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1900s
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino
Lifespan | b. 1923 (Cuba), d. 1985 (Italy)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | G. Einaudi (Turin)
Original Title | Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a novel about the urgency, desire, and frustration bound up in the practice of reading novels. Italo Calvino devises a clever narrative containing a library shelf of incomplete novels—enticing fragments from imagined books that are brutally interrupted by the contingencies of faulty binding or missing pages. For this novel is also about all that can go wrong on that hazardous journey between a writer and a reader who sits down to read a novel. That reader is me—potentially you. But it is also a character called the Reader, whose initial desire to get hold of an undamaged copy of Italo Calvino’s latest novel (which happens to be titled If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler) is soon confused with his desire for Ludmilla, another reader. Theirs is the framing narrative, interspliced with the fragments of the other novels they read—each passing itself off as the sequel to the fragment they (and we) have just read. This complex organization allows Calvino to write ten brilliant extracts from ten very different novels, this tour of reading taking us on a journey across genres, periods, languages, and cultures.
Above all, this novel is a manifesto for the pleasures and the adventures of reading alone as well as a celebration of the thrill of mutual recognition experienced when two readers discover that they have read and loved the same book. KB
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1900s
So Long a Letter
Mariama Bâ
Lifespan | b. 1929 (Senegal), d. 1981
First Published | 1979, by Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines (Dakar)
Original Title | Une si longue lettre
Infidelity is a commonplace in Western fiction, but So Long a Letter is not really a commonplace Western novel; here the betrayal is not simply a private tragedy, but a publicly accepted way of structuring family life. Passionate, melancholy, and gently mocking, So Long a Letter is a declaration of love as well as a denunciation of polygamy. Written as one long letter from Ramatoulaye, a Muslim woman in Senegal, to a close friend, this novel depicts her memory not only of a long, happy marriage shattered by desertion and then death, but of thoughts on a changing society—postcolonial Senegal—where education and the rights of women rub uneasily against culture and religious tradition.
Mariama Bâ was the daughter of a politician who insisted that she pursue her education. This was despite the misgivings of her maternal grandparents, who raised her following her mother’s death. The struggle between modernity and tradition was therefore present in Bâ’s own childhood, and remained a constant theme in a life devoted to teaching, writing, and working for the feminist movement in Senegal.
So Long a Letter is undoubtedly one of the most energetic depictions of the female condition in African literature, and, as such, it is essential reading for those who seek an insight into feminist concerns in a rapidly changing African postcolonial context. The novel was awarded the first Noma Award for Publishing in 1980. RMa
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1900s
Burger’s Daughter
Nadine Gordimer
Lifespan | b. 1923 (South Africa)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1991
Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter is a novel that explores the impossibility and the necessity of a private life. In South Africa in the late 1960s and 1970s, private life is a luxury, belonging only to those whites who can blind themselves to the fact that their “normality” is underpinned by other peoples’ suffering. For Rosa Burger, a private life comes also to be a necessity, a strategy for survival after the death of her father in prison, a means whereby she can resist the absorption of herself into his reputation and his South Africa.
Both of Rosa’s parents were Afrikaner Marxists—freedom fighters, figures for whom politics was no respecter of the thin line demarcating the supposed sanctity of the private domain. By the novel’s end, Rosa Burger is also in prison. But in the defeat of her painful attempt to carve out a life of her own, there is a strange liberation.
Gordimer articulates a critique of what passes for “freedom” through the anguish of a white woman trapped in a past not of her making. The untold histories, interlaced with the story of her struggle, are the stories of migrant miners, factory workers, homeless servants, and landless peasants. This corrodes sympathy, leaving the reader no choice but to read on, to be glad this novel was written, and to regret the need for it to be written. PMcM
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1900s
A Bend in the River
V. S. Naipaul
Lifespan | b. 1932 (Trinidad)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | Deutsch (London)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 2001
“The river and the forest were like presences. You felt unprotected, an intruder.”
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1979, V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is set in an unnamed central African state, closely modeled on Mobutu’s Zaire, and is narrated by Salim, a Muslim of Indian descent who travels from his family’s home on the East African coast to run a sundries shop in a crumbling town “on the bend in the great river.” The Europeans have largely departed; this is a dangerous new land.
Salim is surrounded by people of all sorts: a tribal woman who visits his shop and deals in charms and potions; an old Belgian priest who collects African masks and carvings; and upwardly mobile entrepreneurs, including a fellow Indian who sets up a Bigburger joint in town. Salim has a protégé, a young African called Ferdinand; he sends him to school and watches him transform himself from a rural nobody into a politically engaged government administrator. Always felt but never foregrounded in the narrative are the turbulent events—guerrilla uprisings, corruption, killings—of a nation that is seeking an identity. The president, always referred to as the Big Man, creates his own darkly Africanized myth of himself, aided by a white historian with whose wife Salim has a violent affair.
Everyone’s lives are interconnected, and their complications are driven by larger forces: the clash of cultures, the weight of history. A Bend in the River shares with Naipaul’s other novels a deep skepticism about the direction of non-European civilization, but, at the same time, he manages to avoid glorifying the previous colonial administration of such countries. Rather than focusing exclusively on the larger political struggles of these newly independent nations, what really resonates in Naipaul’s work are the stories of individuals and their personal calamities and triumphs. DSoa
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1900s
A Dry White Season
André Brink
Lifespan | b. 1935 (South Africa)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | W. H. Allen (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1989
“It all really began . . . with the death of Gordon Ngubene.”
Schoolteacher Ben Du Toit is one of those “nice,” unassuming, middle-class Afrikaners enjoying the privileged lifestyle of servants and swimming pools that South Africa’s apartheid in the 1970s afforded the whites. But his world begins to fall apart when he innocently takes up his gardener’s plea to help find his son who has disappeared after protesting with other black school kids in Soweto.
In an increasingly harrowing investigation, Ben gets sucked into a world of corruption, coverup, bigotry, and murder that goes deeper into the corridors of power. In his searching for the truth, Ben has to come to terms with the fact that he is alienating many in his community, even his family, by not “letting it go,” while at the same t
ime he is mistrusted by the blacks he is trying to help. The search is not straightforward and André Brink exposes how the wheels of state repression never stop grinding, at a human and personal level, and eventually grind our hero under. Ultimately he points the finger at the iniquities of South Africa’s apartheid policy.
André Brink was no stranger to controversy when he wrote this novel. His earlier books written in his native Afrikaans (such as Looking on Darkness, 1977) had begun to explore the breakdown of human values brought on by the injustices of apartheid. His opinions did not exactly make him popular with his fellow Afrikaners, nor with the government—who banned his books under censorship laws. Brink was forced to translate from Afrikaans and write his works in English to allow his political message to reach a wider audience. A Dry White Season certainly did that, not least because it became an international movie (1989), starring Donald Sutherland, South African Janet Suzman, and cinematic heavyweight Marlon Brando. JHa
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1900s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera
Lifespan | b. 1929 (Czechoslovakia)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Title | Kniha smíchu a zapomnení
Following the blacklisting of his works in his native Czechoslovakia, Kundera fled to France in 1975, where this novel was published.
Milan Kundera compares the structure of this novel to variations upon a musical theme. This is an apposite analogy because the novel profoundly challenges our expectations of the form. It is separated into seven sections that cannot be assimilated within the conventions of a linear or cohesive narrative, and it is interspersed with historical information and Kundera’s own autobiographical recollections.
Tamina, the novel’s principal character, leaves Czechoslovakia with her husband to escape the realities of the Communist regime. When he dies soon afterward, she struggles with an overwhelming anxiety that she will forget him. The importance of remembering is a preoccupation of the novel, and of Kundera’s wider work. It is his conviction that erasure and forgetting are political tools that are exploited by the Communist state, sometimes literally, as when dissenting party members are airbrushed out of propaganda photographs. The events of the novel take place against the backdrop of Czechoslovakia in the postwar period. Under the leadership of Alexander Dubcek, the country was working to make socialism more “human.” The 1968 Soviet invasion put paid to that ambition, however, and led to disillusionment with the political process.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is recognizably the work of Kundera but, perhaps more than any of his other works, it is suffused with an ineffable strangeness that is at once provocative and forbidding. As with his other writing, this novel raises questions about the representation of female characters, and is open to accusations of latent misogyny. These are valid objections that may engender fruitful considerations of this novel as forming a historical document as much as a work of experimental fiction. JW
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1900s
Fool’s Gold
Maro Douka
Lifespan | b. 1947 (Greece)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | Kedros (Athens)
Original Title | E Archaia Skoura
Maro Douka’s first novel, Fool’s Gold, uses the 1967 coup d’état in Greece as its starting point and the infamous dictatorship of the colonels as its background and inspiration. Myrsini Panayotou, an Athenian girl about to start university, learns of the dictatorship and becomes more and more involved with the underground resistance. Douka uses this scenario to introduce us to a varied cast of characters who all come from a very different social background to Myrsini. Myrsini’s family, bourgeois sophisticates, are forever having affairs and entertaining important people while, at the same time, falling for the latest fad or jumping on the latest fashionable bandwagon.
Douka’s novel is, as you would expect, highly political, and the writer’s sharp wit is aimed as much at posing leftists and the bourgeois middle class as it is at the dictatorship. She writes from Myrsini’s perspective but moves sharply into the first person of the characters around her protagonist, presenting the internal monologues of the supporting cast as they are imagined by Myrsini. The reader is given an interesting, if a little heavy-handed, picture of the Greek class system and those who represent it best.
But Fool’s Gold is not simply a novel about class and politics. It is also a Bildungsroman, for it relates the story of Myrsini’s spiritual, as well as political, education. In the end, it is her feelings for her fiancé that make it difficult to reconcile her human instincts with her idealistic philosophy. OR
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1900s
Smiley’s People
John Le Carré
Lifespan | b. 1931 (England)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)
Given Name | David John Moore Cornwell
Smiley’s People captures the dark, unglamorous world of espionage in the last days of the Cold War. John Le Carré maintains his fine sense of plotting and pace that is the hallmark of the accomplished thriller. George Smiley, a British intelligence agent, is called from retirement to discover why a former Soviet defector has been murdered. The novel portrays the hunt to destroy Carla, the ruthless and formidable grand master of Soviet espionage who featured in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Smiley gradually uncovers an intricate web that leads him to realize that Carla has a weak link: a parental concern for a daughter who is mentally ill. In many respects, this novel is Le Carré’s bleakest depiction of a world that has seemingly lost its ideals. There is no longer even a vestige of ideological struggle between East and West; espionage here is conducted for private purposes. At the same time, he depicts politically displaced figures who have suffered enormous indignity seeking justice. The book powerfully articulates that individuals of integrity can make a difference in a morally anarchic world.
It is the human cost of the Cold War that fascinates Le Carré; both sides have generated an environment that seems to lead to psychological instability. Smiley emerges with credit because he almost wishes not to succeed: he recognizes that there is something repugnant about blackmailing Carla, that he must stoop to using methods Western values are supposed to oppose. TH
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1900s
Southern Seas
Manuel Vásquez Montalbán
Lifespan | b. 1939 (Spain), d. 2003 (Thailand)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | Planeta (Barcelona)
Original Title | Los mares del sur
“The policeman looked aside for a moment, and Darkie gave him a solid righthander. A path opened for him in the night . . .”
The scene is Barcelona on the day before the first democratic municipal elections. The haute bourgeoisie is recovering its pride, at a time when being a businessman seemed something to be ashamed of, as one of its members puts it. The investigator Pepe Carvalho, sentimental liberal, absolute hedonist, compulsive gastronome, insatiable reader, and burdened with a guilty conscience (he burns the books that he has read), declares in his turn: “We private eyes are the barometers of established morality.” And he adds that “this society is rotten. It doesn’t believe in anything.” But the businessman whose death he is investigating, Carlos Stuart Pedrell, appears to have believed in something: he wanted to disappear to the South Seas, following in the footsteps of the painter Gauguin to the island of Tahiti.
Carvalho’s investigation, as he searches for the reasons behind Pedrell’s death, introduces him not only to the glamorous, sophisticated world of Barcelona’s haute bourgeoisie, but also into the world of proletarian immigrants, because the secret of his death lies in one of their dormitory towns, San Magin, which—through a quirk of fate—was built by one
of the dead man’s companies. The novel is among the best (or perhaps the best) of Manuel Vásquez Montalbán’s Carvalho books, with several nods to the best traditions of Hollywood film noir, and it also creates a portrait of the Barcelona of the time that would be hard to excel. JCM
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1900s
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
Lifespan | b. 1932 (Italy)
First Published | 1980, by Bompiani (Milan)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1986
Orginal Title | Il nome della rosa
With a narrative apparatus as complex as it is beautiful, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose gives the reader both a clear defense of the study of signs and an intricate detective story. Both facets are framed by the unfinished story, a prenarrative, of a scholar who finds in a number of manuscripts a story worth telling. Perhaps because the space this prenarrative is given is so slight compared to the density of what is to follow or perhaps because of the tone of the scholar, these first few pages remain with the reader as the text goes back to the source of the manuscripts in the early fourteenth century.
A young Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, tells of his travels with a learned Franciscan, William of Baskerville, to a troubled Benedictine monastery. This monastery, a cruel enclosed arena of conflicts and secrets, is ruled by books. The Benedictines who inhabit it live for books. As, one by one, six of them are murdered, William of Baskerville searches for the truth of their internal mute warfare by finding and reading the signs of jealousy, desire, and fear.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 81