1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 102
From the start, this is a novel with a difference. Written by an already successful poet, the prose is richly textured, resonant, and rhythmic. Michaels employs the vocabularies of archaeology, geology, and literature to build a unique sense of personal and political history, as we witness the developing relationship between Jakob and his savior. We follow the journey of Athos and Jakob to a Canada imbued with a new sense of its immigrant population. Still haunted by the death of his family, Jakob continues the literary career encouraged in him by Athos. The key to Jakob’s redemption comes through his poetry and the late awakening of the sensual possibilities of his own body. In the last section of the novel, the repercussions of the emotional traumas that Jakob has absorbed throughout his life are shown by their redemptive effects on a reader of his poetry. Michaels presents the interlocking of lives across cultures through the passing on of a written knowledge that has the power to heal. She does not balk from the complex notion that beauty applies equally to devastation and to love. AC
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Hallucinating Foucault
Patricia Duncker
Lifespan | b. 1951 (Jamaica)
First Published | 1996
First Published by | Serpent’s Tail (London)
First U.S. Edition | Ecco Press (Hopewell)
Hallucinating Foucault is a dark and tragic novel. It is also beautiful, romantic, and funny. Like its characters, it is a deeply idiosyncratic work that is both disturbing and seductive. While negotiating themes of death, sexuality, crime, and madness, this novel is in fact primarily about love—for both books and people. It is about the surreal disjunction between an author and his work, and the madness of the reader, who loves the book and its creator at the same time and yet distinctly.
In a first-person retrospective narrative, the novel tells the story of a young student writing his doctoral thesis on the works of a (fictional) gay French novelist, Paul Michel. Early in his research, the narrator is drawn into a love affair with a captivating Germanist, who compels the narrator to travel to France to seek out Michel; the novelist has been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions since his violent bout of madness following Michel Foucault’s death in June 1984. In making the journey, the narrator embarks on a love affair that will change his life, if not his work, forever.
A masterfully told story, Hallucinating Foucault leaves its own readers with that profound sense of loss felt when the final lines of a book signal ejection from a world that has both captivated and contained them. Reading Duncker’s first novel, a tale of the kind of love that can exist between reader and author, cannot be anything but the beginning of a personal love affair with her work. SD
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A Light Comedy
Eduardo Mendoza
Lifespan | b. 1943 (Spain)
First Published | 1996
First Published by | Seix-Barral (Barcelona)
Original Title | Una comedia ligera
Ten years after his The City of the Prodigies, Eduardo Mendoza returns to the novel of large scale and multiple personalities with his typical mature, light, invisible irony. Mendoza acts, thinks, and suffers with his characters as if he were living in something like a dramatic muddle, perhaps a light comedy that ends up being torn apart by a murderer. The thriller-like detective story is secondary because it is mainly introduced to shake up certainties and to convey the atmosphere of the end of an era. The novel crosses the city of Barcelona from place to place and the combination of both the coarse surroundings and the sophistication of the bourgeois at leisure create a rich parody of mid twentieth-century Barcelona society, with its police, Falangist leaders, black marketeers, and dimwits of good family.
The delicate comedies of protagonist Carlos Prullàs, with their word-games and theatrical contrivances, seem like something for another audience and another period, while the new times demand, as his good friend Gaudet declares, a different theater “of social realism and the avantgarde.” Without knowing it, the world of the theater embodies the imminent shake-up that will define the future. It also reveals the end of an era and the impossibility of Prullàs being able to adapt: “Everything was ready to change radically in society.” An irreversible change in his life waits to cast a shadow of melancholy over the hedonism and peace of his soft, leisurely summer days. JGG
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Fall on Your Knees
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Lifespan | b. 1958 (Canada)
First Published | 1996
First Published by | Knopf (Toronto)
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize | 1997
Earl Birney, Canada’s pioneer of modernist poetry, once famously declared that Canada suffered from a distinct lack of ghosts: “it’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted.” In Fall on Your Knees, her first novel, Canadian playwright and actress Ann-Marie MacDonald does much to redress this balance.
Set on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, this is the story of the Piper family, which begins when James Piper, a poor piano tuner of Gaelic origin, elopes with Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of a wealthy Lebanese family. The family’s roots are as varied as the forty ethnicities that populate the island, and their isolation as remote as Canada’s.
The four Piper daughters delineate the story’s central axis of family love. Kathleen, the couple’s first-born child, is poised to take her place on the world stage as an opera diva, and provides us with a stark juxtaposition of family love and murder. Her sister Mercedes is the story’s saint figure, born to sacrifice herself for others. Frances, the family’s self-proclaimed bad girl, is motivated by a fear that she will not be loved by her family, and Lilly, whose story begins before her birth, is the product of the family’s dark secret, populating the novel with its ghosts.
This is a disturbing tale of family love and of sin, guilt, and redemption. But it also confronts Canada’s inherited blank cultural space through a distinctly Freudian inquisition into the relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar, through the constant renegotiation of geography and identity. JSD
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Silk
Alessandro Baricco
Lifespan | b. 1958 (Italy)
First Published | 1996
First Published by | Rizzoli (Milan)
Original Title | Seta
One day, Hervé Joncour leaves his small town of Lavilledieu and starts regular journeys to Japan in search of silkworm eggs to bring back to Europe, where the silk industry is beginning to thrive. It is 1861, the year, as the author informs us, when Flaubert was writing Salammbô, electricity was still only a future project, and on the other side of the ocean, Lincoln was engaged in a Civil War.
Hervé’s journeys to Japan are ritualized in their repetitiveness and in the appointments with the unknown characters who provide the Frenchman with eggs in return for gold chips. No dialogue accompanies the repeated gestures, in the same places on the same days of the year. Hervé grows increasingly used to the long silences of the people he meets, witnesses the wars that European countries wage against Japan in the attempt to open the borders of the silk trade, and describes the ensuing consequences of the war with simplicity. But, as impalpable as silk, love embraces Hervé, who exchanges furtive glances with a mysterious Asian woman with Western features, who gives him a secret love message that he will take back to Lavilledieu with his precious load, always on the same day of the same month. Love becomes dream and an urge to explore when Hervé’s journeys to Japan end. The memory of his ethereal love and the desire to interpret the message, the only precious token left of the Orient, are a caress for Hervé even when his wife dies. RPi
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The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Lifespan | b. 1961 (India)
First Published | 1997
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br /> First Published by | India Ink (New Delhi)
Booker Prize | 1997
The pivotal point of Roy’s novel is a tragic drowning, obliquely suggested in the beautiful but oddly disquieting cover image.
Set in Kerala in the 1960s, this Booker Prize winner follows Ammu’s family through both ordinary and tragic events, focusing most memorably on her “twoegg twins,” Estha and Rahel. The accidental death by drowning of a visiting English cousin is to have a pivotal effect on their young lives. The novel is told in nonlinear time through a jigsaw of vivid encounters and descriptions, recounted in exquisite prose. The reader pieces together a childhood world, interrupted by adult tragedies and the effect these have on Velutha, the twins’ boatman friend who belongs to India’s “untouchable” caste. Arundhati Roy’s style has drawn comparison to Salman Rushdie, yet her prose is distinctly rhythmic and poetic, and the overall effect is unique in its sensuality. A less likely, but perhaps more apt reference point might be E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, in the way the strange and lawless beauty of the natural world is evoked as both the counterpoint and the cause of human order and its sometimes brutal interpretations. Roy’s strength lies in the quirky clarity with which she renders the mind of the child and the emotional force she creates in the various relationships.
The novel’s political concerns revolve around the notion of who decides “who should be loved and how much,” with Roy’s imaginative transgressions designed not so much to shock as to move the reader. A political figure who championed the cause of the oppressed and spent time in jail in 2002 for opposing the authority of the Indian court, Roy’s politics are concerned with the small powers of the human, powers that are shocking in their ability to redeem and destroy. She sacrifices neither structure, complexity, nor beautiful prose to convey her beliefs. This book is a challenge to others who have attempted to tell us what love means. AC
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Margot and the Angels
Kristien Hemmerechts
Lifespan | b. 1955 (Belgium)
First Published | 1997
First Published by | Atlas (Amsterdam)
Original Title | Margot en de engelen
The cover of an edition of Hemmerechts’s novel stresses the emotional darkness of her story of a young runaway.
In an era when many male authors have fallen prey to the seductions of magical realism and ludic Postmodernism, women writers of outstanding talent have continued to remind us of the power of the novel to explore human relationships and emotional life in the context of everyday contemporary reality. Kristien Hemmerechts’s work shows just how far such a superficially traditional approach can lead us into innovative territory.
The plot of Margot and the Angels is simple enough. Margot is a runaway teenager. She leaves her Dutch home without explanation, asking her parents not to contact her, and ends up in the English port city of Hull. Hemmerechts charts the differing impacts of this decision upon her father and mother, who eventually resolve to search for her. Margot eventually becomes involved with a religious sect, the angels of the title, as the plot evolves to its inexorably grim conclusion.
Working with great economy of style, Hemmerechts strips bare her characters’ romanticism and self-delusions. Margot’s father, for example, is a man who has always preached the need for people to lead their own lives, but is thrown into emotional torment by his daughter’s declaration of independence. The physical desires of the female characters are delineated with startling matterof-factness, as is the aspiration to escape from the body’s clamoring needs.
Hemmerechts’s prose exhibits the traditional virtues of balance, control, and clarity, and the framework of her plot is satisfactory carpentry. Yet in her vision of life there is an utter lack of complacency and her insights are full of the unexpected, insistently reshaping our image of how “ordinary” people think, feel, and act. RegG
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The Life of Insects
Victor Pelevin
Lifespan | b. 1962 (Russia)
First Published | 1997, by Vagrius (Moscow)
First Serialized | 1994, in Znamya (Moscow)
Original Title | Zhizn’ Nasekomyk
This is a bizarre collection of interconnected vignettes about life in a shabby Crimean Black Sea resort, where people change from insects into humans and back in seemingly random mutations. In fact, the oscillation between human and insect does not form part of the narrative, but rather a change of optical apparatus on the part of the narrator. It sometimes takes the reader a while to understand which lens he is looking through at any given moment, and this produces an effect that is both unsettling and amusing.
In using and subverting the fable genre, Pelevin gives us a picture of contemporary Russian society. This ranges from straightforward satire, as in the joint venture negotiations between Russian and American mosquitoes out to make money, to the invention of an entire mythology and world view for dung beetles, to a surprisingly poignant portrayal of an ordinary swarming female ant’s inner life. There are plenty of intriguing allusions, double entendres, and incongruous, yet carefully constructed, allegories and metaphors. But there is more to the novel than pure intellectual playfulness, and a concrete and wistful account of the human condition emerges. Somehow, and unaccountably, one puts down this novel convinced of having learned something true about life in post-Soviet Russia. The absurd acquires verisimilitude perhaps because it takes absurdity to break through the opacity of language in describing the world. DG
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Money to Burn
Ricardo Piglia
Lifespan | b. 1940 (Argentina)
First Published | 1997
First Published by | Planeta (Buenos Aires)
Original Title | Plata quemada
Following its epigraph—the worrying Brechtian question, which Ricardo Piglia enjoys repeating (“What is the robbing of a bank compared to the opening of a bank?”)—Money to Burn stains the reader with the color of the dirtiest money. The novel is an exercise in documentary fiction or reportage inspired by an actual event that shook Argentine society at the time: the Buenos Aires bank robbery of September 1965, for which delinquent elements plotted with politicians and the police. The story of violence, corruption, and treachery ends in Montevideo, in a fiery and bloody siege that destroys the criminals, the money, and every shade of truth.
Piglia began to write the novel immediately after the events took place but he waited thirty years before going to press, a gap during which the boundary between fact and fiction faded away. The reconstruction of the circumstances of the robbery, the relationship between the men (the woman was only incidental), and the social background that sustains the action are established in a sustained exercise of style. The events are almost always seen from the perspective of a character who recurs in Piglia’s novels: Emilio Renzi, a young journalist on this occasion who, relying in the minutest detail on the documents and statements of eyewitnesses, confirms this epic poem that ends in ashes. Far from being a cold account of events, the story conjures up a bleak period that was moving ever deeper into violence and corruption. DMG
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Jack Maggs
Peter Carey
Lifespan | b. 1943 (Australia)
First Published | 1997
First Published by | University of Queenstown Press
Miles Franklin Literary Award | 1998
“He dusted down his face carefully with his kerchief, and then set off in the darkness, peering to see what street number he could see—none.”
Jack Maggs is a complex historical novel that addresses issues of literary, financial, and emotional indebtedness. In the London of 1837—importantly, the year of both Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne and Charles Dickens’s move from journalism to fiction writing—the transported crimin
al Jack Maggs has come back from Australia, risking detection and execution. He adopts the disguise of a servant in order to track down the young man whose fortune he has made from afar. Meanwhile, he catches the eye of Tobias Oates, a young, journalist on the make—reminiscent of Dickens—who discovers Maggs’s secrets and eventually cannibalizes them for his own fictional creations.
Jack Maggs is in fact a creative reworking of the central motifs of Dickens’ Great Expectations. Not a prequel or pastiche, Carey’s novel instead is more like a musical variation on Dickens’ material, recasting it in a parallel nineteenth-century universe. But it is no simple act of Victorian literary “karaoke”; Carey sounds out the distance between reworking and original text in order to pose questions about the sources of art, and the determinism of literary plotting—if things happened one way in the original, we might ask, are they doomed to turn out the same way again? As Oates’ writing draws parasitically on Maggs’ life, so Carey draws parasitically on Dickens, challenging his readers to feel, even as they take pleasure in his fiction, what the cost of that pleasure might be. BT
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Underworld
Don DeLillo