1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

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  Contact

  Carl Sagan

  Lifespan | b. 1934 (U.S.), d. 1996

  First Published | 1985

  First Published by | Simon & Schuster (New York)

  Locus Award | 1986

  “Science fiction, You’re right, it’s crazy . . . You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an airplane . . .”

  Carl Sagan, an astronomer who was inextricably tied to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (the SETI program), was one of the most famous popular scientists of the last century, as respected by his fellow professionals as he was by the public. A major proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life, Sagan designed a special plaque for the exterior of NASA spacecraft. It bore a universal message for spacecraft bound outside the solar system, which could be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it. He was also one of the first scientists, along with Frank Drake, to use a radio telescope to search for deliberate signals from nearby galaxies, estimating that our galaxy was home to over a million civilizations.

  The highly successful novel Contact, which was adapted for screen a year after Sagan died, was Sagan’s best-known foray into the world of fiction, bringing scientific principles to mainstream entertainment. Unsurprisingly, its overriding theme is that of extraterrestrial contact. The main character, astronomer Ellie Arroway, detects a signal from a nearby star, a repeating sequence of the first 261 prime numbers, which she deduces could only be sent from an intelligent civilization. It turns out that the message is more complex than initially realized; it actually contains a blueprint for an advanced space traveling machine. Religious fundamentalists, scientists, and governments argue over whether to build it and, in the end, a multinational team is chosen to make the trip. Throughout the story, Sagan intertwines complex mathematics with fiction, and through the knots in his story come hints of deep questions about the meaning of religion and spirituality, humanity, and social consciousness. EF

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  Simon and the Oaks

  Marianne Fredriksson

  Lifespan | b. 1927 (Sweden)

  First Published | 1985

  First Published by | Wahlström & Widstrand

  Original Title | Simon och ekarna

  Simon Larsson, aged eleven when the story begins, is given away by his biological mother when he is only three days old. Half Jewish with an unknown father, Simon is brought up by Karin and Erik Larsson at their working-class home in Sweden. With war threatening Europe, he befriends Isak, a Jewish boy brought to Sweden by his father to escape the Nazis. When Isak begins to recollect his traumatic past, Karin rescues him from deep depression. Simon and Karin often take refuge in a copse of oaks; only there can they work out their anger and anxieties. Simon discovers that Karin and Erik are not really his parents but his aunt and uncle, and on this day, the reader learns, he ceases to be a child.

  Fredriksson’s characters are developed to great depth; they experience paradoxical feelings, where guilt accompanies goodness, where loneliness is felt in company, and easy answers are hard to find. Here, taking the mother–child relationship as her central theme, she analyzes the causes of their emotions and actions. Her view tends toward the psychoanalytical and the religious, but without invoking a god; she brings out the hidden mysticism in the lives and struggles of ordinary people.

  Marianne Fredriksson, a successful journalist and editor-in-chief, made her literary debut at fifty-three and is one of Sweden’s most popular authors. Esteemed for her realism and accurate touch, her books are better known than those of Strindberg and have been translated into fifty languages. TSe

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  The Cider House Rules

  John Irving

  Lifespan | b. 1942 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1985

  First Published by | W. Morrow (New York)

  Movie Adaptation | 1999

  One of Irving’s most political novels, The Cider House Rules explores the contentious issue of abortion, as well as those of addiction, racism, and rejection. Dr. Wilbur Larch is the ether-addicted and childless proprietor of the St. Clouds Orphanage in 1920s Maine. After many years witnessing unwanted children and deaths from backstreet abortions, Dr. Larch starts an illegal, and safe, abortion clinic at the orphanage. Homer Wells is one of the orphans, a bright and enterprising boy who appears to be inexplicably unadoptable, being returned again and again to the orphanage from would-be families. Larch realizes Homer will probably spend his life in the orphanage and decides to train him to take over his profession as St. Clouds’s illegal abortionist.

  But Homer does not agree with abortion, and decides instead to take a trip with a young couple, from which he never returns. Dr. Larch must come to terms with Homer’s reluctance both to follow his professional footsteps and to return to St. Clouds, while Homer’s life develops complications of its own as love, and the Second World War, intervene. In dealing with the racism of the time, the novel’s title derives from a list of rules Homer posts in the Cider House. These are supposed to keep order and safety among the black migrant workers who come to pick apples, but Homer is unaware that these rules are resented by the workers. Along with Homer, we come to realize that the real rules of the Cider House, and of life, are never written down. EF

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  Annie John

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Lifespan | b. 1949 (Antigua and Barbuda)

  First Published | 1985

  First Published by | New American Library (N.Y.)

  Given Name | Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson

  Fizzing with all the energy and contradictions of adolescence, Annie John is a coming-of-age tale set on the stunning Caribbean island of Antigua. Bright and insatiably curious, Annie is fascinated by the doings of her neighbors in her small seaside community. Enveloped in her mother’s love and tenderness, Annie’s childhood is happy and peaceful—until notes of discord creep in just before she starts high school. In cool, pared-down prose, Kincaid depicts the horrors of a mother–daughter relationship in freefall, Annie’s disillusionment with respectable pastimes and friendships, and a slide toward delinquency and psychosomatic crisis.

  As with much of Kincaid’s writing, Annie John is richly informed by her own childhood in Antigua. The author experienced a Caribbean way of life that maintained respect for traditional medicines and belief in the restlessness of the dead and the power of dreams. Similarly, Kincaid struggled against the multiple binds of empire, restrictive gender roles and an education system dulled by convention.

  Annie John is imbued with the strange, pure colors of Caribbean magic realism. It is a shining example of Caribbean women’s writing, outlining with startling clarity themes that we find pursued, with varying levels of success, by other writers, namely the troubled mother–daughter relationship that mirrors the motherland–colony problem, the mental distress of the dominated woman, and the urge to escape from the cage via migration. RM

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  The Parable of the Blind

  Gert Hofmann

  Lifespan | b. 1931 (Germany), d. 1993

  First Published | 1985

  First Published by | Luchterhand (Darmstadt)

  Original Title | Der Blindensturz

  Pieter Breughel’s painting The Parable of the Blind depicts six blind men walking in line, one following the other; disturbingly, the leader has stumbled into a pond and lies sprawled on his back as the others approach. Narrated in the first-person plural voice, the collective “we” in which these blind men think Hofmann’s novel retells the big day on which they have come to visit the famous artist, so that he can paint them. On the way, they are taunted by villagers, fall asleep in barns, and lose their bearings several times, before
eventually finding their way, bruised and confused, to the pond beside which the famous artist lives.

  In these frail, exposed, and vulnerable blind men, the reader is brought face to face with bare life. Part of the poignancy of the narrative is that while the blind men pin their hopes on the meeting with the painter, they never in fact encounter him face-to-face. To make matters worse, they are forced to walk into the pond again and again, so that they can be painted in a situation that, if anything, exaggerates the helplessness of their predicament.

  In Hofmann’s masterful hands, Breughel’s painting becomes a parable of not just the blind—who here stand for Everyman—but of the ambiguous power relationship between the artist and his models. By imagining how these unfortunate individuals came to be painted, Hofmann fixes permanently on the strange, shifting world of those who cannot see in a world where sight is all that matters. PT

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  Love in the Time of Cholera

  Gabriel García Márquez

  Lifespan | b. 1928 (Columbia)

  First Published | 1985, by Bruquera (Barcelona)

  Original Title | El amor en los tiempos del cólera

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 1982

  On the day of the funeral of Fermina Daza’s husband, her former fiancé, Florentino Ariza—poet, prodigious lover, and president of the River Company of the Caribbean—reiterates his undying love for her. Appalled, Fermina rejects him: fifty-one years, nine months, and four days after his first unceremonious rejection by her. She then orders him to never show his face again. The body of the novel catapults the reader back more than fifty years to the beginning of Florentino and Fermina’s courtship, as well as their subsequent lives, and a multitude of other characters’ stories are interwoven. The final chapter returns to the present, recounting Florentino’s infinitely more successful second wooing of his beloved.

  Love in the Time of Cholera is an epic love story. At the same time, it is utterly unsentimental, leaving its reader with a sense of the astonishing power of patience and determination to overcome all obstacles, more than some romantic eternal power of love. Peopled by ghostly apparitions, cursed dolls, and sinister parrots, the book contains enough delightful moments of everyday unreality to confirm Garcia Márquez’s place among the most outstanding of magic realist writers. More aware of the weight of history and the scourges of urban living, this is darker but no less captivating than One Hundred Years of Solitude, its great predecessor. SD

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  Ancestral Voices

  Etienne van Heerden

  Lifespan | b. 1954 (South Africa)

  First Published | 1986

  First Published by | Tafelberg (Cape Town)

  Original Title | Toorberg

  The dead walk freely through the pages of this modern South African classic, where the sins of the fathers are visited on their descendants in the arid landscape of the Karoo. Part thriller, part soap opera, and entirely riveting, Ancestral Voices traces the downfall of the Moolmans, a pioneering Afrikaans family, who have farmed the abundant land of Toorberg (Magic Mountain) for a hundred years. When the patriarch’s illegitimate only grandson dies mysteriously in a borehole dug in a fruitless search for water, a magistrate comes to town to investigate.

  He finds himself judging not only the living, but the dead, too. The roots of this tragedy lie in the Moolman men’s drive to dominate. In each generation they reject those who choose a different path. First to fall is Floris, who commits the unforgivable sin of crossing the color line and beginning the Skaamfamilie—the Shame Family. Ironically, from this family comes the true inheritor of the Founder Abel’s driving force, Pastor Oneday Riet, who leads the dispossessed colored people.

  The curse on the Moolmans, representatives of an entire race, is illustrated with powerful, resonant symbolism. Not one is free of the shame of the injustices heaped upon the family black sheep. Etienne van Heerden weaves the past and present together to give a clear vision of the Afrikaner inheritance in the twilight years of apartheid. LD

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  The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman

  Andrzej Szczypiorski

  Lifespan | b. 1924 (Poland), d. 2000

  First Published | 1986

  First Published in | Instytut Literacki (Paris)

  Original Title | Poczatek

  Warsaw under Nazi occupation is a place of sudden death and unexpected redemption, where Jews live like trapped rats in the ghetto or eke out a fugitive existence on the streets. Everyone has a new, often contradictory identity. Henio, a young Jew on the run, forsakes safety to return to his people in the ghetto. Sister Weronika baptises rescued Jewish children into the Catholic faith. Meanwhile, the beautiful Irma Seidenman, a Jewish doctor’s widow, lives quietly with forged papers in the city’s Aryan sector, until an informer betrays her to the Gestapo, and her life depends on the loyalty of strangers.

  In The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, Andrzej Szczypiorski investigates the conundrum of human belonging: who decides who we become? Some of Sister Weronika’s child converts resettle in Israel, others become Polish patriots, rabidly anti-Semitic. Mrs. Seidenman, who renounced her own Jewishness to survive the war, is driven into exile by the anti-Jewish purges of 1968. Although she chose to live as a Pole in Poland, she can never be Polish enough to be safe. Perhaps Henio, who freely chose his own death in the ghetto, made a better choice? Twenty years after the war, Jewish soldiers renew the cycle of killing and hatred in the Arab settlements of Palestine. Perhaps, Szczypiorski warns in this moving and provoking novel, the mask of violence is the only immutable human identity. MuM

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  The Drowned and the Saved

  Primo Levi

  Lifespan | b. 1919 (Italy), d. 1987

  First Published | 1986

  First Published by | G. Einaudi (Turin)

  Original Title | I Sommersi a i salvati

  Published a year before his death, The Drowned and the Saved is Primo Levi’s final return to the tormenting question of how to write about the experience of Auschwitz, the “abyss of viciousness” we are so tempted to forget. In particular, he returns to the question explored in If This is a Man (1947); how to bear witness to the death camps when the “true witnesses”—those put to death—have been obliterated. Survivors, Levi reflects in his chapter on “Shame,” are an “anomalous minority”: “we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom.”

  Throughout the book, Levi brings to bear the resources of memory, anecdote, and reflection on the questions of survival, communication, and judgement that are part of the legacy of the death camps. “Almost everybody,” Levi insists, “feels guilty of having omitted to offer help,” a statement that pulls his readers into the drama of accusation, and self-accusation, that prolongs the suffering of the camps throughout a lifetime. It is a burden of guilt that, Levi suggests, is vital to the totalitarian system; its most extreme example the Sonderkommandos of the extermination camps, the squads of prisoners selected to run the crematoria. Levi’s work is to bring readers toward the paralysis of judgement that results from trying to hear the message of the horrific atrocities perpetrated in the camps. VL

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  Watchmen

  Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

  Lifespan | b. 1953 (England), b. 1949 (England)

  First Published | 1986

  First Published by | DC Comics/Titan Books (N.Y. /Lon.)

  Hugo Award | 1987

  A meditation on the Nietzschean Superman. A murder mystery. An alternate world sci-fi epic. A psychological study of power and corruption. A comic.

  The year 1986 marked a significant turning point for the graphic novel. Alongside Frank Miller’s reinvention of Batman came Alan Moore’s twelve-part saga of superheroes an
d their troubles. Set in America in 1985, Nixon is president for a third term, and costumed adventurers have been outlawed by the 1977 Keene Act. Two are still operational: the Comedian, a tough, vicious soldier with a dark past, and Dr. Manhattan, the victim of an atomic accident, whose extraordinary powers give America the decisive edge in the Cold War. The other superheroes are arguably happier in their enforced retirement. Except for Rorschach, the sociopath, whose response to the Keene Act was to deliver the dead body of a multiple rapist to New York’s police along with a note saying “Never.” But then the Comedian is killed. Someone has a plan. The Cold War is not over but escalating. Who can rise above it? And at what cost?