1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  Kehlmann’s style is almost sketchlike, offering telling detail but leaving much of the background to the imagination. He does not move slowly and methodically through the biographies, but lingers over some sections (not always the obvious ones) and skips over others, subtly portraying the limiting effect fame has on his subjects. Both men are considered to be “islands” (helped by some embellishment from Kehlmann), living in worlds of their own making, obsessed with obtaining vast amounts of knowledge.

  Kehlmann is himself fascinated by his two characters’ often obsessive behaviors and what the two great minds are willing to do to achieve their end goals. Each is, in his own way, locked into his own world, with Gauss not much of a social creature and Humboldt remaining largely oblivious of other individuals. Measuring the World portrays the two historical figures with liveliness, extraordinary erudition, and sly humor, always with an exceptionally light touch. LB

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  The Sea

  John Banville

  Lifespan | b. 1945 (Ireland)

  First Published | 2005

  First Published by | Picador (London)

  Man Booker Prize | 2005

  The Sea was seen to be returning literary credibility to a prize often awarded to populist works when it won the Man Booker in 2005.

  “Happiness was different in childhood.”

  “Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still.” This poignant realization lies at the heart of John Banville’s latest novel, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 in one of the tightest contests in years, narrowly beating out Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go only when the chairman of the judging panel cast his deciding vote in Banville’s favor.

  The Sea tells the story of Max Morden’s grief after the death of his wife, and his subsequent journey to the mysterious scene of a childhood romance. This trip is an attempt by Morden, an art historian, to reclaim the past as a work of art. His bereavement compels him to search for some early scene of love and loss, some original drama that remains proof against the tidal, erosive work of time.

  Banville’s prose often seems to have something of the miraculous to it, and the miracle in this novel is its capacity to use words to produce vivid images—to find beneath the constant movement of the everyday an attitude, or glance, or shape that seems suddenly, magically present. The novel depicts the ugliness of death and of bodily decrepitude, as it conjures the experience of loss with an uncanny intensity. But if this novel discusses death and the steady humiliation of dying, its greater concern is with the preservative power of memory, and of art, to catch something that does not die, something that is as immune to death as innocence. This novel is soaked in images and phrases drawn from works of art—from Bonnard, Whistler, and Vermeer; from Shakespeare, Proust, and Beckett. Morden’s journey to early childhood is woven into this homage to art, seamlessly and exquisitely. Reading the novel is at once to feel what it is to die and to find oneself lifted from the choppy motion of time, into the quiet midst of an unmoving image. PB

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  The Elegance of the Hedgehog

  Muriel Barbery

  Lifespan | b. 1969 (Morocco)

  First Published | 2006

  First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)

  Original Title | L’Élégance du hérisson

  Muriel Barbery’s novel captured the hearts of French readers, selling over a million copies in its first year.

  “Concierges do not read The German Ideology . . .”

  Renée Michel is not who she appears to be. For the rich inhabitants of 7 Rue de Grenelle, the concierge who has been there for years is a good woman, the archetypal building caretaker: there is nothing particularly striking about her appearance, and she can be both helpful and gruff. But behind her slightly tough exterior, the fifty-four-year-old Renée hides some surprising habits. At the back of her concierge’s room, she indulges her passions for Russian literature (her cat is named Leo, in homage to the author of Anna Karenina), Japanese cinema, and Dutch painting and wonders about the nature of phenomenology. She is fascinated by those pure moments of grace when everything hangs in perfect but precarious balance.

  Paloma Josse hides herself, too. She is twelve years old and lives with her parents in one of the very chic apartments in the building. An exceptionally gifted and rebellious child, she plans to kill herself and burn the family apartment on her thirteenth birthday. With wit and humor, she scrupulously records her deepest thoughts in a journal and tries to discover the secret of “still movement.” For Paloma, adult life is a goldfish bowl, an empty and absurd place where false impressions reign.

  The rest of the building is filled mainly with narrow-minded, bourgeois tenants who are rooted in their prejudices. However, the arrival of a wealthy Japanese widower, sophisticated and refined, upsets this world of deceptive appearances. Following the alternating points of view of the two protagonists, the novel is a philosophical journey, a reflection on the meaning of life that offers the reader multiple and unexpected sensations. Written in an elegant and lively style, it brings us spiritedly into a world that is rich, subtle, and funny. SL

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Carry Me Down

  M. J. Hyland

  Lifespan | b. 1968 (England)

  First Published | 2006

  First Published by | Canongate (Edinburgh)

  Man Booker Prize Shortlist Nominee | 2008

  Hyland originally intended John to be middle-aged but wrote a flashback to his childhood and realized he worked better as a child.

  “I’m angry with her now . . .”

  Carry Me Down is narrated in the present tense by eleven-year-old John Egan, who lives in Ireland in the early 1970s. This increasingly popular narrative perspective forces M. J. Hyland to work from a limited vocabulary, giving a clarity and pureness of tone and avoiding overt stylization. Hyland’s style captures this young boy’s various troubles, curiosities, and fears amid a disintegrating family and his awkward pre-pubescent self-discovery.

  A major preoccupation of the novel is the rather grand theme of truth, as refracted through the autodidactic and secretive John, who believes he possesses a “gift” for truth-detection and expends much time and energy trying to prove it. To this end, he produces his own book of lies, a log of the misdirection and compromises he constantly needs to find his way around. He records his physical symptoms when lied to and pushes people to the limits of their patience and good will, ostensibly in order to test their honesty.

  However, John’s abstract systematizing and detective work come unstuck when faced with his family’s deceit. Unversed in the emotional background behind the lies, John subjects those around him to forced confessions and revenge missions, never noticing the disparity between his motivations and actions, or the self-deceit he might have in common with those he attacks.

  Hyland characterizes John as a limited and internalizing young boy on the verge of a skewed adolescence, but he gradually becomes a tool used to explore a wide range of forces beyond his understanding. At its core a novel about emotional development, Carry Me Down pits innocence and deceit against each other and finds the murky middle ground to be littered with vested interests. DTu

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Against the Day

  Thomas Pynchon

  Lifespan | b. 1937 (U.S.)

  First Published | 2006

  First Published by | Penguin (New York)

  National Book Award | 1974

  Of Against the Day, Pynchon has said, “Maybe it’s not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it’s what the world might be.”

  “They fly toward grace.”

  After the intricately woven conflation of fact and fantasy that characterized Mason & Dixon, Against the Day marks the emergence of what might be called Pynchon’s “late style.” Complex yet warmly accessibl
e, eschewing the formal experimentation of Gravity’s Rainbow, this is a vast, multitextured work set primarily in the two decades of geopolitical turbulence leading up to the First World War. Turbulence is an appropriate metaphor given one of the novel’s central plot strands—the madcap, Jules Verne-style exploits of“The Chums of Chance,” global adventurers of varying degrees of competence who traverse the skies in an airship captained by the indefatigable Randolph St. Cosmo. Within this loose framing device, Pynchon leads us on wondrous detours to silent-era Hollywood, Iceland, the Balkans, Göttingen, the Siberian tundra, and the spiritualist backrooms of late Victorian London.

  In many respects, Against the Day exhibits all of the hallmarks of Pynchon’s earlier writing—the ethical commitment to those who “couldn’t buy a baby bonnet for a piss ant” if “a nightshirt for an elephant cost two cents”; the fascination with strange cosmologies, fragile folk cultures and outlaw(ed) traditions; the scorn for corporate skulduggery; the knotted relationship between “historical” and “narrative” time; the loopy fondness for talking animals and obscene songs. There are also, however, a number of new developments, particularly Pynchon’s evocation of fin de siècle anarchism and political violence—a reckoning with the moral vortex of the blast radius that resonates deeply with our contemporary situation. Impossible to summarize, Against the Day is utterly unique yet unmistakably the work of one of America’s greatest and most mysterious literary artists. SamT

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  The Inheritance of Loss

  Kiran Desai

  Lifespan | b. 1971 (India)

  First Published | 2006

  First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)

  Man Booker Prize | 2006

  The Inheritance of Loss is Desai’s second novel; her first, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, won the Betty Trask Award in 1998.

  This multigenerational story is set in India and New York, over which Britain hovers as the ghost of colonial past, casting long shadows over the present. In Kalimpong, the orphaned teenage girl Sai lives with her Cambridge-educated grandfather, a retired judge. Although neglected, Sai is cherished by the cook whose son, Biju, subsists as an immigrant in New York. The narrative moves between the two locations to interweave human stories with the politics of bourgeois neocolonialism, globalization, multiculturalism, and terrorist insurgency.

  The Judge and Biju offer insights into different migrant experiences, in terms of class, historical, and geographical location. Yet both have been indoctrinated with a firm belief in the inherent superiority of the West. The Judge’s sense of internal exile results from the humiliation of his colonial encounter, leaving him with a festering hatred for his culture. Biju’s experience of cultural dislocation within the New York underclass is equally destructive. Local ethnic tensions are dramatized through Sai’s doomed romance with tutor Gyan, who joins the Nepalese insurgents.

  However, the novel’s pessimistic vision of a multicultural future is peppered with penetrating humor. Through the immediacy of comic dialogue, Desai explores colonial history and postcolonial tensions. The shifting sensibility of modernity is articulated through the amusing superiority of the Jane Austen reading class, who pitch the BBC against CNN, and sneer at a country where jam is labeled Smuckers rather than “By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.”

  Essentially a novel about longing and belonging, Desai captures the nuances of her flawed characters with tenderness and affection. KDS

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Half of a Yellow Sun

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Lifespan | b. 1977 (Nigeria)

  First Published | 2006

  First Published by | Fourth Estate (London)

  Orange Prize for Fiction | 2007

  The 1967–70 Nigerian–Biafran War—the subject of Adichie’s second novel—started with the Nigerian Igbo ethnic group setting up their own state and ended with mass starvation caused by a Nigerian blockade. It is a conflagration that may not ring many bells with Westerners these days, but it was a burning issue of the time and motivated John Lennon to return his MBE in disgust at British involvement.

  Adichie’s 2003 debut Purple Hibiscus was highly regarded, but its horizons were limited by its first person narration and the fact that its protagonist was only fifteen years old. With Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie goes panoramic, weaving a wide-ranging story seen through the eyes of three disparate characters across the course of nearly a decade: houseboy Ugwu, beautiful English-educated Olanna, and Richard, an awkward but radical Englishman infatuated by Olanna’s semiestranged twin sister. Added to this is a book within a book, a retrospectively written account of the story the book tells, whose authorship is a sublime twist in the tale.

  Adichie is clearly writing for an international market but is never heavy-handed as she imparts the minutiae of Nigerian life to the unfamiliar. Nor is she didactic, candidly acknowledging snobbery within the beleaguered Igbos’ ranks. Inspired by many of the same things as her compatriot Ben Okri, Adichie spurns his magic realism for the more naturalistic devices of her hero Chinua Achebe, who was directly involved with the short-lived Biafran government. SE

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  Falling Man

  Don DeLillo

  Lifespan | b. 1936 (U.S.)

  First Published | 2007

  First Published by | Scribner (New York)

  Original Language | English

  Falling Man refers to the photograph of a suited man falling head first from the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—a photograph that became an emblem of the 9/11 attacks. The falling man at the center of DeLillo’s narrative is a performance artist who dangles himself from the end of a rope in prominent places throughout New York City, mimicking the pose of the man in the photograph—one leg straight, one leg bent, arms by his sides, arrested in a headlong plunge toward death.

  The novel tells two stories that are balanced around the image of the falling man. The central story follows the slow adjustment of a New York family to life in the days after the attacks. This narrative of posttraumatic recovery is spliced together with much briefer episodes that dramatize the preparation for the attacks, told from the perspective of the 9/11 terrorists. These two narratives meet at the end of the novel, at the moment of catastrophic impact between plane and building.

  The frozen image of the falling man intervenes between the oppositions that the novel crafts. Endlessly falling, his plight suggests the haunting quality of the attacks—the sense that September 11, 2001, has never ended. But if the dangling man is evocative of the enduring horror of 9/11, the novel also finds something beautiful in his poised suspense. It is from the poetics of arrested gesture that the novel points toward a new accommodation between before and after, between “us” and “them.” PB

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  Junot Díaz

  Lifespan | b. 1968 (Dominican Republic)

  First Published | 2007

  First Published by | Riverhead Books (New York)

  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction | 2008

  Junot Díaz’s long-anticipated first novel tells of Oscar’s hopeless love life and his family’s struggles.

  “They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos . . . that it was a demon . . .”

  The long-awaited first novel from Junot Díaz expands the short story about Oscar Wao—a lonely sci-fi nerd who falls hopelessly in love with women who never reciprocate his feelings—originally published in the New Yorker seven years previously. It tells of Oscar’s sister, his mother, and his grandfather who, in defying the vicious Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, brought terrible suffering upon the family’s subsequent generations.

  According to the narrator, Yunior, this suffering wa
s the result of a fukú, or curse, a superstition as old as the first European arrival on Hispaniola and blamed for anything from the Yankees losing a ball game to an inability to have male children. In the story of Oscar Wao (a mishearing of “Oscar Wilde”), the fukú is responsible for the death of Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, and two of his three beautiful daughters, as well as the suffering of the much younger third daughter (Oscar’s mother). It is this same fukú that drives Oscar mad with love and puts an end to his short, desperate life.

  The threads of the story that tell of Oscar’s family, in particular those set in the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s reign of terror, are the most captivating, brought to life by Díaz’s playful voice, which is liberally peppered with Spanish (and especially Dominican) slang and sci-fi references, a style representative of Gabriel García Márquez’s “Macondo” turned “McOndo”: magic realism for the diaspora generation. PC

  See all books from the 2000s

  2000s

  The Blind Side of the Heart

  Julia Franck