1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  Burgess writes as a Catholic, and guilt about sex and masturbation are pervasive, as is an innocent prefeminist satire of women. Near death, Enderby’s bodily eructations return in language of astonished disgust: “Enderby was suffocated by smells: sulphuretted hydrogen, unwashed armpits, halitosis, feces, standing urine, putrefying meat—all thrust into his mouth and nostrils in squelchy balls.” AMu

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  1900s

  The Girls of Slender Means

  Muriel Spark

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

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (London)

  Shortened Version | Saturday Evening Post (1963)

  “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people of England were poor.”

  Brilliantly constructed, this slender novel combines multiple ironies of tone with a series of allegorical levels of storytelling that develop the different narrative possibilities suggested by the title. Out of the adventures of several more or less slender young ladies coping with postwar austerity, Spark spins a remarkable reworking of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland. That this unlikely model for an amusing short novel should figure so unobtrusively and effectively indicates some of the underlying seriousness with which Spark blends comic and religious levels of meaning. Apparently trivial details show up fundamentals, without any loss to the seductive surface of plotting and social wit.

  Set in the ruins of London toward the end of the Second World War, the novel appears at first to engage a delightfully carefree world of girls living in a residential club for unmarried women and variously on the make. This circumscribed context provides an optic through which to view the wider historical context. Spark’s satirical eye is quick to deflate the romantic purposes of youth, male and female, along with withering passages of brief literary pastiche. More than one girl becomes involved with a certain Nicholas Farringdon, and there is plenty of pith and verbal rapacity to amuse and delight. Amid rivalries and the development of peacetime corruption, the plot heads toward an apocalyptic conclusion. The way circumstances bring death suggests the virtues of staying slender, while reminding us that even in the midst of life we are in death, with all that this implies for reflections on mortality.

  Less decisive readers might care to reflect on Spark’s formal ingenuity in offering a metaphysical parable as rigorously well made as it is light and entertaining. A treat for the jaded literary palette. DM

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  1900s

  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

  John Le Carré

  Lifespan | b. 1931 (England)

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | V. Gollancz (London)

  Given Name | David John Moore Cornwell

  “What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs?”

  Before John Le Carré, the British espionage novel was dominated by the dashing spy, a man of action, either amateur or professional, who reflects a confident civilization—a Richard Hannay or a James Bond. With The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Le Carré introduces a much grimmer, antiheroic perspective, a world where there is no clear sense of the democratic West’s moral superiority over the communist East.

  Set largely in Cold War Germany, the novel is a story of deception at all levels. Dismayed by the East German intelligence service’s success in capturing his agents, Lamas, who runs a British operation from Berlin, agrees to become a double agent so that he can sow confusion in East German intelligence by proposing that its head is in the pay of the British. According to plan, Lamas becomes dissolute, leaves “the Service”—Britain’s overseas intelligence agency MI6—and is eventually recruited by the East Germans in the hope of obtaining information about British operations. Part of the book’s quality is Le Carré’s ability to convey the shabby, unglamorous world of the spy while maintaining a wonderful sense of tension and intrigue. Spying here is an elaborate game, a complex operation of trying to outwit the opposition. What is reality and what constructed fantasy remains unclear. In fact, Lamas, too, discovers that he is actually a pawn in a larger game.

  What elevates this book beyond the superior thriller is its critique of the intelligence services’ cynical manipulation of their own citizens in playing espionage games, questioning what they are supposed to be protecting. The human cost is high, and it is never obvious that there is any real intelligence to be obtained. Lamas’s ultimate recognition of this, and his refusal to abandon an innocent girl, leads to his death. TH

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  1900s

  Manon des Sources

  Marcel Pagnol

  Lifespan | b. 1895 (France), d. 1974

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | Editions de Provence (Paris)

  Sequel to | Jean de Florette

  “The spring no longer flowed.”

  Originally published as a two-part novel, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources present an epic tragedy involving three generations of Provençal peasants. Cesar Soubeyran and his nephew, Ugolin, are all that is left of a family cursed with a history of misfortune. To Cesar, known as Papet, the rather simple Ugolin is the last supreme hope of the Soubeyran race. When a hunchback from the city inherits a nearby farm, Papet’s exceptional talent for connivance and deception is mobilized. Conscious that acquiring the farm would be a means of restoring wealth and distinction to the Souberyan name, the uncle and nephew patiently plot to bring about the interloper’s downfall. The hunchback’s daughter, Manon, grows up in the time between the novel’s two parts. Ugolin falls desperately in love with her, but, far from returning his love, her heart is set passionately on avenging the ill treatment of her father. The repercussions of unrequited love ensue, but it is not only Ugolin who suffers this fate.

  Marcel Pagnol was born in the hills near Marseille where the novel is set. He spent long summer holidays in the region as a child, among the people who were to inspire his novel’s characters. His story is interspersed with entertaining detours, offering vignettes of lives long steeped in the peasant tradition. Best known, in France at least, as a filmmaker and a playwright, it was perhaps Pagnol’s awareness of the visual that allowed his simple prose style in Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources to be translated so beautifully into two successful movies by Claude Berri. Starring Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart, Gérard Depardieu, and Yves Montand, these movies provide great accompaniments to the novel, but when it comes to a picture of rural French life, it is Pagnol’s text that provides the richness of detail. PM

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  1900s

  The Graduate

  Charles Webb

  Lifespan | b. 1939 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | New American Library (N.Y.)

  Movie Adaptation Released | 1967

  This 1963 novel is so much eclipsed by the 1967 movie with Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman that we should recall that most of its iconic moments already exist in Webb’s text. The advice to go into “plastics” does not, but the underwater diving-suit scene, Benjamin’s embarrassment at booking a hotel room for sex, the un-naming of “Mrs. Robinson” (no first name), and Benjamin fighting off Elaine’s parents and friends with a crucifix are all in the original. A mild attack on the values of the white American professional middle class, The Graduate, in both forms, has become a much admired populist satire.

  Mrs. Robinson’s alcoholism and silence might signal psychosis, but do not; Benjamin’s post-university distress is short of existential dread; the malice of his parents and their friends is harmless in the face of true love. Written in the early 1960s, Webb’s satire provided that necessary medium of social criticism on which the harder attitudes of the late 1960s were founded. As fiction, The Graduate is notable for its flat and understated but expressive prose. Much hinges on the difference between “What?” and “What.
” The question mark signals anguish or outrage and warns of imminent distress in personal relationships. “What” without the expected query makes a genuine inquiry of the other person and predicts positive consequences. At the iconic moment when Benjamin and Elaine escape from her wedding on the bus, she says “Benjamin?” and he replies “What.” As the bus moves off no more is said. AMu

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  1900s

  Cat’s Cradle

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  Lifespan | b. 1922 (U.S.), d. 2007

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | Holt, Rinehart & Winston (N.Y.)

  Alternate Title | Ice 9

  Felix Hoenikker, father of the A-bomb, is without sin. Rationality abjures abstracts such as morality; he is a man of hard science. Be it nuclear weapons or turtles, Hoenikker is a whirring brain needing occupation. Take away his turtles, and he can blow up Hiroshima. It is when hard science falls to soft humans that things get messy. But Hoenikker’s “greatest” creation is Ice-nine, an isotope of water that freezes at room temperature, creating a chain reaction—like the A-bomb or the children’s game of cat’s cradle—elegant, never ending, and ultimately pointless. Whereas the A-bomb fell short of total annihilation, Ice-nine will do the trick. John, the narrator, while researching a book on the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, stumbles across the Books of Bokonon. Bokonism baldly declares itself a bunch of “shameless lies”; truth plays no part in religion. The least it can do is offer some comfort. Vonnegut creates a religion in order to mock religion. He also targets technology, the big, destructive twentieth-century lie, which supplants it. The end of the world comes as a roaring whimper, the result of carelessness and laziness—technology and stupidity are a very dangerous alchemy indeed. In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut reveals the meaning of life: there is none. But he is a master and can make even the end of the world funny. The serious implications come to us later, after we have our breath back. GT

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  1900s

  V.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Lifespan | b. 1937 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1963

  First Published by | Lippincott (Philadelphia)

  William Faulkner Foundation Award | 1963

  The jacket of the first edition of V., the novel that established Pynchon as an enigmatic cult hero of American literature.

  V. marks the arrival of one of North America’s most imaginative and challenging literary talents. The novel is constructed around two separate but interconnected narratives. The first of these concerns the ex-sailor Benny Profane, who bums his way around the eastern seaboard during the mid-1950s in search of odd jobs, kicks, and a sense of identity. In the course of his wanderings, Profane encounters a strange character named Herbert Stencil. Stencil is obsessed with the mysterious figure of V., a woman who manifests herself in different forms at violent flashpoints in twentieth-century history. Stencil’s paranoid quest to decode the incarnations and abstractions of V.—who becomes less and less corporeal as the novel progresses—sets up an elaborate second narrative spanning the decades from 1880 to 1943. This wild, panoramic sweep takes in Egypt during the Fashoda crisis, rioting Venezuelan expatriates in Florence, the German occupation of south-west Africa, and much more.

  Stencil is searching for a unifying order amid the violence and strife, what Pynchon calls “the century’s master cabal,” the “Plot Which Has No Name.” But perhaps the real danger is to be found in the novel’s “present”—a modern America profoundly transformed by the Second World War, about to hit boiling point through the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s. V. establishes many of the themes that continue to occupy Pynchon: the use and abuse of power, the patterns of historiography, the status of marginalized communities, and altered states of perception. It is grandiose, architectural writing, yet also intimate and humane. V. recalls Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, and European Surrealism, but ultimately coheres into a remarkable, entirely new kind of contemporary American writing. SamT

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  1900s

  Herzog

  Saul Bellow

  Lifespan | b. 1915 (Canada), d. 2005 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1964

  First Published by | Viking Press (New York)

  National Book Award | 1965

  A U.S. edition of Bellow’s novel—the name of the eponymous protagonist means “prince” in German.

  The novel that made Saul Bellow’s name as a literary best seller is a comedy of manners and ideas, loss and partial redemption. The cuckolded academic Moses Herzog is neurotically restless, a pathological condition that notably manifests itself in his habit of composing unsent letters to the great and good of past and present times (“Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression ‘the fall into the quotidian.’ When did this fall occur?”). We follow Herzog’s musings on the events that have brought him to this state, most notably his amatory betrayal at the hands of his former friend, Valentine Gersbach, and we follow him physically as he heads into Chicago for an abortive attempt at bloody revenge. Typically, he ends up arrested for possessing a firearm instead; however, in the process, we find, something may have begun to fall back into place in his life (“At this time he had no messages for anyone”).

  Indeed, the phrase “no messages” could well provide the epigraph for Moses Herzog because, for all its overt intellectualizing, this is not a novel that offers convenient, formulaic meanings. Rather, Herzog works as a whole; we need to take in both Herzog the character’s fretful inner life and his comic wanderings, as part of a larger exploration of the boundaries of human choice (“There is someone inside me. I am in his grip.”). The power of Bellow’s novel comes not only from his famously imaginative prose, but also from what such exercises of the mind can reveal; it is a testimony to Herzog that readers may find themselves thinking more in terms of what its characters are and do than what they “represent.” Herzog comes to recognize how life is always bigger than the shapes we impose on it, and, in following him, we may have a parallel experience. BT

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  1900s

  The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein

  Marguerite Duras

  Lifespan | b. 1914 (Vietnam), d. 1996 (France)

  First Published | 1964

  First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)

  Original Title | Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein

  “Lol was funny, an inveterate wit, and very bright . . .”

  Lol Stein is nineteen years old, and the stuff of local legend. She is engaged to Michael Richardson, we are told by an anonymous narrator, when into the ballroom step two strikingly beautiful women, Anne-Marie Stretter and her daughter. Richardson is transfixed, abandons Lol, and spends the rest of the night dancing in the arms of Anne-Marie Stretter, while Lol looks on. At dawn, the couple leave the ballroom, and Lol lets out a cry. One question that haunts the remainder of the novel is whether the events at the ball constituted a moment of rapture for Lol, or whether in fact it was rupture.

  The action starts long after Lol’s recovery from her supposed trauma, when she is married with three children and has recently returned to her home. She starts to run over the ball in her mind, then begins to orchestrate a repetition of the night’s events: this time she is the outsider, and the unwitting couple are her old friend, Tatiana, and her lover, Jack Hold (who only now reveals himself as the narrator). Jack falls hopelessly in love with Lol, but, rather than urge him to leave Tatiana, she persuades him to keep on loving her, pushing all three beyond the usual economies of desire.

  For psychoanalysts, the love triangle always contains rivals and can be resolved only by the elimination of one of them. Interestingly, Duras herself was involved in a ménage à trois with her husband, the poet Robert Antelme, and Dionys Mascolo; when Duras had Mascolo’s child, Antelme (who also had a lover or two) eventually left, but that relati
onship was not to last either. Duras’s novel explores the possibility of moving beyond this: the possibility of maintaining desire without rivalry. In doing so, it offers its readers one of the most powerful anti-Oedipal myths of recent times. PT

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  1900s

  Arrow of God

  Chinua Achebe

  Lifespan | b. 1930 (Nigeria)

  First Published | 1964

  First Published by | W. Heinemann (London)

  Peace Prize of the German Book Trade | 2002

  “What kind of power was it if it was never to be used?”

  Set in Nigeria in 1921, this novel tells how the elderly Ezeulu, an Ibo community’s polygamous high priest, endeavors to adapt to the power of the white colonial officials (whose black messenger terms him “witch-doctor”). In a bitter comedy of errors, an attempt by a well-meaning English District Officer to declare him an accredited chieftain results in his humiliation by a white deputy and his black emissary. Thereafter, Ezeulu seeks to humiliate his community by post-poning an impending harvest day; the people then turn away from him to the Christian mission, which encourages timely harvesting. Ezeulu withdraws into “the haughty splendor of a demented high priest.”