1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 95
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
Lifespan | b. 1964 (U.S.)
First Published | 1991
First Published by | Vintage (New York)
First UK Edition | Picador (London)
The inhumane face attached to the Wall Street suit on the jacket of the novel epitomizes the character of the novel’s serial killer.
“‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First . . .”
American Psycho is, above all, an ugly book. It is an extraordinarily graphic description of obscene violence, which is spliced with reviews of music by Phil Collins and Whitney Houston, and with endless, repetitive descriptions of 1980s main street fashion. The novel’s protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is a psychopath who also works on Wall Street. He conducts business meetings, goes to upmarket restaurants, and commits rape and murder. The novel registers no difference between these activities. Depravity, it suggests, is so finely woven into the fabric of contemporary life that it is no longer possible to see it or depict it, to know when capitalism stops and brutalization begins.
There is no attempt to take a moral stance on Bateman, or the culture to which he belongs. But the extremity of the violence, coupled with the uninflected way in which it is described, produces a strange, ethereal dimension to the writing, which is as close as the novel can come to an ethics, or to an aesthetic. As Bateman struggles to understand why he has been summoned to this particular damnation, he is unable to formulate to himself his own misery, or his own confusion. As a result, the novel produces a longing for ethical certainty, for some kind of clear perspective on a culture that has become unreadable, and unthinkable. This is a longing that speaks of a kind of innocence, even in the midst of depravity, and for this reason alone, American Psycho must continue to be read. PB
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Laws
Connie Palmen
Lifespan | b. 1955 (Netherlands)
First Published | 1991
First Published by | Prometheus (Amsterdam)
Original Title | De wetten
“With regret and remorse, I see his face cloud over, his excitement shrink . . .”
Marie Deniet, a Catholic country girl who has lost her faith and replaced it with a worship of language and ideas, makes a narrative inventory of her relationships with the seven important men in her life. Each of them provides her with a story that contributes to her self-definition; also, they are themselves defined by their stories as astrologer, epileptic, philosopher, priest, physicist, artist, and psychiatrist. Bolstered by her confidence in the power of words, Marie sets about ordering existence and dispelling the chaos of meaninglessness that threatens a world that has lost its heaven. Her progress through a universe that seems indebted to human wit and reasoning is arrested and rendered illusory by the complications lurking behind a man’s love, the same kind of event with which the cycle of meaning-engendering loves began in her adolescence. Through the disintegration of her dream of love with the sculptor Lucas Asbeek, Marie learns that tales do not accord with reality, that language is not the omnipotent deity that replaced her lost God, and that life outside predetermined story lines has strength and independence.
At a time when artifice seems to provide the web onto which we each weave our own small realities, questioning the possibilities of art and language is synonymous with questioning the meaning of life itself, and forging a new kind of reality equals a work of art. Marie’s failure to completely succumb to the allurement of validation through language, and her final painful withdrawal from the laws made by the men who repeatedly created her story, coincides with her realization that language gives meaning only when it is used as a meeting ground with others, since “that which is individual and alone has no meaning.” MWd
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Faceless Killers
Henning Mankell
Lifespan | b. 1948 (Sweden)
First Published | 1991
First Published by | Ordfront (Stockholm)
Original Title | Mannen utan ansikte
“I meant, of course, that is was particularly fiendish individuals who did this . . .”
A man and his wife are brutally murdered. There is no trace of a perpetrator, no discernible motive, and no witnesses. The few clues to be found all lead nowhere, but something tells police detective Kurt Wallander to keep on looking . . .
In this first novel featuring the latterly well-known Wallander, we are invited behind the scenes of a small town in southern Sweden, which upon closer inspection proves to be less of an idyll than it seems. The hunt for the killer proceeds at a furious pace, and soon Wallander finds himself investigating circles with racist and xenophobic tendencies.
Written in 1991, Faceless Killers reflects a Swedish society facing economic crisis, high unemployment, political populism, and a brief but much publicized appearance of a declared xenophobic party in parliament. The darker undertones pervading society are reflected in the portrayal of a bleak and rainy small town, its dejected police force, and generally passive inhabitants. Distrust permeates not only the murder investigations but society in general, and an increased polarization of opinions shapes the environment in which Wallander is obliged to operate. Although not an overtly political novel, Faceless Killers nevertheless takes a stand against increasing intolerance, so a moral element is added to a riveting plot told by a highly skilled storyteller.
Faceless Killers is the first in a series of nine Wallander novels, and the book proved to be Henning Mankell’s international breakthrough. Although a must-read in its own right, it also deserves our attention as a representative of the inexorable rise of the modern crime novel in late twentieth-century Scandinavia, part of a fictional crime wave arguably led by Mankell and closely followed by Norwegian contemporary Karin Fossum. GW
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Astradeni
Eugenia Fakinou
Lifespan | b. 1945 (Egypt)
First Published | 1991
First Published by | Kedros (Athens)
First English Edition | 1992, by Kedros (Athens)
Astradeni is not a political novel like many modern Greek works. It is set in 1978 and deals with the huge wave of immigration from rural areas to Athens and its consequences for the country and its people.
The family of eleven-year-old schoolgirl Astradeni move from Symi, a small island of the Dodecanese, to Athens. They do not fit in: they are poor, they speak a dialect, and they are scared of cars. Their life in Athens consists mainly of defeats: Astradeni’s father cannot get a decent job, her mother stays at home alone crying, while Astradeni herself has no friends at school and cannot even go outside to play, there being no yard anywhere—“there is not enough room” in Athens. Astradeni’s only victory throughout the book concerns her name. Her new teacher in Athens does not understand it, claims that it is not Christian, and arbitrarily uses “Urania.” But Astradeni means “she who binds the stars,” and in the end the girl manages to persuade the school headmaster to force her teacher into using her name.
In Astradeni herself, Eugenia Fakinou introduces a childishly naive but disarmingly honest narrator who elicits sympathy in her tales of the vast movement of poor peasants to Athens and their fierce resistance to assimilation: “But why are they calling us peasants? We’re islanders.” The unfairness of this life is what Astradeni best conveys, expressing the despair of a free-spirited girl who is caged in an apartment where she cannot play and a school where people do not even use her own name. CSe
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Regeneration
Pat Barker
Lifespan | b. 1943 (England)
First Published | 1991
First Pu
blished by | Viking (London)
First U.S. Edition | 1992, by E. P. Dutton (New York)
With the Regeneration trilogy Pat Barker extended the formal and thematic frontiers of contemporary historical fiction. This first book is a psychologically penetrating novel that revises the account of events at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, in 1917, involving the neurologist Dr. Rivers and traumatized soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon.
In her “Author’s Note” Barker warns, “Fact and Fiction are so interwoven in this book that it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not.” Yet it is precisely her braiding together of actuality and dramatization that sustains arresting insights for the reader. She uses the novel to trace the progression of Sassoon’s complicated commitment to pacifism, and to investigate the cruelty of institutional psychiatry epitomized by Dr. Lewis Yealland’s horrific techniques for treating so-called hysterical disorders. When evoking the scenes of that brutality, Barker’s style remains impersonal and taut. The navigation between pared-down dialogue and interior reflection invites an uneasy sympathy for Rivers. The reader is enticed to collude with his struggle to reform the clinical approach to “shell shock.” But the fluctuating affects of this disorder are everywhere inscribed upon the inhospitable social landscape that unfolds for sufferers like Sassoon on their return. Regeneration reveals the First World War’s indelible and manifold legacy and compels us to re-examine the relationship between public authority and personal memory. DJ
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Typical
Padgett Powell
Lifespan | b. 1952 (U.S.)
First Published | 1991
First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York)
Original Language | English
One of the most inventive writers to emerge in New Southern Writing—hailed by his peers, from Donald Barthleme to Saul Bellow—Padgett Powell takes the reader on a stylistic tour de force in Typical. The voice of America is the true subject of these stories, in particular the language of the South. It is a South of long-neck Buds and shotguns in the back windows of pickup trucks; of the peculiar joy in defeat of backwater trailer parks. Powell captures the music in the language, colorful to the point of poetry.
From the stream of self-excoriation of the narrator in “Typical,” who has come to terms with being “a piece of crud . . . an asshole,” to Aunt Humpy in “Letter from a Dogfighter’s Aunt, Deceased,” who corrects the grammar of her trash family from beyond the grave, Powell explores the soul of a South too complacent to rise again. In “Florida” and “Texas,” he paints entire emotional landscapes with lists. In “Mr. Irony,” the writer searches for his voice under the tutelage of Mr. Irony, “a therapist of self-deprecation.” “Limn with humility,” Mr. Irony extols. The narrator—the writer—ultimately fails to master irony and absents himself from the story. “Dr. Ordinary,” where every sentence begins with “He found . . .” and “General Rancidity,” where each sentence begins with “He ran . . .” are bravura performances. That such technical acrobatics manage to rise above mere novelty to create sublime explorations of self-knowledge without regret is a testament to Powell’s genius. GT
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Mao II
Don DeLillo
Lifespan | b. 1936 (U.S.)
First Published | 1991
First Published by | Viking (New York)
PEN/Faulkner Award | 1992
Don DeLillo’s Mao II adopts the title of a Warhol portrait and brings to the foreground the role of images in the interdependence of individualism, social traditions, and terrorism. This story of reclusive writer Bill Gray’s progressively deeper political involvement opens with a mass wedding conducted by Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The narrative perspective continually vacillates between the soon-to-be-spouses and invited, or interloping, observers in the stands. Bill has spent many years in virtual hiding, holed up in a compound with his affairs managed by a disconcertingly insistent fan-turned-executor. When Bill agrees to meet portrait photographer Brita, and later to act in support of a poet kidnapped in Beirut, he stops interminably writing, reworking, and unwriting the same narrative. His emergence ultimately leads to direct involvement with the poet’s struggle.
Mao II is preoccupied with the figure of the terrorist, particularly in relation to the isolated writer, and the dynamics of crowds. In the wake of Salman Rushdie’s metaphorical abduction by Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa, the writer is no longer the artistic counterpart of the terrorist, but also his potential adversary or victim. Bill’s fiercely guarded isolation, in part an act of resistance against the culture of consent in late capitalist America, becomes more like a terrorist abduction of the self. In the process, the writer’s and the terrorist’s shared but unrealizable dream of complete autonomy is exposed. AF
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Wild Swans
Jung Chang
Lifespan | b. 1952 (China)
First Published | 1991
First Published by | HarperCollins (London)
Full Title | Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“With luck, one could fall in love after getting married.”
In Wild Swans, Jung Chang recounts how three generations of her family’s women fared through the political storms of China in the twentieth century. Her grandmother, whose feet were bound according to ancient Chinese custom, was the concubine of an Emperor. Her mother struggled during Mao’s revolution before rising, like Chang’s father, to a prominent position in the Communist Party, only to be denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself was brought into the world a Communist and also followed Mao enthusiastically, before the harsh excesses of his policies and the destructive purges that crushed millions of innocent Chinese, including her parents, created the shadow of doubt. Working as a “barefoot doctor,” Chang saw the worst effects of Mao’s rule and eventually fled to the United Kingdom in 1978.
This intensely personal memoir is written in powerful yet delicate prose. An important work in terms of its examination of the effects of grand historical movements on the individual soul, as well as providing a vivid depiction of life in twentieth-century China, it covers a particularly eventful period of Chinese history.
Wild Swans traces the demise of Imperial China, the Japanese wartime occupation, the rise of the nationalist movement, the devastating civil war between the nationalist Kuomintang and the Communists, the Communist takeover, Mao’s Great Leap Forward (starving tens of millions to death), and finally the Cultural Revolution, which uprooted the nation’s identity and broke its collective spirit.
This is a revelatory book, and readers must constantly remind themselves that they are reading a work of fact rather than one of fiction—which at some points is a terrible thought. EF
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Arcadia
Jim Crace
Lifespan | b. 1946 (England)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
E. M. Forster Award | 1992
“‘The tallest buildings throw the longest shadows . . .’”
Visions of a garden-city, of a pastoral idyll preserved at the core of a modern commercial center, hold Jim Crace’s aging millionaire in thrall. Alone with his fortune on his eightieth birthday, Victor resolves to pay tribute to the vibrant yet rugged fruit market at the city’s heart by building a vaulted glass enclosure as an epitaph in place of its current traders. The quest to realize this architectural ambition is overseen by a reporter who with sympathy recounts the way Victor’s idyllic monument is eventually overturned by the trading community it romanticizes, and with disastrous consequences. Crace offers a shrewd yet sensitive commentary on a wishful effort to resuscitate an urban environment simply by refurbishing its visible topography within the confines of nostalgia.
I
f Crace can be seen as ironically appropriating long-established pastoral conventions, he does so to evoke one of civilization’s oldest debates, one that pits the urge to preserve the natural world against the ever-present need for redevelopment, the importance of rurality and that of commercial modernity. Arcadia’s voyage unfolds in a pristine style that remains as sensuous as it is polemical; drawing us into that “amiable and congested tension of the streets which kept the traffic and pedestrians apart,” Crace’s evanescent descriptions immerse the reader in a bustling marketplace whose aestheticization he then later interrogates.
As elsewhere in his oeuvre, Crace furnishes an anonymous setting in such a way that personifies its physical terrain: it is as though this fictional place itself is auditioned from the outset as a fellow protagonist among the novel’s events, events whose volatile succession the marketplace does ultimately survive, but scarcely unscathed. DJ
See all books from the 1900s
1900s