1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  Ken Kesey

  Lifespan | b. 1935 (U.S.), d. 2001

  First Published | 1962

  First Published by | Viking Press (New York)

  Movie Adaptation Released | 1975

  “‘I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me . . .’”

  Ken Kesey’s novel depicts a mental asylum in which repeated attempts to diagnose the patients as insane are conceived as part of a larger scheme to produce pliant, docile subjects across the United States. A key text for the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s, it addresses the relationship between sanity and madness, conformity and rebellion. The novel remains finely balanced throughout. It is never clear, for example, whether the so-called “Combine” is, in actuality, a boundless authority designed to ensure social control across the whole population, or a projection of the narrator Chief Bromden’s paranoid imagination. Also, the question of whether insanity, to quote R. D. Laing, “might very well be a state of health in a mad world,” or at least an appropriate form of social rebellion, is raised but never quite answered.

  Into the sterile, hermetically sealed world of the asylum wanders Randall P. McMurphy, a modern day “cowboy” with a “sideshow swagger” who disrupts the ward’s smooth running and challenges the near-total authority of the steely Nurse Ratched. Insofar as McMurphy’s acts of rebellion assume mostly self-interested forms, the novel’s efforts at political mobilization fall short, and there remains something uneasy about its racial and gender politics. It takes the “cowboy” McMurphy to save the “Indian” Bromden and, in the era of civil rights and feminism, the white male patients are painted as “victims of a matriarchy,” ably supported by a cabal of black orderlies. But Kesey’s impressive attempts to come to grips with the amorphous nature of modern power—a power not necessarily tied to leaders or even institutions—make this a prescient, foreboding work. If McMurphy’s fate is what awaits those who push too hard against the system, then Bromden’s sanity depends on not turning a blind eye to injustice and exploitation. AP

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  Girl with Green Eyes

  Edna O’Brien

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (Ireland)

  First Published | 1962

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  Kingsley Amis Award | 1962

  “My face in the mirror looked round and smooth.”

  Originally published as The Lonely Girl, this is the second novel of The Country Girls trilogy narrated by naïve convent girl Caithleen Brady. After moving to Dublin with her childhood friend, Baba, Caithleen (the shier and less streetwise of the two) becomes involved with Eugene, a film maker several years her senior, who is married but estranged from his wife. Perhaps inevitably, it is a fundamentally imbalanced romance, and Eugene exerts disproportionate control over their relationship.

  On top of this, Caithleen’s family’s vehement disapproval forces a confrontation between the Catholic values of her upbringing and the changing cultural attitudes of the 1960s. Her desire to pursue a sexual relationship puts her at odds with strict Irish religious mores at the time, but Caithleen’s moral conflict contrasts starkly with Eugene’s inability to understand religious observance of any kind.

  Upon its publication in 1962, the novel won critical acclaim for its frank, fresh, unpretentious portrayal of a young woman’s experiences. Both the subject matter and O’Brien’s explicit treatment of it were to prove contentious in her native Ireland, however, and the Irish Censorship Board banned all three novels of the trilogy, while copies of the books were burned in Irish churchyards in protest against the frank depiction of the sexual lives of the girls. In many ways, this reception proved O’Brien’s point about the fundamental disjunct between an individual’s desires and the oppressiveness of traditional mores, and reflected her own experience of growing up in rural Ireland. O’Brien’s willingness to engage with the culturally sensitive issues of the period makes her writing of the first importance. Her depiction of the realities of individual experience within a defined social milieu makes this novel unmissable. JW

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  The Death of Artemio Cruz

  Carlos Fuentes

  Lifespan | b. 1928 (Mexico)

  First Published | 1962

  First Published by | FCE (Mexico City)

  Original Title | La muerte de Artemio Cruz

  “If I think about what I did yesterday, I’ll stop thinking about what’s happening to me now. That’s a good idea. Very good. Think yesterday.”

  While he is dying, Artemio Cruz multiplies himself in the form of three voices and three strictly alternated tenses: “I” speaks in the present and gives an account of the moment of his death agony, expanding concentrically throughout the whole novel; “you” is his imaginary twin, whose memories are expressed in an immediate or perhaps eternally postponed future; and finally “he” is the protagonist of twelve episodes or stages of his life had it been arranged as it should have been. In each case, other voices and other tenses appear in an extremely varied way.

  The complex arrangement forms a complete biography: that of a Mexican tycoon who, from 1889 to 1959, represents the story of his country. It is a tale set during the Revolution and then fueled by his achievements. In his wake are loves left destroyed by the Revolution itelf; cowardice and betrayal; abuses, humiliation, and corruption. In the end, Cruz has a heart attack. Surrounded by his family, his secretary, a priest, and doctors—each of whom in turn delivers a different picture of the dying man—the tycoon faces the crossroads of a past and a future in which imagination and memory are mixed.

  The intricate structural marquetry of the novel, its stylistic exuberance, and its historic and psychological density are unusual for its time. It makes demands that teach the reader to read in a different way, as is the case with any truly avant-garde work. DMG

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  The Time of the Hero

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Lifespan | b. 1936 (Peru)

  First Published | 1962

  First Published in | Seix-Barral (Barcelona)

  Original Title | La ciudad y los perros

  This novel, Mario Vargas Llosa’s first, dazzles with the scale of its experimentation with form and the risks it takes in tackling the dissection of a contemporary society. The story of the cadets of a Peruvian military college uses the author’s own experience, but it transcends autobiography through the profound assimilation of literary models (Flaubert, Faulkner, and Sartre) and a rigorous construction based on fragmentation and a multiplicity of narrative voices. From the theft of an examination paper to the death of one of the cadets, the reader is at first presented with a depiction of the college’s framework of races and social classes, whose relationships are governed by violence and deception. Then the novel progresses, like a criminal investigation, to expose the extent of moral corruption and the consequences of perverted education.

  This is a fable about responsibility and determinism, the fundamental result of the structure formed by characters who are split between the world of the college and that of the city. The main characters exist in both (the cadets Alberto, Ricardo, and Jaguar, and Lieutenant Gamboa); from their outside position they are attracted and repelled by the evanescent Teresa, as well as their friends and families. These elements are ultimately brought together in the final part to reveal the faces of deceit and precarious truth. DMG

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  The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

  Giorgio Bassani

  Lifespan | b. 1916 (Italy), d. 2000

  First Published | 1963, by G. Einaudi (Turin)

  Movie Adaptation Released | 1970

  Original Title | Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini

  Bassani’s novel is a moving stor
y of Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, as Fascism takes hold and seeps into ordinary life. The narrator is a frequent visitor to the walled garden of the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy, cosmopolitan, and popular Jewish family in Ferrara. This town was also one of the key Fascist strongholds, but this dramatic irony escapes the narrator. He loves and admires the graceful, eccentric family and becomes increasingly absorbed in the garden’s pleasures as events make the world outside more threatening; soon his world has shrunk to this small space. He falls in love with the beautiful, mysterious Micòl, but they both have to watch her brother, Alberto, waste away and die from a mysterious illness. Micòl, who grasps that she has no future, is forced to withdraw from all forms of public life, abandoning hopes of a brilliant career. Eventually even the myopic narrator starts to understand what is happening, and the novel reaches its sad, inevitable conclusion.

  This novel of corrupted innocence and blighted talent and opportunity is also an indictment of ordinary citizens too blind to see the threat of creeping authoritarianism and prejudice. While affirming ordinary human values of friendship and kindness, it shows what happened to Italy when it made the fatal error of uniting with Nazi Germany—a moral vacuum rendered the beauty and intelligence of Italian culture vulnerable and delusive. AH

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  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

  Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

  Lifespan | b. 1918 (Russia), d. 2008

  First Published | 1963, by Sovetskii pisatel (Moscow)

  Original Title | Odin den Ivana Denisovicha

  Exiled from Soviet Union | 1974

  “Better to . . . submit. If you were stubborn they broke you.”

  This contemporary literary classic is quite literally what it says it is: a single day in the life of a prisoner in a Stalinist labor camp in 1951. Ivan Denisovich Shukov is punished with three days in solitary confinement for not getting out of bed, but the threat is idle, and he only has to wash a floor before being taken back to breakfast. As the day goes on, the reader gains insight into the workers’ suffering and companionship, and the uneasy coexistence between the prisoners and guards. At the end of the day, Ivan is lucky to be rewarded with a few extra mouthfuls of food from another inmate and thanks God for getting him through another day. This day, we find out at the end, is just one out of 3,653 of Ivan’s prison existence. Ivan is an unlikely protagonist for Russian literature of this time, being a peasant, a normal man, and possibly illiterate. He represents the uneducated and persecuted mainstream of Soviet society. Despite his background, however, Ivan develops an inner dignity as he builds some meaning out of his mundane and degrading camp existence, transcending his surroundings with a spiritual intensity. Throughout, the story reverberates with the desperate dehumanization of the prisoners; the unjust punishments and arbitrary rules that reduce men to mere numbers. Yet despite the degradation a hope rings out as the twin strengths of camaraderie and faith help the men to survive.

  Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin in a private letter, spending eight years of his life in labor camps similar to the one he describes here. In 1962, he became famous with this novel’s publication, a landmark event in the history of Soviet literature. This memorable work was the first public recognition of the existence of the labor camps and the hideous conditions endured by their inmates. EF

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  The Third Wedding

  Costas Taktsis

  Lifespan | b. 1927 (Greece), d. 1988

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | Self-published

  Original Title | To trito stefani

  This is the story of two Athenian women, Nina and Ekavi, in the mid twentieth century, focussing especially on Nina’s three weddings. We see how they become friends and how they respond to major historical events in Greece before and after the Second World War, including the German occupation and the Civil War. The narration ends in the early 1960s with Nina’s third marriage. The adventures and sufferings of the characters are based on how ordinary Greeks experenced war, crime, loyalty, betrayal, and love, and the narration is transformed into an allegory of life itself.

  Costas Taktsis uses simple but not simplistic language, enriching his extended monologues with everyday words and idioms in a vibrant and highly recognizable writing style. The language he uses is reminiscent of the vaudeville and folk cinema of Greece in the 1950s and ’60s. The narration, consisting of numerous stories intertwined inextricably with each other and apparently without organization, seems to be written seamlessly with a single stroke of the pen.

  The book offers far too much information on modern Greece, but Taktsis presents his story in an easygoing way, capturing the important minor details of Greek life. Inspired by ordinary people’s fortunes and misfortunes, The Third Wedding is a celebration of life as experienced by everyone. To this end, Taktsis is a master artist who is able to silence himself in order to let life speak. SMy

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  Dog Years

  Günter Grass

  Lifespan | b. 1927 (Poland)

  First Published | 1963, by Luchterhand (Neuwied)

  Original Title | Hundejahre

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1999

  The third novel in Günter Grass’s Danzig trilogy, completing the sequence begun by The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse, Dog Years continues the author’s critical examination of recent German history. Once again, the unnerving perspective of unnaturally grown-up children is exploited to cast a subversive light upon the adult world, although the text grows to embrace a far wider range of viewpoints.

  The foundation of the narrative is the prewar childhood friendship of Walter Matern with the artistic scarecrow-maker Eddie Amsel in Danzig. As the work expands and diversifies in a riot of stories and stories-within-stories, the theme of the friends’ relationship remains its structural backbone. Other narrative lines take over the foreground, including the tale of the epistolary lover Harry Liebenau and of the dog Prinz, who becomes Adolf Hitler’s favorite hound. Prinz’s escape from the Führer’s Berlin bunker is one of the book’s comic highlights.

  Dog Years is even more daring than its predecessors in its repetitive intertwining of myth, fact, and fantasy. Its experimentation with language, including parodies of the tortured diction of German philosopher Heidegger (“The final struggle of the German people will be conducted with regard to the Nothing attuned to distantiality.”), are often very funny, but end up clouding the point of Grass’s complex and surreal vision. The result is a bloated, often frustrating book, yet overflowing with humor, fresh ideas, and narrative surprises. RegG

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  The Bell Jar

  Sylvia Plath

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (U.S.), d. 1963 (England)

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | W. Heinemann (London)

  Pseudonym | Victoria Lucas

  Casually described by Sylvia Plath in a letter to her mother as a “pot boiler,” The Bell Jar has become one of the most notorious depictions of a mental breakdown in American literature. First published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, the novel provides a thinly disguised autobiographical account of Plath’s teenage years. It covers the life of Esther, from her spell as a guest editor of a teen magazine to her failed suicide attempt and the crude care of mid-twentieth-century American psychiatry.

  Initially celebrated for its dry self-deprecation and ruthless honesty, The Bell Jar is now read as a damning critique of 1950s social politics. Plath makes clear connections between Esther’s dawning awareness of the limited female roles available to her and her increasing sense of isolation and paranoia. The contradictory expectations imposed upon women in relation to sexuality, motherhood, and intellectual achievement are linked to Esther’s sense of herself as fragmented. Esther’s ev
entual recovery relies on her ability to dismiss the dominant versions of femininity that populate the novel. Yet concern with the stifling atmosphere of 1950s America is not limited to examination of gender. The opening sentence—“It was a queer sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs”—very precisely locates the novel in Cold War McCarthyism and makes implicit connections between Esther’s experiences and the other paranoias and betrayals that characterized the decade. NM

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  Inside Mr. Enderby

  Anthony Burgess

  Lifespan | b. 1917 (England), d. 1993

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | W. Heinemann (London)

  Pseudonym | Joseph Kell

  This novel, the first in a trilogy, makes the case for Anthony Burgess as the preeminent comic novelist of the 1960s and 1970s, succeeding Waugh and surpassing Kingsley Amis. Burgess’s substance and staying power derive from an intense interest in language, both literary and spoken, and from inspired technical ingenuity. Burgess’s ear for pub speech, for example, permits verbal misunderstandings to develop into startling outcomes, always to the disadvantage of the baffled, too-talkative but tough-minded poet Enderby. Inside Mr. Enderby are his guts. He farts and belches incessantly, the exact sounds carefully transcribed by Burgess, a connoisseur of wind. The body’s disgustingness is evoked in Rabelaisian mode, as is the domestic filth in which Enderby lives. His other “inside” is his poetry, written with trousers down on the toilet. A series of accidents leads from poetry to marriage to a mental hospital. An epigraph from Jules Laforgue (“Tout le monde est dehors”) indicates he should get out more, so Enderby Outside appeared in 1968. The trilogy was completed in A Clockwork Testament (1974).