1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 99
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1900s
The Shipping News
E. Annie Proulx
Lifespan | b. 1935 (U.S.)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Scribner (New York)
Pulitzer Prize | 1994
“His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors . . . called the Sea Lung, a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid . . .”
Quoyle is a thirty-six-year-old reporter from New York with a traumatic and stressful life—his parents have committed suicide, and his wife died in a car accident while she was with another man. His aunt has always wanted to return to the land of her history and she convinces Quoyle and his daughters to move with her to Newfoundland. He overcomes his fear of water to accept a job as the shipping correspondent on a local paper. A series of strange events soon beset Quoyle. In the town, he notices a graceful woman whose child has Down’s syndrome, and they form a bond that nearly leads to intimacy. Quoyle’s ancestors, who lived nearby, were reputedly pirates and violent murderers. He visits their burial ground and on his way home finds a suitcase with a head in it. Less disturbing but more worrisome is the fact that every so often Quoyle finds a length of knotted twine lying around his house.
In the end, there is the triumph of life over death as Quoyle survives a boat wreck. The Shipping News was reputed to have been an experiment in writing a novel with a happy ending, after Proulx had received feedback that her first novel seemed dark. But this happy ending is neither euphoric or easy—it seems that the only form of happiness Proulx can bestow on her characters is an absence of trauma and pain, and the resolution of this strange and unsettling novel is filled with unease. EF
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Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
Ivan Klima
Lifespan | b. 1931 (Czechoslovakia)
First Published | 1993
First Published in | Cesky spisovatel (Prague)
Original Title | Cekani Na Tmu, Cekani Na Svetlo
What does it mean to be free? How can we be expected to cope with a world where old limits have disappeared? And which of the many lives we live, choices we make, and identities we adopt is really our true self? Klima, himself extensively censored during the Cold War, investigates these big questions with a paradoxical authority, stylistic sureness of touch, and potent insight that empower his refusal to draw conclusions or to moralize. A surrealist, almost magical-realist, imagination is blended with deft satire and black humor. While the experience handled by Klima—1989’s Velvet Revolution—is obviously Czech, the setting is trans-national and the messages are universal.
The novel tells the story of Pavel, a commitment-phobic cameraman working for a restrictive and corrupt regime. He distorts the truth on a daily basis and dreams of a freedom where his talents and his true self have free rein. When he gains that “impossible” freedom, the novel explores who he becomes and the ever-complex mismatch between ideals and actions. Multiple narratives interweave in Pavel’s story: a president in an imagined labyrinth of senility, an abstract screenplay that Pavel one day hopes to write, a blurred tale of long-lost love, even a hostage drama. But the heart of the novel is Pavel himself: compromised, mediocre, aimless, flawed, yet ultimately very human. TSu
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The Invention of Curried Sausage
Uwe Timm
Lifespan | b. 1940 (Germany)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Cologne)
Original Title | Die Entdeckung der Currywurst
In The Invention of Curried Sausage, successful and prolifc author Uwe Timm packs in enough material for a work four times its length. It distills challenging subject matter—the end of the Second World War, adultery, Nazism—to its emotional essence, the seemingly inconsequential, yet potent symbol of postwar German cultural integration—the ubiquitous Currywurst.
Timm’s investigation of the invention of this delicacy is sparked off by childhood memories of eating the sausage at Lena Brücker’s fast-food stand. Brücker claims to be the genuine inventor, but before revealing the details of her culinary discovery, she must excavate her past for the events that led to it. Timm, the narrator, pretends that his sole motivation for interviewing Brücker is to solve the riddle of the sausage, when in reality it is more a device for untangling the riddles of war, duty, and love. Our encounter with the accidental recipe is preceded by Brücker’s affair with Bremer, a fugitive soldier hiding from the Nazi authorities. She betrays the unwritten rules of love by lying to him in order to keep their relationship afloat.
The curried sausage becomes a twentieth-century analogy to folklore’s stone in the soup. The deftly handled personal and cultural issues give the novella its overriding flavor, while the sausage provides the spicy seasoning. ABl
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Disappearance
David Dabydeen
Lifespan | b. 1955 (Guyana)
First Published | 1993
First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)
Original Language | English
Chris Shamwana designed the jacket for Dabydeen’s novel, which reflects his experience as a Guyanese living in Britain.
“I think there was a belief that if you went to England and worked, you could become wealthy.”
David Dabydeen
The narrator, a young Guyanese engineer, is sent to Dunsmere Cliff on the Kent coast to oversee the building of a containing wall to save the village from collapse into the sea. A serious and contemplative man, he boards in the home of a fiery old Englishwoman who is fascinated by Africa, where she had spent many years of her life. As the old woman probes into the narrator’s African ancestry, the question at the heart of the novel, whether one can ever “get rid of the past,” begins to trouble the narrator. He begins to understand the nature of the village, discovering that under its apparent Englishness is a latent violence that connects it to its imperial past. What results is a powerful meditation on the condition of England, seen as a land of monuments and national narratives that serve finally to mark what has disappeared, or what was never really properly acknowledged: the imperial encounters, the violence that created great civic works, and the deaths of slaves.
A novel employing epigraphs from both the philosopher Jacques Derrida and former prime minister Margaret Thatcher ought perhaps to demand one’s attention for this reason alone. But it is the way in which Dabydeen incorporates the theoretical idea that absences articulate more than presences into the fabric of recent British national sentiments that gives this short novel a seriousness and resonance that transcends its lightness of touch. ABi
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Deep River
Shusaku Endo
Lifespan | b. 1923 (Japan), d. 1996
First Published | 1993
First Published in | Kodansha (Tokyo)
Original Title | Fukai kawa
By the end of his life, when this novel was written, Japanese Catholic novelist Endo had become a cultural celebrity in his country, regarded by some as the moral and spiritual conscience of the nation. Deep River sums up the personal conflicts and public reflections of a lifetime. The river of the title is the Ganges in northern India, visited by a group of Japanese tourists undergoing varieties of life crisis. One is a Second World War veteran haunted by memories of the horrors of the campaign in Burma, another a guilt-ridden businessman looking for the reincarnation of his wife, dead of cancer. Endo’s religious concerns find expression in the person of Otsu, a Japanese Catholic rejected by the official European-based church, who has followed his own version of the faith in India. And there is Misuko, a woman seeking forgiveness for once seducing Otsu in a frivolous attempt to undermine his faith.
While presenting observations of India and its beliefs from a Japanese perspective, Endo remains preoccupied with his lifelong concerns: Japan and Catholicism. His criticism of the materialism and lack of spirituality of Japanese society is stern, but so is his rejection of the European Catholic hierarchy’s pretensions to define and control the Christian faith. Endo proposes a vision of religion that is inclusive, tolerant, and all-embracing, and all his major characters find some form of reconciliation, self-acceptance, or fulfillment. Japanese director Kei Kumai made a movie of Deep River in 1995. RegG
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Felicia’s Journey
William Trevor
Lifespan | b. 1928 (Ireland)
First Published | 1994
First Published by | Viking (London)
Whitbread Book of the Year | 1994
In Felicia’s Journey, William Trevor grafted a new literary form onto one of the most insistent themes of his fiction; the fraught historical relationship between his native Ireland and his adopted England. In a psychological thriller set in the English Midlands, Trevor exposes Felicia, an innocent Irish girl, to the clutches of Mr. Hilditch, a middle-aged English bachelor with a tenuous hold on reality. The pregnant Felicia has escaped her paternalistic Catholic and Republican family in provincial Ireland to search for the baby’s father in Birmingham. Unable to find him, Felicia is offered help and refuge by Mr. Hilditch. Hilditch’s motives seem uncertain, and the exact nature of his relationship with a string of other women, and their final fate, is also unclear.
The contrast between the perverse, evil, and manipulative Englishman and his intended victim, the young and naive Irish girl, has clear political and historical overtones. As the reader’s sense of foreboding increases, a cat and mouse game develops between the two protagonists, and Felicia is unwittingly assisted in escaping Mr. Hilditch by the persistent attention of Miss Calligary, a zealous West Indian missionary. As the focus of the novel changes to the disintegration of Hilditch’s mind, Felicia is subsumed into society as an anonymous vagrant dependent on the generosity of humankind. She assumes an aura like that of a nun, a personification of unselfish sacrifice, whose mysterious gift of goodness has always fascinated Trevor. UD
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Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Louis de Bernières
Lifespan | b. 1954 (England)
First Published | 1994
First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)
Commonwealth Writers Prize | 1995
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin achieved major bestseller status only gradually, as news of its readability spread by word of mouth.
Louis de Bernières writes in the great tradition of Gabriel García Márquez—vast, sprawling narratives that take in a whole world, that evoke and depict a community and the interrelatedness of its inhabitants from the birth to the death of its most long-lived members. Such a technique creates novels of remarkable depth, breadth, and humor.
The main narrative of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin focuses on Pelagia and her father Dr. Iannis, two inhabitants of the beautiful Greek island of Cephallonia. Against the backdrop of the Second World War and the Italian and German occupation of the island, the novel traces the love that develops between Pelagia and a musically gifted Italian soldier, Captain Corelli. The novel is inhabited by a multiplicity of other characters and its seventy-three sections are narrated from multiple perspectives, ranging from omniscient narrative to secret letters, from the historical writings of Iannis to the imagined megalomaniacal ravings of Mussolini. With its combination of all these narratives—at once beautiful, funny, sad, horrific, and, above all, human—the novel can, at first, seem a little disjunctive and alienating. However, as its momentum builds, the reader is caught up in a multifaceted narrative that testifies with sagacity and humor to the way in which the lives of disparate individuals are at the same time infinitely separate and yet also intimately linked. Despite the wealth of historical description, the novel is not intended to be a textbook of world events against which personal stories are set. Rather, the novel eschews the pretence to objectivity of official history and, more effectively than any textbook, evokes the horror, pain, and strange small miracles that happen during war to “the little people who are caught up in it.” SD
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How Late It Was, How Late
James Kelman
Lifespan | b. 1946 (Scotland)
First Published | 1994
First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)
Booker Prize | 1994
Despite his humor and imaginative verve, Kelman alienated mainstream readers with an insistent use of “bad” language.
How Late It Was, How Late is a novel of existential alienation. Awarded the 1994 Booker Prize for fiction, the resulting public consternation culminated in the charge of “literary vandalism” by the editor of The Times. Consequently the novel became more famous for its “bad” language than its remarkable innovations in form and style.
Told from the viewpoint of an unemployed Glasgow man, this is the story of Sammy Samuels, who wakes up blind after a police beating. Thereafter he struggles to navigate the labyrinthine city and welfare state as he attempts to claim benefit for his “dysfunction,” all the while meditating on his predicament. The Kafkaesque sensibility of the book conjures up a shadowy establishment arbitrarily wielding an oppressive authority. For Kelman, however, the instrument of this horror is language itself, and he rids his novel of a traditional English narrative framework to let Sammy speak for himself in the Glaswegian vernacular. In a further liberating move, the text slips back and forth between the first- and third-person narrative voice, effacing the boundary between narrator and character and eliminating this traditional linguistic hierarchy. Sammy becomes narrator and narrated, subject and object, an unstable identity that signals a crisis in Sammy’s sense of self, a sense of alienation that is amplified by the repetition of words, actions, and events. Sammy is thus trapped in the present moment—a moment stripped of meaning, direction, and opportunity for action. In the postindustrial Scottish context this predicament points to a particularly masculine crisis. However, the dehumanizing forces of society are resisted here with enormous emotional complexity, intellectual insight, and disarming humor. CJ
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City Sister Silver
Jáchym Topol
Lifespan | b. 1962 (Czechoslovakia)
First Published | 1994
First Published by | Atlantis (Brno)
Original Title | Sestra (Sister)
“We were the People of the Secret. And we were waiting.”
Jáchym Topol is undoubtedly one of the bravest and most vibrant Czech voices to emerge since the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Son of the playwright Josef Topol and brother of Filip (the frontman for the rock band Psí vojáci), Topol was the youngest signatory of the dissident initiative Charter 77 and has been involved in the artistic and political underground for his entire adult life. City Sister Silver is perhaps the only literary work to give the postrevolutionary period a sustained treatment. It is also one of the first works to explore the literary potential of colloquial Czech—reveling in the slang and profanities of a language often suppressed by decades of occupation. In many ways, City Sister Silver can be read as a declaration of independence for the modern Czech imagination.
The novel begins at the early stages of the Revolution with an account of the flight of East German refugees from Prague and establishes its primary narrator—an alienated, poetic soul named Potok who falls in with a crew of semi-criminals who are looking for business opportunities amid the chaotic energy of the new era. From this point on, however, time “explodes.” City Sister Silver is a fantastical trip through European history, veering drunkenly between passages of clipped social realism, news events, madcap dream
sequences, and esoteric mythology. It is a difficult experience for a reader unfamiliar with Czech culture, but one that reflects the acute uncertainties—moral, social, political, economic, linguistic, religious—of the post-revolutionary moment. Running parallel to the drift and flux, however, is a moving love story as Potok searches for, and eventually finds, his “sister,” or soul mate. This is a beautiful, bewildering, and consistently inventive work. SamT