge of a Belgian town, a middle-aged married couple scratch out an existence on unemployment benefit. Filthy and indolent, they lie in bed all day, rising only to go to the labor exchange or let in the local baker. The husband, Silvester, once a respected soldier, is now nihilistic, afraid, and defeated. His wife fears the return of war with a hysterical intensity.
Written in the 1950s, Ward Ruyslinck’s short novel recalls Camus in its existential depiction of lives with no purpose. Silvester sees life as simply the living out of days. He knows that those who have courage can take what they want in life but believes, or pretends to believe, that the gratitude one must show for taking things from life is not worth it. Unlike that of Camus’s outsider, Silvester’s nihilism is based on fear; he is unable to act decisively. Both husband and wife, on the day of their twenty-second anniversary, wonder how it is that the person they live with is now a shadow of the person they once found attractive. However, the arrival of an infantry unit carrying out exercises helps to define the character of the feelings they might still have for each other.
Ruyslinck chronicles the inner futility of his two protagonists, using them to make more universal points concerning unemployment, war, and the restlessness of humanity. For Ruyslinck, people have “war in their bodies,” and this harrowing story of two people cast adrift is a deeply troubling picture of minds gone to seed and energy unused. OR
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1900s
Homo Faber
Max Frisch
Lifespan | b. 1911 (Switzerland), d. 1991
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Suhrkamp (Frankfurt)
Original Language | German
Homo Faber is a tragicomic tale of the alienation of modern man and the dangers of rationalism. Walter Faber is a fifty-year-old Swiss émigré working as an engineer for UNESCO. He is a punctilious creature of habit with a strongly held view that science and reason can account for all things. The novel begins when, on a flight to Venezuela, his plane is forced to land in the Mexican desert. This disruption to his ordered life and a chance meeting with the brother of his erstwhile best friend are the beginnings of a series of events that force him to confront his past.
Before the war, Faber was in a relationship with a German Jew, Hanna, who became pregnant. He offered to marry her, but she refused, fearing he was simply making a political gesture. Faber leaves for a long-term work project with the understanding that she would terminate the pregnancy. But in Mexico he learns that Hanna, in fact, married another. This shock discovery creates a fissure in his rationalist armor that will crack completely by the time he is united with Hanna and the daughter he never knew he had. Walter’s failure to address his emotional side, and his dogmatic belief that he can control his environment through logic and technology, make this reunion anything but happy. His hubris has disastrous consequences. Max Frisch is a master of irony, used here to full effect to produce a troubling, ambivalent work that leaves you torn between feelings of sympathy and contempt for his perfectly realized but deeply flawed creation. AL
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1900s
Blue of Noon
Georges Bataille
Lifespan | b. 1897 (France), d. 1962
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Pauvert (Paris)
Original Title | Le Bleu du ciel
Despite having met his ideal woman in the wea
lthy, beautiful, and debauched “Dirty,” Troppmann, the narrator of Blue of Noon, is impotent, forcing him to explore his insatiable appetites by other means. His sexual impotence reflects a wider sense of powerlessness that pervades this novel, written in 1935, but unpublished until 1957. Moving around Europe in 1934, Troppmann witnesses the first signs of the rise of Nazism, seemingly resigned to its eventual triumph. Convinced of the failure of politics in general, he remains resolutely disengaged from any political revolutionary activity. Instead, accompanied by Dirty, he embarks on a project of willful self-destruction. Georges Bataille wrote elsewhere about the state of “sovereignty” that is achieved precisely when the self is lost in a moment that exceeds any potential use, any recuperative “experience.” Troppmann tries to attain this state through repeated acts of transgression, by negating values and violating taboos.
Mirroring Europe’s descent into fascism in the drunk, sick, and decaying bodies of its protagonists, Bataille points to the fascination with a deathly sexuality that Nazism taps into. The novel is attuned to the allure of the ecstatic violence of fascism, while finally suggesting that it might be possible to turn these forces against themselves. Very few can match Bataille’s willingness to search for a degree zero, the headlong pursuit of absolute nullity coupled with the acute knowledge of its ultimate unattainability. SS
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 60