1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

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  2000s

  The Swarm

  Frank Schätzing

  Lifespan | b. 1957 (Germany)

  First Published | 2004

  First Published by | Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Cologne)

  Golden Feather Prize for Fiction | 2005

  Frank Schätzing’s eco-thriller begins off the Peruvian coast where a fisherman ponders his future vis-avis trawler fleets that decimate the world’s fishing grounds. Shortly after, he disappears in the depths of the ocean. This is followed by other mysterious portents: whale attacks, the discovery of strange deep-sea worms, and devastating epidemics. It all turns out to be an attack on humanity in an attempt to halt the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems. Masterminded by the Yrr, a single-cell maritime organism of superior intelligence, Nature eventually unleashes a huge tsunami that devastates Europe.

  The Swarm’s publication coincided not only with a number of natural disasters but also with America’s war on terror, a war the novel alludes to: under the leadership of the presidential adviser Commander Li, the United States launches an expedition to seek contact with the Yrr. While European scientists urge Li to appease the Yrr through diplomacy, he plans to destroy it in order to establish humanity’s dominance over the Earth. In a showdown that sees the sinking of the USS Independence and the death of Li and a number of other protagonists, contact with the Yrr is finally established and hostilities abate. The epilogue presents this truce as a final chance granted to humanity to avoid destruction.

  The novel has been praised for its sound scientific background, although it has been dogged by allegations of plagiarism of scientific Web sites. In 2006, the movie rights were sold to Hollywood. FG

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  2000s

  Suite Française

  Irène Némirovsky

  Lifespan | b. 1903 (Ukraine), d. 1942 (Poland)

  First Published | 2004

  First Published by | Éditions Denoël (Paris)

  Prix Renaudot | 2004

  Suite Française succeeds where all great literature succeeds—in the sharpness and delicacy with which it lays bare the frailties, longings, and triumphs of the human heart. The defeat of France early in the Second World War provides a tumultuous context within which Irène Némirovsky lays bare her cast of engaging yet seriously flawed characters.

  Némirovsky charts the exterior and interior lives of several individuals and families in shock. Here and there the threads are brought together as the story of the rushed, fearful exodus from Paris unfolds, as the superiority and self-confidence of the bourgeoisie are slowly eroded and the basest of human emotions emerge in a time of extreme stress. The second section of the novel turns away from Paris to the life of a village under occupation. Even here, however, the theme of exodus is pursued, as people struggle both for and against the reassertion of normal life in an existence marked by uncertainty.

  Much of the excitement surrounding this book has derived from the author’s own life of exile, as the gifted daughter of rich European Jews who met her death at Auschwitz—a mistress of her craft, rediscovered when the manuscript of Suite Française was found and published half a century later. The hype may deter some. Yet this book is more than just an interesting publishing industry story; it deserves attention as a powerful testimony to events and emotions that were raw and real when they were first committed to paper. RMa

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  2000s

  The Master

  Colm Tóibín

  Lifespan | b. 1955 (Ireland)

  First Published | 2004

  First Published by | Picador (London)

  Novel of the Year | 2004

  Tóibín’s novel attempts to re-create the consciousness of Henry James—the eponymous Master—without mimicking his style.

  In The Master, Colm Tóibín re-creates the period in novelist Henry James’s life between 1895, the year in which James endured the humiliating failure of his play Guy Domville, and 1899, closing with the visit of his brother William and his family to James’s beloved Lamb House in the small fishing port of Rye on England’s south coast. Time in Tóibín’s novel is, for the most part, subordinated to space, and, more particularly, to the spaces of rooms and of houses. The novel creates a Jamesian world of consciousness without falling into pastiche, its narrative inflected by that of “the Master” but never lapsing into a parody of it.

  The Master is a strongly episodic work, depicting in vivid detail a series of self-contained scenes and events: James’s visit to Ireland, his painful negotiations with incompetent servants, and the surreal aftermath of the suicide of his close friend, the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. Tóibín imagines his way into James’s consciousness by describing his dreams and memories, which allow the novel to travel back to James’s boyhood and youth, and to demonstrate the impact of a tragic series of deaths and losses throughout his life. Tóibín also seeks to show how experience, or occasionally the turning away from experience, transmuted itself into the stuff of James’s fiction. The novel opens up, in ways both subtle and powerful, the question of authorial revelation and secrecy, the degree to which a novelist’s work relies on their own lived experience, and the nature of James’s desire, which is neither separable from the question of homosexuality nor fully explicable by it. Published at a time when many novelists are turning to biographical sources, The Master finds a new way for biography and fiction to meet, and to transform each other. LM

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  2000s

  The Book about Blanche and Marie

  Per Olov Enquist

  Lifespan | b. 1934 (Sweden)

  First Published | 2004

  First Published by | Norstedts (Stockholm)

  Original Title | Boken om Blanche och Marie

  “It remembers the caresses . . .”

  The Book about Blanche and Marie charts the lives of Blanche Wittman, the woman used by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in his demonstrations of hysteria at the Salpêtriére Hospital outside Paris, and Marie Curie, the Polish scientist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and co-discoverer of radium. When Blanche leaves the Salpêtriére, she becomes Marie’s assistant and live-in companion. From this point of departure, Per Olov Enquist looks at the private lives led by major public figures, focusing in particular on the friendship that develops between Blanche and Marie, and on how Blanche copes with life as a multiple amputee. Blanche had one arm and both her legs amputated by the time of her death, having been exposed to massive quantities of radioactive material. She leaves behind three notebooks asking the question: What is love?

  Enquist both lingers within his characters and stands resolutely outside of them; despite allowing them to ventriloquize through him, he vehemently asserts his independent presence as the author of the text. Appearing in the first person, Enquist discusses his obsession with the task at hand, and his inspiration and use of sources. Focusing on certain details and moments at random and then panning out again, Enquist provides us with intimate, fragmented snapshots of his subjects’ lives.

  The text is at once compulsive and opaque, and it is hard to fathom what derives from reliable historical sources and what is Enquist’s own fantasy. This delicate, troubling novel marks a movement away from the violence and carnival of many postmodern novelists’ treatment of history, and a movement toward a calmer, more tender, and yet equally open idea of how to bring historical fact within the realm of the novel. LL

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  2000s

  2666

  Roberto Bolaño

  Lifespan | b. 1953 (Chile), d. 2003 (Spain)

  First Published | 2004

  First Published by | Anagrama (Barcelona)

  Original Language | Spanish

  “. . . a cult hero cut down . . .”

  New York Times obituary, August 9, 2005

  If it were a date, the title 2666 would perhaps see
m to anticipate an inevitably posthumous work. Roberto Bolaño’s massive novel, completed shortly before he died of a liver disorder in 2003 and coming in at more than 1,100 pages long, opens a seed of evil, and its five parts transform this seed into the elusive dream of a writer, Benno von Archimboldi. In the first part, four literary critics seek him in their texts while their lives become involved with him, eventually sensing him in the streets of Santa Teresa, a disguised version of the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. In the second, this same city is the cloister where the philosopher Amalfitano teaches, reads, reminds his wife that she left him, and wonders how to escape from there to Rosa, his adolescent daughter. In the third, a sports journalist called Fate arrives at Santa Teresa to report on a boxing match, but ends up becoming involved in the investigation of crimes against women that have occurred there. This thread leads to the fourth part, the real black heart of the novel: a ruthless, exhausting succession of murders, their dates, and their futile investigation. The end of the last part sees the reappearance of Archimboldi, the pseudonym of a German writer who appears to have traversed the twentieth century only to arrive at Santa Teresa.

  An impossible challenge for the hurried reader, 2666 proves a mesmerizing experience. Perhaps the most incredible aspect of Bolaño’s career is that, apart from one novel published in 1984, the rest of his considerable body of work was only published in the decade or so preceding his death. Consequently, 2666 stands as both the culmination of his life’s work and as the promise of what Bolaño might have gone on to achieve, had he not succumbed to a tragically premature death. DMG

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  2000s

  The Line of Beauty

  Alan Hollinghurst

  Lifespan | b. 1954 (England)

  First Published | 2004

  First Published by | Picador (London)

  Man Booker Prize for Fiction | 2004

  For Hogarth, the line of beauty was a curve of aesthetic perfection; for Hollinghurst, it refers to everything from cocaine to a lover’s body.

  “. . . the hot August day was a shimmer of nerves.”

  Winner of the Man Booker Prize, The Line of Beauty is Alan Hollinghurst’s fourth novel written, in the author’s phrase, “from a presumption of the gayness of the narrative position.” London life in the 1980s is viewed through the amoral eyes of Nick Guest, a young man from a steady, middle-class background who emerges from Oxford University and is seduced literally by the discovery of gay sex and metaphorically by the glamour of life among the powerful and the rich in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

  As a hanger-on in the household of a politician and the lover of the son of a Lebanese millionaire, Nick enjoys easy money, easy sex, and ubiquitous cocaine—one of the multiple possible references of the title’s “line.” A series of Thatcherite grotesques make their appearance and Thatcher herself puts in a guest performance in one of the novel’s comic highspots. No-holds-barred descriptions of gay sex are central to the author’s purpose, which is underlined by giving Nick an obsession with Henry James; whereas the “Old Master” had to disguise his sexuality, Hollinghurst can flaunt it. The onset of AIDS darkens the novel’s later stages, which bring suffering and betrayal to center stage as the trap of the plot is sprung. But the mood is far from despair or tragedy; Hollinghurst seems to identify with Nick’s “love of the world that was shockingly unconditional.”

  Except for its sexual orientation, The Line of Beauty is a relatively conventional novel in the English literary tradition, written in an elevated, precise prose with an exact eye for character and a sharp ear for varying social registers of speech. Aesthetically pleasing, darkly humorous, and skillfully plotted, the novel delivers its intended pleasures to any reader ready to follow the author in uncritical acceptance of homosexuality in all its aspects. RegG

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  2000s

  The Accidental

  Ali Smith

  Lifespan | b. 1962 (Scotland)

  First Published | 2005

  First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)

  Whitbread Novel of the Year | 2005

  Ali Smith has attributed The Accidental to a dream that came to her in fully formed sentences, which she recorded in the morning.

  “I am Alhambra, named for the place of my conception.”

  The Smart family is in the midst of an uneventful vacation in the Norfolk region of England when a captivating stranger, Amber, arrives on a breeze of upheaval that spreads through their isolated inner lives, revealing connections that have long been forgotten. At the beginning, each of the characters is facing some kind of dead end, and it is only through Amber that they can find a way to begin their stories. The novel is narrated by each family member in turn—as well as by a mystery other—as they describe how the mercurial Amber upsets the delicate balance of family life, breaking down boundaries and forcing them to look on their situation through different eyes. Amber befriends twelve-year-old Astrid, persuading her to look at the world without the distortion of her trusty camera lens. She bewitches the father, adulterous lecturer Michael, but fails to desire him, revealing his own self-doubt. She also throws a shaft of light on the protective barrier his wife, blocked writer Eve, has built around herself. But it is on troubled teenager Magnus that she has the most beguiling effect. Unbeknownst to his family, Magnus is on the verge of suicide until Amber seduces—and saves—him.

  Inside the stories in The Accidental is wound a history of film, and while Amber, conceived in a cinema, always remains slightly out of focus, the story casts light on the invisible cracks that time forces, unnoticed, into even the closest relationships. The novel’s thematic interest is in secret identities and hidden inner lives; the deception, perhaps, of fiction itself. Ali Smith’s third book—and her second to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize—sets a slower pace than her previous novels, but the characterization is memorable and the themes of truth and consequence powerful. EH

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  2000s

  Mother’s Milk

  Edward St. Aubyn

  Lifespan | b. 1960 (England)

  First Published | 2005

  First Published by | Picador (London)

  Man Booker Prize Shortlist Nominee | 2006

  “For him it was a new world.”

  Mother’s Milk picks up where St. Aubyn’s satirical trilogy of English upper-class machinations, Some Hope, left off. By the time of this novel, Patrick Melrose’s abusive and addiction-inducing father has died, leaving Eleanor, Patrick’s mother, to slowly fade out from Alzheimer’s. Patrick tries his frustrated best to minimize the fallout from this by fighting his mother’s expressed wish to disinherit the family and leave the summer holiday house in France to a spurious new-age fantasist. Seamus, the new owner of the house, draws instinctive revulsion from Patrick’s precocious young sons as he takes over.

  Taking the family to America, Patrick again comes face to face with objects of his scorn and derision. In St. Aubyn’s sardonic version of George W. Bush’s country transformed into a monster gorged on indulgence, faked intimacy, and a lack of healthy scepticism, Patrick’s bathetic alcoholism reemerges as the best coping mechanism against a world simultaneously slipping away from and assaulting him as he flounders into middle age.

  One of St. Aubyn’s significant strengths is an ability to condense character and description into pithy aphorism. Of one minor character’s failed attempts at fathering a desired son and heir, he notes succinctly, “Three daughters later he retired to his study.” He characterizes the “man-in-a-crisis” very well, as he does the overly bright, almost telepathic children. St. Aubyn has clearly spilt his own blood over the pages devoted to the Melrose family, as he has freely admitted in interviews. His attempt to find, via satire and Patrick’s character, an approximation of personal liberation, bound by class and circumstance, results in a well paced and enjoyable Booker Prize contender from a skillful contemporary English novelist. D
Tu

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  2000s

  Measuring the World

  Daniel Kehlmann

  Lifespan | b. 1975 (Germany)

  First Published | 2005

  First Published by | Rowohlt (Reinbeck)

  Original Title | Die Vermessung der Welt

  “The journey was a torture.”

  This is a novel about two great German minds, the mathematician Carl Gauss (1777–1855) and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Their life stories have striking similarities and differences from the very beginning. Gauss comes from impoverished circumstances, but his genius is obvious from early in his childhood; Humboldt is born to nobility and trained for greatness from the first. They represent two very different approaches to surveying the world of their time. Carl Gauss sees little of the physical world but much in his mind’s eye (he surveys the earth’s invisible magnetic field, a game of solitary patience); Humboldt travels far and wide in an attempt to see and grasp as much of the physical world as possible.