1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  The Name of the Rose asks its readers to share Baskerville’s task of interpretation, to respect the polyphony of signs, to slow down before deciding upon meaning, and to doubt anything that promises an end to the pursuit of meaning. In this way, Eco opens up the wonder of interpretation itself. PMcM

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  1900s

  Clear Light of Day

  Anita Desai

  Lifespan | b. 1937 (India)

  First Published | 1980

  First Published in | Heinemann (London)

  Given Name | Anita Mazumdar

  Born of an Indian father and a German mother, Anita Desai has said that while she “feels about India as an Indian, she thinks about India as an outsider.” In this fascinating and finely detailed novel, set in a crumbling mansion in Old Delhi, she describes the tense and fractious relationships within a deeply divided family and sets them against the seismic historical events of India’s partition, the death of Gandhi, and the ensuing struggle for political power.

  The two central characters are the estranged sisters Bim and Tara, brought together again on the occasion of their niece’s wedding. Bim, the elder sister, has remained at home to care for her autistic younger brother and an elderly alcoholic aunt. Tara escaped from both the house and the traditions that ruled it by marrying a diplomat and going to live abroad. The two women recall their childhood past and attempt some degree of reconciliation in spite of the diverging paths their lives have since taken. But Tara finds Bim embittered and defensive, unable to forgive what she regards as betrayal of her family.

  Anita Desai has described history as “a kind of juggernaut,” and in many of her novels the protagonists are swept along by historical and social forces that they struggle in vain to control. In Clear Light of Day, she examines the effects of a complex and turbulent history on contemporary Indian society, and focuses on the way that this has impacted on the lives of the two women and their very different quests for fulfillment. TS

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  1900s

  Confederacy of Dunces

  John Kennedy Toole

  Lifespan | b. 1937 (U.S.), d. 1969

  First Published | 1980

  First Published by | Louisiana State University Press

  Pulitzer Prize | 1981 (posthumous)

  “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” The quote is by the satirist Jonathan Swift, and the unlikely genius at the center of John Kennedy Toole’s grotesquely comic novel is the corpulent Ignatius J. Reilly, a man of huge appetites and extraordinary erudition. Intent on spending his time in his bedroom, bingeeating, ranting, and recording his musings on a jumbled pile of writing pads, he is forced, through an unfortunate turn in circumstances, to venture out into the world of work. He is drawn into a series of misunderstandings and misadventures as he struggles to deal with the horrors of modern life. Orbiting around him are the dunces, the eccentric inhabitants of a splendidly described low-life New Orleans. The atmosphere of decay adds a discordant undertone to the comedy, and there are disquieting insights into the hypocrisy and discrimination lurking behind the city’s grinning carnival mask.

  John Kennedy Toole struggled for years to find a publisher for the novel. It was only years after his suicide that his mother convinced the novelist Walker Percy to read the manuscript, and it was his enthusiasm for the book that led to its publication. It went on to become a bestseller. This is a timelessly funny and fast-moving novel, spiralling through a uniquely unhinged world in which, according to Ignatius J. Reilly, “the gods of Chaos, Lunacy and Bad Taste” have gained ascendancy over humankind. TS

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  Rituals

  Cees Nooteboom

  Lifespan | b. 1933 (Netherlands)

  First Published | 1980

  First Published by | Arbeiderspers (Amsterdam)

  Original Title | Rituelen

  Cees Nooteboom has been described as the Netherlands’s answer to Nabokov or Borges. Rituals is neither outspokenly Postmodern nor especially magic realist, but it is certainly not linear or predictable.

  Concerning Inni Wintrop, a thinker privileged with a prosperous life and too much time on his hands, the novel conjures an impressionistic literary landscape, where events and people mirror each other but are never fully explained. Perhaps Wintrop’s self-confessed dilettantism cannot allow for answers, only endless and restless questioning, yet it is not his life that lies at the heart of the novel as much as the story of two men by the name of Taads; father Arnold and son Philip. Both end up committing suicide. Nooteboom uses the divergent circumstances of their lives and deaths to explore how different generations face similar crises of intellectual and spiritual faith.

  Cees Nooteboom is neither burdensomely philosophical nor anthropological in his approach; ramblings on the nature of God and existence are leavened by the macabre whimsy of a circumcision or satirical soundings on the art world. Much of the language, too, is crisply and poetically precise, whether conveying existential doubt or paying homage to Amsterdam’s engrossing cityscape. Rituals became Nooteboom’s first major success in the English-speaking world; in the case of such an idiosyncratically “European” novel, perhaps this is telling of its assured greatness. ABl

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  1900s

  Smell of Sadness

  Alfred Kossmann

  Lifespan | b. 1922 (Netherlands), d. 1998

  First Published | 1980

  First Published by | Querido (Amsterdam)

  Original Title | Geur der droefenis

  Smell of Sadness is the magnum opus of the Dutch novelist Alfred Kossmann, written after he explored many boundaries of both the literary and journalistic worlds. From an early age, Kossmann was a fascinated observer of his own life and that of others, and his attitude to life was channeled into various literary forms of expression. In 1946, he made his debut as a poet with Het vuurwerk (The Fireworks), which he followed with both novels and journalism. Kossmann also published numerous extensive travel stories that combined firsthand observations and autobiographical reflections.

  Smell of Sadness is is an amalgam of all aspects of Kossmann’s authorship, and it includes many autobiographical elements. The novel describes forty years in the life of writer Thomas Rozendal, who as a teenager claims that life “isn’t hard but extremely boring.” Decades later, he is compelled to accept that existence is meaningless. An atmosphere of futility and mortality emerges: one character commits suicide, another becomes insane, a third is run over by a truck. And Thomas? He lets life pass by with bewildering resignation and remains incapable of experiencing it fully. All the characters have grown up during the war and have led mostly tragic lives as a result of incomprehensible events and developments. Kossmann tells his story through interwoven memories, facts, fabrications, and dreams. Reality is distorted by an impressive literary mix, emanating a “smell of sadness.” JaM

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  Broken April

  Ismail Kadare

  Lifespan | b. 1936 (Albania)

  First Published | 1980, in Gjakftohtësia

  First Published by | Naim Frashëri (Tirana)

  Original Title | Prilli i Thyer

  Set in Albania between the World Wars, in a nation on the brink of European modernity, Broken April focuses on the story of Gjorg Berisha’s involvement in a blood feud, the conduct of which is strictly governed by the Kanun, an ancient code of honor that has dominated Albanian culture for generations. Gjorg’s family have been involved in a seventy-yearold feud with a neighboring family, the Kryeqyqes. The novel begins when Gjorg assassinates a member of the Kryeqyqe family, in revenge for the earlier murder of his own brother. The murder inevitably makes Gjorg himself the next victim in the vicious cycle of recrimination and bloodshed.

  The Kanun decrees
that there is a thirty-day period of truce after a murder occurs, and before it can be avenged with the killing of its perpetrator. It is this period that the novel covers, from the moment that Gjorg murders his victim, in mid March, to the moment that Gjorg will be delivered to the implacable justice of the Kanun, in mid April. During this period, Gjorg is neither alive nor dead, but suspended in empty time.

  Written with an extraordinary simplicity and elegance, this is a haunting and haunted tale. The space between life and death that the novel maps out is given a dreamlike articulation that is infused with the spirit of Homer, Dante, and Kafka. Kadare is also stunningly original, inventing a newly ancient language in which to express the contradictions of contemporary life in eastern Europe. PB

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  Midnight’s Children

  Salman Rushdie

  Lifespan | b. 1947 (India)

  First Published | 1980

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  Booker Prize | 1981

  Midnight’s Children is narrated by Saleem Sinai, who was born at midnight on August 15, 1947: the moment of the creation of India as an independent nation. Saleem’s life comes to embody that of the young nation. Rather than allowing the novel or this protagonist to stand as representative of the country, Salman Rushdie explores the complex fantasies and failures that the myth of nationalism offers.

  All of the children born during the hour of midnight are uniquely gifted, the closer to midnight the more powerful the gift. This cohort of the fantastic and the surreal—children who can move through time, multiply fishes, become invisible—is an imaginary expression of India’s rich potential. Of the group, two are born on the stroke of midnight, and are its potential leaders: Saleem, who can see into the hearts and minds of others, and Shiva, who is given the converse gift, the gift of war, and becomes a brutish killer. The adversarial relation ship between the two is crucial to this huge and sprawling narrative, which is set against the backdrop of the first years of independence. Saleem comes from a privileged and well-connected family, whereas Shiva, a motherless street child, has nothing. Midway through the novel, however, we discover that these two children were swapped at birth and that neither is who they are assumed to be. The anxieties around paternity, dispossession, authenticity, and trust that this knowledge raises come to reverberate throughout the novel and are constantly read back against the partitioned history of India itself.

  This masterly novel, which transfixes the reader with its imaginative scope, humor, dizzying wordplay, and heartbreaking pathos is an exciting blend of magic realism and political reality, Rushdie’s heartfelt tribute to his native land. NM

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  1900s

  Waiting for the Barbarians

  J. M. Coetzee

  Lifespan | b. 1940 (South Africa)

  First Published | 1980

  First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 2003

  Critics frequently attempt to read into J. M. Coetzee’s dense, elliptical narratives allegories of the South African state during and after the period of apartheid. Waiting for the Barbarians is certainly open to such an interpretation.

  Set in an unnamed empire, in an unspecified location, at an imprecise time, the novel relates the tale of a magistrate. He comes up against the machinery of a brutal state by attempting, in some small way, to recompense a “barbarian” girl for the torture inflicted upon her by the inscrutable Colonel Joll. The magistrate collects wooden slips retrieved from the desert containing an ancient and unreadable script. He concludes that these fragments of writing form an allegory that arises not from the slips themselves but from the order and manner in which they are read. In this way, Waiting for the Barbarians is a more general meditation on the act of writing and on the potential failures of writing to communicate meaning. Here the “barbarians” seem to represent a testimony of suffering that cannot be articulated. The woman that the magistrate rescues says little and he largely infers her consciousness, seeking to read a narrative of the empire from her wounds. Similarly, through the magistrate’s abasement, Coetzee offers a portrait of political commitment as something that is simultaneously total and also empty of ideology. LC

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  Summer in Baden-Baden

  Leonid Tsypkin

  Lifespan | b. 1926 (Belarus), d. 1982 (Russia)

  First Published | 1981, in Novyy Amerikanets (N.Y.)

  Original Title | Leto v Badene

  First UK Edition | 1987, by Quartet (London)

  This extraordinary novel, first published in 1981, just before the author died, was recently brought to the attention of the reading public by the critic Susan Sontag just before her own death.

  The novel dramatizes Fyodor and Anna Dostoevsky’s tempestuous relationship, focusing on a summer trip the couple took to Baden-Baden in 1867. However, the story of Anna and Fyodor is also folded inside an autobiographical account of Leonid Tsypkin’s own travels, and folded again into scenes and moments from Dostoevsky’s writing, and from the wider Russian literary heritage.

  As the reader becomes lost between the real and the imagined, the beautiful and the ugly, in this multiframed novel, Tsypkin’s wild, uncontainable prose starts to take over, to produce its own crazed reality. Tsypkin’s prose is unlike any other, an entirely new and vivid invention. In the rhythms of his writing, as he imagines his way toward the insanity of Dostoevsky’s love for Anna, he catches the very movement of Dostoevsky’s thought, of his paranoia, his desperation, and his brilliance.

  Summer in Baden-Baden gives Dostoevsky to us in a new way, and in doing so it promises to redraw the map of contemporary fiction. That it should be rescued from the dark by a woman at the end of her life, in an act that is itself a testament to the love of literary fiction, is almost uncannily fitting. PB

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  The House with the Blind Glass Windows

  Herbjørg Wassmo

  Lifespan | b. 1942 (Norway)

  First Published | 1981

  First Published in | Gyldendal (Oslo)

  Original Title | Huset med den blinde glassveranda

  Set in a small Norwegian fishing village still struggling in the aftermath of German Nazi occupation, The House with the Blind Glass Windows tells the story of eleven-year-old Tora. The illegitimate daughter of a dead German soldier, Tora shares a run-down tenement flat with her mother and drunken stepfather, Henrik. Socially ostracized by the stigma of her birth, Tora also suffers constant sexual and mental abuse from her stepfather while her mother is at work.

  Wassmo’s fragmented prose conveys Tora’s increasing despair as she struggles to deal with her bleak situation. Although in desperate need of protection, Tora is scared of burdening her mother with the truth. She escapes into a fantasy world of safety and comfort, imagining her real father coming to rescue her. Wassmo lightens this brutal narrative and graphic content with gentle and melodic prose.

  The House With The Blind Glass Windows was the first volume of Wassmo’s Tora trilogy. The novel is not just a tale of woe; with the friendship and support of a few neighboring women, Tora finds the strength to survive. While centrally a novel about the victimization of women, The House with the Blind Glass Windows also celebrates Tora’s triumph. This is a powerful tale about women’s solidarity, as together they struggle against gender inequality, poverty, and postwar depression. RA

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  Leaden Wings

  Zhang Jie

  Lifespan | b. 1937 (China)

  First Published | 1981, by The People’s Literature Publishing House

  Original Title | Chenzhong de chibang

  Zhang Jie’s novel tells the stories of a group of characters who have in common their connection to the Dawn Motor Works, a large Chinese industrial co
rporation. The central theme is the radical change brought about by modernization and how this change affected Chinese society. Jie’s intimate observations of daily life in modern China lay bare the effects that cultural and political revolution had on the peripheral characters of industrial society, giving us a unique insight into the lives of factory workers and their wives and children.

  With extensive use of dialog and a tantalizing lack of narrative conclusion, the short, open-ended stories glimpse fragments of a changing culture. Despite recent developments, prejudices rooted in a feudal past still reign; reformers face formidable obstacles from officials who built their careers under the old system, and women are still regarded as second-class citizens. We are left curious as to the outcome of the various characters, but also with a wider picture of their social and political unease.

  In the midst of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Jie was ordered to participate in re-education at a special school in Beijing. She later worked for almost twenty years at the Ministry of Industry for Mechanical Engineering, not starting to write until after the Cultural Revolution; this novel was one of the first of its era to be translated in the West. RA