1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Dusklands

  J. M. Coetzee

  Lifespan | b. 1940 (South Africa)

  First Published | 1974

  First Published by | Ravan Press (Johannesburg)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 2003

  Dusklands is composed of two short narratives. The first deals with Eugene Dawn’s work on “The Vietnam Project,” devising and analyzing mythographies that will both allow America to justify its own position in that war, and undermine the Viet Cong’s resistance. The second is the self-told, brutal tale of Jacobus Coetzee, one of the “heroes who first ventured into the interior of Southern Africa, and brought back news of what we had inherited.”

  The parallels and crossovers of these two narratives make for unsettling, stark juxtapositions. The lines between the physical, mental, and cultural methods of colonial domination are blurred, and the psychology of the imperialist is laid disturbingly bare. Underneath this tantalizing exploration, never quite on the surface, lies a strong interrogation of the way in which history is itself constructed. Yet despite this density of theoretical allusion and exploration, the text is never sterile. J. M. Coetzee’s prose is characteristically direct and vivid. Conjured from the spare passages are visions of horror and empathy, falsehood, and truth. From the twenty-four pictures of the Vietnam War that Dawn carries round in a lunch pail, to the horrific “vengeance” meted out by Jacobus Coetzee, Dusklands is viscerally gripping. It is a novel that manages to be a breathtakingly direct attack on its targets, but also an unnerving reminder of the spreading tentacles of complicity, and of the presence in all our stories of the things that we would rather were not told. DR

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Fan Man

  William Kotzwinkle

  Lifespan | b. 1938 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1974

  First Published by | Avon (New York)

  First UK Edition | A. Ellis (Henley-on-Thames)

  Books take us to many exotic and strange places, but few are stranger than the sublime depths of the mind of Horse Badorties, the Fan Man. William Kotzwinkle plants us into the psychedelic rollercoaster of Horse’s dirt and drug-addled brain. We wander with Horse through the “abominated filthiness” of his Lower East Side apartment, a “pad” stacked so high with garbage and cockroach nests that he needs to get another pad on the same floor. “The rent will be high but it’s not so bad if you don’t pay it.”

  Not a paragraph passes without Horse’s focus abruptly shifting onto a new plan. Swept along on this exuberant torrent, we are left exhausted and not a little disoriented. We travel with Horse in his cardboard Ukrainian slippers and his Commander Schmuck Imperial Red Chinese Army hat as he embarks on his greatest scheme: recruiting teenage runaway “chicks” for his apocalyptic Love Chorus. He is constantly waylaid by his frenzied craving for a Times Square hotdog, the procurement of an air-raid siren from a junkyard, or, startlingly, Dorky Day (a ritualistic mind-cleaning where Horse utters “Dorky” 1,382 times in a single chapter). This marijuana-fuelled rhapsody, combined with a grab-bag of Eastern philosophy, is a hippie celebration of all things hippie, at a time when hippies were regarded, without nostalgia, as dirty, lazy, and deluded (all of which Horse gleefully is). A week in the head of Horse Badorties is exhilarating. And your mind will never be the same, man. At least, not legally. GT

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Port

  Antun Šoljan

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (Yugoslavia), d. 1993 (Croatia)

  First Published | 1974

  First Published in | Znanje (Zagreb)

  Original Title | Luka

  In his novel The Port, Antun Šoljan turns politics into fiction. His theme is the relationship between a government and the individual: how a government can control a person’s dreams and also destroy them without his realizing it. When a government sees profit in something—in this novel it is oil—there is nothing that can stop it in reaching its goal. Conversely, that government can be ruthless if the promise of profit disappears.

  The story is set in a small town called Murvice on Croatia’s Adriatic coast. Šoljan’s protagonist is engineer Slobodan Despot; his only connection with the town is that his father was born there, but he hopes one day to spend his retirement in the port. Engineer Despot is in charge of a government project called “Port.” Creating the port is his dream. He will finally build something magnificent and help the whole region, or so he thinks.

  Despot is just an ordinary, rather bored man, but as the story develops his life is gradually destroyed. His dream gets no support from his wife, government officials start to use him for their dirty work, and stress begins to eat him from the inside. Far from building a bridge to connect nations, he loses himself in fantasy and spends his days in drinking and sex until the whole project falls into the water. The government cancels the project and pulls out, and the poor engineer loses his sanity. The Port’s message is bleak, but it has comedy and also provides insight into what was Yugoslavian life. MCi

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Ragtime

  E. L. Doctorow

  Lifespan | b. 1931 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1975

  First Published by | Random House (New York)

  Musical Adaptation | 1998

  The first paragraph of Ragtime lasts nearly two pages, the sentences tumbling out one after another. Look at the passage again and you’ll find that it consists of a series of short, declarative statements, almost all of them based on past tenses of the verb “to be”: “It was . . . ,” “There were . . . ,” “He was . . . ,” “She had been . . . .” The effect is to consign the things described to an irretrievable past: the sentences gather, like the fragments of a mosaic, to form a picture of American life in the early 1900s—an era whose sensibilities, E. L. Doctorow seems to suggest, belong now to history. As the novel develops out of the threads begun in this opening passage, the stories of real historical figures—Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, Freud, Houdini, and countless others—intersect with the fictional destinies of a white bourgeois American family, called simply Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, and so on, and an equally emblematic immigrant Jewish family, Mameh, Tateh, and The Little Girl. Among the stories that stand out against the panorama is that of Coalhouse Walker, a successful ragtime pianist, who has his new Model T Ford vandalized by racist firemen. He leaves the car to rot in the road where it stands, but his protest escalates, finally ending in a hail of bullets outside the home of Pierpont Morgan, the weathiest man in America. The stories are rich, vivid, and involving; but what will stay with you is the writing, the eddying jazz in Doctorow’s prose. PMy

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Commandant

  Jessica Anderson

  Lifespan | b. 1916 (Australia)

  First Published | 1975

  First Published by | Macmillan (London)

  Miles Franklin Literary Award | 1978, 1980

  Patrick Logan, the Commandant, is an unquestioning disciplinarian, convinced that a strict regime is the only way to run his remote penal colony at Moreton Bay (present-day Brisbane). In the space of just a few months in 1830, he is forced to question his values in a country where social and political changes are afoot, spurred on by a free press. The penal colony is only reachable by boat, so news travels slowly. When it does, it is not good news for Logan. Escaped prisoners have reached Sydney and tales of a barbaric commandant have appeared in the press. Logan is not concerned with the maneuvering taking place between press, governor, and British interest. But when visitors, including Captain Clunie (working for the governor to ascertain the situation) and his more liberal-minded sister-in-law, Frances O’Briene (through whose eyes the story is mostly told), arrive at the colony, the tale unfolds with an added urgency and debate.
>
  Jessica Anderson shows how in fact both protagonists are “outsiders”—Frances, with her mildly radical ideas, will not conform to upper-class colonial society, while the commandant is “out of touch” with the political milieu of London and Sydney. He has become the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, unable to deal with it, and ultimately meeting his death as a result. But nothing is simple in novelist Anderson’s complex treatment, and the reader is left to question the motives and morality of all involved in a land they barely understand. JHa

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Year of the Hare

  Arto Paasilinna

  Lifespan | b. 1942 (Finland)

  First Published | 1975

  First Published by | Weilin & Göös (Helsinki)

  Original Title | Jäniksen vuosi

  Editor Kaarlo Vatanen is fed up with life, numbed by the extreme boredom of his everyday routine. He is middle-aged, cynical, and unhappy. Returning home from an assignment with his photographer, their car hits a hare. Vatanen follows it into the forest and finds it with a broken hind leg. Struck with emotion, he decides to look after the poor creature. The odd couple eventually make a journey together that becomes an extraordinary rural adventure.

  Vatanen’s misery lifts as he becomes liberated by his simple life of traveling and working in the forest, with Arto Paasilinna’s effortless style seeming to smooth away any practical difficulties he might face. The odyssey through Finland brings a new lust for life, a friendship with no need for words, and certainly a mutual dependence. The countryside offers an escape from the stupidity and unbending bureaucracy of the city, and a haven for those who are different. Paasilinna often touches on the absurdities that occur when the norm tries to neutralize the weird, always to very amusing effect.

  Paasilinna uses his burlesque sense of humor to navigate through delicate subjects such as death, mental illness, suicide, unemployment, rebellion, and alcoholism, yet never descending into banality. This ability has made him a loved author not only in Finland but around the world. TSe

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Humboldt’s Gift

  Saul Bellow

  Lifespan | b. 1915 (Canada), d. 2005 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1975

  First Published by | Viking Press (New York)

  Pulitzer Prize | 1976

  The winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize, this novel is narrated in the first person. It is essentially a portrait of the artist, Charlie Citrine, a successful writer who is prompted by the death of his friend, Humboldt, into reflecting upon his own meager talents. The novel provides an episodic rather than sequential account of Citrine’s travails: not only is he in thrall to a Chicago mobster, Citrine is crushed by divorce and is ultimately even abandoned by his mistress.

  However, it is in Citrine’s admiration for Humboldt that the novel becomes an extended lament for men of feeling who are annihilated by the testosterone-fueled credo of greed and self-aggrandizement that characterizes American society. As an increasingly disillusioned Citrine begins to realize how his own character has been shaped by these forces, the novel identifies the decadents: sexual guru Kinsey, corporate capitalism, an intellectually bankrupt philosophical discourse, and the rise of feminism all make for some rather unlikely bedfellows.

  Bellow hoped that this novel would “hold up a mirror to our urban society and to show its noise, its incertitudes, its sense of crisis and despair, its standardization of pleasures.” Armed with his dazzling prose style and blessed with a gift for social satire, Bellow achieves this task with conviction and intelligence. VA

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Woman at Point Zero

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Lifespan | b. 1931 (Egypt)

  First Published | 1975

  First Published in | Dar al-Adab (Beirut)

  Original Title | Emra’a ’inda nuqtat al-sifr

  Woman at Point Zero is a finely executed novel of outrage and an indictment of the position of women in Egypt. It charts the history of Firdaus from her childhood as a village girl, sexually abused by her uncle, forced to marry into a violent relationship, and then pushed into prostitution. She is finally arrested for murdering a pimp and sentenced to death.

  In little more than a hundred pages, the novel creates a resonant and overarching sense of relentlessness and despair. It is narrated from a prison cell, and it is Firdaus’s early life, rather than her incarceration and the events leading up to it, that appears most restrictive and brutal. The circumstances of her pain may change but she remains within a closed system in which she is no more than an exchangeable sexual commodity. The repetition of key passages in the novel, in which certain individuals are substituted for others, emphasizes this element of her substitutability. There is a disturbing irony in the fact that her death, with which the novel ends, must be seen as preferable to any possibility of release.

  This sense of claustrophobia is increased by Saadawi’s focus on eyes throughout the novel. Firdaus’s existence is very much subordinated to the threatening glare of others who prey on her body visually and sexually. There are, to be sure, intimations of the possibility of non-appropriative sexual relations. But they seem distant and fleeting, seeming to arise from an inaccessible past. ABi

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Willard and His Bowling Trophies

  Richard Brautigan

  Lifespan | b. 1935 (U.S.), d. 1984

  First Published | 1975, by Simon & Schuster (N. Y.)

  Full Title | Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery

  “‘Does the gag hurt?’”

  In Willard and His Bowling Trophies—subtitled A Perverse Mystery—Richard Brautigan, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury muse, ventures into genre fiction. As a mystery it is marginal, but it is definitely perverse.

  Bob, his very existence and psyche devastated by a persistent case of venereal warts (it is San Francisco in the 1970s, after all), has taken up amateur sadism in order to preserve his relationship with his wife, Constance. Constance, who gave him the warts in the first place, mourns for the loss of her old Bob, and is frustrated by this mere shell of her former husband. Willard is a large, exotically painted papier mâché bird. The bowling trophies (which are, in fact, stolen) that he presides over are located in Pat and John’s apartment downstairs. Their sex life is fine. Unknown to either couple is the ever-widening, ever more violent swath of crime spreading across America as the monstrous Logan brothers ruthlessly search for their stolen bowling trophies. Formerly clean-cut exemplars of middle-American masculinity—healthy, law-abiding, good at bowling—they are now driven by rage and an obsession that leads from petty theft to armed robbery to, eventually, murder. It takes them three years—“America was a very large place and the bowling trophies were very small in comparison”—before they wind up at the house on Chestnut Street.

  A novel about the arbitrary devastation wrought by fate, about the disintegration of meaning and purpose in the nadir of 1970s America, Willard and His Bowling Trophies is made hypnotic by Brautigan’s unique style. His short, expository, sterile sentences—simple language, like an explanation to a child—act like a rhythmic metronome, leaving the reader breathless, mesmerized. And laughing. GT

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Fateless

  Imre Kertész

  Lifespan | b. 1929 (Hungary)

  First Published | 1975

  First Published by | Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó

  Original Title | Sorstalanság

  “Still, even the imagination is not completely unbounded, or at least is unbounded only within limits, I have found.”

  Initially rejected for publication, Fateless was eventually published in 1975 in Communist Hungary. At its publication, the novel, singled out for the Nobel Prize in 2002, was met with complete silence. No doubt this
is due to the main concern of Imre Kertész’s writing, which explores the struggle of an individual confronted with the faceless brutality of history. György Köves, a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy, is sent first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald. On arrival at the camp, Köves lies about his age and thus unknowingly avoids the gas chamber. Written in the first person, the novel describes the mechanisms of survival under horrific conditions.

  Kertész, himself a Holocaust survivor, described the novel as being autobiographical in form, yet not an autobiography. The linearity of narration, and the frequent use of the present tense draw the reader into concentration camp life as it unfolds, including the tediousness, the physical pain, and, as Köves shockingly asserts on his return to Hungary after the end of war, the “happiness.” Fateless thus avoids objectivity and any simple moral judgment.