When the Soviet tanks roll in to crush the Prague Spring, Tomas and Tereza flee to Switzerland. But Tereza decides to return, leaving Tomas to make a choice. He accepts heaviness and follows her to certain persecution, unwilling to be a pawn of either the Communists or the insurgents. It is unbearable that each choice can only be made once with one possible result, and that we can never know what other choices would have wrought. A novel that is not as much political as about the primacy of personal freedom, it is a bittersweet celebration of the individual; urgent and necessary. GT
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1900s
Legend
David Gemmell
Lifespan | b. 1948 (England)
First Published | 1984
First Published by | Century (London)
Original U.S. Title | Against the Horde
David Gemmell’s aging Druss the Legend represents one of the definitive characters in fantasy literature. With a man at the end of his life as the story’s central protagonist, Gemmell’s book is as much a meditation on a warrior long past his prime, as it is a rip-roaring fantasy. While its story may appear linear, it is the recourse to alternative perspectives and the complex split narrative—in which Druss is largely defined by the people who choose to follow him into his last battle—that sets it apart as a classic work of fantasy literature.
Legend, the first book in Gemmell’s “Drenai” series, is always aware of its predecessors, with clear undertones of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Wallace, but it is also very much a novel of the 1980s, seeking always to present events in a more realist tone. The text is a classic example of a simplistic narrative rendered in a novel manner. Druss is at times an unsympathetic figure, yet he is always heroic, and his humanism renders him powerfully empathic. Druss demonstrates the complexities of a man who has become a warrior through circumstance rather than straight volition. At the same time, the unspoken code that he follows throughout his life makes him a powerful, and often fatherly figure, fulfilling the traditional role of reluctant hero by default rather than intent. Overall, Legend provides a fresh perspective in the genre by emphasizing the ordinariness of heroes, rather than resorting to inexplicable heroics. EMcCS
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1900s
The Young Man
Botho Strauss
Lifespan | b. 1944 (Germany)
First Published | 1984
First Published in | Hanser Verlag (München)
Original Title | Der junge Mann
The loss of humanity under the pressure of history and technology is a frequent theme in the novels of Botho 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. Accordingly, the young man of the work’s title, Leon Pracht, who has left the theater to write, is contemplative, brooding, and alienated from both society in general and those to whom he should be close. Pracht moves numbly through a series of encounters whose protagonists wake up in spaces where the laws of time always change, and where they become victims of erotic metamorphoses or spectators of their own repressed history.
The novel, characterized by an extraordinary stylistic subtlety and avant-garde ambition, has been regarded as a Bildungsroman, an allegorical novel and a romantic fantasy at the same time. The protagonist is a voyeur in the crowd of life, and his precise observation of both the everyday and the fantastic is underscored by his increasing detachment. His reflections and reactions paint a compelling portrait of contemporary society and of the individual struggling to find a place within (and without) it. The Young Man is generally considered to be one of the few Postmodern German novels, a work in which Strauss reveals the hidden truths and underlying misery of a technologically and historically burdened society. LB
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1900s
Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich
Lifespan | b. 1954 (U.S.)
First Published | 1984
First Published by | Holt, Rinehart and Winston
National Book Critics Circle Award | 1984
Louise Erdrich’s intricately woven narrative spans a fifty-year period in and around a North Dakota reservation. Beginning in the 1930s, when the Chippewa community was suffering from chronic high unemployment and poverty, and struggling to maintain their social and cultural practices, the novel follows characters from two main families through to the 1980s. The novel traces the complex intertwining of the characters’ lives through marriage, infidelity, powerful blood-bonds, and the equally enduring unconventional alliances that emerge as a consequence of difficult circumstances.
Although Love Medicine has been likened to a collection of short stories with a shared cast of characters, to make this comparison is to misunderstand its nature—as a metafictional narrative it takes storytelling as its structure and theme. In Erdrich’s exquisite rendering of unique and powerful voices, she references a vibrant oral culture and calls attention to politics of representation.
Erdrich does not engage directly with the tensions existing between the Native American population and the federal government. Rather, the narrative voices provide multiple perspectives on the bicultural influences that informed the Chippewa people’s experiences. In particular, she explores the identities conferred by Catholicism, contrasting the experiences of the white nuns with Native American Catholics, and subtly highlights their differing investments in their faith. JW
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1900s
White Noise
Don DeLillo
Lifespan | b. 1936 (U.S.)
First Published | 1985
First Published by | Viking Press (New York)
American Book Award | 1985
(Post)modern American consumer culture streams powerfully through Don DeLillo’s landmark novel like a fatal sugar rush. The book presents a highly detailed yet utterly mass-mediated world wherein human skin is “a color that I want to call flesh-toned,” television is a member of the family, and one can prayerfully murmur “Toyota Celica” in one’s sleep. But the characters here are not the dupes of the system; they are its professional analysts. Set in a Midwestern college town, the central protagonists are Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, his faculty wife, Babette, and their children from Brady Bunch-style previous marriages. Children, as DeLillo points out, are savvier, more adapted, and yet more disillusioned about modern culture than adults; fourteen-year-old Heinrich, for example, plays chess by mail with an imprisoned mass murderer.
Much of the novel, told from Jack’s perspective, is domestic in orientation, detailing fragments of information and conversation in a way that is both alienating and comforting. It is unclear whether DeLillo affirms a human ability to create meaningful and intimate relationships from the most unpromising of materials or whether he laments a wholesale loss of “authenticity.” White Noise inhabits the hyperreal with wit and warmth, but deals too with a more sinister reality that crashes into the later part of the book, a shadow that no amount of shopping and chattering will obviate. DH
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1900s
Half of Man Is Woman
Zhang Xianliang
Lifespan | b. 1936 (China)
First Published | 1985
First Published in | Wenlian Chuban (Beijing)
Original Title | Nanren de yiban shi nüren
Largely an autobiographical novel, and one of the few Chinese novels of the 1980s that has also won critical attention and commercial success outside China, Half of Man Is Woman continues the story of an imprisoned intellectual, Zhang Yonglin, that was begun in an earlier novel, entitled Mimosa.
Like the author himself, the protagonist has fallen victim to the 1955 “anti-rightist” movement and is imprisoned in a labor camp. Zhang Yonglin is sent to guard a rice paddy, where one day he sees a young inmate of a women’s labor camp bathin
g in the flooded field. While he hides behind the reeds on the banks, his gaze is transfixed on the woman’s naked body. Eight years later, he works on a state farm where the two meet again. They marry, but on their wedding night Zhang realizes that years of denial have left him impotent. Tormented by his own physical inadequacy, he also has to witness how his wife starts an affair with the party secretary. When during a flood he single-handedly fills a breach, he is commended for bravery and finally regains his manhood after his wife renews her affection.
Published at a time of political thaw during the mid-1980s, the book indicts a political system that has rendered parts of its population mentally and physically impotent. Dialogs of the protagonist with philosophers, mythical figures, and even animals bespeak the influence of the magical realism of some Latin-American writers, but also the desire of writers to reconnect to their Chinese origins. FG
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1900s
Reasons to Live
Amy Hempel
Lifespan | b. 1951 (U.S.)
First Published | 1985
First Published by | Knopf (New York)
Original Language | English
In this collection of stories, the tragedies happen offstage. As in life, tragedies are seldom terminal and life goes on. These are stories about just getting on—they are stories about grace. In “Nashville Gone to Ashes,” a widow tends to an ark of pets when her veterinarian husband dies. This includes the ashes of her husband’s beloved saluki—the Egyptian temple dog—who ought to have an Egyptian name. The pick of the litter was named Memphis. They misunderstood and named theirs Nashville. Embedded in the daily details, the narrator takes her husband’s bed, so that when she looks over, the empty bed she sees is her own.
In “Tonight is a Favor to Holly,” the narrator waits for a blind date. The story ends before the date begins because it is actually about the tenuous bond between the narrator and her friend Holly, adrift in the sunshiny limbo of Los Angeles’s beach communities, where “just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.”
These are the stories of people who cope in the little ways they know how, keeping themselves occupied with the tender and absurd details of living. As one character states, “We give what we can, that’s as far as the heart will go.” The stories illustrate the intricate smokescreens of minutiae hiding the current of grief that might swallow us up, if it were acknowledged. Fragile as the surface tension on water, so enthralling and so funny, one almost overlooks the exquisite sadness. Almost. GT
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1900s
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
Lifespan | b. 1939 (Canada)
First Published | 1985
First Published by | McClelland & Stewart (Toronto)
Governor General’s Award for Fiction | 1986
The cover illustration shows women wearing the uniform imposed on handmaids in Atwood’s fictional totalitarian society.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood creates a dystopic future in which the population has become threateningly infertile and women are reduced to their reproductive capabilities. Patriarchy takes on a new, extreme aspect; one that oppresses in the name of preservation and protection, one in which violence is perpetrated by the language of ownership and physical delineation. In this nightmare society women are unable to have jobs or money, and are assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the Wives. The tale’s protagonist, Offred—so named to denote the master to whom she belongs—recounts her present situation with a clinical attention to her body, now only an instrument of reproduction. A counterpoint is provided through moving glimpses into her past life: memories of a sensual love for her lost family.
Set in a future Cambridge, Massachusetts, and partly inspired by New England’s puritan American society, Atwood transforms the institutions and buildings of a familiar landscape into a republic called Gilead. Atwood’s prose is chillingly graphic, achieving the sense that all of life’s past physical pleasures have been reduced to mechanical actions, throwing the value of desire into sharp relief. Through her imagined world, she shows sexual oppression not so much taken to its extreme conclusion, as sexuality obliterated from the desiring body; an act every bit as violent as sexual violation. Atwood expertly handles the different forms that power manages to take within the handmaids’ emotional dilemmas, as she describes the timeless tensions evoked by the body’s immediate needs and our ability to look beyond desire to greater political ends. AC
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1900s
Hawksmoor
Peter Ackroyd
Lifespan | b. 1949 (England)
First Published | 1985
First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)
Whitbread Award | 1985
“And so let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes its shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it.”
Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd’s breakthrough as a novelist, is set in London in two different time frames—the early eighteenth and late twentieth centuries. It is a detective novel that deliberately subverts any coherent concepts one might have of either detection or history.
In the twentieth-century narrative, detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is assigned to investigate a series of murders after the bodies of tramps and small boys are discovered at seven churches dotted around the city. In reality, Nicholas Hawksmoor was an eighteenth-century architect who designed six of London’s churches. In the world of the novel, however, the eighteenth-century architect of these London churches is given the name of Nicholas Dyer. One of Ackroyd’s main achievements in Hawksmoor is the ventriloquism that he performs in recreating the earlier period. He narrates the design and erection of the buildings as well as a similar series of murders committed by Dyer, who, it is revealed, has covertly introduced occult designs and motifs into his churches.
History, rather than being represented as purely linear, is shown here to have a distinctly spatial aspect. Time and history are drawn together in the voices of the two characters in the novel; each chapter united by a repetition of the closing words of the previous chapter. Indeed, the novel turns upon the notion of repetition, which, in turn, leads to one of the most spectacular and peculiar endings to any novel. VC-R
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1900s
Perfume
Patrick Süskind
Lifespan | b. 1949 (Germany)
First Published | 1985, by Diogenes (Zürich)
Full Title | Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Original Title | Das Parfum
Set in eighteenth-century France, Patrick Süskind’s novel tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born with a supernatural sense of smell and the complete absence of any odor of his own. The style of Perfume is distinguished by its emphasis on smell, in which every scene is recounted, via Grenouille’s nose, through the layered complexity of its olfactory detail. Süskind paints a series of elaborate pictures of the smells of everyday objects (such as the depth and variety of aromas emitted by wood) and of the manipulation of smell by eighteenth-century perfumery.
What could become just a literary gimmick is prevented from being such by a focus on the psychology of the characters. A veritable psychopath, Grenouille is convinced that his acute sense of smell elevates him above ordinary humanity. He conceives a fantasy of himself as the capricious ruler of men, bestowing upon the masses the most delicate of fragrances, before surrendering to his own gratification. However, in a world constructed of scents, Grenouille becomes obsessed with his own lack of odor, since this effectively renders him a cipher, able to discern the substance of everything but lacking a substance of his own. Intent on creating a scent for himself, Grenouille embarks on the murderous process of capturing the most beautiful human scents: those of �
��ripe’ young women. But even the most exquisite aroma can only mask his essential odorlessness and his consequent insignificance within a fragrant universe. LC
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Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Lifespan | b. 1933 (U.S.)
First Published | 1985, by Random House (New York)
Full Title | Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
“See the child,” orders the narrator at the beginning of Blood Meridian. Following this initial focus on a character that is known only as “kid” comes a voyage through Texas and Mexico after the U.S.–Mexico War of 1846. The kid’s travels are an odyssey strangled by an unimaginable violence—a violence that knows no limits and is exclusive to no particular race, be it white or indigenous, Mexican, or North American.
Cormac McCarthy learned Spanish for this novel, to help him imagine the squalid exchanges between the gang of amoral scalp hunters with whom the kid works, and the people that emerge like ghostly ciphers on the desert horizons. The novel’s chapters are introduced thematically, like a list of occurrences in an old travel narrative. And yet, Blood Meridian quickly becomes something more than a historical novel. McCarthy’s achievement lies in his prose, which has been compared to the near-biblical style found in Melville and Faulkner. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy introduces one of his devil-incarnate characters—the nameless, nefarious judge. He is a creature of equally limitless wisdom and evil who, like a degenerate Ralph Waldo Emerson, calmly preaches chains of dictums such as “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery,” while holding the great femur of “some beast long extinct.” Ominously, the judge is a figure that cannot be made to disappear, a sinister reminder of the negative side of the American narrative of manifest destiny. MPB
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 87