1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 110
Lifespan | b. 1970 (East Germany)
First Published | 2007
First Published by | S. Fischer Verlag (Frankfurt)
Original Title | Die Mittagsfrau
The Blind Side of the Heart tells the story of Helene, whose tragic love life leads her eventually to abandon her seven-year-old son.
The Blind Side of the Heart, which won Julia Franck the coveted German Book Prize in 2007, tells the story of Helene, a woman whose life-journey takes her from Bautzen in Saxony at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the Berlin of the Roaring Twenties, to occupied Pomerania at the close of the Second World War. The story of Helene’s life also encompasses the twentieth-century history of Germany, spanning two world wars, the Weimar era, and the rise of National Socialism.
The German title of the novel (Die Mittagsfrau, literally “Lady Midday”) refers to the Wendish legend of a woman who would appear at the hottest part of the day in harvest time and condemn those she encountered to death unless they could promptly answer the questions that she posed to them. The title of Franck’s novel thematizes the centrality of narration to life, particularly as The Blind Side of the Heart charts the progressive emotional petrifaction that results from increased repression and silence about a problematic personal history.
The tragic end of a love affair with a charismatic philosophy student plunges Helene into an amnesiac work ethic as a nurse, as well as into increasing emotional apathy. This in turn leads to her ill-advised marriage to an emphatic Nazi sympathizer, who falsifies Helene’s papers to cover over her Jewish roots and changes her name to Alice. The prologue and epilogue that frame the story are narrated from the point of view of Helene’s son, Peter, abandoned by his mother during the flight from Pomerania to Berlin at the close of the Second World War. He represents the millions of Germans who lived in the long shadow of the Nazi era—the physically absent mother in this instance figures as the master trope for an inaccessible and repressed past. KKr
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The Gathering
Anne Enright
Lifespan | b. 1962 (Ireland)
First Published | 2007
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
Man Booker Prize | 2007
Enright has described her epic family novel as “the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepy.”
“I need to bear witness . . .”
Dublin-born author Anne Enright wrote three novels, The Wig My Father Wore (1995), What Are You Like? (2000), and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), before writing The Gathering, the novel that would win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2007.
The Hegarty family is a large family. The novel’s story revolves around thirty-nine-year-old Veronica Hegarty, a mother of two who is in a state of shock after the death of her brother Liam. After years of struggling with alcoholism, Liam has drowned himself in Brighton, walking into the sea with pockets full of stones. The majority of the novel is comprised of flashback sequences in which Veronica tries to locate the motivation for his suicide.
Whether Veronica finds that cause is debatable. The genesis of Liam’s suicide may or may not lie in an incident that occurred the summer that she and her siblings spent at their grandmother’s house. And it may or may not have spiraled from the love triangle that her grandmother was involved in. It is the ambiguity—of “shifting stories and the waking dreams”—that Enright crafts through her prose and her ability to shift the narrative from the inside of one character’s head to the next that bear her mark as a master novelist.
The interior landscape that the novel inhabits stands in stark contrast to the robust corporeal description that runs throughout. Veronica’s experience of grieving for Liam is thus something that is mapped out emotionally as well as physically as “. . . a confusing feeling—somewhere between diarrhea and sex—this grief that is almost genital.” The themes of love and death here intersect on the body, ultimately evoking the lasting scar of love that remains to haunt us when those whom we love leave. JSD
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Kieron Smith, Boy
James Kelman
Lifespan | b. 1946 (Scotland)
First Published | 2008
First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)
Original Language | English
James Kelman is notorious for dividing the critics, and Kieron Smith, Boy provoked heated debate.
“Ye caught fish in it too.”
Kieron Smith, Boy marks a new period in James Kelman’s writing career, as it suggests a new general development in contemporary writing. The novel bears some resemblance to Kelman’s 2004 novel, You Have To Be Careful in the Land of the Free, in that both novels are virtually plotless, and both are locked tightly within the consciousness of an isolated narrator. In the case of You Have To Be Careful, the narrator belongs to a familiar Kelman lineage, being a working-class Scotsman who finds himself out of step with his surroundings (here as an “unassimilatit non-integratit immigrant” living in the United States). But in Kieron Smith, Boy, Kelman writes from the perspective of a child who narrates the story of his family’s relocation from Glaswegian tenements to a housing scheme on the outskirts of the city.
Kelman’s adoption of a child’s voice might put Kieron Smith, Boy in a tradition of novels that see the world through child’s eyes. But Kelman achieves with his use of this voice something that is entirely unprecedented, and that amounts to nothing less than a reinvention of the novel form. In giving language to the thought of Kieron Smith, Kelman’s prose conjures an intense and overwhelming intimacy with the movement of an imagination grappling with the outrageousness of ordinary young life. In reading the novel, one cannot resist asking oneself why this boy should share the inside of his mind with us in this way. What has allowed this miracle of frictionless telepathy to take place? To respond to this question is to recognize that Kelman has forged a language here that reshapes the relationship between reader and narrator, and that, in its poetic perfection, suggests a new way of encountering the movement of the mind. PB
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Home
Marilynne Robinson
Lifespan | b. 1947 (U.S.)
First Published | 2008
First Published by | Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York)
Orange Prize for Fiction | 2009
Home is only Robinson’s third novel in twenty-eight years, but it has cemented her standing as one of the most important living writers.
Home is a retelling of the events of Robinson’s second novel, Gilead, from the perspective of the Boughton family. With it she cements her reputation as one of the most extraordinary novelists writing today, unique in her powerful combination of intellectual rigor and compassion for human frailty.
The plot is minimal. Glory Boughton returns to the house of her father, the ailing Reverend Boughton, at the age of thirty-eight after a failed engagement. Shortly after her arrival, her brother Jack, the much-loved, much-mourned black sheep of the family, sends word that he too will be coming home. The arrival of this prodigal son brings his dying father great joy, but Jack’s sins prove too many and too much for the Reverend to forgive, and his last words to his most distant and beloved son, the son “whom he has favored as one does a wound,” are spoken in petty frustration. Jack leaves and Glory is left as the inheritor of the old family home, preserving it for a time when Jack’s mixed-race son might return in his place.
Set in a small town in the American Midwest against the background of the 1950s civil rights movement, Home is an astonishingly thorough and poignant meditation on the power and limits of faith and forgiveness, longing and loss, and the spiritual isolation of those souls who are seemingly predestined to find themselves alienated wherever they go—above all when they attempt to return home. Robinson’s spare prose, at once simple and poetic, is unforgiving in its dissection of damaged individuals struggling to
ward a state of grace, but the seriousness with which she approaches both the theological and human implications of each gesture and encounter creates the possibility of transcendence, or of something like it. JHu
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The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Lifespan | b. 1974 (India)
First Published | 2008
First Published by | Atlantic Books (London)
Man Booker Prize | 2008
Aravind Adiga’s breakout first novel depicts an India that is jarringly different from the country usually seen in the West.
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, made a huge splash upon publication, garnering voluminous praise and making Adiga the second-youngest author ever to win the Man Booker Prize.
The book received this praise for the story it tells and the uniqueness of the protagonist’s character and narrative voice. Balram Halwai, according to his name and his caste, ought to be a sweet-maker in the small village in rural India where he was born (referred to as the Darkness, in contrast to the Light of the big cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore). But there is nothing typical about Balram. He is an entrepreneur, and as the story unfolds—told over seven nights to Premier Wen Jiabao of China in an imaginary series of letters from Balram’s tiny, chandelier-equipped office in Bangalore—we learn just what it means to be one of the new breed of entrepreneurs in India.
This is not the beautiful, exotic, magic-realist India of Salman Rushdie that is so often idealized by Western readers. Instead, this is a story of the dark, dirty, corrupt India that, along with China, is booming while the West stagnates. It is the story of India debunked, the story of one man’s attempt to escape the dead end that is, according to Balram, the lot of the vast majority of the Indian population. In Balram’s eyes, the people have been hoodwinked and sold into servitude by fellow countrymen against whose ruthlessness the only response is more ruthlessness. As he says, “Only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed . . . can break out of the coop.”
The White Tiger exposes the stale attitudes and deep-rooted injustices that keep Indian society running, yet shows that something is about to break under all the pressure. This is a very angry book that manages, remarkably, to be very funny indeed. PC
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Cost
Roxana Robinson
Lifespan | b. 1946 (U.S.)
First Published | 2008
First Published by | Sarah Crichton Books (New York)
Original Language | English
Roxana Robinson’s fourth novel deals with the far-reaching consequences of a young man’s addiction to heroin.
“Her memory was gone.”
Roxana Robinson had already written three novels—Sweetwater (2003), This Is My Daughter (1998), and Summer Light (1988)—in addition to three short story collections and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe (1989) when she sat down to write Cost, a story of addiction that wonderfully explores the intricacies of family relationships and emotions.
Protagonist Julia Lambert is an art professor at Columbia University in New York. She has two adult sons, Steven and Jack, and two elderly parents, Edward and Katherine, and when Cost opens, Julia is entertaining said parents at her summer home in Maine. And she is feeling immensely frustrated with her childlike behavior toward them. It is into this fraught space that Steven, on his way up to the house, steps. Steven has just visited his younger brother and has learned that Jack is addicted to heroin. The discovery of this addiction—and the ensuing family intervention—shapes the plot of the book as we witness two characters from each generation cycle through their own personal anxieties in the face of Jack’s demise.
Though it is Jack’s addiction that drives the novel, the characters provide it with its conflict and momentum. Robinson has said that she plans biographies for each of her characters before she begins writing, and in Cost this is evident. It is the interiority of her characters’ landscapes, described in intensely scrutinous writing and careful language that gives Cost its remarkable quality. Robinson has often been tagged as a chronicler of conservative WASP life, and Cost will undoubtedly be marketed as a book about heroin addiction. Both are misleading in the face of a novel about the depth of human anxiety, about discovering that the cost of losing one’s family may just motivate us all. JSD
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American Rust
Philipp Meyer
Lifespan | b. 1974 (U.S.)
First Published | 2009
First Published by | Spiegel & Grau (New York)
Original Language | English
Meyer worked several different jobs, including stints as a banker and a paramedic, before writing American Rust.
“A small thin figure . . .”
This assured first novel from Philipp Meyer presents from a number of first person perspectives the brutalized nature of life in a dying Pennsylvania steel town. Isaac English, a strange but smart twenty year old, and his high school football star friend Billy Poe have both stayed in Buell, Pennsylvania, after high school despite being offered the chance to leave. Now they dream of sending Isaac to California to study astrophysics with the help of the railroads and four thousand dollars that he has stolen from his disabled father. On the way out of town, however, they encounter three homeless men; Poe cannot resist a fight, and one of the strangers ends up dead. In following the fallout of this event from the perspectives not only of Isaac and Poe but also Poe’s mother Grace, police chief and Grace’s longtime lover Bud Harris, and Isaac’s sister Lee, the reader is taken further and further into a world where economic calamity has rendered free will an illusion.
In the two decades that the main protagonists have been alive, 150,000 jobs have been lost in the Mon Valley region. While American Rust is vividly plotted, its real strength is in depicting the consequences of this catastrophic blow to the blue-collar middle class at every level: from the crippling demoralization of a man who wants to work and cannot, to the families condemned generation after generation to a life lived in unheated trailers eating only what they can kill, to communities unable to pay for basic services, existing in a landscape of rusting steelworks that nobody can afford to tear down. At a time when hundreds of thousands more well-paid manufacturing jobs are being lost across the United States, this prescient novel delivers an unsentimental indictment of the human costs of late capitalism. JHu
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Invisible
Paul Auster
Lifespan | b. 1947 (U.S.)
First Published | 2009
First Published by | H. Holt & Co. (New York)
Original Language | English
Invisible unfolds in the New York and Paris of Auster’s early twenties, though he says it is not at all autobiographical.
“. . . a know nothing boy . . .”
In his latest novel, Paul Auster returns to the world of his undergraduate days, focusing on aspiring poet Adam Walker, who, in the spring of 1967, is finishing his sophomore year at Columbia University. One evening, while at a party, Walker meets mysterious Frenchman Rudolf Born and his beautiful girlfriend, Margot. Though almost twice Walker’s age and a visiting professor of political science at the university’s School of International Affairs, Born takes an interest in him and initiates Walker into a world that is exciting and dangerous, competitive and masculine. What at first seems like a literary fantasy straight out of a Bertolucci film ends suddenly in a way that permanently alters Walker’s life, forcing him to confront a side of his personality that will haunt him until his death.
Having been fully caught up in Walker’s story, we are pulled up short in the second part of the novel, in which it turns out that what we have been reading is not fiction at all but rather Walker’s memoir of the spring of 1967. Forty years on, Walker is still trying to come to grips with the e
vents of that year and is enlisting the help of a former classmate, now a famous novelist, in overcoming his writer’s block as he attempts to purge himself of his emotional turmoil.
Auster is on familiar ground as he once again adds layer upon layer of narrative that shifts between characters and points of view, yet there is a depth of emotion in this novel that is conveyed with a richness and sensibility sometimes absent in his other work. As we move from New York to Paris following Walker through the summer and fall of 1967, the lines between fiction and memoir are blurred, and we must question which narrative we can really believe. PC
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The Children’s Book
A. S. Byatt
Lifespan | b. 1936 (England)
First Published | 2009
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Original Language | English
The Children’s Book explores the darker side of childhood in the late Victorian era.
“His eyes were blue . . .”
Covering twenty-five years from the last days of the Victorian era to the end of the First World War and with a cast of hundreds, The Children’s Book is a vastly ambitious novel that combines trenchant social analysis of turn-of-the-century utopianism in all its forms (Fabianism, Quakerism, the suffrage movement, anarchism, and New Paganism to name just a few) with a compelling depiction of the darker aspects of childhood. The intensities of youth, from the dreamlike sense of oneness with the natural world to the opaquely disturbing but endlessly powerful experience of infant sexuality and the Oedipal complex, are strikingly connected by Byatt to the development of English and German society in the run up to the Great War.