1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 97
In one of the finest scenes in the novel, the uneasy peace of the villa is shattered when Kip hears the news of the bombing of Hiroshima and, shocked and outraged, abandons the villa. It presents the damage and the terrible strain on each character in a way that manages to be both a microcosm of the novel as a whole, and its perfect conclusion. Division and unity, ally and enemy, the boundaries become confused and indistinguishable, running into each other like the sands of the English Patient’s memories. This novel is a virtuoso performance from Ondaatje and an endlessly pleasurable read. DR
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1900s
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Alice Walker
Lifespan | b. 1944 (U.S.)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (N.Y.)
First UK Edition | Jonathan Cape (London)
Possessing the Secret of Joy is an angry, impassioned defence of femininity, and of the female body, against the horrific violence of female genital mutilation. The novel focuses on the story of Tashi, an Americanized member of Walker’s fictional African people, the Olinka. Tashi opts in adult life to have herself circumcised, or, as she calls it, “bathed.” For Olinkans, “bathing” involves not only the excision of the clitoris, but also the removal of the labia, and the stitching closed of the vagina.
Tashi is demonstrating her allegiance to Olinkan tradition and her fierce devotion to a culture that is under threat. As the novel progresses, however, she comes to believe that her genital mutilation is a symptom of a more general, transcultural oppression of women by men. In dramatizing Tashi’s choice between her nation and her sexuality, Walker sets up an extremely difficult and troubling set of oppositions; the powerful claims of allegiance to African nationalism cannot be reconciled with equally powerful demands of feminism. The novel seeks to understand female suffering at the hands of patriarchal culture and a universal horror at the form that such suffering has taken. It is the possibility of a resistance to patriarchal oppression that turns out, here, to be the real secret of joy. Whatever its difficulties, as a poem of resistance to the violence of misogynist cultures in both Africa and the West, this novel is unforgettable. PB
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1900s
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy
Lifespan | b. 1933 (U.S.)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)
National Book Award | 1992
All the Pretty Horses, the first novel in Cormac McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy,” centers on John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old cowboy old enough to choose his way of life, but too young to realize this choice in the face of familial and institutional resistance. When John’s mother sells the family ranch, John and his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, leave for Mexico. Along the way they cross paths with the even younger character Blevins—a meeting that will dramatically alter each of the boys’ lives in different ways.
The novel’s cultural landscape is in a state of transition, as the open Texan spaces are encroached upon by electric fences dividing land into smaller and smaller parcels. One feels that the fast-food homogeneity already colonizing the rest of the country waits just around the corner. At the outset of John and Lacey’s journey, Mexico plays a familiar part in this scenario: As the young men leave their home behind, they imagine a rugged land that will form a suitable backdrop to their nostalgic fantasies of cowboy life. When they become workers at a large hacienda, however, they find themselves the subordinates of one of Mexico’s powerful elite. An island of opulence surrounded by back-breaking poverty, the hacienda does not protect John and Lacey from the intrigue resulting from their association with Blevins, and John’s love for the hacendado’s daughter promises future trouble. AF
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1900s
The Triple Mirror of the Self
Zulfikar Ghose
Lifespan | b. 1935 (Pakistan)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Bloomsbury (London)
Original Language | English
The question of national origin and identity is never simple in Zulfikar Ghose’s work. In The Triple Mirror of the Self, his most accomplished novel, themes of exile, migration, and identity loss are woven into an elaborate, mythic journey in time and space. Divided into three sections, the novel opens in a jungle in South America, where a group of strange characters have come together to form a pseudo-primitive commune of exiles and misfits. As the mountains of South America fade into the Hindu Kush, the novel changes tack and touches on a ship sailing to Europe, a university in the United States, and finally pre-1947 India, where a young boy is learning difficult lessons about identity as a Muslim in a group of friends soon to be split by Partition.
The Triple Mirror of the Self explores how we think about our own national identity when our nation is taken away. The reader never really pins down the central character, whose identity shifts throughout the narrative. Through the novel’s dreamy, evocative prose and deliberately obscure chronology, the reader is encouraged to see boundaries blur through the medium of a single extraordinary life. The Triple Mirror of the Self suggests that a coherent identity is nothing more than a series of infinite reflections; for Ghose, however, the interaction of these reflections makes up what is most beautiful and valuable about the human experience. AB
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1900s
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture
Apostolos Doxiadis
Lifespan | b. 1953 (Australia)
First Published | 1992, by Kastaniotis (Athens)
Original Title | O Theios Petros kai i Eikasia tou Goldbach
In this novel the narrator’s uncle, a gifted Greek mathematician called Petros Papachristou, becomes obsessed with solving Goldbach’s Conjecture, one of the great problems in mathematics. Searching for a proof, Uncle Petros throws away a promising career in academic mathematics, and at the novel’s end the reader remains uncertain whether he ever solved the problem. The narrator, a young man, inherits his uncle’s fascination with the conjecture, but only as an excuse to construct a fiction. At the same time he describes, in his own charming manner, what all people experience at least once in their lifetime: a face-to-face encounter with major existential questions. The plot unravels like a mathematical problem, drawing the reader into a tale of life, love, and sacrifice, with Uncle Petros battling against human irrationality, isolation, and loss of ideals.
Doxiadis is a talented storyteller and a gifted mathematician who knows how to present mathematics in an easygoing and fascinating way. His book combines fiction and fact in equal measure, helped along by a plethora of unexpected events, colorful language, clever plotting, and an eye for irony. Doxiadis’s achievement is to open up the worlds of mathematics and science, even for those who have always been mystified by them, and show that everyone can find interesting challenges even in the most unexpected fields. PMy
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1900s
The Discovery of Heaven
Harry Mulisch
Lifespan | b. 1927 (Netherlands), d. 2010 (Netherlands)
First Published | 1992, by De Bezige Bij (Amsterdam)
Movie Adaptation | 2001
Original Title | De Ontdekking van de Hemel
“At the stroke of midnight I contrived a short-circuit. Anyone walking along . . . would have seen all the lights in the detached mansion suddenly go off . . .”
Although Harry Mulisch is less well known in the English-speaking world, he is a prolific writer and a prominent figure in twentieth-century Dutch literature. On the basis of its physical heft alone, The Discovery of Heaven is a book to be reckoned with, while its theme consists of nothing less than the failure of humanity’s covenant with God. One premise of the novel is that the scientific method is a trick of Lucifer’s, one that has succeeded incredi
bly well. As the narrative unfolds, two supremely talented men, Max Delius, an astronomer, and Onno Quist, a linguist, meet by chance one dark night and become friends. Later, on a trip to Cuba, they jointly and repeatedly impregnate a young cellist named Ada Brons, who had earlier been involved with each of them in turn. Though she suffers a serious accident and dies, her baby survives. Named Quinten Quist, his mission is to retrieve the Ten Commandments and return them to heaven because of mankind’s utter inability to fulfill God’s will on earth. Delius, meanwhile, makes a stupendous astronomical discovery, before being killed by a meteorite. If the plot sounds contrived, that is the result of the intervention of angels or, more precisely, demiurges, who concoct the plan to create a human being to reclaim the Biblical tablets.
This monumental and controversial effort, cosmic in scope and comic in tone, has been heralded internationally and may be considered a contemporary instance of myth creation. ES
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1900s
Life is a Caravanserai
Emine Sevgi Özdamar
Lifespan | b. 1946 (Turkey)
First Published | 1992, by Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Original Title | Leben ist eine Karawanserai hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus
The book with the unconventional title (Life is a Caravanserai Has Two Doors I Came in One I Went Out the Other) breaks conventions throughout. That unpunctuated running together of phrases starts us off as we will go on. The first sentence continues: “First I saw the soldiers, I was standing there in my mother’s belly between the bars of ice . . .” Clearly, Caravanserai is not your usual memoir: in the process of describing childhood in the Turkey of the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, we can switch between the protagonist in her mother’s womb and the train carriage in which the mother stands surrounded by soldiers just as easily as the book continuously shifts its diction, register, and perspective.
The marriage of stylistic and thematic concerns is absolute: while the narrative is about the way in which female identity can be newly constructed in a laden political and social context, the stylistic experiments at first seem disorienting, but come to create a poetic and challenging sort of logic of their own. The boundaries of linguistic categories are fluidly reinvented as subjective, national, and gender roles are rethought. The book is wonderfully anarchic: both in the verbal marvels that disrupt its own narrative texture (from the Arabic prayer for protection and forgiveness that runs throughout to Joycean renderings of the sounds of a crunching apple), and also in its physical openness and pungency, replete with dozens of farts, all kinds of bodily fluid, and a vivid catalog of smells. MS
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1900s
Before Night Falls
Reinaldo Arenas
Lifespan | b. 1943 (Cuba), d. 1990 (U.S.)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Tusquets (Barcelona)
Original Title | Antes que anochezca
Written against time and published posthumously, Arenas’s autobiography is a furious denunciation of the Castro regime in Cuba, but, above all, it relates the circumstances that influence the life of a homosexual intellectual in a world marked by repression. Sex, politics, and writing are tied together in a linear story of resounding frankness and amazing dynamism. From Arenas’s childhood in Cuba to his flight to New York, where he knows he is about to die, homosexuality is the basis of his every experience. Its recognition is almost simultaneous with the loss of illusions raised by the revolution; it reveals the moral perversion of the political system; it is seen as the mechanism of collective rebellion; it is the pretext that brings the protagonist to prison; and, ironically, it opens the way to freedom (as an “undesirable”) through the Port of Mariél exodus.
Arenas tells of his detention, his escape, his almost dreamlike clandestine life in a park, his terrible incarceration, his defeat, his denunciation of his work, the further surveillance he underwent, and his final flight. Everything was made worse because writing was the whole of Arenas’s life. This secret journey leads from a literary childhood but without reading to international conferences, moving through his early triumphs in the revolutionary atmosphere, his relationships with Virgilio Piñera, Lezama Lima, and his companions of the “lost generation,” and his continuous efforts to save his texts before he reached the end. DMG
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The Secret History
Donna Tartt
Lifespan | b. 1963 (U.S.)
First Published | 1992
First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)
First UK Edition | Viking (London)
After the sensational success of Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, she was determined to remain “a writer, not a TV personality.”
“. . . how I longed to be an orphan when I was a child!”
Good publicity can give a book a bad name. Donna Tartt’s first novel, begun when she was still at college and bought for $450,000 by Knopf after a bidding war, quickly became a bestseller and made its author a reluctant star. The critics were not impressed: they thought the book leaden, pretentious, and thinly characterized. In some ways, they were taking it too seriously; in others, perhaps, not seriously enough.
The Secret History is a page-turner, certainly, but there is more to the novel than plot alone. Telling his story as if it were still unfolding, though in fact he is recalling events long since past, the narrator, Richard Papen, leaves behind his unsatisfying teenage years in Plano, California, to enroll at Hampden, a small, exclusive college in Vermont. He is soon captivated by a group of five rich, otherworldly classics students and their mercurial tutor, Julian Morrow, and gradually becomes enmeshed in the clique. He learns that the group—Henry, Francis, Bunny, and the twins Charles and Camilla—have been attempting to recreate a frenzied bacchanal, the consequences of which culminate in Bunny’s death. The remainder of the novel charts the slow splintering of the group’s friendships under the pressures of fear, remorse, and sickened self-knowledge.
The Secret History is a study of ruin, of lives blighted forever by adolescent hubris. It is also about charisma: the reader is seduced, along with Richard, by the charming and dissolute Francis, by Julian’s sublime sensibility, and the twins’ ethereal self-containment, and, above all, by Henry, who is by turns benevolent and warm, aloof and forbidding, but always, in the end, opaque. A strange confection, Tartt’s melancholy murder mystery is quality trash for highbrows: the storytelling retains its grip to the final page and beyond. PMy
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1900s
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Álvaro Mutis
Lifespan | b. 1923 (Colombia)
First Published | 1993, by Siruela (Madrid)
Original Title | Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero
“He is always semi-inebriated, a condition that he skillfully maintains by a process of steady drinking . . .”
Under this overall title and around an enigmatic figure, a saga of seven novels unfolds, originally published between 1986 and 1993. Maqroll is a hero of the earth and sea, in the tradition of those Conrad or Hugo Pratt, at the edge of the conventional, beyond time and space. He multiplies his destinies: he transports logs or he runs a bar in the mountains (The Snow of the Admiral); he co-manages a brothel (Ilona Arrives with the Rain) or he restores an old steamship (The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call); he takes part in arms smuggling (A Beautiful Death) or he tries to bring an old mine back into production (Amirbar). Many more adventures are described, as are the innumerable characters Maqroll encounters in his travels, among whom Ilona, the girl from Trieste, and the Lebanese Abdul Basur stand out.
Elegiac and almost magical, in this journey every meeting is always a reunion and a prediction of departure, everything is inevitable, and everything (except death) is avoidable. A philosopher alternating between dis
illusionment and the pleasure of the journey, a tireless reader, a notable diarist, letter writer, and invocatory poet, Maqroll is, above all, a literary hero. He leaves an ironic, fragmentary, incomplete dossier of documents and declarations, unified by a fictionalized Mutis. The collection is a dazzling verbal comic strip that, at any moment, appears capable of being expanded. DMG
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1900s
Remembering Babylon
David Malouf
Lifespan | b. 1934 (Australia)
First Published | 1993
First Published in | Chatto & Windus (Sydney)
NSW Premier’s Literary Award | 1993
Set in the mid nineteenth century in Queensland, Remembering Babylon is the story of an English baby who is thrown from the ship that brought him from England to Australia. The castaway in question, Gemmy, is raised by a group of Aboriginal people for sixteen years before returning to civilization via a small community of Scottish immigrant farmers.