1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Slaughterhouse Five

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  Lifespan | b. 1922 (U.S.), d. 2007

  First Published | 1969, by Delacourte Press (N. Y.)

  Alternate Title | The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

  “All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all . . . bugs in amber.”

  Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is a dazzling, indispensable achievement in twentieth-century writing, juggling broad thematic and structural complexities alongside a narrative that combines autobiography with a story of time-traveling aliens taken straight from some particularly imaginative science fiction, and with an apparent ease that makes the joins impossible to spot.

  In this absurdist classic, Billy Pilgrim, a German-American and a former infantry scout in the Second World War, is a man “unstuck in time” after he is abducted by aliens. Who is this single man to make decisions upon universal solutions, let alone trouble us with his workings? Time, memory, and the literary combination of invention and experience are at the book’s center, but Vonnegut rejects any undue artifice in his language.

  The absurdities of war and those of time-traveling aliens appear to Billy Pilgrim on an even footing, as we follow him through all the many phases of his life in a novel that absolutely refuses to subscribe to any incarnation of rigid authority. Having fought in the Second World War, been imprisoned, seen thousands dead, and witnessed the devastating Allied fire-bombing of Dresden, the author has produced from his experiences a representation of the literal result of all such authority being simultaneously let go. SF

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Blind Man with a Pistol

  Chester Himes

  Lifespan | b. 1909 (U.S.), d. 1984 (Spain)

  First Published | 1969

  First Published by | Morrow (New York)

  Alternate Title | Hot Day, Hot Night

  The final, completed novel of a series featuring two black Harlem police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, Blind Man with a Pistol takes the detective fiction genre as far as, and beyond, its breaking point. In previous novels, Himes found a way of reconciling his coruscating anger at the open-ended nature of racial discrimination and injustice in the United States with the genre’s demands for explanations and closure. Writing from Paris about New York, the results were an often beguiling mix of surreal violence, political protest, and police procedural. In Blind Man with a Pistol, Himes is no longer interested in performing such a convoluted juggling act. Rather, the debilitating effects of living in a racist, white-controlled world finally mean that Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, already set against the black community they police and the white justice system they reluctantly serve, can no longer fulfill their function as detectives.

  Entering the novel invisible and nameless, they leave it, frustrated and impotent, while a blind, black man fires his pistol indiscriminately into a crowded subway car. Marginalized within the white-controlled police department they served for their entire careers, they end up shooting rats on a derelict Harlem construction site. Blind Man with a Pistol is a bleak antidote to the hopeful yearnings of the Civil Rights movement. AP

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Pricksongs and Descants

  Robert Coover

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1969

  First Published by | E. P. Dutton (New York)

  Original Language | English

  Coover takes as his source the fables and myths of our collective psyche, the folk tales and television programs and nameless anxieties that keep us awake at night. A master of legerdemain, he plays with the familiar, contorting it into something more complexly sinister than even the grimmest of fairy tales. There are Disneyland woods and breadcrumb trails, where birds join in on children’s songs about God’s love. Why are the children singing? Childish imbecility? To comfort the old man? What is the old man gazing at with such sadness? Distant regrets? His destination? Small details burn with inchoate sexual energy. A carnival sideshow is a riotous self-contained universe, where the fat lady becomes thin and the thin man beefs up, through vanity, for each other’s love, creating a chaos of multiple voices and absurdist anarchy.

  The language is refracted through a prism; phrases seem familiar or new, depending on the facet Coover shows us. Meanings, chronologies, become fundamental elements that coalesce like quick fades in a movie—sometimes a montage of color; sometimes a sound cue in an empty frame. Coover makes the archetypal real and the mundane archetypal. Bedtime stories teem with real shadows, deep phobias are made manifest, and biblical characters are confused. He is the ringleader of a universe that operates with the dark and heavy logic of delta-wavelength sleep. GT

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Tent of Miracles

  Jorge Amado

  Lifespan | b. 1912 (Brazil), d. 2001

  First Published | 1969

  First Published by | Livaria Martins Editora (Rio de J.)

  Original Title | Tenda dos milagres

  With this novel, Jorge Amado, Brazil’s greatest twentieth-century novelist, wrote his most ambitious political satire and also his richest articulation of the complexity of Afro-Brazilian culture. Mainly set in the crumbling colonial labyrinths of Pelhourinho, a black district in the heart of Salvador Bahia, the novel confronts the legacy of Pedro Archanjo, Amado’s most seductive, yet ambiguous, fictional creation. He is a mestizo—an autodidact, author of cookbooks, poet, part-time ethnographer, carnival king, black rights activist, worshipper, and lover of women. Archanjo is also, in the eyes of the Brazilian white cultural elite, a drunk, a seducer, a libertine, a scoundrel, and an intellectual charlatan.

  The novel opens as Arachanjo dies drunk and alone in a gutter in the small hours of the morning while the Second World War rages. Some fifty years later, James D. Levenson, Nobel Laureate from East Coast American academe, discovers the now-forgotten Archanjo’s publications, and goes to Bahia to cash in on the cultural gold mine he has unearthed. An exploration of why Black Brazil matters follows, and of the ways in which North America and Europe only see it through stereotypes, parody, and patronization. Amado’s approach is tolerant and celebratory of cultural and sexual miscegen ation. Black and white people are “gonna go on being born and growing up and mixing and making more babies, and no son-of-a-bitch is gonna stop ’em!” You can’t argue with that. MW

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Case Worker

  György Konrád

  Lifespan | b. 1933 (Hungary)

  First Published | 1969

  First Published by | Magveto (Budapest)

  Original Title | A látogató

  The Case Worker recounts the events that take place during a busy working day of a social worker: his insoluble conflict between personal and impersonal loyalty, and his powerlessness in the face of extreme misery. György Konrád’s first novel was immediately condemned by the authorities in Hungary for its harsh realism and its exposure of the darker side of contemporary Hungarian society.

  The author himself was a social worker for seven years, and the novel draws heavily on his experiences. The narrator, also the main character, produces reports of his work in charge of children at a state welfare organization. His files are filled with cases of neglected, abused, abandoned, delinquent, and retarded children, along with parents dead by suicide. Doing this job and still maintaining his humanity becomes a vain effort. As the narration progresses, the novel becomes a powerful and very disturbing image of the social substrata not only in Budapest but also in the universal metropolis.

  The novel fuses sociological and literary concerns. The stark realism of physical, moral, and intellectual degenerat
ion in cities is recounted in lyrical language. An advocate of individual freedom, Konrád was under a publication ban during most of the 1970s and 1980s; it was only when Communism began to collapse in Hungary in 1989 that his books began to appear in Budapest. However, this extraordinary novel assured him a prominent place in world literature long before that. AGu

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Moscow Stations

  Venedikt Yerofeev

  Lifespan | b. 1938 (Soviet Union), d. 1990

  First Published | 1969

  First Published in | Samizdat

  Original Title | Moskva-Petushki

  In the Soviet Union, quality alcohol was hard to find, but Venedikt Yerofeev’s cult novella shows a way out of such an impasse. It teems with recipes for deadly alcoholic beverages; diagrams (much in the spirit of the planned Soviet economy) showing the average alcohol consumption on an average work day; lyrical insights—“First love or last sorrow, is there a difference?”; descriptions of fated love affairs between comsorgs (an organizer and secretary of the Comsomol) and honest working girls; and discussions of Russian literature, homosexuality, and other exigencies of Soviet day-to-day life. Moscow Stations is a drink novella, with Yerofeev as the sole originator of the genre.

  Much like a “road movie,” the story follows a journey that is contemporaneous with the character’s inner journey from one melancholy rumination to the other, destined from the very outset to lead nowhere. “On the road,” so to speak, the narrator encounters a plethora of Russian folk willing to discuss their often wildly absurd life experience, which in no way corresponds to the purported ideals of Soviet life. Yerofeev, who himself was kicked out of five universities due to “ideological unsuitability,” writes an immensely entertaining and ultimately sad story that runs against the grain of an ideology that claims to have all the answers. The narrator’s truth-seeking therefore has to take the form of incessant question asking, and finally—in a theological twist of affairs—Christlike suffering. IJ

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Heartbreak Tango

  Manuel Puig

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (Argentina), d. 1990 (Mexico)

  First Published | 1969

  First Published by | Sudamericana (Buenos Aires)

  Original Title | Boquitas pintadas

  Starting with an obituary reporting the death of Juan Carlos Etchepare in 1947, a complex story of jealousy and meanness begins to unfold, the main episodes of which come to a head at the end of the 1930s in the fictional town of Coronel Vallejos. The plot of Heartbreak Tango consists of perfectly choreographed triangles: Nélida and Mabel compete for the love of Juan Carlos, but they drop him when they find he is tubercular and poor; Pancho, a friend of Juan Carlos, falls in love with a maid called Raba and leaves her pregnant, only to seduce Mabel, who will cost him his life. Extending this geometry of passions are the mother and the treacherous sister of Juan Carlos, Celina; and the widow with whom the ailing Don Juan will end his days. The novel ends in 1968 when Nélida dies, taking with her the knowledge that was linking all these stories together.

  Manuel Puig developed a new form of popular literature, employing kitsch resources such as the strip cartoon and tango lyrics. In doing this he displays a dazzling panoply of voices (particularly female ones): letters; diary entries, medical notes, and police records; advertising slogans and radio commercials; confessions, conversations with double meanings, telephone conversations; and interior monologues using a supposedly objective third person. Playing on his readers’ taste for gossip, Puig knows how to deliver a virulent criticism of the deep hypocrisy that eats away at the little worlds of human society, which are usually the closest. DMG

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Seasons of Migrations to the North

  Tayeb Salih

  Lifespan | b. 1929 (Sudan)

  First Published | 1969

  First Published by | Heinemann (London)

  Original Title | Mawsim al-hijrah ila’l-shamal

  Mustafa Sa’eed’s sojourn in England has brought academic success, but he has also served time in prison for the deaths of a number of his English sexual partners. Back in the Sudan and married, he dies suddenly, apparently taking his own life. The narrator’s fragmentary recreation of Sa’eed’s life portrays him as a dislocated figure, hiding violent urges of the colonizer that have survived many generations and passed through to the children of the once colonized nation.

  It appears that the narrator—also a successful returnee from the north—may also unwittingly hide an unavowed colonial violence. This is implied further when Sa’eed’s widow kills both herself and her new husband, events that the narrator intimates he could have prevented. It is the narrator’s complicity in a situation outside his volition that finally leads to his trying to break the cycle of violence in which he has found himself embroiled.

  The novel’s presentation of colonial violence through local sexual violence makes it a rather uncompromising read, but this relationship yields an extraordinarily disturbing sense of how different kinds of brutality can coalesce in the postcolonial nation. While the novel was banned by the Sudanese government in 1989, it is hailed as the “most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century” by the Syria-based Arab Literary Academy. ABi

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Here’s to You, Jesusa!

  Elena Poniatowska

  Lifespan | b. 1933 (France)

  First Published | 1969

  First Published by | Ediciones Era (Mexico City)

  Original Title | Hasta no verte, Jesús mío

  Based on actual interviews by Poniatowska, Jesusa Palancares is a synthesis in the first person of the history of Mexico in the twentieth century, and a discourse on behalf of women who have had enough of hard times and want to find good ones. The author is simply the silent interviewer who filters Jesusa’s continuous monologue. Jesusa tells the story of how she came to take control of her destiny. Left an orphan by her mother, she travels with her father, eventually joining the revolutionary forces. Surviving the war, she takes up many trades in the country and in the capital—barmaid, servant, furniture maker, and washerwoman, always dragged along by historic events, including the Cristero Rebellion and the expropriations of the 1940s.

  While Jesusa’s character is indomitable and she refuses to submit, whether to men or to adversity, it is the touchstone of an often desolate reality. Jesusa’s life is touched by the esoteric after she discovers the Obra Espiritual, a kind of sect that teaches the immediate presence of the most far. Fatalistic and rebellious, nothing stops her; only age and tiredness put an end to her way of life and her discourse. Through subtle handling of the spoken word and the ingenious assembly of sequences that are not always linear, the book reflects the rise of modern Mexico, and it is a perfect example of autobiography by the person interviewed. DMG

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Fifth Business

  Robertson Davies

  Lifespan | b. 1913 (Canada), d. 1995

  First Published | 1970, by Macmillan (Toronto)

  Trilogy | The Deptford Trilogy: Fifth Business (1970); The Manticore (1972); World of Wonders (1975)

  Fifth Business, the first novel in Robertson Davies’s acclaimed Deptford trilogy, won him international recognition as a storyteller. The novel is particularly noted for its adept dramatization of the spiritual and psychological theories of Carl Jung, who posits that we interpret the world through our recognition of archetypes: We all have our villains and our saints, and understand our role in relation to these.

  Dunstan Ramsay, the novel’s protagonist, comes to understand himself as Fifth Business, neither “Hero nor Heroine, Villain nor Confidante,” but nonetheless essential to the story’s unfolding. As a ten-year-old, Dunstan ducks a snowball intended for him that instead hits the Baptist pastor’s wife. The
pastor’s wife goes into premature labor and loses most of her wits; later she becomes the town scandal and ruins her family’s reputation. Boy Staunton, the boastful brat who threw the snowball, is permitted to bury the secret and his share of the blame until it buries him years later. And Dunstan bears the full burden of guilt well into middle age. Along the way he picks up wisdom from various sources—a saintly apparition, a Jesuit hedonist, and a magician’s sidekick. These lead to a Jungian understanding of God as an essential psychological concept, uniting both the saintly and villainous sides of the unconscious—both of which one needs to reveal and confront to maintain a moral life. MaM

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Play It As It Lays

  Joan Didion

  Lifespan | b. 1934 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1970

  First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux

  Movie Adaptation | 1972

  Joan Didion’s novel of 1960s dissolution centers on the character Maria Wyeth, an actress who freewheels through her life in a haze of insular celebrity and anaesthetics. With a stylistic debt to American Modernists like Hemmingway, Didion refrains from abstraction and focuses instead on Maria’s messy world on the fringes of half-formed social-convenience networks.