1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  The novel follows Anselm through a series of memories. His retrospective narration is interlaced with associations, where external events and the protagonist’s meditations and flashbacks all merge into a vibrant verbal flow without the confines of a linear story line (but not without the critical distance that derives from the narrator’s irony). Despite scattered hints of criticism, however, it remains unclear to the reader whether Anselm will choose his family as an alternative to the ladder-climbing social ambitions that ultimately make him—physically and metaphorically—ill. LB

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  1900s

  The Country Girls

  Edna O’Brien

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (Ireland)

  First Published | 1960, by Hutchinson (London)

  Trilogy Published | Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1986)

  Sick of the privations and oppressions of the convent school where they have been sent to board, Caithleen, the narrator of The Country Girls, and her best friend, Baba, compose an obscene letter about one of the nuns and leave it where they know it will be found. Duly expelled and sent home, they are met by Caithleen’s furious father, who strikes his daughter’s face. Edna O’Brien’s first novel shows girls growing up in the shadow of the patriarchal family and the Church, the twin powers that dominate gossip-ridden small-town east Clare, where it is largely set. The heroines’ irreverent, pleasure-seeking temperament is irreconcilably at odds with the claustrophobic limitations of that world, vividly depicted in the novel, and their eventual departure for Dublin is inevitable.

  In The Country Girls the author subtly conceals her own more complex understanding and brings her narrator’s artless impulsiveness to the foreground. Caithleen’s narrative is impressionistic rather than reflective, focused on the pains and pleasures of the everyday: the nastiness of the convent soup, her enjoyment of Tender Is the Night, and dressing up to go out on the town. Unlike Baba, Caithleen nurses romantic illusions, not least about the clammy-handed “Mr. Gentleman” who pursues her in Clare and tries to seduce her after her flight to the capital. She has yet to discover that to seek happiness through love, sex, and men is not necessarily to find it, as the two succeeding novels in O’Brien’s trilogy were to show. MR

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  1900s

  Bebo’s Girl

  Carlo Cassola

  Lifespan | b. 1917 (Italy), d. 1987 (Monaco)

  First Published | 1960

  First Published by | Einaudi (Turin)

  Original Title | La ragazza di Bube

  Like most of Carlo Cassola’s works, Bebo’s Girl, his most celebrated novel, deals with the effects of the Fascist era after the Second World War. The young female protagonist, Mara, becomes engaged to an equally young partisan called Bebo, who is a hero of the anti-Fascist resistance. As the novel unfolds we learn that Bebo is involved in an armed struggle against fascism in Tuscany’s rural villages. Ultimately, however, Bebo’s political mentor, the Italian Communist Party, decides to engage in the politics of compromise with the bourgeoisie. Despite this, Bebo continues his struggle, until events overwhelm him and he becomes a murderer to avenge the death of a comrade.

  Mara must then decide whether to move on to a life of forgetting and rebuilding for the future, or to remain faithful to Bebo, who is sentenced to fourteen years in prison. She opts for the path of dignity and commitment to her generation’s tragedy, which is to have fought for social justice and to have been denied it.

  Cassola exposes how the emerging order of the new Italian republic betrayed Mara’s generation and he does not condemn Bebo’s actions politically. Rather, Cassola asks why the Italian Communist Party allowed potential leaders like Bebo to be unaware of the complexities of the forces uniting to defeat Communism. Cassola’s writing, stripped down and loaded with detail, made him a forerunner of the French nouveau roman. LB

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  1900s

  God’s Bits of Wood

  Ousmane Sembène

  Lifespan | b. 1923 (Senegal), d. 2007

  First Published | 1960

  First Published by | Presses Pocket (Paris)

  Original Title | Les bouts de bois de Dieu

  Based on the Senegalese railway workers’ strike of 1947–48, Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood is the gripping and adventurous narrative of a community in transition, galvanized and struggling against injustice. There is no one hero in the text, but rather a tableau of players, from men such as the rock-solid Bakayoko, ideological leader of the strike, through to loyal followers, turncoats, collaborators, and a white managerial class that finds its world turning upside down. Most remarkable is the burgeoning social awareness among the women of the town, whose traditional docility is challenged by the threat facing their families. In fact, it is the growing engagement of the women that structures the narrative, and their growing self-confidence that drives the novel toward its climax.

  Ousmane consistently sought to portray the social changes facing Senegalese communities on the cusp of and beyond decolonization. Western students of the postcolonial period have seen God’s Bits of Wood as a key text but it is also widely read and well respected in West Africa itself. This is because it is one of the earliest and most impressive novels to affirm the place of Africans in determining their own fate, challenging assumptions about their reliance on European leadership, or on self-serving individuals within their own ranks. It soon became a model for African social history writers, thanks to its defiance of the colonial status quo and its heady evocation of unity among the urban poor. RMa

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  1900s

  The Shipyard

  Juan Carlos Onetti

  Lifespan | b. 1909 (Uruguay), d. 1994 (Spain)

  First Published | 1961

  First Published by | Comp. General Fabril Editora

  Original Title | El astillero

  The first part of a diptych—completed by The Body Snatchers in 1964, which describes the background of events only alluded to here—The Shipyard has as its main character Larsen, an ageing man who has returned to Santa Maria, the city from which he had been expelled, a world inhabited by familiar shadows. He is hired as manager in a dilapidated shipyard, the property of Jeremías Petrus, a former tycoon who lives with Angélica Inés, his idolized daughter, and his maid, Josefina. The shipyard is a fantastic, absurd enterprise, run by Gálvez and Kunz, who do not know whether Larsen is a threat or an ally in their dilemma of either to support the sham or promote its irretrievable collapse.

  The novel is organised in short chapters. The story runs between the town, the collapsing shipyard, the little home of Gálvez and his pregnant wife (whom Larsen, if he had had the will, would have wanted to seduce), the arbor where Larsen and Angélica Inés meet, and the house where Larsen, on one occasion before disappearing, goes to bed with Josefina. An eye-witness narrator tells the story, making conjectures and supplying information, sometimes with hidden irony, in meandering phrases that pinpoint qualities of the characters. The narrator’s domination of the story is such that he ends up by putting forward two alternate endings. An apparently traditional story of disappointed encounters, The Shipyard has a boldness that only later would be exploited in Spanish fiction. DMG

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  1900s

  Catch-22

  Joseph Heller

  Lifespan | b. 1923 (U.S.), d. 1999

  First Published | 1961

  First Published by | Simon & Schuster (New York)

  Sequel | Closing Time (1994)

  The writing of Catch-22 was a lengthy process: Heller wrote the first section in 1953 while working as an advertising copywriter.

  First published in 1961, Joseph Heller’s frenetic satire on the madness of war and the excesses of bureaucracy has now been canonized as a cult classic. The novel tells the story of Captain Joseph Yossarian, a member of a U.S. bomber crew stationed on the Mediterranea
n island of Pianosa during the Second World War. Unmoved by patriotic ideals or abstract notions of duty, Yossarian interprets the entire war as a personal attack and becomes convinced that the military is deliberately trying to send him to an untimely death. He therefore spends much of the book concocting evermore inventive ways of escaping his missions—faking various medical conditions, oscillating between sanity and insanity, trapped in the circular logic of his “Catch-22” situation (the phrase that has become Heller’s gift to the English language). Heller inserts a cast of manic, cartoonish characters into the island’s hothouse environment—from demented disciplinarian Colonel Scheisskopf to Milo Minderbinder, a ruthless profiteer.

  Heller presents war as a form of institutional insanity, a psychosis that overtakes the machinery of public and private life. Catch-22 turns its back on conventional notions of heroism and “fighting the good fight,” in order to place war in a much broader psychological, sociological, and economic context. Hilariously funny, the novel’s insights are also deadly serious, stretching far beyond the limits of peacenik propaganda. It marks a major departure from the austere, realist approach that had dominated U.S. war fiction until the sweeping changes of the 1960s. Alongside works by Roth, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, Catch-22 opened the floodgates for a wave of U.S. fiction in which war was represented with a new, countercultural sensibility in a language every bit as wild, grotesque, and bizarre as the real thing. SamT

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  1900s

  Solaris

  Stanislaw Lem

  Lifespan | b. 1921 (Poland), d. 2006

  First Published | 1961, by Wydawnictwo (Warsaw)

  Original Language | Polish

  Movie Adaptation Released | 1972, 2002

  “I was too astonished to speak, and this dumbshow continued for so long that Snow’s terror gradually communicated itself to me.”

  Science fiction has always been an obsessively debated literary category. For outspoken Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, who spent much of his career dismissing American science fiction as kitsch commercial fodder, its shortcomings were all too plain. It is no small irony then that his 1961 novel Solaris has become one of the undisputed classics of the genre, spawning two cinema adaptations (Andrei Tarkovsky’s in 1972 and Steven Soderbergh’s in 2002). Predictably, Lem poured scorn on them both.

  The initial premise of Solaris is almost textbook: human scientists try and fail to make contact with an alien from the eponymous planet. Solaris is covered by an oceanlike organism whose intelligence outwits them continually. Their attempts to understand it are thrown back on themselves; their experiments reveal only their own psychological weaknesses. Kris Kelvin, the protagonist, is gradually destroyed by memories of his suicidal lover, whose image, regenerated by Solaris, haunts him. The other characters are, in turn, plagued by unspecified traumas.

  Although well known and generally well-received, the movie versions of the book focussed almost exclusively on this psychological element. However, Lem is more concerned with hard science. Indeed, what the movies could never capture is the book’s distinctive tone: dispassionate academic language describes inexplicable phenomena on the planet that our protagonists can never hope to comprehend.

  By revealing the absolute alienness of that oft-imagined fantasy world beyond our own blue planet, Lem suggests a new literary hybrid. Part Franz Kafka, part Aldous Huxley, here is an unmapped mutation of sci fi that is compelling precisely because of its refusal to be explained. ABl

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  1900s

  Cat and Mouse

  Günter Grass

  Lifespan | b. 1927 (Poland)

  First Published | 1961, by Luchterhand (Neuwied)

  Original Title | Katz und Maus: eine Novelle

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1999

  “Still practicing, the cat came closer. Mahlke’s Adam’s apple attracted attention because it was large, always in motion . . .”

  Günter Grass was born in Danzig in 1927 and with Cat and Mouse, the central work in the Danzig trilogy (the others being The Tin Drum and Dog Years), he attempts to recapture the past of that city and understand the impact of Naziism upon it. The novel presents wider historical events through the eyes of a small group of children, allowing the author to ground the narrative in his memory of the city and its people. Its central and elusive figure, Joachim Mahlke, dreams of becoming a clown and becomes instead a war hero. His performances and demonstrations of bravery for the other children seem more impressive and exciting than anything going on in the world around them. He is an outsider and possibly a Pole who refuses to bow to the pressure the regime places upon him to conform and to believe. His mysterious life satirizes Nazi preoccupation with heroism and hero worship; the other children hold him in awe and reverence, while he holds the regime in something approaching contempt. His desire to be a clown stems from his desire to perform for others, to be watched and admired, and it enables Grass to explore the contradictions at the heart of many of those raised to the rank of hero within the Nazi era.

  The story, told by his friend, Pilenz, is written in the form of a confessional, a format that deliberately mirrors and engages with the postwar attempts to “confess” the Nazi past and thereby receive absolution. The novel shows the extraordinary technical abilities that Grass possesses by adeptly moving between comic fantasy, brutality, realism, and myth; between moments of almost lyrical beauty and horrific violence. It is also in constant dialogue with its own storytelling, the distorting power of memory, and the impossibility of reconciliation. JM

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  1900s

  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

  Muriel Spark

  Lifespan | b. 1918 (Scotland), d. 2006 (Italy)

  First Published | 1961

  First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (London)

  Stage Adaptation | 1966

  “‘You will end up as a Girl Guide leader in a suburb like Corstorphine,’ she said warningly to Eunice, who was in fact secretly attracted to this idea . . .”

  The qualities of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as a novel have been obscured by the popularity of the stage show and movie versions. Phrases such as the “crème de la crème” have entered popular consciousness, without the sophistication of Spark’s overlapping purposes receiving the same recognition. From Miss Brodie’s chilling Jesuitical assertion—“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life”—through to the novel’s dark conclusions, Spark poses a series of difficult questions about education, femininity, and authoritarianism. The very allure and asperity of Miss Brodie cut back into the elegant severity of Muriel Spark’s own style and artifice. For all the minor trappings of glamour, Miss Brodie’s deluded romanticizing is matter for this novel’s inquiry into the authority of Spark’s omniscient narrator. While maintaining an eminently readable narrative form, the novel is also as self-critical about its construction as any formalist could wish.

  The story overlaps a number of time frames and alternative perspectives, notably the retrospective judgements of different members of the Brodie set that pepper the novel. This provides hints as to the ultimate unfolding of the modest rise and nasty downfall of an inspiring but dangerous teacher, the eponymous Jean Brodie. Miss Brodie teaches her charges with a reductive but inspiring severity that verges on criminal propaganda for authoritarianism, molding them as her fascisti. Tapping into the strange sadomasochistic fantasies of pedagogical crushes and schoolroom sexual tensions, the novel works through the curiously ineffective consequences of this “education” on the Brodie set, seen darkly through pupil Sandy Stranger’s eyes. Satirical comedy as political diagnosis, it brings the morality of teaching and storytelling into stark relief: a delight. DM

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  1900s

  A Severed Head

  Iris Murdoch

  Lifespan | b. 1919 (Ireland), d. 1999

  First P
ublished | 1961

  First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)

  Married Name | Mrs. J. O. Bayley

  As Martin Lynch-Gibbon enjoys a lazy afternoon in his mistress’s apartment, he ponders his life. He has no intention of leaving his slightly older wife, Antonia, but nonetheless he relishes his liaisons with Georgie. Only blithely aware of Georgie’s emotional needs, Martin is obtuse and complacent, despite his self-conscious civility and middle-class propriety—and ripe for moral education. This education comes in the form of the compelling, demonic Honor Klein, an anthropologist with something of the primitive about her, but who stands for truth and unmasking. Martin is shocked when he learns that his wife wishes to leave him for Klein’s half brother, Palmer, but can readjust himself as a sort of a child to their surrogate parenting. Honor cuts through the cant and fake civility of this arrangement. When Martin learns that Antonia has also been having an affair with his brother, and when Honor exposes the truth about his relationship with Georgie, Martin’s world comes undone.

  A Severed Head has all the antic sexuality of a restoration comedy, yet chimes resonantly with the 1960s revolution in values and sexual mores. It uses surprise and suspense, incorporates farce and melodrama, balances its unlikely plot elements, integrates symbolism and imagery into its realist structure, and manages to comment wisely on the stupidities of human relationships. RM