1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 100
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1900s
Pereira Declares: A Testimony
Antonio Tabucchi
Lifespan | b. 1943 (Italy)
First Published | 1994, by Feltrinelli (Milan)
Original Title | Sostiene Pereira: una testimonianza
Campiello Prize | 1994
“But he, Pereira, was meditating on death.”
The story is recounted to the narrator—as we are reminded by the phrase “declares Pereira” ritually introducing each chapter—by Pereira, the editor of the cultural page of the Lisboa newspaper. Tabucchi’s love for Portugal is tangible in the novel’s descriptions of Lisbon glittering under the sun or shivering under the ocean breeze. It is the summer of 1938 and, while dictatorships in the rest of Europe are already strongly established, Portugal is still witnessing the early manifestations of Salazar’s regime. Pereira Declares is a story about the power of words and how they can make people politically and ethically responsible. At the opening, Pereira is a rather heavy, inward looking widower who converses depressingly with a photograph of his dead wife. Untouched by the erosion of democracy and the violent silencing of protest under Salazar’s dictatorship, Pereira is divided between his worries about his heart condition and his intellectual concerns about death. From the beginning, the smell of death permeates the novel. When Pereira discovers a philosophical essay on the topic by the young revolutionary Monteiro Rossi, Pereira is awakened to echoes of the collective extermination of Jews and the beating of workers. The violent murder of Monteiro at the hands of Salazar’s police convinces Pereira to take a political stance.
Death is a political metaphor for the absence of freedom. Symbolically, out of death comes life and Pereira’s decision to fight for it. The novel closes on a transformed Pereira, feeling younger and lighter and committed to fight political repression with the use of words. Before fleeing Portugal, his last piece in Lisboa is not just another timid book review but a fearless accusation of government responsibility for the death of his friend Monteiro. RPi
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
Lifespan | b. 1949 (Japan)
First Published | 1994
First Published by | Shinchosa (Tokyo)
Original Title | Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru
The narrator of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami’s heftiest novel, has recently quit his job. Toru Okada spends his days at home in a Tokyo suburb, while his wife goes out to work. Then a series of strange events disrupts his life: the cat goes missing, he receives sinister erotic phone calls from a woman he does not know, and he inherits an empty box from an old fortune-teller. Then, one day, his wife does not come home.
The novel takes on the form of an ambiguous quest, with many intriguing clues. Okada meets a teenage girl who, like him, does not have much to do all day. A platonic friendship develops. She points him in the direction of a garden with a dried-up well in it. An old soldier tells him a story of how, during the war, he spent several days at the bottom of a well in Mongolia. Okada takes to meditating in the well in the garden, where the borders between alternative realities become porous.
“Most Japanese novelists,” Murakami has said, “are addicted to the beauty of the language. I’d like to change that. . . . Language is . . . an instrument to communicate.” His flat style is more remarkable in Japanese, because the flatness itself is more striking, but it lends itself well to translation. TEJ
Murakami’s Japan is the everyday contemporary urban world, but strangely penetrated by mysteries and historical reflections.
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Our Lady of the Assassins
Fernando Vallejo
Lifespan | b. 1942 (Colombia)
First Published | 1994
First Published by | Alfaguara (Bogotá)
Original Title | La virgen de los sicarios
After thirty years abroad, Fernando, writer and grammarian, returns to Medellín, a city that has been degraded by violence. There he falls in love with Alexis, one of the young hit men who are risky sexual playthings to be found at the parties of the cynical well-to-do. The wearied, misanthropic Pygmalion finds a terrifying yet fascinating purity in the murderous child. He travels the city with him and realizes that the dead mark the route—because Alexis has resolved every conflict with bullets.
Fernando Vallejo has written some of the most brilliant prose of recent times, in all registers, from Catholic liturgy to the most brutal narco-murderous slang and grotesque, irrational horror. Yet shooting a wounded dog is the only crime and the only act of piety that he will admit to. When the end comes, Alexis dies protecting Fernando, who is desolated. However, he takes little time in replacing his lover with Wilmar, without knowing that it was he who killed Alexis. When he discovers this, and before discovering what it might do to their relationship, Wilmar, too, is killed by anonymous bullets.
This monologue of love, death, and scorn for the world is explicitly aimed at a polymorphous destination, an ignorant foreigner in hell, a necessary counterpoint to justify the ironic didacticism of the narrator. The book reveals one of the most powerful voices of Spanish-American fiction today. DMG
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Land
Park Kyong-ni
Lifespan | b. 1926 (South Korea)
First Published | 1969–1994
First UK Edition | 2002, by Kegan Paul (London)
Original Title | Toji
This five-part saga relates the tragic story of four generations of the Choi family of rich landowners—from 1897 to Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945—revealing in the process many little-understood aspects of Korean life and history.
In Part 1 (1897–1908), Park describes the collapse of the Choi family and the seizing of their property by Cho Joon-ku, a remote relative. Also covered is the childhood of Seo-hee, a daughter of the family, who eventually travels to Jendao in Jilin Province, China, with some villagers who hate Cho Joon-ku. Part 2 (1911–1917) is concerned with Seohee’s life and success in Jendao. Seo-hee marries Gilsang, a former servant of the Choi family, before returning home. The reader is introduced to the Korean independence movement, and conflicts in the expatriate Korean community are exposed. In Part 3 (1919–1929), Seo-hee succeeds in driving out Cho Joon-ku. Meanwhile, the narrative touches on the predominant issues and difficulties of Korean intellectuals under Japanese colonial rule.
In Part 4 (1930–1939), as Seo-hee’s sons, Hwankuk and Yoon-kuk, grow up, Park delves deeper into Korean history, culture, and art. She explores how Korea evolved greater self-knowledge as Japanese oppression resulted in growing disorder in Korean society. Part 5 (1940–1945) is focused on the Koreans who sought liberation. It climaxes with the news of Japan’s surrender, when Seo-hee feels as if a heavy iron chain on herself has finally been removed. Hoy
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Whatever
Michel Houellebecq
Lifespan | b. 1958 (Réunion)
First Published | 1994, by M. Nadeau (Paris)
Given Name | Michel Thomas
Original Title | Extension du domaine de la lutte
Whatever is a study in contemporary alienation. In straightforward, almost journalistic prose, the first-person narration documents the lonely life of a computer engineer. He is well-off, but finds no satisfaction in his job or any of the products that it allows him to buy. He manages to do a passable imitation of a functioning individual, but is unable to form attachments to either things or people.
The original French title, which translates as “Extension of the Domain of the Struggle,” provides an insight into the novel’s main theme. The insidious advance of capitalist values has infiltrated every aspect of our lives. Even the realms of love and sex are subject to the same forces of competition and exchange a
s the marketplace. This creates a sexual underclass, represented in the novel by the narrator and his ugly colleague Tisserand, still a virgin at age twenty-eight, although not through want of trying. Drunk, bored, and on the verge of a breakdown, the narrator tries halfheartedly to talk Tisserand into murdering the latest in a long line of women who have turned him down, as if to redress the imbalance he perceives in the sexual economy.
Michel Houellebecq’s approach adopts a highly deterministic outlook, where one is merely the sum of the quality of one’s genetic inheritance and the strength of one’s socio-economic position. This view of contemporary European society may be what makes Houellebecq one of the most popular and influential novelists currently writing. SS
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Troubling Love
Elena Ferrante
Lifespan | b. undisclosed (Italy)
First Published | 1995
First Published by | Edizioni e/o (Rome)
Original Title | L’amore molesto
Narrated in a deeply observed, excruciatingly blunt style, this story is set in a beguiling but often hostile Naples, whose chaotic, suffocating streets become one of the book’s central motifs. After her mother’s untimely and mysterious death, Dalia, an illustrator originally from Naples who has lived in Bologna for years, returns to her native city. Dalia cannot believe that her mother, who she remembers as a positive, exuberant woman, might have committed suicide. Searching for the truth about her mother also inevitably becomes a search for the truth about her family and herself, and the knot of lies and emotions that has bound them together.
A reconstruction of her mother’s last days sheds light on willfully-forgotten events from Dahlia’s own life, forcing her to reinterpret her past. In a raging, tormented narrative voice, she remembers how her relationship with her mother collapsed after her aggressive, possessive father accused her of having an extramarital affair. Dalia, however, is not ready to face the whole truth about her mother and herself. For this reason, when the mystery of her mother’s final days is about to be resolved, Dalia decides to return to Bologna, leaving Naples—its streets and its unbearable knots of lies and truths—behind.
Ferrante’s novel has been widely acclaimed for the way it combines a psychologically subtle and effective use of simple language, an insightful prose, and lucid analysis of a mother–daughter relationship in contemporary Italian society. LB
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The Late-Night News
Petros Markaris
Lifespan | b. 1937 (Turkey)
First Published | 1995
First Published by | Gabrielides (Athens)
Original Title | Nychterino deltio
The Late-Night News is the first book in Petros Markaris’s series of mysteries featuring Athenian police inspector Costas Haritos. An apparently simple crime of passion in the Albanian immigrant community of Athens becomes much more high-profile when celebrated TV journalist Yanna Karayoryi takes an interest. When Yanna is murdered moments before making an on-air revelation about the case, Inspector Haritos embarks on a complex investigation that leads ultimately to the discovery of an international network of child traffickers.
Although Haritos, as narrator, is not a likeable character, the reader begins to sympathize with his aggressive and pessimistic outlook. He has reached age fifty and dramatic changes in his world have left him uneasy and cynical. He knew where he was when Greece was still a military dictatorship, and before his daughter left home. Now Haritos is passed over for promotion because he does not know how to operate in the complex world of democratic Greece. At home, he has an uncomfortable relationship with his wife; now that they are alone, they no longer know how to relate to each other.
In this winding and sometimes over-complex narrative, Markaris gives the reader a broad look at contemporary Greek society, ranging in scope from the sexual politics of Haritos’s relationship with his wife and daughter to Athenian traffic congestion, and from the corruption of Greek politics old and new to the legacy of the fall of communism. ClW
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The End of the Story
Lydia Davis
Lifespan | b. 1947 (U.S.)
First Published | 1995
First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York)
First UK Edition | 1996, by High Risk (London)
True to its title, The End of the Story begins at the end of the love affair at its heart. Flashing forward a year, the nameless narrator, a writer and university teacher, goes on to tell us of her failed attempts to find “him” (also nameless) in a strange city. Tracing him to his last known address, she finds unfamiliar names above the doorbell. With more than a nod to Proust (of whom Davis is a distinguished translator), the narrator spends the novel ringing the doorbell of the past in the vain hope of finding truth on the other side. The hope is all the more urgent in that she is writing a novel about the affair, the very novel we are reading (or is it?).
Like many contemporary novels, The End of the Story is in large part about itself, about the painful process of its own making. Yet it is not a novel seeking to subvert conventional modes of storytelling from some self-conscious and superior ironic perspective. Rather, it is about the strange paradox under which all writers (and indeed non-writers) labor, namely that the very attempt to clarify our experience can end up obscuring it. Thus, the narrator starts to doubt the apparent solidity of her memory—did she really fall in love by candlelight? Indeed, was that really what she was feeling?
The crystalline simplicity and precision of Davis’s prose only intensifies this sense of the profound elusiveness of life and love. We can tell our stories, her novel painstakingly shows us, only after they happen—that is, after they are lost to us. JC
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Love’s Work
Gillian Rose
Lifespan | b. 1947 (England), d. 1995
First Published | 1995
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Full Title | Love’s Work: A Reckoning With Life
Sigmund Freud described love and work as the foundations of human happiness. The philosopher and social theorist Gillian Rose’s autobiographical text, Love’s Work, intertwines them in order to explore the love of work (the work of thought, of philosophy) and the work, and workings, of love. The book opens with Rose’s first meeting with Edna, a New Yorker in her nineties, who has lived with cancer since the age of sixteen. Love’s Work thus begins with an exploration of the meanings of survival and the necessity of living “skeptically.” Contradiction, difference, and the ways in which we negotiate them are at the heart of the book and are strongly figured for Rose in the relationship between Protestantism and Judaism (her family’s religion), the appeal to “inwardness” or to a law that compels obedience but not belief. This is a story about “education,” but one in which the meanings of this term are continually tested.
It is not until several chapters into the book that Rose reveals to the reader that, as she writes, she has advanced cancer. She has already described the destruction wrought by an unhappy love affair, which has to be embraced in order that “I may have a chance of surviving . . . I hear the roaring and the roasting and know that it is I.” The reader, confronted with his or her own preconceptions of the disease, is challenged to think in new ways about living and dying, the comedy of life and the tragedy of philosophy, and their ultimate inseparability. LM
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A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Lifespan | b. 1952 (India)
First Published | 1995
First Published by | McClelland & Stewart (Toronto)
Commonwealth Writers Prize | 1996
Rohinton Mistry has lived in Canada since 1975, but his novels and short stories have been set in India, the countr
y of his birth.
“Dina pretended to be upset, saying he had never praised her meals with superlatives. He tried to wriggle out of it.”
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is set in India in the mid-1970s. Two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash, leave their small village under tragic circumstances to work in the city. Their employer is the widowed Dina Dalal, who is also supplying accommodation for her friends’ student son, Manek. These four lives become intertwined and tremulous friendships are made amid the chaos of Indian life under the State of Emergency, declared in 1975.
The epic scale of the novel confronts the ruthless brutality of class and caste as the protagonists are left vulnerable to the vagaries of poverty and discrimination. This is a historical novel, which meticulously recreates Indira Gandhi’s India, and the author uses this context to present a paradoxically humane vision of inhumanity.
Rigorously unsentimental and full of black humor, A Fine Balance takes the reader through a vicious and sometimes carnivalesque world of poverty and utter powerlessness. The novel’s harrowing denouement is as shocking and as distressing as anything in twentieth-century literature. Perhaps Mistry’s greatest achievement is his clear-sighted depiction of relentless, impersonal brutality. What we are given is a heartbreaking story of lives torn apart not by individual weakness but by institutional inequity and the horrors of corrupt power. This is a beautiful and devastating novel whose genius lies in its refusal to allow the reader to escape to either pathos or cynicism. PMcM