1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 98
Backed onto a fence by a stick-brandishing eleven-year-old Scot, Lachlan Beattie, and his cousins, Gemmy’s first appearance in the novel is carefully engineered by Malouf, who places him between European colonizers and the Aboriginal land. Indeed, his role as an “in-between creature,” a self-proclaimed “B-b-british object” with an understanding for and alliance with Aboriginal life, brings into focus the novel’s principal preoccupation with the problem of identity for the colonial subject.
Gemmy’s appearance in this small community is so threatening, his knowledge of “the other” so closely rendered, that the settlers are forced to question their own inherent sense of superiority. Settlers who ally themselves with Gemmy are quickly estranged from their community. Gemmy’s eventual forced departure from the community invites readers to remember Babylon, the cradle of civilization that provided both motivation and justification for the colonial project that created him, and that frames Gemmy’s narrative. JSD
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The Holder of the World
Bharati Mukherjee
Lifespan | b. 1940 (India)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)
Original Language | English
In this, the sixth novel by Indian-born American writer Bharati Mukherjee, the story is told by Beigh Masters, a twentieth-century asset hunter who is trying to trace a legendary diamond from Mughal India. Beigh uncovers the story of Hannah Easton, the American lover of an Indian Raja. Born in the backwoods of New England in 1670, Hannah’s life takes her through a strict Puritan upbringing in Salem to the shorebound life of a seafarer’s wife in England. Searching for adventure, she finds herself segregated behind the walls of White Town in Mughal India, before being carried off by a Hindu Raja. Hannah finds herself trapped by, and yet alienated from, each of the cultures in which she finds herself. Only when she becomes the Raja’s lover does Hannah finally gain the freedom to act as she wishes rather than as her society dictates.
In the story that frames Hannah’s tale, Beigh’s investigations of Hannah’s life through objects, diaries, and pictures is contrasted with her partner Venn’s computer simulation of a recent day using modern paraphernalia. The conclusion that the former creates a richer and more valid evocation of the past is underlined when Beigh physically steps into Hannah’s world through a computer simulation. The Holder of the World is thus a vibrant narrative of migration and alienation that crosses the boundaries of time and culture. ClW
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1900s
The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Lifespan | b. 1960 (U.S.)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York)
Movie Adaptation | 1999
“Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic . . .”
Part detective story, part Bildungsroman, part tragedy, The Virgin Suicides starts from a premise so shocking it is almost inconceivable (though supposedly drawing its basic facts from a real-life case). Jeffrey Eugenides’s adult narrator recalls the “year of the suicides,” in which all five of the Lisbon family’s daughters ultimately succeed in committing suicide. The novel brings together “evidence” such as the girls’ journals and notes, the collected memories of the narrator and his clique, and interviews conducted around the time of the narrative—yet the atmosphere is thick with confusion.
Several aspects of the Lisbon girls’ lives seem to collude in the air of mystification. Neighborhood boys have always romanticized them into a monolithic blond fantasy of unreachability, while neighbors create a whispering backdrop for familial eccentricities. After the first suicide, the remaining four girls become isolated at school by the awkward pity of their peers and teachers. For all the persistence with which the narrator pursues the “truth” behind the suicides, he is never able to illuminate the mystery that enshrouds the girls and their self-inflicted, eternal silence. Never having attempted to look beyond his own interpretation of the girls’ mental state, the narrator can only allude to his contributing role in their deaths. The sense that the suicides are simply physical enactments of their complete effacement by their environment is reinforced by the paranoia of their mother, Mrs. Lisbon, about spiritual propriety and pollution. Dutch elm disease hysteria provides a metaphor for the hypochondriacal fear of pandemic at the heart of suburban American culture, where killing something healthy is the preferred resolution to fear of the possibility of contamination. AF
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1900s
The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields
Lifespan | b. 1935 (U.S.), d. 2003 (Canada)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Random House (New York)
Pulitzer Prize | 1995
“It is frightening, and also exhilarating, her ability to deceive those around her . . .“
The Stone Diaries is a panoramic novel, a masterful odyssey through the trials, minor joys, and ennui of the nearly century-long life of Daisy Goodwill. Starting with her tragic birth in rural Manitoba in 1905 and ending with her death in Florida, the story is told in chapters, spaced a decade apart, that visit childhood, marriage, remarriage, motherhood, independence, grief, and finally old age and death. We glimpse in the distance, from these windows into Daisy’s life, the changing face of the twentieth century. We also see the evolution of women’s position in society.
But is this purely a women’s book? It is about a woman, and the mundane crises of being a woman, but, more fundamentally, it is about being human. It is a complex narrative—made more complex in that it is ostensibly a first-person “autobiography,” but one that alerts us to its unreliability at every step of the way. It offers us multiple versions of Daisy’s life—some from before she was born, some after she has died—from a variety of characters. But through all of the different subjective viewpoints, through entire sections made up of letters and newspaper columns on gardening, oddly the one point of view most often absent is that of Daisy. This is a novel about the difficulty of finding an identity, and—considering the position of women—the complication that we are most often defined by others.
Throughout the decades, two motifs reflect minor triumphs and ordinary devastation: the resolute rigidity of stone and the irrational growth of plants. But plants win. Where loss, ossifying grief, or age would be a dead end to other heroines, Carol Shields repeatedly gives us renewal. She shows that life—in surprising ways—finds a way to bloom. There is dignity in the ordinary. There is hope. GT
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1900s
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
Lifespan | b. 1952 (India)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Phoenix House (London)
Commonwealth Writers Prize | 1994
Seth’s epic novel is set in India, the country of his birth, although the author has lived primarily in the U.K. and U.S. since his teens.
“You too will marry a boy I choose,” announces Mrs. Rupa Mehra to her younger daughter, Lata, at the start of Vikram Seth’s colossal novel. Lata, however, is unconvinced, and at the heart of the story is the decision she has to make. Will she comply with her mother’s wishes and marry Haresh Khanna, the most “suitable” of the three men who are courting her, a shoe factory manager with great enthusiasm for his work who was introduced by a family friend? Will she marry the poet Amit, her brother’s brotherin-law, who proposes after they become friends during Lata’s university holidays? Or will she defy her mother and marry the most unsuitable boy of them all, Kabir, a Muslim fellow university student, with whom she has fallen in love? The story of the search for a husband follows the fortunes of four families during one year, 1951, four years after Indian independence. It is set against the background of the passage of land re
form legislation, religious festivals such as the Pul Mela, and the considerable Hindu–Muslim tensions that lurk beneath the surface and occasionally erupt into violence.
Why read such a long book, shorter than War and Peace by only some fifty pages? In Seth’s novel, there are none of the weighty meditations of Tolstoy, nor is the intention behind the novel one of a grand epic. Instead, there is a lightness of touch in his prose that moves effortlessly through his vast cast of characters, spanning the frivolous world of the anglicized elite, the tensions of academia and politics, and the grinding poverty of the villages and slums. Surprisingly, the novel is a remarkably accomplished example of restraint and temperance in narrative. It avoids excess despite its enormous scope, and there is a respect for character and detail that is now rare among modern writers. ABi
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What a Carve Up!
Jonathan Coe
Lifespan | b. 1961 (England)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Viking (London)
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize | 1994
In this, Jonathan Coe’s fourth and overwhelmingly most successful novel, Michael Owen is the hapless biographer of the Winshaw family, a gallery of monsters whose greed and unscrupulousness have enabled them to profit from, and indeed to have made possible, the Thatcherite climate of 1980s Britain. As we move from formative episodes of Michael’s life to his account of the Winshaws’ rise to positions of power and influence, we discover, along with him, that the family has determined the course of his life in unimaginably far-reaching ways. In the end, a traumatized Michael is transported to the Winshaws’ family home, where he and they live out a Carry On movie spoof called What a Carve Up!, in which Michael’s dreams are fulfilled and the Winshaws, in turn, receive their just deserts.
In calling Coe’s dazzling novel “Postmodern,” critics presumably have in mind its metatextual playfulness—its unreliable narrator, its mingling of literary forms, and the apparently arbitrary interconnectedness of its characters and plots. However, it sits just as happily in the tradition of Victorian social realism, in which personal destinies and sociopolitical contexts are entwined in ways revealed by the story. Many of Coe’s novels are detective stories in disguise, beginning with loose ends and gradually tying them into elegant knots. Here, the story’s resolution is as satisfying as its literary tricks are delightful, but do not be deceived: at heart, this novel is a furious social satire. PMy
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On Love
Alain de Botton
Lifespan | b. 1969 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Macmillan (London)
Alternate Title | Essays in Love
As its title suggests, Alain de Botton’s On Love is in the same genre of philosophical essay that received its fullest expression in the work of Michel de Montaigne. But it is also a thoroughly modern love story.
This skillful combination of the intellectual and the emotional, the philosophical and the novelistic, makes On Love a delightful and original work. With references to Wilde, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kant, Wittgenstein, Plato, Mill, Heraclitus, Freud, and Flaubert, among others, On Love is unashamedly intellectual. But its narrator uses erudition in order to reflect with wit and insight upon the universal experiences of falling in and out of love: that feeling when we first fall in love that we were meant to be together; the way we idealize the beloved; the subtext of seduction; the lack of authenticity involved in wanting to be whoever you think your beloved wants you to be; the disjunction between mind and body when making love; the insecurity of the lover when the beloved eventually returns their affection; and the way in which being a lover reaffirms everything about oneself and is in fact the mirror in which one sees oneself. The novel’s philosophical reflections are interwoven with the story of the narrator’s love affair with a woman called Chloë, who he meets on a Paris–London flight. This is not a novel for the incurably romantic, but it is a sharp and sustained philosophical dissection of love that also achieves the irresistible seduction of a well-told love story. SD
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The Twins
Tessa de Loo
Lifespan | b. 1946 (Netherlands)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | De Arbeiderspers (Amsterdam)
Original Title | De tweeling
The cover of the first edition of De Loo’s novel, the tale of two lives that illuminates a dark period of European history.
“What was a German doing here, in Spa, where every square . . . had a monument with lists of the fallen of two World Wars carved in stone?”
The twins Anna and Lotte, separated in early childhood, first by the death of both parents in rapid succession, then by illness, family feuds, and finally by the Second World War, meet accidentally, aged seventy-four, at a health resort. The unexpected encounter produces opposite emotions in the two women: Anna, the German sister, who had been mistreated by her adoptive family as a child, and who had since lost, to war and circumstances, everybody who gave her anchorage and a feeling of belonging, fervently embraces her newfound sibling. Lotte, raised in Holland by an estranged branch of the family, has a longstanding hatred for her former homeland, and she receives her sister’s joyous advances with suspicion and disdain.
Tessa de Loo gives voice to the millions of Germans standing convicted before the tribunal of history of passively acquiescing to genocide. With Anna, a picture of the ordinary citizen takes shape, and it is very different from the one approved by history. Questions with wider ethical reach stand in counterpoint with this theme. How much of our energy and resources are we allowed to expend on ourselves, and how much should we save for others, even in the face of dire personal need and adversity? Can affection be rekindled, and childhood bonds renewed, across over half a century of neglect and misunderstanding? This novel provides no clear answers, but the problems it poses revolve in the mind long after the last page is finished. MWd
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Looking for the Possible Dance
A. L. Kennedy
Lifespan | b. 1965 (Scotland)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)
Somerset Maugham Award | 1993
“. . . a compliment directed to one’s teeth.”
Looking for the Possible Dance is an almost everyday story of life, love, and sacrifice in the fraught world of male–female relations. In charting Margaret’s resistance to the limited womanly roles of daughter, wife, and mistress, the novel demonstrates the fragility of men and their desperate and resented dependence on the women in their lives, a dependence that must breed hate alongside love.
During a train journey from Glasgow to London, Margaret recounts the events that have brought her to this moment. Her beloved but possessive father has died, and she has lost her job at a community center because her boss, who indulged himself in an imaginary and unreciprocated affair with her, has engineered false accusations against her. Her lover, Colin, has been severely disabled by a gangland attack, in which he was nailed to a warehouse floor in a gruesome crucifixion, a punishment for exposing loan sharks in the community. Having earlier refused to marry him, Margaret now has to decide whether to return to that relationship on his terms, reciprocating his public sacrifice with her own private one. In a typically ambiguous conclusion, Kennedy sends her heroine home, completing the journey of discovery that takes her back where she started. Anxious love and uneasy fear coexist in Margaret, suspending her in this finely balanced narrative of duty and desire. Only dancing offers a glimpse of social harmony, but even this affirmation of the possibility of new relations is finally denied. The present soulless reality is sustained by violence: the public brutality of men’s relationships with men and the private coercion of men
’s relationships with women. In this novel, the dance of life provides little opportunity to escape a routine that creates love and resentment in equal measure. CJ
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Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks
Lifespan | b. 1953 (England)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Hutchinson (London)
First U.S. Edition | 1994, by Vintage (New York)
“Madame Azaire had not fully engaged Stephen’s eye.”
Birdsong is “a story of love and war.” A mixture of fact and fiction, the book was born of the fear that the First World War was passing out of collective consciousness. At one level, it upholds the promise: “We Shall Remember Them,” and Faulks’s fictional soldiers give an identity to the “lost” of the war—both the dead and “the ones they did not find.” Through unashamed emotional manipulation, Faulks solicits heartrending sympathy. He redefines heroism by presenting valor, not as gung-ho bravado, but as fear and the stoic endurance of pointless suffering.
Stephen Wraysford’s notebooks, containing his war diaries, are found by his granddaughter, Elizabeth, in 1978. In reading Wraysford’s history, Elizabeth relives his past and finds her own identity—a way “of understanding more about herself.” The explicit intensity of Stephen’s sexual passion for his mistress, Isabelle, stands as vicarious sexual experience for those, like Stephen’s friend, Weir, who lost their lives without experiencing sex. And the graphic horror of the Belgian trenches is seared into the reader’s consciousness to provide a vicarious national identity for a generation that has never experienced combat. By glimpsing how we might respond in extreme situations that arise only in national crises, Birdsong enables readers to learn, as Elizabeth learns, more about themselves. But the novel is not nationalistic, for Stephen is saved by a German soldier, and they weep together “at the bitter strangeness of human lives.” Ultimately, the novel acknowledges that any attempt to tell the truth about war lies beyond language, for that truth is too awful both to tell and to comprehend. The “birdsong” of the title stands for the voice of a lost generation and also represents the voice of art, which attempts, and necessarily fails, to capture it. AR