1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 69
First Published | 1966
First Published by | Random House (New York)
Full Name | Truman Streckfus Persons
A window display set up by Random House, Capote’s publisher, in 1966 reflects the scale of the media interest his book aroused.
Capote’s most famous work is a pioneering example of both the “nonfiction novel” and the modern “true crime” story. It retells the story of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas by a pair of drifting misfits, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, and of the subsequent trial and execution of the killers. Capote also uses the polarities of this particular case as the starting point for a larger examination of the values of late 1950s and early 1960s America; the respectable Clutters are so wholesomely all-American that they could almost have been invented, while Smith and Hickock come over as brutal real life versions of the James Dean “rebel” culture. The world of the victims is painstakingly and sympathetically reconstructed, but Capote’s real interest is in the emotional lives of Perry and Dick, and what might have led them into such murderous excess. Indeed, some argue that Capote was so fascinated by Perry Smith because he saw in him a possible alternative version of himself. Given that Capote wrote about the crime throughout the trial, it has even been suggested that the final verdicts were conditioned by the way in which his journalism had portrayed the killers. In this light, In Cold Blood offers a larger, more disturbing insight. Like Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979), it embodies a debate about fact, fiction, and the overlaps and differences between their ethical responsibilities. BT
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Death and the Dervish
Mesa Selimovic
Lifespan | b. 1910 (Bosnia), d. 1982 (Serbia)
First Published | 1966
First Published by | Svjetlost (Sarajevo)
Original Title | Dervis i smrt
Sheikh Ahmed Nuruddin is a dervish (an Islamic ascetic) in Ottoman-occupied Bosnia. He has lived most of his life in religious seclusion and it is his internal monologue that makes up a great deal of Mesa Selimovic’s epic novel. Ahmed’s deliberate avoidance of the turmoil of everyday life is put to an end by the arrest and subsequent death of his brother toward the beginning of the novel. This death leads him to question previous certainties and brings him into conflict with the local authorities. He becomes part of the political system himself and, unable to act decisively, comes to an unhappy end.
Death and the Dervish contains little dialog and Selimovic tells his seemingly sparse story through the voice of the highly introspective Ahmed. Occasionally exasperating, Ahmed is thankfully supported by a delightfully eccentric cast of supporting characters, including his friend Hassan, the family oddball who also happens to be in love with a Dalmatian Christian.
Selimovic, whose written Serbo-Croat greatly influenced today’s Bosnian standard language, poured a great deal of the turmoil he felt over his own brother’s death into the novel. While he also drew on the political events of his day in his work, Death and the Dervish is an invocation of another time that, in its Kafkaesque portrayal of a man sucked in and destroyed by a repressive system, addresses universal themes that go beyond Selimovic’s troubled homeland. OR
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Silence
Shusaku Endo
Lifespan | b. 1923 (Japan), d. 1996
First Published | 1966
First Published by | Kodansha (Tokyo)
Original Title | Chimmoku
Novelist Shusaku Endo was a cultural oddity: a Japanese Catholic. Influenced by European Catholic novelists such as Graham Greene and Georges Bernanos, his work expresses an anguished faith on the edge of disbelief, as well as a horror at the dark thread of cruelty running through Japanese history.
Silence, set in the early seventeenth century, is widely acknowledged as Endo’s masterpiece. The Japanese shogunate has embarked on the ruthless extirpation of Christianity by torture and massacre. News reaches the Vatican that a highly respected Jesuit missionary, Father Ferreira, has renounced the faith under duress. Portuguese priest Sebastian Rodrigues, who regards Ferreira as his spiritual mentor, is sent to Japan to contact him. It is a risky mission that soon goes awry. Betrayed to the authorities by the Judas-like Kichijiro, Rodrigues is imprisoned and tortured. To save himself he must symbolically renounce his faith by treading on an image of Christ. When he refuses, the authorities begin martyring other Christians in front of his eyes. Rodrigues eventually meets Ferreira, who urges him to make an act of apparent apostasy.
The spare and dramatic narrative unfolds with stark power the horrors of persecution and the bitterness of the priest’s dilemma. In Rodrigues, Endo succeeds in depicting a good man who is wholly credible and likeable, embodying the author’s vision of a Christianity focussed on the suffering of Jesus rather than his glory. RegG
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To Each His Own
Leonardo Sciascia
Lifespan | b. 1921 (Sicily), d. 1989
First Published | 1966, by Adelphi Edizioni (Milan)
Alternate Title | A Man’s Blessing
Original Title | A ciascuno il suo
“To get involved in politics was a waste of time; if you didn’t know that much, either you found politicking profitable or you’d been born blind.”
Leonardo Sciascia grew up in Sicily under the influence of Fascism. Beginning his career as a schoolteacher, he later became one of Italy’s most controversial politicians and eventually a Radical Party MP in the Italian and European Parliaments. A love of his homeland and loathing of organized crime and political corruption would become driving inspirational forces in his writings.
In To Each His Own, a small-town chemist named Manno receives a death threat in the mail and, writing it off as a joke, is subsequently murdered together with his hunting companion, Dr. Roscio. The investigation focuses on Manno’s death, with Dr. Roscio being declared an innocent bystander. Professor Laurana, a local schoolteacher, sets out to solve the mystery after coming across a disregarded clue. His investigation begins to bear fruit but his findings prove problematic. In a twist of fate, it turns out to be the chemist who was the unlucky bystander and Roscio who becomes the center of Laurana’s investigation. With a skillful eye and a bit of cunning, Laurana persistently and systematically breaks down and unravels a network of erotic deception and skillful political calculation.
A detective story that seeks to understand the psychological grip and far-reaching influences of the never mentioned but always implied Cosa Nostra, or Mafia, To Each His Own is also a poignant critique of a society steeped in a tradition of silence and fueled by lies, complicity, and bloodshed. SMu
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The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon
Lifespan | b. 1937 (U.S.)
First Published | 1966
First Published by | Lippincott (Philadelphia)
Rosenthal Foundation Award | 1966
“The reality is in this head. Mine.”
Joyously brief compared with the rather too-drawn-out literary pyrotechnics of Pynchon’s longer novels, this is the postmodernist’s perfect thriller, guaranteed to fox the literal-minded sleuth, while deliciously deft with its play of possible interpretations. Where many sophisticated novels resist plot summary because plot is an entirely secondary concern, this confection weaves a rich tapestry of narrative threads.
As befits a novel with a protagonist called Oedipa, this box of puzzles wears its enigmas with the smile of a sphinx. Set somewhere approximating California, the book’s names work both as clues and as a comedy of connotations. From bands called Sick Dick and the Volkswagens to a cast of characters that includes Mike Fallopian, Dr. Hilarius, Genghis Cohen, and Professor Emory Bortz, Pynchon strains the limits of literary invention. The names mirror the larger structure of narrative gaming, interweavin
g conspiracy theories, more structural social critique, and doses of slapstick, including spoof mop-top popsters, The Paranoids, and a pastiche Jacobean revenge tragedy. Pynchon’s spoofs are researched to within an inch of plausibility. The Paranoids’ lyrics, for example, are sufficiently convincing that the group begins to take on an imaginary existence as lifelike as that of their nonfictional prototypes. Oscillations between ideological absurdity and mediated superficiality sketch out a wasteland of seemingly empty but wildly proliferating signs, and the story careers from thought experiments to anarchist miracles.
As well as providing the idle dullness of stamp collectors with a most intriguing rationale, there is an almost Borgesian history of the modern world. The blueprint for a generation of clever-clever novels that combine highbrow and pop cultural sensibilities, this is the one with which to start. DM
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Giles Goat-Boy
John Barth
Lifespan | b. 1930 (U.S.)
First Published | 1966, by Doubleday (New York)
Full Title | Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus
“George is my name; my deeds have been heard of . . .”
Giles Goat-Boy opens with various publishers’ written qualms (charting their various deteriorating mental states) and a faux cover letter that was attached to this orphan—if not feral—manuscript. Publishing is just one of the many targets for Barth’s vitriolic comic genius; others are technology, sexual mores, jingoism, and the idea of the noble savage. It is giddy and profane, a ribald tilt-a-whirl packed tight with wit as dry as the academic density that it mocks.
The story concerns the journey of Billy Bockfuss, saved as a baby from the belly of a supercomputer and raised at the teat of a goat. With the turbulence of adolescence Billy grows ambivalent, not wanting to leave his beautiful goathood to become an uncertain, hairy-in-all-the-wrong-places human being. But the ewes are unresponsive, and his needs are as relentless as spring. He adopts life as a human, first as George the Undergraduate and finally as the messianic George the Heroic Grand Tutor, savior of New Tammany College. In a retelling, rife with odd usages and neologisms, of the myths and legends of humanity—from the New Testament to Cold War internecine politics—the entire language is corrupted, transmuted, a patois of academic terminology becoming the lingua franca. The campus becomes a microcosm of the world: the East Campus is the Soviet Union, the Great Founder is God Almighty, copulation is commencement exercise, and Enos Enoch is Jesus Christ. Academic verbiage is used as everyday colloquialisms; “flunk” is a multi purpose vulgarity (as in “flunk it” or “this flunking gate”).
In Barth’s hands the story becomes a living thing, like electricity. It is both a satire and a celebration of language, with phrases like succulent nuggets of hard candy: rich, delicious, to be savored. It is doubtful that it is like anything you have read before. GT
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Marks of Identity
Juan Goytisolo
Lifespan | b. 1931 (Spain)
First Published | 1966
First Published by | Joaquín Mortiz (Mexico City)
Original Title | Señas de identidad
“. . . we are made of stone and we will remain stone why do you blindly seek disaster forget about us and we will forget about you your birth was a mistake bear with it”
Three despairing thoughts open this novel: one by Quevedo (“Yesterday has gone, tomorrow has not yet come”), another by Larry, and a final one by Cernuda (“better yet, destruction, fire,” which almost became the title of the novel). The main character, Álvaro Mendiola, who is Spanish, bourgeois, and anti-Franco, recounts his life as he finishes a bottle of Fefiñanes wine (it is summer and he is in the garden of his family house). Through his memory pass his childhood recollections of the civil war, his anti-Franco militancy, the Spanish resistance fighters whom he met in his exile in France, his experiences in the Cuban revolution (greatly cut in later editions, after the author’s break with Castro), his eventful romantic life and its many breakups, his discovery of homosexuality, and his search for what little remained of the rebellious spirit in 1970s Spain.
Mendiola’s interior monologue and sarcastic outbursts, the author’s use of second-person narrative as an objectification of moral self-awareness, and even—in the final pages—the fluency of the poem in free verse all form a profound puzzle for the reader. The novel began a trilogy that continued with Count Julian (1970) and Juan the Landless (1975). Banned in Spain, Marks of Identity became the bible of a generation and a symbol of the author’s break with the traditional, Catholic, repressive idea of his country. Applied to the need to know about the hidden past, its title became emblematic of Spain’s political transition. JCM
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The Vice-Consul
Marguerite Duras
Lifespan | b. 1914 (Vietnam), d. 1996 (France)
First Published | 1966
First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Title | Le Vice-Consul
The Vice-Consul might be categorized as a nouveau roman, in that it rejects conventions of realist fiction, such as morality and psychology, in favor of the visual description of action. Two stories emerge. The first depicts the solitary journey of a young Vietnamese peasant girl, who is turned out of her home by her mother when she becomes pregnant. The second revolves around several figures associated with the French Embassy in Calcutta, most notably the Vice-Consul of Lahore. The Vice-Consul creates a scandal that preoccupies the French diplomatic community when he fires gunshots indiscriminately at lepers and dogs living in the Shalimar gardens. He also falls in love with Anne-Marie Stretter, the Ambassador’s enigmatic, promiscuous wife.
Duras’s minimalist style handles issues of love, sexual desire, jealousy, motherhood, hunger, violence, waiting, and boredom with beautiful and exceptional subtlety. Through the story of the Vice-Consul’s scandalous shooting, she explores the effects of confronting human suffering, illness, and poverty in a way that exposes rational reaction as highly suspect and even fraudulent. One of the most fascinating aspects of this novel is the texture and layering of its narrative voice. The novel’s structure places the reader in a disturbing position, inspiring consideration of questions such as “Who is writing?” and “Whose story are we reading?” Duras ensures that we do not forget that we are experiencing a literary construct and not a representation of reality. PMB
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The Magus
John Fowles
Lifespan | b. 1926 (England), d. 2005
First Published | 1966
First Published by | Little, Brown & Co. (Boston)
Revised Edition | 1977
The Magus, although not John Fowles’s first published work, was in fact his first novel, begun in the 1950s. An absorbing book, redolent with the atmosphere of a gray, decaying London and a resplendent Greece, it charts the stage-managed masque both endured and enjoyed by the novel’s protagonist, Nicholas Urfe. Nicholas is, in many ways, a fundamentally unlikable character. A middle-class English everyman of the postwar period, he is self-absorbed, naïve, and a sexual predator. Yet it is impossible not to empathize with both his humanity and the extraordinary ordeal he undergoes. Indeed, the events surrounding his encounters with Conchis and the beautiful twins are as compelling and intoxicating for the reader as they are for Nicholas himself.
The novel is steeped in Jungian ideas about the psychological. The overall effect is powerful, but ambiguous, interrogating ideas of freedom, absolute power, and knowledge, as well as the concept and experience of love. It does not seek to provide an answer to the questions it raises, and as such it is both exhilirating and disturbing, as well as frustrating at times. Yet the book’s engagement with humanity’s longing for transcen dence in both life and art is fascinating.
Fowles’s foreword to
the revised edition (1977) speaks of his uncomfortable relationship with the text, which he feels to be deeply flawed. In this debate it is impossible not to side with the readers who have given The Magus its lasting popularity. DR
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The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Lifespan | b. 1891 (Ukraine), d. 1940 (Russia)
First Published | 1966, in Moskva journal
First Published (Book) by | YMCA Press (Paris)
Original Title | Master i Margarita
In 1966, almost thirty years after the author’s death, the magazine Moskva published the first part of The Master and Margarita in its November issue. The book had circulated underground before surfacing into the public arena. Had it been discovered during Bulgakov’s lifetime, the author would probably have “disappeared” like so many others—despite the dubious honor of being named as Stalin’s favorite playwright for a short period. The Master and Margarita has survived against the odds and is now recognized as one of the finest achievements in twentieth-century Russian fiction. Sentences from the novel have become proverbs in Russian: “Manuscripts don’t burn” and “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices” are words with a special resonance for the generations who endured Soviet totalitarianism’s worst excesses. Its influence can be detected further afield—from Latin American magic realism to Rushdie, Pynchon, and even the Rolling Stones (“Sympathy for the Devil” is said to be inspired by Bulgakov).