First Published | 2000
First Published by | Anagrama (Barcelona)
Original Title | Bartleby y compañía
Becoming a cult author with A Brief History of Portable Literature (1985), Enrique Vila-Matas gained wider recognition with this novel, which won an award in France as the best essay of 2000. He used the mysterious protagonist of Bartleby, Herman Melville’s scrivener, as an emblem of those writers who, at a certain moment, prefer to abstain from publishing their work and give in to the power of saying “No.” To examine this enigmatic “Bartleby syndrome,” the author invents an alter ego, Marcelo, a solitary office worker, inspired by Kafka and Pessoa among others. In the summer of 1999, Marcelo starts a diary in which are recorded cases of “writers touched by the Evil” of silence, in “footnotes commenting on a text which is invisible.”
The novel consists of eighty-six essay notes by Marcelo in which a fascinating army of inhibited and secret creators appears, people who prefer not to write or to make their writing known, from Socrates and Rimbaud to Juan Rulfo, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, B. Traven, and Robert Walser, the final one a key name in the later work of Vila-Matas. Reality and fiction invade each other’s boundaries, as do the text and his footnotes, the narrative and the essay, since the dissolution of conventional literary categories is one of the aesthetic intentions of the author, perhaps even the main intention. The result of this systematic subversion is a fascinating blend of imagination, writing, and reading in which the reader becomes involved. DRM
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Celestial Harmonies
Péter Esterházy
Lifespan | b. 1950 (Hungary)
First Published | 2000
First Published by | Magveto (Budapest)
Original Title | Harmonia caelestis
Esterházy is a scion of Hungary’s most prominent aristocrat clan, and, a decade after the end of Central European Communism under which the Esterházys lived in reduced circumstances, Celestial Harmonies is an attempt to reinscribe the family chronicles. It is massive in both its weight and in the reach of its anecdotes, judgements, and apercus. Even when the book is being deliberately evasive, the reader feels a shock of recognition at the extent to which private and public significances are entwined here, as Esterházy rolls out cameos for figures like Haydn, Béla Bartók, Winston Churchill, and Napoleon III.
Celestial Harmonies is divided into two very different halves. While “Book Two” gives us “Confessions of an Esterházy Family” in a narrative of the author’s immediate ancestors, “Book One” is a playful, capricious, and somewhat insane catalog of “Numbered Sentences from the Lives of the Esterházy Family,” in which a singular protagonist takes on a myriad of historical identities, stretched across several hundred years and many forms. No mistaking, this is a deeply odd book; possible English-language counterparts might be the more hallucinatory parts of Ulysses. If Celestial Harmonies seems sometimes oppressively Old World, Alpha-Male, hierarchical, and willful, it makes up for it with the anarchic brilliance of its imagination. MS
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Under the Skin
Michel Faber
Lifespan | b. 1960 (The Netherlands)
First Published | 2000
First Published by | Canongate Press (Edinburgh)
First U.S. Edition | Harcourt (New York)
Michel Faber’s first novel focuses on the life and work of its main female character, Isserley, who trawls the Scottish Highlands in an old Corolla searching for well-built and muscular male hitchhikers. To reveal her purpose in doing so would be to ruin a novel whose shocking power is derived primarily from its perfect orchestration of beautiful description, cunning deception, suspense, and macabre revelation. Suffice to say that reading this novel will force you to confront the arbitrariness of divisions between the human and the animal, as well as the often overlooked ethics of our culture’s industrial-scale slaughter and consumption of meat. But it does so within the context of a compelling and original story that defies simple generic classification—it is a thriller, a science fiction novel, and a lyrical portrayal of one individual’s struggle to make sense of the world.
The novel is saturated with powerful, evocative descriptions of the landscape. For Isserley, the breathtaking beauty of nature is compensation for the hardships of her life and work, but she has undergone immense personal sacrifice and pain to gain the freedom to appreciate it. Herein lies Faber’s elegiac yearning for delight in the natural world and a recognition of our privilege to be living in it, attitudes that the reader senses he feels might be irretrievable or unachievable in the face of the urbanization, consumption, waste, and destruction of contemporary global capitalism. SD
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The Human Stain
Philip Roth
Lifespan | b. 1933 (U.S.)
First Published | 2000
First Published by | Houghton Mifflin (New York)
PEN/Faulkner Award | 2000
The Human Stain brings together two common preoccupations—a hero with a secret and an affair between an older man and a younger woman—in the character of Coleman Silk, the boxer-turned-professor whose story is narrated by his neighbor, Nathan Zuckerman. Silk is vilified by his university following false allegations of racism and retires to his home, discovering Viagra and beginning an affair with Faunia, an illiterate maid who is grieving over the death of her children and is being pursued by a violent Vietnam veteran ex-husband.
Through flashbacks to his childhood, we discover that Silk has been covering up an enormous secret—he is a black man who has rejected the racism he has experienced from both blacks and whites. Silk’s liberation—both personal and sexual—after his involvement with Faunia is startling, and Nathan, at first simply a curious observer, begins to develop a relationship with Silk himself.
While The Human Stain questions the possibility of objectivity in a world of emotions, the book is primarily about guilty secrets, assumptions, and perceptions. Silk may appear to be the archetypal man fallen from grace, but there is far more at work here than simple parables. It is a sly glance at American social politics, replete with judgment, shame, and hypocrisy, and at the stain left on life by humanity itself. And at the end, it is a book that, although ostensibly about the black and white of things, is inherently a thousand shades of gray. EF
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White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Lifespan | b. 1975 (London)
First Published | 2000
First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)
Whitbread First Novel Award | 2000
Zadie Smith’s English father and Jamaican mother met at a party, just as Archie Jones and Clara were made to do in her novel.
“He had flipped a coin and stood staunchly by its conclusions. This was a decided-upon suicide. In fact it was a New Year’s resolution.”
White Teeth opens with the attempted suicide of Archie Jones. Archie is a war veteran, unable to make a decision without the toss of a coin, and basically irrelevant. His suicide foiled, he wanders into a New Year’s party. He meets a toothless angel, a Jamaican goddess named Clara. She is a Jehovah’s Witness and Archie’s fresh start. They beget Irie, a hybrid, put-upon, and quintessential Brit of the new sort; multiethnic, rootless, and disenchanted.
Samad Iqbal is a Bengali waiter at an Indian restaurant. He met Archie in the war, and also has a fresh young wife. A traditionalist, he, too, is trying to come to terms with postwar England. His twin sons do not make it easy. He has to kidnap one and take him to Bangladesh to prevent him from becoming too English. Anchored in the twin histories of Archie and Samad, White Teeth is an epic diorama spanning decades of postcolonial England. A narrative shot through with accident, fate, and disappointment, it is about immigration and hybridity, religion and politics, and what it means to be English
in an increasingly impersonal landscape.
White Teeth, a virtuoso debut from a then twenty-four-year-old writer, is crawling with vibrant characters, each with a distinct voice that sings with authenticity. Smith writes with equal facility about teenage love or the trenches of the Second World War; she knows the hearts of her characters and treats them with humor and compassion. The maturity and scope of her talent seems preternatural. GT
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2000s
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
Ismail Kadare
Lifespan | b. 1936 (Albania)
First Published | 2000
First Published by | Onufri (Tiranë)
Original Title | Lulet e ftohta të marsit
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost is set in contemporary Albania and tells the story of Mark Gurabardhi, an artist who is struggling to live and work after the fall of his country’s communist regime. Ismail Kadare’s novel is carefully structured between balanced opposites—between movement and stasis, between sleep and wakefulness. Everywhere in the novel there are signs of rebirth, and everywhere these signs are balanced against omens of talismanic death, betokened most powerfully in the resurrected “book of blood,” or Kanun, that has regulated ritual murder in Albania since medieval times.
These oppositions create an extraordinarily jarring effect. Elements from contemporary Europe sit side-by-side with stories and rituals that are derived from deep in the Albanian cultural memory. These oppositions suggest a deadlock, an impasse between a bankrupt mythical history and an equally bankrupt present. Mark cannot feel at home, either in the Albanian past, or in the present dominated by global capital. The novel vividly depicts this nightmarish impasse. But in the quietly poetic movement of Kadare’s prose we can glimpse a new set of possibilities: a new art, and a new Albania, for which there is not yet a language. PB
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The Devil and Miss Prym
Paulo Coelho
Lifespan | b. 1947 (Brazil)
First Published | 2000
First Published by | Objetiva (Rio de Janeiro)
Original Title | O demônio e a Senhorita Prym
The Devil and Miss Prym concludes Paulo Coelho’s trilogy “And on the Seventh Day.” Each of the three books is concerned with a week in the lives of ordinary people, who find themselves suddenly confronted by love, death, and power and are forced to face their own inner conflicts and make choices that will affect their very futures.
In The Devil and Miss Prym, a stranger descends on Viscos, a small town in France, depicted both as paradise on earth and a dead-end, lifeless place. This contradiction illustrates the author’s belief that we choose our own attitudes to life; either affecting reality by making it better for ourselves or failing to find happiness in even the most perfect conditions. Into the village comes a stranger, the Devil of the title, with a mission to discover within a week the answer to the question: are humans essentially good or evil? He finds his Eve in the local barmaid, Chantal Prym, and tempts her to commit evil. In welcoming the mysterious foreigner, the whole village becomes an accomplice to his sophisticated plot. The novel illustrates how the actions of a moment can affect the entire course of our lives and makes us question how we respond to those moments of no return. In a world where we are quick to condemn murderous regimes and “axes of evil,” this is a book that reminds us that all humans are fallible and that each and every one of us has the capacity for good or evil. LE
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The Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa
Lifespan | b. 1936 (Peru)
First Published | 2000
First Published by | Alfaguara (Madrid)
Original Title | La Fiesta del Chivo
“The most loyal of your dogs asks, begs, implores you.”
Novels describing the rise, fall, and personal lives of South American dictators can hardly be said to be a new development in Latin American literature. Established authors of the “dictator” genre—most notably Gabriel García Márquez with Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth—typify their writing by drawing on myth and allegory. However, in The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa shows his readers the private world of the conspirators, invites them to the dinner table of the victims, and mocks the urine-stained trousers of the notorious seventy-year-old General Rafael Trujillo by exploring the last day of the dictator’s thirty-one-year tyrannical rule of the Dominican Republic.
The novel has three storylines which interweave and form the overall structure. The story of Urania Cabral—the daughter of Trujillo’s former secretary-of-state, who returns to her homeland after gaining an education in the United States—represents the Dominican Republic’s political relationship with the rest of the world, but is also used to describe both the suffering of the Dominican citizens, and their blind faith and complicity in the exploitative regime. The second plotline is that of the conspirators, the once-upon-a-time Trujillo loyalists. Finally, there is Trujillo himself. Obsessed with cleanliness as much as with the bladder problem that challenges the machismo of his powerful public persona, even Trujillo is a character that suffers from compromise.
Llosa once claimed that in writing about this particular dictator, he was effectively writing about all dictators, wherever they are found, and about the essential nature of the power they wield. But Llosa’s meticulous research on the streets of the republic, interviewing real people for this novel, makes it a tense, unnerving, and uncomfortably direct read. JSD
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I’m Not Scared
Niccolò Ammaniti
Lifespan | b. 1966 (Italy)
First Published | 2001
First Published by | Einaudi (Turin)
Original Title | Io non ho paura
“The heat got into the stones, crumbled the earth . . .”
Niccolò Ammaniti’s I'm Not Scared is set in southern Italy during the ferocious heat wave of 1978. The narrator, Michele Amitrano, is now an adult, but he looks back on his nine-year-old self, when he was living in Acqua Traverse, a village of four hovels in a desolate countryside.
It is summer and there is a tremendous, sticky, unbearable heat, which only a small group of boys can bear, spending most of their days exploring their surroundings on their bikes, and setting each other dares as they do so. Michele, like almost all the young men who are the central characters of Ammaniti’s novels, has an exaggerated sensibility, innocent yet mature, which separates him from the petty, unthinking logic of the herd. While “Skull” claims the others’ rough respect as the leader, inflicting a load of forfeits on the rest of the gang, Michele does not take part in what increasingly seems to be a form of juvenile tyranny; in fact, he takes on another’s forfeit, agreeing to explore an abandoned farmhouse. Once there, Michele discovers something in the building that changes his world, and this twist wrenches the book out of the relatively innocent world of childhood into the sinister, incomprehensible world of adults.
I’m Not Scared is the very best kind of coming-of-age novel—one in which the progression from childhood to adulthood is not presented as a necessary “putting away of childish things” in favor of the increased experience of maturity, nor as a naive celebration of the innocence of children in contrast with the cruelty of adults. If anything, Ammaniti suggests that children and adults have more in common than most people think. The novel bears this philosophy lightly, however, carrying it on the back of what is, fundamentally, a thrilling story. FF
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Atonement
Ian McEwan
Lifespan | b. 1948 (England)
First Published | 2001
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
National Book Critics Circle Award | 2001
Atonement’s cover photograph by Chris Fraser Smith
captures the feverish cerebral activity of McEwan’s protagonist, Briony.
The first part of the novel begins in the summer of 1935 as thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis attempts to direct her three cousins in a self-penned play to celebrate the homecoming of her adored older brother, Leon. The children’s lives should be idyllic in their upper-middle-class, interwar setting, but real-life events soon enrapture Briony more than her play. She witnesses a moment of sexual tension between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, whose education Cecilia’s father has been funding. Assuming he is forcing Cecilia into a sexual encounter, and later intercepting a letter Robbie sends to Cecilia declaring his lust, Briony decides that Robbie is an evil beast. When her cousin Lola is mysteriously attacked, Briony wrongly points the finger at Robbie, who is arrested and jailed. Cecilia, heartbroken at her lover’s confinement and never ceasing to believe in him, leaves to become a nurse in London and refuses to speak to Briony.
The second part of the novel follows Robbie five years later, now in the army, as he is exposed to the horrors and suffering of the Dunkirk evacuations. In the third, and final, part, Briony becomes a war nurse in London and begins to come to terms with her guilt over what she did to Robbie and Cecilia, now finally together.
In the epilogue, McEwan paints Briony as an aging novelist, revisiting her past in fact and fiction and casting doubt over the truthfulness of her stories, which brings into question the author’s struggle to relinquish control over the reaction of his readers. This novel is not only about love, trust, and the war. It is also about the pleasures, pains, and challenges of writing, the burden of guilt, and, above all, the danger of interpretation. EF
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 105