Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Lifespan | b. 1937 (U.S.)
First Published | 1973
First Published by | Viking Press (New York)
National Book Award | 1974
Pynchon’s massive work opens with London under attack from V-2 rockets during the closing stages of the Second World War.
It would be as futile to attempt a plot summary of Gravity’s Rainbow here as it would be to say that Ulysses is about two men and their day in Dublin. Indeed, Thomas Pynchon’s extraordinary novel is already famous (or perhaps infamous) for its linguistic experimentation, its esoteric knowledge systems, and the way in which it so visibly dismantles its own sense of space and time. Nevertheless, much of the novel can be located in Europe during the years just preceding the end of the Second World War and the years of fragile peace just after. The central motif that binds the work together is the German V-2 rocket bomb, a weapon one hears only after it has already hit its target (the rocket travels faster than the speed of sound). The V-2 becomes a mystic object, a Kabbalistic text, an apocalyptic phallus, an emblem of “the World’s suicide.” Behind the scenes, shadowy (but very real) companies such as IG Farben and Shell Oil form another order of power—as if the whole war had been staged in order to find uses for their technologies and to expand their markets.
It is almost impossible to convey the scope of Pynchon’s writing in a few words. Gravity’s Rainbow is a proliferating, encyclopedic work with multiple points of entry and exit. There are literally thousands of allusions and enigmas in which to lose oneself: references to comics, B-movies, popular and classical music, drugs, magic and the occult, engineering, physics, Pavlovian psychology, economic theory—the list goes on. It remains a milestone in American fiction; a massively ambitious, carnivalesque epic that tracks the realignment of global power through the theater of war. For all the novel’s complexity and darkness, it is Pynchon’s commitment to oppressed and unrecorded voices, to justice, to partnership, and to community that shines through. SamT
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The Honorary Consul
Graham Greene
Lifespan | b. 1904 (England), d. 1991 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1973
First Published by | Bodley Head (London)
Full Name | Henry Graham Greene
The title of Greene’s novel is, of course, ironic, with its suggestion of “honor” in a world that seems quite devoid of that quality.
Charley Fortnum, the alcoholic British Honorary Consul in a remote region of northern Argentina, has been kidnapped by mistake. Rebels from over the border in Paraguay intended to capture the American Ambassador. Fortnum may not have been the target, but he is now the hostage, and will be killed in four days’ time unless a number of political prisoners are released in Paraguay. The General—Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled Paraguay from 1954 until 1989—holds power only by virtue of American patronage. But Fortnum is more of a nuisance than an asset to the British authorities, and British influence is anyway negligible.
Fortnum’s only friend is Dr. Eduardo Plarr, who arrived in Argentina twenty years previously as a teenage refugee with his Paraguayan mother, leaving his English father behind. As a child in Paraguay, Plarr went to school with two of the kidnappers, and when the sedatives they have given their hostage react badly with the alcohol in his system, they call on the doctor for help. But Plarr’s motives are suspect, even to himself: his father is one of the prisoners the rebels want released; he is also sleeping with Fortnum’s wife.
Like many of Greene’s novels, The Honorary Consul is concerned with the intersections of politics, religion, and sex. But the burden of Catholic guilt is carried not, as in previous books, by the protagonist, but by the leader of the kidnappers, a defrocked priest. And if Plarr seems unusually world-weary for a man in his thirties, his cynicism can be traced not only to the age of the author (Greene was nearly seventy when he wrote the novel) but to the age in which he lived. The Honorary Consul was published the year that Allende was overthrown in Chile by General Pinochet and the CIA. TEJ
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Crash
J. G. Ballard
Lifespan | b. 1930 (China), d. 2009 (England)
First Published | 1973
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1996
The striking jacket of the first edition of Ballard’s novel gives eye-catching prominence to an undisguisedly phallic gearstick.
J. G. Ballard’s Crash is the story of the narrator’s relationship with Vaughan and of Vaughan’s obsession with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. Contemporary desire, the violence of the look, has a new vehicle, the car. There are bodies everywhere; sex and chassis, metal and skin. Photographs, radio transmissions, cameras, motor shows—all these are the new manifest content of our waking dreams. Disturbingly, the novel’s characters appear to have no internal life in any traditional novelistic sense, since every excess is exposed on film or, finally, by actions. Gestures of apparent intimacy become a search for new wounds, barriers are smashed, and damage is a revered quality.
Ballard’s novel, “the first pornographic book dominated by twentieth-century technology” according to Maxim Jakubowski, is an exception within an exceptional body of work. It contains none of the more explicit, worldwide catastrophes of his earlier works. This breakdown is something we can all identify with; it has already happened, inside us. Given that the narrator is named Jim Ballard, the novel jumps other barriers, providing a link with his later, lightly fictionalized, autobiographies, especially The Kindness of Women, where it is unnervingly possible to identify certain characters from Crash.
Nevertheless, the novel remains classic Ballard; the shocking insights are unerring, the perversions intensely sane and personalized. Frighteningly, it all makes sense, although not everyone would be prepared to admit they belong to this world: “The author of this book has gone beyond psychiatric help,” a publisher’s reader stated. This inadvertently perceptive comment invites the question—where has he ended up? Ballard considered the assessment “the greatest compliment you can be paid.” JS
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Italo Calvino
Lifespan | b. 1923 (Cuba), d. 1985 (Italy)
First Published | 1973
First Published by | G. Einaudi (Turin)
Original Title | Il castello dei destini incrociati
In Italo Calvino’s essay collection, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, he argued passionately for the qualities in literature that future generations should cherish: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The Castle of Crossed Destinies exemplifies all of these qualities, though perhaps, above all, visibility. As Calvino has said: “This book is made first of pictures—from tarot cards—and secondly of written words.”
The two short books that make up The Castle of Crossed Destinies both follow the same pattern: a traveler arrives at his destination (a castle in one book, a tavern in the next), to discover that everyone there, including himself, has been struck dumb. The guests tell their stories to each other by means of tarot cards. The resulting tales are like a distillation of all the stories ever told. They include tales of the alchemist who sold his soul, of Roland crazed with love, tales of St. George and St. Jerome, of Faust, Oedipus, and Hamlet. Calvino’s own invention, “The Waverer’s Tale,” tells the story of a man unable to choose in a world that continues to inflict the torment of choice upon him. In the tarot decks of Bonifacio Bembo and of Marseille, Calvino discovers, or rediscovers, the oldest story-generating machine of them all. PT
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The Siege of Krishnapur
J. G. Farrell
Lifespan | b. 1935 (England), d. 1979 (Ireland)
/> First Published | 1973
First Published by | Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London)
Booker Prize | 1973
Set during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, The Siege of Krishnapur is concerned with a large group of characters. It might even be viewed as a kind of nineteenth-century pastiche, but it is odder and funnier than that. Beyond the siege, the novel’s main point of reference is the Great Exhibition of 1851, when all the new technology invented by the Victorians was brought together and proudly displayed in London. Krishnapur’s taxman, Mr. Hopkins, is an enthusiast who brings examples of the new technology to India, although most of it is eventually fired at the attacking sepoys.
The fighting is an opportunity for debates between the padre, who stresses God’s existence even as he helps fire a cannon, the rationalist magistrate who believes in phrenology, and competing views of medical research. Dr. McNab correctly understands how to treat cholera, but his rival refuses treatment and dies. The novel is a mosaic of mid-Victorian languages in dispute. The languages of belief, of rationalist skepticism, and quite bad poetry embody new (and old) perceptions. Women are modernized and liberated by the siege; Lucy, trapped in Krishnapur, becomes expert in making cartridges and when the siege is raised and they are no longer needed, she weeps. The anti-imperialist uprising provokes debates about occupation of countries that are as relevant now as then. AMu
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A Question of Power
Bessie Head
Lifespan | b. 1937 (South Africa), d. 1986 (Botswana)
First Published | 1973
First Published by | Davis-Poynter (London)
Paperback | Heinemann African Writers Series
A Question of Power raises fascinating questions about the relationship of fiction to autobiography. Like Bessie Head herself, the novel’s protagonist, Elizabeth, has fled apartheid South Africa for Botswana; the daughter of a black father and a white mother imprisoned for insanity, she was brought up by a foster-mother she believed to be her birth mother until adolescence. Elizabeth, like Head, undergoes an experience in Botswana that could be variously described as spiritual journey or mental breakdown.
The novel shifts continually between two narratives. One concerns Elizabeth’s life in a Botswanan village. The other strand tells the story of Elizabeth’s debilitating visions of the monklike figure Sello and the sadistic seducer Dan. Head never allows her reader to know whether these figures are supernatural apparitions of ancient souls or the figments of a disordered mind. Not least of the haunting presences in the novel is South Africa itself. A Question of Power is perhaps most profoundly concerned with what Head calls “the problem of evil.” Elizabeth’s wrestling with the visions comprises a meditation upon the nature of evil. The final outcome of her journey is the realization that life must be sacred. Perhaps the greatest triumph of this fine novel is that to read it is to feel oneself go just a little mad—to have thrown into disarray one’s certainties about the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, reality and unreality, madness and cure. VM
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Fear of Flying
Erica Jong
Lifespan | b. 1942 (U.S.)
First Published | 1973
First Published by | Holt, Rinehart & Winston (N.Y.)
Full Name | Erica Mann Jong
An uninhibited tale of sexual liberation and self-discovery, as well as being a self-consciously feminist text, Fear of Flying tells the story of a twice-married, over-psychoanalyzed woman writer named Isadora Wing, who models herself on predecessors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf, and leaves her psychiatrist husband at an international conference in order to take up with an inappropriate lover. They travel around Europe in a drunken daze, making love and feeling guilty in equal measures, before the lover leaves Isadora. Isadora returns to her husband, having learned, in the space of twenty-four hours of solitude, to stand on her own two feet.
A flawed, articulate heroine, Isadora is unable to incorporate feminism fully in her life. Escape fantasies loom large in her imagination, and are intimately bound up, for her, in being a woman. The novel is peppered with both graphically sexual flashbacks and didactic statements of feminism; the combination does not always work. While Erica Jong attempts to portray sexual infidelity as liberating, Isadora’s emotional dependence on the men in her life undercuts this message. Fear of Flying breaks many taboos, but the novel ultimately leaves the status of the institution of marriage intact. It is this ambivalence toward feminism that makes this a key text in the feminist canon. HM
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The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
Lifespan | b. 1929 (U.S.)
First Published | 1974
First Published by | Harper & Row (New York)
Full Title | The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
The Dispossessed is the fifth in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle of novels but concerns the earliest events in its chronology. While a science fiction novel on the surface, The Dispossessed gives up the genre staples of light-speed travel and space battles in favour of a more “realistic” mode, alongside a simultaneous rendering of a complex temporality in theme and plot. The novel tells of two parts of the physicist Shevek’s life on two different planets, described in alternating chapters. The plot concerns his experience of separately flawed systems as he lives first in the socially libertarian but scientifically restrictive Anarres, then on the capitalist Uras where he is free to work towards the completion of his research into a General Temporal Theory.
The Cold War parallels in Le Guin’s description of the two planets are self-evident, but the positive and negative characteristics of each society oscillate as much as the complex temporality that the novel attempts to establish. This is both a complex work of science fiction and a complex political text, refusing to draw simple, black-and-white conclusions about the differing states Shevek attempts to innovate within. Instead, Le Guin uses the novel to draw distinctions and comparisons in a manner that mirrors the temporal concepts at the heart of the story; the respective benefits and impediments that the two systems produce are presented alongside each other in a way that highlights the process of evaluation over the conclusions. SF
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The Diviners
Margaret Laurence
Lifespan | b. 1926 (Canada), d. 1987
First Published | 1974
First Published by | McClelland & Stewart (Toronto)
Given Name | Jean Margaret Wemyss
In the year of its publication, The Diviners was awarded the Governor General’s award, the highest honor for literary arts in Canada. In the same year, however, and throughout the decade that followed, it was also denounced from pulpits and banned by school boards as blasphemy, pornography, and insidious warfare on the sanctity of marriage.
Margaret Laurence’s last novel, the fifth in her Manawaka cycle set in rural Manitoba, is now prescribed reading in Canadian classrooms. Its well-loved heroine, Morag Gunn, is a towering figure of courage and independence, challenging the racial and sexual mores of her time. The Diviners is also emblematic of its generation, however, for its early grappling with the meaning of “identity.” Morag is an orphan who attempts to weld a heritage out of snapshot memories of her parents and her foster father’s epic tales of her ever-resilient Scottish ancestors. But she is also fascinated by the heritage of other displaced people she knows, finding understanding and a strange kind of love with a Métis boy, whose forebears were pushed aside by hers. Over the years, their lives intersect and diverge and intersect again, as she becomes a writer, and he a singer, both divining the past for a sense of belonging. Eventually, they share a child, who later seeks her own identity in much the same painful way. The Diviners’ no-nonsense prose, starkly honest depictions of small-town life, and witty, moving heroine l
odge in the memory as lifelong allies. MaM
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The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
Heinrich Böll
Lifespan | b. 1917 (Germany), d. 1985
First Published | 1974
First Published by | Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Cologne)
Original Title | Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
“. . . she rings the front door bell at the home of Walter Moeding, Crime Commissioner, . . . and she declares to the startled Moeding that at about 12:15 noon that day she shot and killed Werner Totges . . .”
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is possibly best known now as the basis for Volker Schlöndorff’s and Margarethe von Trotta’s acclaimed 1975 film of the same name. On the surface, the novel appears to be a morality tale with a simple lesson about the evil of the unscrupulous sensationalism of the mass media. This is born out by the fact that it was written after Heinrich Böll himself was made the subject of a virulent hate campaign by the populist right-wing tabloid Bild after he criticized the newspaper in the liberal weekly Der Spiegel.
Katharina Blum is a normal young woman who lives a somewhat reclusive life, working as a housekeeper. At a party she meets and falls in love with Ludwig Gotten, wanted by the police for an unspecified crime. The pair spend the night together at Katharina’s flat, but when the police storm the building in the morning, Ludwig has vanished. Over the next four days, Katharina’s life is taken apart by the police and her name is dragged through the mud by a mass tabloid clearly modeled on Bild. She decides to give a private interview to the tabloid reporter responsible, and when he makes a sexual pass at her, she shoots him dead. Böll’s text is more than simply an outraged response to the excesses of a specific tabloid. It contains an awareness of the power and the dangers of language, as well as a warning about the violence that even supposedly objective words can do if respect for facts is not accompanied by respect for people. DG
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 76