1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  “. . . the usual in the head world of San Francisco, just a little routine messing up the minds of the citizenry . . .”

  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is one of the most notable works of the American “New Journalism”—which, in the writing of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion, creatively blurs the boundaries between the techniques of fiction and those of journalistic reporting. In his account of novelist Ken Kesey and his roving band of political performance artists, the Merry Pranksters, Wolfe tries, as he claims, “to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality” of the experience. As the Pranksters’ bus travels around, leaving a trail of LSD trips and improvised “happenings” in its wake, Wolfe’s book unfolds like a verbal pop art painting. It offers an extraordinary verbal collage of the Pranksters’ world, taking in hippie slang, comic book impressionism, and cinematic jump cuts. Wolfe’s style bends and skews to fit itself to the contours of how it might have felt to “be there” with them, making it a necessary document of the rise and eventual fall of a particular era and mentality. Hell’s Angels, Thompson’s more historically accurate account of the same events, offers a sobering counterweight.

  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test hangs together so well stylistically that one cannot always tell where history ends and Wolfe’s journalistic riffs begin. It is an exhilarating and exhausting experience, but, like the movie of Woodstock, it cannot define its times, only respond to them. BT

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  1900s

  Eva Trout

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Lifespan | b. 1899 (Ireland), d. 1973

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | A. Knopf (New York)

  First UK Edition | 1969, by Jonathan Cape (London)

  Eva Trout is Bowen’s final and, in some ways, most demanding masterpiece. It shares with her earlier great works the brilliantly funny and disquieting incisiveness of her descriptions of people and places, feelings and ideas, love and loss, but it moves out to weird new depths. It is a marvelously fishy book. In some ways, apparently still inhabiting the social ambience and language of earlier decades, it is also one of the most remarkable, elusive, and yet strangely representative literary works of the 1960s.

  Eva Trout tells the story of an improbably large or “outsize” young woman who inherits enough money to do virtually anything. The protagonist somehow acquires a child in the United States, a deaf and mute boy called Jeremy, and back in England falls in love with Henry, a Cambridge undergraduate a good deal younger than herself. In a surreal, compelling finale at Victoria Station, about to depart for a fake wedding and honeymoon with Henry, she is shot dead by Jeremy. A sense of anarchic possibility affects everything, including Bowen’s syntax: you often can hardly guess where or how a sentence is going to land. There is a profound impression of diffusion and seeking new, multiple channels of feeling and communication. Eva Trout casts bizarre, fascinating, and comical reflections on the sense that, as a character remarks, “Life is an anti-novel.” NWor

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  1900s

  The Cathedral

  Oles Honchar

  Lifespan | b. 1918 (Russia)

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | Harper & Row (New York)

  Original Title | Sobor

  Oles Honchar’s The Cathedral is a key work of the Ukrainian literary movement of the 1960s, which challenged the norms of “socialist realism,” both in the artistry of its work and in its focus on the historic and cultural heritage of Ukraine.

  The story is set in a town on the Dnieper river, the location of a Soviet-style heavy metallurgical works but still redolent of its independent Ukrainian Cossack history. This past is symbolized by a derelict cathedral built by a group of Cossacks-turned-monks in the eighteenth century. The cathedral is being used as a grain store, and the authorities are proposing to demolish it and replace it with a market hall. To the protagonist of the story, Mykola, a student of metallurgy, the cathedral sums up the spiritual values ignored by the Soviet worldview. As the threat to the cathedral increases, the townspeople become aware of the personal significance it has for each of them. The dispute over whether to destroy or preserve it becomes an allegory of the struggle between historical identity and the ideologues’ vision of a “Soviet person.”

  The novel is, however, far more than allegory, and more than a brilliant portrayal of a town in the grim Soviet era—almost devoid of young men, a young woman struggling to obtain the necessary papers to leave the collective farm and become a student, industrial pollution, mindless bureaucracy. The novel is a lasting proclamation of the fact that “where there is no vision, the people perish.” VR

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  1900s

  A Kestrel for a Knave

  Barry Hines

  Lifespan | b. 1939 (England)

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | Michael Joseph (London)

  Movie Adaptation Released | 1969

  More lyrical than deadpan social reportage, more impressionistic than might be presumed, with opening scenes of a Yorkshire town under the grip of mining pit monotony, Barry Hines’s portrait of one teenager’s survival with the companionship of his kestrel singularly defies generic categorization. Ambitiously, Hines divides the novel’s timescale between the hardship of the present and the pull of sudden remembrance. His uncompromising journey thus shadows Billy Casper’s routine paper round and his subsequent day at school. These successive events are interspersed with flashback episodes, rewinding to Billy’s first discovery of the hawk to whom he will become devoted, against the meanness and futility of the mundane. Hines becomes our guide to Billy’s austere mining community, evoking the tenderness the boy develops by training his hawk. From chick, to leash, to exercising her with a lure as an adult raptor freely off the glove, falconry itself opens up an ultimately fragile space of resistance to Barnsley’s everyday necessities.

  The novella subsequently appeared as the remarkable movie Kes (1969), directed by Ken Loach. Loach’s working methods at that time chime with a kind of Italian neorealism, and the movie steadfastly refuses to embellish the rhetorical economy that for Hines had remained so crucial. DJ

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  1900s

  In Watermelon Sugar

  Richard Brautigan

  Lifespan | b. 1935 (U.S.), d. 1984

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | Four Seasons Foundation

  Full Name | Richard Gary Brautigan

  To be in watermelon sugar is a state of mind. Or a state of grace. Or a hallucination. Most people in watermelon sugar live in iDEATH, a village that is constantly reshaping itself. It is a place full of statues (there is one of a potato, another of grass), where the sun shines a different color every day, and where everyone has a job (whether it be writing a book about clouds, tending the watermelon fields, or simply planting flowers). And everything in iDEATH is made out of watermelon sugar, pine, and stones. Or trout. There were once tigers in iDEATH, who spoke beautifully, but had to eat people or die. They were very pleasant about it. They even helped the young narrator with his arithmetic as they ate his parents. But there is a disturbance in watermelon sugar. Margaret, her heart broken by the narrator, has fallen under the influence of inBOIL, a disgruntled alcoholic who left iDEATH and started making whiskey. He and his band of like-minded drunkards mean to prove to those in watermelon sugar that they do not know what iDEATH really means. They arrive at the Trout Hatchery and dismember themselves with jackknives, bleeding to death, having made their point. What may have seemed nonsensical begins to make perfect sense.

  Brautigan’s language casts a spell. Repetitive and hypnotic, his prose is a transcendental mantra. Gradually, painlessly, the reader soon finds himself in watermelon sugar. More than just a document of the 1960s, it is a passport to revisiting that time. GT

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ks from the 1900s

  1900s

  The German Lesson

  Siegfried Lenz

  Lifespan | b. 1926 (Germany)

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | Hoffman & Campe (Hamburg)

  Original Title | Deutschstunde

  “It was all simply too much. I was swamped.”

  Siggi Jepsen, an inmate in a juvenile offenders’ institution, has to write an essay on “The Joys of Duty”. He writes about his father, Jepsen, who, during the Second World War, held the post of police chief in a village in the north of Germany. In Siggi’s account, his father is charged with implementing the Nazi policy against “degenerate art”; in this role, he is required to enact a prohibition against the local painter Nansen (a character based on the Expressionist painter Emil Nolde, 1867–1956), who has been his friend since their youth. Jepsen carries out his orders, even going so far as to destroy some of Nansen’s work. Siggi refuses to help his father, and instead becomes the painter’s ally, hiding his pictures and warning him when danger threatens.

  When the war is over, matters acquire a strange dynamic of their own. Although Jepsen no longer holds the authority of his post, he is unable to stop persecuting the painter, and Siggi is equally unable to give up the role of protector. When some of Nansen’s paintings are destroyed in a fire, and Siggi suspects his father, his frustration leads him to steal other pictures from an exhibition—the action that has landed him in the juvenile offenders’ institution.

  What Siggi achieves in his own private “German lesson”—the examination of his private history—is also applicable, on a broader scale, to what Lenz regards as the task of German literature as a whole: to work through the past in order to understand the present. In The German Lesson, Lenz is particularly interested in the concept of duty: as it affects the father, who must do what he is told; as it affects Nansen, who is commanded by his conscience and vocation; and as it affects Siggi, who is caught between the two. The German Lesson is a plea for the questioning of authority. MM

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  1900s

  The Quest for Christa T.

  Christa Wolf

  Lifespan | b. 1929 (Germany)

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | Mitteldeutscher Verlag (Saale)

  Original Title | Nachdenken über Christa T.

  “It was I who ended up knowing most about her.”

  Christa Wolf is undoubtedly the most significant author to have lived and worked in the German Democratic Republic (the former East Germany). She was a convinced socialist and a member of the ruling party, yet her work nevertheless demonstrated a sensitivity to some contradictions of the system. She frequently investigated the difficulty of maintaining a sense of personal identity and integrity in a society in which the emphasis was always on the collective.

  The novel presents a dense, nonlinear narrative in which the organizing principle is the narrator’s “quest” to reconstruct the life of a friend, Christa T., who has recently died of leukemia. The focus is upon Christa T.’s struggle to balance her eccentric character with the political conformism expected of her and her intense desire for a private, personal existence with a willingness to serve the community. The narrator, who functions as an alter ego for Wolf, combines her own fragmentary memories of her friend with extracts from diaries, letters, and other sources. From the beginning she concedes that the project can never be complete, that one can never wholly “know” another person, and that in a sense it is as much about getting to know herself as it is about her dead friend. The narrator’s highly self-conscious investigation becomes a meditation upon familiar themes for Wolf: politics and morality, memory and identity, and the underlying purpose of writing. Unsurprisingly, the novel prompted a good deal of controversy in East Germany, and authorities even went so far as to instruct bookstores to sell it only to well-known literary professionals. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the novel established her as an important figure in the cultural life of the eastern bloc. JH

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  1900s

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  Philip K. Dick

  Lifespan | b. 1918 (U.S.), d. 1982

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | Doubleday (New York)

  Movie Adaptation | Blade Runner (1982)

  The novels of Philip K. Dick are a continual and often surprising source of inspiration for the mundane fantasies of Hollywood. Total Recall (1990) (from the short story of 1966 “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”), Minority Report (2002), Paycheck (2003), and A Scanner Darkly (2006) have all graced blockbuster screens. The complexities of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking Blade Runner (1982), but the movie is still a pale shade of the text.

  The book questions the nature of humanity through the figure of Rick Deckard, a man who hunts “replicants”—androids designed to be “more human than human.” The nominal “sheep” of the title is an artificial creation that dies through Deckard’s neglect, a source of intense shame to him. This lack of empathy, fundamental to Dick’s distinction between human and replicant, suggests the interminably argued point that Deckard himself may be one of the replicants he hunts. Deckard’s growing ethical confusion about “retiring” the replicants is highlighted by the book’s extension into the quasi-religious undertones of persuasion and vicarious empathy. The religion of Mercerism—from which replicants are prohibited—is a typical Dick invention. Mercer is a false idol, and the text not only asks what it means to be human, but also, in an expression of Dick’s philosophy, questions the viability of reality itself. SS

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  1900s

  2001: A Space Odyssey

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Lifespan | b. 1917 (England)

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | Hutchinson (London)

  Original Movie Released | 1968

  A “book-of-the-movie” every bit as superbly crafted as the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name, 2001: A Space Odyssey was not written after the movie was made, but rather in tandem with it. The fabric of both movie and text were woven simultaneously, with Clarke and Kubrick collaborating to create one of the most enduring and influential science fiction works ever envisioned.

  Clarke’s novel sometimes seems overly specific in its technical detail, especially in instances where the passage of time has made his projected futuristic developments date badly. It is important (and remarkable) to remember, however, how many of Clarke’s predictions have been realized, and how respected he is not simply as an author, but also as one of the foremost visionaries of the space age. It is in the final part of 2001 that his vision truly bursts forth. The all-powerful computer HAL 9000, which controls the exploratory spacecraft Discovery, turns the human emotions of its creators back on themselves, becoming a terrifying psychotic. The magnificent climax of Clarke’s 2001 leaves the reader in little doubt as to why it is considered one of the best novels of its type, and shows why it has garnered such a central place in our imaginings of the future. DR

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  1900s

  Belle du Seigneur

  Albert Cohen

  Lifespan | b. 1895 (Greece), d. 1981 (Switzerland)

  First Published | 1968

  First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)

  Original Language | French

  Comic and tragic in almost equal measure, Belle du Seigneur is many things, but remains essentially a love story. The tone is set from the beginning, as the opening scene finds protagonist Solal, posturing in the guise of Don Juan, fresh but firm in his resolve to seduce another man’s wife: the incorrigibly vain Ariane d’Auble. The other man in question is Adrien Deume, an ingratiating social climber under Solal’s employ, whom Solal smoothly outmaneuvers by exploiting his position as Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations. He do
es succeed in his endeavor, though not without consequence, and a passionate if rather contrived love affair unfurls as he and Ariane elope. However, their initial happiness soon subsides as the threat of boredom, coupled with their respective sacrifices, reveals the fragility of their love, and they hobble toward an unhappy finale. Different characters’ perspectives are given in first-person stream-of-consciousness-style passages, adding texture, and often humor, to the novel. The incorporation of certain autobiographical elements means that beneath the blithe veneer of sprawling text are sharp observations on society mores.

  Despite being highly rated in France and recognized as a significant contributor to French Jewish fiction, it is fair to say that Albert Cohen has been largely forgotten, perhaps unfairly. TW

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  1900s

  Cancer Ward

  Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

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

  First Published | 1968, by Il Saggiatore (Milan)

  Original Title | Rakovy korpus

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1970

  Strongly autobiographical, like most of Solzhenitsyn’s work, Cancer Ward takes place in the post-Stalinist 1960s in a provincial hospital in Central Asia. It was published abroad in 1968, after prolonged and unsuccessful efforts to place it in the Soviet literary journal Novyi Mir. It constructs a whole social world by unmediated shifts of perspective and of narrative focus from one character to the next. However, it seems less interested in the overtly political and philosophical questions raised by the Soviet system of camps and oppression than in focusing on the way a distorted society affects the lives of individuals.