1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  The novel is composed of two distinct but interconnected narratives. One is set in modern Moscow; the other in ancient Jerusalem. Into these Bulgakov inserts a cast of strange and otherworldly characters that includes Woland (Satan) and his demonic entourage, an unnamed writer known as “the master,” and his adulterous lover, Margarita. Each is a complex, morally ambiguous figure whose motivations fluctuate as the tale twists and turns in unexpected directions. The novel pulsates with mischievous energy and invention. By turns a searing satire of Soviet life, a religious allegory to rival Goethe’s Faust, and an untamed burlesque fantasy, this is a novel of laughter and terror, of freedom and bondage—a novel that blasts open “official truths” with the force of a carnival out of control. SamT

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  1900s

  Wide Sargasso Sea

  Jean Rhys

  Lifespan | b. 1890 (Dominica), d. 1979 (England)

  First Published | 1966

  First Published by | Andre Deutsche (London)

  WH Smith Literary Award | 1967

  Wide Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhys’s literary response to Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre. Rhys takes as her starting point Brontë’s animalistic, sexualized depiction of Bertha Mason, Edward Rochester’s dangerously insane first wife. In rewriting this literary classic, Rhys allows Antoinette to speak (Bertha is revealed as Rochester’s imposed name for his wife) and also explores the uneven desires and fears that have dominated relationships between the Caribbean and Europe. The novel is divided into three parts: in the first, Antoinette gives an account of her unhappy childhood; in the second, Rochester describes his uneasy first marriage; and in the third, we are witness to the confused dreams and thoughts of Antoinette after she has been imprisoned in England. This structure allows Rhys to make explicit connections between the story of Jane Eyre and the violent colonial history underpinning it.

  Rhys sets the events in the novel against slavery’s ending in the Caribbean and positions Antoinette—whose mother was from Martinique—between the black and European communities. Her vulnerability is used by Rhys to explore the colonial relations identity that Brontë could only imply. The doomed arranged marriage between Antoinette and Rochester is sexually charged and yet profoundly precarious because of the incomprehension and mistrust that both bring to it. In this parallel narrative, Antoinette is no longer merely an insanely vengeful wife, but a tragic victim of a complex historical moment. NM

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  1900s

  The Third Policeman

  Flann O’Brien

  Lifespan | b. 1911 (Ireland), d. 1966

  First Published | 1967

  First Published by | MacGibbon & Kee (London)

  Given Name | Brian O’Nolan

  There is a fascination with the bicycle in the Irish experimental novel. Flann O’Brien’s comic masterpiece The Third Policeman, written in 1940 but unpublished until 1967, treats the bicycle with an obsessive philosophical interest, at once absurd and hilariously plausible. The story starts off in a humdrum world of Irish pubs, farms, and petty ambitions. Following a brutal murder, this realist beginning unravels, and the first-person narrator wanders into a two-dimensional, perplexing, and incomprehensible world. He shows up at a bizarre police barracks, where he finds the two policemen, MacCruiskeen and Pluck, and is introduced to “Atomic Theory” and its relation to bicycles. The title’s third policeman, Sergeant Fox, bears a striking similarity to the man the narrator has killed and operates the machinery that generates “eternity” which, it turns out, is just down the road. The narrator’s obsession throughout is with fictitious philosopher De Selby, who is a skeptic about all known laws of physics. His eccentric ideas on the delusory nature of time and space are repeatedly footnoted in a wonderful parody of academic scholarship and intellectual pretension. It places the novel in a distinctly Irish strain of comic writing associated with the likes of Jonathan Swift, in which po-faced scholasticism and internally plausible reasoning lead to bizarre conclusions. For first-time readers, the surprise ending casts events in this delightfully weird but deeply intelligent novel in a wholly new light. RM

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  1900s

  Miramar

  Naguib Mahfouz

  Lifespan | b. 1911 (Egypt), d. 2006

  First Published | 1967

  First Published by | Maktabat Misr (Cairo)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1988

  The cover of a 1993 English edition of Mahfouz’s novel stresses the Nobel Prize that belatedly won him a Western readership.

  “‘The Revolution has stolen the property of a few and the liberty of all.’”

  Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar portrays a slice of Egyptian life in the immediate aftermath of the army coup of July 1952. “The Revolution” is one of the main characters of the novel; encountering it changes people’s lives, and makes or unmakes their fortunes. The action is set around a pension called “Miramar” on the Alexandrian seafront—the lodgers belong to different social classes and generations, and espouse disparate ideologies reflecting the hybridity and diversity of Egyptian identity.

  The plot of the novel transpires through the characters’ monologues, which shift between past and present to furnish us with the histories of both the narrators and their communities. Details accumulate to build the narrative and solve the riddle of the death of Sarhan El-Beheiry, the symbol of the hope and promise of the Revolution. Mahfouz’s portrayal deviates from the officially sanctioned narrative of a post-Revolutionary Egypt enjoying the fruits of liberty, equality, and stability. He delineates a society terrified of “Uniforms,” of arbitrary arrests and detentions, of sudden confiscations and random sequestration.

  One of Miramar’s greatest achievements is its depiction of the emergent attitudes to gender, class, politics, and religion in a turbulent period of Egypt’s history—attitudes that have evolved to shape the social and political realities of today. It offers a penetrating, albeit bleak, view of the rich and complex tapestry of Egyptian society. JH

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  1900s

  Z

  Vassilis Vassilikos

  Lifespan | b. 1934 (Greece)

  First Published | 1967

  First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)

  Movie Adaptation Released | 1969

  “In writing Z I wanted to show, more than the precise case of Z, the mechanism of political crime in our time.”

  Vassilis Vassilikos, 1967

  Part All The President’s Men, part JFK, part Missing, this political thriller combines investigative reporting with a hard-hitting exposé of the 1960s Greek military junta. Vassilikos pulls no punches in showing how the corrupt regime orchestrated the assassination of a popular Greek left-wing politician named Gregoris Lambrakis. He was a hero to a voiceless people, but the right wing saw him as pro-Communist and an anti-American troublemaker. He was assassinated on a Salonika street in 1963 and 400,000 came to the funeral in silent protest. Very soon after that, “Z”—zei meaning he lives—was seen scrawled everywhere in Athens.

  In this thinly veiled fictionalized account (the names are changed) the author retraces the few seconds surrounding a politician’s suspicious death after allegedly being run over in a hit-and-run accident. Through his study of the investigative documents of the time and his understanding of his native Salonika, where the murder takes place, Vassilikos uncovers a crudely sanctioned plot involving a drive-by beating up by hired thugs in plain view of the police and civilian spectators. What emerges through the pages of this absorbing novel is the bravery of ordinary people cowered by a brutal dictatorship that routinely resorts to a network of corruption, illegality, and violence to silence dissent. Vassilikos went on to co-write the Oscar-winning movie directed by Costa-Gavras—as riveting now as when it first came out in 1969. JHa

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  1900s

  Pilgrimage

&nb
sp; Dorothy Richardson

  Lifespan | b. 1873 (England), d. 1957

  First Published | 1967

  First Published by | J. M. Dent & Sons (London)

  Published Separately | 1915–1938

  Pilgrimage was Dorothy Richardson’s life work, in many senses of the term. Its thirteen volumes recount the experiences of the years between 1891 and 1912 through the consciousness of her autobiographical/fictional persona, Miriam Henderson. It opens with the seventeen-year-old Miriam on the eve of her departure to Germany, where she will work as a pupil-teacher; her middle-class family’s financial losses, like those of her creator, plunge her into the world of work. In the central volumes of the series, Miriam is in London, living on a pound a week, a “New Woman” embracing the intellectual and personal freedoms of the city and the new century. The later volumes take Miriam out of London and into rural existence, as she pursues her journey and the “adventure” of the questing, and writing, self.

  When she began to write Pilgrimage in 1913, at the age of forty, Richardson understood that, at the center of her novel, her heroine must be alone in her narration. Miriam’s consciousness is all we have, though the narrative moves between third- and first-person narration, and as readers we are fully immersed in the world she touches, feels, hears, and sees. The publication of the collected volumes by Dent did not persuade Richardson that Pilgrimage was complete. It was a project, perhaps, that could not be brought to a conclusion. As she was to write of the work: “To go ahead investigating, rather than describing, was what seemed to me from the first minute must be done.” LM

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  1900s

  The Manor

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Lifespan | b. 1904 (Poland), d. 1991 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1967

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

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1978

  A historical saga (complete with a sequel, The Estate), The Manor chronicles the trials of a Polish merchant and his family “on the way up” in the late nineteenth century. Singer introduces his shrewd Jew, Calman Jacoby, a trader in wheat who is left in charge of the “manor” of the title—a former Polish count’s estate confiscated by the czar after the unsuccessful Polish Rebellion of 1863. Jacoby prospers at a time when Jews were beginning to play an active role in Polish industry, business, arts, and society. Jacoby’s dilemma is how to take the social opportunities brought by industrial revolution, urbanization, and entrepreneurship while staying faithful to deeply engrained Jewish customs and religious rituals.

  The spiritual and the social do not sit comfortably together for Calman in this modernizing milieu, especially when it comes to the social standing expected by his wife, Zelda, and the need to get their four daughters wedded. Marriage and dowry are everything—“One’s own children were born of pain, but grandchildren were sheer profit”—but his daughters’ marriages are not straightforward and Calman is caught up in many experiences that pull him between the strictures of Judaism and the attractions of Mammon.

  Written in 1953–55, in Yiddish, as with most of Singer’s novels it was first serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward on which he worked as journalist (with his novelist brother Israel) after emigrating to the United States from Warsaw in 1935. JHa

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  1900s

  One Hundred Years of Solitude

  Gabriel García Márquez

  Lifespan | b. 1928 (Colombia)

  First Published | 1967, by Sudamericana (B. Aires)

  Original Title | Cien años de soledad

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1982

  This rare hardcover edition evokes the forest around Macondo, in which a galleon is found in the novel’s early pages.

  “‘The farce is over, old friend’”

  Widely acknowledged as Gabriel García Márquez’s finest work, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the fictional Colombian town Macondo and the rise and fall of its founders, the Buendía family. Revealed through intriguing temporal folds, characters inherit the names and dispositions of their family, unfolding patterns that double and recur. The mighty José Arcadio Buendía goes from intrepid, charismatic founder of Macondo to a madman on its fringes. Macondo fights off plagues of insomnia, war, and rain. Mysteries are spun out of almost nothing. This beguilingly colorful saga also works out a wider social and political allegory—sometimes too surreal to be plausible, at times more real than any conventional realism could afford. An exemplification of so-called magic realism, this allegorical texture incorporates a sense of the strange, fantastic, or incredible. Perhaps the key sociopolitical example is the apparent massacre by the army of several thousand striking workers whose dead bodies seem to have been loaded into freight trains before being dumped in the sea. Against the smoke screen of the official version, the massacre becomes a nightmare lost in the fog of martial law. The disappeared’s true history takes on a reality stranger than any conventional fiction, demanding fiction for the truth to be told. While the novel can be read as an alternative, unofficial history, the inventive story telling brings to the foreground sensuality, love, intimacy, and different varieties of privation. Imagine the wit and mystery of the Arabian Nights and Don Quixote told by a narrator capable of metamorphosing from Hardy into Kafka and back in the course of a paragraph. García Márquez may have spawned clumsy imitations whose too clever inventions merely tire, but this is a strange and moving account of solitude. DM

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  1900s

  No Laughing Matter

  Angus Wilson

  Lifespan | b. 1913 (England), d. 1991

  First Published | 1967

  First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)

  Original Language | English

  When Angus Wilson submitted No Laughing Matter to his publishers, they were sufficiently bemused for him to send a thematic synopsis to guide them through a second reading. At first, the outline’s territory would have been familiar even to Jane Austen: according to Wilson, the book is the story of “three brothers and three sisters” from a “shabby genteel . . . middle-class family.” By its end, however, Wilson’s summary has name-checked Guernica, Hitler, Stalin, the Suez crisis, Look Back in Anger, Kandinsky, Ben Hur, and the challenges of providing honorably for an extended household of same-sex Moroccan lovers.

  Clearly, this is not a conventional family saga. The book’s scale can be inferred from the list of “Principal Players,” “Supporting Roles,” and “Additional Cast” with which it is prefaced. Yet one of its joys is its evocation of the ties and rivalries of the Matthews family; Wilson dramatizes a century of change without sacrificing his fine observations of class, gender, and sexuality. More than that, the Matthews family is the twentieth century, as experienced by middle-class Britons adjusting to the loss of empire. In retrospect, the book can be seen as both the high point of the traditional family-based English novel and the beginning of magic realism. Mixing naturalism, hyperrealism, and fantasy, it is a missing link in British fiction, connecting Alan Hollinghurst to Jane Austen and E. M. Forster. VQ

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  1900s

  Day of the Dolphin

  Robert Merle

  Lifespan | b. 1908 (Algeria), d. 2004 (France)

  First Published | 1967

  First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)

  Original Title | Un animal doué de raison

  In this thriller, morality, justice, and even humanity appear to have deserted most of the characters. Set in the United States in the early 1970s, the combined effects of the Vietnam War, modern technological developments, and an arms race spiraling out of control have left the government and security services a cynical and weary elite.

  At the center of this corruption Robert Merle places Professor Sevilla, a marine biologist, who is looking into the possibilities of communication between humans and dolphins. It is in the
animal innocence of the dolphins that Merle locates the remaining way forward for a hopelessly corrupt world. Attempting to communicate with Ivan the dolphin and his mate, Bessie, Sevilla is reminded of altruism, hope, and love by what Merle ironically terms “the humanity of the dolphins.” Inevitably, however, the idyll is threatened when both sides of the Cold War begin to view the dolphin as useful as an “un-detectable submarine and an intelligent torpedo.”

  Combining the creativity of science fiction with the suspense of a perfectly crafted spy novel, Day of the Dolphin poses some deep questions about the human capability for good and evil. Fascinating, at times disturbing, and overall deeply moving, Merle’s novel encourages us to question the assumptions behind not only political decisions but the conventional thriller as well. AB

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  1900s

  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

  Tom Wolfe

  Lifespan | b. 1931 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1968

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

  Full Name | Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr.