1960's Literature: 1965-1969
This the time period where the discussion of world literature begins to get interesting in terms of what a general audience for world literature cares about. Before 1965 you are basically talking about an audience of students and specialists, after 1965 there are solid streams of experimental literature, world literature, non-English/French/German European literature as well as a continuing discussion about the relevant canon from this period. So you can basically take everything before 1965 and put it one pot, and then start making new pots starting here.
Published 3/5/16
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
by Kurt Vonnegut
Like Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut is one of those authors who emerged from the genre ghetto of science fiction to obtain something like critical acclaim. I didn't live through the 1960's, so I can't testify to how I went down, but I know that growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980's and 90's, Vonnegut was very much a well read author whose works were much in evidence in used books stores and private homes alike. He never made much of an impression on me. I read a ton of science fiction in junior high school, and in college I read most of the beats and the existentialists but I took a pass on Vonnegut and his ilk, except as he was presented in school.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is the first of four titles by Vonnegut that made the 2006 edition of the 1001 Books list. He lost two of those in the 2008 revision, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is one of those two. I think, probably that God Bless You made it onto the 2006 list because it is a "first"- the first Vonnegut book to feature his alter ego, Kilgore Trout, and even though it wasn't the breakthrough hit of Slaughter-House Five, it introduces many of the themes that he would ride to glory in the later 1960's. One aspect of God Bless You that is striking is the near absence of anything that you could remotely call "science fiction." Other than a brief stop by the main character at any out of the way convention of science fiction writers, God Bless You is firmly grounded in the present. No aliens, no time travel, just everyday reality.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
by Kurt Vonnegut
Like Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut is one of those authors who emerged from the genre ghetto of science fiction to obtain something like critical acclaim. I didn't live through the 1960's, so I can't testify to how I went down, but I know that growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980's and 90's, Vonnegut was very much a well read author whose works were much in evidence in used books stores and private homes alike. He never made much of an impression on me. I read a ton of science fiction in junior high school, and in college I read most of the beats and the existentialists but I took a pass on Vonnegut and his ilk, except as he was presented in school.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is the first of four titles by Vonnegut that made the 2006 edition of the 1001 Books list. He lost two of those in the 2008 revision, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is one of those two. I think, probably that God Bless You made it onto the 2006 list because it is a "first"- the first Vonnegut book to feature his alter ego, Kilgore Trout, and even though it wasn't the breakthrough hit of Slaughter-House Five, it introduces many of the themes that he would ride to glory in the later 1960's. One aspect of God Bless You that is striking is the near absence of anything that you could remotely call "science fiction." Other than a brief stop by the main character at any out of the way convention of science fiction writers, God Bless You is firmly grounded in the present. No aliens, no time travel, just everyday reality.
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| The author photo from the original edition of August is a Wicked Month is called by Wikipedia, "The greatest author photograph of all time." |
August is a Wicked Month (1965)
by Edna O'Brien
Edna O'Brien is a forerunner of the popular "chick lit" genre of the last few decades, featuring women who are sexually active and outside the normal world of marriage and children. By the mid 1960s, O'Brien wasn't the only writer working this territory, Doris Lessing for one, Francoise Sagan for another. But O'Brien was unique by virtue of her Irish heritage. Her books were banned in Ireland, and this gives her work a heroic sheen that would otherwise be absent, were the reader to judge strictly on the text itself.
Ellen, the heroine of August if a Wicked Month, is the disaffected Mother of a young boy, divorced from the father, dreaming of escape while living and working in London. When her ex takes their child to the woods for a week of camping, she decides to travel to France, where she has a variety of sexual and social encounters.
August is a Wicked Month is unremittingly dark. Ellen's behavior is understandable within the context of 20th century women's history, but it doesn't make her very likable. Her unusually frank depiction of sexual activity raises an eyebrow today, a half century after publication. She is straight forward about contracting sexually transmitted disease and methods of ejaculation. Her eagerness to engage in casual sexual encounters is almost nonparallel in the history of literature.
What appears to be a book almost without a story is brought to live with a shocking third act, that is no doubt the reason that it was included on the 2006 1001 Books list. In 2008, it got the axe, reducing O'Brien's contributions from three to two.
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| Ngugi wa Thiong'o is one of the best known members of the Kikuyu ethnic group of Kenya |
Published 3/13/16
The River Between (1965)
by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is one of those authors who is a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature (which doesn't actually reveal their decision process, so it's just speculation), presumably on the strength of his overall output and lifetime of political activism in Kenya. He did a year in prison! Thiong'o is also an important figure in the movement to "decolonize" literature. His early works, including this one, were written in English, but he deliberately abandoned the English language in favor of his native Gikuyu. Ethnically, he is Kikuyu, the largest single ethnic group in Kenya, although they are only 20 percent of the total population. The Agĩkũyũ, as they were known, were a significant non-subjugated people, even though the coast of Kenya had long been a preferred port of Arab slave traders and merchants.
The culture of Kikuyu independence provides the back drop to the events of The River Between, which show Kikuyu culture in the process of assimilation to Christian religion, but prior to any kind of interference from actual Western governments. The River Between takes place in the early 20th century and the action is centered on two adjoining Kikuyu villages. One becomes the center of pro-Christian Kikuyu, the other the center of anti-Western sentiment. The focus of action is Waiyaki, who is actually the son of the last tribal leader to (unsuccessfully) call for armed resistance to white missionaries. Waiyaki is sent to the mission school, but told to keep his heart with his people. After finishing his education, he returns to the village to set up their first school.
Meanwhile, tensions rise between the Christian and Animist villagers. Thiong'o does an excellent job of demonstrating the conflicting loyalties that were a prominent feature of the African colonial experience. Modern readers may be put off by the centrality of female circumcision, or "female genital mutilation" as it is called today, to the plot of The River Between.
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| A young Marguerite Duras |
The Vice Consul (1965)
by Marguerite Duras
I have a complicated relationship with the European colonial experience in the 19th and 20th century. As a democratic American citizen, I'm of course appalled. As a vacationing citizen of the world, the "colonial experience" is a short-hand for an appealing vacation, i.e. luxurious restored mansions, plentiful staff on hand to cater to your whims, As a student of 20th century history, I'm appalled by the vacationing citizen of the world, who views European colonialism through an aesthetic gaze, instead of confronting the terrible realities of colonialism.
But honestly, besides learning the story of the oppressed, what can you do? Make sure one vacations where the locals aren't being horribly exploited, but beyond that, the European colonial experience is in the past, and the only way to access it is through the literature of 20th century Europe. Marguerite Duras drew heavily on her Asian experiences in her oeuvre. The Vice Consul is set in India, not Vietnam and the characters are mostly English, though the Vice Consul and his whore wife are French.
Unlike her other books on the 1001 Books list, the sex in The Vice Consul stays in the background- no explicit fondling of girl-flesh to be had here. Duras interweaves the story of a disgraced Cambodian beggar woman into the more conventional tale of bored European colonials and their whispered about sex capades. The portion dealing with the Cambodian beggar is the first time I can remember a European writer tackling the experience of a member of the Asian peasantry.
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| George Perec: A crazy coot! |
Things: A Story of the Sixties(1965)
by George Perec
Things: A Story of the Sixties is a well-regarded early post-modernist type book by French-Jewish author George Perec. An initial English translation soon after the original French publication flopped, and the book was reintroduced to the English speaking world in 1990, with an entirely new publication. Thus, for many decades, Things: A Story of the Sixties was widely famous almost everywhere but the English speaking world, and now it is a kind of minor classic- far better known in England, where some people actually read books in French, then here, where no one does.
Things tells the story of a young couple, known only by their first names, who are something like early Yuppies- obsessed with materialism and status in post war Europe. They live in Paris, they work as market researchers, they strive for an upper class life style. Suddenly, they become dissatisfied and decamp to Morocco, where the woman gets a job as a French teacher and the man loafs around doing nothing. Almost as suddenly, they abandon their North African adventure, and return to France where they both get jobs in the marketing field they left behind.
Both Jerome and Slyvia are portrayed, if that is the right word, as existing without any kind of inner life, simultaneously repelled by society and yet fundamentally incapable of existing outside of it. They are like mannequins, automatons or robots, and the book was received as a strident critique of the emerging consumer society which blossomed world wide in the mid 1960s. In that way, the French edition published in 1965, was timely. By the time the well distributed second English translation was released in 1990, 25 years had proved that Perec was sage in his description of a world obsessed with surface and status.
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| Jean Rhys, dangerous woman. |
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
by Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys was out of print and living in obscurity in Cornwall, of all places, when an English actress made a plea over the BBC for any information about her whereabouts. She wanted to do a radio version of one of Rhys's out of print novels from the 1920s, and no one could give her the rights. Everyone, it turned out, just assumed that Rhys had died either during or immediately after World War II. The subsequent radio version of her novel spurred new editions of her existing work, and it turned out that she had been working on a new novel since the late 1940's.
That novel was Wide Sargasso Sea, written from the perspective of the "Mad Woman in the Attic" from Charlotte Bronte's book Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea sat at the intersection of several hot trends in literature: It was set in Jamaica and Dominica (Rhys' home was on Dominica, though she left as a teenager literally never to retunr), it was, of course, written by a woman and it was about a character from another famous novel, making it as post-modern as post-modern gets. Also, it was under one hundred fifty pages long. Really just the perfect storm of characteristics to ensure that it would become one of the most read novels of the mid to late 20th century, and a staple text in undergraduate literature courses in England and America for the next fifty years.
It's incredible because Rhys' novels in the 20s hardly been ignored. It was more like the author herself chose to disappear. That's all well and good, but for her to come back close to a half century later and drop Wide Sargasso Sea at the end of her life, well it's just an extraordinary second act, and unlike any that I can think of up to this point. I guess, during her thirty years away from the spotlight she struggled with substance abuse. It sounds like she was pretty desperately impoverished during that period.
Rhys reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston, who was living in obscurity, cleaning hotel rooms at the end of her life, except that Rhys made it all the back, and wrote the biggest hit of her life.
Published 4/12/16
The Birds Fall Down (1966)
by Rebecca West
It actually took me just as long to read The Birds Fall Down(377 page) as The Recognitions (960 pages). The Birds Fall Down was West's last novel, so this is a good place to evaluate her contributions to the 1001 Books list, 2006 edition. Both The Birds Fall Down and Harriet Hume got the axe in the 2008 revision of the 1001 Books list. That leaves The Return of the Soldier and The Thinking Reed as her two remaining entries on the list.
There is a strong argument that The Return of the Soldier is a top 100 title on the strength of it having the first depiction of post-traumatic stress disorder (or "shell shock") in literature, in addition to a strong female protagonist and woman author. It's less clear that The Thinking Reed belongs. Based on my own post on that book, I can't make a case for it staying. West was also an important public intellectual who wrote non-fiction and criticism, so the 1001 Books project doesn't capture her full import. I've not read anything that would cause me to pursue her further afield. She is a significant 20th century writer, but not a life changer.
The Birds Fall Down is about a young Russian-English woman travelling with her exiled Russian Count Grandfather from Paris to the French countryside. While on the train they encounter a young Revolutionary, known to the Count, and it becomes clear that a trusted aide to the County is in fact a triple agent, betraying both the Czar and the Revolutionaries at the same time. He's accomplished this by using three different identities, a fact that only becomes clear during the train rider.
Based at least partially on the shock he experiences at the train-ride revelations about his trusted associate (the triple agent) the Count dies just after exiting the train. The rest of the book is occupied with funeral arrangements and the consequences of the discovery of the triple-agent. It sounds straight forward, but I was as confused during the intiial train ride as can be possible while reading a book that doesn't involve any complicated post-modern narration techniques. It's just three people sitting together on the train, but not until they got off the train did I figure out what had happened.
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| Woland (the Devil) has a massive black cat called the Behemoth who can walk and talk like a human. |
Published 4/3/16
The Master and Margarita (1966)
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita has one of those quintessential 20th century publication histories, written during the darkest parts of Stalinist rule in Russia between 1928 and 1940, finally published in 1966, and immediately hailed as a lost classic. Amazingly, prior to publication almost nobody knew The Master and Margarita even existed, despite Bulgarov maintaining a popular and critical audience. Today, The Master and Margarita is a universally acknowledged classic of Russian literature, with dozens of film, television, theatrical and operatic versions existing in almost every major language.
The Master and Margarita tells the tale of the Devil arriving in Moscow during the post-revolutionary Soviet period. Many have argued that Mick Jagger was directly inspired by the opening chapters when he penned the opening verse of Sympathy for the Devil, "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.... Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands, and sealed his fate." The actual plot of The Master and Margarita switches between the Russian present and the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus, with the Devil (called Woland) insisting that he was present in Pilate's palace.
The Master in the title is not Woland, but a Russian author who has coincidentally written a novel about Pilate's behavior during the crucifixion, a novel which as been barred from publication by the Soviet authorities. Margarita starts off as The Master's lover, but she is then selected by Woland to serve as his consort at his Midnight Ball. Before that, Woland arranges for the death of the head of the Moscow literary bureaucracy, and poses as a "black magician" hypnotizing a large audience of Muscovites and convincing them to parade around in the streets naked.
The Master and Margarita (1966)
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita has one of those quintessential 20th century publication histories, written during the darkest parts of Stalinist rule in Russia between 1928 and 1940, finally published in 1966, and immediately hailed as a lost classic. Amazingly, prior to publication almost nobody knew The Master and Margarita even existed, despite Bulgarov maintaining a popular and critical audience. Today, The Master and Margarita is a universally acknowledged classic of Russian literature, with dozens of film, television, theatrical and operatic versions existing in almost every major language.
The Master and Margarita tells the tale of the Devil arriving in Moscow during the post-revolutionary Soviet period. Many have argued that Mick Jagger was directly inspired by the opening chapters when he penned the opening verse of Sympathy for the Devil, "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.... Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands, and sealed his fate." The actual plot of The Master and Margarita switches between the Russian present and the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus, with the Devil (called Woland) insisting that he was present in Pilate's palace.
The Master in the title is not Woland, but a Russian author who has coincidentally written a novel about Pilate's behavior during the crucifixion, a novel which as been barred from publication by the Soviet authorities. Margarita starts off as The Master's lover, but she is then selected by Woland to serve as his consort at his Midnight Ball. Before that, Woland arranges for the death of the head of the Moscow literary bureaucracy, and poses as a "black magician" hypnotizing a large audience of Muscovites and convincing them to parade around in the streets naked.
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| Flann O'Brien was the third member of the holy trinity of early to mid20th century experimental Irish literature alongside Joyce and Beckett. |
The Third Policeman (1966)
by Flann O'Brien
The Third Policeman was written by Brian O'Nolan (AKA Flann O'Brien) between 1939 and 1940 but went unpublished until 1966, when his widow got it published after he died. He told everyone that the manuscript had been lost, at least partially to avoid the shame of not being able to find a publisher, but it turns out it sat on a shelf in his dining room, in plain sight, for some 30 years until he died.
The significance of The Third Policeman is that you can make a strong case that it was the first fully post-modern novel, leapfrogging the steps that his countryman Samuel Beckett was taking early in his career. Of course, Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, three years after O'Nolan's widow got The Third Policeman published for the first time, so one can fairly observed that O'Nolan/O'Brien was a generation (20 years) ahead of his time at least.
O'Brien deploys the full panoply of techniques that became synonymous with post-modern literature. Most notably, he creates an imaginary "scientist" named De Selby. The narrator is a De Selby "scholar" and includes multiple page long footnotes about De Selby and his bizarre experiments to prove the "non existence" of night and sleep. The text plays with conventions of time and space. For example, the fact that the narrator is dead and living a kind of repetitive hellish existence is not revealed until the end of the book. Even so the publishers take the added step of adding a letter O'Nolan wrote to William Saroyan when he was trying to get it published in the 1940s.
For me the pleasure was in the post-modern stylistic flourishes than the main plot of a hell bound repetition of events bound to a guilty conscience. The plot itself anticipates the deconstruction of Beckett's trilogy- written after The Third Policeman. When O'Nolan was writing The Third Policeman, Beckett was publishing Murphy. Murphy is a highly conventional novel that is the "before" in Beckett's evolution to Nobel Prize for Literature winning status.
Taking all this into account, and like many of Beckett's canonical works, The Third Policeman is not a very fun read, with the notable exception of the "De Selby footnotes." Because one doesn't learn of the death of the narrator until the end of the book, you can reasonably expect to be confused about what, if anything, is actually happening. Readers with a background in Joyce and later Beckett will at least have the context in mind, but O'Nolan was really out there.
It gives me pause to think that this book was not published in the author's lifetime. O'Nolan wrote this amazing book, and couldn't find a single person to publish it, and gave up. What is the lesson there? That you can write a canonical work and utterly fail to find an audience. You can be world class, and still languish in obscurity. What was even the point? The author never got to enjoy anything as the result of his efforts. What is the value of art if it does not benefit the artist?
Published 4/11/16
The Joke (1967)
by Milan Kundera
The Joke is Milan Kundera's first novel, and it only lasted two years on the 1001 Books list. The translation history from Czech to English. Kundera hated the original translation, and a second, approved translation came out in the 80s. Kundera eventually grew disenchanted with that translation as well, so now there is a third version. According to the Wikipedia plot summary, Kundera called this book "The Joke" because there are several jokes at the center of the plot, about the interconnected lives of two students attending university at the same time in newly Communist Prague after World War II. One is denounced by a friend after he makes an innocent joke with a romantic target. He is sent off to the Czech version of a re-education camp, where he mines coal and begins an ambivalent relationship with a mysterious young girl.
Ludvik, the student sent away to the re-education camp, recovers from his time in disgrace and becomes a successful professional. Years later, he meets Helena, the wife of his rival(Pavel.) He seduces Helena, but what begins as a simple revenge plot becomes complicated, in a darkly comic fashion involving a failed suicide attempt and laxatives. Like many works of the Czech New Wave, and the Polish New Wave and the French New Wave, Kundera's debut addresses issues of intertwined fate between the main characters.
Published 4/18/16
The Quest for Christa T. (1968)
by Christa Wolf
Translation by Christopher Middelton
Like The Joke by Milan Kundera, The Quest for Christa T. is a literary depiction of life under Communist rule, this time in East Germany (vs. the Czechoslovakian setting of The Joke.) The Quest for Christa T. has nothing overt to do with politics, but the title character suffers from what might be termed "existential despair" at the thought of living the crassly materialistic society of post-World War II East Germany. The very existence of this novel rebuts a dominant strand of Cold War Communist propaganda, that citizens in the East lived spiritually fulfilling lives without the help of religion. As we all know today, that claim was always a sham, but that wasn't the case in the late 1960's.
At a time when many Western intellectuals painted rosy pictures of life under Russian/Eastern European Communism, the actual authors writing in those areas gave a much more realistic portrayal of life. The Quest for Christa T. has some similarities to a Virginia Woolf novel. Everything is presented as if viewed through a gauzy membrane. The underlying dissatisfaction with circumstances that leads to the death of Christa T. is left unstated. Like many artists operating in an restricted creative environment, Wolf seeks solace in abstraction.
Published 4/18/16
The Cubs and Other Stories (1967)
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa won his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Before and after that point he occupied a position as one of Latin America's premier public intellectuals, publishing both fiction and non-fiction, and doing things like running for President of Peru (as a conservative, no less.) The Cubs and Other Stories is only book of short fiction available in English. The characters are young men living in the wealthy Lima neighborhood of Miraflores, long before the decades long civil was with the Shining Path and other marxist guerillas tour the country apart.
Llosa's Miraflores is hardly idyllic. His young men are well off enough to not have money figure as their primary concern. They wrestle with questions of masculinity and identity that blends Faulkerian narrative techniques with characters who evoke Italian neo-realism. Vargas Llosa had six titles on the 2006 1001 Books list. He lost three in the 2008 revision, including this one. I wouldn't argue with that decision. I'm sure the only reason The Cubs is on the list in the first place is because it is the "first" Vargas Llosa book you can read in English.
The Cubs and Other Stories (1967)
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa won his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Before and after that point he occupied a position as one of Latin America's premier public intellectuals, publishing both fiction and non-fiction, and doing things like running for President of Peru (as a conservative, no less.) The Cubs and Other Stories is only book of short fiction available in English. The characters are young men living in the wealthy Lima neighborhood of Miraflores, long before the decades long civil was with the Shining Path and other marxist guerillas tour the country apart.
Llosa's Miraflores is hardly idyllic. His young men are well off enough to not have money figure as their primary concern. They wrestle with questions of masculinity and identity that blends Faulkerian narrative techniques with characters who evoke Italian neo-realism. Vargas Llosa had six titles on the 2006 1001 Books list. He lost three in the 2008 revision, including this one. I wouldn't argue with that decision. I'm sure the only reason The Cubs is on the list in the first place is because it is the "first" Vargas Llosa book you can read in English.
Published 4/19/16
In Watermelon Sugar (1968)
by Richard Brautigan
In Watermelon Sugar is a controversial selection for Richard Brautigan on the 1001 Books list. He is best known for his 1967 novel, Trout Fishing in America, which maintains a certain status as a fair representative of the literature of the peak hippie period in the late 1960's. Trout Fishing in America did not make the 1001 Books list, but In Watermelon Sugar did. In Watermelon is like a combination of Beckett and Heinlein, with one foot in the world of the avant garde and the other in genre fiction. It is difficult to summarize In Watermelon Sugar, it may be a story about people living in a post-apocalyptic world that only partially remembers our present. It could also be a parallel universe, or another place and time entirely.
The concrete details that are provided appear to function according to surreal or dream logic, the world is made of watermelon sugar, which is made at a factory in different colors. Talking tigers came and killed and ate the narrators parents, but also helped him with his math problems. There is no other way to read these details without thinking about dada or surrealism, both of which were major points of interest for the San Francisco beat culture Brautigan was firmly ensconced in when he wrote In Watermelon Sugar.
Brautigan's explicit identification with the later stages of the Beat literary movement in San Francisco have perhaps hurt his long-term reputation, but Trout Fishing in America maintains it's popularity with certain audiences for American literature. In Watermelon has less iconic status but it is likely more "out there."
In Watermelon Sugar (1968)
by Richard Brautigan
In Watermelon Sugar is a controversial selection for Richard Brautigan on the 1001 Books list. He is best known for his 1967 novel, Trout Fishing in America, which maintains a certain status as a fair representative of the literature of the peak hippie period in the late 1960's. Trout Fishing in America did not make the 1001 Books list, but In Watermelon Sugar did. In Watermelon is like a combination of Beckett and Heinlein, with one foot in the world of the avant garde and the other in genre fiction. It is difficult to summarize In Watermelon Sugar, it may be a story about people living in a post-apocalyptic world that only partially remembers our present. It could also be a parallel universe, or another place and time entirely.
The concrete details that are provided appear to function according to surreal or dream logic, the world is made of watermelon sugar, which is made at a factory in different colors. Talking tigers came and killed and ate the narrators parents, but also helped him with his math problems. There is no other way to read these details without thinking about dada or surrealism, both of which were major points of interest for the San Francisco beat culture Brautigan was firmly ensconced in when he wrote In Watermelon Sugar.
Brautigan's explicit identification with the later stages of the Beat literary movement in San Francisco have perhaps hurt his long-term reputation, but Trout Fishing in America maintains it's popularity with certain audiences for American literature. In Watermelon has less iconic status but it is likely more "out there."
Published 4/26/16
Cancer Ward (1968)
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A six hundred page book about suffering from cancer in Soviet Tashkent, Uzbekistan? Call it the literature of confinement, whether the subject be common prisoners, political prisoners or hospital patients. The literature of confinement is an important genre of post World War II literature, and Solzhenitsyn, with his 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, is the top in this particular field. Unlike A Day Life in of Ivan Denisovich, which takes place over the course of one day, Cancer Ward takes place over a seemingly endless numbers of days and weeks and months. In Cancer Ward is not the classic "Arctic Soviet Gulag Prison Camp." Instead it is a regional hospital, treating almost entirely "eternally exiled" former Soviet military and government officials who have come into disrepute in various ways.
One of the major aspects of Cancer Ward not related to the Solzhenitsyn-proxy character's own cancer is the back story of the various inhabitants of the hospital. How each of them came to be "eternally exiled" within the Soviet Union is a catalog of totalitarian insanity. Like The Case of Comrade Tulayev published in 1949, Cancer Ward is a testament as to why totalitarianism rarely works out, even for the die hard supporters. Similar to Tulayev, the most sympathetic figures in Cancer Ward are "old Communists" who were involved with the initial Civil War or early converts outside the major Russian cities. These people were purged starting in the late 1930's and on through the early stages of the Cold War. Solzhenitsyn was one of those people.
Beyond the vintage Soviet setting, Cancer Ward is notable for the frank discussion of the subject of cancer itself, which maintained a quasi-taboo status that is still evident today. Like any work of literature that address mental or physical health, Cancer Ward addresses the role of societal stigma among the sufferers of ailments. It goes without saying that Cancer Ward is a deeply sad work of art. Throughout, there are hints of some kind of reprieve, to address the status of "eternally exiled" Soviet citizens, much in the way the cancer treatment may provide hope of recovery without providing recovery. Any humor lies in the most abstract of concepts, for example the irony that these "cancers on the state" are themselves afflicted with cancer as if to prove their tormentors right.
Both patients and doctors are portrayed. The Soviet Union was distinct from the West in having an ultra high percentage of female doctors vs. male doctors. I knew that going in, but was still surprised that male doctors were few and far between. The major dynamic in Cancer Ward is between the male patients and the female staff. Solzhenitsyn handles these fragile relationships with incredible deftness. By the end of Cancer Ward the reader is likely to be exhausted. You will crave lighter fare.
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| Perry Smith and Richard Hicock, the murderers of the Clutter family. |
Published 4/27/16
In Cold Blood (1966)
by Truman Capote
As a criminal defense lawyer, I live in a dark world, filled with other people's absolute worst moments. I also work alone. That means that the problems of other people that come to me stay at my desk. Most of my clients are deeply upset at whatever challenges they happen to be facing when I represent the. The ones that aren't bothered are the scariest. My job leaves me with little patience for the problems of people that aren't my clients. When I'm not working, the absolute last thing I want to do is listen to the problems of friend or loved ones. It's unfortunate, because listening to other people complain is something between a quarter to 100% of most friendships/family relationships/relationships.
This same emotional dynamic has driven me into the worlds of literature. I take deep solace in reading about the problems of imaginary people, and comparing their situation to the situations of my clients and murmuring to myself, "Well, things could be worse." There are other reasons I read, but I find reading a good novel to be more emotionally cathartic than trying to talk to a friend for thirty minutes about the issues which arise when I'm doing my job.
In Cold Blood hits very close to the mark of my working life. It is generally credited as the first "non fiction novel," and it concerns the murder of four family members in rural Kansas in 1959 by two recently paroled convicts, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Hickock was a local, a fast talking con-man sort who was imprisoned for writing bad checks. Smith was a half-Native America, half-Irish drifter with a third grade education. While imprisoned at the Kansas State Pentitnenary, Hickock learned about Herbet Cuttler, a wealthy farmer who supposedly kept a wall safe with tens of thousands of dollars inside.
After he was released from prison, Hickock wrote the previously paroled Smith, and together they went to Cuttler's farm, where they failed to find the safe (which never existed) and murdered the four family members who were home in spectacularly brutal fashion. They got away with something less than 100 dollars and a few stolen items. Hickock and Smith were on the run for six weeks before they were arrested in Las Vegas Nevada. Shortly after they confessed, were extradited to Kansas, tried for the murder and executed.
First and foremost, In Cold Blood was a masterful work of craft, seamlessly blending the requirements of non-fiction with the aesthetic sensibility of fiction. This approach to writing has been widely disseminated in the decades since In Cold Blood was originally published, to the point where readers accept it as a major category of literature. Capote blends the perspectives of the perpetrators, investigators and towns people so smoothly that the reader is barely aware of the transitions back and forth.
At no point does Capote intrude on the action, disguising his own appearance in the narrative as an interviewer. His background work was incredibly thorough. What he did then would probably qualify as competent mitigation work for a client facing the death penalty in 2016. Capote develops the theme that both Hickock and Smith suffered head trauma that likely resulted in organic brain damage. He also uncovers the kind of traumatic child abuse in the past of Smith that is often used as mitigation in death penalty cases.
Unfortunately for the two murderers, Kansas was not sophisticated in the defense of death penalty cases, and the mitigation case on their behalf was somewhere between short and non existent. Capote did not abandon the two after the verdict, famously advocating on their behalf up and until the actual execution. I'd put even money on whether the two would be executed if they committed the same crime today. On the one hand, it's the kind of spectacular, senseless crime that evokes cries for vengeance. On the other, both defendants appeared to have organic brain damage, and neither had a history of committing violent crimes.
In Cold Blood (1966)
by Truman Capote
As a criminal defense lawyer, I live in a dark world, filled with other people's absolute worst moments. I also work alone. That means that the problems of other people that come to me stay at my desk. Most of my clients are deeply upset at whatever challenges they happen to be facing when I represent the. The ones that aren't bothered are the scariest. My job leaves me with little patience for the problems of people that aren't my clients. When I'm not working, the absolute last thing I want to do is listen to the problems of friend or loved ones. It's unfortunate, because listening to other people complain is something between a quarter to 100% of most friendships/family relationships/relationships.
This same emotional dynamic has driven me into the worlds of literature. I take deep solace in reading about the problems of imaginary people, and comparing their situation to the situations of my clients and murmuring to myself, "Well, things could be worse." There are other reasons I read, but I find reading a good novel to be more emotionally cathartic than trying to talk to a friend for thirty minutes about the issues which arise when I'm doing my job.
In Cold Blood hits very close to the mark of my working life. It is generally credited as the first "non fiction novel," and it concerns the murder of four family members in rural Kansas in 1959 by two recently paroled convicts, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Hickock was a local, a fast talking con-man sort who was imprisoned for writing bad checks. Smith was a half-Native America, half-Irish drifter with a third grade education. While imprisoned at the Kansas State Pentitnenary, Hickock learned about Herbet Cuttler, a wealthy farmer who supposedly kept a wall safe with tens of thousands of dollars inside.
After he was released from prison, Hickock wrote the previously paroled Smith, and together they went to Cuttler's farm, where they failed to find the safe (which never existed) and murdered the four family members who were home in spectacularly brutal fashion. They got away with something less than 100 dollars and a few stolen items. Hickock and Smith were on the run for six weeks before they were arrested in Las Vegas Nevada. Shortly after they confessed, were extradited to Kansas, tried for the murder and executed.
First and foremost, In Cold Blood was a masterful work of craft, seamlessly blending the requirements of non-fiction with the aesthetic sensibility of fiction. This approach to writing has been widely disseminated in the decades since In Cold Blood was originally published, to the point where readers accept it as a major category of literature. Capote blends the perspectives of the perpetrators, investigators and towns people so smoothly that the reader is barely aware of the transitions back and forth.
At no point does Capote intrude on the action, disguising his own appearance in the narrative as an interviewer. His background work was incredibly thorough. What he did then would probably qualify as competent mitigation work for a client facing the death penalty in 2016. Capote develops the theme that both Hickock and Smith suffered head trauma that likely resulted in organic brain damage. He also uncovers the kind of traumatic child abuse in the past of Smith that is often used as mitigation in death penalty cases.
Unfortunately for the two murderers, Kansas was not sophisticated in the defense of death penalty cases, and the mitigation case on their behalf was somewhere between short and non existent. Capote did not abandon the two after the verdict, famously advocating on their behalf up and until the actual execution. I'd put even money on whether the two would be executed if they committed the same crime today. On the one hand, it's the kind of spectacular, senseless crime that evokes cries for vengeance. On the other, both defendants appeared to have organic brain damage, and neither had a history of committing violent crimes.
Published 4/28/16
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1968)
by Malcolm Lowry
Malcolm Lowry is the end point of the fascination of English novelists with "Old Mexico." Start with The Plumed Serpent, written by D.H. Lawrence and published in 1926. Jump ahead to Graham Greene's, The Power and the Glory, published in 1940. Lowry's own Under the Volcano was the exclamation point on the end of this relationship between artist and subject. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid is Lowry's unfinished roman a clef about a return to the environs of Under the Volcano by a thinly veiled Lowry substitute. The Author/narrator of Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid is the author of a differently titled Under the Volcano.
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid is interesting only to the extent that one agrees with the statement that Under the Volcano is one of the top novels of the 20th century. I agree with that statement, and I thought Dark as the Grave was interesting. Unlike the carefully layered symbolism of Under the Volcano, Dark as the Grave is an impressionistic affair. It's unclear at times whether Lowry is doing anything except changing the names from a diary entry or letter to a friend back home.
Like Under the Volcano, Dark as the Grave is a romantic/horrifying depiction of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. I can't name any other work of fiction that takes place there. As of this point in the 1001 Books project, I haven't read a single work by a Mexican author, while South America has four already(Lispector, Vargas-Llosa, Garcia Marquez, Borges.) It's really remarkable to think that English authors were using Mexico as a passive location for their fictional exploits for a half century before any Mexcian novelist made an impression in the international marketplace. It's artistic imperialism, is what it is.
by Malcolm Lowry
Malcolm Lowry is the end point of the fascination of English novelists with "Old Mexico." Start with The Plumed Serpent, written by D.H. Lawrence and published in 1926. Jump ahead to Graham Greene's, The Power and the Glory, published in 1940. Lowry's own Under the Volcano was the exclamation point on the end of this relationship between artist and subject. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid is Lowry's unfinished roman a clef about a return to the environs of Under the Volcano by a thinly veiled Lowry substitute. The Author/narrator of Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid is the author of a differently titled Under the Volcano.
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid is interesting only to the extent that one agrees with the statement that Under the Volcano is one of the top novels of the 20th century. I agree with that statement, and I thought Dark as the Grave was interesting. Unlike the carefully layered symbolism of Under the Volcano, Dark as the Grave is an impressionistic affair. It's unclear at times whether Lowry is doing anything except changing the names from a diary entry or letter to a friend back home.
Like Under the Volcano, Dark as the Grave is a romantic/horrifying depiction of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. I can't name any other work of fiction that takes place there. As of this point in the 1001 Books project, I haven't read a single work by a Mexican author, while South America has four already(Lispector, Vargas-Llosa, Garcia Marquez, Borges.) It's really remarkable to think that English authors were using Mexico as a passive location for their fictional exploits for a half century before any Mexcian novelist made an impression in the international marketplace. It's artistic imperialism, is what it is.
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| Still from 2001: A Space Odyssey |
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
by Arthur C. Clarke
The novel version of 2001 was written at the same time as the script for the film. Kubrick and Clarke actually collaborated on the novel as well, but Clarke was ultimately deemed to be the only author. For an audience raised on the film itself (as I was) the book comes as a revelation, explaining many key points the film leaves unsaid. Arthur C. Clarke is the ultimate example of the author as technological prophet, and the creator of the sub-genre of "hard science" science fiction. The most recent example of a cross-over success in this field is the Matt Damon starring film, The Martian. As a sub-genre, hard science fiction eschews plot devices which exceed the boundaries of known science.
2001: A Space Odyssey was written before the first moon landing. It's very easy to forget that, so accurate is Clarke's depiction of near-future space travel. 2001 was also path-blazing in it's treatment of subjects like Artificial Intelligence (the psychotic on-board computer, HAL), alien life and the use of wormholes for interstellar travel. So many exciting new ideas are included that it's easy to overlook the unimaginative prose. The novel of 2001 is as concrete as the film version is artistic.
Published 5/9/16
Belle du Seigneur (1968)
by Albert Cohen
Belle du Seigneur is another one of those novels where the publication date is deceptive. Belle du Seigneur was published in it's original French edition in 1968, but not translated into English until 1995. Despite it's obvious literary merit, the delay in translation is understandable considering the bulk of the volume- 971 large pages with narrow margins, and the fact that almost all of the "action" of the book takes place inside the rooms of hotels and private residences in Geneva in the 1930s. Arguably, there are only two characters in the entire book. Other humans exist in those claustrophobic pages, but this is the story of Solal and Adriane. He, a French Jew by way of Greece, Under Secretary of the League of Nations in Geneva in the 1930's. She, a poor-ish Swiss aristocrat, married to one of his subordinates at the League of Nations.
It is clear, from page one, that Belle du Seigneur is to be an extended riff on the portion of Anna Karenina where Karenina and Count Vronsky slip away to Venice in an attempt to escape their Russian fate. It's like that, although instead of it being a hundred page portion of a seven hundred page book, it takes up about 700 pages of a thousand page book. Stylistically, Cohen blends Joycean stream of consciousness prose with a sharp first person narrator, Solal, who is obviously a stand in for the author himself. The stream of consciousness technique embraces many different narrators, Ariane, her husband for almost a hundred pages at the beginning and Ariane's maid.
Even accounting for the fact that Belle du Seigneur is backward looking in time, the ability for Cohen to transcend the limitations of the publishing industry circa 1968 is totally amazing. Belle du Seigneur isn't just a thousand page novel, it's a thousand page novel about to social pariahs who have literally no friends for almost the entirety of the book. Although the opening chapters take us all the way back to the beginning of life for Adriane, by the end I could think of nothing else but the two lovers, locked in their love shack on the outskirts of Geneva, Solal cutting his hands with glass, just to make things interesting between the two of them.
That's a universal statement about the effect that time and proximity has on the love between two peoples and it's fair to say that identified more with Solal and Adriane than with any two characters I've read recently.
by Arthur C. Clarke
The novel version of 2001 was written at the same time as the script for the film. Kubrick and Clarke actually collaborated on the novel as well, but Clarke was ultimately deemed to be the only author. For an audience raised on the film itself (as I was) the book comes as a revelation, explaining many key points the film leaves unsaid. Arthur C. Clarke is the ultimate example of the author as technological prophet, and the creator of the sub-genre of "hard science" science fiction. The most recent example of a cross-over success in this field is the Matt Damon starring film, The Martian. As a sub-genre, hard science fiction eschews plot devices which exceed the boundaries of known science.
2001: A Space Odyssey was written before the first moon landing. It's very easy to forget that, so accurate is Clarke's depiction of near-future space travel. 2001 was also path-blazing in it's treatment of subjects like Artificial Intelligence (the psychotic on-board computer, HAL), alien life and the use of wormholes for interstellar travel. So many exciting new ideas are included that it's easy to overlook the unimaginative prose. The novel of 2001 is as concrete as the film version is artistic.
2001, the novel fills in the blanks to the point where you could say it takes the mystery out of the film. It's extraordinary to think of the two of them, Clarke and Kubrick, hashing out the novel. 2001 is based on parts of several existing Clarke short stories. The subtitle, "A Space Odyssey," clearly refers to the Greek Odyssey. A key plot point that is unexplained in the film is that at the end, Dave travels through the monolith on the moon of Saturn (Jupiter in the film version). He goes into an interdimension, where he encounters the alien's who are responsible for the Monolith placed on the earth millions of years ago (The "Thus Spake Zarathustra" scored scene in the film) and corresponding monoliths on the moon and the one on the moon of Jupiter/Saturn that is the object of the Space Odyssey.
Published 5/1/16
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep (1968)
by Phillip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep gained it's canonical status retroactively, after the 1982 film Blade Runner became a genre-defining hit. Before Blade Runner struck a chord in the psyche of the world, Dick was considered a second-tier genre-limited author of ambitious science fiction. Afterwards, he became a prophet of "cyber punk" and the computer age. Today, it's impossible to read Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep independent of one or multiple viewings of Blade Runner. The biggest difference between book and film is the religious element in the book, which is absent from the film.
That religion is called Mercerism, and it is the least original element in the book. It bears a striking to resemblance to other sci-fi/future religions like the Church of All Worlds (from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein), Bokonism, from Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, and of course Scientology, which as much a creation of a 50's era science fiction writer as any of the others. On the other hand, Dick's depiction of a post-nuclear war San Francisco (changed to Los Angeles in the movie) and an Earth deserted by all but the most pathetic human specimens, called "specials" or "chickenheads" in the argot of the book.
The largest difference between book and film is the question of whether Deckard, the bounty hunter/blade detective-hero is android or human. The book is unambiguous that Deckard is human. The movie suggested that Deckard was perhaps an android, which apparently was the perspective of director Ridley Scott. The film is far superior in depicting the environment. Other than conveying the sense that the Earth was quasi-abandoned in drowning in it's own debris, the book does little to convey the world of Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the way film does so memorably.
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep (1968)
by Phillip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep gained it's canonical status retroactively, after the 1982 film Blade Runner became a genre-defining hit. Before Blade Runner struck a chord in the psyche of the world, Dick was considered a second-tier genre-limited author of ambitious science fiction. Afterwards, he became a prophet of "cyber punk" and the computer age. Today, it's impossible to read Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep independent of one or multiple viewings of Blade Runner. The biggest difference between book and film is the religious element in the book, which is absent from the film.
That religion is called Mercerism, and it is the least original element in the book. It bears a striking to resemblance to other sci-fi/future religions like the Church of All Worlds (from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein), Bokonism, from Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, and of course Scientology, which as much a creation of a 50's era science fiction writer as any of the others. On the other hand, Dick's depiction of a post-nuclear war San Francisco (changed to Los Angeles in the movie) and an Earth deserted by all but the most pathetic human specimens, called "specials" or "chickenheads" in the argot of the book.
The largest difference between book and film is the question of whether Deckard, the bounty hunter/blade detective-hero is android or human. The book is unambiguous that Deckard is human. The movie suggested that Deckard was perhaps an android, which apparently was the perspective of director Ridley Scott. The film is far superior in depicting the environment. Other than conveying the sense that the Earth was quasi-abandoned in drowning in it's own debris, the book does little to convey the world of Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the way film does so memorably.
Published 5/9/16
Belle du Seigneur (1968)
by Albert Cohen
Belle du Seigneur is another one of those novels where the publication date is deceptive. Belle du Seigneur was published in it's original French edition in 1968, but not translated into English until 1995. Despite it's obvious literary merit, the delay in translation is understandable considering the bulk of the volume- 971 large pages with narrow margins, and the fact that almost all of the "action" of the book takes place inside the rooms of hotels and private residences in Geneva in the 1930s. Arguably, there are only two characters in the entire book. Other humans exist in those claustrophobic pages, but this is the story of Solal and Adriane. He, a French Jew by way of Greece, Under Secretary of the League of Nations in Geneva in the 1930's. She, a poor-ish Swiss aristocrat, married to one of his subordinates at the League of Nations.
It is clear, from page one, that Belle du Seigneur is to be an extended riff on the portion of Anna Karenina where Karenina and Count Vronsky slip away to Venice in an attempt to escape their Russian fate. It's like that, although instead of it being a hundred page portion of a seven hundred page book, it takes up about 700 pages of a thousand page book. Stylistically, Cohen blends Joycean stream of consciousness prose with a sharp first person narrator, Solal, who is obviously a stand in for the author himself. The stream of consciousness technique embraces many different narrators, Ariane, her husband for almost a hundred pages at the beginning and Ariane's maid.
Even accounting for the fact that Belle du Seigneur is backward looking in time, the ability for Cohen to transcend the limitations of the publishing industry circa 1968 is totally amazing. Belle du Seigneur isn't just a thousand page novel, it's a thousand page novel about to social pariahs who have literally no friends for almost the entirety of the book. Although the opening chapters take us all the way back to the beginning of life for Adriane, by the end I could think of nothing else but the two lovers, locked in their love shack on the outskirts of Geneva, Solal cutting his hands with glass, just to make things interesting between the two of them.
That's a universal statement about the effect that time and proximity has on the love between two peoples and it's fair to say that identified more with Solal and Adriane than with any two characters I've read recently.
Published 5/11/16
The Nice and the Good (1968)
by Iris Murdoch
So much Iris Murdoch on the 1001 Books list. The Nice and the Good is her fourth novel on the list, following Under the Net (1954), The Bell (1958) and A Severed Head (1961). As her excellent wikipedia entry says she is, "best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious." She also fits the classic profile of an author who was over represented in the first edition of 1001 Books. She landed six titles in that first edition, cut to four in the second edition. The Nice and the Good was one of the two books to get the ax.
That is a decision that makes sense to me. My sense is that The Nice and the Good made the list in the first place because it represents a thematic departure for Murdoch. The Nice and the Good is part relationship drama and part spy/detective novel. It's almost like she had been reading a lot of Graham Greene right before she sat down to write this book. The protagonist is called John Ducane or "Ducane," a 40ish single guy, carrying on a relationship with a young art teacher in London and a strange, platonic relationship with the wife of his best friend and boss. Working for the government in London, a colleague mysteriously commits suicide.
The investigation quickly leads to exotic topics like black mail and Satanism and The Nice and the Good even includes a brief appearance by a flying saucer. All of this is essentially window dressing for what is at heart a classic Murdochian tale about "sexual relationships, morality and the power of the unconscious."
Published 5/13/16
Myra Breckinridge (1968)
by Gore Vidal
I would expect more than one Gore Vidal novel on the 1001 Books list. Maybe if it was assembled by an American editorial staff. Norman Mailer, another hugely popular American novelist from the same generation as Vidal, doesn't get a single book on the list. In Vidal and the list's defense, he was better known for his non-fiction writing and general public/celebrity persona than any specific work of fiction. However, to the extent that he did write a memorable novel, Myra Breckinridge is it, generally credited with the first literary depiction of a "post-op" (male to female) trans.
Myra Breckinridge is a satire of "Hollywood culture," Myra arrives in Hollywood as the "widow" of her "dead" male persona (Myron.) As the book is written, this fact is eventually revealed as a modest surprise for the reader. For a contemporary reader, Myra's trans status is communicated before you start, either from a foreword designating Myra a classic of trans lit, or packaging Myra with it's twin, Myron, published several years later.
To be clear, Myra Breckinridge is only revolutionary in terms of the explicit depiction of a post operative trans. The literary theme of gender fluidity is as ancient as myth, and 20th centuries authors like Virginia Woolf explored related concepts a half century before Breckinridge was published in 1968. Although it shocked when it was initially published, today the sexual material is best described as "mildly bawdy." On the other hand, his jabs at left-coast culture are prescient, including the first mention of the California bred tradition of including "Like" before every statement. "Like, I'm drowning, can you help me?" is one memorable quote from Myra in the book.
There is also an early depiction of "60's style" orgy complete with weed and a lot of good lines about classic Hollywood film culture, again courtesy of Myra. What there isn't is plot, or a deep understanding of the psychology of the trans protagonist. In fact, Myra Breckinridge ends with an incredibly insensitive return by Myra to status as "Myron" after his fake boobs are removed while she is in recovery after an auto accident. It's that ending that has likely diminished the reputation of Myra Breckinridge for subsequent generations of readers.
by Gore Vidal
I would expect more than one Gore Vidal novel on the 1001 Books list. Maybe if it was assembled by an American editorial staff. Norman Mailer, another hugely popular American novelist from the same generation as Vidal, doesn't get a single book on the list. In Vidal and the list's defense, he was better known for his non-fiction writing and general public/celebrity persona than any specific work of fiction. However, to the extent that he did write a memorable novel, Myra Breckinridge is it, generally credited with the first literary depiction of a "post-op" (male to female) trans.
Myra Breckinridge is a satire of "Hollywood culture," Myra arrives in Hollywood as the "widow" of her "dead" male persona (Myron.) As the book is written, this fact is eventually revealed as a modest surprise for the reader. For a contemporary reader, Myra's trans status is communicated before you start, either from a foreword designating Myra a classic of trans lit, or packaging Myra with it's twin, Myron, published several years later.
To be clear, Myra Breckinridge is only revolutionary in terms of the explicit depiction of a post operative trans. The literary theme of gender fluidity is as ancient as myth, and 20th centuries authors like Virginia Woolf explored related concepts a half century before Breckinridge was published in 1968. Although it shocked when it was initially published, today the sexual material is best described as "mildly bawdy." On the other hand, his jabs at left-coast culture are prescient, including the first mention of the California bred tradition of including "Like" before every statement. "Like, I'm drowning, can you help me?" is one memorable quote from Myra in the book.
There is also an early depiction of "60's style" orgy complete with weed and a lot of good lines about classic Hollywood film culture, again courtesy of Myra. What there isn't is plot, or a deep understanding of the psychology of the trans protagonist. In fact, Myra Breckinridge ends with an incredibly insensitive return by Myra to status as "Myron" after his fake boobs are removed while she is in recovery after an auto accident. It's that ending that has likely diminished the reputation of Myra Breckinridge for subsequent generations of readers.
Published 5/16/16
The First Circle (1968)
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a bitter sweet moment for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. On the one hand, he survived to see the collapse of the entity that was responsible for sending him to a series of prison camps for making fun of Joseph Stalin in a letter. On the other, it meant the immediate downgrade of Solzhenitsyn as a saint of the anti-Communist movement to a half-crack pot/half-literary immortal in the larger field of totalitarian regimes and their excesses. In 2016, his trilogy of fictional prison camp books: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward (which is about the Soviet practice of internal exile to remote locations rather than a prison camp, per se) are more relevant for what they say about the 20th century totalitarian experience than anything specifically Russian.
At the same time, Solzhenitsyn is an undeniably Russian writer, steeped in the technique of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The First Circle, or In The First Circle as it is also known, takes place in a special "Sharaskha" prison in the suburbs. The Sharaskha were special, technically skilled prisoners who were kept outside the brutal forced labor camps that comprised the great majority of GULAG priso camps. The Soviet government used them to work on special technical projects. In The First Circle, the prisoners devote themselves to problems with acoustics and optics.
Solzhenitsyn develops a thin plot about a diplomat who places a warning call to a scientist who is about to be arrested for trading with an enemy nation. The zeks, and one in particular, are asked to identify the caller based on a new technology developed by the prisoners. The development of the plot is interspersed with lengthy descriptions about almost every significant character in regards to their pasts, and how they came to be in the special Sharaskha unit.
These character portraits overwhelm everything else. By the end of The First Circle, the reader gains a firm understanding of just how arbitrary and capricious the purges following Stalin's rise to power were. Ironically, the most victimized were the Party members who pre-dated Stalin's rise to power. These were the most loyal soldiers of the Revolution, many playing key roles in the Civil War and World War II. And yet, it wasn't enough for Stalin who appears in The First Circle in a memorable scene that reveals him offhandedly reminiscing about the millions he's killed, his anger at the way Adolph Hitler betrayed his trust and whether or not to kill his top security officer.
Published 5/20/16
The German Lesson (1968)
by Siegfried Lenz
The success of Marcel Proust and his Remembrance of Things Past marked the coming of age of the anti-picaresque, "memory novel." This type of novel, for which Remembrance of Things Past is the first and still greatest example, inverts the picaresque model of the narrator who goes everywhere and learns nothing with a narrator who goes nowhere and learns everything.
Although the picaresque was well in decline by the time Proust rolled around, it left an indelible imprint in the genetic code of the novel, inspiring successor genre's like the bildungsroman/coming of age. The picaresque also echoes in the world of genre fiction, detective novels, science fiction, all those sorts of books maintain a direct connection to the picaresque tradition.
The inversion of picaresque in the form of the "memory novel" took firm root across multiple artistic disciplines in the mid to late 20th century, finding particular traction in the area of "art film" in places like France, Italy, Sweden and the United States from 1950 to the present. The German Lesson is an excellent illustration of the development of this genre by a German author. The narrator in The German Lesson is Siggi Jepsen, the son of a policeman in the most northern part of Germany, along the border with Denmark. In the present of the novel, Jepsen is serving a three year sentence for theft at an island juvenile detention facility.
The German Lesson (1968)
by Siegfried Lenz
The success of Marcel Proust and his Remembrance of Things Past marked the coming of age of the anti-picaresque, "memory novel." This type of novel, for which Remembrance of Things Past is the first and still greatest example, inverts the picaresque model of the narrator who goes everywhere and learns nothing with a narrator who goes nowhere and learns everything.
Although the picaresque was well in decline by the time Proust rolled around, it left an indelible imprint in the genetic code of the novel, inspiring successor genre's like the bildungsroman/coming of age. The picaresque also echoes in the world of genre fiction, detective novels, science fiction, all those sorts of books maintain a direct connection to the picaresque tradition.
The inversion of picaresque in the form of the "memory novel" took firm root across multiple artistic disciplines in the mid to late 20th century, finding particular traction in the area of "art film" in places like France, Italy, Sweden and the United States from 1950 to the present. The German Lesson is an excellent illustration of the development of this genre by a German author. The narrator in The German Lesson is Siggi Jepsen, the son of a policeman in the most northern part of Germany, along the border with Denmark. In the present of the novel, Jepsen is serving a three year sentence for theft at an island juvenile detention facility.
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| Blind Man With A Pistol by Chester Himes, original cover art. |
Blind Man With A Pistol (1969)
by Chester Himes
The 1989 Vintage Crime edition of Chester Himes' noir classic Blind Man With A Pistol carries a quote from Newsweek hailing the fact that Blind Man With A Pistol is "back in print." That would seem to indicate that it was out of print at some point between 1969 and 1988/89, only twenty years after publication. The time line coincidences with the artistic re-appraisal that artists receive after their death, with Himes dying in 1984, or roughly five years before the Vintage Crime edition of Blind Man With A Pistol was published.
The late 80's and early 90's are also the time when detective and "pulp" fiction was making a serious entry into the halls of literature departments in the American university system. Chester Himes was a productive author between the end of World War II and the end of the 1960's. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction, but Blind Man With A Pistol is an example of his "Harlem Cycle" about African-American police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Differ Jones. Blind Man With A Pistol was presumably selected from the multiple possibilities due to the late 1960's Harlem milieu.
It was a fertile time in Harlem, with a heady mix of homosexual prostitutes, black panthers and religious freaks of all persuasions, from gleefully multi-racial hippie love cults to "Mormon" style prophets living in abandoned funeral homes with 12 wives and 26 children. As Johnson and Jones investigate what appears to be the murder of a white john, they encounter all these outfits and more. Blind Man With A Pistol isn't exactly neo-noir or neo-detective fiction, but it is at the end of the that period, and it coincides with the rise of "high" literature that was beginning to adopt some of the techniques of pulp fiction.
Also Blind Man With A Pistol is very much a book "about the 60's" in a way that very many of the other books published first during this period are not. If you exclude the fiction of the American Beats and the early long form prose of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, you are left with the very distant relation of mid career Doris Lessing and Edna O'Brien.
At the beginning of The German Lesson, Jepsen is placed in solitary confinement so he can finish a paper on the "joys of duty." The story that unfolds through the medium of his school assignment is a complex tale involving Jepsen's father, the stern policeman of his home town and his persecution of a local painter (and longtime friend) Max Nansen.
The events take place during and after World War II. Schweig-Holstein, the province where Jepsen, his father and Nansen live, is far from the front. Nansen, the persecuted painter, is based on real-life expressionist Emil Nolde. The landscape, surrounded and bisected by water on all sides, low to the ground mirrors the limited palette of emotions displayed by Jepsen's father. Lenz's decision to place Siggi Jepsen on an island, miles away from the location of the majority of events in the book, serves to highlight the alienation from family and land that plagues Jepsen.
And indeed, one could read that alienation from family and land as a metaphor for all thinking Germans after World War II, those who were perhaps vaguely uneasy with parts of the Fuhrer's plan for Nazi Germany but either did nothing to oppose it or continued the roles they served in the German state prior to Hitler's rise. Nansen and Jepsen's father represent two poles on that spectrum- Nansen- who is actively persecuted by the Nazi state but stays in Germany and tries to make the best of a very bad situation, and Jepsen's local policeman father, who becomes increasingly obsessed with following his concept of "duty" to its utmost conclusion, in the face of virulent opposition from both friends and loved ones.
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| photograph of a model who looks like Ada is described as a young woman in the book. |
Published 5/31/16
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)
by Vladimir Nabokov
Ada is the capstone to Vladimir Nabokov's distinguished career as a novelist, a six hundred fever dream/paean to an incestuous life long relationship between two cousins (who are actually brother and sister) Van, the narrator, and Ada. The events of Ada take place not on Earth, or "Terra" as it's called, but an "anti-terra" which is exactly like the Earth except all physical locations have different names. Van and Ada come from an impossibly aristocratic family that you would say is Russian-American by way of France, were all the names of places in anti-terra changed.
Ada is dirty in a way that Lolita is not. Van and Ada are a gleefully depraved pair, and the initiation of their affair when Ada is but 12 years old is beyond the pale of the adolescent Lolita. The positioning of Ada in Nabokov's parallel universe is disorienting, as is his insistence on utilizing the modernist technique of moving around, backwards and forwards in time, without signaling the reader. The effect is something akin to either magical realism or post-modernism, although neither term actually describes the impact that Ada has on the reader.
Their young love is eventually discovered, and they are forced to part. Ada marries suitably, and Van spends the next half century as a peripatetic professor of psychology. Like, Lolita, the prurient interest aroused by an illicit love affair between two cousin/siblings is dissipated over the course of 600 pages. The adult Van bears some resemblance to Lolita's dissipated aristocrat Humbert Humbert, but unlike Humbert, adult Van does not pursue love outside the pale of descent society. Ada herself disappears almost entirely for the middle 400 pages of the book named after her.
The ending, while not exactly upbeat, is a happy one in that Ada and Van may or may not die together, after a half century apart. Ada marks the conclusion of Nabokov's contribution to the 1001 Books project. The four books included: Ada, Pale Fire (1962), Pnin(1957) and Lolita (1955), followed one another in Nabokov's publication history. None of his Russian language novels or novellas made it into the 1001 Books, list nor did any of his short story collections or anything published after Ada. He is certainly a unique figure in 20th century literature, and in my opinion he's one of the top 10 novelists of all time. Others I would put on that list, roughly half way through the 1001 Books project are Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway and William Burroughs. I would also want to add Thomas Pynchon, and leave one slot available for unfamiliar authors who published between 1970 and today.
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)
by Vladimir Nabokov
Ada is the capstone to Vladimir Nabokov's distinguished career as a novelist, a six hundred fever dream/paean to an incestuous life long relationship between two cousins (who are actually brother and sister) Van, the narrator, and Ada. The events of Ada take place not on Earth, or "Terra" as it's called, but an "anti-terra" which is exactly like the Earth except all physical locations have different names. Van and Ada come from an impossibly aristocratic family that you would say is Russian-American by way of France, were all the names of places in anti-terra changed.
Ada is dirty in a way that Lolita is not. Van and Ada are a gleefully depraved pair, and the initiation of their affair when Ada is but 12 years old is beyond the pale of the adolescent Lolita. The positioning of Ada in Nabokov's parallel universe is disorienting, as is his insistence on utilizing the modernist technique of moving around, backwards and forwards in time, without signaling the reader. The effect is something akin to either magical realism or post-modernism, although neither term actually describes the impact that Ada has on the reader.
Their young love is eventually discovered, and they are forced to part. Ada marries suitably, and Van spends the next half century as a peripatetic professor of psychology. Like, Lolita, the prurient interest aroused by an illicit love affair between two cousin/siblings is dissipated over the course of 600 pages. The adult Van bears some resemblance to Lolita's dissipated aristocrat Humbert Humbert, but unlike Humbert, adult Van does not pursue love outside the pale of descent society. Ada herself disappears almost entirely for the middle 400 pages of the book named after her.
The ending, while not exactly upbeat, is a happy one in that Ada and Van may or may not die together, after a half century apart. Ada marks the conclusion of Nabokov's contribution to the 1001 Books project. The four books included: Ada, Pale Fire (1962), Pnin(1957) and Lolita (1955), followed one another in Nabokov's publication history. None of his Russian language novels or novellas made it into the 1001 Books, list nor did any of his short story collections or anything published after Ada. He is certainly a unique figure in 20th century literature, and in my opinion he's one of the top 10 novelists of all time. Others I would put on that list, roughly half way through the 1001 Books project are Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway and William Burroughs. I would also want to add Thomas Pynchon, and leave one slot available for unfamiliar authors who published between 1970 and today.
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| Joyce Carol Oates |
them (1969)
by Joyce Carol Oates
Making it to Joyce Carol Oates felt like a milestone of sorts. You'd be hard pressed to name an author who has combined literary prestige with a work ethic that would make a Harelquin romance author blush. Wikipedia puts her at "over 40 novels, plus plays, novellas, volumes of short stories, non-fiction and poetry." Perhaps she's not quite as cool as, say, Joan Didion, but she's hard to match in terms of that combination of market place presence and liteary credibility. them, which won the National Book award in 1969, is her single best known work, a stark piece of realism depicting the intertwined lives of a nuclear family: mother, son and daughter, over the course of the 1950s through the riots of 1967.
It's hard not to compare them to to the slightly earlier books of Saul Bellow. Oates' Detroit it a parallel to Bellow's Chicago. Jules, the son and primary male protagonist in a novel otherwise dominated by female narrators (his Mother and sister) is a more disreputable version of Bellow's Augie March. But Oates is raw where Bellow is mannered.
them is above all a portrait of post-war white, working class instability. Her characters have nothing to do with the Beats or Hippies. Maureen, the sister, spends a good page or so puzzling over the emotional reaction to the death of John F. Kennedy, "People die all the time, here, in Detroit;" she says. The subject matter of them includes whoring (a lot of whoring), drugs, rape, robbery and murder, committed by various of the narrators, but mostly by Jules, who is shown descending into a life of criminal misery.
Calling them a downer doesn't really do it justice. It's as bad as a Zola novel from the 19th century. Whether Oates is actually sympathetic to her characters is open to debate. First of all, there's the title "them" distinguishing the family as an other. There is also her use of a fake "Based on reality" framing device, featuring Oates herself as a character, teaching the sister at a community college. All three of the family members do things that are best characterized as "immoral." It's a wild ride, something like a limited HBO series about urban life in America.
The ending chapters, depicting the Detroit riots of 1967 are a very good description of that place and time, and one of the earlier actual literary depictions of those important events.
Published 6/2/16
The Green Man (1969)
by Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis is a kind of English Norman Mailer figure, hard drinking and hard loving, but in a uniquely English way. In between Lucky Jim, his break-out novel, published in 1954, and The Green Man, published in 1969, Amis published nine other full length novels, so the The Green Man is an example of "middle Amis" in the same way that Lucky Jim is the book to read for "early Amis." "middle Amis" was known for combining his indelible English protagonist, drunken, philandering men like Amis himself, with genre fiction. Science fiction was a favorite of his, but The Green Man is a straight-forward ghost story, like a Washington Irving story blended with the comic social novel tradition.
The Green Man got dropped from the 2008 revision of the 1001 Books list, leaving Lucky Jim and the "late Amis" example of The Old Devils as his two representative works in the list. This makes sense, since genre work, or books that cross genre themes with literary themes are often disfavored compared to "pure" works of literature by the same author (different considerations when the author is primarily an author of genre work.)
It's hard to feel remorse for Amis losing a place on any canonical list of literature, since he is literally the epitome of the privileged, white, male novelist. Surely, if you are going to make room for new voices, Amis pere is top of the list to be cut down a notch
The Green Man (1969)
by Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis is a kind of English Norman Mailer figure, hard drinking and hard loving, but in a uniquely English way. In between Lucky Jim, his break-out novel, published in 1954, and The Green Man, published in 1969, Amis published nine other full length novels, so the The Green Man is an example of "middle Amis" in the same way that Lucky Jim is the book to read for "early Amis." "middle Amis" was known for combining his indelible English protagonist, drunken, philandering men like Amis himself, with genre fiction. Science fiction was a favorite of his, but The Green Man is a straight-forward ghost story, like a Washington Irving story blended with the comic social novel tradition.
The Green Man got dropped from the 2008 revision of the 1001 Books list, leaving Lucky Jim and the "late Amis" example of The Old Devils as his two representative works in the list. This makes sense, since genre work, or books that cross genre themes with literary themes are often disfavored compared to "pure" works of literature by the same author (different considerations when the author is primarily an author of genre work.)
It's hard to feel remorse for Amis losing a place on any canonical list of literature, since he is literally the epitome of the privileged, white, male novelist. Surely, if you are going to make room for new voices, Amis pere is top of the list to be cut down a notch
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| Cover Art for the original hard back edition of Eva Trout (1968) by Elizabeth Bowen |
Eva Trout (1968)
by Elizabeth Bowen
Eva Trout is the fifth of sixth books, in chronological order, which she placed in the initial edition of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. In the 2008 edition, she was reduced to three entries, reflecting the general trend of reduction for any Author with three or more titles in the first edition. Eva Trout is one of the three keepers, and that probably comes from it's status as the best version of "late Bowen." Eva Trout is nothing more or less than a serious literary novel about an awkward young heiress and her convoluted effort to purchase and raise a disabled child. That one sentence plot summary does a gross disservice to the complex way in which Bowen develops the plot. Instead of using the conventional modernist technique of moving back and forth in time without signaling the reader, she structures Eva Trout as a series of episodes separated in time and space, without any connective tissue to tell you what has happened in the interim.
Mostly, the reader is left to guess at the motives of Trout and the other characters- calling them friends does not do justice to the complexity of the relationship between Eva Trout, the parent-less heiress, and the various parties who have been recruited to raise her in the absence of either parent. Trout is a cipher, and Bowen explains nothing to the reader, leaving us to speculate at her poorly explained motives, and, what, in fact, is going one.
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| Author Philip Roth |
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
by Philip Roth
One major difference between 20th century literature in the United States and 20th century literature in England is the role of the Jewish protagonist. Largely absent in England, America saw a stream of critically approved, popular writers, beginning with Henry Roth, then Saul Bellow(Canadian by birth, but still) and Philip Roth, who was first received wide spread public attention when Portnoy's Complaint was published in 1969.
Portnoy's Complaint is two hundred odd pages taking the form of the protagonist/narrator monologing to his Freud-style psychotherapist. His major topics are 1) his mother/family, 2) his fondness for masturbation 3) his defunct relationship with a shiska girl who he calls "Monkey." I think the argument could be made that even more than Woody Allen, Roth bears responsibility for the neurotic, sex-obsessed urban Jewish male stereotype taking root in popular western culture.
The sexual description in Portnoy's Complaint are noteworthy. It was published a few years too late to really evoke the ire of censors, but it does have minor claims in that regard, such. In 2016, Alexander Portnoy seems intimately familiar, another archetype that has inspired a generation of writers, actors and film makers. You can probably also attribute the topic of masturbation as a subject of popular humor to the influence of Portnoy's Complaint, or rather the idea that smart people would find jokes about masturbation funny. Roth's Alexander Portnoy is a virtuoso of masturbation, and he is not afraid to let his therapist hear about it.
Published 6/8/16
Chocky (1968)
by John Wyndham
John Wyndham occupies a solid third place on any list of mid 20th century English/British science fiction writers, firmly ensconced behind Arthur C. Clarke and J.G. Ballard. If Clarke is the prophet of the future, and Ballard is the master of the alternative dystopian present, then Wyndham is the link to the past, the bridge between the proto-science fiction of H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and Arthur C. Clarke in 2001.
Like his other entry on the 1001 Books list, Day of the Triffids, Chocky is a short story lengthened out make a thin novel or novella. Both books had their work in Wyndham's work as a writer of genre science fiction, and like the plant terrorized world of Triffids, Chocky features a memorable set up: A little boy visited by an imaginary friend who is apparently visiting from a highly advanced civilization in another galaxy.
Published 6/12/16
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
by Flannery O'Connor
The genre of literature known as "Southern Gothic" is essentially William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. A major difference between Southern and other iterations of literature known as Gothic is the absence of the supernatural as a major motif. Instead, "Gothic" in the context of southern literature refers to quirky characters and dark plots. Everything That Rises Must Converge was the last book published by O'Connor before she died of Lupus at 46.
Everything That Rises Must Converge is a group of short stories, nine in total, six of which were published in various publications prior to their collection. The characters and themes are familiar: racist mother's, religious fanatics, disappointing sons, class and race conflict. The pairing of a disaffected, failed, intellectual son and an elderly, widowed mother reoccurs in multiple stories. This is also a frequent dynamic in the work of William Faulkner, and it is a combination that foreshadows the dynamic between conservative parents and their more liberal offspring for decades to come.
Flannery O'Connor was herself no hipster, she was a practicing Catholic and remained so until her untimely death. Her appeal to hipsters is a combination of a little bit of the dead-before-their-time rock-star, a little bit of the consanguinity between her concerns and the concerns of 1960's youth culture and a little bit of the darkness and weirdness of her vision, which spread so far, particularly in the worlds of film and tv to the point where her influence isn't cited. Whether cited or not, her influence on the artistic concept of "weird small town America" can be traced back to her work. For example, it's hard to imagine David Lynch or Tom Waits without Flannery O'Connor.
Chocky (1968)
by John Wyndham
John Wyndham occupies a solid third place on any list of mid 20th century English/British science fiction writers, firmly ensconced behind Arthur C. Clarke and J.G. Ballard. If Clarke is the prophet of the future, and Ballard is the master of the alternative dystopian present, then Wyndham is the link to the past, the bridge between the proto-science fiction of H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and Arthur C. Clarke in 2001.
Like his other entry on the 1001 Books list, Day of the Triffids, Chocky is a short story lengthened out make a thin novel or novella. Both books had their work in Wyndham's work as a writer of genre science fiction, and like the plant terrorized world of Triffids, Chocky features a memorable set up: A little boy visited by an imaginary friend who is apparently visiting from a highly advanced civilization in another galaxy.
Published 6/12/16
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
by Flannery O'Connor
The genre of literature known as "Southern Gothic" is essentially William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. A major difference between Southern and other iterations of literature known as Gothic is the absence of the supernatural as a major motif. Instead, "Gothic" in the context of southern literature refers to quirky characters and dark plots. Everything That Rises Must Converge was the last book published by O'Connor before she died of Lupus at 46.
Everything That Rises Must Converge is a group of short stories, nine in total, six of which were published in various publications prior to their collection. The characters and themes are familiar: racist mother's, religious fanatics, disappointing sons, class and race conflict. The pairing of a disaffected, failed, intellectual son and an elderly, widowed mother reoccurs in multiple stories. This is also a frequent dynamic in the work of William Faulkner, and it is a combination that foreshadows the dynamic between conservative parents and their more liberal offspring for decades to come.
Flannery O'Connor was herself no hipster, she was a practicing Catholic and remained so until her untimely death. Her appeal to hipsters is a combination of a little bit of the dead-before-their-time rock-star, a little bit of the consanguinity between her concerns and the concerns of 1960's youth culture and a little bit of the darkness and weirdness of her vision, which spread so far, particularly in the worlds of film and tv to the point where her influence isn't cited. Whether cited or not, her influence on the artistic concept of "weird small town America" can be traced back to her work. For example, it's hard to imagine David Lynch or Tom Waits without Flannery O'Connor.
| Meryl Streep memorably portrayed the title character in film version The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles |
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
by John Fowles
English post-modernist/existentialist author John Fowles has three books on the first version of the 1001 Books list. Two of them, The Collector and The Magus, I read in high school. I may have actually pulled them off of my parent's book shelf, because I'm not sure how else my 15 year old self could have tracked down John Fowles. That is proof enough that Fowles was still a popular author widely in circulation circa the mid 1990's in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The French Lieutenant's Woman was a hit on it's own merit and also popular in the 1981 movie version, which actually featured a script written by playwright Harold Pinter. I guess the association with my high school taste (which also included Ayn Rand, in addition to the usual Beat/Existentialist/Russian suspects) and my parent's bookshelf has prejudiced my present self against him, but it's hard to dislike The French Lieutenant's Woman, which, I think, is probably the first full-blown post-modernist work of historical fiction. The combination of post-modern technique and the conventions of the 19th century novel has proved to be an enduring formula for both popular and critical success. The Wikipedia page is called "Historiographic metafiction" and it's worth listing some of the well known examples:
E.L Doctorow's Ragtime (1975)
Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children (1981)
A.S Byatt Possession (1990)
Michael Ondaatje The English Patient (1992)
Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon (1997)
That makes The French Lieutenant's Woman first by half a decade. Fowles achievement is to write a mid 19th century novel from the perspective of a contemporary narrator. Thus, the book both addresses the concerns of a 19th century novel as well as the concerns of the contemporary reader of upscale popular fiction. The plot of The French Lieutenant's Woman blends heavy elements of Thomas Hardy- acknowledged repeatedly by the narrator by having character's reference Hardy during the action- with the Dickensian all-knowing narrator, who also happens to be a time traveler, in that he is narrating a tale set in the 19th century. Fowles goes so far as to introduce himself as a character in the third act.
In 2016 all the post-modern chicanery is a little much, but I can imagine it was quite the revelation in 1969, and it certainly stands up as a worthwhile read today.
Wyndham elaborates this scenario with a minimum of fuss and bother- it's all very English of him, and this English-ness might just explain why he is so neglected compared to Clarke and Ballard. Unlike those two, Wyndham doesn't have a modern day cult keeping his memory alive. I can see where the editorial staff of 1001 Books would want him represented, but in the American market his popularity hovers between "out of print" and "recently reprinted but in a New York review of books paperback edition." The New York Review of Books paperback reissue is a good guide to when a book is hovering at the margin of commercial viability, and also makes a prima facie case that the author in question is overlooked by big publishing.
Like the book itself, the ending of Chocky is tied up in a neat, question answering bow, and in this regard it's a departure from the question provoking endings of other 60's English sci-fi classics. I'm thinking of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, but also of Ballard's 60's stories.
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| Cover of Ircksongs and Descants, Robert Coover's seminal 1969 collection of short stories that helped define the term "metafiction." |
Published 6/15/16
Pricksongs and Descants (1969)
by Robert Coover
Pricksongs and Descants gets you pretty close to the heart of the secret literary Illuminati that find eventual employment in the academy, teaching or in the culture industry. Coover's breakthrough collection of meta-fictional stories is best known for the much anthologized The Babysitter. That story gives the reader a shattered mirror of different possible scenarios that unfold from the conventional "babysitter home alone" trope. Other, less popular stories pioneer meta-fictional techniques of using fairy tales and comic books to inspire shard-like narratives.
So deep and profound have Coover's ideas about fiction penetrated subsequent writers efforts that Pricksongs and Descants feels dated and obvious, like a Roy Lichtenstein comic art canvas, or a Warhol Campbell's Tomato Soup Can. A bit like a museum piece, if you will. However, there is the graphic sexual parts to keep a contemporary reader interested. Coover is not exactly transgressive in the vein of a Henry Miller or William Burroughs, he's a more sober writer interested in the fullness of human weirdness.
Amazingly, Coover is still publishing novels- he put one out in 2014, but he never achieved the kind of popular attention that the writers he influenced achieved. It's hard to explain why the 1001 Books series essentially ignores the short story as a genre. If you were relying on this project for your information, you might think that nobody wrote short stories before the late 1960's.
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| The Flower Carrier by Diego Rivera. part of an artistic awakening in Latin America that bore fruit in many disciplines. |
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Forget any list of 1000 top novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude would probably be on the top 10 list out of 95% of well-read people. Essentially synonymous with the vital "magical realism" movement, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a rare book that is universally loved by academics, critics and a world wide audience of popular readers. Of course, I'd read One Hundred Years of Solitude before- maybe on multiple occasions by this point, but when I saw a new paperback edition sitting in a well maintained independent book store in Santa Fe New Mexico on a recent trip, I couldn't resist making the purchase.
As it turned out, I got to devote almost a week to reading it. After I caught a stomach bug in Paris, I had a few days in small town New Hampshire to recuperate and really give Solitude my full and undivided attention. Magical realism has become so successful that a high percentage of new books that qualify as "literature" contains at least one element traceable to the sui generis beginning found in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but the influences on One Hundred Years of Solitude are almost reducible to a formula, "Charismatic Colombian grandmother, Labyrinths by Borges and Kafka."
Besides the success of the book itself on any level one would care to discuss, there is also the fact that before One Hundred Years of Solitude, "magical realism" didn't exist as a term, and after it was published, it did. Marquez's multi-generational sage encapsulates the experience of a certain history of Latin America, without making anything specific enough to dispel the gauze that hangs over the famous fictional town of Macondo.
The Author himself is not that far away from being a mythic figure, what with his fraught history of journalism, kinship with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and "Most Interesting Man in the World" look. And the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the translated into all the languages and read in all the languages. It's a Nobel Prize winning book you can buy in an airport, or an independent book store.
Published 7/8/16
Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut is an author I associate with college undergraduates and precocious high school upperclassmen, and Slaughterhouse Five is the most well known title of his, to the point where I have seen actual Slaughterhouse Five novelty baseball jersey's at every Boston Red Sox game I've ever attended. Vonnegut is not just associated with college students in general, he is particularly associated with college students from the north-east, and actually lived and wrote in the Boston area.
Slaughterhouse Five is about a time travelling optometrist who experienced the Dresden Fire Bombing as a POW and was later kidnapped by aliens in a flying saucer. Like his abductors, Billy Pilgrim experiences all times simultaneously and Vonnegut structures the narrative in episodic fashion. This technique- jumping backwards and forwards in time within the narrative- is of course a tried and true modernist stand-by, but never is it dealt with so specifically as Vonnegut addresses it.
The experience is a kind of comic-book take on the high modernist novel, and by utilizing plot elements like an alien abduction, Vonnegut assured the attention of a genre audience. Like other Vonnegutian novels of ideas, the underlying ideas themselves are not particularly complex. That no doubt helped him with his target audience in the 1960's, and today it's a key to his continuing appeal with kids attending college.
Published 7/14/16
Tent of Miracles (1967)
by Jorge Amado
Tent of Miracles (1967)
by Jorge Amado
Amado is typically considered the most popular/best Modernist novelist. He had a lengthy career as a public intellectual and abroad, wrote multiple novels that embraced the fractious modern society of Brazil and was even elected to Congress in Brazil as a Communist. Tent of Miracles is part of his series of Bahia novels, and mostly concerns the life and times of Pedro Archanjo, a self taught savant of the social sciences who fiercely opposes the racist ideologies of the university professors. He is also a spiritual talisman for his community, living and loving, fathering children near and far and generally promoting miscegenation as a Brazilian solution to racism.
I'm told that Tent of Miracle is a satire, and while the prose evokes an occasional chuckle, I think a modern English language reader is going to find much that is particularly funny. On the other hand it is an insightful portrayal of Brazilian society in the mid 1960's, and what with the Olympics imminent, there is no better time to read up on Brazilian literature.
I'm told that Tent of Miracle is a satire, and while the prose evokes an occasional chuckle, I think a modern English language reader is going to find much that is particularly funny. On the other hand it is an insightful portrayal of Brazilian society in the mid 1960's, and what with the Olympics imminent, there is no better time to read up on Brazilian literature.
Published 7/20/16
No Laughing Matter (1967)
by Angus Wilson
I checked No Laughing Matter out of the San Diego Public Library about three months ago, and it sat on the shelf until two weeks ago. No Laughing Matter is only 500 pages, but it covers so much time that it feels like twice that many. Wilson doesn't help matters by switching between six main characters (siblings) and inserting mini-plays into the more conventional narrative.
What I got out of No Laughing Matter was that there was a writing sister, a gay brother who bought and sold art, a sister who went to prison for swindling an old couple out of a painting, a brother who was a successful radical journalist and then I think one brother who was a conventional rich dude. Portions of events are memorable- the writing sister heads to the south of France for a casual affair, the writing brother goes to Moscow at the behest of the Communist party prior to World War II, the other sister gets sent to prison for her art swindle.
But large portions are so impressionistic that I found events difficult to follow. I had little to no idea what the interstitial plays were about. Wilson, who was gay for a large portion of his life where homosexuality was still a death penalty offense, writes about the same subject as authors like John Galsworthy with a decidedly more modern take on what essentially are the same sequence of events. A last portion set in the south of Portugal brings the multi-generational English family drama into the Sixties, capital S.
Ultimately, there was nothing to make No Laughing Matter anything but heavy, heavy, sledding, for English fiction completists only.
Published 8/10/16
Giles Goat-Boy (1965)
by John Barth
John Barth himself called Giles Goat-Boy the first "meta-fictional" novel. A half-century later, it's hard to imagine anyone caring enough about which was the "first" meta-fictional novel to debate the claim. Amazingly, Giles Goat-Boy was not just a critical but also a commercial success, i.e. best-seller list, mass-media coverage, book-of-the-month level marketing. Today, that commercial success is hard to imagine. I can only surmise it was a combination of several "right place, right time" factors having to do with the plot (an elaborate cold war allegory set on a fictional "campus" that took the place of the world), the style (learned in a way that was comprehensible to an college-level audience) and the novelty of some of the meta-fictional techniques to a mid 1960's American audience.
Today, Giles Goat-Boy is hardly read, even by people who have read John Barth. Having now read this 710 page book (in hardback) I can now safely opine that there are many reasons for Giles Goat-Boy having fallen out of favor with critical and popular audiences. First, there is the heavy handed Cold War/Campus allegory which dominates the narrative. You can't hope to follow the allegory without a thorough understanding of the struggle of East and West in the Cold War. The relevance of this allegory in it's Cold War context is debatable two decades after the conclusion of the Cold War.
The second part of the allegory is the equation of the Campus of the novel with the entire world. This is likely to appeal most to audiences that think that the culture of the university campus is the center of the cultural/intellectual world. This attitude was wide-spread, and expanding in 1965, the year Giles Goat-Boy was published. Today, that world of the university has much less universal appeal.
Loosely put, Giles Goat-Boy is about the eponymous hero doing his Joseph Campbell Power of Myth style meta-quest towards spiritual and temporal power. This takes the form of his progress from a human child literally raised by goats by a professor who has been banished from the main university to the role of the "Grand Tutor" a Christ-figure whose manifestation is a apocalypse triggering event for the world of the campus.
Upon the way he does the typical thing a hero does in a Western hero quest: he has to solve impossible problems, have sex with a sister he doesn't know is his sister, meet his parents and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. The villain in Giles Boat-Boy is an evil ENIAC style computer called WESCAC that may or may not be Giles father. Perhaps the theme that provides the most enduring interest to a modern reader is the role of computers and technology as a force for evil.
Writing before the computer era had properly begun, Barth correctly inferred the dehumanizing impact of turning over much of our decision making process over to machines. It's a well traveled theme in 2016, but in 1965, not so much.
Published 8/20/16
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou actually wrote a seven volume autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first volume, covering her childhood up to the birth of her son. Angelou led an incredible life but Caged Bird is the single work which defines her. Angelou was never a novelist in the mode of the typical twentieth century writer. Her writing ranged from journalism to poetry. She also worked in entertainment and politics. Angelou had a huge revival/canonization during the 1990's, when President Bill Clinton had her recite a poem at his first term inauguration.
In 2016 she remains a staple of student reading and the Oprah crowd. Although described as an autobiography, the level of narrative art and skill applied to the material makes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings more like autobiographical fiction. Like Toni Morrison's, The Bluest Eye, or Harper Lee in To Kill A Mockingbird, Angelou makes use of an unsophisticated child narrator to describe some very adult events.
The matter of fact depiction of Angelou's violation as an eight year old at the hands of her Mother's companion escapes being unbearable only because the Angelou-narrator child lacks the vocabulary to describe the events accurately. Like The Bluest Eye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is about children but it is not children's literature. The Angelou narrator character manages to cover most of the United States as she is shuffled between both sets of grand parents and her separated parents.
The action begins in rural Arkansas, moves to urban St. Louis, then switches between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Part of the value of Caged Bird is Angelou's skilled depiction of these different areas and the relationship dynamics between blacks and whites, and within the black community. Towards the end, the Angelou narrator character goes so far as to become the first black employee of the San Francisco street car company, lowering a barrier before she was out of high school.
As is made very clear, Angelou was no ordinary child, reading Dickens and Defoe before she was out of grade school. And despite the rape, she writes about a life that was essentially free of hardship. In Arkansas, her father's mother, who she calls Momma, is almost the sole member of the black bourgeois, running the only shop that sells to African-American's in that part of Arkansas. In St. Louis, her mothers mother is an essentially white mulatto who serves as a ward boss and commands a gang of her three sons and their cronies.
Only her father, working a series of menial jobs and living in a trailer in Southern California, would fail to meet normal standards of middle class existence. For African American author writing about life in the early part of the 20th century, little conflict needs to be invented. The mere description of day-to-day existence is harrowing enough, every moment fraught with tension, or at least the potential for tension.
It's no wonder that Caged Bird is close to being required reading for students.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou actually wrote a seven volume autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first volume, covering her childhood up to the birth of her son. Angelou led an incredible life but Caged Bird is the single work which defines her. Angelou was never a novelist in the mode of the typical twentieth century writer. Her writing ranged from journalism to poetry. She also worked in entertainment and politics. Angelou had a huge revival/canonization during the 1990's, when President Bill Clinton had her recite a poem at his first term inauguration.
In 2016 she remains a staple of student reading and the Oprah crowd. Although described as an autobiography, the level of narrative art and skill applied to the material makes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings more like autobiographical fiction. Like Toni Morrison's, The Bluest Eye, or Harper Lee in To Kill A Mockingbird, Angelou makes use of an unsophisticated child narrator to describe some very adult events.
The matter of fact depiction of Angelou's violation as an eight year old at the hands of her Mother's companion escapes being unbearable only because the Angelou-narrator child lacks the vocabulary to describe the events accurately. Like The Bluest Eye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is about children but it is not children's literature. The Angelou narrator character manages to cover most of the United States as she is shuffled between both sets of grand parents and her separated parents.
The action begins in rural Arkansas, moves to urban St. Louis, then switches between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Part of the value of Caged Bird is Angelou's skilled depiction of these different areas and the relationship dynamics between blacks and whites, and within the black community. Towards the end, the Angelou narrator character goes so far as to become the first black employee of the San Francisco street car company, lowering a barrier before she was out of high school.
As is made very clear, Angelou was no ordinary child, reading Dickens and Defoe before she was out of grade school. And despite the rape, she writes about a life that was essentially free of hardship. In Arkansas, her father's mother, who she calls Momma, is almost the sole member of the black bourgeois, running the only shop that sells to African-American's in that part of Arkansas. In St. Louis, her mothers mother is an essentially white mulatto who serves as a ward boss and commands a gang of her three sons and their cronies.
Only her father, working a series of menial jobs and living in a trailer in Southern California, would fail to meet normal standards of middle class existence. For African American author writing about life in the early part of the 20th century, little conflict needs to be invented. The mere description of day-to-day existence is harrowing enough, every moment fraught with tension, or at least the potential for tension.
It's no wonder that Caged Bird is close to being required reading for students.
Published 9/18/16
The Godfather (1969)
by Mario Puzo
If you grew up after the movie version of The Godfather, you might be forgiven for not knowing that it was even based on a book of the same name, by author Mario Puzo. The book has maintained some amount of popularity as the source material for the insanely popular film series. Perhaps the most surprising experience I derived from reading The Godfather is how little of the text DIDN'T make it into the film. Indeed, never have I read the source material for a movie I've seen multiple times and spotted fewer changes between book and film. I can't think of a single subplot that didn't make it from book to film with the exception of the story of the bridesmaid who is seen in the film banging Sonny at his sister's wedding. In the movie, that's all she gets- in the book, she becomes Sonny's mistress, moves to Las Vegas to work in a Corleone casino after Sonny is gunned down, and even undergoes vaginal reconstruction in Los Angeles.
The Godfather, the book, covers the time in the film from the story of young Vito Corelone, to the initiation of the movement of the Corelone family from New York to Las Vegas. Puzo, a "serious" writer of literature before he published this book, famously wrote The Godfather to make a hit, and it is clear from every element of the book: plot and style. Puzo's populist intent is clear on the combination of sex and violence with what amounts to an organizational description of the rise of Italian-American organized crime. Unless you are a historian of crime, The Godfather IS the mafia. Much of what our culture "knows" about the Mafia: The five families, the mixture of secrecy and flamboyant violence and the mixture of "American" values with the Sicilian "Omerta"(the law of silence), these all come direct from The Godfather and no where else.
The Godfather is not one of the best written novels of all time, but it is one of the top 10 stories of the 20th century. It is universally known to the point where even people who have never seen the film or read the book can quote from it in casual conversation, "I made him an offer he can't refuse." One aspect of that line that the book makes clearer than the film is that the ultimate offer one can't refuse is to be murdered by The Godfather.
The Godfather (1969)
by Mario Puzo
If you grew up after the movie version of The Godfather, you might be forgiven for not knowing that it was even based on a book of the same name, by author Mario Puzo. The book has maintained some amount of popularity as the source material for the insanely popular film series. Perhaps the most surprising experience I derived from reading The Godfather is how little of the text DIDN'T make it into the film. Indeed, never have I read the source material for a movie I've seen multiple times and spotted fewer changes between book and film. I can't think of a single subplot that didn't make it from book to film with the exception of the story of the bridesmaid who is seen in the film banging Sonny at his sister's wedding. In the movie, that's all she gets- in the book, she becomes Sonny's mistress, moves to Las Vegas to work in a Corleone casino after Sonny is gunned down, and even undergoes vaginal reconstruction in Los Angeles.
The Godfather, the book, covers the time in the film from the story of young Vito Corelone, to the initiation of the movement of the Corelone family from New York to Las Vegas. Puzo, a "serious" writer of literature before he published this book, famously wrote The Godfather to make a hit, and it is clear from every element of the book: plot and style. Puzo's populist intent is clear on the combination of sex and violence with what amounts to an organizational description of the rise of Italian-American organized crime. Unless you are a historian of crime, The Godfather IS the mafia. Much of what our culture "knows" about the Mafia: The five families, the mixture of secrecy and flamboyant violence and the mixture of "American" values with the Sicilian "Omerta"(the law of silence), these all come direct from The Godfather and no where else.
The Godfather is not one of the best written novels of all time, but it is one of the top 10 stories of the 20th century. It is universally known to the point where even people who have never seen the film or read the book can quote from it in casual conversation, "I made him an offer he can't refuse." One aspect of that line that the book makes clearer than the film is that the ultimate offer one can't refuse is to be murdered by The Godfather.
Published 9/19/16
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
by Tom Wolfe
The "new journalism" of the 1960's involved non-fiction, long form journalism written from the perspective of a participant. In that way, it resembled the canons of fiction, particularly those of the novel, and thus "new journalism" was the origin of the larger field of "creative non fiction," where writers of non-fiction do their best to emulate the stylistic concerns of novelists. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is one of the first AND the most popular example of this genre, and it is also, in my mind, the single best book about the origins of the west-coast hippie movement of the 1960's.
It's also a book best read in the early stages of high school, which is when I read it for the first time. This book, alongside On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, were the four titles that defined the counter-culture of the mid 20th century. It's worth pointing out that only The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was actually published during the 1960's. It's actually possible to read all four books in chronological order and maintain a narrative consistency.
On the Road features thinly veiled versions of William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Naked Lunch was written by Burroughs during the time portrayed in On the Road. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test has Neal Cassady as a major characters, and relies on work done by Hunter S. Thompson. Feart and Loathing in Las Vegas is essentially the death of all the dreams put forward in the previous three books.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test tells the tale of Ken Kesey, successful novelist, and his Merry Pranksters, a group of young people (and an older Neal Cassady) who saw themselves as apostles for a religion centered around intake of drugs (Weed and LSD in particular) and a loosely defined spiritualism which incorporated lessons learned from earlier 20th century authors like Herman Hesse and Aldous Huxley. Those looking for the positives and negatives of this fussy approach to awakening the spirit need go no further than the figure of Kesey himself, who was clearly the Christ figure (and financial sponsor) of this particular movement.
Kesey was from rural Oregon, son of a well-off builder, who had made his way south after graduating from college to take an MFA (I think) in creative writing at Stanford. There, he took a succession of odd jobs to pay his way, one of which involved being a test subject for hallucinogenic drugs. He was smitten by LSD and sought to spread awareness by example. Eventually, he and the pranksters came up with the ideas of "acid tests" where revelers would take acid and groove to the music of the band that would eventually be called The Grateful Dead.
As much as my adolescent self was enthralled, as an adult I now see the deep flaws in their vision, not the least of which was Kesey's cowardly flight from prosecution into the wilds of Mexico. He eventually makes his peace with the law by renouncing acid experimentation and retiring from public life after serving a short jail sentence, revealing himself to be more bourgeois than revolutionary.
Published 10/5/16
The Magus (1965)
by John Fowles
The Magus is another book I read, and loved, in high school. Now I find it mildly embarrassing. Both the book itself, which is still regularly considered a "top 100 novels of the century" type of book, and my admiration for it. The Magus is the sort of book you read in college in the United States or England. It is a popular example of "metafiction." It's also a good example of just how popular and successful a work of meta-fiction could be in the market place.
It is also, in my opinion, a very good example of just how tedious metafiction can be. The Magus is nearly 600 pages long, and it winds through so many fun-house-mirror type twists that I was left only vaguely intrigued by the end of the book. I'm sure some of my attitude was engendered by my prior familiarity with the narrative. Like other novels from this time period on the 1001 Books list, the narrative appeals to a young person questioning his or her place in the universe.
Really though, The Magus is a work of popular fiction, not a piece of trailblazing literature. It's not both of these things, either. In fact, I very much doubt The Magus would be on the list at all if it hadn't sold so many copies over the years. The Magus isn't simply a top 100 title else where, it is one of the two (of four) Fowles titles on the original 1001 Books list to make it to the 2010 edition.
Published 3/6/17
The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)
by Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49 is usually the only Thomas Pynchon book that a college undergraduate is likely to come across during survey level literature classes. That is because, unlike all other of Pynchon's books, it is brief- a novella, not a novel. It's not exactly a puzzling or unjustified selection, but it seems strange to include Pynchon's second published work when his first book, V, published in 1963, is pretty much a sprawling masterpiece. Perhaps the choice is a nod to the truth that no normal reader is going to read anything Pynchon wrote except The Crying of Lot 49.
The Crying of Lot 49 is often described as an early post-modern masterpiece AND a knowing parody of post-modernism, and both descriptions reflect that is hard to say, what, exactly, is going on in The Crying of Lot 49- both on the surface and underneath. On the surface, The Crying of Lot 49 is the story of Oedipus Maas, who is appointed executor of her mysterious ex-boy friend's sprawling estate. The estate includes an enormous stamp collection which features the only known evidence of two ultra secret private postal services that flourished in the early modern period. Maas travels a very recognizable early 1960's California, encountering Beatles-style rock bands and Kesey style new-age gurus.
Pynchon's accurate characterization of the psychedelic 1960's as it was happening is the most astonishing part of The Crying of Lot 49. It's hard to believe that it was written in 1965, rather than 1985.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
by Tom Wolfe
The "new journalism" of the 1960's involved non-fiction, long form journalism written from the perspective of a participant. In that way, it resembled the canons of fiction, particularly those of the novel, and thus "new journalism" was the origin of the larger field of "creative non fiction," where writers of non-fiction do their best to emulate the stylistic concerns of novelists. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is one of the first AND the most popular example of this genre, and it is also, in my mind, the single best book about the origins of the west-coast hippie movement of the 1960's.
It's also a book best read in the early stages of high school, which is when I read it for the first time. This book, alongside On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, were the four titles that defined the counter-culture of the mid 20th century. It's worth pointing out that only The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was actually published during the 1960's. It's actually possible to read all four books in chronological order and maintain a narrative consistency.
On the Road features thinly veiled versions of William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Naked Lunch was written by Burroughs during the time portrayed in On the Road. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test has Neal Cassady as a major characters, and relies on work done by Hunter S. Thompson. Feart and Loathing in Las Vegas is essentially the death of all the dreams put forward in the previous three books.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test tells the tale of Ken Kesey, successful novelist, and his Merry Pranksters, a group of young people (and an older Neal Cassady) who saw themselves as apostles for a religion centered around intake of drugs (Weed and LSD in particular) and a loosely defined spiritualism which incorporated lessons learned from earlier 20th century authors like Herman Hesse and Aldous Huxley. Those looking for the positives and negatives of this fussy approach to awakening the spirit need go no further than the figure of Kesey himself, who was clearly the Christ figure (and financial sponsor) of this particular movement.
Kesey was from rural Oregon, son of a well-off builder, who had made his way south after graduating from college to take an MFA (I think) in creative writing at Stanford. There, he took a succession of odd jobs to pay his way, one of which involved being a test subject for hallucinogenic drugs. He was smitten by LSD and sought to spread awareness by example. Eventually, he and the pranksters came up with the ideas of "acid tests" where revelers would take acid and groove to the music of the band that would eventually be called The Grateful Dead.
As much as my adolescent self was enthralled, as an adult I now see the deep flaws in their vision, not the least of which was Kesey's cowardly flight from prosecution into the wilds of Mexico. He eventually makes his peace with the law by renouncing acid experimentation and retiring from public life after serving a short jail sentence, revealing himself to be more bourgeois than revolutionary.
Published 10/5/16
The Magus (1965)
by John Fowles
The Magus is another book I read, and loved, in high school. Now I find it mildly embarrassing. Both the book itself, which is still regularly considered a "top 100 novels of the century" type of book, and my admiration for it. The Magus is the sort of book you read in college in the United States or England. It is a popular example of "metafiction." It's also a good example of just how popular and successful a work of meta-fiction could be in the market place.
It is also, in my opinion, a very good example of just how tedious metafiction can be. The Magus is nearly 600 pages long, and it winds through so many fun-house-mirror type twists that I was left only vaguely intrigued by the end of the book. I'm sure some of my attitude was engendered by my prior familiarity with the narrative. Like other novels from this time period on the 1001 Books list, the narrative appeals to a young person questioning his or her place in the universe.
Really though, The Magus is a work of popular fiction, not a piece of trailblazing literature. It's not both of these things, either. In fact, I very much doubt The Magus would be on the list at all if it hadn't sold so many copies over the years. The Magus isn't simply a top 100 title else where, it is one of the two (of four) Fowles titles on the original 1001 Books list to make it to the 2010 edition.
Published 3/6/17
The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)
by Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49 is usually the only Thomas Pynchon book that a college undergraduate is likely to come across during survey level literature classes. That is because, unlike all other of Pynchon's books, it is brief- a novella, not a novel. It's not exactly a puzzling or unjustified selection, but it seems strange to include Pynchon's second published work when his first book, V, published in 1963, is pretty much a sprawling masterpiece. Perhaps the choice is a nod to the truth that no normal reader is going to read anything Pynchon wrote except The Crying of Lot 49.
The Crying of Lot 49 is often described as an early post-modern masterpiece AND a knowing parody of post-modernism, and both descriptions reflect that is hard to say, what, exactly, is going on in The Crying of Lot 49- both on the surface and underneath. On the surface, The Crying of Lot 49 is the story of Oedipus Maas, who is appointed executor of her mysterious ex-boy friend's sprawling estate. The estate includes an enormous stamp collection which features the only known evidence of two ultra secret private postal services that flourished in the early modern period. Maas travels a very recognizable early 1960's California, encountering Beatles-style rock bands and Kesey style new-age gurus.
Pynchon's accurate characterization of the psychedelic 1960's as it was happening is the most astonishing part of The Crying of Lot 49. It's hard to believe that it was written in 1965, rather than 1985.
Published 2/23/18
Omensetter's Luck (1966)
by William H. Gass
William Howard Gass died on December 7th of last year. As for all artists, death provides an opportunity to re-evaluate (or evaluate for the first time) the published works of the dead artist. It's macabre, if you stop to think about it, but it is also very true. Gass is typically grouped among the first generation of American post-modernist writers of fiction. He wasn't just a novelist- he held down a professorship in philosophy at Washington University for several decades, and he only published three novels and two collections of shorter works of fiction. He was more verbose when it came to non fiction, putting out a dozen more academic works, ranging from literary criticism to philosophy.
He never really found mainstream acceptance, in terms of a celebrity level media profile or a single book that broke out to a broad, general audience. Of what is there, Omensetter's Luck, Gass' first novel, is generally considered his most readable- which is saying something about the other two- because Omensetter's Luck is hardly readable. Literary reputation as a post-modernist aside, it was hard for me to grasp, what exactly, was post modern about Omensetter's Luck, vs. the high modernism that it actually appears to be.
High modernism in the sense that Gass employs a very strict stream of consciousness technique for the middle hundred pages of a three hundred page book. High modernism in the sense that nothing is explained to the reader. There is none of the humor or mischievousness of post-modernism here, only strict historical (meta?) fiction. Gass, writing a half century after high modernism's hey day, was plugging into an aesthetic that would have been appreciated by the critical audience of the mid 1960's, but high modernism, even in it's own day, rarely had what one would call a popular audience.
Omensetter's Luck is "about" the eponymous Brackett Omensetter, who moves down the river in 19th century Ohio. After a brief introduction, the main part is the stream of consciousness of Jethro Furber, the local priest, who become obsessed with Omensetter's "luck" and gradually disintegrates mentally as a result of the strength of his hatred.
Published 6/5/18
A Kestrel for a Knave (1968)
by Barry Hines
A Kestrel for a Knave, about a young, working-class boy living in a coal mining area of England, is regularly taught to students in the UK, where it was also the basis for a very well regarded film by director Ken Loach. In the US, the blend of English working class concerns circa the early 1960's and falconry is less accessible, but certainly the story of a boy and his bird carries enough universality to appeal to the interested USA residing reader.
Billy, the protagonist, lives in a shanty with his slatternly mother and vile older brother, Jud. He attends the local grammar school, where he has a bad reputation: half slacker, half criminal, and is regularly bullied both by teachers and other students. Billy is the kind of kid, who, when asked to write a work of fiction, chooses to write about what others would call an ideal family live, with hot meals and a present father. That sort of world is Billy's fiction, and his reality is a go nowhere existence, where going into the mines is presented as an excellent career.
Hines writes squarely within the "angry young man/kitchen sink" genre of British prose. All the characters speak in dialect. Economic circumstances are dire. The kestrel becomes a force for good in Billy's dim, uneventful life and A Kestrel for a Knave largely boils down to waiting for someone to come along and ruin it.
Published 8/6/18
A void (1969)
by George Perec
How do you translate a book, written in French without the letter "E" into English? Seems like it would be impossible, but in 1995 an English translation was published, and it managed to adhere to the same rule- omitting the letter e. I left A Void to the end of the 1001 Books project because it seems like reading a book with no e's in it would be tedious and confusing. A Void is, indeed, both tedious and incredibly confusing. I also found it impossible to put aside the fact that no e's were used in the book- although I noted that the number twenty was written out 20, and thus the e avoided by a technicality.
A void (1969)
by George Perec
How do you translate a book, written in French without the letter "E" into English? Seems like it would be impossible, but in 1995 an English translation was published, and it managed to adhere to the same rule- omitting the letter e. I left A Void to the end of the 1001 Books project because it seems like reading a book with no e's in it would be tedious and confusing. A Void is, indeed, both tedious and incredibly confusing. I also found it impossible to put aside the fact that no e's were used in the book- although I noted that the number twenty was written out 20, and thus the e avoided by a technicality.
 |
| Richard Farina, Pynchon friend, and noted novelist and folk singer |
Been Down So Long it Looks Up to Me (1966)
by Richard Fariña
Richard Fariña is one of those tantalizing "what-if's" of 20th century American popular culture. He went to college at Cornell with Thomas Pynchon- Pynchon officiated at his wedding, and Pynchon authored the foreword for the re-issue of Been Down So Long it Looks Up to Me, which I think, is pretty high up there on the list of "lost" classics of counter-cultural literature. Farina also cut two folk albums with his wife - Joan Baez's sister- and it isn't hard to find people who will compare him- favorably- to Bob Dylan. Unfortunately, Farina died in a motorcycle accident in 1966- extinguishing his light, and ultimately leaving him an interesting foot note.
It is easy to see the relationship between Farina and Pynchon- and it made me think about the degree to which all the major writers of the 1960's in American Literature were influenced by "jive" the particular slang of New York City jazz musicians- black and white. It's particularly striking in Been Down So Long because the characters are students at Cornell University in the mid 1960's- true- the protagonist is Greek, and one of the gang is African-American, but we aren't talking a hep situation up there in Ithaca. Whereas with Pynchon- his early books set in California- or the past- the jive influence is muted and blends into the larger "Pynchonian" style.
I didn't love it- Farina has his antic and mad cap moments, but there are a lot of poop jokes and a generally deplorable attitude towards women. There is little in the way of plot- call it a picaresque, which is probably what the the author intended. I haven't yet listened to his folk records but I plan to.
Published 10/6/19
Stoner (1965)
by John Williams
Stoner is not about weed, it's about a guy named Stoner. I've been aware of Stoner since the New York Review of Books put out a paperback version- that was back in 2005- and then in 2012 is Waterstone's book of the year, which spurred more interest in the United States- for the last few years I've seen it everywhere that carries New York Review of Books Editions. Sadly, New York Review of Books doesn't do Audiobooks, but I guess someone else got the rights and BOOM- I'm listening to the Audiobook.
John Williams spent most of his life in Denver as a tenured assistant professor at the University of Denver. He wasn't unrecognized in his lifetime- his 1972 novel, Augustus, about the life and times of Caesar (of ancient Rome) won the National Book Award, but he isn't what you would call "canonical." If he is, it is because of this book- Stoner, his anti-bildungsroman slash existential hero, about a character who bears a marked resemblance to the Author. William Stoner is what you call a "tragic hero," born to a pair of Missouri dirt-farmers who decide to send him to the then brand new University of Missouri (Columbia) with the thought that he will learn agricultural science and return to the farm.
Instead, young Stoner- who is, it must be said a "square"- he represents the polar opposite of of Kerouac's Sal Paradise in On The Road- falls in love with English literature and abandons his planned course of study to become a university English instructor. What follows takes place almost entirely on or near the University of Missouri, making Stoner a charter member of the first generation of the "campus novel" of American literature.
The pathos really starts to build when Stoner makes the ill-advised choice to court and wed Edith, the mentally ill daughter of a wealthy St. Louis area banker who is affiliated with the university. Edith is literally the first woman that Stoner dates, so a modern reader won't miss the warning signs, and the use of a third part narrator makes sure that the reader is aware of how bad things are likely to get. Edith is a memorable character, and the miseries Stoner experiences at her hands are only exceeded by the misery he experiences in his job as a tenured assistant professor- he has a lifetime job, but no guarantee of when or what he will be teaching, a hitch that comes to the fore when Stoner gets into a spat with his department head over the progress of a student.
Stoner is a sad book, very sad. It's certainly a nice counter-point to the beat influenced/classic 60's era American books from this period. One thing that Stoner is not is experimental, nor is it difficult to read. My understanding of books reprinted by the New York Review of Books is that they are often experimential/modernist/difficult to read, and that was not the case here.
Published 2/8/20
Heartbreak Tango (1969)
by Manuel Puig
Replaces: Grimus by Salman Rushdie
Heartbreak Tango is not an LGBT book- I'm guessing that 1969 was a leetle early for a LGBT writer like Puig to be explicit about queer love. Instead, Heartbreak Tango is a collection of discursive recollections about Juan Carlos Etchepare, a thoroughly average example of a young Argentinian male who inspires slavish devotion from a handful of women as he slouches towards death from tuberculosis. It is a kalidospocpic tale, told from a half dozen different perspectives.
I suppose the interesting perspective is that of people from the working classes of Latin America. Latin American literature tends to work from the top down and the kind of social-realism present in Heartbreak Tango isn't something you associate with Latin American literature until the more recent past. I'm not sad to see Grimus, Salman Rushdie's early science fiction book (and his first published novel), get the axe. The longer Rushdie's career goes on, the less he seems like an author who needs four or five books in the canon. Certainly Grimus, which was reviled when it was published and has hardly been resuscitated since, merely illustrates how great he would become.
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| Elena Poniatowska, Mexican author |
Here's to You, Jesusa (1969)
by Elena Ponisatowska
Replaces: The Public Burning by Robert Coover
This is another book focusing on the Latin American working-class, here embodied by Jesusa- the narrator and protagonist. Jesusa leads a colorful life, travelling with soldiers, drinking, carousing and in general living the kind of life that you might call "liberated." Which is not to say that everything is fun and games, abuse at the hands of her husband is frequent, and it causes her to swear off relationships for decades. She is a witness to the tumult of the 20th century, with an emphasis on the Mexican anti-clericism of the early 20th century.
by Elena Ponisatowska
Replaces: The Public Burning by Robert Coover
This is another book focusing on the Latin American working-class, here embodied by Jesusa- the narrator and protagonist. Jesusa leads a colorful life, travelling with soldiers, drinking, carousing and in general living the kind of life that you might call "liberated." Which is not to say that everything is fun and games, abuse at the hands of her husband is frequent, and it causes her to swear off relationships for decades. She is a witness to the tumult of the 20th century, with an emphasis on the Mexican anti-clericism of the early 20th century.
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| Hungarian author Gyorgy Konrad |
The Case Worker (1969)
by Gyorgy Konrad
Replaces: Dead Babies by Martin Amis
Well, he's no Milan Kundera, but Gyorgy Konrad is in a similar position as a central European author who wrote during the Communist period in that country. Hungary was always an awkward fit with Communism, a former imperial power itself that suffered greatly from partition after both World War I and World War II. There can be no doubt that he suffered greatly by being banned from publication in his native Hungarian language until after the fall of Communism in 1989. Such are the vagaries of 20th century literature!
Konrad just died last September, so if there was going to be a reappraisal of his status in English, now would be the time. The Case Worker is his best known book, about an inspector in the Hungarian department of child welfare, responsible for removing disabled children from parents who are incapable of caring for them. That he ran afoul of the Communist era censor will come as no surprise to readers, there is a grimness in his depiction of contemporary Hungarian life that is positively nihilistic.
Bye bye to Dead Babies (1975) by Martin Amis, it was his second book- an Agatha Christie inspired country-house mystery with Amis' characteristically mordant wit. Dead Babies is probably only Amis' fourth-best book, behind London Fields- a clear career number one- Money and The Information.
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| The Day of the Dolphin was made into a movie starring George C. Scott |
The Day of the Dolphin (1967)
by Robert Merle
Replaces: The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
Originally written in French, the English translation of this 1967 French eco-thriller is an interesting pick for the second edition of 1001 Books. The Day of the Dolphin is about an American scientist, Sevilla, who teaches a pair of dolphins to speak as the United States hurdles towards a war with China during the Vietnam War. I think technically, The Day of the Dolphin is an alternate history, because said dolphins are eventually (spoiler alert) used in a false flag operation to destroy an American warship in an attempt to trigger a nuclear war with Communist China.
The Day of the Dolphin really draws attention to the lack of big, international hits by French language authors in the mid to late 20th century, paralleling a general decline in the global importance of French culture in the English speaking world. I don't think it reflects a decline in France as much as it reflects a rise in the number of languages seeing works of contemporary literature translated into English. Before 1950, you are basically talking about French and German with cameos for Russian, Spanish and Italian when it comes to representatives of world literature. After 1950 there is an explosion- today I can name a dozen languages that have had genuine hits in translation. Swedish, Danish, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, Albanian, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese. Spanish has exploded, Portuguese is well represented. There's also the post-1950's rise of non-UK, non-American English writers, who occupy a translation adjacent spot in the market for serious literature. So it is understandable that there might be fewer books from France being read in English translation.
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| cover of Pavane, Keith Roberts' pioneering work of alternate-history |
Pavane (1968)
by Keith Roberts
If you read The Alteration (1976)by Kingsley Amis, you will hear about Pavane by Keith Roberts, published eight years earlier, albeit within the confines of the science fiction/fantasy genre, also about an alternate universe where the Catholic church overcomes the schismatic efforts of the English King and maintain their control over the entire world into the 20th century, when both books take place in a world where the Pope ruthlessly suppresses technology (like electricity, banned by the Pope in both The Alteration and Pavane). Pavane was originally published as a series of connected short stories in a UK based fantasy magazine, episodic in nature.
Roberts didn't invent alternate history, in 1968 the sub-genre had antecedents going back centuries and a viable position in the science fiction/fantasy world through the influence of H.G. Wells. Philip K. Dick revitalized the space in 1962 when he published The Man in the High Castle, his still read "if the Nazi's won" take on a post World War II America. Today, it's hard to imagine alternate history without Hitler. Pavane represents an elevation from simple (though fascinating) genre fiction to "high literature," or at least that is what critics argue today.
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| Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo |
Marks of Identity (1969)
by Juan Goytisolo
Replaces: The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
I feel bad for Juan Goytisolo as a Spanish language author who was a contemporary of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez really took up A LOT of oxygen in the department of Spanish language authors drawing attention in English translation. Goytisolo, on the other hand, maintained a huge reputation within the Spanish language audience but never really latched on to an Audience in translation. Things would probably be different if he were writing today, but as it stands his top selling titles on American Amazon were editions published ten and thirty years ago.
The top selling English language version of Marks of Identity dates from 2007 and was issued by Dalkey Archive Press, so, something that got into libraries but is no one's idea of a best seller. It's not hard to see why- Marks of Identity is a technical read, with lots of unexplained shifts in time and place linked by the experiences of Alvaro Mendiola. Marks of Identity is the first book in the trilogy that bears his name.
Mendiola is your average mid to late 20th century protagonist of European literature: He's a straight, white man from a wealthy family which has experienced some difficulties during the tumult of the 20th century. Here, Mendiola's family are conservative Spaniards who come from Barcelona, and their suffering is at the hands of the Republican forces and their sympathy. Young Alvaro unsurprisingly rebels against his families Franco-ist sympathies and becomes a leftists, living a live of "self imposed exile" first in Italy, then in France.
It is hardly cutting edge stuff, and another example of how the broadening aspect of the 2008 revision of the 1001 Books project ends up decreasing diversity on one spectrum while increasing it on another.
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| Ukrainian writer Oles Honchar |
The Cathedral (1968)
by Oles Honchar
Replaces: The Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
A Soviet era writer from the Ukraine, Honchar had the misfortune to be approved-of by the Communist government, making translation into English a non-starter for the bulk of the career. Coincidentally, The Cathedral, which is his only book readily available in English translation (albeit via a 1989 translation published by the Society of Ukrainian Catholics, is also the work that got him into trouble with the Communist government.
The Cathedral of the title is based on the story of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, which was designed by a Cossack- a non engineer/non architect, and then built entirely of wood without nails, in 1778. Honachar's Ukrainians are indeed Cossacks, now working in a steel mill during the Soviet Era. Yelka, a poor peasant girl, orphaned, yearns for something more when she falls into disgrace in the village after a one night stand with a married man. She flees to the house of her Uncle, where she is pursued by a scatter brained poet and an engineer at the same time. It is a very Ukrainian vibe- full of references to Cossack history and details from life under Communism. Even though The Cathedral was controversial when it was originally published, it still paints a soothing picture of life under Communism, especially compared to the heroes of refusenik literature.
Published 3/18/20
The Manor (1967)
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Replaces: Sula by Toni Morrison
Isaac Singer is a complicated figure in world literature. He won the Nobel Prize in 1978, for a career where he wrote in Yiddish but found fame in English translation, decades after his books were published in their original edition, often in serial. He died in 1991 a canonical author, but whether he represents anything greater than the culture of Eastern European Jews who were annihilated int he Holocaust remains an open question. See for, example this Guide to Singer published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012. Addressing Singer's bibliography in a comprehensive fashion requires coming to terms with the fractured timelines and multiple translations, both with and without Singer's living assistance.
Also there is the fact that Singer is very, very, very unfashionable, so unfashionable that a mid period banger like The Manor can't even be found on the first page of his Amazon author results. I understand it- The Manor is the kind of turn of the century multi-generation family saga that most closely resembles Buddenbrooks era Thomas Mann with a heavy dose of mid-19th century Russian histrionics. The Manor isn't cheesy or schmaltzy, the Polish Jews featured here are at the cusp of modernity and intimately tied to the embryonic industrial revolution in late 19th century Poland.
The Manor doesn't pull any psycho-sexual punches, and his characters are as sophisticated about sex (if very much not as reasonable) as those in a Philip Roth novel set a century in the future. One take away for my dive into Singer's bibliography is that he does not deserve his dowdy, unfashionable reputation. His people, wiped off the map, offer insight on avoiding, or embracing our own demise.
Published 3/31/20
Garden, Ashes (1965)
by Danilo Kis
Replaces: Troubles by J.G. Farrell
The big winner in the first revision of the 1001 Books list is Spanish and Portuguese language books: Spain, Portugal and Latin America are all huge gainers, almost entirely at the expense of writers from the UK and the USA. Behind the Spanish/Portuguese/Latin Americans are what you might call the marginal Europeans from the south and east of the continent. Ukraine, Poland, Czechia and the Balkans constitute the second biggest clump of added books. Kis (1935-1989) was born in what is now Yugoslavia, then Serbia, the son of a Jewish father and an Eastern Orthodox mother.
The unusual angle for Garden, Ashes is that it is a Holocaust memoir without the Holocaust, roughly based on the life of Kis' father, who was mentally unstable and eventually was deported to Treblinka. Called Eduard Sham, he featured prominently in three of Kis' books. Garden, Ashes features the kind of elliptical narrative that is synonymous with European fiction after World War II. I felt like Garden, Ashes was more about the vagaries of growing up with a mentally ill parent than the circumstances surrounding the Holocaust in south eastern Europe.
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| Japanese author Taeko Kono (Kono Taeko as written by the Japanese) |
Toddler Hunting and Other Stories (2018)
Translations by Lucy North and Lucy Lower (for Bone Meat only)
New Directions Publishing
by Taeko Kono
I'd never heard of Japanese writer Taeko Kono until I scrolled past this listing as an Ebook in the Libby app for the Los Angeles Public Library, published by New Directions Publishing in 2018. I was missing out:
Born in 1926, in Osaka, Taeko Kono (or, in the Japanese order, Kono Taeko) spent her youth engaged in Japan’s war effort, and her young adulthood in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat. Her childhood, twenties, and early thirties were marked by bouts of serious illness, and she had to wait years to be recognized as a writer. “Toddler-Hunting,” published in a coterie magazine in 1961, was her first story to gain wider attention. “Snow,” published in 1962, was nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, which she then won in 1963 for the wonderful story “Crabs.” She went on to produce a stream of remarkable fiction, winning nearly every top literary prize in Japan, securing a place for herself at the top of the literary establishment. In the mid-1990s Kono lived for several years in New York. In 2014 she was awarded Japan’s highest culture award. She died in January 2015.
This collections contains all her hits, particularly Toddler-Hunting and Crabs. Kono stands out for the transgressive nature of her themes, "Kono’s early stories deal with themes, ideas and images that are often troubling and repellent — fantasies of violence towards children, an interest in little boys that seems definitely unhealthy, women’s gender disaffection, and sadomasochism." Japanese critics situated her work to the trauma of World War II, though after reading this collection I would argue there is a more universal theme of alienation for ideas like "family" and the boundaries of sexuality.
Published 5/1/20
Death and the Dervish (1966)
by Mesa Selimovic
Replaces: Mercier and Camier by Samuel Beckett
Behind Latin American and other Spanish language books, the Balkans have emerged as a major winner in the 1001 Books revision from 2008. Generally speaking, the swatch of Europe from Poland south has seen a radical expansion in western translations, moving from a starting point of near zero in the mid 20th century to seeing semi-regular recognition at the highest levels, i.e. Nobel Prizes and English language editions of the biggest hits.
Death and the Dervish by Yugoslavian author Mesa Selimovic is a good example of that phenomenon. The American English language translation came out in 2015, in the Northwestern Press European Voices series (This year's co-Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk was first published in English on the same imprint.) Death and the Dervish was a huge hit in Yugoslavia when it came out, at a time when Yugoslavia was a fairly happening spot on the global map, as supposed to the decades long nightmare it's become recently.
That said, it's hard to make a case for Death and the Dervish when it covers basically the same territory as several books by Ismail Kadare, and Kadare is a step above Selimovic. The plot involves Sheikh Nuruddin, a respected Dervish who runs an Islamic monastery in the Bosnian mountains. In Part one, Nuruddin learns that his brother has been imprisoned by the Ottomans and tries to get to the bottom of it. Later in the book, he becomes the local Ottoman judge and finds that all is not great for the man in charge. Besides sharing a setting and theme (struggle against arbitrary exercise of Ottoman power) it also mirrors countless books written about life under the various leftist dictatorships of the 20th century, from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia.
No tears lost for Mercier and Camier by Samuel Beckett leaving the list- that book is clear afterthought to Beckett's career, and not the kind of title that the 1001 Books list generally includes, except for the most popular writers- Dickens, Coetzee, who had their own weaker books removed in the 2008 revision.
Published 5/7/20
Spring Snow: The Sea of Fertility 1 (1969)
by Yukio Mishima
In the original 1001 Books list, Japanese author Yukio Mishima has a listing for the The Sea of Fertility, which is the name for his career ending tetraology (he literally committed seppuku after the last volume was published in 1970.) It took me forever to figure out that there is no single volume for The Sea of Fertility, rather each volume is published separately. This appears to a decision made by Vintage International when they published their English language editions in the United States. Before that, it looks like they were all published as one volume.
I haven't read all four volumes- I checked out The Sea of Fertility 2: Runaway Horses, last year from the library, figured out I had the wrong book, and returned it. This first volume is set in the early 20th century. It's typical forbidden love affair material- she is a Princess preparing to marry a member of the Royal Family, he is a romantic ne-er do well (high school student) who is a childhood friend of the Princess and a member of a slightly less prestigious Japanese family. There are a pair of Siamese Princes who show up for some reason, where they star as dark-skinner "others" at the prestigous prep school attended by the protagonist, Kiyoki.
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| District map of the Indian state of Karnataka |
Published 7/12/20
Samskara (1965)
by U.R. Anathamurthy
Samskara was published by the New York Review of Books Classics imprint in 2017- originally written in the mid 1960's in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken by 44 million people in Karnataka and other southern Indian states. It is a strongly Hindu area- 85 percent of the modern day population, compared to 12 percent Islam, and a late addition to the Moghul empire, only fully coming into control at the beginning of the 18th century, only decades before the empire collapsed entirely. The Dravidian language family is major- 215 million speakers, though it lacks in terms of an international literary presence, perhaps because it lacks a "pan-Dravidian" proto-language equivalent to Latin in Western Europe or Sanskrit in South Asia.
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| Cover of the New York Review of Books Classics Edition of Samskara by Indian novelist U.R. Anathamurthy |
The obvious comparison is with Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, published in 1958, which similarly deals with the impact of change on a small village removed from the front-lines of modernity. Here, it is a village of Brahmins, living sometime in the 1930's. The events are spurred by the death of a non-conforming member of the village- he flouts prohibitions against interactions with lower caste women and eats fish from the holy fish pond- and the question of whether he should be afforded a Brahmin funeral. The dilemma throws the entire village into a frenzy, and the question lands on the shoulders of the local guru, or pundit, who becomes the central protagonist.
It's impossible to argue with the diversity value of Samskara- within the Dravidian language family the dominant literary language is Tamil, with a tradition that stretches back to the Sangam period in 300 BC. Kannada literary tradition starts seven or eight hundred years later, and was practiced by Jainist religious minorities at first. I'm unaware of any other novels translated from Kannada into English- if there are any native Kannada speakers/readers looking at this please leave me recommendations (with publisher) as a comment.
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| Cover of the original paperback version of The Left Hand of Darkness(1974) by Ursula Le Guin |
Published 7/14/20
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
by Ursula Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness, the fourth book in the Hainish Cycle by Ursula Le Guin, was a monster hit= her first and served to establish her as a major force in the genre world. The Left Hand of Darkness has been huge in American universities for multiple generations, as a trail-blazer in literature about non-binary sexuality. Here, the aliens on planet Gethen are intersex- manifesting either male or female sexuality at random during weeks when they are in heat. Like all the novels in the Hainish cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness can be read as a stand alone, besides the shared timeline there is little to connect this book to the first three in the series. Besides the path-blazing depiction of non binary human gender, Le Guin also steps up the complexity of her alien world- previous alien worlds have been more akin to the middle ages, in The Left of Hand of Darkness she depicts two different civilizations on the same world for the first time. This is a technique she also deploys The Dispossessed, where one planet has a capitalist oligarchy and the other a workers utopia.
Like many alien worlds of genre fiction, Gethen is a harsh (cold) environment- in a situation where the Author has to imagine an entire alien planet, less is certainly easier than more. I think there is a strong argument that The Left Hand of Darkness, rather than The Dispossessed, is a better Le Guin representative in a the canon. All four of the Hainish Cycle have been great Audiobooks- I'm bummed that book five is an Audible exclusive. What is that bullshit? Audible is ridiculous- I would spend a thousand dollars a month if I used that service.
Published 9/16/20
The Plain in Flames(1967)
by Juan Rulfo
Replaces: A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen
I don't know if Cormac McCarthy read The Plain in Flames, Juan Rulfo's classic collection of short stories depicting harsh life in the era of the Mexican Revolution, but it is impossible not to think of Cormac McCarthy's depiction of Mexico, and it's also impossible for any English language reader not to be reminded of the setting of The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Of course, The Plain in Flames is the authentic stuff of Mexican literary culture, a kind of ur depiction of the Mexican peasant class, which you would have to say represents the "soul" of the Mexican people, especially as the culture combines a Spanish overlay with deeply indigenous folkways.
The scenery is haunting, the stories, also haunting. Life in early 20th century Mexico just feels so spartan and severe. And sad. Terribly, terribly sad. The Plain in Flames might as well be from a different planet than the Anglo-Irish country house antics of A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen- one of the least significant titles from the original edition. I mean, the Anglo Irish aristocracy gets so many picks in the original 1001 Books list (mainly through Elizabeth Bowen.)
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| Austrian author Thomas Bernhard |
Published 10/20/20
Gargoyles (1967)
by Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard might be my favorite discovery from the 1001 Books project. He is certainly my favorite author I'd never heard of before I started reading the original 1001 Books. To date, I've never met anyone else who's read Bernhard. It seems like there must be some audience around me- there is a line of Vintage quality paperback editions in English that are readily available in hard copy. Bernhard has NO English language Audiobooks, which is equally a sign that his audience in English isn't that big.
The essentially Bernhardian quality is a lengthy monologue by or about (or both) some kind of reprehensible near sociopath who is likely an aesthete, someone who commits suicide, has an obsessional relationship with his sister or female cousin or a mental obsession of extraordinary scope. Gargoyles was his second novel, and his breakthrough- before Gargoyles Bernhard was a nobody, after he was an internationally renowned Author who was drawing comparisons to Kafka.
Gargoyles is easy to describe: A country Doctor in the Austrian mountains and his adult son encounter a series of grotesques on his regular rounds- a man who is kept in a cage by his family is a memorable example. The pair end up at the home of Prince Saurau a typically Bernhardian eccentric who then spends the final hundred pages of the book in a quintessential Bernhard monologue, detailing his obsession with communication, family and death.
Published 10/27/20
Z (1969)
by Vassilis Vassilikos
Replaces: The Breast by Philip Roth
Z is a kaleidoscopic political thriller set in the tumult of the post-World War II/Cold War era Greece, where the ruling junta used a variety of techniques, ranging from concentration camps to targeted assassination's in their fight against "foreign" Communists, personified in Z as non-Greek "Bulgars." Vassilikos uses an interesting technique-- telling the story of the investiagation of the murder of a popular leftist population on right-wing paramilitary thugs from the persective of the victim, investigator and the perpetrators. Thus, there is no, "whodunit" element Z- the reader knows exactly who did what when and for what reasons, and then you just watch the investigator piece it together.
It is not exactly an original story either then or now, rather it seems like an almost generic narrative about the abuses of Western aligned military dictators during the Cold War.
Published 11/23/20
Three Trapped Tigers (1967) by
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Replaces: The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch
Very easily described as Ulysses by James Joyce except it is set in Havana and not Cuba. At 451 pages it is no light read, employing every modernist trick in the book, from stream of consciousness to including two different versions of the same story, Three Trapped Tigers (originally Three Sad Tigers in Spanish with the second word changed in English to keep the alliteration intact. Cabrera Infante was an early supporter of the Cuban Revolution but quickly fell into disfavor with the Castro regime and ended up in exile in London in the mid 1960's.
Although he is typically included with the "Latin American Book" writers on the 1960's, Cabrera Infante was iconoclastic in his outlook, and he is barely read in the United States- if you glance at his Amazon author page you will see that most of his top 10 selling tiles are en espanol. His inclusion is another example of the 1001 Books project dumping a well represented English-woman author for a non-English language white male author. Not a dynamic that I love, but it isn't like I'm sad to see The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch- her weird country-house with-flying-saucers detective-philosophical book. Personally, I don't think Cuba and the Caribbean is particularly interesting, outside of Jamaica and V.S. Naipaul. Change my mind!
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| Criterion Collection cover of Le Samourai d. Jeane Pierre Melville |
Published 1/26/21
Le Samourai (1967)
d. Jean Pierre Melville
Criterion Collection #306
I can't believe I haven't watched this movie in the decade plus I've been keeping this blog. I remember seeing Le Samourai for the first time in undergraduate, a film class on film noir, and just being wowed at the effortless cool of Alain Delon as Jef Costello, a quintessentially French hit man by way of American Film Noir and Japanese Noir.
For contemporary movie-goers, probably Le Samourai's biggest successor is the early work of Quentin Tarantino. Obviously, Tarantino has, dozens of reference points, but the feel of Le Samourai really seems like something he took seriously.
What is funny about Le Samourai is that, by virtue of being French and the product of an Auteur, this basically B-movie plot is elevated to a timeless work of world literature. Also, I guess, the timeless performance of Alain Delon. Iconic!
Published 4/12/21
Midaq Alley (1966)
by Naguib Mahfouz
Replaces: Party Going by Henry Green
Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the first Arabic language writer to do so, and one of only a handful of Arabic speakers to win the Prize in any category, periodt. While Arabic has a millennium long history as a literary language, most of that literature takes the form of poetry, which is almost universally respected as the premier form of literature both in the Arabic and wider Islamic cultural world. Generations of Arabic intellectuals frowned on the novel as an art form, for a host of reasons, which has necessarily delayed the creation of Arabic-language novels and their subsequent translation into Western languages.
Thus, Mahfouz represents a distinct first in that he represents not just a national literary culture but also an entire language. In terms of subject matter, Mahfouz IS decidedly Egyptian and Midaq Alley is a postcard view of a developing Egypt, published in the original Arabic in 1947 and portraying a Cairo in the midst of Modernization, as experienced by the denizens of one alley/neighborhood.
Mahfouz doesn't pull any punches- the many-tendrilled plot includes homosexuality, drug usage and sex trafficking.
Published 7/24/21
Season of Migration to the North (1966)
by Tayeb Salih
Postcolonial Literature is a subject so big that it threatens to be meaningless- peep the unreadable Wikipedia page, But, the definition is basically all literature written by people from places that were colonized by Western European powers but mainly the United Kingdom and France. As opposed to colonial era literature, which is mostly concerned with the vagaries of life as the colonized or the desire to liberate oneself from a colonized status, post-colonial literature begins to engage with the relationship between colonizer and colonized, often in the context of characters/protagonists/narrators who have physically travelled to the colonizer county.
Season of Migration to the North is an early, great example of the genre, with a psycho-sexual theme that remains compelling today. The structure of Season of Migration to the North is also sophisticated, squarely within the modernist tradition, but carefully crafted in the manner of a literary puzzle. Salih hardly has an English language audience, this book and a collection of stories have NYRB classics editions, but many of the novels in his bibliography remain untranslated.
Published 7/29/21
A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
by Ursula Le Guin
Hard to believe I didn't read A Wizard of Earthsea growing up, since I exhausted every library I encountered in terms of their selection of YA/Fantasy/Science Fiction. I can still envision the science fiction/fantasy corner of the local library in my Bay Area suburb which I patronized between third and ninth grade, before I discovered the used book stores of Berkeley. Even more ironic that Le Guin is very much of and from the Bay Area, and it makes her omission from my adolescent bibliography even more perplexing- surely someone should have mentioned something?
If you look at Le Guin's Amazon Page, her top four are A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and Tombs of Atuan. It's an order that roughly comports with her place in the canon- A Wizard of Earthsea is a stone-cold classic, albeit one firmly categorized as a YA book. The Left Hand of Darkness is her grown-up classic with its pathbreaking treatment of gender. The Dispossessed is her environmentalist/60's protest movement book and Tombs of Atuan is the sequel to her biggest hit.
A Wizard of Earthsea is one of those books that has been so influential on the literary marketplace that it almost seems mundane today- a bildungsroman about a boy wizard in a magical land that isn't England? Yet, A Wizard of Earthsea was one of the first books to actually do that, and her integration of contemporary understandings of anthropology and the role of myth in story telling hold up a half century plus later. OH also, all the good guys are black and all the bad guys are white, which is pretty cool.
Published 10/3/22
Ubik (1969)
by Philip K. Dick
I got COVID in June of this year and ever since then I've had a hard time reading like I did before I got COVID. In the past I've been able to basically read very fast with comprehension- well basically for my whole life and it's been instrumental in establishing myself as an attorney and getting to be an attorney in the first place. It also covered up a lot of flaws that might have otherwise let me off the academic path to becoming a criminal defense lawyer.
Essentially though, since I recovered at the end of June I've found reading for more than 15-20 minutes to be difficult to impossible. I imagine it's something akin to what people with learning disabilities feel, although of course I can't be sure. However it is quite clear that I have no hopes of maintaining this blog in anything like its former state both because I can hardly read anything outside of what is required for my job and stuff on the internet. I'm thinking of maybe moving back into music or maybe just going back and rereading/writing books I've already covered.
Ubik I found because I was looking for library available Audiobooks by Philip K. Dick, who is an author I find tedious in print- I thought maybe an Audiobook version of one or more of his books/stories might be more interesting. Ubik was actually the ONLY Philip K. Dick Audiobook I located and I had to wait for about six months before my number came up.
Best described as a "real mind fuck," Ubik is a variation on the techno dystopia of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (AKA Bladerunner) with a more acerbic critique of capitalism. Here, the protagonist is a indebted salaryman who works as an evaluator for a business that provides anti-psychic contractors to help prevent psionic espionage. The underlying worldscape is familiarly dystopian: Everything costs money (five cents to open your apartment door!), the inner solar system is being colonized and governments appear to have been replaced by giant corporations.
Joe Chip, the indebted anti-psychic analyst, is astonished when an agent brings him a young woman with a hithero undiscovered talent: She can alter the past. I won't get into it beyond that but shit is crazy. Philip K. Dick was a real wacko!
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| City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin Cover |
Published 7/6/20
City of Illusions (1967)
by Ursula LeGuin
City of Illusions is book two in the nine volume Hainish Cycle by Ursula LeGuin, a series of common-universe novels that deal in a galaxy of worlds seeded by the Hainish- humans who dispersed different versions of themselves and then disappeared, reemerging millenniums later to connect the worlds with a tenuous web of human-free fast than light ships, slightly slower than light speed ships and the ansible, a device that can be used to communicate instantaneously across the stars. The books hop around in time and space- The Dispossessed, written in 1974 is the earliest in time.
You can chart LeGuin emerging as a writer sophisticated beyond genre in the first three books- City of Illusions is the conclusion of that original set, all written and published as straight genre books, and it is one of the distinct literary pleasures of the mid to late 20th century to see books published as pulp paperback succeed as canon level titles. Like the other two books in the initial three, City of Illusions begins from the isolated galactic traveler, though this time he has arrived without memory and furthermore he has arrived on "the" earth- centuries after an invasion by the alien Shing have destroyed the original League of Worlds.
Falk, the alien traveler, differs from the later-day earth humans by virtue of his yellow eyes, and eventually it is revealed that he is descendant of the leader of the colony from Planet of Exile, he journeys from the forests of a deserted Great Lakes region of the United States, over the great planes, where he hooks up with a human female to head to Es Toch, the city of the Shing, where he confronts his destiny. LeGuin answers many of the questions that hover around the fringes of the more traditional books that precede this one in the cycle- but it is clear at this point that LeGuin is aiming for an impact beyond genre convention.
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| Original cover of The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard (painting by Max Ernst) |
Published 7/10/20
The Crystal World (1966)
by J.G. Ballard
1967 is a good year to mark the evolution of J.G. Ballard from interesting but strictly genre science fiction author to potential Author of literary fiction. In 1966, he published The Crystal World, in 1967 he published THREE separate collections of short stories and in 1967 he published The Atrocity Exhibition, which is profoundly influence by William Burroughs and a clear attempt to escape genre status. Thus, The Crystal World is still squarely in his genre period.
It is also set in Africa, though Ballard manages to avoid the pratfalls that often occur in this era of fiction by making most of his speaking characters white Europeans. The plot is Heart of Darkness adjacent: Edward Sanders, a doctor specializing in leprosy, disembarks in Gabon and travels upriver to find a leper colony run by some colleagues. He doesn't find the leper colony, but he does come across a mysterious phenomenon involving everything turning into crystals/gems- everything- advancing through the African jungle at 50 meters at a time. Sanders becomes embroiled in a feud between a diamond mine owner and a Belgian architect, fighting over the ex wife of the architect.
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| Cover of the hard back edition of Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch |
Published 7/12/20
Camp Concentration (1968)
by Thomas M. Disch
My recent spin through Ursula Le Guin's nine volume Hainish Cycle has had me thinking about progressive science fiction from the 1960's and 1970's. Despite reading the library available science fiction voraciously as a grade and middle schooler, I haven't kept up with it, or tried to explore the history of the genre. It seems like a good time to revisit the era now for a couple reasons- first, 1970 was 50 years ago, which is a solid time for reevaluating the legacy of works from this period. Second, the progressive science fiction from this era gibes with the the atmosphere of wide spread protests against police violence and the looming Apocalypse of the corona-virus. The comparison would be Vietnam as the looming apocalypse, and the 60's counter-culture as the wide spread protests.
I got turned on to Disch while I was reading up on Le Guin- at one point a publisher put two of their books together as a single edition:
![Planet of Exile [by Le Guin]. [Bound dos a dos with]: Mankind ...](https://pictures.abebooks.com/APLATZ/27811361.jpg) |
| Copy of the Le Guin/Disch double edition. |
I picked up Camp Concentration because it sounded intriguing: A conscientious objector is imprisoned in a secret prison during an alternate-timeline Vietnam War where President Robert MacNamara is using "tactical nukes" an attempt to end the war. Louis Sachetti is the objector, and Camp Concentration takes the form of a journal which Sachetti is asked to keep at the request of the Strangelovian head of the prison. The point of the prison is to inject criminal with a variety of syphilis that has the side effect of making the victims into geniuses. The flowering of genius is shortly followed by a horrific death caused by the syphilis.
Despite the clunky journal format, Disch ends up delivering a fitting resolution to a scenario that often feels like it is going nowhere. Disch's prose is studded with allusions to Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, a retelling of the Faust legend where the Faustian musician exchange genius for syphilis, or something like that.
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