Inevitably, Tita falls in love with Pedro, who then decides to marry Tita’s ugly older sister, Rosaura, in order to at least remain physically close to his true love. The marriage marks the start of a twenty-two-year-long conflict, filled with passion, deceit, anger, and love, during which the two lovers are forced to circle one another, their passion remaining unconsummated. In her position as head cook on the family ranch, Tita produces food that is imbued with her own feelings of love and longing—food that affects both everyone who eats it and ultimately the outcome of the story.
The culinary backdrop to the lovers’ tale features mouthwatering recipes for Wedding Cake, Quail in Rose Petal Sauce, and Chilies in Walnut Sauce, which, as well as whetting the appetite, provide a metaphorical commentary on the characters. The delicate blending of these recipes with the tale of romance produces an extraordinary novel with an unusual and distinct flavor, at once vibrant and sensual, funny and passionate, bittersweet and delicious. Like Tita’s Chocolate and Three King’s Day Bread, this original and compelling novel is impossible to resist. LE
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1900s
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
José Saramago
Lifespan | b. 1922 (Portugal)
First Published | 1989, by Editorial Caminho (Lisbon)
Original Title | História do Cerco de Lisboa
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1998
As in all his extraordinary novels, here José Saramago writes with the absolute minimum of punctuation. The result, something akin to the serial music of Schoenberg, is a reinvention of the historical novel as we know it, which makes most efforts in this direction look clumsy and heavy-handed. By a conjurer’s sleight of hand, Saramago transports his reader straight to the heart of another world.
Raimundo Silva, proofreader for a Lisbon publisher, decides on a whim to put a negative into a history text, effectively recasting Portugal’s past: during the siege of Lisbon in the twelfth century, the Crusaders did not come to the help of the king of Portugal against the Saracens. Rather than causing Silva to lose his job, his act of insubordination grabs the attention of his new superior, Dr. Maria Sara, who is fifteen years his junior. She persuades him to actually write this new history, and as he begins to create his revisionist tale, the two fall in love. Characteristically, Saramago lets us into their love affair via glimpsed moments of awkwardness, humor, and tenderness.
In the whole of twentieth-century writing, there can be no purer example, and certainly no funnier one, of what novelist Christine Brooke-Rose has referred to as “palimpsest history”—that is, the novel that offers us an overwriting of history and, in the process, the reinvention of our world. PT
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1900s
The Trick is to Keep Breathing
Janice Galloway
Lifespan | b. 1956 (Scotland)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | Polygon (Edinburgh)
MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year | 1990
A frank account of female psychological crisis, The Trick is to Keep Breathing is by turns soul-destroying and bleakly comic. When the lover of the ironically named Joy Stones dies in an accident, she senses his spirit in an omnipresent aromatic cloud, until she finds the overturned, leaking aftershave bottle under the bed. This scene of self-delusion provides a quintessential model of a stereotypical femininity that, in a desperate quest for love and intimacy, is complicit in its own oppression. It is not only Michael who dies, but Joy herself experiences a kind of living death along with him when she becomes socially invisible as the mistress of a still-married man, excluded from the rituals of mourning. In her subsequent anguish, Joy becomes anorexic and literally almost disappears. Her body feels remote and fragmented in an experience of psychic fracture only intensified by her time in a psychiatric unit.
Embodying Joy’s breakdown, the novel fragments, dissolves, and reconstitutes itself in myriad of different forms: extracts from magazines, recipes, horoscopes, letters, and self-help books—all the accessories of insecure femininity. In navigating this haphazard textual landscape, we appreciate the destructiveness of Joy’s predicament and the absurdly precarious nature of woman’s position in the world. Eventually Joy regains a coherent sense of self when she realizes that life, like swimming, is a trick to be learned. CJ
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1900s
The Great Indian Novel
Shashi Tharoor
Lifespan | b. 1956 (England)
First Published | 1989
First Published in | Arcade Publishing (New York)
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize | 1991
Self-consciously announcing its aspiration to epic status from its very title, The Great Indian Novel sets itself the daunting task of, as one of the characters puts it, telling “the story of an entire nation.” For this task Shashi Tharoor enlists the aid of the epic Indian stories of the Mahabharata, basing his novel around the interaction of ancient myth with modern Indian political and historical realities. The result is a dazzling, sensitive, and often riotously funny ride through a semi-imaginary twentieth-century India, an alternative created in loving parody of its original.
Told as a memoir by Ved Vayas to his scribe, Ganapathi, the novel follows the complex political machinations of a family seemingly formed by combining the most famous among India’s political leaders and mythological creations, ranging from Nehru to Indira Ghandi to Krishna within the space of a few pages. Clever and self-aware, the novel also plays with the cultural heritage of the Indian novel in English; characters from A Passage to India and Kipling’s renamed “The Bungle Book” wander in and out. Despite its ironic humor and slippery political allegiances, the novel treats its subject with both reverence and a critical eye, emphasizing, in the grand sweep of its satire, both the importance of this story of national birth and the sense that, as Tharoor puts it, “in our country the mundane is as important as the mystical.” AB
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1900s
The Melancholy of Resistance
László Krasznahorkai
Lifespan | b. 1954 (Hungary)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | Magveto Kiadó (Budapest)
Original Title | Az ellenállás menakóliája
The Melancholy of Resistance is the first work by the reclusive Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai to be translated into English. A small, anonymous, and impoverished Hungarian town is utterly transformed when a traveling circus arrives on a winter’s night carrying the desiccated corpse of an enormous whale. After the exhibit is parked in the central square, a wave of suspicious rumors and paranoia sweeps the town, eventually descending into rioting and violence. But the whale is only a Trojan horse. Behind the scenes, a horribly deformed dwarf known as the Prince has ordered the town to be destroyed, and he expertly manipulates the townspeople into a state of fear and nihilism. Struggling against this tide of senseless aggression are Valuska, a naïve young man treated as a kind of village idiot by the locals, and his mentor, Mr. Eszter, a strange figure who is obsessed by the idea of retuning a piano to its “original” harmonies using mathematically pure intervals.
This is a deeply strange, unsettling, intensely detailed, and richly atmospheric work. It is a novel of long shadows, bitter cold, and sinister whispers—all rendered in treaclelike prose. Perhaps the novel can be read as an allegory for the upheavals of eastern Europe; perhaps it is a meditation on folk culture and the formation of social consciousness; perhaps it is an attempt to reclaim the gothic from the clutches of kitsch; perhaps it is all this and more. SamT
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1900s
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
Lifespan | b. 1954 (Japan)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
Booker Prize | 1989
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br /> Time is running out for both Stevens and the British Empire on the jacket of the first edition, shown here.
“What a terrible mistake . . .”
Stevens is the butler of thirty-four years at Darlington Hall, right in the dying heart of the British class system. He is precise, rigid, and will broach no effusion. His father, also a butler, taught him that to be great, dignity is key. He staves off any inchoate passions and thwarts any slackening of the cold precision with which he runs the house. Four years after Darlington’s death, Stevens travels to persuade the former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, to return to work for a new master, a wealthy American named Farraday. Farraday is as brash and casual as Stevens is staid and frigid. Stevens is not comfortable with “banter.” Miss Kenton had been as conscientious as Stevens, but her warmth ran counter to his severity. Their squabbles were petty and endearing, surges sublimating affection. When she reveals her life may have turned out better had she married Stevens, he is deeply shaken, though reticent. This lost possibility goes not only unacted upon but undiscussed.
Stevens’s journey to visit Miss Kenton gives him an opportunity to reminisce about his life and work. He longs for times of pomp and decency and grows melancholic about a world that is gone, a world in which he knew his place. He has become an anachronism, an outdated tradition. Finally he confronts the truth that Lord Darlington, though a perfect gentleman, was a Nazi supporter. Stevens had always been loyal to the point of blindness, but his long overdue lucidity leaves him bereft. He recognizes that his life has been one of misplaced trust and unplaced affection. He finally locates dignity—too late—where he previously ignored it, in Miss Kenton’s honesty. This is a breathtaking feat of voice, by turns hilarious and poignant. Ishiguro casts a merciless eye on British society, but never with cruelty, always with affection. GT
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1900s
London Fields
Martin Amis
Lifespan | b. 1949 (England)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
First U.S. Edition | 1990, by Harmony (New York)
This novel is the second in a loose trilogy that begins in 1984 with Money and ends in 1995 with The Information.
“Keith Talent was a bad guy.”
Martin Amis’s London Fields is a darkly ironic inversion of the whodunit plot in which the central protagonist, Nicola Six, conspires with the narrator to create two potential “murderees.” The sour and witty novel uses this sense of suspense to explore the possibility of the end of time.
Nicola Six is the fulcrum for this cataclysmic possibility. She uses the weaknesses of her failed suitors—the vicious, criminally minded working-class Keith and the gentle, guileless upper-class Guy—to associate herself with a crudely feminized version of nuclear holocaust. She sends Guy on a fruitless search for her orphaned friends “Enola Gay and Little Boy” and taunts a confused Keith with her bikini-clad body while lecturing him about the etymology of the word “bikini.” The narrative takes place in the final weeks of the twentieth century when ominous clouds threaten an environmental catastrophe, and “Faith,” the American President’s wife, fights for her life. These literal evocations of the end of the world are set within an ambivalent fear of the death of culture itself. The deeply self-conscious form of the novel itself only reinforces this fear. Keith’s slavish dependence upon an impoverishing mass culture is contrasted against mocking references to high literary culture, including a lengthy parody of a passage from D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Samson Young, the narrator, is slowly dying throughout the novel and by its end he is dead. The novel’s closing anxious reference to Samson’s more successful doppelgänger (Mark Asprey or “M.A.”) renders the novel’s author uncertain. Indeed this uncertainty seems generally characteristic of the novel, as it delves unflinchingly into the darker side of urban life without ever quite reconciling itself to anything as obvious as critique. NM
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1900s
Moon Palace
Paul Auster
Lifespan | b. 1947 (U.S.)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | Viking Press (New York)
Full Name | Paul Benjamin Auster
Moon Palace is a meditation on the obstacles that can frustrate and derail fatherhood: the novel is littered with men ignorant of, overeager for, or ambivalent toward their prospective or actual paternity. The protagonist, Marco Stanley Fogg, has never known his father and was raised by his mother until her death when he was eleven years old. He went on to live with his Uncle Victor in a congenial but emotionally casual household. On Victor’s death, Fogg inherits his massive book collection, which he sells piece by piece to fend off eviction, homelessness, and ruin. Kitty Wu, the child of an elderly, polygamist father, rescues Fogg, and they fall in love. He finds work recording the life story of Thomas Effing, a bizarre, reclusive painter, but this period of stability is short-lived. Fogg forms a crochety bond with Effing, who becomes an adopted spiritual mentor, and Fogg later discovers that Effing is, in fact, his paternal grandfather. Through Effing’s will, Fogg is finally reunited with his biological father, with whom he shares an intense but brief connection. Kitty’s pregnancy takes on symbolic dimensions for Fogg, who sees an opportunity to redeem his own disheartening experiences, but their love cannot survive the mutual sense of betrayal generated by his controlling behavior. Ultimately Fogg is left alone, yet perhaps with a newfound clarity. AF
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1900s
Sexing the Cherry
Jeanette Winterson
Lifespan | b. 1959 (England)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
First U.S. Edition | Atlantic (New York)
Set in seventeenth-century London, Sexing the Cherry brings to life a tumultuous time of imperial exploration, revolution, and the discovery of a perversely shaped tropical fruit. The Dog Woman, a living mountain of flesh, camps with an assortment of raucously disturbing neighbors, scores of home-bred dogs, and her adopted son Jordan, the child she found in the Thames whom she raises as her own. She is of superhuman scale: by virtue of her extreme size and deeply held ethical convictions, the Dog Woman is a sovereign avenging force in the lawless bustle of her world, achieving by might anything she cannot achieve by argument or persuasion. She comes to lament having named young Jordan after a body of moving water when he falls in love with discovery on seeing the explorer Tradescant’s exhibition of bananas. Jordan eventually sets off on an expedition that is as much metaphysical as it is geographical. The final section of the novel, identified as taking place “some years later,” reincarnates Jordan and the Dog Woman as a Royal Navy sailor and an environmental scientist-turned-activist, who recapture their primal bond.
Winterson’s trademark style is here at its most glittering. With stories of twelve dancing princesses, or “word cleaners,” dispatched to cleanse cities’ atmospheres of their logomaniacal citizens’ pollution, the narrative complicates notions of reality and fantasy until they dissolve. Myth, fable, fairy tale, and history are cannibalized until a new genre is achieved. AF
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1900s
Like Life
Lorrie Moore
Lifespan | b. 1957 (U.S.)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)
Given Name | Marie Lorena Moore
Moore’s stories are set in the Midwest, a part of the United States where in the author’s words, “there were gyms but no irony.”
“‘Is this a TV show?’”
Lorrie Moore’s Like Life met with excellent reviews on its publication, and it is no secret that Moore crafts her stories like a gem cutter wields a chisel. In this collection of eight short stories, most of them take place in the Midwest, a noticeably innocent swath of America less prone to self-e
xamination than, say, to snowmobiling and deer hunting. “There were gyms but no irony . . . people took things literally, without drugs.”
These are stories about people who watch, baffled, as life seems to go easily for others. “Sometimes she thought she was just trying to have fun in life, and other times she realized she must be terribly confused.” Mary is dating two men. It all seems daring and utterly modern. And, of course, that’s the impression she gives in postcards to envious friends. But she is slowly unraveling, wearing only white and sitting in public parks reading “bible poetry.” Harry is a playwright who, through naïve enthusiasm and hunger for success, gives his life story, his life’s work, to a predatory television producer over drinks. Zoe is a teacher at a small university in rural Illinois, a land so blond that just because she has dark hair, she is presumed to be from Spain. She tries to make a home, like others do, and buys an oriental rug. The salesgirl tells her the pictograms mean “Peace” and “Eternal Life.” But how can she be sure? How can she ever know that they don’t in fact say, for instance, “Bruce Springsteen”? Plagued with uncertainty, she has no choice but to return the rug.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 93