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1900s
The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
Lifespan | b. 1944 (Germany)
First Published | 1995
First Published by | Diogenes (Zürich)
Original Title | Der Vorleser
“The woman seized my arm and pulled me through the dark entryway . . .”
Falling ill on his way home from school, fifteenyear-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna Schmitz, a streetcar conductor twice his age. When he returns later to thank her, a passionate and volatile relationship ensues. Torn between his youth and his desire for Hanna, Michael is nonetheless devastated when she mysteriously disappears. While the affair is short-lived, the experience fundamentally affects the way in which he shapes his own identity. Subsequently, Michael’s sense of self is shattered when he encounters Hanna, years later, on trial for Nazi war crimes. As he watches her refuse to defend herself, he slowly realizes that she is hiding a secret she considers more humiliating than murder. Simultaneously a student of law and her former lover, Michael must attempt to reconcile the horrendous crimes of which she is accused with the memory of the woman he loved. After Hanna dies years after she and Michael renew their acquaintance, he visits an elderly Jewish woman who had been one of the prisoners guarded by Hanna during the war. Hanna has asked Michael to give this woman all of her savings but the woman refuses the money, unwilling to “sell” Hanna her forgiveness.
Bernhard Schlink, himself a professor of law and a practicing judge, grapples with the complex ethical questions that inevitably emerge after the horror of genocide. But instead of concentrating on its victims, Schlink shifts his focus to the inheritors of the Nazi legacy. The Reader asks its readers to consider to what extent we can hold the postwar generation responsible for the sins of its fathers and mothers, and if such atrocities can even be redressed. Does the demonization of the Nazis serve to chastise their behavior, or is it a selfish measure to create a false division between them and us? BJ
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1900s
Santa Evita
Tomás Eloy Martínez
Lifespan | b. 1934 (Argentina)
First Published | 1995
First Published by | Planeta (Buenos Aires)
First U.S. Edition | 1996, by Alfred A. Knopf (New York)
“She did not seem to be the same person who had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1935 . . .”
Santa Evita is the story of the investigation into what happened to the body of the legendary Argentine First Lady Eva Perón (1919–52) in the years following her death. Embalmed immediately after passing away (at the age of thirty-three from what was later disclosed to be cervical cancer), the relic leaves Argentina when the widowed leader is exiled in 1955, and becomes a strange and embarrassing phenomenon for the new regime. Kidnapped, multiplied by a number of accurate wax replicas, sent to Europe, later recovered and returned to the country, its posthumous history is confused and elusive. The peregrinations of the corpse as it passes into legend are collected together by a narrator who is explicitly identified with the author, the body’s final guardian, a prisoner of the same curse that emanates from this deceased woman.
Combining documentary fiction, adventure story, and a heterodox hagiography, the novel is also the work of a writer who wants to exorcise an obsession. Like an embalmer, Tomás Eloy Martínez wants to stop the deterioration of a body and its story. Critical of Argentina as a necrophiliac nation, the story expresses its allegorical range from the very first pages, sometimes by parodic attacks that reveal the fragile boundary that exists between fiction and reality. The writing does not attempt to conceal the ways in which the transcription of interviews, or the quotations and commentary of fictional and historical sources, is inevitably affected by manipulation. Experimenting with various means of textual representation (such as scripts, conversations, and letters), and being open about the task of rewriting and creating an impossible ending, the story develops the effigy of a future Eva, uncorrupted and for ever renewed. DMG
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1900s
Morvern Callar
Alan Warner
Lifespan | b. 1964 (Scotland)
First Published | 1995
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
First U.S. Edition | 1997, by Anchor (New York)
It is just before Christmas, and there is something lying on the kitchen floor that Morvern Callar is putting off dealing with—the dead body of her boyfriend. Her first reaction is, understandably, to consider ringing for an ambulance, but she smokes a Silk Cut (the first of many), turns away from “His” body, and leaves for a night of untroubled alcoholic, narcotic, and sexual excess. This, it turns out, is to be expected from our heroine. As the reader is drawn into the fallout from this suicide and Morvern’s complex reactions to it, we encounter a brilliantly eccentric succession of West Highland misfits debauched in their apathy, and “the Port,” a dreamlike town on the coast where they are all marooned.
Yet this is definitively Morvern’s novel, and—just as in Lynne Ramsay’s recent film adaptation—it is her dispassionate voice and her eclectic music tastes that dominate. Warner does not pretend to offer insights into Morvern’s soul, but she is governed by her own sense of morality: it is this, in fact, that raises her above the druggies, townies, and no-hopers she encounters on her travels. She simply and genuinely adapts to situations as they arise; she takes advantage of circumstances; ultimately she gains a different perspective upon her life and those around her as a result. Taking in the unrepentant hedonism of rave culture of the early nineties, Club Med holidays, and British tourism, this was a defining text for a generation. This powerful and original voice remains unsurprisingly vital. MD
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1900s
The Unconsoled
Kazuo Ishiguro
Lifespan | b. 1954 (Japan)
First Published | 1995
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
Original Language | English
Few readers will know a book as mesmerizing as Kazuo Ishiguro’s unique The Unconsoled. The text is oriented around (if it can be said to be oriented at all) the uncanny sense that we as readers, and Ryder the narrator, have somehow been here before. The novel opens with Ryder entering a hotel in an unnamed Central European city for a performance at the Civic Concert Hall, probably the most important concert of his life. Ryder is confident in the knowledge that he is the greatest pianist of his generation, but he suffers from severe and disorienting bouts of amnesia.
The music-obsessed city in which he finds himself is as much a city of the mind as a physical space: as he wanders the streets, he encounters people he knows intimately, and people similarly seem to know him. His past continually intrudes on the present, and with deft surrealist touches Ishiguro allows the fictional world of the novel to overflow its bounds. Space becomes compressed and expanded, time loses meaning, and Ryder finds himself entangled in a situation where he only knows that he has the solution, although what that answer is, he has no idea. The narrative plays tricks with Ryder and with the reader, combining his limited sense of his own past and events around him with a prescient third-person narrative that allows him apparently impossible insights. A virtuoso performance, this thrillingly original text demands engagement from its readers and is a richly rewarding experience. MD
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1900s
Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood
Lifespan | b. 1939 (Canada)
First Published | 1996
First Published by | McClelland & Stewart (Toronto)
Giller Prize | 1996
The design for the jacket of Atwood’s novel aptly reflects the themes of imprisonment and the mystery of human motivation.
“It’s 1851. I’ll be twenty-four years old next birthday. I’ve been shut up in here since the age of sixteen.
I am a model prisoner, and give no trouble.”
Alias Grace is a lyrical work of historical fiction based around the story of servant girl, Grace Marks, who is one of Canada’s most notorious female criminals. Grace tells her story in a vivid, bitter voice, from her childhood in Ireland through life as part of the underclass in colonial Victorian Canada to her conviction for murdering her employer in 1843 at the age of sixteen. The story is told to Dr. Simon Jordan, a mental illness specialist who is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists seeking a pardon for the young woman. As he brings Grace closer and closer to the day she cannot remember, he comes to learn about the strained relationship between her employer, James Kinnear, and his housekeeper and mistress, Nancy, and of the alarming behavior of Grace’s fellow servant, James McDermott.
As always, Margaret Atwood includes elements of social and feminist comment in her work, exploring the relationships between sex and violence in a historically repressed society. The author also reflects, in people’s reactions to Grace, the period’s ambiguity about the nature of woman. Some factions of society felt that women were weak and therefore that Grace must have been a victim who was forced into a desperate act. Others believed that women were intrinsically more evil than men. This dichotomy between the demonic and pathetic woman is subtly reflected in the character of Grace who, having spent time in a lunatic asylum, claims to have no memory at all of the murders. EF
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1900s
The Clay Machine-Gun
Victor Pelevin
Lifespan | b. 1962 (Russia)
First Published | 1996
First Published by | Vagrius (Moscow)
Original Title | Chapaev i Pustota
The main character of this novel is Petr, a comrade of Chapayev, a Soviet Civil War hero made famous by a 1930s propaganda movie that spawned a whole series of irreverent “Chapayev jokes.” Hard drinking and hard living in the turbulent early 1920s, Petr has recurrent alcohol and cocaine-induced dreams, which, in a reversal of ordinary flashback techniques, take him and the plot to a post-Soviet insane asylum, where the stories of three inmates are revealed during their therapy. Overarching all this is a Buddhist vision centered on Chapayev-turnedspiritual teacher, which explores the meaning and dissolution of reality.
The Clay Machine-Gun weaves together its various strands and characters in a way that is nothing less than random. Its language and motives, taken variously from post-Soviet daily life, outdated ideology, history, literature, Zen philosophy, and pop culture, may seem incongruent. Yet they all form part of a plot constructed with the absurd stringency of a children’s play, where there can be no loose ends left untied, and every element must be connected into a tapestry of the strange, the exaggerated, and the delusional, creating the impression of some larger meaning. The charm of Victor Pelevin’s book is the playful way in which it denies yet enjoys meaning, and the sheer joy of invention it exudes. It is a bit like one very long, very complex, and, above all, very good joke; and, like all good jokes, it has a great deal to say about the “real world.” DG
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1900s
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Lifespan | b. 1962 (U.S.), d. 2008
First Published | 1996
First Published by | Little, Brown & Co. (Boston)
First UK Edition | 1997, by Abacus (London)
Where does one begin with a book of over a thousand pages, of which the last ninety-six feature three hundred and eighty-eight detailed (but also wildly funny) footnotes? A plot synopsis is sadly doomed to inadequacy. Set in the near future, Infinite Jest is the title of a film made by the maverick avantgarde filmmaker James O. Incandenza, which is apparently so funny that the viewer ultimately expires in a state of uncontrollable hilarity. When both film and filmmaker disappear, all manner of sinister individuals, government agencies, and foreign governments attempt to track them down, and the ensuing chaos incorporates the recovering addicts of Ennet House (a Boston dependency clinic), and the Enfield Tennis Academy. These last two locations provide two opposing points of focus for the text. One allows Wallace to explore the centrality of addiction to consumer culture and the place of narcotics within that culture. The other is an extraordinary vision of a hothouse sporting school, which produces children for an industry that will disregard most of them.
Infinite Jest satirically attacks the vacuous predilections of contemporary American culture mercilessly, while shamelessly reveling in them. Wildly inventive, linguistically original, extravagantly detailed, and playful, this text is the one you would take with you to a desert island. MD
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1900s
Forever a Stranger
Hella Haasse
Lifespan | b. 1918 (Java)
First Published | 1996, by Oxford University Press
Originally Published by | Collectieve Propaganda voor het Nederlandse Boek, in 1948 (as Oeroeg)
Hella Haasse is one of the Netherlands’s most esteemed, venerable, and prolific authors, although English-language translations of her works have been mysteriously slow to arrive. Forever a Stranger was her first prose work, written at the age of thirty, and it made her name. Written as the deeply controversial Dutch military operations against the Indonesian struggle for independence were beginning, this spare and incisive ninety-page story of friendship between a Dutch boy and an Indonesian boy is at once a moving and engaging narrative, a telling historical fable, and a treatise on “irrevocable, incomprehensible differentness.”
The original Dutch title was Oeroeg, after the Indonesian boy with whom the (unnamed) Dutch narrator is friends. The story covers their inseparable childhood, through to an adolescence of increasing alienation and displacement governed by the immovable judgement: “Some day you’ll have to live without Oeroeg. . . . You’re European!” The implications of this difference are followed through to the final confrontation: “Am I forever to be a stranger in the land of my birth?”
Forever a Stranger and Other Stories is tellingly aware of the ways that language, personal identities, and national destinies intersect, and are at odds. Although the finer points of these qualities were lost in Oeroeg’s translation to the big screen (Going Home, 1993), the continuing power Haasse’s tale has over Dutch culture is evident. MS
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1900s
The Ghost Road
Pat Barker
Lifespan | b. 1943 (England)
First Published | 1996
First Published by | Viking (London)
Booker Prize | 1995
Ghost Road is the final part of Barker’s World War trilogy that began with Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993), and that started to change the face of war writing by depicting alternative perspectives on the war, including its investigation of trauma patients and the roles of working-class women, homosexuals, protest organizations, and government officials on the home front.
Her introduction of fictional characters among established figures, such as the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and military psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, has led to criticism and historical confusion. But Barker’s trilogy attempts to portray the complexities that are inherent in our attitude to all combat. In The Ghost Road, she sends her protagonists back to the arena of the Western Front and enables the familiar device of a wartime diary to discuss the responses to direct combat. At the same time, she chronicles the doubts and declining health of W. H. R. Rivers, whose job is to rehabilitate men in order to return them to the field of war. The text is a clear example of later social values being imposed on wartime circumstances, especially in the liberal responses to trauma and homosexuality, but Barker recognizes this and draws a complex, if modern, picture of men at war. This may not be historically accurate, but Barker’s trilogy firmly expands the staid vision of mud, blood, and poppies into a version that suggests both complexity and
the potential for later war literature to develop further. EMcCS
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1900s
Fugitive Pieces
Anne Michaels
Lifespan | b. 1958 (Canada)
First Published | 1996
First Published by | McClelland & Stewart (Toronto)
Orange Prize | 1997
The cover of the Bloomsbury edition of Fugitive Pieces underlines the imaginative quality of the book, a poet’s first novel.
“Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul.”
Winner of several prestigious awards and critically acclaimed, Fugitive Pieces recounts the life of a Jewish boy, Jakob, rescued from a Polish city during the Holocaust and taken by Athos, a Greek scholar, to the island of Zakynthos. In a hilltop refuge, surrounded by botany, geological artifacts, and classic poetry, Jakob soaks up knowledge while he grieves for his murdered parents and lost sister.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 101