1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Soldiers of Salamis

  Javier Cercas

  Lifespan | b. 1962 (Spain)

  First Published | 2001

  First Published by | Tusquets (Barcelona)

  Original Title | Soldados de Salamina

  “It was the summer of 1994 . . .”

  It is not easy to pinpoint the precise factors that contribute to a novel being both a brilliant popular success and one that is also capable of attracting the emphatic appreciation of high-brow writers and critics such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Alberto Manguel, and George Steiner. But the clarity of Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis) is certainly one of the reasons this deceptively innocent look at both sides of the Spanish Civil War, set simultaneously during the war and the present day, has attracted such a following.

  The narrator begins an investigation of the life of a Spanish Falangist leader, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, but the work ends up as a moral fable. It reflects on the virtuous instinct that causes a militiaman who discovers Mazas to spare his life in the war (Mazas then continues to fight until 1945, when he enters Paris with the tanks of the liberation forces). The attempt to understand, without prejudice, the nature of the interaction between the two men is combined with another more secret adventure: the moral and personal maturing of the narrator. Like the author, he is a Spanish journalist named Javier Cercas, and he achieves, during the course of his investigations into why the two sides are fighting, not only a better understanding of the world but also of himself. The tension of the story builds up to an explosive and sentimental end. Concealed, and then confounded, is a belief arising from having, at last, found the militiaman who spared the life of Rafael Sánchez Mazas, and a private feeling of having learned something fundamental: that the instinct for virtue can be a gift bestowed by people furthest from one’s political persuasion, although in this case the militiaman offers both moral and political reasons. JGG

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Austerlitz

  W. G. Sebald

  Lifespan | b. 1944 (Germany), d. 2001 (England)

  First Published | 2001

  First Published by | C. Hanser (Munich)

  Original Language | German

  “Our Antwerp conversations”

  W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz opens with a chance encounter in a railway station in Antwerp between its unnamed narrator and the eponymous Austerlitz, who has set out to explore his roots in Europe after discovering that he is actually the son of Jews from Prague. Austerlitz has been brought up as Daffyd Elias by an austere Welsh minister and his wife, and kept in total ignorance of his real name and early childhood living with his biological family in Prague. It turns out that he was evacuated to Wales before the Second World War, where his amnesiac, dislocated life as Daffyd Elias began. The ensuing discussion between the men at the station, focusing on the relationship between architecture and historical time, lasts for several hours, and then is rejoined as the two meet up repeatedly, and always by chance, over a number of years. Their relationship remains cold and distant, until Austerlitz decides to tell the narrator his life story, a story that he is still in the process of remembering.

  The novel follows Austerlitz’s attempt to plumb the depths of his memory, seeking, like Austerlitz himself, to reclaim a time lost in the shadows of the Second World War—a time made inaccessible by the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. The recovery of these memories begins when Austerlitz wanders into a disused room in London’s Liverpool Street Station, and has a vague feeling that he has been there before. He realizes that the general feeling of desolation that plagues him in his daily life might come from being cut off from his origins; until he discovers his past, his life will remain unfulfilled. The narrative style performs with an uncanny fidelity the process of remembering, of diving into the darkness of repressed personal and cultural memory. To read the novel is to experience the regaining of time. PB

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Life of Pi

  Yann Martel

  Lifespan | b. 1963 (Spain)

  First Published | 2001

  First Published by | Knopf Canada (Toronto)

  Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction | 2001

  Chip Kidd is the designer credited for the dust jacket of the hardback edition, with its oblique allusion to Thai prostitution.

  “My suffering left me sad . . .”

  This book, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, is the story of Pi Patel, the sixteen-year-old son of a zookeeper from Pondicherry, India. Pi is a religious zealot—the problem being that he is not quite sure which religion he is zealous about, attracting different beliefs “like flies” to become a practicing Christian, Muslim, and Hindu all at the same time. Planning a move to start a new life in Canada, Pi’s father packs up the belongings and the menagerie, and the family set off aboard a freighter. After a terrifying shipwreck, Pi finds himself the sole survivor adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a twenty-sixfoot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After Richard Parker dispatches the others, Pi must use all his zoological knowledge, wits, and faith to stay alive. The two remain drifting, hungry and exposed to the elements, for 227 days. Pi recounts the harrowing journey but hidden in his account is an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of religion and writing, and the essential difference between truth and fiction. Pi realizes he must learn to become the tiger’s master, with the interaction between the two forming rich metaphors for spirituality and belief—to some extent, each of the (possibly imaginary) animals could represent a different facet of the hallucinating Pi. The underlying current of the book is that Pi must master his own dark side, his fear, despair, and desperation at his condition and the loss of his family. In a philosophical twist at the end, after Richard Parker disappears and Pi is rescued, Pi placates doubting officials with a more credible version of his survival story. This is the version he is convinced they want to hear, and the reader is reminded yet again of how hard it is to tell whether a story is true. EF

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  The Corrections

  Jonathan Franzen

  Lifespan | b. 1959 (U.S.)

  First Published | 2001

  First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York)

  National Book Award for Fiction | 2001

  The understated dust jacket of the original edition has nothing in common with the book’s attention-grabbing paperback cover.

  “The anxiety of coupons . . .”

  It is ambition that makes Jonathan Franzen’s third novel, The Corrections, an important novel. It sets out to be important, to declare unapologetically and often ferociously that the novel itself, literature in all its tenuous glory, is important.

  The significance of the novel genre for Franzen lies not with the stories it can tell but with the fact that it can tell any story at all, that the novel as a form enables the making visible of that stream of connections and unities that constitute a life, whereas life itself, pummeled with distractions and weak with forgetting, hides nine-tenths or more of the work that creates and sustains it.

  The Corrections asks as much of its readers as it asks of itself. The ambition that drives it to melt down and merge the interlocking relations, careers, and madnesses of a midwestern, middle-class, middle-aged American family, is an ambition its readers must take on themselves if they are to make it through pages that simultaneously have the cognitive shape of a hangover and a high.

  The pace of The Corrections is frenetic, simply because it has to be: it is an encyclopedic work, meticulously detailed about the areas of American life it brings under its gaze. These are so multifarious, their significances so varied yet so irrefutable, that the novel creates something of the multi-colored polyphony of history itself.

  Published in
the United States a week before the atrocity of 9/11—when terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center causing huge loss of life—there is plenty in this novel to support the view that America is bent on dancing with death. The scope and exuberance of The Corrections’ appetite for the world, however, makes it an oddly affirmative and even joyful novel. PMcM

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Platform

  Michel Houellebecq

  Lifespan | b. 1958 (Réunion)

  First Published | 2001

  First Published by | Flammarion (Paris)

  Original Title | Plateforme

  Chip Kidd is the designer credited for the dust jacket of the hardback edition, with its oblique allusion to Thai prostitution.

  “In fact, nothing disturbs me.”

  This Swiftian analysis of Western decadence and its global impact interweaves narrative with the thought of Baudrillard, Comte, and a trademark essay style voiced through the central protagonist, Michel. Houellebecq offers an argument justifying Third World prostitution through market forces. Prefaced by a citation from Balzac that states, “The more contemptible his life, the more a man clings to it,” the book also concerns Michel’s quest for redemption through love.

  At the novel’s outset, middle-aged bachelor Michel discovers his father has been murdered, a fact that, far from forming a psychological angle to the plot, simply allows him to resign his dull job at the Ministry of Culture and indulge in foreign travel. Once abroad, his taste for Thai prostitutes, nurtured already by peep shows and prostitutes in Paris, is only offset by his distaste for more worthy, conventional tourists. He meets Valérie, with whom, back in Paris, he begins an affair. Valérie, it transpires, is an executive for a large travel agency and, with her boss, Jean-Yves, she and Michel develop the “platform” of the novel’s title: a travel agency dealing specifically with sex tourism.

  Houellebecq’s thesis is that, no longer empire builders or “civilizers,” modern Europeans barely deserve to survive: their only use is to redistribute the wealth of their industrious forebears. In the absence of more concrete principles, the exchange of sex, rationally, should follow the exchange of money: “a concept in which neither race, physical appearance, age, intelligence, nor distinction plays any part.” Scathingly ironic, magisterially scurrilous, and thoroughly dangerous, the novel is a timely provocation for both liberal orthodoxies and Islamic morality, as its devastating conclusion shows. DH

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Snow

  Orhan Pamuk

  Lifespan | b. 1952 (Turkey)

  First Published | 2002, as Kar

  First Published by | İletişim (Istanbul)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 2006

  In 2005 Pamuk faced criminal charges, now dropped, after alleging the Turkish state committed genocide against Armenians in 1915.

  “The silence of snow . . .”

  When Ka, a poet, returns to Turkey after years of political exile in Germany, he is sent as a journalist to the remote city of Kars on the Turkish border. He is to report on the local election, which is likely to be won by fundamental Islamists, and to investigate a sudden outbreak of suicides among young women fighting for the right to wear their Islamic head scarves. As a blizzard cuts the city off from the outside world, tensions between secularists and fundamentalists come to a head in a violent coup. Ka enters the city with the mindset of one who has been brought up in a secular, Westernized Turkish family, and has lived for many years in the West. He is ready to listen to everyone, but is dismissive of fundamentalism, seeing such beliefs as backward. But, drawn into the events around him, Ka will leave the city, once the blizzard is over, an utterly changed man, with his heart broken.

  This is a tense political thriller, cut through with moments of black farce. The reader is bombarded with different views, as Ka meets fundamentalists, secularists, writers, religious leaders, and the “head scarf girls” themselves. The book considers not only the clash between Turkey’s various political and cultural groups, but also contemplates the basic gap between East and West, the nature of religious belief, and how art is created.

  Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, has described Snow as “my first and last political novel.” First published in Turkey in 2002, Snow caused controversy among Pamuk’s compatriots, with some critics viewing him as being too Westernized to paint a fair portrait of his country. It brought Pamuk international acclaim, however, for his honest portrayal of Turkey’s complex political and cultural situation. ClW

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Nowhere Man

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Lifespan | b. 1964 (Yugoslavia)

  First Published | 2002

  First Published by | Nan A. Talese (New York)

  Original Language | English

  Josef Pronek’s journey from Sarajevo to the United States is referred to in the novel’s quirky hardback dust jacket artwork.

  “Today was the interview.”

  Aleksandar Hemon arrived in the United States from Sarajevo in 1992, and started writing in his adoptive language three years later. The most striking feature of his writing is his wonderfully innovative use of the English language. Like his postcolonial antecedents, Hemon’s work expands the limits of English and challenges the cultural authority of the standard forms of the language.

  Nowhere Man, Hemon’s first novel, comprises of six interrelated narratives, each with its own style. These different narrative voices recount moments in Josef Pronek’s life in Sarajevo prior to the outbreak of the Yugoslav war, in the Ukraine, and in Chicago. They range from the self-consciously scholarly idiom of the graduate student, littered with Shakespearean quotations, to imperfect English as Josef struggles to express himself in his adopted language. Salman Rushdie has commented that translation is a physical movement from one cultural space to another. Hemon vividly represents the exertion that this physical movement requires by depicting the effort that Josef must expend in order to make himself understood. Words strain out of him like the imperfect distillation of ideas. The novel is most striking in those passages where he forces the reader to contemplate the English language afresh by stretching the literal meaning of English words into contexts in which they are not usually applied. For instance, he talks of a light switch “pending in the darkness,” which, although consistent with the literal meaning of pending (in the sense of hanging or waiting), is so idiomatically unusual and fresh that it estranges speakers of standard English from their own language. By compelling us to reflect upon his word choices, Hemon’s writing forces us to reconsider the very contours of language itself. LC

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Everything Is Illuminated

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Lifespan | b. 1977 (U.S.)

  First Published | 2002

  First Published by | Houghton Mifflin (Boston)

  Guardian First Book Award | 2002

  Everything Is Illuminated was inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s own visit to the Ukraine in 1999 to research his grandfather’s life.

  “I am unequivocally tall.”

  Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated is a strikingly ambitious first novel that has enjoyed a rare combination of commercial success and critical acclaim. The story revolves around a young Jewish American author (also named Jonathan) who, with little more than a faded photograph, travels to the Ukraine in search of Augustine—a woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazi occupation. Much of the novel is built around a series of retrospective letters to Jonathan from Alex Perchov, a Ukrainian in his late teens who Jonathan hires as his guide and translator. Alex’s limited grasp of English (“my second tongue is not so premium,” he admits) and misconceived use of a Thesaurus are rendered in a dazzling feat of linguistic invention. However, although his mistakes and malapropisms
are often wildly comical, Alex is no simpleton and he grows in dignity and insight as the novel progresses. These letters are broken up by strange, magic-realist style episodes, which recount the history of Jonathan’s ancestral village (or “shtetl”) from the day of its founding at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the tragedy of the Final Solution.

  Everything Is Illuminated is a willful conflation of fact and fantasy—an audacious vision of the Holocaust and its legacy presented through skewed translations, simple twists of fate, half-remembered conversations, fragile friendships, and competing narrative voices. It is a novel deeply concerned with the politics of memory, with how our relationship to the past is negotiated by the needs of the present. It is a novel about ancient secrets, about ignorance and knowledge, innocence and experience, atonement and guilt. It is both riotously funny and quietly devastating and may well signal the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. SamT