1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

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  1900s

  The Christmas Oratorio

  Göran Tunström

  Lifespan | b. 1937 (Sweden), d. 2000

  First Published | 1983

  First Published by | Bonniers (Stockholm)

  Original Title | Juloratoriet

  The Swedish cover of Tunström’s The Christmas Oratorio attempts to suggest the novel’s major themes of love, loss, and memory.

  “Every act in the past yielded a thousand other possibilities, all trickling along toward their own future.”

  Big in Sweden, and bigger still after a 1996 movie adaptation directed by Kjell-Åke Andersson, The Christmas Oratorio is a finely wrought and sweeping drama from a gifted writer. As with his other fiction, especially The Thief (1986), Göran Tunström explores, in a lyrical and economical style, the themes of lost childhood and the search for identity in the dynamics of an extended family.

  The Christmas Oratorio is effectively a succession of tragedies—composed by Tunström as a variation on the theme of mourning—that befall three generations of the Nordensson family across three continents. Their lives are all shaped by the slowly expanding ripples of one tragic event, “like frozen music that may take ages to thaw out.”

  That event goes back to the 1930s: Sidner, the pivotal character, tells his son how he saw his own mother, Solveig, crushed to death by cows in a freak accident. She had been cycling to a remote country church to sing in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. This part of the story, like much of his other writings, takes place in the pastoral setting of Värmland, Tunström’s birthplace. Sidner’s father, Aron, runs off without him to New Zealand (where Tunström himself lived for a while), beginning a new relationship that is haunted by his dead wife, while Sidner ends up with an older woman. These are tragic, poignant, and perplexing love stories and father–son relationships beautifully observed by an author who deserves a wider readership. JHa

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  1900s

  Fado Alexandrino

  António Lobo Antunes

  Lifespan | b. 1942 (Portugal)

  First Published | 1983

  First Published by | Publicações D. Quixote (Lisbon)

  Jerusalem Prize | 2005

  “Slowly, painfully . . . he put back together inside himself the city he had left two years before amid boat whistles . . .”

  In Portuguese, fado relates to either traditional singing or to one’s destiny. Fado Alexandrino, made up of three sections, each containing twelve chapters, encapsulates both meanings of the word in the shape of thirty-six verses concerned with the fate of Angola before, during, and after the revolution of April 25, 1974.

  António Lobo Antunes, a former psychiatrist, was sent to war in Angola in 1971. In the two years that he was there as a lieutenant and army doctor, he apprehended the reality not only of war itself but particularly that of his companions’ perception of war. In his prose, war becomes a process that, while omnipresent, invokes a feeling of alienation from self and other on the part of its direct participants. Every individual tries continually to reattain what is lost at the most mundane, everyday level, as a way of conferring meaning to communal experience.

  Fado Alexandrino is merciless in depicting a dystopian scenario of impotence—both sexual and political—that demands an emotional predisposition from the reader to want to explore more. Why so? Because, in an imaginative and beautifully constructed use of language, Lobo Antunes guides us through what is most mundanely profound in a nation trying to come to terms with its identity just before, during, and after one of the most crucial events of its history. At a superficial level, the novel is about five ex-militants who have dinner and discuss their professional, social, and personal lives in the period of 1972–82. However, in intertwining space and time—frequently within a set dialog—Lobo Antunes weaves a complex structure that encompasses issues of race, class, and money but, above all, deglorifies the effort of war through the narration of individual life stories. ML

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  The Witness

  Juan José Saer

  Lifespan | b. 1937 (Argentina), d. 2005 (France)

  First Published | 1983

  First Published by | Folios (Buenos Aires)

  Original Title | El entenado

  “The truth is not necessarily the opposite of fiction.”

  Juan José Saer

  With the outward appearance of a historical novel, The Witness is actually an existentialist fable on the awareness of life. It is the story of an anonymous orphaned cabin boy who, in the early sixteenth century, travels from Spain to the New World. He and his traveling companions are besieged by Indians when they arrive and he is the sole survivor of the raid. He lives for ten years as a prisoner of a tribe of cannibals and, once freed, makes the story of this experience the center of his existence. It is an allegory on the radical strangeness of human beings and on the responsibility of the individual toward the world. Cannibalism ceases to seem a monstrous sign of alienation and becomes a metaphor for the obligation of indigenous peoples toward a universe whose balance must be preserved. The apparent report ends like an anthropological treatise and horror gives way to understanding: the essence of the human being is problematical, and only the subjective conscience allows a meaning to be given to existence.

  The prime responsibility of the unnamed narrator is to preserve the memory of these Indians. Although they are radically different to him, they are also similar to him in his state as an orphan, which is that of a man ignorant of his origins, the subject of chance events, and, in short, able to learn about himself only through his immediate experience. The memory of the eclipse of the moon with which the novel ends is also presented as an allegory of this complete darkness. The balance between objectivism and lyricism, the freedom in the treatment of linguistic truth and of the point of view, and the changes of narrative pace make this book a model example of a new treatment within the genre of the historical novel. DMG

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  Shame

  Salman Rushdie

  Lifespan | b. 1947 (India)

  First Published | 1983

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  Full Name | Ahmed Salman Rushdie

  The red lettering on the jacket of the first edition symbolizes the central theme of the novel—that violence is born out of shame.

  “‘Come quickly, your fatherji is sending himself to the devil.’”

  Following the discussion of India’s partition in Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame focuses on the nation that emerged from that partition, Pakistan. It has a “peripheral” hero who watches from the wings, the disreputable Omar Shakil. He is the child of three sequestered sisters who all consider themselves the boy’s mother. The novel is set in the remote border town of Q in a country that is not quite Pakistan but a place “at a slight angle to reality.” The narrative is frequently disrupted with asides and newspaper reports, blurring the division between fiction and history, and creating a satire of the Pakistan of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia al Haq, in their fictional equivalents, Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder.

  The narrative follows the feud between Iskander Harappa, the prime minister, who is a gambler and womanizer, and Raza Hyder, who usurps his power in a coup. Set against this political struggle, the Hyder and Harappa families are inextricably bound up in a series of sexual and marital intrigues, which largely center on the female characters, particularly Sufiya Zinobia, the daughter of Harappa who eventually marries Omar Shakil. Zinobia is the embodiment of the barely translatable Urdu word sharam, rendered in English as “shame.” As the brainsick daughter who should have been a son, she also symbolizes Pakistan, the miracle that went wrong. It is the beast of shame hidden deep inside Zinobia that finally surfaces to exact retribution on the whole cast of characters.

  A daring blend of historical commentary, p
olitical allegory, and a fantastical fictional style that owes a stylistic debt to Gabriel García Márquez, Shame is a fitting successor to Midnight’s Children, displaying the same capacity for comic excess, complex narrative, and biting political critique. ABi

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  Money: A Suicide Note

  Martin Amis

  Lifespan | b. 1949 (England)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  First U.S. Edition | 1985, by Viking (New York)

  Designed by Mon Mohan and Dick Jones, the jacket of the first edition of the book evokes 1980s-style material wealth.

  “I’m drinking tax-exempt whisky from a toothmug . . .“

  John Self, the empty Everyman of Money, is one of Martin Amis’s more powerful and memorable creations. Set in the summer of 1981, the novel’s opening sees Self escape the nationalist romance of the Royal Wedding and his own failing and violent love affair by flying to New York. There he embarks on a corporately financed yet profoundly pleasureless binge of drugs, alcohol, violence, and sex.

  The novel offers a darkly satirical celebration of the insatiable but righteous greed of Reaganite America and its counterpart in Thatcherite Britain. Money also invites us to identify with John Self, who makes a thoroughly unpleasant but oddly likeable hero. Self has been lured from Britain and his successful career in advertising—that most archetypal of 1980s industries—by the promise of Hollywood fame, and it is the money pressed upon him by the movie’s financiers that he so recklessly spends throughout the novel. However, the reader soon becomes aware that Self’s profound loss of control is quickly leading him to a moment of humiliating hubris. As the novel unravels we realize that Self has been the victim of a hugely elaborate corporate hoax that will leave him financially destitute. By the novel’s end we see that he has lost not only his ambition, his livelihood, his father, and friends, but also, more poignantly, the salvation offered by his unlikely and redemptive lover. The final irony of the novel, although it offers little solace to Self, is that he inadvertently thwarts the hoax that ruins him. His limited participation in the movie that was destined never to be made involves hiring a lowly British novelist—Martin Amis himself—whose rewriting of the ludicrously unfilmable screenplay began the chain of events that ultimately led to the plot’s unraveling. NM

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  Flaubert’s Parrot

  Julian Barnes

  Lifespan | b. 1946 (England)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)

  Pseudonym | Dan Kavanagh

  Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, the novel began three years earlier on the sighting of two stuffed parrots in Normandy.

  Funny and erudite, this is a novel about quiet passion and the delusion of academic celebrity. It is a love story, spectacularly unrequited, between a lonely amateur scholar and the object of his affection, Gustave Flaubert. And it is a detective story—though less Chandler than Borges.

  Geoffrey Braithewaite stumbles onto what seems to him a great unsolved literary mystery: which of two stuffed parrots is the one that sat on Flaubert’s desk—the parrot featured in Un Coeur Simple? Ultimately pointless, it is a parody of the ineffectuality of academia and the hermetic viciousness of overspecialization. It explores the nature of creativity, of criticism, and of creating heroes. Beauty can be fragile: do we risk destroying it through intimate dissection or is part of the magic in the mystery? The novel is less about Flaubert (and even less about the parrot) than about Braithewaite and the danger that, in getting too close to one’s heroes, one is getting uncomfortably close to oneself. “All art is autobiographical,” claims Lucien Freud, and that includes the art of biography. Braithewaite is a tragic figure: numb to life, his own memories and feelings go unregarded, so empty he must devote himself not to another human being but to something far safer.

  A dusty retired doctor consumed by a dead French writer seems unlikely to be fertile ground for humor—but the novel is full of wit and insight. It brims with detail, including three biographies of Flaubert (one unctious, one critical, one objective), the appearance of real-life Flaubert expert Enid Starkie, and even a mock university exam. It also contains whimsical material like Braithewaite’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. This is a fascinating jigsaw puzzle of a book. GT

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  Professor Martens’ Departure

  Jaan Kross

  Lifespan | b. 1920 (Estonia)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Eesti Raamat (Tallinn)

  Original Title | Professor Martensi ärasõit

  In 1907, F. Martens, Professor for International Law and official of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, travels from his native Estonian summer home back to St. Petersburg. Along this journey, out of Martens’s reminiscences, daydreams, and conversations with real and hallucinated fellow travelers emerges the trajectory of a life that led from a provincial orphanage to international renown. This life is strangely intertwined with that of another Martens, also a famous lawyer, who lived almost a century before him in Germany. It is a life dominated by a combination of learning, ambition, and the wounded self-love of one who made his way among those who never accepted him as one of their own.

  Jaan Kross did not have to invent the bitterness, hurt vanity, and contempt that characterizes Martens, or his reaction at being passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize—they can be found in the real Martens’s diaries. But it is Kross’s idea to let Martens, at the end of his life, conclude an imaginary “contract of honesty” with his wife and to set his vanity and self-importance against a sustained attempt at self-examination—and to show that self-awareness does not make the slightest bit of difference; that vanity, ambition, and the compromising of ideals can coexist and even feed on the ability to see through one’s own self-deceptions. It is this profound insight that gives the book its universal appeal. DG

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  Blood and Guts in High School

  Kathy Acker

  Lifespan | b. 1947 (U.S.), d. 1997 (Mexico)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Grove Press (New York)

  First UK Edition | Pan Books (London)

  Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School reinterprets the familiar rite-of-passage novel. The result is a narrative that combines the troubled life of Janey (an American teenager who hates school, is bored by her part-time job, and gets into trouble with the police) with the profane, the shocking, and the surreal. Its opening tone is that of the familiarly banal daytime talk show as it depicts Janey and her father as adults wrangling with the guilt and responsibility attendant upon a failed sexual relationship. The reader’s inability to determine Janey’s age, or to distinguish between what is either a metaphorical comment on gender politics or a literal and disturbingly normalized representation of incest, characterizes the profoundly disquieting experience that the book as a whole imparts.

  As the novel progresses, the depiction of Janey’s life becomes increasingly preposterous, frightening, and comic. The narrative of her sexual liberation and subsequent enslavement is interpolated with hand-drawn images of her dreams, pieces of her homework, and childish translations of rudimentary Arabic. This unruly and challenging text is an affront to the assumption that literary texts should be neat, complete, and somehow true. In the face of this, Acker places the sexual and anarchic energy of a young woman firmly at odds with the stifling patriarchal order she so literally caricatures. NM

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  Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel

  Julián Ríos

  Lifespan | b. 1941 (Spain)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published in | Libres del Mall (Barcelona)


  Original Title | Larva: Babel de una noche de San Juan

  The neo-avant-garde movement of the 1970s, inspired by French structuralism and the counterculture movement, produced its best fruit and at the same time reached its limits in Larva, a novel that consists of a frenetic, opaque, linguistic festival reserved for the enjoyment of a minority of readers. The distortions affect both the writing and the graphic arrangement of the text so that the slight story is scarcely visible through the dense tangle of multilingual wordplay and constant cult allusions.

  The model for Julián Ríos was Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, and, as in that novel, the basic technique is the combination of one or several words with another, usually with humorous effect: thus, Herr Narrator is a “ventrilocuelo” (a play on “ventriloquist”) and the protagonists Milalias and Babelle ”escriviven” (“write-and-live”) their alcoholfuelled erotic adventures on a midsummer’s night in London. To the carnivalesque metamorphosis and interweaving of words and the flood of hidden references, as well as the Cervantes-like alternation of narrators, must be added the singular division of the text—the even pages contain the ironic, cloudy narration of facts; the odd pages, the notes and commentaries that they engender, and, at the end, the “Pillow Notes,” the comments of Babelle about the story of Milalias. The work is a tribute to the structural heterodoxy of Rayuela by Cortázar. DRM