1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

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  1900s

  The Tin Drum

  Günter Grass

  Lifespan | b. 1927 (Poland)

  First Published | 1959, by Luchterhand (Neuwied)

  Original Title | Die Blechtrommel

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1999

  A striking representation of “little Oskar,” Grass’s compulsive drummer, illustrates the jacket of the German first edition.

  “How blind, how nervous and ill-bred they are!”

  Oskar Matzerath is detained in a mental hospital for a murder he did not commit. His keeper watches him. His keeper also brings him the paper on which Oskar writes his autobiography. Oskar considers the keeper a friend, rather than an enemy, for the simple reason that the keeper has eyes that are the right shade of brown. Oskar Matzerath is a dwarf: he claims to have willed himself to stop growing at the age of four. He has a singing voice that can cut holes in glass at fifty paces. During the Second World War, Oskar was part of a traveling band of dwarves that entertained the troops. He also uses his tin drum to beat out the story of his life. That life story is also the story of prewar Poland and Germany, the rise of Hitler, the defeat of Poland, the Nazi onslaught on Europe, then the defeat and partition of Germany.

  An important book in the exploration of postwar German identity, Günter Grass’s novel is heartbreakingly beautiful. Oskar Matzerath’s voice continues to haunt long after the novel itself is finished. It is the voice of an “asocial,” those the Nazis considered to belong (along with criminals, homosexuals, and vagabonds) to “life unworthy of life.” Grass draws on the picaresque tradition to map out his dwarf drummer’s journey through a brutal and brutalizing era in European history, but he also reinvents the traditions of a popular culture despised by the Nazis as “degenerate art.” Fairy tales, the carnivalesque, the harlequin, the mythological trickster—all jostle and combine in The Tin Drum to reveal the deathlike inhumanity of the rationalization of racial hygiene. The result is not a fetishization of the irrational, but rather an expansion and transformation of the normal, until the life Oskar inhabits ultimately becomes swollen to grotesque, yet all the more painfully human, proportions. PMcM

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  1900s

  The Naked Lunch

  William Burroughs

  Lifespan | b. 1914 (U.S.), d. 1997

  First Published | 1959

  First Published by | Olympia Press (Paris)

  Full Name | William Seward Burroughs

  The Parisian Olympia Press issued the first edition of this and other novels thought too obscene for U.K. or U.S. publication.

  William Burroughs has often been hailed as a celebrator of drug indulgence and (homo)sexual excess, but his best works, among which The Naked Lunch is preeminent, provide a far deeper and more complex account of Western culture. The novel’s central argument is that drugs are not an accidental problem; the whole notion of addiction is deeply engrained in a society that fetishizes commodity and consumption. Furthermore, the line between so-called “prescription” drugs and illegal drugs is a narrow one, which can be manipulated by those in power to serve their need for ever-increasing profits.

  But these arguments alone would not make The Naked Lunch a great book. What is more important is the tremendous energy and vividness that Burroughs brings to his scenes of violence and mayhem. He presents us with a cast of characters who are constantly tearing at the walls of the prisons their lives have become; they see something of the truth of “the system,” but are too paralyzed by dependence to escape. Further, Burroughs invents his own style, here and in other novels, based on what he called the “cut-up technique,” which serves to render the reader equally unable to make full sense of the surroundings. Narratives begin, interweave, become lost, and are found again; scenarios are glimpsed then vanish from sight.

  There are plenty of postmodern texts that use unreliable narrators. Burroughs goes further than this, producing a world that seems to have no recognizable coordinates at all. Lost in the world of the junkie, we are sometimes painfully aware that the paranoid visions of the drug world may be more accurate about the systems of corporate and state power than the consoling fictions we tell ourselves in asserting the freedom of the individual will. DP

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  1900s

  Billy Liar

  Keith Waterhouse

  Lifespan | b. 1929 (England)

  First Published | 1959

  First Published by | Michael Joseph (London)

  Stage Adaptation | 1960

  When people refer to the “angry young men” of 1950s British fiction and drama, they will usually have in mind Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon; perhaps John Braine’s Joe Lampton and William Cooper’s Joe Lunn; certainly John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. Billy Fisher, Keith Waterhouse’s feckless antihero, gets less of a look-in. He would be the first to feel the injustice: Billy is every bit as thwarted and furious as his peers, and this novel is just as telling a document of the postwar crises of class and masculinity as Lucky Jim or Room at the Top.

  Billy, maybe twenty years old, still lives with his parents in the English town of Stradhoughton, works as an undertaker’s clerk, and dreams of escape. A compulsive fantasist, Billy has invented Ambrosia, an imaginary world where he can be prime minister, lover, revolutionary, and writer all at once. His life has become a tangle of increasingly elaborate lies, and Billy Liar is the story of the day when it all goes wrong. Much of the unraveling is hysterical, but only some of it is funny, reflecting as it does the impotence of a generation of British men born too late to have had their lives defined by the war, but too soon to enjoy the class mobility afforded by the postwar settlement. Billy’s anxiety pierces every line, and at the end, the reader is left with the queasy sense that for him, finally, there can be no escape. PMy

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  1900s

  Absolute Beginners

  Colin MacInnes

  Lifespan | b. 1914 (England), d. 1976

  First Published | 1959

  First Published by | MacGibbon & Kee (London)

  UK Musical Movie Adaptation Released | 1986

  The best known of Colin MacInnes’s London trilogy, which includes City of Spades (1957) and Mr. Love and Justice (1960), Absolute Beginners has had a curious afterlife, thanks to the David Bowie-featured 1980s movie musical, which culled large sections of the text. Frequently appearing on top-ten “hip lists” alongside Jack Kerouac’s superficially similar On the Road (1957), the novel has as its star not its central character, a bohemian photographer “out for kicks and fantasy,” but London in all its frenetic glory. It is narrated in a language replete with “spades,” “daddy-os,” “reefers,” “oldies,” and “oafos,” yet behind the coming-of-age tale lies a society in the throes of radical transformation.

  This is postwar London in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, in the year of the Notting Hill riots: previously ironclad certainties concerning the God-given destiny of the British Empire and the racial homogeneity of its metropolitan center are archaic irrelevancies. This is an emerging London entirely incomprehensible to the prewar “oldies” in positions of authority. It is also a city fizzing with excitement and tension—racial, generational, and sexual. When it finally breaks down in riots, it is not just law and order, nor the social bonds of community that begins to disintegrate, but the city itself begins to collapse.

  Fresh, vital, and eternally relevant, Absolute Beginners offers extraordinary insight into the origins of contemporary society and a farewell to the society that was left behind. MD

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  1900s

  Promise at Dawn

  Romain Gary

  Lifespan | b. 1914 (Lithuania), d. 1980 (France)

  First Published | 1960

  First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)

  Original Title | La Promesse de l’aube

  “Then she began t
o cry . . .”

  A tribute to the woman who single-handedly, and single-mindedly, raised him to become the great artist that she believed to be her own destiny, Promise at Dawn is Romain Gary’s memoir of his youth in Vilna and Nice. It reads as a self-portrait in double, reflecting the mix of East European and French cultures that shaped him.

  Written with contagious humor and profound affection, it describes his formative experiences with a mother who, if she had not existed, would have certainly required being invented, and to some degree probably was. But this is only fair, as she herself went to such lengths to create her son’s fate, her years of struggle and hard work recounted with a restraint that gives them poignant if often comic immediacy. Her unshakable desire that her son grow up as a Frenchman and not a Russian was one of many goals that she set—and he met.

  Every facet of Gary’s mother’s life, every effort she made, was dedicated to the child she adored and to his future triumphs. This was the promise at the dawn of his life. She foresaw and directed him toward his accomplishments as author, officer, and diplomat, and he did his utmost to fulfill and reward her faith in him. Her unremitting devotion sustained him through law school, military training, and wartime service, as well as his early attempts at getting his fiction published. Hers was a love that would leave him forever hungry and longing to find its perfection again, but also one that served as inspiration for his courage and conviction in justice.

  The story closes at the end of the Second World War, with Gary’s formidable, indefatigable, and sometimes embarrassing mother, with her romantic and noble soul, demonstrating yet another surprising facet of the artistic genius she truly was. ES

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  1900s

  Rabbit, Run

  John Updike

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (U.S.), d. 2009

  First Published | 1960

  First Published by | A. Knopf (New York)

  National Medal for Humanities | 2003

  “Love makes the air light.”

  In Rabbit, Run, John Updike’s second novel, the author introduced one of the towering characters of postwar American fiction. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was a basketball star at school, famous throughout his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania. Now in his late twenties, he lives in a small apartment in one of the poorer parts of town with his pregnant wife, Janice, and young son, Nelson. He has a dead-end job selling vegetable peelers door to door. Alienated and estranged, desperate to escape, he drives away one night without telling anyone he is leaving. But he soon loses heart and turns back toward Brewer. His old basketball coach, one of the few who has not forgotten Harry’s glory days, introduces him to a girl called Ruth, with whom he begins an affair.

  Updike tells the story in the present tense: if it has become commonplace since, the technique was fairly innovative at the time, and Updike’s use of it has rarely been bettered. The novel is also in the third person: although the bulk of the narrative takes place inside Harry’s head, it is not Harry’s voice that we hear, or not exactly. In sensuous, elegant, hyper-articulate prose, Updike represents Harry’s consciousness in the language that Harry would use if only his mind moved as gracefully as his body once did on the basketball court.

  Harry is not so much an everyman as a nobody and a far from admirable one: his impulsive and thoughtless behavior has appalling consequences. Yet our sympathy is secured by the quality of careful attentiveness that Updike brings to describing the intricacies of Harry’s character. With its sequels— Rabbit, Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)—Rabbit, Run presents a detailed and extraordinary portrait of an ordinary American man in the second half of the twentieth century. TEJ

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  1900s

  To Kill a Mockingbird

  Harper Lee

  Lifespan | b. 1926 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1960

  First Published by | Lippincott (Philadelphia)

  Pulitzer Prize | 1961

  The jacket of the novel’s first edition: it was an immediate success and was made into a movie within two years of publication.

  Set in Depression-era Alabama, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning novel weaves together a young girl’s coming-of-age story and a darker drama about the roots and consequences of racism, probing how good and evil can coexist within a single community or individual.

  Scout, the novel’s protagonist, is raised with her brother, Jem, by their widowed father, Atticus Finch. He is a prominent lawyer who speaks to them as competent interlocutors and encourages them to be empathetic and philosophical, rather than swept away by the superstition bred of ignorance. Atticus lives his convictions when a spurious rape charge is brought against Tom Robinson, one of the town’s black residents. Atticus agrees to defend him, puts together a case that gives a more plausible interpretation of the evidence, then prepares for the town’s attempts to intimidate him into abandoning his client to their lynch mob. As the furor escalates, Tom is convicted and Bob Ewell, the Robinson plaintiff, tries to punish Atticus with an unimaginably brutal act.

  The children, meanwhile, play out their own miniaturized drama of prejudice and superstition centering on Boo Radley, a local legend who remains shut inside his brother’s house. They have their own ideas about him and cannot resist the allure of trespassing on the Radley property. Their speculations thrive on the dehumanization perpetu ated by their elders; Atticus reprimands them, however, and tries to encourage a more sensitive attitude. Boo then makes his presence felt indirectly through a series of benevolent acts, finally intervening in a dangerous situation to protect Jem and Scout. Scout’s continuing moral education is twofold: to resist abusing others with unfounded negativity, but also the necessity of perseverance when these values are inevitably, and sometimes violently, subverted. AF

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  1900s

  The Magician of Lublin

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Lifespan | b. 1904 (Poland), d. 1991 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1960, by Noonday (New York)

  Original Title | Der Kunstnmakher fun Lublin

  Nobel Prize | 1978

  “. . . Yasha was held in small esteem by the community.”

  In The Magician of Lublin, set in late nineteenth-century Poland, Yasha Mazur is the David Blaine of Warsaw—without the financial wealth. Making a career out of escape, he is also adept at escaping his own Jewish faith, and (when he needs to) his barren and pious wife as well as the women he lusts after. He is hampered by lack of both money and moral courage, and concerns himself only with the superficial pursuits of getting his hands on money and having sex. But his life turns upside down when he bungles a robbery that was meant to finance a new life with one of his adoring women, while Magda, his faithful assistant, commits suicide because of his continuing infidelity. At the scene, Yasha “touched her forehead: it felt neither cold nor warm but beyond temperature.”

  Yasha, agonizing over his actions and dire situation, returns to his wife, but only with a typical Singer twist. He has himself bricked up as a penitent in a “cooler” with nothing but the barest essentials—candlestick, water jug, straw pallet to sleep on, pelisse, a few books, and a shovel to bury his excrement. Initially people think it must be merely another magician’s stunt, but after three years of solitude, he has become a celebrity hermit with people seeking him out for answers to their problems. It is a curious resolution, but one that Singer obviously feels comfortable with in his continuous literary examination of the role of the Jewish faith in the lives of his Polish characters (largely before the Holocaust), pestered with passions, magic, and religious devotion. The Magician of Lublin was made into a movie in 1979, with Alan Arkin as the lusty Yasha and Louise Fletcher, Valerie Perrine, and Shelley Winters as three of his adoring women. JHa

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  1900s

  Halftime

  Martin Walser

  Lifespan | b. 1927 (
Germany)

  First Published | 1960

  First Published by | Suhrkamp (Frankfurt)

  Original Title | Halbzeit

  “Writing is organized spontaneity.” Martin Walser

  The novel Halftime is the first part of the so-called Anselm Kristlein trilogy, in which the story of the social decline and fall of the protagonist unfolds against the backdrop of the historical developments of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Halftime focuses on the period of the economic boom of the 1950s and offers a critical view of the emergent consumer society.

  Anselm Kristlein, a thirty-five-year-old married man and a father of three children, interrupts his studies and finds a job in the advertising industry. Within a year he becomes not only an admired, well-paid expert in his field, but also skilled in the art of social climbing. As he perceives his family as an obstacle to his career, he prefers to divide his time between friends, colleagues, and his many lovers. Thanks to the parameters of his job, he soon gains access to high society, where he displays an ability to adapt quickly. Soon, the fundamental laws of consumer society, especially that of merciless competition, take on universal applicability in his life. Accordingly, Anselm attempts to conquer a friend’s fiancée using the tricks and techniques of the expert advertiser he has become.