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1900s
Franny and Zooey
J. D. Salinger
Lifespan | b. 1919 (U.S.)
First Published | 1961, by Little, Brown & Co. (Bost.)
Published as Short Stories | Franny (1955), Zooey (1957) in New Yorker magazine
The notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye has had the effect of deflecting attention both from J.D. Salinger’s other writings and from what remains the essential quality of his writing in general: it is all about the details, rather than the broad strokes of disaffection and alienation. Franny and Zooey is almost entirely composed of details. A lopsided pair of stories about two children of the Glass family, the “novel” almost has the air of a minor work or sketch because of its deformed structure and apparently unfocused storytelling. Yet it deals throughout with ideas that are to be found at the edges of Salinger’s other books, in particular the egotism and “phoniness” of people who, particularly as a result of intellectualism or religion, believe they can provide absolutes and remove the need to keep addressing daily the events of their lives.
Salinger’s interest in Eastern religion—especially the rejection of absolutes and the refusal to provide anything as guaranteed—is at its clearest at the center of Franny and Zooey. The Glass family’s youngest children are tormented by an idea that they move toward grasping as the novel progresses, the idea that learning, religion, and even happiness have been reduced to commodities. As such, each and every choice, irrespective of what it concerns, has the potential to be negative or positive. In the modern world, where all that many people desire is a lifestyle that removes the need to think constantly about their lives, the parallels with Salinger’s apparently minor work are all too clear. SF
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1900s
No One Writes to the Colonel
Gabriel García Márquez
Lifespan | b. 1928 (Colombia)
First Published | 1961
First Published by | Aguirre Editores (Medellín)
Original Title | El coronel no tiene quien le escriba
This novella, Gabriel García Márquez’s second book, is a tale of violence and injustice, solitude and stagnancy. At the turn of the twentieth century, an unnamed colonel and civil war veteran lives with his asthma-ridden wife, starving and seemingly forgotten in a small village in Colombia. The colonel’s life is fueled by the hope that he will one day receive the government pension, fifteen years overdue, that would end the poverty and hardship of his postwar existence. But every Friday his hopes for a better life are dashed when the mailman utters his weekly refrain: “No one writes to the colonel.”
The irony of the colonel’s plight—his blind faith in participating in a revolution only served to impoverish both himself and his countrymen farther—is juxtaposed with his central struggle: whether or not to sell his late son’s sole legacy, the village’s prize fighter-cock that may one day win him a fortune. Their son’s life was taken as a result of his clandestine activities, circulating banned literature, but over time the cock comes to embody the potential for victory in the wake of loss. It also embodies the possibility of an alternative kind of battlefield in which citizens are remunerated for the madness of striving and hoping, and are shaken from the stagnancy that results from festering in solitude—a solitude that would soon become a trademark of García Márquez’s literature. JSD
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1900s
Faces in the Water
Janet Frame
Lifespan | b. 1924 (New Zealand), d. 2004
First Published | 1961
First Published by | Pegasus Press (Christchurch)
Order of New Zealand Awarded | 1990
Faces in the Water is one of the most powerful descriptions of mental illness ever written. Although a work of fiction, the novel is informed by Janet Frame’s own experience as a patient (wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia) in a New Zealand mental asylum.
Istina Mavet, the novel’s main character, relates her experiences on the wards of Cliffhaven and Treecroft hospitals in a highly lyrical but disjointed fashion. Through her gaze, we see the deplorable conditions of these institutions, the horrible side effects of electroconvulsive shock therapy, insulin-induced comas, and lobotomies, as well as the kindnesses and cruelties of the psychiatric nurses.
The book is a biting critique of the gross power differential between medical “professional” and patient. While the skillful way in which the novel makes this point is enough to make it memorable, the prose’s striking quality elevates it to a truly great novel. Istina’s thoughts and narrative descriptions combine an accomplished lyricism with the fractured digressions symptomatic of psycho logical trauma. Istina’s disturbance is unmistakable at times, but her ability to narrate these experiences is what sets her apart from her mostly inarticulate fellow patients. Frame herself won release from the mental institution in which she was a patient after eight years, an escape she attributed to publication of her book The Lagoon and Other Stories in 1951. CG-G
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1900s
Memoirs of a Peasant Boy
Xosé Neira Vilas
Lifespan | b. 1928 (Spain)
First Published | 1961
First Published by | Follas Novas (Buenos Aires)
Original Title | Memorias dun neno labrego
This classic of Galician children’s literature consists of an emotional description of the life of a poor child in rural Galicia. The main character is Balbino, who is presented as “a boy from a village. That’s to say, a nobody.” Through the boy’s eyes and sensibility, the reader shares the experiences that build up his character as he matures. His encounters with death take place through two events: his godfather is run over, and his dog is accidentally caught in a snare set for foxes. But Balbino still has hope for the future and, as a symbol of this, he plants a cherry tree where the animal died. Another bitter experience is that of injustice, now exercised by his father, who hits him for dirtying the face of Manolito, a rich child. No less hard is his contact with love. At school, Balbino falls in love with the schoolmistress and this feeling drives him to study; but her marriage causes him such anguish that he refuses to return to school. His father makes him work for him as a punishment.
Wisdom on the one hand and friendship on the other combine to educate the youth. The first is delivered by a Jew, who teaches him about people and shows him that only honor and solidarity will pacify his conscience. Friendship is incarnate in Lelo, who has to emigrate and writes to him from America. As a result of this friendly correspondence, Balbino ceases to write his confidences in the notebook that we are reading. DRM
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1900s
Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein
Lifespan | b. 1907 (U.S.), d. 1988
First Published | 1961
First Published by | Putnam (New York)
Hugo Award | 1962
A strange and disturbing book, which won the 1962 Hugo Prize and rocked the science fiction world, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land not only gave science fiction books a place on mainstream bookshelves, but also became an emblem of the 1960s counterculture movement toward free love and unconstrained living. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, the orphaned son of the first Mars explorers, who has been raised by Martians and returned to Earth by a second human mission. Although Smith is in his twenties by the time he comes back to Earth, he looks on the world with the eyes of a child, as he faces the arduous task of learning to be human. He has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of human culture or religions. Smith preaches his message of spirituality and free love and disseminates the psychic powers he learned on Mars. As time goes on, he converts many people to his way of thinking and becomes a messiah-like figure, with explosive results.
The story is a reflection on the conceits of its time, a spr
awling satire of the human condition that takes in love, politics, sex, and, above all, organized religion, which is seen as a sham. The fact that, in reality, several religious movements emerged as a result of people reading the novel must have been alarming to an author whose message seems to reveal a frustration at people’s desire to follow prophets and causes. EF
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Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
Lifespan | b. 1899 (Argentina), d. 1986 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1962
First Published by | New Directions (New York)
Original Language | English
Borges never wrote a novel. A novel would be either unnecessary or unfinished. Instead there are these “episodes,” brought together in Labyrinths, a collection of his major works, comprising some of his most important short stories and most challenging essays. Here the reader can see the impact of vast ideas on tiny spots of history and individuals; the perspective of one person seeing the infinite for the first and only time. Borges’s lucid prose, at once melancholy and scientific, is the ideal vehicle for tales of unending libraries, dreamers who are dreamed in turn, and men paralyzed by the inability to forget anything at all.
Fictions, essays, and parables—the range of Borges’s reading and inspiration is evident. Pascal, Kafka, Judas, and Bernard Shaw all put in appearances. As André Maurois says: “Borges has read everything and especially what no one reads anymore.” From Old Norse sagas to Arab philosophy, Borges favors the trick of reading between the lines, making the unseen connections and realizing the immense, sometimes terrible, implications. Despite separation into the three genres, all the pieces operate on similar levels. There is a constant wonder at the potential of both mankind and the universe, a certain irony about the actions of individuals and an elusive sadness at the ending of things. Magical realism, intertextuality, and postmodernist trickery are all here, fresh and absorbing, before the burden of such descriptions. Somewhere in Borges all the reading and writing in the world has already been done. JS
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1900s
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
Lifespan | b. 1919 (Iran)
First Published | 1962
First Published by | Michael Joseph (London)
Prix Medicis | 1976
When, in 1972, Margaret Drabble characterized Doris Lessing as a “Cassandra in a world under siege,” she brought into focus what has become a truism in the reception of Lessing’s writing: namely, that we read her to find out “what’s going on”—for an independent “diagnosis” of the dilemmas of our individual and collective lives.
First published in 1962, The Golden Notebook was immediately taken up—or, in Lessing’s terms, “belittled”—as a crucial intervention in the so-called sex war. It was seen as a literary plea for psychic and political change in the lives of the “free women” at the book’s heart. It is a complex novel, narrated through the four notebooks that divide, and contain, the life of the protagonist, Anna Wulf. As a struggling writer and single mother closely associated with the Communist Party through the 1950s, Wulf is the figure through whom Lessing writes about the conflicts of sexuality and sexual difference, politics and creativity—and, in particular, the theme of breakdown, which is omnipresent throughout the book. The crisis of political belief that shadowed the British Communist Party through the 1950s, the paranoia of the Cold War, is refracted through both the crisis of imagination that afflicts Anna Wulf as a writer and the disturbance in the relationship between the sexes that so preoccupies her as a “modern” woman. VL
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Time of Silence
Luis Martín-Santos
Lifespan | b. 1924 (Spain), d. 1964
First Published | 1962
First Published by | Seix-Barral (Barcelona)
Original Title | Tiempo de silencio
Luis Martín-Santos, the son of a military doctor, was a successful young psychiatrist, a friend of the best writers of his generation, and a clandestine militant of the Socialist Party. With Time of Silence, he blew apart the foundations of the realist, politically committed novel. He made free use of the internal monologue of the characters, he carefully broke up the structure of the story, and, above all, he employed a sarcastic style of narration, packed with wordplay, that came directly from James Joyce.
However, the problems he described were the same that were concerning his realist friends, and which had been a familiar part of Spanish writing since the time of the respected Pio Baroja: the hypocrisy of the traditional middle classes, the matriarchal aspect of Spanish society, the absurdity of any attempt at intellectual emancipation, and the impossibility of establishing links between a mindless proletariat and his own group of writers, who were committed to liberation.
With enthralling violence, the novel presents the environment in which the brief action unrolls—the family’s rooming house, the brothel, the pretentious, aristocratic mansion, the nocturnal gatherings of the young intellectuals, and the shacks where the immigrants crowd together. It confers on Pedro, the young doctor who is the main character, more victim than agitator and always more astonished than aware, the distressing role of representative of the failure of a generation. JCM
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Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
Lifespan | b. 1899 (Russia), d. 1977 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1962
First Published by | Putnam (New York)
Original Language | English
Entering a web of reflections, imputations, madness, neighborliness, gayness, exiled royalty, murder, and literary criticism, it is hard to discern any stable world outside the text of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. With astonishing literary dexterity, Nabokov takes to considerable lengths here the notion that writing need be about nothing but itself.
The novel is divided into two parts: the four cantos of the poem “Pale Fire,” attributed to invented author John Shade, and their annotated exegesis written, after Shade’s death, by his friend, neighbor, and editor, Charles Kinbote. The poem and its notes, along with Kinbote’s explanatory preface and index, form the novel’s entire substance. Shade’s poem is an apparently uncomplicated reflection on his life, his daughter’s suicide, and his Christian thoughts on the nature of divine order. Kinbote’s notes suggest that he believes himself to be Charles the Beloved, king of an obscure European country called Zembla. Escaping to the United States from revolution, Charles pseudonymously took up a post at Wordsmith University alongside his favorite poet, John Shade, whom he befriended and whose work he claims to understand. In his opinion, “Pale Fire” is really a coded history of Zembla. Is Kinbote an editor, a stalker, a madman, or an academic? Or is he a fiction supplied by a Shade writing his own annotations? DH
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A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Lifespan | b. 1917 (England), d. 1993
First Published | 1962
First Published by | W. Heinemann (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1971
Penguin’s Pop Art-influenced cover for the novel offers a faceless, dehumanized image of Alex, the violent leader of the Droogs.
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’s best-known work, shot to fame following Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 movie adaptation. The novel was inspired by a group of Russian teddy-boy ruffians Burgess encountered in St. Petersburg. It is narrated by teenage hooligan Alex and dotted with Russian-derived slang. Alex, along with his friends and followers Dim, Pete, and Georgie, leads a life of violence—beating up an old man and raping his wife as part of a normal night out. When Alex is set up, arrested, and sent to prison, he is chosen for a new, Pavlovian style anti-violence treatment called “Ludovico’s technique.” Soon, if so much as
a violent thought passes through Alex’s mind he feels ill, and his treatment is hailed as a great success. When Alex is released from prison, unable to fight back, he is beaten and left for dead in a field before being rescued by the very man he attacked at the beginning of the novel. Following his failed suicide attempt, while Alex is still unconscious, government psychologists reverse Ludovico’s technique. For a time he reverts to his old violent ways, but by the end of the book, he is thinking about settling down. In the U.S. edition of A Clockwork Orange, the last chapter was removed—against Burgess’s will—because it was thought to be too sentimental.
The novel is a comment on what the author saw as society’s will to swallow up individual freedom and the rise of mass popular culture in the early 1960s, which brought a new rebellious conformism. Burgess rails against the psychological conditioning techniques of the time, which he thought were abhorrent. Alex’s free choice of leaving the violence behind brings him to a final moral level infinitely higher than the forced harmlessness of his conditioning—a complete freedom. EF
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 65