See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Book of Daniel
E. L. Doctorow
Lifespan | b. 1931 (U.S.)
First Published | 1971
First Published by | Random House (New York)
Full Name | Edgar Lawrence Doctorow
The cover of the Pan paperback edition, published in London in 1973, blends the Communist red and Jewish yellow stars.
“‘Few books of the Old Testament have been so full of enigmas as The Book of Daniel.’”
The Book of Daniel examines the nature and effectiveness of different forms of political protest in the United States, and the passage from the Old Left of the 1940s and 1950s to the New Left of the 1960s. For the narrator, Daniel Isaacson, it is about the difficulties of coming to terms with the political and familial legacy of his parents—Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in all but name—who were executed by the state for allegedly passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in 1953.
The novel asks how political power manifests itself in the hands of individuals and institutions, and what can be done to oppose the concentration and abuse of power by government and corporations. In a choice between the “gutsy and pathetic” radicalism of his father, and the flaccid, hubristic counter-cultural pronounce ments of Artie Sternlicht, who promises to “overthrow the United States with images,” Daniel finds only disillusionment and dead ends. The former is naïve and easily crushed by the state. The latter finds its fullest realization in Disneyland, a theme park world that proposes “a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses.” Daniel must address the different fragments of his life in order to reconcile the political legacy of his parents’ activism with his own disenchanted view of the world. This account of protest and family succumbs neither to the optimistic belief that personal struggle conquers all nor the pessimistic belief that all political struggle is futile. AP
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Lives of Girls & Women
Alice Munro
Lifespan | b. 1931 (Canada)
First Published | 1971
First Published by | McGraw-Hill Ryerson (New York)
Television Adaptation | 1994
Lives of Girls and Women was Alice Munro’s first attempt at a novel after her award-winning short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades. Despite the disavowal printed in most editions, the material is highly autobiographical, Del Jordan’s circumstances reflecting Munro’s own upbringing in semi-rural Ontario. The adolescent Del is torn between bookishness and an intense hunger for physical experience, rejecting her mother’s belief in sexual repression as the means to female liberation.
The book consists of a series of free-standing chapters, halfway between a traditional novel and a short-story collection. The episodic form suits the material perfectly, as Munro explores the impulse to turn our lives and those of others into a set of tales, conforming to our own self-image, fantasies, and the neat resolutions we expect from fiction. The section, “Epilogue: The Photographer,” refers to a novel Del has begun, turning her neighbors’ lives into a gothic yarn. An encounter with one of her fictional characters’ real-life prototypes makes her rethink her whole attitude. In a phrase that has become Munro’s own artistic manifesto, she learns that ordinary lives are “dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” Del has learned to empathize with others instead of treating them as raw material. That same appreciation of the contradictions of the everyday brings to life the small-town streets and the natural landscape, along the banks of the Wawanash river. ACo
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
House Mother Normal
B. S. Johnson
Lifespan | b. 1933 (England), d. 1973
First Published | 1971
First Published by | Collins (London)
Full Title | House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy
B. S. Johnson’s novel is a razor-sharp parody of the world of geriatric state-care. Cruelty between proprietor and patient is normalized as an accepted routine for nursing the elderly under meager sponsorship. House Mother Normal is structured by descent, both psychological and moral. The novel unfolds as a series of monologues from the most able-minded resident, Sarah Lamson, whose disabilities are largely rheumatic, to the ninety-four-year-old Rosetta Stanton, whose physical and cognitive ailments are too numerous to list. Rosetta has been addressed by the authorities as a case unworthy even of pity simply because “she has everything everyone else has,” and her utterances randomly scatter the page, drained of all intention or reference.
This is a challenging and uncomfortable position in which to be placed as reader. Johnson offers us a privileged, almost forensic, access to the mind of each of his speakers. Little is inevitable in this anarchic care home as we move, in the case of each occupant, through the vicissitudes of their recollections, interrupted only by the House Mother’s grim party game of pass-the-parcel, which she has organized solely for her own sadistic gratification. Johnson compels us to acknowledge our freedom as observers who can go on thinking and speculating at will—who have the freedom, potentially, to choose not to be at the mercy of institutional abuse—while each of the narrators lapse between pain and slumber. DJ
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
In a Free State
V. S. Naipaul
Lifespan | b. 1932 (Trinidad)
First Published | 1971, by Deutsch (London)
Full Name | Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Booker Prize | 1971
Winner of the 1971 Booker Prize, In a Free State contains two short stories and a novella enveloped by a diary-form prologue and epilogue. One ofV. S. Naipaul’s best-known novels, it is a profound examination of dislocation and the meaning and limitations of freedom in a context of displacement.
In the first story, an Indian servant finds himself in Washington after his boss is posted there as a diplomat. He ends up as an illegal immigrant and marries to become naturalized. In the second narrative, an Indian from the West Indies follows his brother to England and is left fending for himself. In both cases, freedom arrives only with the loss of those anchors that once provided meaning and security in their home countries.
The longest narrative of the collection, “In a Free State,” is set in an unnamed, newly independent country in Africa. Bobby, a homosexual colonial civil servant with a penchant for seducing young black men, and Linda, a colonial radio host’s wife, who harbors a disgust for Africans, travel by car to the Southern Collectorate, an autonomous region of the country still controlled by the king. During the journey, a series of antagonistic encounters take place with local inhabitants that progress from insults and vandalism to physical violence. The old colonial confidence that surrounds the start of the journey is gradually eroded and the brutal reality of what the new free state implies for the expatriate community begins to appear. ABi
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Surfacing
Margaret Atwood
Lifespan | b. 1939 (Canada)
First Published | 1972
First Published by | McClelland & Stewart (Toronto)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1981
Surfacing, Margaret Atwood’s second novel, draws on elements of the thriller, the ghost story, the travelogue, and the pioneer narrative. It strikes a perfect balance between around-the-campfire suspense and intellectual insight. Surfacing is the story of an unnamed narrator who returns to her birthplace on a remote island in Québec after her father mysteriously disappears. She is accompanied by three lifelong city-dwellers: her partner, Joe, and an obnoxious married couple, Anna and David. After arriving on the island, dark secrets “surface” like sunken objects from the lake that surrounds it. The weaknesses, vanities, and prejudices of each character are slowly squeezed out by the experience of isolation. As the pressures of both past and pres
ent intensify, the narrator regresses into a paranoid, animalistic state, and eventually imagines herself in a shamanic union with nature after discovering an underwater cave painted with Native American glyphs.
Surfacing is a novel preoccupied by the question of boundaries: of language, of national identity, of “home,” of gender, and of the body. One of its most engaging features, however, is the depiction of a rural Canada transformed by commercialization and tourism. The novel shows that it is not only refugees or armies who cross borders but the whole gigantic machinery of capital and the mass media. This is a novel of belonging and displacement told with remarkable precision and economy. SamT
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
G
John Berger
Lifespan | b. 1926 (England)
First Published | 1972
First Published by | Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London)
Booker Prize | 1972
G is a chronicle of the sexual exploits of a nameless protagonist (helpfully identified in the novel as “the protagonist”) at the turn of the century. Set against the backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the novel provides an intimate portrait of the numerous dalliances of this aspiring Don Juan, who is seemingly impervious to the calamities that are occurring outside the bedroom. G is an exploration of how the domain of private experience can ultimately also translate into a recognition of broader social belonging.
What is most immediately striking about the novel is the experimental narrative style. As the story is recounted largely from the perspective of the narrator and the women who yield to his seductions, “the protagonist” largely becomes the layered accumulation of these perceptions rather than a fully defined character from the outset. The novel is notable for its attention not merely to what occurs during sexual intimacy, but also how this is structured through a perception of intersubjectivity. Eroticism arises from the way the characters fashion their experience of consciousness through an awareness they have of the experience while actually performing it. This narrative absorption in the realm of the senses, rather than insulating the reluctant hero further from a world of contact with others, becomes the mainspring for an aroused consciousness of the oppression and injustice that is taking place around him. VA
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Summer Book
Tove Jansson
Lifespan | b. 1914 (Finland), d. 2001
First Published | 1972, by A. Bonnier (Stockholm)
Original Language | Swedish
Original Title | Sommarboken
The writer and artist Tove Jansson is best known as the creator of the much-loved Moomin children’s stories. The Summer Book was one of ten novels she wrote for adults and is regarded as a modern classic in Scandinavia, where it has never been out of print.
Based loosely on the author’s own experiences, The Summer Book spans a season during which an elderly artist and her six-year-old granddaughter, Sophia, while away the long days together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. It is a magical, elegiac, quietly humorous book that slowly draws the reader into the lives of Sophia (whose mother has recently died), her grandmother, and her largely absent “Papa.” The color and depth of the characterization moves the narrative forward, despite the fact that very little actually happens. The old woman and the young girl spend their days pottering around their tiny, idyllic island summer home, collecting driftwood, discussing death, putting down new turf, and infuriating each other. Descriptions, such as that of the texture of moss that has been trodden on three times, are written in minute, leisurely detail and through these descriptions the reader comes to understand the special relationship between the grandmother and granddaughter. Jansson’s style is unsentimental and, as the book meanders through summer, the two learn to adjust to each other’s fears and idiosyncrasies, allowing a deep, understated love to unfold that extends beyond the family to both the island and the season. LE
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Twilight Years
Sawako Ariyoshi
Lifespan | b. 1931 (Japan), d. 1984
First Published | 1972
First Published by | Shinchôsha (Tokyo)
Original Title | Kôkotsu no hito
“But for a working wife, speed and nutritional value came before taste.”
Ariyoshi’s poignant, humane novel addresses a topic of pressing concern in societies with ever-increasing life expectancy: the impact of ageing relatives upon their families. With consummate skill, Ariyoshi draws the reader into the life of Akiko, a working mother in 1970s Japan. Her busy everyday routines are blown apart by the unexpected death of her mother-in-law, which leaves her father-in-law, Shigezo, as an incipiently senile dependent. Shigezo is a contemptuous and bad-tempered egotist but now, because she is a woman, it falls to her to care for him.
Ariyoshi has plenty to say about gender and generational relations in a rapidly changing Japan, but the focus never shifts far from the almost unbearable experience of mental and physical decline in the aged. Despite painting an unsentimental and unflinching portrait of the awfulness and degradation of ageing, Ariyoshi miraculously draws a positive feeling out of the experience. Akiko finds a kind of pride and fulfillment in her absolute commitment to keeping the useless old man alive, while the mind-blank Shigezo seems to discover a serenity on the threshold of death denied him in his choleric selfish life. The Twilight Years is one of those profoundly useful books that confronts the worst life can bring and convinces you that, for no crude or obvious reason, it all somehow remains worthwhile. RegG
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Optimist’s Daughter
Eudora Welty
Lifespan | b. 1909 (U.S.), d. 2001
First Published | 1972
First Published by | Random House (New York)
Pulitzer Prize | 1973
Eudora Welty’s understated novel relates events surrounding the death of 71-year-old Judge McKelva following an eye operation. The novel begins by sketching out various antagonisms that intensify once the judge, the “optimist” of the title, is no longer there to neutralize them. His young second wife, Fay, takes pains to assert her authority as “Mrs. McKelva”; Laurel, his adult daughter, tries to manage the funeral formalities while remembering her family’s past; and the townswomen frame the activity in a flurry of speculative talk. Laurel and Fay struggle against each other almost constantly, for reasons of temperament and perceived familial status. In the end, however, the fact that Laurel has long ago left her hometown and forfeited her insider status renders her palpably ignorant of who her father is and what has motivated his retired life.
Laurel represents a genteel Southern woman, whereas Fay is characterized as a grasping, coarse figure. Yet both women are young widows by the end of the novel, and the village women interpret Laurel’s choice to remain in Chicago after her husband’s death as an indication of Laurel’s own version of Fay’s self-centeredness. The fact that the novel closes with the village women’s amused disbelief over the judge’s poor choice of Fay as his second wife, seems to suggest the parties may not be so dissimilar as they like to imagine. AF
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Lifespan | b. 1923 (Cuba), d. 1985 (Italy)
First Published | 1972
First Published by | G. Einaudi (Turin)
Original Title | Le città invisibili
Invisible Cities is constructed as a series of imaginary travel anecdotes told to the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan by the Venetian explorer Marco Polo. Fifty-five prose pieces each describe a different fabulous city and each contains a conceptual or philosophical puzzle or enigma. Zemrude, for example, is a city that changes according to the mood of the beholder. It is divided into upper and lower parts, windowsills and fountains above, gu
tters and wastepaper below. The upper world is known chiefly through the memory of those whose eyes now dwell on the lower. In Diomira, one feels envious toward those other visitors for whom the city instils melancholy. Zoe, a city of “indivisible existence,” where every activity is possible everywhere, becomes indistinct: “Why, then, does the city exist?
Tucked between some of the descriptions are brief but telling episodes in which the relationship between the interlocutors is developed. Kublai Khan finds in the Venetian’s stories something to transcend his earthly, temporal empire. In their art he discerns, “through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.” For his part, Polo invents cities on a redemptive principle. He says, “I am collecting the ashes of the other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered.” DH
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 75