1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

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  The Afternoon of a Writer

  Peter Handke

  Lifespan | b. 1942 (Austria)

  First Published | 1987

  First Published by | Residenz Verlag (Salzburg)

  Original Title | Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers

  “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”

  “Afternoon” in Peter Handke’s The Afternoon of a Writer is, on the one hand, a definite temporal category. The writer finishes his day’s work in a house saturated with the dull, melancholy sunlight of a winter’s afternoon. But, on the other hand, “Afternoon” is also a spatial and sensual arena, a matter of the body’s movements in habitual spaces, when the body itself is impelled by its own needs rather than by the purposeful structures of work. “Afternoon” in this sense is the aftermath of labor, a period and a sensibility marked by a certain freedom, yet also by a fatigue that transmutes that freedom into something semiconscious; a precious yet barely endurable return to a self stripped of external purpose or motivation.

  Handke’s writer in The Afternoon of a Writer is a man who lives, works, eats, and walks on his own, but this physical isolation only barely protects the privacy he nourishes and cherishes. Seduced, yet at the same time repelled, by the abstract chatter of words and images that engulf a city street, the writer embarks on a walk, hesitates, plunges in, and is lost.

  Uneasily self-conscious about calling himself a writer, he is a man for whom art is a daily, sweaty activity and an overarching proud goal. Confronted with the depth of the writer’s solitude and the consequent richness of his relations to language and to observation, the world “outside” cannot but pale a little. Handke indeed encourages such an opposition by refusing to name the city the writer walks in; its streets are anonymous and the language or languages spoken on them are unspecified. An opposition is not an unbridgeable chasm, however, and it is the beauty of this small book to make the writer—and the reader—hunger for the things of the world. PMcM

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  The Radiant Way

  Margaret Drabble

  Lifespan | b. 1939 (England)

  First Published | 1987

  First Published by | Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London)

  First U.S. Edition | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)

  “. . . knowledge must always be omnipresent in all things . . .”

  Margaret Drabble’s acclaimed novel is the first book in a sweeping trilogy that follows the lives of three women who, like Drabble herself, found themselves at Cambridge University in the 1950s. Opening at a party on New Years’ Eve, 1979, The Radiant Way begins by examining the life of Liz Headland, whose apparent success in family, career, and London social life have resulted in twenty years of settled contentment. However, as the 1980s begin, Liz’s certainties about life begin to crumble in a dramatic fashion, and she finds herself again thinking of her childhood and adolescence in the provincial north of England, before Cambridge provided her with a passport to the welcome sophistication of London. Interwoven with Liz’s story are those of her two Cambridge friends: Alix, whose naïve political convictions and cheerful romanticism make her frighteningly vulnerable to the emotional and financial vagaries of adult life, and Esther, whose mysterious reserve, amusing at Cambridge, has since grown to extreme lengths that worry her friends. All three are confident, happy women, but the life-changing events of the 1980s, culminating in a suggestion of violence previously unimaginable within their comfortable lives, force them to reconsider their success in life and to find value once again in their long friendship.

  Here, as usual, Drabble explores the issues of freedom, ambition, and love that face working women in a subtle and often ironically funny way. The otherwise mundane details of characters’ lives are interwoven with the surreal background of London during exciting cultural change and political uncertainty. Both an ironic feminist Bildungsroman and a magnificent state-of-England novel, this remains one of Drabble’s finest and most absorbing books. AB

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  Kitchen

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Lifespan | b. 1964 (Japan)

  First Published | 1987, by Fukutake (Tokyo)

  Given Name | Mahoko Yoshimoto

  Original Title | Kitchin

  When Kitchen first appeared in Japan with this discreet cover, its sensational impact provoked “Bananamania” among the young.

  “Now only the kitchen and I are left. It’s just a little nicer than being left all alone.”

  In the two novellas that comprise Kitchen, Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto (pen name of Mahoko Yoshimoto) explores the inextricable link between longing and mourning. When Mikage Sakurai in the title novella, “Kitchen,” is left an orphan by the death of her grandmother, she accepts the offer from college classmate Yuichi Tanabe, and his mother/father, Eriko (a post-operative transsexual), to move temporarily into their home. Within a quirky world of gay nightclubs, gender reassignment surgeries, and culinary experimentation, the three attempt to carve out an alternative nuclear family. However, a tragic murder threatens to destroy Yuichi and Mikage’s newfound equanimity, uniting them in hopelessness, grief, and, finally, love.

  The fragile boundary between death and desire is also subtly analyzed in the second novella, “Moonlight Shadow.” Overwhelmed by the premature death of her lover, Hitoshi, Satsuki takes up jogging to avoid coming to terms with her loss. However, she finds herself unable to refuse when a mysterious woman she meets on a bridge offers her the chance to lay her grief to rest. Written in simple, elegiac prose, “Moonlight Shadow,” like “Kitchen,” depicts characters that suddenly find themselves adrift in a cold and unfamiliar universe, and their subsequent search for meaning.

  Banana Yoshimoto, daughter of renowned 1960s New Left philosopher Ryumei (Takaaki Yoshimoto) and sister of popular cartoonist Haruno Yoiko, has received much critical acclaim in both her native Japan and abroad. Although written when she was only twenty-three and working as a waitress in Tokyo, this debut novel was awarded two of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, and has since been translated into over twenty languages. BJ

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  Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

  Douglas Adams

  Lifespan | b. 1952 (England), d. 2001 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1987

  First Published by | Heinemann (London)

  First U.S. Edition | Simon & Schuster (New York)

  “Let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

  In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams returns to earth with a highly unconventional detective story. The author deals with all the big questions that informed his earlier series, the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galax. As ever with Adams, things are not what they seem: a playful and comic interweaving of the science fiction, ghost story, and whodunit genres serves to mask a darker and altogether more haunting set of themes.

  Private detective Dirk Gently undertakes to track down the murderer of the millionaire founder of a computer empire. The case enables this most unusual sleuth to employ his trademark holistic method. His longheld belief in the underlying interconnectedness of all things yields results. The conventions of the detective genre are inverted: the clues follow Dirk and reveal themselves to him one after another. But there is plenty left for him to do, for the central mystery that Dirk Gently is trying to solve is none other than discovering the origins of life on earth and unveiling the forces behind the course of history. Although Gently is painted as an absurd and slightly tragic figure, it is through him that Adams accesses some of the more profound currents of thought circulating in the 1980s. This is one of few novels to investigate the ideas of chaos or complexity theory. In rescaling his canvas from the intergalactic Hi
tch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to the terrestrial for Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Adams reflects an emerging popular awareness of the connections found in and among a globalizing world. As his characters grapple with a malevolent enemy, they become conscious that their choices, even those made with the best of intentions, have an unintended but far-reaching impact on the interconnected webs of life. AC

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  Cigarettes

  Harry Mathews

  Lifespan | b. 1930 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1987

  First Published by | Weidenfeld & Nicolson (N. Y.)

  First UK Edition | 1988, by Carcanet (Manchester)

  Harry Mathews is the only American member of the Oulipo, the Paris-based group of writers who experimented with inventions in literary combinatorics, mathematically derived rules imposed upon sentences, poems, and whole novels. Mathews’s best-known contribution to the forum is the Mathews Algorithm, a way of recombining arbitrary elements of plot in order to discover unthought-of sequences.

  This may or may not be the organizing principle behind Cigarettes, which is set over a period of thirty years among New York’s generally idle rich—the kind of people Mathews grew up among. Each chapter is a subtle transformation of those surrounding it, where similar events are seen from a different point of view, and each is devoted to the power play between a particular pairing of characters—Owen, who is blackmailing Allen, whose daughter Priscilla has an affair with Walter, who is the mentor of Phoebe, who forges a portrait of Elizabeth, who everyone loves. There are multiple miscommunications and deceptions—between lovers, business partners, parents, and children—and talismanic objects move through the text, from one person to another, connecting them all. It is impossible to avoid the feeling—typical of Mathews—that something intricate is going on beneath the surface. But even that surface is phenomenally rich, and it displays a great range of forms and registers, all engineered with faultless precision. DSoa

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  Nervous Conditions

  Tsitsi Dangarembga

  Lifespan | b. 1959 (Zimbabwe)

  First Published | 1988

  First Published by | Women’s Press (London)

  Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (Africa) | 1988

  Nervous Conditions is a colorful personal memoir, but also a clear-eyed snapshot of colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s. Tambu’s branch of the family are subsistence farmers, and her early life on the homestead is marked by hard work and a deep sense of injustice. She is a canny observer of the Shona patriarchy in operation, but will not, like her mother, resign herself to the “poverty of blackness on the one side and the weight of womanhood on the other.” Her father deems that there is no point sending Tambu to school, as she cannot “cook books” to feed a husband. But she realizes early that education will be her escape; though clearly a gifted student, she succeeds through chance and sheer determination.

  The novel’s title is taken from its epigraph, itself a quotation from Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “The condition of native is a nervous condition.” Once at the mission school, Tambu enters a different world: the world of her successful uncle and his family, each member of whom has been marked by time spent in England. Tambu sees firsthand, in her cousin Nyasha’s eating disorder, in her uncle’s nervousness and excessive control—the tensions produced by the colonial condition, by being caught between two worlds. This is the minefield Tambu must negotiate in her formal education, but it is exacerbated by larger questions about black female identity articulated through the unique experience of the four women of her utterly engaging story. ST

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  The First Garden

  Anne Hébert

  Lifespan | b. 1916 (Canada), d. 2000

  First Published | 1988

  First Published by | Éditions du Seuil (Paris)

  Original Title | Le premier jardin

  The First Garden takes as its epigraph William Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage,” a quotation that the main character, the fading actress Flora Faranges, takes all too literally, interpreting her life through the medium of a series of dramatic roles. After years of living in France, Flora is offered a role in a play and returns to her native Quebec, where the remembrance of her troubled past and her problematic relationship with her estranged daughter rise up to haunt her, despite her outward success. While rehearsing for the play, she begins to spend an increasing amount of time with the much younger Raphael, a relationship that begins a chain of events that lead her back to the horrifying events of her early childhood.

  Hébert’s short, dreamlike scenes convey the intricacies of Flora’s consciousness to the reader with an immediacy that is almost disturbing; the novel skips around in time and place so that we, like Flora, discover memories gradually through psychological association and reverie. The First Garden details the painful minutiae of failed family life—Flora’s failure with her daughter, Maud, echoes her own troubled relations with her adoptive parents, whose bourgeois facade has hidden a horrifying truth about her early childhood.

  A short, savage novel, The First Garden takes an unsparing look at how people “act out” at the expense of others, and spells out the repercussions that such behavior can have. AB

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  The Last World

  Christoph Ransmayr

  Lifespan | b. 1954 (Austria)

  First Published | 1988

  First Published in | Fischer (Frankfurt)

  Original Title | Die letzte Welt

  Ransmayr’s novel takes as its starting point Ovid’s banishment from Rome and his youthful friend Cotta’s search for him in the remote Black Sea port of Tomi (in modern Bulgaria). The narrative soon becomes a visionary alternative to history when the landscape impersonates Ovid’s vanished poem Metamorphoses. Cotta meets or hears about inhabitants of Tomi who reveal themselves as modern counterparts of mythic figures in the poem. The village prostitute, who repeats the words of those talking to her, is called Echo; Dis and Proserpina, gods of Hades, are now Thies, a refugee German gravedigger, and his quarrelsome fiancée; the deaf-mute weaver is Arachne; and Fama is a gossip who runs the local store. These encounters and other events furnish the pieces of a puzzle that Cotta molds into a dramatic and bewitching story.

  Acclaimed as a modern masterpiece, The Last World is especially praised for its dense magical images, for which it has been compared to the magic realism of Garcia Marquez. But this parable of vivid images and unsettling force goes beyond the assertion that great authors cannot be silenced and that myth permeates our lives. Ransmayr’s universe is not just a metamorphosis of the Metamorphoses, it is also a timeless poetic world, a political fable that allows its author to deal subtly and indirectly with themes of universal and contemporary interest, such as exile, censorship, dictatorship, and the threat of ecological disaster. LB

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  Oscar and Lucinda

  Peter Carey

  Lifespan | b. 1943 (Australia)

  First Published | 1988

  First Published by | University of Queenstown Press

  Booker Prize | 1988

  Oscar and Lucinda, here shown with its UK cover, won the Booker Prize in 1988. A movie version was made in 1997.

  Peter Carey is probably Australia’s best-known postcolonial writer. Oscar and Lucinda is set in mid-nineteenth-century England and Australia. Oscar Hopkins is the son of a preacher, an effeminate Englishman with hydrophobia. Lucinda Leplastrier is an Australian heiress who, fighting against society’s expectations of the confinement of her gender, buys a glass factory with her inheritance. Both suffer childhood traumas, Oscar’s the result of his relationship with his controlling, religious father, and Lucinda’s centered around a doll, a pres
ent from her mother. In adulthood, both protagonists develop a passion for gambling and it is this love of risk that unites them when they finally meet, on a boat bound for New South Wales. Between the two there develops an uneasy and unspoken affection. Finally, they set out to transport a glass church across godforsaken terrain and the love developing between them, instead of blossoming, becomes isolated inside their skins.

  Several important themes run through the book—not least the idea of love as the ultimate gamble, the high-risk play to which Oscar and Lucinda ironically cannot commit themselves. Carey explores the idea of gender confinement at a time and place in history where society was happiest with strictly defined roles. Lucinda discovers again and again that if she manages to step outside the boundaries placed upon her by society, she will be excluded. Finally, the novel is an acerbic comment on colonialism as the couple attempt to transport a glass church unharmed across native land. In the end it is glass (so similar to his feared water) that, although providing Lucinda with her fortune, plays a hand in the tragic conclusion and in the eventual destruction of the Australian outback. EF