1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

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  1900s

  The War at the End of the World

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Lifespan | b. 1936 (Peru)

  First Published | 1981

  First Published in | Seix-Barral (Barcelona)

  Original Title | La guerra del fin del mundo

  Still addressing the various faces of evil in his eighth novel, Mario Vargas Llosa presents a remarkable, apocalyptic tale, at the same time establishing a turning point in his work. For the first time, the Peruvian author leaves the country of his birth and his own times to tell the story of real-life events that took place in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the messianic experience of Antonio Consejero, a visionary holy man who, by preaching against the Republic and modernity, spoke up for the dispossessed of northeast Brazil and challenged the Republican government. Inevitably, the Brazilian army destroyed Canudos, the city in which Consejero and his supporters intended setting up a thousand-year kingdom.

  Vargas Llosa created a novel of remarkable documentary power, inspired by a work that he considered fundamental, Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha. He organized his story into a strict structural pattern consisting of an alternation of parallel stories. The result is a meticulous account of the rise, career, and destruction of a fascinating monster. A vehement critic of fanaticism and utopianism, Vargas Llosa here recovered the ambition of his novels of the 1960s. The work gave a tremendous boost to a new treatment of the historical novel that was beginning to achieve recognition in the Hispanic world. DMG

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  Lanark: A Life in Four Books

  Alasdair Gray

  Lifespan | b. 1934 (Scotland)

  First Published | 1981

  First Published by | Canongate (Edinburgh)

  Saltire Society Book of the Year | 1981

  When Alasdair Gray made his debut with Lanark, he seemed to reset the benchmarks for invention in Scottish fiction. Gray continued a twofold legacy, inheriting the impulse for typographic innovation from Jonathan Swift and Joyce, while sustaining a Blakean vision of radical social possibilities latent within the texture of everyday Glaswegian life. Traversing between Unthank and Glasgow, the narrative spans two urban underworlds as it traces the attempts by Lanark and Duncan Thaw to resist the drudgery of workaday routine.

  Throughout Lanark, the reader’s attention is drawn to the value of the physical book by its material layout. From chapter to chapter, Gray’s iridescent etchings of imaginary topographies offset his written documentary of cynicism as an affliction of Scotland’s youth. The portrayal in words of urban disaffection provokes illustrations that prospect Scotland’s regeneration. With both cities portrayed as perpetual transit zones, shifting between stagnation and restitution, the reader is encouraged to interact with Gray’s typographical designs (just as his protagonists mature on their journeys of selfdiscovery). It is this state of interactivity that testifies to the indispensability of the printed page. DJ

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  Rabbit is Rich

  John Updike

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (U.S.), d. 2009

  First Published | 1981

  First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)

  Pulitzer Prize | 1982

  Rabbit is Rich, the third novel in John Updike’s acclaimed four-part Rabbit series, jumps forward another ten years to 1979. Set in the fictional small town of Brewer, Pennsylvania, it again takes up the story of Harry Angstrom, nicknamed “Rabbit,” who, now in his forties, is enjoying a prosperous career as a used-car salesman. Happily settled with his wife, and renegotiating difficult relationships as his son grows older and marries, Rabbit has seemingly grown into the role of “solid citizen” mocked by Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, which serves as an epigraph to the book. Set against the background of the worldwide oil crisis of the late 1970s, the novel’s action turns on the ironies implied by Rabbit’s change of occupation from a working-class linotyper to an upwardly mobile dealer in used cars. Selling Toyotas to newly gas-conscious middle-class drivers has become Rabbit’s own ticket into the middleclass world of country clubs and cocktails. His pleasure in achieving the riches implied by the title is balanced by the book’s sensitive portrayal of the loss of American working-class jobs.

  Rabbit is Rich charts the emotional upheavals of Rabbit’s personal life against the background of an America that was just on the cusp of what would become the grim anxieties of the 1980s. Updike’s lyric prose and thoughtful characterizations are as strong as ever. As Rabbit ages, the sensitive portrayal of the emotional connections that underpin everyday life achieves a new poignancy. AB

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  Couples, Passerby

  Botho Strauss

  Lifespan | b. 1944 (Germany)

  First Published | 1981

  First Published in | Hanser Verlag (München)

  Original Title | Paare, Passanten

  In this collection of six vignettes by German writer and playwright Botho Strauss, couples both longstanding and temporary, frustrated in their neverending but fruitless search for meaning and emotional connection, cling together only to find greater loneliness and despair.

  Loss of humanity, solipsism, and essential selfishness under the pressure of history and technology are frequent themes in the work of Strauss, an acute social conservative profoundly displeased with what he sees as the cultural drift of his country and uninterested in the way of life in the new Germany. Strauss’s alienated individuals are likely to collide briefly, pointlessly, or violently.

  The stories in this collection depict a people losing their humanity under the pressures of modernization and the past; they describe robotlike characters with holes where their souls should be, carrying out the tasks of their daily lives—working, talking, sinning—amid spiritually void and intellectually desolate surroundings. By sketching the lifelessness of his modern Germany, Strauss attempts to point toward a truer, more authentic mode of life and expression. That he writes in the shadow of Germany’s twentieth-century history adds an obvious edge to his work and directs the interested reader’s attention toward his aesthetic vision. His mini-portraits and short-takes flow from the anonymously guilty Volk of the Third Reich to the individuals of the Cold War and beyond. LB

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  July’s People

  Nadine Gordimer

  Lifespan | b. 1923 (South Africa)

  First Published | 1981

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1991

  “The black man looked over to the three sleeping children bedded down on seats taken from the vehicle. He smiled confirmation: ‘They all right.’”

  This apocalyptic novel is set during the imaginary civil war that follows upon an invasion of South Africa from Mozambique in 1980. The cities are alight and the houses burning, as Maureen and Bam Smales and their children set out in a pickup truck, “the yellow bakkie,” with their servant, July, to escape to safety in his distant village.

  Confronted with the gritty realities of village life, Maureen prospers, whereas Bam, lost without his rifle, is a defeated man. In their newly dependent situation, Bam’s relationship with July becomes increasingly difficult as the white couple gradually lose touch with their culture day by day: Maureen poses like a model across the bakkie, and July fails to recognize the moment or the meaning. Desire and duty are now largely shaped by economic considerations, and the white liberal assumption of a shared human nature is brought into question. Nadine Gordimer’s complex prose performs extraordinary feats of allusion and implication to juxtapose past certainties with present doubt, and scarcely a single paragraph is set in an undisturbed present. These profound questions are hardly capable of resolution. When a helicopter lands in the village, Maureen rushes out
to it, not knowing if it belongs to the army or to the revolutionaries, and there the novel ends, itself unresolved. Untrue to history and the actual moment of change in South Africa, July’s People nevertheless provides a truthful dissection of white liberal vulnerability. AMu

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  On the Black Hill

  Bruce Chatwin

  Lifespan | b. 1940 (England), d. 1989 (France)

  First Published | 1982

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  Whitbread Literary Award | 1982

  For an author who spent much of his short life traveling and writing about traveling, On the Black Hill is a curious book to have written. It concerns eighty years in the lives of Benjamin and Lewis, identical twins from the Welsh border country, who remain for that entire period either within or near an isolated farm on which they live and subsequently work. Apart from a very brief period in the army, from which Benjamin is dishonorably discharged, they avoid the draft for the First World War, they never marry, and after the death of their parents, they sleep in their parents’ bed for over forty years.

  The novel looks back over the lives of the twins, and is recounted in a distinctive realist prose. Bruce Chatwin favors the short single clause summary sentence over more complex, longer structures. He also relegates complexity of plot in favor of detailed character portrayal, avoiding both crude simplification or sentimental excess.

  On one level, the novel contains all the appeal of a traditional rural drama: a hot-headed father who mistreats his educated wife and disrupts her attempts at schooling the twins, rural family feuds involving violence, a suicide, army brutality, the demise of a noble family due to corruption. But the book is also a study in the local and sedentary, and the tensions created within traditional lifestyles by motion and flight, as created by Lewis’s interest in aviation and the opposite sex, and the brief and difficult moments where the twins are parted. ABi

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  The House of the Spirits

  Isabel Allende

  Lifespan | b. 1942 (Peru)

  First Published | 1982

  First Published by | Plaza & Janés (Barcelona)

  Original Title | La casa de los espíritus

  The vivacity of the imagination that shines through the fantastic story of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits is difficult to describe as being anything other than magical. The novel playfully traverses the boundary between the real and the incredible, while never losing its solid grounding in the history and political reality of Chile.

  The House of the Spirits is a deeply personal novel. Begun as a letter to Allende’s dying grandfather, it tells the story of the Trueba family, with the rise to power of Isabel’s own uncle, Salvador Allende (“The Candidate” in the text), and his subsequent death in the coup of 1973 as its tragic backdrop. The atrocities that surround this bloody moment of Chilean history are strikingly evoked, and what has seemed an enchanting fairy tale becomes a dark and powerful narrative. The chronicle of these events may be the most striking element of the book, and has much to do with its (deserved) acclaim, but it is the exuberant presentation of the Trueba clan that is its emotional heart. Allende’s tender and sentimental, caustic and biting assessments of thinly veiled figures from her own life are brilliantly evocative. The empathy inspired by the tale of this extraordinary family is gripping, and the deep involvement engendered by Allende’s writing makes the tragic and horrifying end personally moving. DR

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  Schindler’s Ark

  Thomas Keneally

  Lifespan | b. 1935 (Australia)

  First Published | 1982, by Hodder & Stoughton (Lon.)

  Alternate Title | Schindler’s List

  Booker Prize | 1982

  A copy of Oskar Schindler’s original list of twelve hundred Polish Jews to be saved from death in the Holocaust.

  Schindler’s Ark begins with a “note” from Thomas Keneally describing the chance encounter with Leopold Pfefferberg, a “Schindler survivor,” that prompted him to write the story of Oskar Schindler, “bon vivant, speculator, charmer.” An industrialist and member of the Nazi Party, Schindler risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.

  Winning the Booker Prize on its publication in 1982, Schindler’s Ark is a “novel” deeply embedded in the trauma of modern European history, a story that, Keneally insists, attempts to avoid all fiction. Driven to understand Schindler’s “impulse towards rescue,” to explore the enigma that, on this telling, still haunts “Schindler’s Jews”, the book combines historical research with imaginative reconstruction to portray the complex and provocative character of Oskar Schindler. In the process, Keneally draws his readers into the world of those condemned by the Nazis as a form of “life unworthy of life.” He examines the volatile mix of political violence and sexual sadism that prompts one of the most unsettling questions in the book: “What could embarrass the SS?” At the same time, in taking the decision to represent the Holocaust, Keneally writes his way into the controversy that surrounds that project: not only how “true” is this portrayal of Schindler, but who is licensed to bear witness to the Holocaust? What literary form can memorialize the reality of those events? In 1993, the release of Steven Spielberg’s award-winning Schindler’s List (the U.S. title of Keneally’s book) reinforced that controversy. In particular, as part of the so-called “Holocaust boom,” Spielberg’s film refracts what remains, in one critical view, the untroubled, but profoundly troubling, sentimentality of Keneally’s narrative: its novelistic depiction of history through the life of one man. VL

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  A Pale View of Hills

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Lifespan | b. 1954 (Japan)

  First Published | 1982

  First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)

  Original Language | English

  A Pale View of Hills is narrated by Etsuko, a warravaged widow from Nagasaki who is living in England. Her memories of the past and of her daughter Keiko, who committed suicide, are prompted by the arrival in England of her second child, Niki. Not only does Etsuko try unsuccessfully to articulate a meaningful response to her daughter’s death, the reader is also never fully certain about the events that took place in the hot summer in Nagasaki to which her narrative returns time and again. Ishiguro is less interested in offering an account of the central trauma that defines a character’s identity than in demonstrating how the very act of storytelling is never straightforward.

  As past and present interweave in increasingly enigmatic ways, the novel raises as many questions as it answers. Ishiguro’s narrative style urges the reader to consider the ways that subjectivity is both provisional and improvised, and how identity, rather than the pre-existing stories we come to tell about ourselves, may be something that is perhaps always in process. Just as the horror of Nagasaki broods over the narrative without ever being mentioned directly, so too the interplay between memory, identity, and trauma in this haunting debut novel challenges any naive conception of language as a clear window onto a world of objective truth. VA

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  Wittgenstein’s Nephew

  Thomas Bernhard

  Lifespan | b. 1931 (Netherlands), d. 1989 (Austria)

  First Published | 1982

  First Published by | Suhrkamp (Frankfurt)

  Original Title | Wittgensteins Neffe: eine Freundschaft

  In Wittgenstein’s Nephew, an intellectual, sick, and obsessive narrator reflects on the tragic life and unfortunate death of a close friend, who is also an intellectual and sick and obsessive. The narrator is Thomas Bernhard himself and in this, his most personal novel, he reveals a compassionate humanity that is so glaringly absent from his work in general.

  The novel is written as a tribute to Bernhard’s
friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, nephew of the famous Austrian philosopher. It opens with Wittgenstein and Bernhard staying in the same Viennese hospital, in separate wards. Wittgenstein suffers from a recurring mental illness and Bernhard from a recurring pulmonary condition. From this beginning, Bernhard creates an honest and touching account of Wittgenstein’s life, his gradual demise, and Bernhard’s reaction to it. He reflects on illness, intellectual and artistic passion, and the two men’s hatred for the complacency of Austrian society. Bernhard sees Wittgenstein as a victim of his patrician family’s suffocating conformity and Austrian society’s blinkered provincialism. He considers Wittgenstein an intellectual equal to his uncle, who he believes would have shared a similar fate had he not escaped to England.

  Wittgenstein’s Nephew is an affectionate account of the value of friendship and a meditation on the perilous link between intellectual energy and insanity, which addresses issues of isolation, illness, and death without being sentimental or morose. AL

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