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1900s
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Lifespan | b. 1930 (Nigeria)
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Heinemann (London)
Full Name | Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
Things Fall Apart is Chinua Achebe’s first and most famous novel, written in response to the negative ways that Africans are represented in canonical English texts such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson. It has sold over eight million copies and been translated into more than thirty languages. The novel describes the historical tragedy caused by the arrival of the British in Igboland, in eastern Nigeria. In the first part of the novel, the local culture is shown to be complex and dynamic, pristine and untouched by Europe. The second section reveals the social transformations brought about by early imperialists and Christian missionaries. The final part dwells on the theme of African silence as a direct consequence of British colonial rule. The story of the protagonist, Okonkwo, is caught up in these broader historical currents.
Things Fall Apart is an anticolonial novel. It contains numerous scenes of African silence, or absence, in the face of Europe’s speech, or presence. Over and against these acts of silencing, the novel as a whole works in the opposite direction, pulling against colonialism and celebrating the noisiness of an uncolonized Igbo world. It is shown to be filled with oral genres, including ceremonies, proverbs, folktales, debates, gossip, and conversations, overseen by the ubiquitous West African “talking drum.” SN
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1900s
The Bitter Glass
Eilís Dillon
Lifespan | b. 1920 (Ireland), d. 1994
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
Original Language | English
The Irish Civil War of 1922–23 pitted “free staters” against Republicans, those who accepted the partition of Ireland drawn out in the Treaty of 1921 against those who held out for a united Ireland. The war was as bitter and as personal as only a civil war can be, as the first Irish Free State Government authorized the execution of Republicans committed to a cause they had shared but two years before.
Eilís Dillon’s The Bitter Glass is set in the west of Ireland in the hot summer of 1922 and uses the conflict to pinpoint the redundancy of the war to those in whose name it was being fought. A party of wealthy young Dubliners makes the journey to a remote summer house in Connemara, rich with memories of childhood alliances, hopes, and betrayals. Dillon uses the opening sections of the novel to build up a vivid sense of the ambiguous conflicts pulsing under the surface of the Dubliners’ personal relationships. When the house and its inhabitants are taken prisoner by a flying column of IRA men on the run from Free State forces, the idyllic holiday home is turned into an arena of rage that explodes with an emancipatory shock.
Dillon crafts a poetic and sardonic narrative that identifies women as those who resent most strongly the lack of, and hope most keenly for, freedom. The freedom they yearn for, however, exceeds the political liberties being fought for around them, as it embraces liberation from both material want and emotional shame. PMcM
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1900s
The Guide
R. K. Narayan
Lifespan | b. 1906 (India), d. 2001
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Methuen (London)
Full Name | Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan
“I knew that here was a lifelong customer for me. A man who preferred to dress like a permanent tourist was just what a guide passionately looked for all his life.”
There is a minor figure of a lawyer in R. K. Narayan’s novel, The Guide, who can talk for hours without completing a sentence. This is the secret of his success because he can keep a jury fidgeting over minute details. It is also the reason why Railway Raju succeeds in a series of corrupt practices throughout this novel. As a tourist guide, he attains star status because he can fabricate local histories at a pinch for bored tourists. It is his work as a guide that leads him to meet the neglected dancer Nalini, wife of academic Marco. Nalini’s dancing is denigrated by her husband and it is Raju’s support for her that brings them together once Marco disowns his wife.
Nalini’s success as a dancer and Raju’s corrupt business sense lead to fortunes for the pair, but Raju falls into a trap laid by Marco and is sent to prison. On his release, Raju is mistaken for a holy man. He assumes this role willingly and once again attains fame through his deception. However, he is a victim of his own success as he inadvertently suggests that he might fast to bring rains to a drought-ridden village. Resentful at his self-imposed hunger and his body weakening, Raju finally resolves to complete the fast out of sincerity. On the eleventh day of the fast, he staggers and collapses. There is, however, the slightest suggestion that the rains may well arrive.
The Guide is one of the best loved of Narayan’s works set in his fictitous town, Malgudi. Its success is no doubt due to its humor in depicting the irrestible urge to spin a yarn, and keep it spinning. ABi
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1900s
The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Lifespan | b. 1896 (Italy), d. 1957
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Feltrinelli (Milan)
Original Title | Il gattopardo
Appearing posthumously in 1958, one year after the author’s death, The Leopard received unexpected international success. Translated into many languages, it became the subject of cinematographic epic by Visconti in 1963. The Leopard struck a new chord, as it deliberately ignored the Italian neorealist narrative tradition, both stylistically and thematically. While neorealism centered on low-class characters and unveiled the crude reality of Fascist Italy, The Leopard is the saga of the aristocratic Sicilian family of the Salinas (whose coat of arms bears a leopard).
From 1860 to 1910, a series of events affects the microcosm of the protagonist, Prince Fabrizio, and his relatives, as well as the macrocosm of the Italian nation. In Italy’s south, the Bourbon kingdom is crumbling under Garibaldi, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is being joined with the rest of the country; however, the end of Spanish colonization coincides with the death of the aristocracy, which had long been supported by the feudal system and which is being supplanted by the bourgeoisie. The Leopard portrays the melancholy of that loss. The most poignant pages are those in which Prince Fabrizio bemoans the harsh landscape of Sicily and the Sicilians, who have developed an irredeemable sense of indifference and vanity in the attempt to survive numberless foreign colonizations. The new course of history will not touch Sicily, Don Fabrizio predicts, as the national unification that is underway is for the Sicilians nothing but a new form of domination. RPi
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1900s
Deep Rivers
José María Arguedas
Lifespan | b. 1911 (Peru), d. 1969
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Losada (Buenos Aires)
Original Title | Los ríos profundos
In Deep Rivers, José María Arguedas immerses himself in the reality of being Peruvian through the experience of an autobiographical character, Ernesto. His subject is the abandonment of innocence and identity brought about by the plight of the indigenous peoples. After traveling for years through the mountains in the company of his father, an obscure country lawyer, Ernesto enters a religious seminary in Abancay. This is where all his argument’s tension is concentrated: from personal conflict (training in a violently racist environment), to universal conflict (the struggle against plague that by the end of the novel is hovering over the city), to social conflict (the rebellion of the native women).
At the seminary Ernesto learns the law of force and subjugation. He also finds out about the assimi
lation of Indian culture, with its potential for revolt and its redeeming vocation of helping the victims of plague. Eventually, he leaves the mountains and joins his destiny with those he has chosen as his own. The viewpoints of the adolescent, the adult, and the specialist in linguistic and cultural questions are married in a single awareness that finds meaning, in memory and imagination, in his experience. Paying special attention to nature, to Quechua singing, to the role of magic and ritual, and to some very well-known symbols, Arguedas makes an argument of high artistic quality in favor of indigenous Peru. This is his best text and one of the best novels of the indigenous movement. DMG
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1900s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote
Lifespan | b. 1924 (U.S.), d. 1984
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Random House (New York)
Given Name | Truman Streckfus Persons
“You got to be rich to go mucking around in Africa.”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a charmingly naughty fable, capturing in crystal a glorious moment of New York during the last gasp of American innocence. The story is the reminiscence of a writer in New York during the Second World War, closely echoing Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, in which a writer in a strange land struggles to make a name.
With Holly Golightly, Truman Capote has given us one of the most indelible heroines in fiction. Pushing the boundaries and paving the way for the revolution to come, Holly is a gamine—sexually free, hedonistic, and a prostitute. She lives for the moment, damns the consequences, and makes up her own morality as she goes along. Like her cat without a name, she is unfettered, untameable.
The novel’s unnamed narrator meets Holly when she climbs through the writer’s window, to escape an overzealous and unmuzzled john who intends to bite her. They become fast friends, and the narrator is swept up in Holly’s thrill-seeking (albeit subsistence) living. At the core they want “happiness” and connection, dreams that seem like fate to those young enough to hope. But hints of darkness cloud their lives and the novel itself. Disaster strikes Holly’s family, ultimately changing the relationship she has with the narrator, and her innocence is tested when her regular client, Mafia don “Sally” Tomato, uses her for more than just sex.
The novel was a turning point for Capote. Gone is the lyrical Southern Gothic of his early writing. With Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he takes his place among New York’s glitterati. Daring in its day—promis cuity and homosexuality are discussed openly—it may have lost its ability to shock, but its charm does not diminish. The novel is a fresh breeze off the East River—from a time when such a thing was still possible. GT
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1900s
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring
Kenzaburo Oe
Lifespan | b. 1935 (Japan)
First Published | 1958 by Kodansha (Tokyo)
Original Title | Memushiri kouchi
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1994
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring vividly captures the devastating conditions that war can inflict on even the most innocent of victims. The novel is told from the view of a vulnerable boy determined to live, and presents us with a personal experience of Japan toward the end of the Second World War.
As bombs rain down daily on the cities of Japan, the coming end is foreshadowed. A group of boys, abandoned by their parents and incarcerated in a rehabilitation center, are about to take refuge in a country village. As outsiders, they are treated inhumanely by the villagers, but unity among them remains tight. Through the voice of the narrative “I” they are determined to become the “we,” and to survive. When a deadly plague arrives, the villagers abandon the boys and flee, closing all the gates to the village. Although the boys find themselves locked in, they gain a transitory freedom. In the most devastating conditions, they set up a kind of paradise, occupying the villagers’ houses and managing to create a life for themselves. Their happiness is short-lived, however, as their fear of the plague develops into larger conflicts and disputes. The villagers’ eventual return brings the final blow. “Listen, someone like you should be throttled while they’re still a kid. We squash vermin while it’s small. We’re peasants: we nip the buds early.” Sadly, paradise is about to disappear. KK
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1900s
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
Heinrich Böll
Lifespan | b. 1917 (Germany), d. 1985
First Published | 1959, by Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Original Title | Billard um Halbzehn
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1972
This family saga about three generations of architects living and working in a town in Catholic West Germany unfolds in conversations and inner monologues, all during one day, September 6, 1958. Over sixty years of German history are revealed through the lives of the family—from the Kaiser era through the Third Reich and into the West German economic miracle of the 1950s.
Billiards at Half-Past Nine is about the refusal to forgive and forget the failure of civilization and the Catholic Church’s complicity in war, persecution, and torture. When the monastery that was the first great project of architect Heinrich Fähmel in 1907 is blown up at the end of the Second World War by his son, Robert, an explosions expert for the Wehrmacht, it is really in an act of protest against the civilization it represents. The grandson, Joseph, who is involved in the restoration of the monastery after the war, is deeply confused when he finds out about this. Family tensions, as well as the contradiction of living in a society to which one cannot be reconciled, find a strangely redemptive resolution in a symbolic act of violence. The novel is remarkable for its humanism, and its call to readers to share the characters’ moral revulsion and their refusal to forget. DG
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1900s
Down Second Avenue
Ezekiel Mphahlele
Lifespan | b. 1919 (South Africa), d. 1997
First Published | 1959
First Published by | Faber and Faber (London)
Given Name | Ezekiel Mphahlele
Ezekiel Mphahlele is one of the most pervasive voices in South African literature. Down Second Avenue is his first autobiographical novel. Mixing reminiscences with penetrating social criticism, Mphahlele paints a vivid picture of his own struggle against the racial segregation of the apartheid South African education system.
The book tells the story of a young black man, Eseki, growing up in a tribal village near Pretoria and making his way as a secondary school teacher of Afrikaans and English in the city. Like many young black idealists relocated to townships built only for black and colored people in the early 1940s, Eseki is quickly drawn into the world of politics and opposition to the country’s ruling party. Patronized and bullied, he is consequently barred from teaching. He exiles himself to Nigeria, where he can finally breathe “the new air of freedom” and express his uncompromising critique of the apartheid regime: “Africa is no more for the white man who comes here to teach and to control her human and material forces and not to learn.”
The story is told in a simple but evocative language. Pivoting on two central themes in black South African literature, alienation and exile, it presents Mphahlele’s personal transformation from a provincial schoolboy from the rural “old Africa” into a socially and politically conscious writer, journalist, and activist shaping the new consciousness of modern, nationalist, black South Africa. JK
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1900s
Cider With Rosie
Laurie Lee
Lifespan | b. 1914 (England), d. 1997
First Published | 1959
First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)
Original Language | English
An extremely vivid semi-autobiographical description of life in a small English village in the early part of the twentieth century, Cider With Ros
ie depicts a world that was soon to vanish: a world where transport was limited to the horse and cart, and where there were few reasons to travel away from one’s home.
What is perhaps most remarkable about it, and has kept it a firm readers’ favorite since it was first published, is the rich lushness of the description. The cottage garden, for example, as seen through the eyes and other senses of a young child, becomes a world of its own. Many of the episodes are richly comic, yet there is also a sense of tragedy, a sense that the certainty and routine that once controlled village life have now vanished. The protagonist’s mother, abandoned by her husband with two families to cope with, leads a life of extraordinary drudgery, yet her longing for, and recognition of, the greater things in life rarely falters. Most of all, perhaps, Laurie Lee makes no attempt to prettify country life; although there are marvelous things to be found in the fields and hedgerows, there is also a commonplace brutality to country living, including incest, violent sexual relations, and even murder. The counterbalance to this is the sense of tradition, of belonging, which has disappeared as modernity has spread to the most distant places of England. DP
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 62