1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  The interest of Arrow of God lies partly in the novel’s subtle plotting and largely in the vivid rendering of the complexities of the evolving indigenous society. We see how diversely the people respond to the challenges of colonialism. Ezeulu’s community maintains traditional celebrations and intimate rituals, but also sanctions the ubiquitous exploitation of women by men; lepers are scorned; its religion veers between the profoundly intuitive and the superstitiously silly. Chinua Achebe’s intelligent objectivity extends to the British community, too. If one official is naïvely arrogant, another tries to be fair-minded. If the English colonialists cause cultural disruption, they also terminate tribal warfare and build schools, roads, and hospitals. Achebe reminds us that British imperialism, however culpable, was far more constructive than the African imperialism of the nineteenth-century Benin dynasty.

  Achebe writes with wit, humor, sharp realism, and imaginative empathy. His prose is refreshingly original, pungently spiced with translated idioms (“Unless the penis dies young it will surely eat bearded meat”), and coolly ironic. CW

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  1900s

  Three Trapped Tigers

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

  Lifespan | b. 1929 (Cuba), d. 2005 (Britain)

  First Published | 1964

  First Published by | Seix-Barral (Barcelona)

  Original Title | Tres tristes tigres

  This, Infante’s first novel, was awarded a prize in Spain in 1964 but was only published in 1967 after censorship; the complete version did not appear until 2005. Its defining title was a tongue-twister: a verbal display and an argumental hieroglyphic. It is the story of a ferocious melancholy fought with resourceful blows. But the protagonists are not the many people who wander through a leafy night, but their multiple voices. Translation tangles with the adventures of five friends (Cué, Códac, Silvestre, Eribó, and Bustrófedon) and the women they meet in the Havana of the 1950s, while change—loyal or deceptive—is the novel’s subject and its method.

  On the thread of a psychoanalytical session (a history of a singer of boleros and the nocturnal wanderings of two other characters), the book is constructed like a collage and a palimpsest, studded with written and oral monologues, stories that stand independently, and continuous open or hidden allusions to literature, music, and the cinema. The novel is a baroque literary display that enunciates its own poetry: ingenious wordplay, parodies of styles applied to historic events (such as the death of Trotsky), typographical experiments (pages in black, in white, or printed in mirror-image, with drawings). Three Trapped Tigers takes its genre toward a more complicated pattern, placing it in the avant-garde of the renewal of narrative fiction in the 1960s. DMG

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  1900s

  Sometimes a Great Notion

  Ken Kesey

  Lifespan | b. 1935 (U.S.), d. 2001

  First Published | 1964

  First Published by | Viking Press (New York)

  Movie Adaptation Released | 1971

  Ken Kesey’s second novel is a text that defines a period of twentieth-century U.S. history with originality, passion, and skill. Set in and around an Oregon logging camp, it explores the dynamics of one family, the Stampers, at odds with their town, at odds with their union, and—most of the time—at odds with each other. The tale revolves around the conflict between two brothers, Hank and Leland, two competing versions of manhood, played out in an environment redolent of the American frontier. Hank is big, brash, committed, and used to running the place, and the narrative begins with a conflict with the trade union. His younger half brother Leland then arrives, an East Coast college-educated dope smoker. Leland is unwilling to conform to Hank’s straightforward rough-and-ready notion of manhood, or to his family’s expectations. Kesey skillfully explores the dynamics of their relationship—their similarities, respect, and loyalty, and their destructive differences, particularly when competing in love. This is made all the more powerful as he switches between narrators, countering initial sympathies for Leland by showing the depths of Hank’s struggle for the family and his own peace of mind.

  An exploration of the American Dream and a fable of man pitted against nature, community, and big business, the novel is an important and unjustly neglected classic of American literature. MD

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  1900s

  The Passion According to G. H.

  Clarice Lispector

  Lifespan | b. 1920 (Ukraine), d. 1977 (Brazil)

  First Published | 1964

  First Published by | Editôra do Autor (Rio)

  Original Title | A paixão segundo G. H.

  Ukranian-born Clarice Lispector lived in Brazil and wrote in Portuguese, but this work took more than twenty years to be translated into English. The Passion According to G. H. could hardly be considered conventional. To describe it using the language of plot and characterization would make little sense; in fact, it reads more like an existential inquiry than a narrative. For this reason, it is also a text that calls for careful, thoughtful reading, one that challenges and invites its reader, posing and exploring some of the fundamental questions that more normally appear in the often dry prose of philosophers.

  The protagonist, known to us only as G. H. from the initials on her luggage, is propelled into a whirlpool of thoughts and emotions when she enters the room of her former maid, who has left a curious drawing on the wall. Further to the feelings that this evokes for G. H., there is an encounter with a dying cockroach, which becomes a central symbolic image around which the narrative sweepingly circles. Each chapter is beautifully linked through the repetition at the start of the previous section’s final line, and the writing has the feel of a deeply personal internal monologue, encompassing questions and disquisitions on love and living, on the role of the past, and that of the future. Addressed to a personalized and also mysteriously undefined “you,” this is a very intimate reading experience. JC

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  1900s

  Back to Oegstgeest

  Jan Wolkers

  Lifespan | b. 1925 (Netherlands)

  First Published | 1965

  First Published by | Meulenhoff (Amsterdam)

  Original Title | Terug naar Oegstgeest

  A major theme in Jan Wolkers’s works is sex. It serves not only as an escape, but also as a compensation for loneliness. Explicit sexual scenes are typical of his works and this characteristic has often drawn criticism. Other predominant themes are love of nature and criticism of religion.

  All Wolkers’s major themes converge in his autobiographical novel Back to Oegstgeest, which begins by describing his youth and first steps into the adult world. The narrator grows up in a family of ten children. The father is a strict Dutch Reformed Church grocery owner from the village of Oegstgeest; three times a day, he reads the Bible to his family. As a young man, the narrator has various jobs. Working as an animal keeper in a laboratory, he witnesses tests carried out by students on the animals. Later events are his brother’s death and his life during the Second World War. The narrator’s experiences with mortality coincide with his awakening sexuality and loss of faith.

  Despite the protagonist’s many setbacks and several horrific scenes, Back to Oegstgeest never condemns life. What makes the novel so captivating is the narrator’s almost dogged attempt to retrieve a bygone world. The result is an impressive and evocative portrait of the prewar era, including kettles, steam trains, swimsuits for men, and grocery shops, served with a Calvinistic dressing. JaM

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  1900s

  Closely Watched Trains

  Bohumil Hrabal

  Lifespan | b. 1914 (Moravia), d. 1997 (Czech Rep.)

  First Published | 1965, by Ceskoslovensky spisovatel (Prague)

  Original Title | Ostre sledované vlaky

  In Closely Watched Trains, Hrabal tells the story of Milos Hrma, a gauche young apprentice wo
rking at a railway station in Bohemia in 1945. The Second World War is grinding to an end, and Milos has just come back from an enforced sabbatical brought about by his slashing his wrists. A sensitive young man, Milos is preoccupied by his inability to consummate his love for his girlfriend, Masha.

  The novel describes the events of a day that will culminate in the acting out, by Milos and a colleague, of a plot intended to sabotage a passing German train. Despite his protagonist’s dislike of the Germans, Hrabal emphasizes the human as well as the warlike character of the German soldiers traveling through the town. Milos is surprised that two SS soldiers on a train look as though they could be poets or men of leisure. He then sees a wounded German soldier crying for the mother of his children and recognizes the threads that connect people, whether they are Czechs or Germans.

  The war, followed by the normalization of culture under Communist rule, meant that Hrabal, once a poet, was forty-nine before he had his first breakthrough as a writer of prose. Closely Watched Trains, told with a rare humor and humanity, is one of the finest examples of his craft. It was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1967 by Jirí Menzel. OR

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  1900s

  The River Between

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o

  Lifespan | b. 1938 (Kenya)

  First Published | 1965

  First Published by | Heinemann Education (Lon.)

  Original Language | English

  The River Between, Ngugi’s second novel, established his reputation as a major African writer. At one level, this is a simple love story set in the mid-colonial period, an African Romeo and Juliet in which two young people from opposing Gikuyu villages fall in love and attempt to transcend the ancient rift between their communities, with tragic results. On a more complex level, the novel engages with Kenya’s precolonial and colonial history. It depicts the slow but steady infiltration of the country by the British; the alienation of local people from their land; the negative effects of Christian mission on local power structures, rituals, and relationships; and the deep disunity between different African factions that preceded the anticolonial struggle of the 1950s.

  Centrally, the novel engages in the debate about female circumcision and reconciling this practice with Christian and European ones. Circumcision comes to symbolize Gikuyu cultural purity and anticolonial resistance to such an extent that the “unclean” status of the young heroine, Nyambura, seals the lovers’ fate. In spite of its tragic consequences, circumcision is shown to be an important element of Kenyan national identity, a vital ritual in the face of colonial incursions and an increasingly absolute Christian education system. In describing the mythological origins of the Gikuyu people, and in setting his story in Kenyan hills as yet untouched by colonialism, Ngugi works to preserve African cultural differences within the English-language novel. SN

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  1900s

  Garden, Ashes

  Danilo Kis

  Lifespan | b. 1935 (Serbia), d. 1989 (France)

  First Published | 1965

  First Published by | Prosveta (Belgrade)

  Original Title | Basta, pepeo

  “In her passionate brush with death, she had come to know the secret of everlasting life.”

  Garden, Ashes is a remarkable portrayal of a middle-class Hungarian family during the Second World War. Seen through the eyes of the youngest son, Andi Scham, the story is focused on Andi’s Jewish father, Eduard, as the family travels through Europe in order to escape persecution. A deeply eccentric and flamboyant character, Eduard is captivating and enigmatic, but also plagued by alcoholism and bouts of depression. As he becomes obsessed with the completion of his book, the third edition of the Bus, Ship, Rail, and Air Travel Guide, his behavior becomes increasingly erratic. It is not clear whether the cause is the burden of war, the pressures of their bizarre transient existence, or genuine madness.

  Danilo Kis’s dense and poetic prose is rich in detail as he explores Andi’s childhood recollections. The narrative contains such intense and powerful evocations of childhood that often the story seems to slip into lyrical verse. But Eduard eventually disappears, and it is assumed that he has been despatched to a concentration camp.

  Garden, Ashes, Kis’s first novel, is a semi-autobiographical work—his own father was a Hungarian Jew who died at Auschwitz in 1944 when Kis was a child. However, the novel is not merely an account of the Second World War as a whole or of the Holocaust: its appeal is more universal. Auschwitz and concentration camps, incomprehensible to the young Andi, are never mentioned. The exhilaration and wonder of Andi’s childhood experiences, although overshadowed by poverty and war, are far more vivid to him, and to us, than the family’s wartime struggle. Garden, Ashes is a poignant story about a family living on the periphery of war, and a child’s attempt to understand the world around him and to cope with the loss of his father. RA

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  1900s

  Everything That Rises Must Converge

  Flannery O’Connor

  Lifespan | b. 1925 (U.S.), d. 1964

  First Published | 1965

  First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (N.Y.)

  Full Name | Mary Flannery O’Connor

  “The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure coming towards him.”

  Like the sweet rot of fallen magnolia blooms, volatile notions of class and color, generational schisms, and convictions of belief permeate these stories, which rise from a time when the genteel South still tenuously hung onto outdated conventions and prejudices. This is a Manichean world full of grotesques and eruptions of unexpected cruelty. Characters rise and converge, through civil rights and through religious clarity. With the rising comes knowledge, but with the convergence comes collision—with old ideas, unexamined self-images, and the harsh light of truth. These are stories of dangerous epiphanies; sometimes finding grace is not a pleasant thing. And sometimes to find God you have to take a bullet in the chest, get thrashed with a broom, or get gored through the heart by a bull.

  In one story, on a newly integrated bus, Julian, educated and stricken with class guilt, takes his mother to her slimming class at the “Y.” She is mired in tradition and prejudice, and tension mounts when a black woman, with her own son, boards wearing the same new hat. Julian is so blinded by rage when his mother gives the black boy a penny that he cannot see her tragic chastening. In another story, Mrs. Turpin, self-righteous and superior, believes “it’s one thing to be ugly and another to act ugly” and falls asleep at night by naming the classes of people. When she is throttled by a woman in a doctor’s waiting room, she must contend with the idea that revelations can crumble the safety of the world.

  Flannery O’Connor is, in turn, funny, trenchant, and brutal. The ignorant are punished; the well-intentioned even more so because of their insufficient strength to act. Her genius lies in writing profoundly moral stories where it is up to the reader to decide between right and wrong. GT

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  1900s

  Things

  Georges Perec

  Lifespan | b. 1936 (France), d. 1982

  First Published | 1965, by Julliard (Paris)

  Original Title | Les Choses: Une Histoire des années soixante

  Already the author of four unfinished and rejected novels when he erupted onto the literary scene in 1965, Georges Perec won the Renaudot prize for Things: A Story of the Sixties, his first published novel. The book recounts the intellectual decline of a young and likable couple of sociologists, Jerôme and Sylvie. Their search for happiness, promoted and stimulated by an affluent society, imperceptibly transforms them into a frustrated and resigned middle-class couple.

  The story shocked the public, who saw in the novel a purely sociological representation of the so-called “consumer” society—not an appropriate subject for a work of literature. By his own admission, Perec wanted to describe the evolution of his own s
ocial milieu—that of the students who had fiercely opposed France’s vicious war with Algeria and had become disillusioned and indifferent to politics by the war’s end. He also wanted to bring literary theorist Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), in which Barthes used semiological concepts in the analysis of myths and signs in contemporary culture, to bear on his writing.

  The unusual character of Things is due in great part to the coldness of the narrator-witness, who refuses to criticize, to judge, and to interpret the attitude of the protagonists. He merely records the things that they covet and accumulate in their apartment, describing them like “signs” or “images,” by means of advertising formulas. JD

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  1900s

  In Cold Blood

  Truman Capote

  Lifespan | b. 1924 (U.S.), d. 1984