1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 96
Hideous Kinky
Esther Freud
Lifespan | b. 1963 (England)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)
Movie Adaptation | 1998
The image on the cover of the Penguin edition, shown here, was drawn by the author’s father, Lucien Freud.
This novel is semi-autobiographical and based on the author’s own experience of traveling with her mother, Bernadine Coverley, in North Africa, between the ages of four and six. Weaving between the vivid descriptions of life on the move, the desert, and its cast of exotic characters, is a deeply moving and poignant tale of what it is like, as a child, to be part of an unconventional family. For Freud herself, the daughter of the artist Lucien, and the great-granddaughter of the famed Sigmund, childhood was unlikely ever to be normal. The novel beautifully evokes the bohemian life that she and her sister, the fashion designer Bella Freud, unwittingly witnessed as children, while all the while craving a more stable upbringing.
Hideous Kinky is the story of Julia, a hippie mother, and her daughters, Lucia and Bea, who travel to Morocco. Early on in the trip the girls decide that many of the sights they witness are best described in the words of the title. Events are narrated through the voice of five-year-old Lucia, who observes their exotic foreign surroundings with mixed emotions. One moment she is seduced by the vast desert skies and the magic of colorful street markets, but the next she is craving a normal, English upbringing, complete with childhood staples such as regular school and set bedtimes. As their mother immerses herself in Sufism, in her quest for personal fulfillment and spiritual enlightenment, the girls’ longing for stability amidst the shifting desert sands intensifies. In this, her first novel, Freud not only paints a vivid and compelling picture of a country that was the Mecca of the hippie movement of the 1970s, but also tells a touching story about childhood, with a simplicity and lightness that both moves and enchants. LE
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Memoirs of Rain
Sunetra Gupta
Lifespan | b. 1965 (India)
First Published | 1992
First Published in | Grove Press (New York)
Sahitya Akademi Award | 1996
Sunetra Gupta’s debut novel was published to acclaim from critics who likened her sinuous, poignant prose to that of Virginia Woolf. The events of Memoirs of Rain take place over a weekend, during which Moni, the Bengali-born wife of an English writer, prepares to escape the quiet anguish of her unhappy marriage and return to India with her daughter.
Like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Moni is superficially occupied with arrangements for a party, but her mind continually wanders as she remembers the tentative beginnings of her relationship with her husband, Anthony, and her uneasy adjustment to life in London. The passion of youth contrasts painfully with Anthony’s subsiding infatuation and later guilty indifference, and his barely concealed infidelity is the source of Moni’s despair. Although it is Moni’s point of view that informs most of the narrative, the stream-of-consciousness technique (again echoing Woolf) confuses and conflates wife and mistress, past and present, real and imaginary, while the intensely lyrical rhythms of descriptive passages are accentuated by extracts from the poetry of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, interwoven with the text in translations by the author.
A searching examination of a fading affair and the exploration of a particularly feminine form of self-expression are bound up in the juxtaposition of two cultures. As the literary importance of Indian diasporic writers continues to grow, Gupta’s elegant, thought-provoking debut remains remarkable. VB
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Asphodel
H. D.
Lifespan | b. 1886 (U.S.), d. 1961 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Duke University Press
Given Name | Hilda Doolittle
Asphodel is a remarkably complex, innovative, and hugely underrated work of Modernist fiction. The story follows the European travels of Hermione Gart, a young American who experiences artistic and sexual awakenings in the years leading up to the First World War. Themes of marriage, infidelity, and illegitimacy all connect the novel with the Jamesian literary tradition. More radically, however, the novel also explores one failed and one hopeful lesbian relationship. H. D. attempted to deter publication of this autobiographical novel—written in 1922 and unpublished for seventy years—by penciling “DESTROY” across the title page of the manuscript; it has been presumed that this was due to Asphodel’s lesbian theme. Perhaps also psychological trauma and the stillbirth of Hermione’s first child were themes that were just too close to home.
As a feminist novel, this is the story of female expatriation, an experience that is immeasurably different from that of young expatriate men. As a novel that reinscribes the psychological experience of war, it presents a landscape where both interior and exterior spaces are violated. If for the Modernists, the world of the mind was the only safe space to retreat to, then where does one go when even interior space has been violated by the public trauma of war, or the private trauma of stillbirth? VC-R
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The Butcher Boy
Patrick McCabe
Lifespan | b. 1955 (Ireland)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Picador (London)
Irish Literature Prize for Fiction | 1992
“I was thinking about Mrs. Nugent standing there crying.”
The Butcher Boy is as exciting as it is horrific, as comic as it is disturbing. The story is told in tightly controlled flashback from Francie Brady’s wooded hideout, where we learn the whole town is after him “on account of what I done on Mrs. Nugent.”
Set in the Irish Republic in the early 1960s, Francie is the neglected only child of an alcoholic father and a suicidal mother. His troubled family is very unlike that of the well-to-do Mrs. Nugent and her namby-pamby son, Phillip. Francie’s imagination is saturated with comic books, American movies, television, and the mischief he gets up to with his only friend, Joe Purcell. The stifling town in which Francie lives, and his twisted family life, makes him love-starved, emotionally stunted, and ultimately unhinged. While Joe can grow into adolescence, Francie remains undeveloped and childlike, despite leaving school early and getting a job in an abattoir, an appropriate occupation for one obsessed by Mrs. Nugent’s comparison of his family to “pigs.”
Exploiting the tendency of the childish voice to imitate what it overhears, the narrative recycles adult cliché through the mind of a disturbed boy. Francie absorbs and invigorates the banal conversational idiom of life in a small Irish town, infusing it with energy and menace. The first-person narrative here races along in colloquial fluency, for despite the utter dysfunctionality of Francie’s family life, his inner, fantasy life is explosive and dynamic. The more the world outside rejects him and fails to meet his needs, the more recourse he has to this fantasy world, so that the descent into madness and murder, however genuinely shocking, comes with its own childish logic. It is a powerfully original voice, deftly crafted into a compelling, shocking, and entertaining novel about damaged childhood. RM
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Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Peter Høeg
Lifespan | b. 1957 (Denmark)
First Published | 1992, by Rosinante (Copenhagen)
Alternate Title | Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow
Original Title | Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne
“This winter I’ve been able to watch the ice forming.”
Six-year-old Isaiah is found lying face down in the snow at the foot of an apartment complex in Copenhagen, Denmark. The authorities record the death as an accident, but Smilla Jasperson, Isaiah’s neighbor and surrogate mother, feels convinced that something more sinister lies behind the trag
edy. An expert reader of snow and ice, Smilla is able to deduce from Isaiah’s footprints that he jumped on purpose, something he only would have done had he been pursued. Her subsequent research leads her to the Arctic ice cap, as a stowaway on a cruise liner, as she slowly uncovers a conspiracy involving numerous members of Denmark’s scientific elite intent on safeguarding their secret at any cost.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow is narrated in the first person: we inhabit the perspective of a highly intelligent woman whose pluckiness and abrasive sense of humor at first belie the tremendous grief she feels as a result of Isaiah’s death. As the story progresses, we learn more about Smilla’s relationship with Isaiah, particularly the bond they shared as displaced Greenlanders forced to make a life for themselves in homogenous Denmark. The novel is a bracing critique of Denmark’s colonization of Greenland as well as of the continuing prejudices harbored by many Danish toward Greenland’s indigenous people.
What elevates this story to the status of a great novel is the eloquence with which Peter Høeg deftly interweaves a detective plot with striking character portraitures and philosophical musings. “Ice and life are related in many ways,” Smilla tells us at the beginning of her story, and the rest of the novel ingeniously expounds on this relationship, juxtaposing adventure on the high seas with finely crafted meditations on love and loss. CG-G
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The Dumas Club
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Lifespan | b. 1951 (Spain)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Alfaguara (Madrid)
Original Title | El club Dumas
The Dumas Club is the novel by Pérez-Reverte most admired by his critics, perhaps because it is the most meta-literary of all his works, or perhaps simply because its chosen subject is the world of antiquarian books.
In any case, this explicit tribute to Alexander Dumas contains, in equal measure, any and all of the ingredients needed to turn a story of intrigue, mystery, and action into an excellent book appealing to contemporary tastes: a plausible protagonist (the unheroic Lucas Corso, antiquarian book dealer and faithful heir of the skeptical characters of the traditional detective novel); enigmas to be resolved (authenticating a forged manuscript chapter of The Three Musketeers; investigating the existence of examples of a medieval work—The Ninth Gate—burned, with its printer, on its appearance in 1667); the universe of assistants (Irene Adler, the young beauty who decides to help Corso); and the opposition (the evil and metaliterary Balkan/Richelieu, Rochefort, and Milady/Liana), all involved in an investigation that develops in an exotic international setting; the intelligent segmentation of the story through ellipsis and insinuation to increase the suspense and the crossing of trails and countertrails; and, finally, the no-less skillful inclusion of erudite information (that comes from the buccaneering world of antiquarian books), satisfying readers by presenting difficulties and then leading them well through the decipherment of the tangle. JCA
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Written on the Body
Jeanette Winterson
Lifespan | b. 1959 (England)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
First U.S. Edition | 1993, Knopf (New York)
Set against the comic relation of the narrator’s previous sexual liaisons, Written on the Body tells the story of the narrator’s deeply serious love affair with a married woman called Louise. Although, in this book Jeanette Winterson eschews the explicit engagement with sexual and gender politics that characterized her infamous first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1985), her decision to make the gender of the narrator in Written on the Body ambiguous has prompted much debate. Various textual clues—including the evidently easy bisexuality of the narrator, and the ease with which Louise’s husband allows them to carry on their affair under the eaves of the marital home—suggest that the narrator is female. While the novel might therefore be read as an acutely observed reflection on female sexuality, the mystery of the narrator’s gender might also indicate a more radical undermining of assumptions about gender and sexuality.
The novel begins and ends with more abstract poetic reflections on love, testifying to Winterson’s skill as one of the few contemporary prose writers who can both write a compelling narrative about the vicissitudes of love and sex and construct sentences with the precision and beauty of the poetic. Sharing the magic realism of contemporary novels such as Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the story is a poetic and philosophical reflection on the body—a complex, interwoven palimpsest of who we are. SD
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The Crow Road
Iain Banks
Lifespan | b. 1954 (Scotland)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Scribner (London)
Adapted for Radio (BBC) | 1996
Iain Banks’s The Crow Road begins with one of the most memorable paragraphs in modern literature: “It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.” This is the voice of Prentice McHoan, the middle son of an affluent Scottish family whose narrative forms the greater part of the book, while the rest is told in the third person, a kind of domestic saga of the McHoan, Watt, and Urvill families.
Away at university, Prentice finds himself returning to his family home (or rather, after a falling-out with his father over religious belief, to the home of his Uncle Hamish). Another uncle, Rory, hasn’t been seen in eight years. As the mystery of Uncle Rory’s fate takes greater and greater hold on the text, Prentice takes on the role of fallible detective, charged with making sense of all that happened to the generations before him and piecing together fragments to form a single truth.
The Crow Road is a novel about death: desire and its relationship to death, the body in life and death, and the exhuming of buried secrets. By the end of the book, despite the concentration on a bleak and stark Scottish landscape, the real map is created within Prentice’s mind, as he reaches inside himself to discover the lost truths of a generation and the fragility of memory. EF
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Indigo
Marina Warner
Lifespan | b. 1946 (England)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
First U.S. Edition | Simon & Schuster (New York)
Novelist, literary critic, and historian, Marina Warner is a chameleon of the pen, and Indigo derives from all these aspects of her interest. Skipping between the fifteenth-century British appropriation of an imaginary Caribbean island, with many references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the story of the founding family’s heirs in the twentieth century, Indigo draws upon several facets of English history.
Warner draws out all the more sinister colonial implications of Prospero’s enslavement of Ariel and Caliban, and revives the witch Sycorax, mentioned fleetingly in The Tempest as Caliban’s mother. She is the island wise woman and herbalist, learned in the art of extracting indigo and dying cloths. As the British misunderstand and all but destroy the local population, Sycorax’s daughter escapes death, if not the ravages of the community established by the conquerors. Alongside this narrative of colonial tyranny is the tale of London-born Miranda, a descendant of the island’s colonial governor, who eventually finds her way to the Caribbean island that her family helped to alter dramatically. Warner also manages to poignantly portray the struggle of Miranda to understand and come to terms with her relatives. However, while the tale is played out within a single family, the message is clearly wider: the legacy of colonialism and its crimes do not disappear but are part of the fabric and history of our culture and
those they have impacted in a way that is extremely real and present. JC
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The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
Lifespan | b. 1943 (Sri Lanka)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | McClelland & Stewart
Booker Prize | 1993 (joint)
The cover picture of Indian sapper Kip on the U.K. edition is strongly reminiscent of Kipling’s Kim.
Michael Ondaatje writes the most remarkable prose. Beautifully crafted sentences flow effortlessly through his work, hypnotic in their perfection. The English Patient is a spellbinding novel, both because of this endlessly rich language, and for the story itself, filled as it is with sadness and tragedy.
Set in the closing days of the Second World War, the novel moves between war-ravaged Italy, and the prewar African desert of Ladislaus de Almásy’s memory, the terribly burned “English Patient” of the title. Scarred beyond recognition, and dying, he is cared for by a young nurse, Hana, in a partially ruined and deserted villa. Into the lives of this strange couple come Kip, a young Indian sapper in the British Army, and Caravaggio, a charming Italian-Canadian thief, who has been broken by his experiences of war. The tale of Almásy’s doomed affair with a married woman, and its tragic end, weaves around the lives of Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip, pouring forth from the strange living corpse that the English Patient has become. The horror of war is distant, but central, as Hana and Kip begin a tentative love affair. The characters are warm, human, likable, yet morally flawed, damaged, and overwhelmingly ambiguous.