1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 103
Lifespan | b. 1936 (U.S.)
First Published | 1997
First Published by | Scribner (New York)
First UK Edition | 1998, by Picador (London)
Underworld is a vast, encyclopedic novel, which reaches back from the brink of the twenty-first century to the early 1950s, and to the beginnings of the Cold War. Told as the private story of the central character, Nick Shay, as well as the public story of the Cold War, the narrative offers to bring the hidden connections that have driven the second half of the twentieth century into the light. In a liquid, versatile, and immaculate prose the narrative burrows back through the decades, both toward the shrouded space of Nick’s personal secret, and toward the unconscious, abject places from which postwar history itself emerges. One of the most remarkable things about this revelatory novel is that its search for a universal voice with which to reveal the secrets of history leads it, repeatedly, to those historical, political, and personal moments that cannot be spoken of, to those secrets that cannot be given away.
Written at the end of a century, and at the end of a millennium, Underworld offers a way of understanding our collective past. It excavates the arcane workings of our culture, articulating connections between the overt and the hidden mechanisms of state power. At the same time, its awed intuition of the unseen forces that continue to drive history toward redemption or annihilation looks forward to a new millennium. PB
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Enduring Love
Ian McEwan
Lifespan | b. 1948 (England)
First Published | 1997
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
Movie Adaptation | 2004
Scientific journalist Joe Rose has planned an idyllic picnic with his wife Clarissa in the English countryside. Above them a hot-air balloon gets into trouble, and they watch on in horror as the pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope and the other passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump to safety. With this characteristic catalytic event, McEwan’s story begins. As Joe and four other men rush to help secure the basket, a gust of wind whips four of them skyward. Joe and two of the other men let go and drop safely to the ground while the fourth hangs on, falling to his death in a nearby field.
All of the men’s lives are affected by the incident, and we follow Joe as he tries to make sense of the memory and his guilt over the stranger’s death (the boy lands safely). His feelings are complicated when Jed Parry, a fellow would-be rescuer, develops an obsession with Joe and begins to stalk him with a series of letters, phone calls, and confrontations. Joe’s scientific mind is driven to distraction by the conditionals of the balloon experience, the whatifs and the if-onlys, bringing frustration and chaos to his previously ordered life and threatening his relationship with Clarissa as well as his own self-confidence. The central theme is obsession, not only Jed’s obsession with Joe but also Joe’s obsession with rooting out meaning from chaos. Trust and doubt are also central; as Clarissa’s belief in Joe’s version of events begins to falter, the reader is never quite sure of what exactly happened. EF
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Crossfire
Miyabe Miyuki
Lifespan | b. 1960 (Japan)
First Published | 1998
First Published by | Kobunsha (Tokyo)
Original Title | Kurosufaia
Miyabe Miyuki’s crisp, hard-hitting urban crime novel weaves the supernatural into the habitual pattern of murder and detection.
“Reaching out to touch it, the water was cold. And black, like night.”
The third translated novel from Miyabe Miyuki, one of Japan’s most popular writers, exposes complex interior worlds and a dark and unforgiving metropolis—a Tokyo that lies both before and beyond cyberpunk. Crossfire uses the structure and vocabulary of the detective story to lay open a place where values are uncertain, where rationality is useless, and where people live side by side yet remain blind to one another.
The heartrending story of Junko Aoki, a semi-voluntary vigilante born with the supernatural power to create and control fire, is told in counterpoint with that of the middle-aged arson detective—Chikako Ishizu—who is drawn deeper and deeper into her case. While these two women and their damaged male accomplices crisscross the urban desert of contemporary Tokyo, Miyabe gently explores the nature of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, of punishment and revenge. She exposes the emptiness and isolation at the heart of the cosmopolitan city at the end of the twentieth century, and adumbrates a curve of Japanese culture leading back into the murky aftermath of the Second World War and forward into the dark, casual criminality of a place where the once staunch mores have long been in decline.
In this very accessible book the pyrotechnics stay firmly in the narrative. There are no linguistic or stylistic fireworks, just controlled plotting and impactful storytelling. Yet Aoki’s firestarting is wonderfully, deeply imagined and there is a poignancy to her loneliness and isolation—even to the routine daily grind of her hunter, the mumsy Ishizu. This is a beautifully fashioned book of simplicity and depth that drags you irresistingly onward toward its bitter denouement. TSu
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The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
Lifespan | b. 1955 (U.S.)
First Published | 1998
First Published by | HarperFlamingo (New York)
Pulitzer Prize Finalist | 1998
The anti-colonial subject matter of The Poisonwood Bible reflects the author’s overriding concern with promoting social change.
“Ants. We were walking on, surrounded, enclosed, enveloped, being eaten by ants.”
Set in the Congo, this novel is narrated by Orelanna Price and her four daughters and tells the story of her husband, the overzealous Baptist preacher Nathan Price. As a child, Barbara Kingsolver lived in the Congo with her healthworker parents, but it was only in adulthood that she learned of the political situation that had seized the Congo while she lived there, when the United States secretly sabotaged the country’s independence. She wrote this novel to address and publicize these issues.
The missionary’s four children—Rachel, Ruth May, Leah, and the crippled mute Adah—react differently to their father’s work, but when poisonous snakes appear in their house, planted by the village’s religious leader, they try to convince their father to let them leave. He refuses, and Ruth May is killed, prompting her mother to leave the village with the other three daughters. Rachel goes on to marry three men and inherit a hotel in the Congo; Leah marries the village schoolteacher and dedicates herself to working for African independence; and Adah takes on science as her religion and becomes an epidemiologist. The mother lives the rest of her life wracked with guilt.
The novel represents a powerful indictment of Western colonialism and post-colonialism, of cultural arrogance and simple greed. Each of the narrators must struggle to deal with their guilt over Ruth May’s death, but also with the guilt of their implication in the ruin of a country and, on a wider scale, Western guilt over its colonial past. The novel’s title comes from the poisonwood, an African tree that Nathan Price is warned not to touch; he ignores the warning and suffers painful swelling. There can be no simpler allegory for Kingsolver’s message about Price’s missionary zeal. EF
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Veronika Decides to Die
Paulo Coelho
Lifespan | b. 1947 (Brazil)
First Published | 1998
First Published by | Objetiva (Rio de Janeiro)
Original Title | Veronika decide morrer
With a steady stream of boyfriends, a secure job in a library, a room to call her home, caring friends and family, Veronika is a normal young woman leading a normal life. Yet she decides to kill herself, leaving behind a note that deplores global ignorance as to the whereabouts of Slovenia. As she regains conscious
ness in Ljubljana’s psychiatric hospital, Villete, she learns that she has one week to live as her heart is now apparently damaged. The novel follows Veronika’s shift from seeking death to her awareness that there are facets of her world that make life worthwhile. In Villete, she blossoms. Since the insane have no behavioral norms, she embraces the freedom to behave in any way she wants. This newfound autonomy prompts her to hit a man who annoys her, to masturbate in front of a stoic schizophrenic, to reconnect with her passion for playing the piano, and ultimately to discover love with Eduard, a man hospitalized by his parents because he wants to be an artist.
The character Eduard is one of several elements that link Coelho himself with the fictional world of the novel. He actually enters the narrative in the third chapter, where he reveals his own stays in Brazilian asylums, committed by his parents because of his artistic inclinations. It is this direct personal knowledge that makes the novel so stark in its simplicity. Details of electroconvulsive therapy, insulin shock, and other treatments imposed on the insane lead us to reconsider the meaning of sanity.
In a world of increasing uniformity, conformity, and isolation, the novel reflects its late twentieth-century provenance with its blend of world religious sentiment, its self-help angle, and its advocacy that life can have meaning if we do not heed the social mores that stifle the human spirit. CK
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The Hours
Michael Cunningham
Lifespan | b. 1952 (U.S.)
First Published | 1998
First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York)
Pulitzer Prize | 1999
“I begin to hear voices . . .”
An intricate reworking of Virginia Woolf’s classic 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel, Mrs. Dalloway, which describes a day in the life of a London socialite as she prepares for a party, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours splits Clarissa Dalloway’s internal monologue into the third-person narratives of three women. Clarissa Vaughan is a middle-aged lesbian living in contemporary New York. To help establish the links with Woolf’s precursor, she is nicknamed “Mrs. Dalloway” by Richard, a prominent gay poet with whom she has shared a sexually ambiguous friendship. In another time and place, Los Angeles housewife Laura Brown reads Mrs. Dalloway and other novels to fight the emptiness of suburban motherhood in the late 1940s, and finds herself deeply shocked by her own moment of lesbian desire. Meanwhile a fictionalized Virginia Woolf frets over the writing of Mrs. Dalloway itself. As Clarissa prepares a party to celebrate Richard’s receiving a prestigious literary award, Laura tries to invest herself in her young son, and Woolf struggles to navigate illness in order to complete the work around which Cunningham’s novel is structured.
Cunningham reproduces Woolf’s anatomy of the mourning of lost possibility—her heroine Clarissa Dalloway remains haunted by the unexplored lesbian connection. Clarissa Vaughan’s successful long-term relationship and urban social freedom become the mundane background against which her youthful relationship with Richard and a single, ecstatic kiss shine all the more intensely. The uncertain way in which the eventful (suicide, kiss) complements ongoing ordinariness permeates the novel, as it meditates on the alchemical process through which temperament and experience act on each other to create our worlds. AF
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All Souls Day
Cees Nooteboom
Lifespan | b. 1933 (The Netherlands)
First Published | 1998
First Published by | Atlas (Amsterdam)
Original Title | Allerzielen
“Arthur had seen the light.”
Arthur Daane, the central character of Cees Nooteboom’s All Souls Day, is a man with time on his hands; indeed, he has specifically arranged it that way. He spends his days wandering through post-Wall Berlin, ruminating and reflecting as he negotiates his way through a city’s past, and his own.
Ten years earlier, his wife and young son were killed in a plane crash, and since then Arthur has tried to live with the burden of his freedom and has carefully structures his life to allow him to do so. As a documentary filmmaker, he is accustomed to being an observer; however, when he meets a young woman who bears the scars of trauma on her face, he is called upon to engage in life more directly. Love—and, ultimately, another random act of violence—shock him out of his anonymity and propel him forward. The story is told at a rambling, walking pace, with scenes that read like verbal snapshots interposed with long discussions among a handful of Arthur’s friends, who are as inclined to intellectual discourse as he is.
As much a romance as a kind of dialog with the dying twentieth century, Nooteboom’s novel of ideas contemplates the catalog of horrors, losses, and destruction wrought in recent history—a contemporary reader will be chastened by considering all that has transpired since it was written. Indeed, the book opens with Arthur contemplating the relative sound of the word “history” in German and Dutch, realizing that the word itself gives no hint of the nature of the events it represents. With occasional, more far-reaching, narration offered by some of the souls already above and beyond the scope of time, All Souls Day is a sober inquiry into the meaning of life, art, and historical events, both personal and public. ES
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The Heretic
Miguel Deliber
Lifespan | b. 1920 (Spain)
First Published | 1998
First Published in | Destino (Barcelona)
Original Title | El hereje
The starting point of Miguel Delibes’s novel is October 31, 1517—the day in which Martin Luther nails to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, his ninety-five theses on papal abuses and the sale of indulgences by church officials. It is also the day in which Cipriano Salcedo is born in Valladolid, Spain. The atmosphere of this historical novel is marked by the Roman Catholic intolerance and repression that ensues in Valladolid (where Delibes was born) in response to the awakening of Castilian Lutheranism.
At the heart of this transfixing narrative is Salcedo, a bourgeois Catholic man tormented by problems of conscience. Neither his religious doctrine nor the priests in charge of his education provide convincing answers to his theological questions. Unknown to him, these point to the Reformation: why should he, Salcedo, confide his sins to a priest in confession?; why does Mass distract him rather than elevate him?; why does he have to expiate his sins in Purgatory; didn’t Christ suffer enough for all of humanity? His quest to define his relationship with God is largely ignored by a society that is becoming increasingly fanatical. He feels isolated, which leads him to a fraternity of new believers who provide him with a sense of belonging, but with devastating consequences.
The Heretic states persuasively our rights to religious freedom and tolerance, a particularly poignant message today. In 1999 it was the winner of the National Narrative Prize in Spain. AK
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Elementary Particles
Michel Houellebecq
Lifespan | b. 1958 (Réunion)
First Published | 1998, by Flammarion (Paris)
Alternate Title | Atomized
Original Title | Les Particules élémentaires
This was the novel that first brought Michel Houellebecq’s bleak worldview to an international audience. Western civilization has failed on a grand scale and human beings are miserable and lonely, barely capable of communication or emotion. Houellebecq charts the ascent of the modern leisure society with persuasive cultural analysis, concluding that the injunction to pursue personal pleasure and happiness is itself repressive and painful.
The book’s central characters, Michel and Bruno, are brothers separated until middle age. Michel is a brilliant yet emotionally isolated scientist, Bruno a hopeless libertine. Sex is the arena in which the novel’s argument is played out. Michel cannot form sexual relationships—he declines the affection of
his beautiful childhood sweetheart Annabelle—while Bruno’s escapades in New Age holiday camps, swingers’ clubs, and as an occasional flasher provide a comic stage for Houellebecq’s dissertation on the momentary utopias and abjections of the sexual act. The supremacy of the biological imperative leads to a series of conclusions about men and women. Women are self-sacrificing signifiers of mortality, men condemned to the destiny of their glandular promptings. This is no elegy to humanity—Houellebecq cannot wait to see the back of us. The question, though, is, does he really mean it? DH
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The Talk of the Town
Ardal O’Hanlon
Lifespan | b. 1965 (Ireland)
First Published | 1998
First Published by | Sceptre (London)
U.S. Title | Knick Knack Paddy Whack
Based on this novel, Ardal O’Hanlon, the stand-up comic famous for playing Father Dougal in the TV comedy Father Ted, could not be accused of writing opportunistic fluff or seeking manufactured gravitas. His tale captures the atmosphere and rituals of small-town Irish life in the early 1980s through the experiences of its narrator, nineteen-year-old Patrick Scully. At the start of the novel, he is going home on the bus for the weekend from his dead-end job as security man at a Dublin jeweler’s. Through the winningly cynical meanderings of Scully’s mind, we start to discover the discontents of his life.