1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

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  1900s

  Nights at the Circus

  Angela Carter

  Lifespan | b. 1940 (England), d. 1992

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)

  Given Name | Angela Olive Stalker

  Angela Carter’s dazzling aerialist, the tough and beguiling Fevvers, a winged-woman who defies gravity and sexual ideology, takes center stage of a novel that explores the eccentric limits of gender and geography. With the narrative’s three-part excursion from London to St. Petersburg, finally reaching the vast expanses of Siberia, we journey with reporter Jack Walser, assigned to shadow the fortunes of Fevver’s carnivalesque circus community. In his position as commentator, he is at once convivial and satirical.

  The novel is filled with burlesque ebullience, a carnival riot of voices, dialects, and stories, through which Carter explores the reality of the perpetual masquerade with shrewd discretion. Performers from the circus emerge each night disheveled, wearied by the outward selves that they are compelled to assume. Carter brings a degree of rationality, of subtle reticence, to her narrative, enabling her to exploit the self-parodic energies of magic realism. But she does not compromise pragmatism in her depiction of self-transformation, charting Fevvers’ uneven journey, “turning, willynilly, from a woman into an idea.” Tirelessly defying generic consistency, Carter’s work invites us to assume a pleasurable if disarming repose, which swings between complicity and detachment, while at the same time thwarting our preconceptions. DJ

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  Neuromancer

  William Gibson

  Lifespan | b. 1948 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Ace Books (New York)

  Video Game Adaptation | 1988

  The first cyberpunk novel has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide and won three major science fiction awards.

  Neuromancer is a landmark novel, not only in the science fiction genre, but also in the contemporary social imagination as a whole. With extraordinary prescience, William Gibson invented the basic concept of “cyberspace” (a three-dimensional representation of computer data through which users communicate and do business, alongside a whole host of more dubious activities) long before the Internet and other virtual technologies were integrated into everyday life. It is a book that has inspired a generation of technophiles.

  The plot revolves around a “computer cowboy” known as Case—a data thief who “jacks in” to the virtual world until his nervous system is badly maimed by a client he has double-crossed. Unable to interface with a “deck,” he ekes out a precarious living in the lawless zones of Chiba City, Japan. However, Case is offered the chance of regaining his old powers by the mysterious Armitage—a businessman whose motives remain unclear until the final, exhilarating denouement. Gibson creates a world of televisual twilight and fiber optic shocks, all realized in lavish detail with a rich, sometimes disorienting vocabulary of jargon and slang. It is a world of techno-hustlers, strung-out junkies, bizarre subcultures, surgically enhanced assassins, and sinister “megacorps”—a world that increasingly resembles parts of our own.

  Neuromancer is an enduring work because it combines the pace and urgency of the best thrillers with the scope, invention, and intellectual rigor of Orwell or Huxley. Perhaps its most compelling and disquieting feature, however, is Gibson’s refusal to make any clear-cut moral distinctions between virtual and organic life—between human and cyborg, between program and reality. SamT

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  The Wasp Factory

  Iain Banks

  Lifespan | b. 1954 (Scotland)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Macmillan (London)

  Full Name | Iain Menzies Banks

  The destructive impact of Thatcherite policies on British society resonate throughout this highly political novel.

  Like many of Iain Banks’s novels, much of the impact of The Wasp Factory comes from its surprise ending and from the hyperbolic qualities of its content. It is a story of exceptional cruelties inflicted upon animals and humans alike.

  The narrator, Frank Cauldhames (“cold homes”—a name with appropriate metaphoric content), spends his time carrying out idiosyncratic rituals: inventively killing animals and capriciously murdering siblings and cousins. Haunted by his apparent castration by the family dog, Frank’s life is formed around a bizarre exaggeration of masculinity. Frank imagines himself, unmutilated, as a tall, dark, lean hunter; he despises women, eschews sex, but childishly revels in the adolescent drinking and the pissing games invented by his friend, Jamie. Frank’s father is an eccentric libertarian who, having failed to register Frank at birth, allows Frank’s behavior to continue almost unchecked. It is only at the end of the novel that the reader realizes that both Frank and his half-brother, Eric, are the products of their father’s experimentation and impersonal cruelty. A surprising revelation comes during the cataclysmic conclusion to the novel when the insane Eric returns home driving a herd of burning sheep.

  As a whole, the novel develops a deeply layered mythology based upon a series of masculine clichés: the potency of bodily fluids; the cosmic superiority of men over creation, which is manifested as violence toward animals; and the totemic effectiveness of their corpses. However, despite its occasionally exaggerated fantasies, the true value of The Wasp Factory is in the quality and style of Banks’s writing, which is both beautiful and arresting. His skill is in characterization and his depiction of Frank as both psychotic and believably mundane. LC

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  Democracy

  Joan Didion

  Lifespan | b. 1934 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Simon & Schuster (New York)

  Original Language | English

  Democracy opens with a nuclear weapons test in the Pacific and ends with the American withdrawal from Vietnam. Between these geopolitical poles is played out the more personal story of Inez Victor, wife of presidential hopeful Harry Victor. Under the glare of political publicity Inez deals with her father’s bitter recriminations and eventual murderous bent, her daughter’s very middle-class heroin habit, and an affair with C.I.A. agent Jack Lovett.

  These events are filtered through a fractured narrative voice and the novel can read like a subgenre of Gonzo-journalism. Stylized repetition extends the plot by revealing different trajectories the novel could have taken. With tongue in cheek, Joan Didion describes how the novel’s style could be discussed in a literature studies classroom and gives creative-writing advice. These fragments of different realities often work most effectively when reproducing the vocabulary of oblique behind-thescenes political maneuvering, blurring boundaries between public and private personality, which Inez uses to navigate her various lives. For all the cryptic playfulness, Didion has personal warmth at the center of the novel in the form of Inez. A complicit victim, she claims the major casualty of a publicly lived life is “memory.”

  Democracy is an explicitly experimental novel and Didion’s fusion of genres and literary devices gives a fascinating insight into both her creativity and the backrooms of American politicking. DTu

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  The Lover

  Marguerite Duras

  Lifespan | b. 1914 (Indochina), d. 1996 (France)

  First Published | 1984, by Éditions de Minuit (Paris)

  Original Title | L’Amant

  Prix Goncourt | 1984

  Set in Sa Dec, French Indochina, in the 1930s, this ostensibly autobiographical novel details fifteen-year-old French girl Hélène Lagonelle’s relationship with a wealthy Chinese man twelve years her senior. This taboo sexual relationship unfolds against the backdrop of her unstable and largely unhappy family life. Li
ving with her depressive mother and two older brothers, Hélène and her family exist in a poverty induced by her eldest brother’s drug and gambling addictions. His sadistic treatment of her, and the disturbing pleasure he derives from her mother’s abuse of her, lend the novel an unsettling dimension that is perhaps underplayed by the adult voice of the narrator. While her family disapprove of the interracial relationship, they benefit financially from it, and their awkward meetings with her lover throw into relief the tensions generated by the French colonial regime and the differences in their status and cultural backgrounds. Challenging sexual stereotypes, Hélène instigates the relationship, she is the partner able to detach the physical from the emotional, and, despite being a child and financially insecure, she is ultimately the one with the upper hand in the relationship.

  With its shifts between the first and third person, the use of flashbacks, and its impressionistic, disrupted style, Duras’s writing is very cinematic, influenced as she was by the French nouveau roman of the 1950s. The novel was turned into a movie in 1993, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. JW

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  The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

  José Saramago

  Lifespan | b. 1922 (Portugal)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Editorial Caminho (Lisbon)

  Original Title | O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis

  “Lisboa, Lisbon, Lisbonne, Lissabon, there are four different ways of saying it . . . And so the children come to know what they did not know before, and that is what they knew already, nothing . . .”

  Ricardo Reis was one of the pseudonyms used by the celebrated Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), for example, in his poetry collection, Odes de Ricardo Reis (1946). In José Saramago’s novel, Reis, a doctor and unpublished poet, returns to Lisbon after many years abroad in Brazil. This is the year following Pessoa’s death, and Reis meets the ghost of Pessoa, with whom he holds a number of dialogs on matters great and small.

  Against the backdrop of the rise of fascism in Europe and Salazar’s oppressive regime in Portugal, Saramago skillfully employs a panoply of literary methods to bring issues under scrutiny. Most important among these are questions of identity: who precisely is Ricardo Reis and what is his relationship to Pessoa? There is also the gently implied but finally irresistible suggestion that there is a thin line between the monarchism, social conservatism, and stoicism of Reis, and the successful rise of Salazar.

  Notwithstanding its weighty concerns, it remains an eminently readable novel. The narrative is intimate, almost conversational. The plot has conventional elements: Reis has an affair with a hotel chambermaid and falls in love with an aristocratic woman from Coimbra. Large parts of the novel are taken up with walks though the streets of Lisbon, giving the book a flavor of a Portuguese Ulysses. And, like Joyce’s masterpiece, the more one brings to this erudite novel, the richer it becomes. ABi

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  Empire of the Sun

  J. G. Ballard

  Lifespan | b. 1930 (China), d. 2009 (England)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | V. Gollancz (London)

  Movie Adaptation | 1987

  During a career spanning nearly fifty years, J. G. Ballard published many science fiction and futuristic novels. With Empire of the Sun, however, he discussed what seems a very different topic, namely his own incarceration as a child in a Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War. The story charts the fall of Shanghai to Japanese occupying troops, the capture of the protagonist, Jim, and his various complicated means of managing his survival in the Lunghua camp. Though predominantly from Jim’s perspective, there are terrifying moments when we see Jim as the other camp inmates do and realize the madness within him. The book culminates when the world lights up as the first atom bomb is dropped on Japan, after which Jim escapes.

  A major strength of the book lies in the way we are drawn into a frightening closeness to Jim, a boy who is obviously being forced to mature beyond his years under circumstances of chronic degradation. Because of his youth, he is perhaps more resilient than the others, but we are left in no doubt as to the trauma of his imprisonment. Many of the motifs of the book—the sudden atomic explosion, the lonely lives and deaths of airmen, the presence of torn and mangled bodies—occur throughout Ballard’s work. Empire of the Sun, a remarkably achieved work in its own right, also serves as a key to the preoccupations of the rest of Ballard’s fiction. DP

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  The Busconductor Hines

  James Kelman

  Lifespan | b. 1946 (Scotland)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Polygon (Edinburgh)

  Original Language | English

  With his first novel, The Busconductor Hines, James Kelman extends the short story mode, which initially earned him recognition, into what is his funniest and most likable book. Robert Hines, the eponymous hero, is a bus conductor on the verge of an existential collapse. The episodic events of the novel develop through an innovatively woven mix of idiomatic and colloquial registers, which offers an acute representation of spoken Glaswegian, moving fluidly between a first-person narration centered on Hines and third-person description. One signature stylization is the introduction of emphasis in the middle of words, as in “malnufuckingtrition,” “exploifuckingtation,” or “C. B. bastarn I.”

  The world of Hines is one of domestic incidents, family life on limited resources, the trials of work, and occasional reveries that reveal an intellectual imagination attuned to the reality of his situation without the trappings of populist ideology. Hines is quick to reject the typical strategies of capitalist common sense, instead offering an amusingly skeptical take on the lives available. Indeed, the novel is notably free of the world of media and what passes for popular culture. Time spent watching television is mentioned, but as if it were a piece of furniture, the inspection of which constitutes a kind of emptying loss of consciousness. Public transport workers, in particular, will enjoy this novel. DM

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  Dictionary of the Khazars

  Milorad Pavić

  Lifespan | b. 1929 (Yugoslavia)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Prosveta (Belgrade)

  Original Title | Hazarski Recnik

  The cover of the Hamish Hamilton edition of the book, shown here, is based on the original Rita Muhlbauer jacket design.

  “Whoever opened the book soon grew numb . . .”

  Part encyclopedia, part intellectual puzzle, part deconstruction (or spoof of same), part myth, part hodgepodge, Dictionary of the Khazars is not a traditional novel that respects the conventions of beginning/middle/end. In addition to its other oddities, the book was published in male and female editions, with seventeen lines of differing text that distinguish them from each other. The author himself encourages readers to make of it what they please, without regard to chronology.

  It is almost impossible to relate the teeming abundance of such a non-narrative, although there is a plot of sorts. This concerns the attempt of three modern-day scholars to locate the last remaining copies of a lexicon otherwise destroyed during the Inquisition. The dictionary is composed of three distinct but intertwined and cross-referenced versions—one each for the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish interpretations—of the fate of the long-lost Khazars, a Turkish people who once lived in the Balkan region, and the biographies of those involved in the so-called Polemic.

  But it is the dictionary entries in themselves that supply the pleasure of the book. Enjoy the whimsy, the inventive imagery, the surrealistic complexity, and the delights afforded by the imaginative application of language itself. No one could charge Milorad Pavić with a lack of generosity. ES

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  The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  Milan Kundera

  Lifespan | b. 1929 (Czech Republic)

  First Published | 1984

  First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)

  Original Czech Title | Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí

  “If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?”

  This is a novel about exile and persecution in the former Czechoslovakia, written by a man who knew a great deal about both conditions. The novel considers the quality of lightness, where nothing means anything, and the heaviness that forms Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal return.

  It is the dangerous year of 1968 in Prague. Tomas is a surgeon who embraces lightness. He is willfully free of all heaviness, shunning labels and ideals. Sabina is the epitome of lightness, an artist who, like Tomas, believes in unfettered individualism. Tereza is heaviness. Escaping from provincial life, she believes in the romantic ideal of Tomas. Her love is a binding thing—not bad, just heavy. She also has fervent political ideals, whereas Tomas is held down by none. As their three lives collide, the viability of lightness is questioned. What is our responsibility to ourselves, to others?