Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Light in August (1932)

by William Faulkner

Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi

Mississippi: 1/18

  Faulkner might be considered the apotheosis (a word he uses at least three times in Light in August) of high modernism in America, in that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Faulkner won in 1949, Hemingway in 1954, Steinbeck in 1962.  Only Faulkner is comprable to the high modernism/experimentalist prose of the early 20th century, both Hemingway and Steinbeck are the opposite of the flowery, ornate prose and complicated plot structures of Faulkner.   Faulkner has also maintained a legacy through the writers he influenced- Cormac McCarthy, to name one. At the same time, it's hard not to think Faulkner's time has past- a dead white male, an alcoholic and a frequent user of the n word, there are plenty of textual and non-textual reasons that a contemporary student of literature could through an MFA program without reading more than a short story here or there.

   At the same time- and I'm saying this as someone who is 250 books into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, there is no denying the Faulkner simply is one of the top five American novelists of the 20th century.  It is simply undeniable, even if you don't like modernist prose, the south or writers who use the n word. If you think about it in terms of the south as a literary place, consider that Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, one of the great prose narratives of the South, in 1936.  The movie came out in 1939. Faulkner wins the Nobel a decade later. 

  I listened to the Audiobook because I've read plenty of Faulkner novels, and I've always felt like they would be good Audiobooks.  This version was only recorded 10 years ago.  I think it a fair observation that the American literary establishment itself didn't appreciate the brilliance of Faulkner at the time he was writing- I went and looked at the New York Times and saw a plea from Malcolm Lowery- published in the 40's, that said Faulkner was out of print. 

1930's World Literature

   This is the miscellaneous category for 1930's literature- the most common nation represented is Germany, or at least the German language.  The English colonies are making a play- some of these books you could classify as "British" but I think I was trying to make a distinction between the close in nations of the UK and colonial possessions like Australia.  

The Austro Hungarian Empire in all its glory

Published 10/9/14
The Radetzky March (1932)
by Joseph Roth

  Joseph Roth is a lesser known German language author from the early part of the 20th century (he died in 1939) he was a journalist, and very active in anti-facist/nazi circles, leaving Germany as Hitler rose to power. The Radetzky March is a story of three generations of Austrian military men- the grandfather, ennobled after saving the life of Franz Joseph the "Grand Warlord" in action in Bosnia in the late 19th century.  His son becomes a District Supervisor, and the grandson becomes  military officer of no great distinction.  Although The Radetzky March is in theory about the lives of the three Von Trotta men, it is hard not to see it as a story about the decline and fall of the Austrian monarchy, pressed by forces (Nationalism, modernity) that it could not control.

  One notable attribute of The Radetzky March is the use of the Austrian Monarch as a character, who speaks, and whose actions are subject to description similar to any character.  Although today we are acclimated to fictional depictions of real historical characters, Roth's move was unheard of in the early part of the 20th century.  The Radetzky March is worth tracking down if you are as into the decline and fall of empires as I am (very.)

World War I: Life in the trenches.

Published 11/3/14
Her Privates We (1930)
 by Frederic Manning

  Yet another book in the 1001 Books project focusing on the experience of soldiers on the front lines of World War I.  I've now read novels about World War I written by English, Australians, Americans, French, Germans and Czech.  If I had to summarize the themes of the literature of World War I based on these books, I would say the following:

  The experience of German soldiers in the West was bad, the experience of English/French/American soldiers wasn't great but wasn't as bad as people seem to think it was, the Western front was much worse than fighting in the East and South, the soldiers were pretty much willing participants whose initial enthusiasm was dampened by the unexpectedly harsh conditions. Even soldiers who were not injured or killed suffered mental/psychic injuries that society was ill equipped to treat.  People who experienced the war were generally more cynical than they were prior to the war.

   Mannen occupies the niche of "semi-scandalous thinly veiled account of a gentleman who enlisted with the regular army."  In the English language World War I literature, the perspective is overwhelmingly that of the educated officer.  Thus, Her Privates We was originally published anonymously, under a different title.  To a modern reader, there is nothing scandalous beyond what you would see in an episode of M*A*S*H on television, but I can see where it would have stood out as being an especially bawdy description of the fighting experience.

  There isn't much action in Her Privates We, but the idea of this book as a "war novel about nothing, where nothing much happens" is very much part of the enduring appeal- it's more of a general war novel than other books written about World War I. 

Published 1/14/15
The Nine Tailors (1934)
by Dorothy Sayers

   Dorothy Sayers is a charter member of the Golden Age of Detective fiction, but she's probably less interesting to contemporary critics and the audience for mystery books.  Two of her titles made the 1001 Books project, The Nine Tailors and Murder Must Advertise.  The Nine Tailors makes it for a well regarded "literary" sense of place and character development, which it combines with a complex set of story mechanics involving the science/art of bell ringing as an integral part of unravelling the mystery at hand.

  Lord Peter Wimsy, here playing himself (he spends much of Murder Must Advertise "under cover" at an advertising agency.)  Has his car break down on the way to an ill defined country estate and makes the acquaintance of a Rector who runs a rural church with an above-average set of nine church bells (the "Nine Tailors") of the title. I'll cop to the fact that I maybe didn't get as much out of The Nine Tailors as someone who actually appreciates the art and science of church bells, since the solving of the mystery involves a cipher built around the notation used for sequences of bell ringing.

Published 2/6/15
The Man Without Qualities, Volume 1(1930)
 by Robert Musil

   The Man Without Qualities is two volumes, the first, 720 pages long, the second, over a thousand pages and unfinished.  Volume One consists of two books and volume two of a third book.  The Man Without Qualities is one of those books that haunts the precincts of 20th century literature enthusiasts, occupying a space somewhere between the "late realist classic symbolist" work of Thomas Mann and the stranger musings of Franz Kafka.  Unlike The Confusions of Young Torless (1906), which is an intimate portrayal of a high school age youth, The Man Without Qualities is a grand drama on the scale of The Magic Mountain, with equal parts character development and philosophical musings.

   I think the thoughts that cross the mind of anyone who has heard of The Man Without Qualities  and is considering reading it are first, do you have to read it at all? Second: Can you get away with only reading one volume?  For the latter question the answer is yes, one volume certainly does suffice.  The second volume revolves mostly around a sister who is not featured in the second volume at all, and the first volume ends on no kind of a cliff hanger.  As to the former question, I would say probably not.  Especially if you've read The Magic Mountain and other works of late realism.  While I finished The Man Without Qualities, Volume 1 satisfied, there were moments where Musil resembles nothing so more as an Austrian Anthony Trollope or Theodore Dreiser, flailing at the onset of modernity with a luddite mace.

   The pace of the narrative is glacial for the first six hundred pages, and only in the last hundred and twenty does the reader get anything resembling a spark: first the description by one character of her attempted seduction by her own father, and then the revelation that a critical character is motivated to be involved in the central charitable endeavor by his desire to access the "coal fields of Galacia." Although firmly a work of the twentieth century, with character who use automobiles and telephones, the tint of the 19th century "novel of ideas" is well ingrained The Man Without Qualities.

  I would say that if you are a reader nostalgic for 19th century fiction vs. 20th century, The Man Without Qualities is a must on the list.  Budget at least a month for the first volume and longer for the second.

Published 2/24/15
Threepenny Novel (1934)
 by Bertolt Brecht

  Bertolt Brecht's canonical work is the Threepenny Opera, a musical that he co-wrote with Kurt Weill- most Americans know the Bobby Darin song, Mack the Knife- which originally appeared in the German language musical.  Threepenny Novel is most appropriately described as a sequel to Threepenny Opera, with the main characters appearing several years AFTER the events of Threepenny Opera.

  The low life criminals of Threepenny Opera have matured, in Threepenny Novel Jonathan Peachum, the beggar king owns a line of retail shops, as does Macheath (AKA Mack the Knife.)  Polly Peachum, winsome daughter of Jonathan Peachum, marries Macheath, a business competitor of her daughter, and all hell breaks lose in terms of plot.  Like many other novels of the 1930s, Brecht creates a portrait of "modern" capitalism which is simply crime by other means.  

 If you aren't clear on it going in, you will understand by the end that Brecht is no fan of consumer capitalism.  His critique is something like a literary equivalent of the writers of the Frankfurt school: that consumer capitalism is low.  Since the captains of industry in Threepenny Novel are literally the criminals of Threepenny Opera, Brecht does little to disguise his critique, and perhaps this explains the lack of interest from contemporary American readers.

Published 3/2/15
Auto-da-Fé (1935)
by Elias Canetti

   For any time period within the 1001 Books project I've got a consistent pattern: Start with the easy to find American and English novels, then the foreign language hits, then the more obscure foreign language titles, starting with French and then moving to German, Russian and other.  Right now I'm heavy into the "German, Russian and other" portion of the 1930s, and like other decades I find I enjoy it more than the English and American titles because there is a greater amount of novelty and more counter-cultural content.

  Elias Canetti was a Sephardic Jew whose family moved to Bulgaria.  He spoke and wrote in German, and he won the Nobel prize for literature, but not for his novels (Auto-da-Fe is his only novel) but rather for his work of non-fiction, Crowds and Power.  Auto-da-Fe sits somewhere between Kafka and Musil in the spectrum of 20th century German literature.  You would not call Auto de Fe a work of realism,  but it isn't over the top fantasy either.  Rather, Canetti combines multiple unreliable narrators and a deep understanding of psychological disorders to produce a work that is at once familiar and deeply, deeply disquieting.

  Familiar and deeply disquieting to me personally, because Auto-da-Fe is about a middle aged private scholar who cares about nothing but his books.  On a whim he decides to marry his much-older house keeper, and disaster follows.  Nearly 500 pages in length, Auto-da-Fe is filled with interpersonal conflict but little action.  It is hard to call any of the characters sympathetic or likeable, and the main characters are all essentially insane.

Published 3/5/15
Novel with Cocaine (1934)
by M. Ageyev

  M. Ageyev is a pseudonym for the unknown real author of Novel with Cocaine.  The original Russian subtitle was "Confessions of a Russian Opium Eater" and that is a fair hint as to the backwards looking perspective of the narrator, a student living in Revolutionary era Russia.  Novel with Cocaine was only translated into English in 1984, and the anonymous writer, once thought to be perhaps Vladimir Nabokov was actually Mark Levi.

  The student narrator is your typical mid century existentialist student hero.  There are a great deal of cool points in the 180 pages of Novel with Cocaine, but nothing that really blows your hair back unless you count the parts where the narrator abuses his elderly Mom.  

Published 3/25/15
After the Death of Don Juan(1939)
 by Sylvia Warner

   Talk about your minor classics, After the Death of Don Juan by Sylvia Warner doesn't even have it's own Wikipedia page! Sylvia Warner is included in the 1001 Books project because she is an early LGBT author, and a Communist to boot, thought After the Death of Don Juan has zero LGBT themes.  After the Death of Don Juan is supposedly a parable about the rise of Franco in Spain, though I would have been hard pressed to identify it had I not read it separately on the internet.  The Don Juan in question is "the" Don Juan, or at least "a" Don Juan, one of the line of legendary lotharios who have inspired authors for centuries.  Warner doesn't identify the time of the events in her book, but the manner and speech of the characters seems to place After the Death of Don Juan in the early 20th century.

  In the opening pages, Don Juan disappears after murdering the father of one of his would-be conquests.  The only witness to his disappearance is his valet/man servant, who testifies that Juan was literally pulled down into hell by demons.  This explanation is accepted by most everyone except Juan's long-suffering father, who is doubtful in a "modern" way.  Juan then reappears, claiming that he disappeared because of an outbreak of an embarrassing skin condition, and that he told his valet to make up whatever story he wanted.

  Juan's reappearance causes a rebellion amongst the long suffering peasants of the region, who have been exploited by Juan's father to pay for his prolfigateness(sp?) and there is a rebellion, ruthlessly suppressed by local soldiers.  Soooo... not exactly sure how you get from here to the Franco dictatorship.  Like many of the minor classics in the 1001 Books project, After the Death of Don Juan was genuinely surprising to read in the sense of "What is going to happen next?"  The combination of an exotic setting and a familiar main character makes for a diverting read.

Published 3/31/15
Good Morning Midnight (1939)
by Jean Rhys

  "As depressing as a Jean Rhys novel" should be a metaphor. Like the other Rhys title that has shown up during the 1001 Books project (Quartet (1929)), Good Morning Midnight is about a woman at loose ends.  Rhys' train wreck protagonists are half proto feminist icons and half Edwardian "fallen woman" existing in the grey area between mistress and prostitute.  In fact, they had a phrase for it "demi monde."  Quartet was explicitly a roman a clef (thinly veiled fictional account of biographical material) about her lengthy affair with Modernist Author and Editor Ford Madox Ford.  

  Neither Good Morning Midnight or Quartet are explicitly biographical, but it's hard not connect the dots.  Quartet is a portrait of the author as a young woman, and Good Morning Midnight is a portrait of that same woman as a drunken, suicidal, penniless wreck, shifting between horrific flashbacks involving a life on the margins and an equally horrific present, where she aimlessly wanders the streets or Paris, spending a monthly stipend left by an unnamed benefactor from her past- enough to survive but not enough to live.

  The end of Quartet involves her being raped- or maybe it's just an attempted rape- and robbed by a gigolo.  Good Morning Midnight is sad in a thoroughly modern way.  The great sadness and loneliness at the heart of the "liberation" brought by modernism to men and women around the globe is itself one of the great themes of 20th century literature, and Rhys is one of the earliest practitioners of the sad science of individualism.

Irish author Flann O"Brien aka Brian O'Nolan.  Prescient post modernist.

Published 4/7/15
At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
 by Flann O'Brien

   Flann O'Brien was the pseudonym of Irish author Brian O'Nolan. Decades before "Metafiction" or "Post-Modernism,"  At Swim-Two-Birds was both, and how.  The 1001 Books descriptive essay says, "This is a novel about a novelist writing a novel about the writing of [a] novel."  At Swim-Two-Birds was plainly ahead of its time, and it didn't help that it was published on the eve of World War II.  It was essentially out of print before Pantheon Books republished it in New York in 1950. Although many important English literati were hip, it's very easy to see the potential for At Swim-Two-Birds to find an audience among English departments in the mid to late 20th century, and beyond.

    In addition to the stridently recursive plot within a plot within a plot, O'Brien/O'Nolan layers At Swim-Two-Birds with multiple references and allusions to Irish folklore. Of course James Joyces' shadow looms large over O'Brien, but the influence doesn't overwhelm the proceedings.  It is possible to read At Swim-Two-Birds casually because of the peppering of folklore, found language and esoteric knowledge inside the novel within a novel within a novel.   Personally, I was able to understand that it was a "novel about a novelist writing a novel" but the part about the novel itself being about the writing of a novel was lost on me.

   When I read a book like At Swim-Two-Birds, an experimental classic that waited something like 25 years before finding a substantial audience, I think about what it must have been like to be Flann O'Brien.  Did he even think what he had written was great, or did he accept the lack of wider audience attention as an indication that he failed or that his work was not good.  Importantly, At Swim-Two-Birds did impress his peer group- Graham Greene, working as a reader for his publisher, was instrumental in securing the initial publication, and Joyce read it and was impressed (and died immediately after reading it as it turned out.)

   I'm fascinated by that aspect of the experience of being an Artist- when someone creates an epic, enduring work of art and it fails to reach a general Audience. This experience was really only fully possible after the development of both a general audience for art AND the development of an avant garde sub culture. By 1939 that avant-garde sub culture fully existed, but hadn't broken out into the consciousness of a general audience.   Events like the Ulysses/Joyce obscenity trial contributed towards this break through, but it wasn't until the 1960s that avant garde art reached anything approaching a general audience.

  The larger question is in what sense is it even worth it for an Author to create a work that is brilliant but only recognized as such long after it can no longer play any role in adjusting his or her material circumstances?  "Art for Art's sake" is a romantic notion, and many artists are romantic no doubt, but I would hardly call experimental modernist novelists romantic.  The idea of an experimental modernist novelist dying unknown in a garret is itself perhaps romantic, but I doubt the novelist would consider it so.

  There are parallels to what musicians are experiencing these days- what is the point of art that doesn't benefit the artist?  Why would one even create at all if there is no possible benefit?  Perhaps O'Brien/O'Nolan did consider such things in the 1930s, but certainly a contemporary reader contemplating the delay between publication and the generation of a significant audience for a work might well ask that question.

Published 5/7/18
Independent People (1935)
by Haldor Laxness

   I've never been to Iceland, despite being asked to go at least a half dozen times.  I've turned down offers to attend the Airwaves festival, a personal invitation from a long-time San Diego neighbor who relocated, and requests from two significant others to go.  My sense is that few, if any of the American's I see posting photos on social media about their Iceland trip have read Independent People, written by Iceland's Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Halldor Laxness.   I read Independent People for the first time a decade ago, when my Icelandic neighbor lent it to me after I expressed interest in knowing about the "real" Iceland- beyond the landscape photos and Bjork.

   I'd admit that Independent People is a tough sell for a casual visitor to Iceland. It is almost 500 pages long, and focuses almost solely on the life of a small time sheep herder, living on a marginal farm on the edge of Icelandic civilization.  The title, Independent People, translates in the original Icelandic to "self-standing"folk, and it a concept near and dear to Bjartur, the peasant-farmer, who takes possession of an allegedly haunted holding and renames it "Summerhomes" in much the same spirit that the original Viking settlers dubbed "Greenland."  Summerhomes is allegedly haunted by a pre-Christian/medieval witch and a pagan demon.

  Pre-Independence Iceland was an incredibly impoverished place- not even indpendent until 1944, so much of Independent People takes place during the late colonial period.  For all that modernity intrudes into the initial portion of the narrative, it could have been seven hundred years ago, but eventually modernity rudely arrives at Summerhomes.  This really is THE book to read if you are heading off to Iceland itself, but maybe give yourself a couple weeks before you take off, lest you not finish before you leave.

Frans Eemil Sillanpää: Finland's obscure Nobel Prize in Literature winner

Published 3/18/19
Meek Heritage (1938)
by Frans Eemil Sillanpää


   Frans Eemil Sillanpää ranks among the more obscure Nobel Prize in Literature winners, a Finnish author, little known outside Scandinavia.  It is possible that Meek Heritage is the only book translated from Finnish into English, and the copy I checked out from the Los Angeles Public Library was the original print of the 1948 English translation.   

  Those looking to support a hypothesis that the Nobel Prize in Literature committee favors dour, humorless prose (me, for one) will find great support in Meek Heritage, which is just about as dour as dour gets- the life story of a Finnish peasant, he goes by many names, but we can call him Jussi.  Jussi is a sad loner, orphaned by the early death of his older, alcoholic father and the later death of his servant-girl mother.

  He becomes crofter- this in late 19th century Finland- which should be familiar to Nobel Prize completists and tourists to Iceland who have read Halldor Laxness- he made a career out of writing about crofter culture- basically sharecroppers in the American context, men who work for a wealthier landlord by donating their time doing work for the landlord in exchange for land to farm.  Jussi has a miserable domestic existence, burdened with a wife best described as "slack," and a child who becomes disabled after he is attacked by his older brother.

   The action picks up after Jussi loses his wife and his children have left the house:

And so it goes on for years. Until the sleepless night comes when he discovers that not even this burden is left to him. Death has been liberal with its mercies But now ease becomes a burden. Around him is emptiness, a drear emptiness left after his deliverance from his burden, a vacuum attracting thoughts over which he has no control; and for an untrained mind that is misery.

  Jussi falls in with the local "temocracts" and gets involved in the Finnish Civil War- a little known post World War I fight between Russian supported Finnish leftists and German/Swedish supported rightists- the German/Swedish side won.

 The action, such as it is, reaches a brief crescendo as Jussi becomes a fighter on the side of the Reds.  He is filled, for the first time, with a sense of self importance, brief as it may be.  Here, the revolution stands in for Jussi:

And the Revolution goes on, swelling with a sense of its own importance. Every morning the mail brings newspapers which tell of the growth of the movement throughout the country, from Helsinki upward. The fairest summer of the Finnish proletariat is dawning Weeks come when not a Hutter is to be seen anywhere of the capitalist newspapers which always lie and distort the facts in their attempts to combat the truth of the workers' movement. On the harvest-field nobody takes any notice when the master tries to set an example and in a fury erects the shocks on three whole plots unaided. It is almost a pleasure to watch his helpless rage while the men sit around for hours whetting and testing their sickles. The former competitions between man and man to see who reached the end of a plot first are forgotten. The summer of the proletariat in Finland 1917. Free, head proudly erect, the young laborer sauntered along the summery lanes; the crofter felt a new affection for his fields, from which breathed an inspiring promise.

  Alas, it all ends in sorrow, with Jussi captured by the victorious Swedish led army, Jussi executed for treason and shot inside his grave, presumably to cut down on the work load.

Published 5/31/19
Satan in Goray (1933)
by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Isaac Bashevis Singer was an astonishing omission from the original version of the 1001 Books list.  The editors rectified their error in the 2008 revision, adding two books.   They did not add Satan in Goray- Singer's first novel- not translated into English until 1955.   Set in an Eastern European shtetl (a small Jewish community in Eastern Europe, typically existing as a protected group under the aegis of the local noble, and as a result in near constant conflict with the surrounding villages of non-Jewish peasants.

   Set in 1648 after Jewish communities were decimated by a roving army of Cossacks- including starting the book with the incredible detail that the Cossacks cut babies out of the wombs of pregnant Jewish women and sewed cats inside their wombs.   Satan in Goray refers to the emissaries Shabbati Zvi- a real life false messiah of the middle ages who whipped thousands of Eastern European Jews into a religious frenzy before converting to Islam at the behest of the Ottoman Emperor.

   Satan in Goray is a dark, heavy, deeply weird book and I'm saying that as someone who has ancestors who lived in this environment.  The world of Eastern European shtetl was 100% eradicated between the combination of Nazi Germany's extremely violent, pre-holocaust liquidation policy in Eastern Europe and the policies of Soviet Russia.  Once again, I found myself surprised that I'd made it this far- a Jewish guy interested in classic literature, and had never even talked to anyone about Singer in casual conversation until I specifically brought him up to my Rabbi friend.  I mean, this is a guy who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and lived in New York for most of his adult life.

Published 2/25/20
The Forest of a Thousand Daemons - A Hunter's Saga (1938)
by D. O. Fagunwa

  I am a BIG fan of Marlon James, Booker Prize winner for his novel about Bob Marley, A Brief History of Seven Killings, he just published Black Leopard, Red Wolf, his African-mythology infused claim to a mass audience, and as, it turns out, also a podcaster, with Marlon & Jake Read Dead People, which he does with his editor, Jake Morrissey.  Marlon & Jake Read Dead People is the first podcast I've ever hard.  I think podcasts are pretty dumb as a rule.  I try not to judge people who listen to them, not everyone spends six hours a day behind the wheel, and podcasts make more sense if you have a 30 minute commute, or if you are a busy parent who doesn't have time to read a book.

  Marlon & Jake Read Dead People did an episode on "epic fantasy" and of course James had much to say on the subject, particularly on African contributions to the field.  In particular, I wanted to check out The Forest of a Thousand Daemons- which was published in Yoruba in 1938, is credited with being the first novel written in Yoruba.  It was translated into English in the late 1960's, and I'd never heard of it, nor the author until Marlon James talked about it on the podcast, where he put it forward as being published before the Lord of the Rings series.

The Forest of a Thousand Daemons is closer to Grimm's Fairy Tales and Norse saga' than Lord of the Rings, but there is no doubting that it a  red blooded adventure with plenty of terrifying monsters, aggressively non-western spell casting and enough graphic violence to satisfy an R-rated movie. 

Cover of the New York Review of Books Classics edition of Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky

Published 4/1/20
Castle Gripsholm (1931)
by Kurt Tucholsky
New York Review of Books Classics published 2019

   I'm leaning on New York Review of Books Classics and New Directions to supply me with Kindle books from the library- not a high level of demand for either list.  There is no rhyme or reason for it, I select "publisher" from the search page and scroll through the selections, looking for books that are available and that either look short or interesting or both.   Castle Gripsholm is a novella written by German journalist Kurt Tucholsky.  Tucholsky died in 1935, probably a suicide. 

   He's mostly remembered today for his satire- he ran a satirical magazine during the Weimar Republic, but Castle Gripsholm isn't satirical, rather it is a "summer story" about three friends who take a summer vacation in Sweden, where they encounter a young girl who is suffering at the hands of the cruel mistress of a boarding school.  The girl's mother is in Switzerland, and the plot involves Peter, his girlfriend (called Princess) and another couple- Peter's friend Karlchen and his girlfriend Billie.   Castle Gripsholm was a hit in the original German- selling close to a million copies.

  It still has some appeal today- the translation doesn't seem dated, and the idea that a vacationing couple would rescue a child from a cruel boarding school is more in line with modern sensibilities than those of Europe in the 1930's.   Here is a taste of the prose- at 144 pages with a twenty page intro Castle Gripsholm doesn't seem like a solid buy recommendation, but it might be worth perusing on a quiet afternoon- there are a lot of those these days.

Published 11/11/20

Cheese (1933)

by Willem Elsschot

Replaces: Quartet by Jean Rhys

   This 1933 novel by Belgian/Flemish writer Willem Elsschot finally got an English language translation in 2002, and was promptly included in the 2008 revised edition of 1001 Books, probably on a theory of underrepresentation of the Flemish-Belgian minority in the original edition of 1001 Books.  Cheese is a simple story, almost a novella, about a Flemish clerk, Frans Larrman, who agrees to become a representative of a Dutch cheese concerns, agreeing to take 10,000 cheese on consignment.  The problems begin when the cheese shows up in his town. 10,000 Edam cheeses is no small amount!

  The tone of gentle humor is closest to American fiction from the same period- shades of the New Yorker short story and the Babbitt-era commentary of Sinclair Lewis.  Elssschot was a pseudonym for the author, a Belgian Ad agency owner named Alphonus de Ridder.  Apparently, he managed to hide his success as a writer from his family- who learned that de Ridder was the writer Elsschot only after this death.  It's another victory for the underrepresented nations of Europe in the 2008 1001 Books revision.

Published 1/5/21

Insatiability (1930)

by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Replaces: Cane by Jean Toomer

  Another revelation from the depths of the 1001 Books 2008 revision, this early work of speculative fiction by Polish author Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz packs occasional wallops that anticipate the intersection of science fiction and literature by decades.  It wasn't translated into English until 1977, meaning that it could not have influence authors like William S. Burroughs, but if it had, I wouldn't be surprised.

   Set in the year 2000, Insatiability takes place in a world where a Chinese Communist invasion has conquered Russia and sits on the border of Poland. Genezip Kapen is the 19 year old protagonist is caught in the instability caused by the approaching battle- some Poles want to surrender, others to resist.   Although Insatiability has many "wow" moments, the overall plot and style is "modernist" i.e. oft incomprehensible.  At 550 pages, it's not a quick read either.   Still, if you are a fan of sci-fi/lit cross over, this is a little known must read.

Published 1/5/21

The Return of Philip Latinowicz (1932)

by Miroslav Kreza

Replaces: Billy Budd, Foretopman by Herman Melville

   Another 1001 Books 2nd edition selection from the "misc. European" box, The Return of Philip Latinowicz is generally credited as the "first Modern Croatian novel."  That probably means its the first modernist Croatian novel, given the fractured narration and utilization of stream-of-consciousness technique, but I'm not going to investigate.  The protagonist is a failed(?) succesful(?) painter who is returning home to address his troubled relationship with his mother. In the process, he begins an affair with a local woman who introduces him to the nightlife of his hometown.

 Considering the paucity of Croatian authors in the 1001 Books list I would have liked something with a little less modernity- a classic 19th century historical epic or multi-generation family drama would have been more interesting. 

Cover of the New York Review of Books Classics Edition of Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge

Published 1/6/21

Midnight in the Century (1939)

by Victor Serge

        One of the interesting footnotes of the 20th century Soviet/Communist government is the way they ruthlessly persecuted not only their enemies:  Aristocrats, intellectuals and property owning peasants, but also their allies:  Social Democrats, Anarchists and, eventually, their early fighters, many of whom were grouped as "leftist" enemies of the Communist State, especially after Stalin took over.

   Victor Serge was one of those "leftist" enemies of the state, who found themselves subject to a revolving door of prosecution, exile and rehabilitation, and sometimes being murdered in cold blood depending on the "crime."  Serge was one of these "leftist" enemies of the state- originally an Anarchist who "converted" to Bolshevism after the initial Russian Revolution.   Ironically, there was probably no group of enemies that was treated with more kindness- often they were exiled to less than idyllic but still survivable prison towns in Central Asia and the Caucasus's, which is where most of Midnight in the Century takes place.   If you are interested in the subject, Midnight in the Century is a must read, those seeking a less information can stick to the better known classics. of the genre. 

Indian author Mulk Raj Anand

Published 3/1/21

Untouchable (1935)

by Mulk Raj Anand

Replaces: The Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

   Although Untouchable was not actually written by a Dalit, Mulk Raj Anand was a Brahmin scion who studied in the UK and palled around London with members of the Bloomsbury Group.  Anand was dedicated to uplifting the Dalits and other low caste minorities in British India.   Untouchable takes the form of a day-in-the-life of Bakha, a Dalit sweeper (toilet cleaner.)  After a brief introduction to the gig, which involves daily cleaning of multiple open pit toilets, which, for any western reader, rich or poor, will itself be appalling to the point of unbearable, Bakha wanders into town to enjoy some of his limited free time.   When he accidentally bumps into a higher caste townsman, he triggers a cascade of events that ends with him being publicly humiliated.  

  The obvious comparison for American readers is the treatment of African Americans not during slavery, but after.  Dalits are not slaves, they are defined by their occupation, and indeed, as this book shows, any interaction with the level of citizenry that would require slaves and servants is prohibited by their uncleanliness.   Surely a necessary inclusion to the 1001 Books list, particularly when it is compared to the American noir it replaces.  Personally, I'm moved by the plight of the Dalits and I really think the issue of public sanitation in South Asia, and India in particular, is of the utmost importance on a planetary level.  Also killing all the loose cows they let run around in the streets.

Published 3/2/21

On the Edge of Reason (1938)

by Miroslav Krleza

Replaces: A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

  Croatian author Miroslav Krleza is one a handful of authors who went from zero books in the original 1001 Books list to having more than one (2) in the second edition.  Moving from zero to two books on the 1001 Books list is a tacit admission by the editors that they erred by excluding that author in the first edition.   Unlike his unremarkable The Return of Philip Latinowicz, which barely registered with me, On The Edge of Reason packs a heavy, if highly Kafka-esque punch.   Told in first-person form, On the Edge of Reason is about a Croatian lawyer, who, at dinner one night with the local elites, criticizes one of his clients for a War time incident where the client kills four peasants he catches trying to liberate his wine cellar.  It is the bragging about this incident which irks the narrator, who calls the Director-General "criminally insane" in front of the entire party.

   In turn, he is charged with a crime- defamation, and hauled into court, where he tries to defend himself.  Although On the Edge of Reason often carries the air of the unreal a la Kafka and 1984, it is a decidedly reality based book, as witnessed by the very realistic depiction of the disintegration of his life after his outburst.  On the Edge of Reason is the Krleza novel I would recommend to a casual reader.

Iranian author Sadegh Hedayat

Published 3/3/21

The Blind Owl (1937)

by Sadegh Hedayat

Replaces: The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

   Iranian author Sadegh Hedayat, one of the first Persian language authors to embrace literary modernism, exists on an alternate timeline, one where emerging Persian modernism wasn't stamped out by the political-religious upheaval which convulsed Iran during their revolution.  Pitched somewhere between decadent movement era Joris-Karl Huysmans and Edgar Allan Poe, The Blind Owl stands out for the feverish, nightmare imagery of the opiate addicted narrator, obsessed, and not in a healthy way, with his loveless marriage to his cousin-wife. 

   Sadly, Hedayat committed suicide, in Paris, in 1951, burning his unpublished work before he killed himself.  Among United States readers, Hedayat is virtually forgotten- The Blind Owl is the only English language edition available on Amazon.  His books are banned inside Iran.

Published 3/4/21

The Street of Crocodiles (1937)

by Bruno Schulz

Replaces: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

  The seemingly endless procession of mid 20th century  Eastern, Central and Southern European adds from the 2008 revised 1001 Books continues with The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz.  Schulz had one of the most unusual deaths of World War II era Jewish artists in that he was initially protected from abuse by a Nazi officer fan of his writing, only to be recognized in the streets by a different Nazi officer who shot him on the spot.  I would take that over the camps any day. 

  Although Schulz did make it to 50 before he was murdered in the street by Nazis, his corpus is small- The Street of Crocodiles, a collection of short-stories, is it.   Subsequent editions of the English translations have added his other short stories, the copy I checked out of the library was the original translation edition from the 60's.   Schulz is no doubt a unique prose stylists- especially for his time and place and the stories in this collection evoke Borges and Eastern Europe folk roots at the same time.  Plots and details are fantastical and surreal, even as the terrain remains decidedly prosaic, family life in a town in Poland in the early 20th century.

Published  3/15/21

Rickshaw Boy (1937)

by Lao She

Replaces: Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

     Lao She was an early adopter of Western literary styles.  He returned from a London sojourn as a committed fan of Charles Dickens, and Rickshaw Boy echoes Dickens concerns with the grimier parts of urban existence.  Here, the Rickshaw Boy (really he's a Rickshaw Man) is Xiangzi, who emigrated to Beijing from the country side and finds a calling in pulling a rickshaw. 

  His one and only goal is to save up enough money to buy his own rickshaw.  He is prevented from achieving this goal by series of obstacles:  He is abducted by rebels, shaken down by police and falls under the sway of the daughter of the owner of the rickshaw garage where he works.  She tricks him into marrying her under the guide of a fake pregnancy, only to die in actual childbirth.  Rickshaw Boy is unfailingly bleak- as dark as anything cooked up by Western writers in the same time period. 

Published 3/22/21

Ferdydurke (1937)

by Wiltold Gombrowicz

Replaces: Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham

   Honestly I have no idea what Ferdydurke is about.  It is not an unusual experience for me when reading so-called modernist "classics" from the early part of the 20th century.  Disorientation of the reader is at the heart of the modernist project, as is deconstructing and reconstructing the rules of literature.  Also, I read the first translation, from the 60's, which is well known for being a piece of shit.  There is a newer translation from Yale University Press, but the Los Angeles Public Library didn't have it, or I didn't see it.

  The plot revolves around Johnnie, a thirty year old man who is basically abducted by a distinguished philologist, who takes him back to school, where he has to sit in class with children.  He does not fit in at school.  He boards with a family called the Youthfuls, where he falls in love with the daughter of the family, Zuta.  It does not go well for him there, either.   After that he lives with his Aunt and Uncle who are snobby and alienate him much as the school children and the Youthfuls have done.

Published 4/5/21

Alamut (1938)

by Vladimir Bartol

Replaces: Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibson

  This bonkers historical novel by Slovenian-Italian author Vladimir Bartol is best known today as being a direct inspiration for the hugely succesful Assassin's Creed video game franchise.  Before the video game, it was mostly known as the biggest Slovenian language novel ever.  Ironically, it has nothing to do with Slovenia, instead being a more or less "faithful" work about Hassan-i-sabbah, founder of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam.  Sabbah was famous for his invention of the modern "Assassin," derived from the Arabic word for hashish eater.   He also had a crazy mountain fortress (Alamut of the title) and built a paradise inside, which he used in conjunction with the hashish, to inspire his followers to self-sacrifice while murdering his opponents. 

  If you are familiar with the historical "facts" that surround Sabbah and his Assassins, there really isn't much more to Alamut, except lengthy philosophical arguments between Sabbah and his lieutenants about, roughly speaking, whether the "ends justify the means." 

Published 4/19/21

In the Heart of the Seas (1933)

by S. Y. Agnon

Replaces: Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton

   Here I am, a decade into the 1001 Books project, and I'm still learning about Nobel Prize winning Authors who share my own heritage, for the first time.  S. Y. Agnon won the Nobel in 1966- he was born in then Polish-Galicia (now the Ukraine after a century lost to Russians, Germans then Russians again.)  He emigrated to Palestine in 1906 (still Ottoman Palestine), then moved to Germany, where he wrote in Hebrew and gained some literary acclaim, finally securing his reputation with The Bridal Canopy- a 19th century style mutli-generational family history of Galician Judaism. 

  Agnon also had ties to the Hasidic movement, which has gone from being a bit of an outlier of Eastern European Judaism to being almost synonymous with Orthodox Judaism in the United States today.  In the Heart of the Seas tells the story of a group of Hasidim from Agnon's hometown- Bucsacz- who decide to take a pilgrimage to Jerusalem- a controversial move at the time, where conventional Judaism held that such a return needed to await the return of the Messiah. 

   At times it is hard to really grasp the motivation of the characters, but the journey from Ukraine to Jerusalem is interesting, with depictions of different types of Jewish communities and a memorable sojourn in Istanbul.

Published 7/22/21

War with the Newts (1936)

by Karel Capek

  Karel Capek is an author that stands out from the many debutants from Eastern, Central and Southern Europe in the 2008 revision of the 1001 Books list.  The small nation-states of non-western Europe, the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Greeks, the various Slavs, all of whom get at least one author on the revised list.  All of these books were seemingly published between World War I and the 1970's.  Most of the writers are men, and thematically there is a similarity: young men caught between different ethnicities and world events, trying to come to terms both with their national and personal identity.   Capek stands out because he wrote science fiction- coined the term robot in his book RUR, and in War with the Newts he has another title- which has maintained almost a century of cult-like status in English translation. 

   It is such a joy to read a work of genre on the 1001 Books list, that I almost weep with joy when I realize it.  Like many early works of science fiction, War with the Newts is occasionally breath-taking in terms of reading like a book that could have been published decades later.  Ahead of his time, that's what it was.  I think the concepts of retro-futures, the futures imagined by writers in the past, is an interesting subject, and War with the Newts makes a good entry in that series of books, extending into a place (Central Europe) and time (1930's) that is adjacent to many of the formal advances that were going on in film and literature in Germany in the Expressionist movement. 

Published 1/26/22

Sao Bernardo (1930)

by Graciliano Ramos

   Sao Bernardo, a 1930 novel by Brazilian author Graciliano Ramos, is a classic end of the year pick for me- a 2020 New York Review of Books edition of an out-of-print 1930 novella by a quasi-obscure journalist-writer.   The blurb copy of the NYRB refers to his depiction of a modernizing (or not so modernizing) Brazilian country side as "Faulknerian" and other promotional blurbs refer to a "Borgesian" quality, which seems like a stretch.  

   There's no denying the earthy depiction of authentic Brazilian character in the guise of narrator and protagonist Honorario, a self-made rancher whose type is not confined to Brazil.   The milieu is not the high European melange of the south coast, but nor is it the distant hinterlands.  The sense the reader gets is of a slowly urbanizing region in an unfashionable but not obscure area of Brazil.  Ramos was a notorious leftist and eventual member of the Brazilian Communist Party, and his prose takes a dim view of the rural elites of this place and time. 

1930's English, British & French Literature

    1930's English literature is kind of a "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."  Real highlights like several George Orwell novels, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and, I don't know, The Hobbit and lows like Evelyn Waugh and (sigh) Wyndham Lewis.   Wyndham Lewis was one of those authors that made me question the wisdom of the entire 1001 Books project: An experimental modernist with little or no current audience.  Certainly, the continuing evolution of modernist writing, characterized by radical experiments with the form of the novel is still a major trend in the 1930's in England.  It was less so in America, where many of the representatives of the 1930's were closer to French style 19th century naturalism than 20th century modernist writing. 

   

Published  10/10/14

Vile Bodies (1930)

by Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodied by Evelyn Waugh

Book Review
Vile Bodies (1930)
 by Eveyln Waugh

  I must confess that I read Vile Bodies with absolutely NO memory of the plot or characters of the last Evelyn Waugh title I read, Decline and Fall.  My review of Decline and Fall, in total, was three paragraphs. (1)  Vile Bodies soldifies his focus in a way similar to how Great Gatsby soldified the focus of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  In America, the group of characters was called "the Lost Generation."  In England, the corresponding group was the Bright Young Things.  These people were Artists, trust fund babies, proto celebrities, demi-mondes, patrons of the Arts, etc, etc, etc. So the important thing to understand about Waugh is that he satirizing these people, not worshipping them.

   And although Waugh is hardly at the forefront of experimental literary modernism, he isn't stuck in the past the same way that say, Ford Madox Ford was in Parade's End.  Vile Bodies will inevitably put readers in mind of the celeb obsessed culture epitomized by TMZ and the Kardashian clan.  In fact, much of the plot revolves around a scurrilous gossip column dedicated to printing the most libelous falsehoods that evoke  the gossip of the web.

   Waugh's characters may not be memorable, but Waugh's writing is.  Much of the breezy style of modern pop literature owes a direct debt to Vile Bodies, consciously or not.


(1)

Book Review
Decline and Fall (1928)
by Evelyn Waugh

  Decline and Fall is Evelyn Waugh's first novel. Waugh belongs to the "comic" strand of the novel, a strain of literature that is present in the creation of the novel itself and in a certain sense is a constituent element of the literary elements that preceded the novel proper.  Waugh draws from different comic sub-traditions: contemporary critics claimed that Waugh was simply aping Voltaire's Candide.  If you are looking for French inspiration closer in time, the characters of Guy de Maupassant in Bel Ami come immediately to mind.

 At the same time, Waugh is a quintessentially English writer.  Although his books are perhaps not particularly popular in 2014, his influence in mediums like television and film is omnipresent. The whole idea of a dry, sarcastic, archness in dialogue seems to originate with Waugh himself.  Compared to other "light" authors of the teens and twenties- Edith Wharton, I'm looking at you- Waugh's satire cuts with a knife and would not be considered "gentle."

  There can be no question that Waugh is NOT for everyone.  I'm sure J.K. Rowling has read everything Waugh has ever written, but I bet none of her Harry Potter fan base have even heard of him.  When you take Waugh's influence on other light lit franchises- Bridget Jones diary would be a not so distant grand child.  Television shows like Absolutely Fabulous- these are all made possible by Waugh.

Published 10/16/14
Testament of Youth (1933)
by Vera Brittain

  This is the first volume of Vera Brittain's three volume auto-biography, covering the period between 1900-1925.  Notably, it gives a first hand account of Brittain's work as a nurse during World War I, where she was stationed during some of the heaviest fighting.  She lost her fiance, brother and cousin in the course of the fighting, and her memoir is also significant in terms of her experience as a woman who began pursuing her degree at Oxford University even before the start of World War I.

  In addition to the vital first hand testimony about the horrors of war, Brittain conveys the actual change in mindset among the young before and after the war.  This shift in attitude, which is often described in terms of "the Lost Generation" is well represented by Brittain both in terms of her material and her position as a well-to-do early feminist living in London after the war.

  I think any reader facing the prospect on whether to engage a 650 page auto-biography about a World War I nurse is going to ask him or herself whether the time investment is "worth it."  I would yes, for the female perspective, for the value of Brittain as an insider the post World War I English literary scene (she wouldn't call herself that.)  Can one really read too much about World War I?  Testament of Youth, published a full fifteen years AFTER the cessation of hostilities, is still grappling with questions that remained unresolved for decades afterwards.

Published 11/7/14

Book Review
The Apes of God (1930)
by Wyndham Lewis
Black Sparrow Press Edition, 1981
639 Pages

 If you are looking for a 600 page satire on the English Artist class in the 1920s, The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis is for you.  Most of the characters are based on real people, artists and socialites.  The story, such as it is, concerns young Daniel Boleyn, a would-be artist, and his mentor, the mischievous albino Horace Zagreus.  Zagreus promises to guide him through the world of the Apes of God, who are basically wealthy dilettantes who think themselves artsy.  There isn't much difference between Lewis' Apes and the "Hipsters" of today, both are stereotypes with some truth in them.

 It's hard not to read Apes of God as being anything other than homophobic, Lewis' obsession with the relationship between homosexuality and his Apes of God is impossible to ignore if you know, actually read the book. His depiction of homosexuality is not flattering, and again, it kinda reads as being super homophobic.  That's my guess why this particular volume doesn't appear on many college Modern Literature classes- it's certainly not a theme that he explores in his earlier work, and I was left wondering how the afterword in the Black Sparrow Press edition barely mentions it.  Maybe because the afterword was written in 1981, when it was totally ok to be a homophobe.

 I'm not normally one to get wound up by non-PC artistic themes, the combination of the extreme length, lack of incident, prevalence of dialogue and general incomprehensibility, it is hard to get over.

Published 11/24/14
Murder Must Advertise (1933)
 by Dorothy Sayers

  Dorothy Sayers was a charter member of the so-called "Golden Age of Detective Fiction."  This Golden Age of Detective Fiction lasted between 1920 and 1940.  Typically thought to be ended by the onset of World War II, The Golden Age of Detective Fiction canon includes Sayers, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler.  The two main branches which descend from this period in the field of the crime fiction genre are neatly parallel by the two nationalities of the four leading exponents.  Christie and Sayers gave rise to the "cosy" style- characterized by genteel detectives and country house murder plots.  Chandler and Hammett developed the "hard boiled" styled.  Not only have all four authors inspired legions of fans and authors writing under their influence, they have also maintained a place for their own characters via film versions and, especially, television series.

   If I had to distinguish Sayers from the others, I would say that she is more on the posh side, with Oxford credentials, and a Detective who is literally an English lord.  Lord Peter Wimsy, or as he is known in Murder Must Advertise, "Death Breedon."  Wimsy is the most famous example of the "gentleman detective" and his DNA is in evidence in comic books characters like Batman.  Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who simply appears to be indifferent to money, Wimsy is a thorough going participant in the between wars aristo lifestyle, with a mansion, cavalcade of servants, and wicked fast automobile.

  My sense is that Wimsy's aristocratic character has hurt his staying power, and his viability as a candidate for remakes.  It's easy to see how a post Lord would come in second to an irascible Belgian detective, or a hard boiled private eye.   In Murder Must Advertise, Wimsy is called in to investigate the "accidental" death of a copy writer ad a London advertising firm.  While investigating, he stumbles into an enormous, London based, cocaine distribution network, which has an uncanny ability to murder people immediately before they are questioned by authorities.   Both the milieu of advertising and the cocaine distribution plot make Murder Must Advertise a well aged narrative.   I was surprised to see no film or television versions since the 1980s.  That's probably due to the fact that Sayers work is still under copyright (unlike Sherlock Holmes and Poirot.)

Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, the 1985 film version of the 1934 book by Isak Dinesen.  A major difference between the film and movie is the strong love story in the film between Streep and Redford's character- which is absent from the book.

Published 12/12/14
Out of Africa (1934)
by Isak Dinesen(Karen Blixen)

  I'm sure that 99/100 Americans think of the 1985 Robert Redford/Meryl Streep starring film when they hear the title of Out of Africa.  The central plot of the film: A passionate love affair between Redford's Denys, a big game hunter, and Streep's Karen is nowhere in the book, which isn't so much a novel as a memoir- an interesting memoir- of a woman who ran a coffee plantation in the Kenyan uplands prior to and after World War I.

 The enduring popularity of this book is likely due to the great sensitivity and perception (and respect) that Dinesen/Blixen shows towards the landscape and people of Africa, even as she engaged in a prototypically imperialist endeavor. The world of Out of Africa is a gentle place, with none of the seething hatred and sprang up prior to and after independence.  True, Blixen is hardly looking for trouble- quite the opposite.  Her privileged status as a wealthy white woman, not a British subject (Blixen was Danish) meant that she had a sensitivity to injustice but didn't have to confront it on a daily basis.

  Those looking for a better understanding of modern day Kenya could do worse than starting here. While it would be unfair to call Kenya an unhistorical place, the coming of Europeans to the area was barely preceded by the entrance of Arab slave traders.  Blixen lives among a mix of Kikuyu's- the largest single ethnic group in Kenya, Somalis, who occupy a kind of "house servant" role within colonial Kenya, and the Masai, who live apart but nearby, since her coffee plantation is on the edge of their reserve.

 Dinesen/Blixen has much to say about the people, particularly her native servants.  Much of Out of Africa is split between the natives and her depiction of the land itself, with various European characters popping in and out.  Thought Blixen emigrated to Africa with her husband, they divorced while they were there and Blixen kept the coffee plantation.  Blixen downplays the uniqueness of her role as a single white female plantation owner in the middle of Africa in the early 20th century, but it's easy to read Out of the Africa as a kind of white-girl fantasy of mastery.

 But Out of Africa isn't fictional- and it doesn't even have the structure of a Novel, merely a series of vaguely linked anecdotes from her life in Africa.   So while the book is a romantic tale, it's not a romance, and there is no sex, so if you are looking for that based on the content of the film version, don't bother because it ain't there.

Published 12/10/14
A Handful of Dust (1934)
 by Evelyn Waugh

  A Handful of Dust is the third book by Evelyn Waugh in the 1001 Books Project, and the only one I would recommend to someone else to read. Neither Decline and Fall (1928) nor Vile Bodies (1930) made much of an impression on me.  In fact, prior to reading A Handful of Dust I had to go back and look at the wikipedia entries for both books so I could remember the plot details of each work.

 While still in the vein of light satire that he established as the overriding tone in the first two books, A Handful of Dust packs a heavier wallop, with a plot that includes infidelity, divorce, the tragic death of a young child, and protagonist Tony Last finding himself held captive in the Amazon rain forest by a deranged settler who forces him to endlessly re-read Charles Dickens out loud.  Last is an English country gentleman, married to the feckless Brenda.  In the early chapters of the book, Brenda embarks on a reckless affair with "idle parasite" John Beavers.  Like all of Waughs works so far, sympathetic characters are hard to find.

  Tony Last behaves as a passive non entity from first to...last.  His wife is inexplicably motivated to pursue a young man who seems to barely tolerate her.  Her young son, also named John, is killed by a kick to the head from a horse while she is away from their country home.  When she is told by a friend, her first thought is to thank god that it is her son, and not her lover, who is deceased.  AND THAT is all you need to know about the character of Brenda Last.

  After Brenda announces she is done with their marriage, Tony duly goes through the necessary arrangements that precede a divorce in post-World War I England, then backs out when he is informed that Brenda intends to ask for thousands a month in alimony.  He decamps for the Amazon on a whim with a professor who is searching for a lost city.  The trip is a nightmare, his companion dies, and he ends up essentially imprisoned by a deranged settler of English background.

  Brenda is left to her own devices and ends up both poor and apparently single, as the repulsive Beavers is unwilling to wed her without her ex husbands money.  It's a sad ending, and a sad novel. Unlike his first two books, A Handful of Dust is more directly based on his personal experience- his young wife left him, and he himself went to the Amazon, and I think that personal experience gives A Handful of Dust some depth compared to Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies.
 

Published 12/12/14
Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
by Stella Gibbons

   In an era of literature saturated with satire, Cold Comfort Farm is a parody.  Gibbons was a professional journalist tasked with summarizing prior episodes from a Mary Webb serial in the periodical that was serializing Webbs work.  Webb was like the last representative of the gloomy Victorian romance typified by Thomas Hardy.  By Webb's time, the formula of the sad rural romance was popular enough to support both Webb and a parody- Cold Comfort Farm was an immediate popular success and its commercial popularity essentially ruined Gibbons later attempts to establish herself as a "serious" novelist.

  Although Mary Webb may have been the immediate target of Gibbons parody, any contemporary reader will be more reminded of Thomas Hardy- since no one reads Mary Webb today.  D.H. Lawrence, or rather his fans, are also a target but he is restricted to influencing one of the characters. Flora Poste herself and the basic structure of the plot reference the popular romantic rural genre of the time, but probably will remind the modern reader of Emma by Jane Austen, with Poste in the same vein of the self satisfied officious meddler in human affairs.

  Probably the most famous line in the entire book is Aunt Ada Dooms famous line, "I saw something nasty in the woodshed."  That phrase has entered English as a generic idiom for a hideous secret memory, though for the record the reader never learns what Aunt Doom actually saw in the woodshed, nor what terrible famous secret makes Flora's Aunt Judith feel compelled to host her after the untimely death of Poste's parents at the beginning of the novel.

  Unlike much of the satire from the early part of the 20th century, Cold Comfort Farm is genuinely funny, whether or not you have familiarity with the works being parodied.  The fact that it has survived even as the underlying books have faded from memory is the strongest argument in favor of Cold Comfort Farm  belonging in the 1001 Books Project/literary canon.

Published 12/31/14
The Thinking Reed (1936)
 by Rebecca West

  Rebecca West was not just an author of fiction, she was, according to her Wikipedia entry, an important public intellectual who wrote criticism and non-fiction.  She has four books in the 1001 Books project: The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Harriet Hume (1928) are the two I've read.  If you are looking for similarities between the three works it would be strong heroine and a gradually expanding scope.  The Return of the Soldier is mostly an English country house novel,  Harriet Hume is a novel about London, and The Thinking Reed is a novel set in Europe, with a mixed cast of European, English and American expatriate characters.

  However, the book that The Thinking Reed most resembles is Tender is the Night (1934), published two years before The Thinking Reed and an obvious reference point and/or direct inspiration.  Both books dwell on the lives and loves of wealthy, floating Euro-Americans with a variety of real and imagined neuroses and ailments. If Tender is the Night is the "male" version of this narrative, The Thinking Reed is the female counter-part.  Like Tender is the Night it's hard not to read The Thinking Reed as containing a main character who resembles the author.

Published 1/8/15
Thank You, Jeeves (1934)
 by P.G. Wodehouse

  If you are my age, you associate the name "Jeeves" with the failed internet search engine "Ask Jeeves" (now "Ask.com.")  If you are twenty years older you might think of Jeeves as the generic term for a butler.  Both references are derived from the same place, the Jeeves series of novels by P.G. Wodehouse.  Thank You, Jeeves is the first in the series of novels, and it features all the characteristics of a Jeeves novel.  Bertram Wooster, an amiable upper class twit from England, gets into a marriage related scrape and worms out of trouble with the help of Jeeves, his condescending, well educated butler.

  The plot of Thank You, Jeeves is as emblematic of the series as any, according to the descriptive essay included in the 2006 edition of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die.  And although the characters and plotting couldn't be more dated: A major plot point in Thank You, Jeeves involves so-called "Nigger" (I shit you not) jazz musicians and Bertram disguising himself in black face and evoking literally murderous reactions from various servants, afraid that he is a "black devil."  Perhaps the only saving grace, in terms of the racist language is that Wodehouse doesn't actually have any black characters, and therefore he can't dig himself deeper then the casual, repeated use of the offensive "nigger"can take him.  I mean this book was published in the 1930s.

 One way that Wodehouse  maintains relevance is his light, airy style which presages the internet style of bloggers and websites.  It is not a far leap, stylistically, from Wodehouse to slang heavy language of the net, and his obsessions with light subjects similarly echoes the cats and kardashians net world.  

Published 1/15/15
Cakes and Ale (1930)
by W. Somerset Maugham

  It is two and out for W. Somerset Maugham: He contributes Cakes and Ale and Of Human Bondage to the 1001 Books Project and bows out gracefully.  If Of Human Bondage is the prototypical "first novel": with a heavily autobiographical main character,  then Cakes and Ale is his mid period masterpiece, and the author's self proclaimed favorite.  Cakes and Ale features a first person narration by William Ashenden, himself an independently wealthy doctor novelist, but it is mostly about another, older author, Edward Driffield, who most consider to be based on late Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy. Told through a combination of present-tense narration and flashbacks which take place during Ashenden's childhood and before Driffield/Hardy's canonization as England's "greatest living novelist" late in life,  Cakes and Ale focus gradually shifts away from Ashenden and Driffield to Rosie Driffield, Driffield's blowsy first wife.

   It is very, very, very easy to see Thomas Hardy in Edward Driffield, and Hardy's own foreword denying it merely reinforces the similarities  Although the central story of the Driffield's marriage and Ashenden's social and indeed, sexual involvement with Rosie is compelling, the insight into the literary world of turn of the century and early 20th century England perhaps seals Cakes and Ale's place in the literary canon.

Published 1/20/15
The Years (1937)
 by Virginia Woolf

 With six titles included in the 1001 Books list, Virginia Woolf is what you call a "major twentieth century author."  She is also one of the top three modernist authors and a prominent publisher.  She also killed herself.  Virginia Woolf, above all else, is a hugely taught author, in that students studying literature in English speaking countries are likely to read her work as part of any course of study.  While she has a popular audience simply from having generations of students being exposed to her work, she's not an author with an enduring hit or hits that has been endlessly cycled through the organs of mass media and popular films and television shows in the manner of Charles Dickens or Jane Austen.

 The Years was the last novel that Woolf wrote before her death, and it is also the best selling and most read novel.

This is an example of an Aspidistra, a house plant that Orwell uses as a symbol of respectability and homage to the "money god."

Published 1/22/15
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
 by George Orwell

  I studied in London my junior year of undergraduate, and while I was there I wrote a term paper on George Orwell.  One of the subjects that Orwell covers is the experience of being poor in a big city.  Most notably in his "tramping adventure" non-fiction work of Down and Out in London and Paris but also in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which is a memorable fictional work about Gordon Comstock, an erstwhile ad copywriter determined to make it as a poet.  An "Aspidistra" is a houseplant that Orwell/Comstock uses as a symbol of lower middle class bourgeois conformity.   Keep the Aspidistra shows its age, but personally I've found Orwell's critique of the perils of poverty to be convincing, and though I hadn't read Aspidistra before,  Down and Out in London and Paris deeply influenced my personal decision to go to law school instead of "being a writer."

  Decades later, and I'm happy with the decision, and Aspidistra simply reminded me of why I made the decision in the first place.  Poverty is bad enough, but avoidable poverty is the worst.

George Orwell only published nine books in his too-short life:

Novels
1934 – Burmese Days
1935 – A Clergyman's Daughter
1936 – Keep the Aspidistra Flying
1939 – Coming Up for Air
1945 – Animal Farm
1949 – Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nonfiction
1933 – Down and Out in Paris and London
1937 – The Road to Wigan Pier
1938 – Homage to Catalonia

   He's got two all-time world-beating classics, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both of which continue to be a commonly understood reference point in the English speaking world.   Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia are still commonly available in every book store.   Out of his second tier of titles, Burmese Days is still read, though mostly by specialists and students.  That leaves A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air and The Road to Wigan Pier in Orwell's second tier.

Published 5/4/20
The Hobbit (1937)
by J.R.R. Tolkien

  I read The Hobbit for the first time in junior high.  Even though I became a card carrying Dungeons & Dragons nerd up until I discovered girls in high school, The Hobbit wasn't a huge part of that.  Quite the opposite!  I never even bothered to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, still haven't. I flat out didn't like the movies- the fact that they made a TRILOGY from a book that barely scratches 300 pages tells you all you need to know.   The book is a tight little adventure novel, and it moves quickly, unlike the films, which seem to be filmed in real time like some kind of avant garde experiment.

  Inclusion of The Hobbit as a core member of the 1001 Books list is obvious, it's probably the most succesful piece of fantasy literature every published.  Tolkien, of course, was a linguistic scholar- he read many of the Norse saga's in the original, and had early access to rare translations of other works. The Hobbit, with its trolls, dwarves, elves, hobbits and wizards most closely resembles a Scandinavian mythic ecology projected onto a "nation state" political economy, where the nation states are the various races of Middle Earth.

  This combination of mythic elements with a weltanschauung that closely resembles the society of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages/early Modern period proved so persuasive that it persists to this day.  Just try to find a fantasy scenario where the various races DON'T resemble warring nation states of early modern Europe.   I was struck by the scene with the Trolls near the beginning where the Trolls speak with what could only be described as a "working class" English accent:

“Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don’t look like mutton again tomorrer,” said one of the trolls. “Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough,” said a second. “What the ’ell William was a-thinkin’ of to bring us into these parts at all, beats me—and the drink runnin’ short, what’s more,” he said jogging the elbow of William, who was taking a pull at his jug. William choked. “Shut yer mouth!” he said as soon as he could. “Yer can’t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be et by you and Bert. You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains. How much more d’yer want? And time’s been up our way, when yer’d have said ’thank yer Bill’ for a nice bit o’ fat valley mutton like what this is.” He took a big bite off a sheep’s leg he was roasting, and wiped his lips on his sleeve. Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each.

     There is generally an obsession with race and racial characteristics that Tolkien transports to his fantasy world- though at times it is clear that the narrator is someone in our world- for example a reference to the sound of a gun going off in a world where there are no guns.  Take this description, near the end of "the dwarven race":

The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor little fellow doing it if he would; but they would all have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it, as they did in the case of the trolls at the beginning of their adventures before they had any particular reasons for being grateful to him. There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company,

    It's a shame the movies turned into such a bloated mess, succesful though they might have been.

A still from the Alfred Hitchcock film version of Rebecca

Published 1/16/15
Rebecca (1938)
by Daphne Du Maurier

  I bought a new paperback edition of Rebecca at an independent bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire.  Rebecca is a genre hit- with the Alfred Hitchcock film helping maintain its evergreen status in book stores. Because Rebecca is a straight up genre exercise, any discussion of the plot risks the disclosure of "spoilers."  Suffice it to say that Rebecca continues to be read today because it is a very good, very fun book.

Published 1/27/15
In Parentheses (1937)
 by David Jones

  This is an "epic poem" about the experience of fighting in World War I.  I have to be about 20 deep on World War I fighting books at this point, which left me wondering is In Parentheses is really one of the 1001 Books I need to read prior to my demise.  The foreword by T.S. Eliot is like a kiss of death in terms of whether there was any chance I might actually enjoy In Parentheses.  This is the second book in a month that has come with a "classic" T.S. Eliot foreword, but the editors of the 1001 Books project don't actually include any T.S. Eliot poems, leaving me wondering why they would essentially include books on his say-so but not include any of his own work.  Surely The Wasteland is something that one should read before one dies?

Published 2/3/15

Berlin Stories
The Last of Mr. Norris (1935)
Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
 by Christopher Isherwood


   Important thing to keep in mind is that the 1001 Books Project counts Berlin Stories as TWO separate titles- The Last of Mr. Norris (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) but the standard American edition published by New Directions publishes both novellas in one volume called Berlin Stories.  Technically, this double edition does not exist as an entry in the 1001 Books project but contains two titles that do.

  In the public mind, the most indelible image from Berlin Stories is that of Liza Minnelli playing Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's 1972 film.  You know the image I'm talking about (see above.)   Bowles, while not exactly a bit player in the context of the entire Berlin Stories, is hardly a dominant focus.  Rather, Isherwood is himself the main character, drifting around the margins of the Berlin underworld in the pre-Hitler Weimar Republic as an underemployed English tutor and active gay man. 

  Berlin Stories is a curious progenitor of gay literature in that entirely admits any description of male or female homosexuality, although many of the characters and situations are obviously gay,  being gay is never actually mentioned.  Hard to blame Isherwood- homosexuality was a hanging offense in the United Kingdom until AFTER World War II.  From that perspective, Berlin Stories are incredibly brave, since Isherwood is so recognizably gay in the book.

  In addition to the well drawn gay and non-gay characters, there is the setting of Weimar Republic Berlin, which was later to become synonymous with early 20th century decadence. Thus, Berlin

 Stories is itself a central document of this place and time.

England Made Me (1935) by Graham Greene is loosely based on the real life story of Swedish industrialist and con man Ivar Kreuger.

Published 2/9/15
England Made Me (1935)
by Graham Greene

    England Made Me is loosely based on the life of Swedish industrialist and con man Ivar Kreuger.  Kreuger invented several financial instruments (debentures, Class A and Class B shares) and became internationally famous before committing suicide in 1933.  Kreuger's legacy is somewhere between John Rockefeller and Bernie Madoff-  his confused Wikipedia entry is a testament to his mixed legacy.

    England Made Me, while not quite a spy novel in the way his later books were, is close to being a spy novel in terms of character and theme.  Set in inter-war Stockholm, with a shiftless English protagonist possessing some of the attributes that would later be associated with Secret Agents and Spies in 20th century fiction, I was waiting for Greene to shift into a higher gear that never came.  I suppose that is something that he developed later in his career, but England Made Me is still a suspenseful, atmospheric read, and at 200 or so pages this is a book you can digest during a morning commute on the train or on vacation.

Graham Greene Book Reviews - 1001 Books 2006 Edition
England Made Me (1935)
Brighton Rock (1938) *
The Power and the Glory (1940) *
The Heart of the Matter (1948)
The Third Man (1949)
The End of the Affair (1951) *
The Quiet American (1955) *
Honorary Counsel (1973) *
* =  core title in 1001 Books list

Published 2/10/15
Burmese Days (1934)
by George Orwell

  George Orwell is a staple of English class from Junior High, where Animal Farm is a perennial, to High School, where 1984 is required reading, to college, where Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in London and Paris and his short story Killing An Elephant are like as not to pop up in the general requirements for a B.A. degree.  Orwell is certainly not fashionable in post-graduate circles, quite the opposite, with his reputation suffering in the aftermath of the 1960s led revolution in voices outside the limited perspective of the entitled white male.   Although George Orwell made his reputation on books criticizing mid 20th century totalitarianism in ways that anticipate much of 20th and 21st century radical thought, he himself was a relentlessly bourgeois white male with issues related to women.

  This makes his more autobiographical novels, including Burmese Days, more of a chore and less appealing for the contemporary reader than his immortal hits.  BUT if you are someone who actually likes George Orwell and aren't just reading him because of a school assignment, it is more biographical works that really tell us about the Author.   Andddd man, he seems like he really had issues with women.  Burmese Days pivots on the relationship between John Flory, the Orwell figure, his Malaysian slave-prostitute and Elizabeth Lackersteen, a young English orphan (20 years old) who arrives in his remote Burmese village with the idea that she needs to find a husband and soon.

 Like the love interest in Keep the Aphrisdia Flying, Elizabeth Lackersteen is a confused figure whose inner life only appears as a reflection of the narrative of Flory.  In his more biographical novels, the love story takes second shift to the struggle between man and society.  In Burmese Days, his critique of the British Imperialist project is trenchant and insightful.  The lower level government employees and European representatives of Corporations doing business in the Teak forests of Burma are a surly and servile lot.

 Compared to their Burmese and Indian counterparts (Burma was a part of India under British rule), the English are one dimensional a-holes; all the depth is reserved for the fascinating native characters, Flory himself excepted.  Modern readers are likely to find Burmese Days troubling for repeated use of ethnic slurs and the casual use and disuse of a sex slave in the context of British Imperial rule.  

Poster from the movie version of Brighton Rock, the 1938 film by Graham Greene.

Published 2/18/15
Brighton Rock (1938)
by Graham Greene

Graham Greene Book Reviews - 1001 Books 2006 Edition
England Made Me (1935)
Brighton Rock (1938) *
The Power and the Glory (1940) *
The Heart of the Matter (1948)
The Third Man (1949)
The End of the Affair (1951) *
The Quiet American (1955) *
Honorary Counsel (1973) *
* =  core title in 1001 Books list

   I'm two books deep into the Graham Greene oeuvre and I can already see why he is such a favorite of the 1001 Books editors: 1) English 2) Catholic 3) Had popular hits that combined genre work with "serious" subjects.   Both England Made Me and Brighton Rock have worked in genre areas: England Made Me is a proto-spy thriller and Brighton Rock more straight forward crime fiction.  I preferred the former to the latter.   Brighton Rock actually has a Catholic theme, with "Pinkie" Brown, the hero/anti hero/protagonist frequently referring to his own Catholic faith and that of others.

  The plot of Brighton Rock is straight forward: Pinkie kills a guy who kills his boss, and then he marries the only witness, a young waitress who is a willing accomplice in his scheme to prevent her from eventually testifying against him any potential court action.  It's a little thin, as crime thriller plots go, and there is something quintessentially Catholic about a gangster who MARRIES a woman simply to keep her from POSSIBLY testifying against him in a case that hasn't been initiated. The marriage assumes he will be charged with murder and need her to NOT testify.  That seems... to be a somewhat remote possibility during the entire book

   Mechanics aside, there is much to enjoy in Brighton Rock, particularly the setting and the inherent pleasure of an English crime novel set outside of London, which seems to be the location for most every English novel that doesn't take place "in the country."

Published 3/9/15
Coming Up For Air (1939)
by George Orwell

  Coming Up For Air is some deep Orwell... a social satire about a 45 year old toothless fatty: George Bowling, who sells insurance and lives in the suburbs with a perpetually distressed, dried up wife and two anonymous young children. After a brief introduction to Bowling's day to day existence in pre World War II England, there is an extended flashback concerning Bowling's childhood.  Bowling repeatedly refers to himself as a Cockney, and his childhood is a kind of late 19th century semi-rural idyll, replete with nostalgic fishing holes.

 After the flashback ends, Bowling decides to tell his wife he's going away for week but instead goes back to his old neighborhood and laments the destruction of a more innocent world.  And drinks.  Personally, I was obsessed with Bowling's lack of teeth- at 45.  I don't think I'm alone when I say that this detail sends Coming Up For Air into the macabre.  Why just today I was at Chipotle, and the bags they had for to-go orders had a quote attributed to Aziz Ansari that simply said, "Do you ever see people without teeth and want to ask, what happened?"

 Of course, what happened is that they didn't receive proper dental care.  Thus, George Bowling, a toothless 45 year old, is emblematic of an English "every man" and not, say, a drifter/hobo riding the rails.  Coming Up For Air is minor classic territory, interesting for the committed fan, but nothing for the average student who reads Animal Farm and 1984 in class.

Published 3/10/15
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938)
by Winifred Watson

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day benefited from the 1998 movie version- the LIBRARY copy of this book was a movie version.  The foreword seems to indicate that immediately prior to the publication of the movie edition, Winifred Watson was "lost" because the writer of the foreword "discovered her" living in happy obscurity.

  The action of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day takes place during a single day.  Miss Pettigrew is a self-described dowdy, middle aged Nanny- and not a good Nanny- as she points out repeatedly who is sent- by mistake- to the apartment of Delysia Lafosse- a flamboyant English (in the book) or American (Amy Adams in the movie) starlet.

  Miss Pettigrew is a fun romp- racy, flirty and modern- and quite unlike Watson's other books which are more in the neo-Hardian mode of somber rural country novels.

Published 3/17/15
Party Going (1939)
by Henry Green


  English author Henry Green placed four titles into the 1001 Books Project:  Blindness (1926), about a blind soldier after World War I.  Living (1929), about the lives of Birmingham factor workers. Loving(1945), about the servants in an Anglo-Irish castle during World War II and Party Going.  The library edition of Party Going is part of a three-in-one Penguin classic's edition along with Loving and Living.  The foreword to this edition is written by John Updike, and if you take Updike's introduction with Living, Party Going and Blindness you have the portrait of an author whose work places him after the Modernists but before the careful character driven fiction of mid to late twentieth century, or 'New Yorker short story fiction" as I think of it.
  This style is a kind of literary miniaturism.  Unlike the high modernists, who deployed the everyday and mundane in the service of grand ideas about life, the universe and everything, Green does not seem to be concerned with the world outside the universe of the particular characters.  These characters are sharply drawn.  Shifts between narrators are accomplished with a  minimum of fuss.  Green is in the business of domesticating the disorienting narrative techniques of the high modernists.

   Party Going takes place entirely in a single afternoon, at a fogged-in train station, with the main characters huddled at a close by hotel while crowds mill about aimlessly outside.  As the two hundred page story spools out, the upper class characters are questioned about infidelity.  Green is a careful, subtle writer, and my thought is that he wrote on multiple levels.  The Wikipedia entry for this book hints at a "symbolic" analysis of Party Going that relies on Greek mythology and the god of Hermes.   I certainly didn't get that, and Updike doesn't mention literary symbolism in his career summarizing foreword.

Published 2/10/15
Burmese Days (1934)
by George Orwell

  George Orwell is a staple of English class from Junior High, where Animal Farm is a perennial, to High School, where 1984 is required reading, to college, where Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in London and Paris and his short story Killing An Elephant are like as not to pop up in the general requirements for a B.A. degree.  Orwell is certainly not fashionable in post-graduate circles, quite the opposite, with his reputation suffering in the aftermath of the 1960s led revolution in voices outside the limited perspective of the entitled white male.   Although George Orwell made his reputation on books criticizing mid 20th century totalitarianism in ways that anticipate much of 20th and 21st century radical thought, he himself was a relentlessly bourgeois white male with issues related to women.

  This makes his more autobiographical novels, including Burmese Days, more of a chore and less appealing for the contemporary reader than his immortal hits.  BUT if you are someone who actually likes George Orwell and aren't just reading him because of a school assignment, it is more biographical works that really tell us about the Author.   Andddd man, he seems like he really had issues with women.  Burmese Days pivots on the relationship between John Flory, the Orwell figure, his Malaysian slave-prostitute and Elizabeth Lackersteen, a young English orphan (20 years old) who arrives in his remote Burmese village with the idea that she needs to find a husband and soon.

 Like the love interest in Keep the Aphrisdia Flying, Elizabeth Lackersteen is a confused figure whose inner life only appears as a reflection of the narrative of Flory.  In his more biographical novels, the love story takes second shift to the struggle between man and society.  In Burmese Days, his critique of the British Imperialist project is trenchant and insightful.  The lower level government employees and European representatives of Corporations doing business in the Teak forests of Burma are a surly and servile lot.

 Compared to their Burmese and Indian counterparts (Burma was a part of India under British rule), the English are one dimensional a-holes; all the depth is reserved for the fascinating native characters, Flory himself excepted.  Modern readers are likely to find Burmese Days troubling for repeated use of ethnic slurs and the casual use and disuse of a sex slave in the context of British Imperial rule.  

Published 7/10/15
Cause for Alarm (1938)
 by Eric Ambler

  The modern "spy thriller" is forever linked to the politics of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, but its genre roots predate that conflict.   The first novel to be widely acknowledged as a spy novel is the The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erksine Childers.  That book took place in the North sea, and the plot revolves around a couple of English gentleman seafarers who unwittingly stumble upon nefarious German activity.  Conrad's The Secret Agent, published in 1906, is widely known, though its literary quality sets it above the common genre work of most later spy novels.   The clear inspiration for The Riddle of the Sands is the "adventure novel," popular in the 19th century.   In Riddle, the spy/espionage element seems almost happenstance, merely an additional element dreamed up by an author looking for novel incident for his sailing  adventure story.

  The spy novel as we know it incorporated the crime/hard boiled fiction of the 1920s and 30s with the political upheaval of the 20th century.  In this sense, Cause for Alarm, written almost a decade before the outbreak of the Cold War, is the first "true" spy novel in the 1001 Books list.  The story concerns an English engineer who is suddenly put out of work in his native land and, out of desperation, accepts an assignment as the representative of an English machine tools company in Fascist Italy, stationed in Milan.

  He becomes embroiled in the kind of international geopolitical machinations familiar to any reader of later spy novels.  So unformed in the genre at this point that one of the main characters is an American working FOR the Soviets against the interest of the German/Italian Axis.  Cause For Alarm is a fast paced thriller, and will appeal to any fan of the genre.

Published 7/20/15
The Revenge For Love (1937)
by Wyndham Lewis


     Ultimately, Wyndham Lewis' most memorable excursions into fiction are his satires.  This book and The Apes of God (1930) are the two titles that best exemplify his dark explorations of the modes and mores of 1930s English "bright young things."  Like many thoughtful writers of the 1930s, Lewis explored Communism, Fascism and the similarities between the two in the context of the times.  This "context" were the tumultuous events between the Great Depression and World War II, with a heavy emphasis on the Spanish Civil War and fashionable London.

  Whether a reader is interested in the bright young things of London in the 1930s is very much a matter of personal taste.  Personally, I take interest in all 20th century avant gardes, but the English are at the top of the list in terms of just the level of documentation via the number of authors who were writing about the same smallish group of people.  Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Wyndham Lewis all traversed a social set that couldn't have been more than a thousand or so individuals.

A young Aldous Huxley.  Eyeless in Gaza is supposed to be his most biographical novel, written after Brave New World was a smash hit.

Published 8/5/15
Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
 by Aldous Huxley

 I know plenty of people who "don't read reviews" because they don't want to "spoil" the movie/tv show/book etc, and I have to say, I just don't get it.  I actually like to know the plot before hand, because it helps me focus in on the art and craft of the work, rather than worrying if someone dies or whatever in the end.  If "not spoiling the plot" is important to you, you might as well be reading dime store romance novels.  To me, the plot is the least important thing because ultimately, every plot is predictable to a certain degree, it's the carrying out of the mechanics, the depiction of the scene and the characters, which are interesting- to me- anyway.

 Eyeless in Gaza is a portrait of disaffected well off English youth in the 30s.  The jacket copy on my Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition is laudatory ("An important book...without parallel in literature.") but I was not so impressed.  This book concerns the trials and tribulations of Anthony Beavis, a wealthy, upper-class socialite who experiences multiple crises of meanings in the non-chronologically arranged narrative.  The narrative is punctuated by incident: the suicide of a close friend, a love affair with a heroin addicted matron, an expedition to Mexico to assist a socialist revolution.  The lack of chronology makes the reader work, but there are no other modernist techniques in evidence, meaning that what is on the page is at least, understandable.

It's unclear why this book, along with close to 20 other portraits of upper-class English youth in the early 20th century would be one of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.   The only difference between this book and many of the themes (and characters)of D.H. Lawrence is that Huxley isn't afraid to pointedly discuss sex and drug abuse. The authorial voice in Eyeless in Gaza is closer to the tone of post World War II literature in its explicit treatment of historically "controversial" subjects, but the social milieu is unquestionably pre World War II.  

 The over-all impression I received from this survey of pre-World War II English literature was that the English upper classes were perilously close to declaring moral bankruptcy at the onset of World War II.  This perspective is certainly colored by the querulous sort of people who write classic novels, but the impression is a strong one.  Perhaps the most extraordinary part of reading Eyeless in Gaza was actually laying hands on a paperback copy.  I had it "on hold" at the San Diego Public Library for a half year before I broke down and bought at a book store in Concord Massachusetts during summer vacation last year.

Published 2/6/16
A Day Off (1933)
by Storm Jameson

  The depiction of loneliness in London is practically a genre itself within the 1001 Books project.  Urban anomie is often associated with the rise of existentialism in the 1950s, but English authors depicted this alienation, minus the heavy philosophical overlay, starting in the late 19th century.  Jameson's take on this fertile territory is that of a single woman, aging, with no children or spouse.  Out of work, she decides to take "A Day Off" to ease her mind, and while doing so she travels back and forth in time, remembering lost lovers and worrying for her future. The feeling of sadness permeates A Day Off, and if a reader has any inclinations in the area of loneliness and anxiety, this book will certainly trigger an interior dialogue with those emotions

Brave New World was published in 1932, a decade and a half before George Orwell wrote along similar lines in 1984.

Published 10/6/15
Brave New World (1932)
by Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World was published 17 years before George Orwell's 1984.   Huxley's depiction of a futuristic totalitarian state may have been the first techno dystopia in fiction or non fiction.  His future dystopia is a combination of mass production and "pure" communism, with a benevolent oligarchic dictatorship ensuring that babies are properly grown in test tubes, the five classes of humanity- alpha through epsilon- are properly indoctrinated via hypno/sleep suggestion and that every has an adequate supply of soma, a drug that sounds pretty much like morphine.

  Compared to Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World is a fairly benign place.  Orwell, of course, was writing with full knowledge of the horrors of World War II, where Huxley was writing during the interwar period where many English intellectuals flirted with totalitarianism of both right and left varieties.   Huxley's most penetrating observations surround his depiction of the pleasure seeking consumer society that wasn't even beginning in the 1930's.   The idea of cheap drugs and free sex began to resonate deeply a generation after Huxley published Brave New World.   Like Herman Hesse, Huxley wrote books in the early part of the 20th century that only fully resonated with it's largest audience decades later.  In this way, he falls into the same category as Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters.

  Although Huxley's techno-dystopia was prescient in many ways, his writing style is more or less derivative of H.G. Wells.   That is nothing to be ashamed of, but the plot and the writing in general is not equal to Orwell in 1984.  Orwell was very deeply involved with the language of totalitarianism, to the point where he generated his own argot for 1984.  Huxley, on the other hand, relies on Shakespeare, from where Huxley derives his title. 

Published 10/12/15
Star Maker (1937)
by Olaf Stapledon

   I recently completed the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy-  written by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin and I have to say that my mind was blown.  Not so much by book one- which was amazing- and reviewed here, but by the second and third books The Dark Forest and Death's End, which are impossible to even discuss without ruining the sheer mind-blowingness of it all.  But in summary, the trilogy is a variation on the standard "first contact" narrative, where Earth makes contact with an alien race.  The surprise and delight is in the science and philosophy that Cixin brings to the table, and while both might be off putting to casual readers, Cixin clearly strikes a chord, one that has resonated not just in his native China but also in the West, where Amazon studios recently picked up the trilogy for development.

  The experience of the trilogy was so revelatory that I found myself wondering whether I had missed some influential works of science fiction that might have inspired Liu.  The Foundation Trilogy by Issac Asimov is an obvious inspiration, and the characters and the book reference it.  Another book that is often cited by people writing about the Remembrance trilogy is Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon.
I'd heard of neither book nor author, so I checked out 1970's era reprint.


Published 2/11/19
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
 by George Orwell

   George Orwell is one of my favorite writers.  He is very much on my completist list, of authors where I'm trying to read all their books.  The Audiobook of Orwell's 1937 poverty tour in northern mining towns is readily available via the Los Angeles Public Library, and it also ranked #39 on the Guardian's 2011 list of Best 100 Non Fiction books, so I picked it as a space filler during my long weekly drives.

  I didn't expect to be disappointed by Orwell, and I wasn't.   Poverty is a consistent theme of the second tier of Orwell's books- not the ones you read in school but books you might come across if you take an interest in Orwell beyond his big canon-busting hits like Animal Farm and 1984.   The most popular of his poverty books is Down and Out in London and Paris, (1933) which explores similar themes and probably explained why this book was commissioned by Victor Gollancz.   Besides the non-fiction, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, an early novel, deals explicitly with the theme of poverty in the guise of a kunstsleroman.

  The 2011 Guardian list of 100 Best Non Fiction books takes The Road to Wigan Pier as it's representative of the Orwell bibliography, and it's hard to argue, if only because it is the only one of Orwell's books where he well and truly gives his opinion about his subject, and I think the reader can see a hit of the kind of public intellectual he could have become were it not for his very early death at the age or 50, in 1946.

  The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier is a straight forward description of the living conditions and working conditions for the miners in northern English coal mining towns, the second is a polemic directed against the socialist leadership for not doing enough to appeal to actual working men, as supposed to the effete intellectuals who tended to be socialists back then.   It's a critique that holds true into today- you can think of the Democrats in America repeated failures to appeal to white working class voters in the industrial midwest and south.

  The descriptions of actual living conditions, it's hard to believe he's talking about life in England during the 20th century- for example, he describes a common condition of people who can't afford to buy bedding and just sleep on piles of rags placed on top of the bed frame.  It's also very clear that nutrition was terrible for the English working class.   What marks out Orwell from a half century of anti-poverty crusaders is that he actually lived it- experienced poverty both as a reporter and as a bohemian- so both naturally and unnaturally, which was very much not the case for educated writer inveighing against working class poverty in the late 19th and early to mid 20th century.
  Stapledon was an English science fiction writer who had the misfortune to do most of his writing either directly before or after World War II, a time when opportunities were slim for trans-atlantic publishing of all sorts, and before science fiction was taken seriously by literary critics.  He became a cult author, for example, Borges wrote a foreword for 1960's era reprint of Star Maker.   

  Star Maker is, I think, the first serious attempt to imagine the outlines of intergalactic civilization.  Stapeldon's Star Maker is an English man, living in the 20th century, who, one night, rises out of his journey and begins travelling among the stars.  When he lands on a world with intelligent life, he is able to partially occupy the consciousness of the "other humans" as he calls them.    What follows is a systemic attempt to describe all forms of intelligent life in the galaxy.

  Stapledon then follows with an incredible description of millions years of Galactic history, featuring battles, intergalactic space travel and even conscious stars.  It is a wild ride, although there is little in the way of plot or character development. I found myself repeatedly needing to confirm that Star Maker had actually been published in 1937, because it feels several decades ahead of its time.

  I think there is a strong argument to include Star Maker as a canonical novel, perhaps as a substitute for other proto-genre works like At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (1936), or a work of detective fiction like The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (1931), Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers (1933) or The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain (1934).  Do Hammett and Sayers both need multiple titles published in the 1930's?  Surely one book by each author is sufficient.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Published 2/21/16
Summer Will Show (1936)
by Sylvia Townsend Warner

    The most striking difference between the 2006 and 2008 versions of the 1001 Books list is the exclusion of books by authors who placed multiple titles on the 2006 list in favor of non-English language, unrepresented authors.  A major theme of the 2006 list which is eclipsed in the 2008 list is the emphasis of books by English language women authors who are commonly excluded from the canon.  Sylvia Townsend Warner is a good example of an author from the group.  Summer Will Show is a little-read, historical novel about the French Revolution, written about a wealthy English woman who becomes a lesbian radical.

   Warner is so little read today that all of her major books are published by the New York Review of Books publishing imprint.  The NYRB is a who's-who of neglected 20th century authors, and I can only presume that their criteria for publication is a lack of interest from bigger publishing houses and a solid critical reputation.

    Warner is so little read today that only one of her books even has it's own Wikipedia page.   There have been perhaps less than ten titles in the 1001 Books list that lack an independent Wikipedia page.  Obscurity aside, there is much to admire in Summer Will Show, namely a strong female protagonist who engages in a lesbian relationship and forsakes a life of leisure in rural England for a position on the barricades of the French Revolution.

Criterion Collection cover for The Lady Vanishes d. Alfred Hitchcock

Published 1/15/21

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

d. Alfred Hitchcock

Criterion Collection #3

  The question of whether movies (or "film" or "cinema) is literature is very important to this blog- even if I do go half a decade or more without seriously addressing the question here.  Now that I'm back to it (the last stand alone Criterion Collection review was in 2015), I'm back to thinking about the  literature /movies/film/cinema issue.   If you wanted to sketch out the major schools of thought on the issue, you can look at it in the context of the American/Western University system, where films are typically taught as literature to undergraduates, with a narrower band of technical education that typically takes place outside of the question of film as literature.

   On the one side you've got the actually Professors and students of film.  The Professors are typically Professors of literature.  The distinction is less important to the students, many of whom may reasonably prefer movies to the more traditional forms of literature, poetry, novels, short stories.  Because the idea that film was a type of literature to be studied only happened after World War II, all Professors of Film take a post-modernist perspective on the ideas of literature, so they all question the distinction even as they benefit from it.

  On the other side you've got the Professors in the more traditional lines of Literature- World Literature, American Literature, 20th Century Literature, Poetry, Creative Writing, Comparative Literature, Etc.   Those people are naturally going to resent/dislike Professors of Film because they take jobs from these same traditional Professor types.  There is also some prejudice against the idea of moving images as art, and the broad technical and monetary restrictions on making a work of film as literature. 

   Alfred Hitchcock is interesting because he represents a key moment in the transformation of movies into a form of literature, in that he was the artist who inspired Francois Truffaut to coin the term "auteur" back in 1954.  After the term came into common usage, film had its "author" -a prestige denied to the actual writers of films, who were and continue to be viewed as mere technical support.   The whole idea of the auteur then inspired scholars and fans to go back to film before 1954 and re-evaluate film makers for auteur status.   This is another very important example of how artistic reputation is often rejudged decades after the work is published. 

   Using the example of The Lady Vanishes, it was the third Criterion Collection film.  That is despite the fact that, as the accompanying materials make clear, The Lady Vanishes was considered a thriller b-movie type production by the English studio providing the financing.    One of the points that Truffaut makes in his discussion with Hitchcock that appears in audio format in the extras of the Criterion Collection edition is that he has seen The Lady Vanishes multiple times, and will go in saying that he is going to focus on the technical acuity that Hitchcock displays, but instead he gets swept into the story and forgets to look.  That is the essence of great art.   Indeed, I quite enjoyed The Lady Vanishes even though I've never been a fan of Hitchcock.   Part of it has to do with the fact that his films aren't that widely shown.

  I'm sure all Criterion Channel has is his early English films.  They should really let those movies out to breath somewhere!

Published 11/10/14
To The North (1932)
by Elizabeth Bowen

  This is Anglo-Irish author Bowen's second book within the 1001 Books projects.  Her first was The Last September, published in 1929.  In To The North, Bowen has moved on from her rural Irish homeland to the fast times of post World War I, pre Great Depression London.  Any discussion of To The North needs to address the role of technology on the characters of To The North.  Opining that technology has changed our lives in many way is beyond a common place in 2014, but it's interesting to see how long it took Art to absorb and reflect the way technology and innovation changed the way we lived.

  For example, To The North is one of two books in the 101 Books project up until this point that uses the automobile as an active element in telling the story, and maybe one of five books where the characters use a telephone.  Both this novel and The Last September deal with  a changing world where the characters struggle to adapt.  The difference is that in The Last September the changing world is of a recognizable type: political upheaval brought about by the English colonial adventure in Ireland.   In To The North, the change is stranger, less familiar to the author and the characters, but infinitely more familiar to a present day reader.

  The female protagonists of To The North are sisters in law, Cecilia, 29, was married to Emmeline's brother Henry, but Henry died.  During the novel Cecilia does not much of all, while Emmeline has a travel agency with a partner and tools around town in her own car.  Emmeline is involved with a brilliant but decadent barrister who goes by "Markie."  Emmeline and Cecilia are a kind of mid point between the heroines of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters and those of Bridget Jones and Sex & the City.

  And while no one is likely to mistake the chaste description of the interactions between Markie and Emmeline for a Sex & the City episode, the modernity of Emmeline with her car, business and lack of interest in marriage and children is impossible to miss.  

Published 11/11/14
Sunset Song (1932)
 by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  Widely acknowledged as the first important Scottish novel of the 20th century, Sunset Song is part of a trilogy of novels written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.  It's hard to argue that Gibbon in any way started the tradition of the Scottish novel, since Scottish writers like Sir Walter Scott and Tobias Smollett played a role in inventing the novel itself.  However, Gibbon is the first author to attempt to portray the "common folk" of highland Scotland in a realistic manner.  His trilogy of A Scots Quair, of which Sunset Song is the first volume, combines modernist technique (dialogue integrated into the text, stream of consciousness), a strong female hero (Chris Guthrie, who is the central figure of all three novels) and regional dialect (complete with a glossary.). to excellent effect.
  It is the interaction of these three features that make Sunset Song/A Scots Quair classic, and they outweigh the limited invention of the plot, which has the strong scent of earlier nineteenth century novels from other northern countries like Sweden and Norway.   A plot point dealing with a triple infanticide/suicide by Guthrie's mother can't help but recall the rural infanticide of The Growth of the Soil (1917) by Knut Hamsun.   The earlier chapters of the novel, describing the history, courtship and marriage of her parents reminded me of The People of Hemso (1877) by August Strindberg.  Which is to say that Sunset Song isn't necessarily breathlessly original aside from the technique, but it is first in the field, and at 195 pages makes for a quick read.

Published 1/21/15
Wild Harbour (1936)
by Ian Macpherson

  I can't remember the last 1001 Books title that hasn't had it's own Wikipedia page.  Wild Harbour, by Scottish novelist Ian Macpherson has to be one of the most obscure titles thus far simply for that reason.   It's a shame that Wild Harbour is so obscure, because it is actually one of my top ten books for the last 12 months or so.  Half survival narrative in the fine tradition of Robinson Crusoe and his progeny, half dystopian futurism,  Wild Harbour also features a well observed Scottish highlands(?) locale and an engaging love story between the two lead characters, who pack up and leave in the early days of a (fictional) World War II set some time in the near future.

   The transition from traditional-ish survival story to a depiction of an anarchic English country side is a clear influence on popular current dystopian narratives:  Fans of The Road by Cormac McCarthy and the book or movie version of Children of Men will recognize the influence of this book on those books.  Generally speaking, the world-systems perspective of serious fiction is conservative, with authors firmly rooted in the upper-middle class concerns of property inheritance and marriage protocol, with an increasing interest in corresponding concerns among the working classes.  The idea of writing fiction in a world where government is absent is not particularly new, but the setting that world after the collapse of the current social system is.  Wild Harbour merits attention for its early depiction of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Published 2/20/15
Murphy (1938)
by Samuel Beckett

  You can get away with calling Samuel Beckett either the "last of the modernists" or the "first of the post-modernists" in casual conversation, either assertion is easily buttressed by  Murphy, one of Beckett's few novels.  Published in 1938, the end of the modernist period, it contains a main character whose behavior is more in line with precepts of post modernism than any particular strain of modernism.  Murphy is equally obsessed with not working and conducting breathing and meditation exercises while tightly restrained in a chair.

 Beckett's prose technique is recognizably modernist or avant garde, but not excessively so. It's hard not to compare Murphy to novels written by James Joyce in their similar espousal of a low budget, pre-1960s concern with non-traditional brands of spirituality.  For example, Joyce's Ulysses is infused with multiple ruminations about Kabbalah.  Murphy has no explicit ideology, Samuel Beckett clearly did not want him to have any appreciable motivation.  At the end of Beckett, he is immolated in his "proper garrett" inside the insane asylum where he works.   The portion of the book where Beckett goes to work among the insane is the only part that could be considered to have "action."  The rest takes place mostly in the apartment of Beckett and his hooker girlfriend.

  The relationship of Beckett and James Joyce is no secret, occupying pride of place on Wikipedia for Samuel Beckett's "Early Works" heading.

Published 2/7/16
The House in Paris (1935)
by Elizabeth Bowen

   Any author who placed more than 5 titles on the 2006 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list is practically guaranteed to lose 50% or more of those titles on the 2008 list.  Elizabeth Bowen is no exception, losing three of her six entries on the 2006 edition.  The House in Paris is one of the lost titles.   All of Bowen's works combine modernist styles (use of the "free indirect" narrator, moving backwards and forwards in time out of sequence) but The House in Paris is the most modernist, with the action taking place within a single day and the use of lengthy imagined scenes (imagined by one of the characters) taking place out of the time sequence of the novel, as a flash back.

  Like much of her work, The House in Paris touches on issues of class and religion without being about those things.  Rather, The House in Paris is about a young boy, Leopold, learning about the tangled circumstances around his birth.  In the fine modernist tradition, none of this is spelled out for the reader.  You have to either work or pay close attention to really zero in on the story before the third act ties it all together.  Before then you might find yourself asking which character is which.  That is frequently the case with books that embrace early 20th century modernist technique, a disorientation, if you will, from the standard feelings obtained from reading a well written novel.

  Does anyone read Elizabeth Bowen these days?  Maybe in England.  The last American edition of The House in Paris was published in 1976.  I'd never heard of her before the 1001 Books project, now I would rank her as a middle of the table British (Anglo-Irish) author from the early-mid 20th century.  I think though, that three books is adequate to represent her proper status.

Published 11/23/20

Monica (1930)

by Saunders Lewis

Replaces: Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley

   It is kind of amazing that the Welsh have managed to preserve their indigenous language in the face of going on 800 years of English imperialism.  Monica by Welsh nationalist Saunders Lewis makes it into the revised 1001 Books project as the sole representative of translated from the original Welsh.  Of course, anyone following the 1001 Books project is reading the English language translation.  Without the original language, Monica comes off as early kitchen sink realism with a Welsh accent.

  Monica wasn't a hit- Welsh nationalists didn't like the negative take on social relations between wife and husband.  "Kitchen Sink Realism" wasn't really a thing in England until the 1950's, so Lewis was ahead of his time in that regard. 

Louis-Ferdinand Celine, forerunner of Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.

Published 3/11/16
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
 by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

   Before there was Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski, there was Louis-Ferdinand Celine.   Celine was also, regrettably, a rabid anti-Semite who was firmly committed to the Nazi cause in World War II AND after- eventually being convicted in abstentia of being a collaborator with the Nazis.  Celine's place in the literary canon is still debated.  He was famously included then excluded from a list of "500 French intellectuals" compiled by the French government itself.

  His widow, still alive at the age of 103, has ensured that his most rabidly anti-Semetic tracts are out of print and he's kind of a poster child for the impact that extremely non-p.c. believes can have on an artistic legacy.  Unlike many other authors I've not read in the 1001 Books project, I know exactly why I hadn't read Journey to the End of the Night before now: It's because Louis-Ferdinand Celine is a Nazi, more or less.  

  But now I'm quite clear on the philosophy of pardoning artists for moral flaws that would otherwise put them beyond the pale of polite society.  Being a Nazi may be more offensive than living as a unrepentant degenerate or heroin addicted trust-funder, but only as a matter of degree.  The direct and obvious comparison is to American author Henry Miller.   Like Miller, Celine directly confronted the reality of life on the margins of Western society in the 1920s and 30s.  Topics like venereal disease, back alley abortions and the ugliness of 20th century racism are put front and center to the reader.

   Journey to the End of the Night squarely fits into the literary genre of 'bildungsroman' or "coming of age story,"  but it represents the negative image of what that genre typically represents.  A fun house mirror, if you will.   Like so many other 20th century anti-heroes, Ferdinand Bardamu is deeply imbued with an existentialist philosophy before such a thing existed.   Bardamu isn't a thoughtful intellectual, but he isn't a thug, either.   He starts out in the army during World War I, finds his way to Africa, where he has some memorable adventures, makes his way to America for a year or so, and returns to France, where he becomes an unsuccessful doctor.

   There is also a kind of negative double to Bardamu, his "frenemy" Leon Robinson, whom he meets first on the battlefields of Belgium, where Robinson is trying to get himself captured by the Germans.  They renew acquaintances in America and after Bardamu returns to France, Robinson ends up becoming a focal point of Bardamu's existence.   This relationship between Bardamu and Robinson more or less constitutes the plot of Journey to the End  of the Night, but like Miller and Kerouac, the atmosphere is more of interest than any overarching narrative.

   Once you get past Celine's unrepentant, explicitly pro-Nazi Antisemitism (or if, I guess) it's clear that Journey to the End of the Night is an early classic of 20th century existentialist

Published 8/30/15
Nausea (1938)
 by Jean Paul Sartre

  Nausea is the first novel by Nobel Prize decliner Jean Paul Sartre.  It's also the first existentialist novel, and indeed the single text that introduced the most people to the idea of existentialism.   It's common to associate existentialism with the post World War II period, but for Sartre and the other existentialists of the early 20th century it was the experience of the first World War and the subsequent post War crisis of faith that shaped their perspective. 

 Antoine Roquentin, the existentialist anti-hero, is living in a thinly veiled version of the French port city of Le Havre, where he suffers from a crisis of faith where being in society, in public, causes him to be nauseas.  He consorts with a variety of low lifes, including his friend, "the self taught man," who spends his days reading indiscriminately at the local library.

  The plight of the existential hero is so familiar 80 years after Nausea was published that it is difficult to plug in the excitement that it must have caused at the time.  It's also unclear how far Nausea penetrated in translation- with the major current English translation dating from 1965, 25 years after it was first published in French.

 

Published 1/4/21

Vipers' Tangle (The Knot of Vipers)

by Francois Mauriac

Replaces:  The Plumed Serpent by D.H. Lawrence

  French author Francois Mauriac won the Nobel Prize in 1952.  Unusually for someone known as a "Catholic" author, he supported the resistance during World War II and was the only member of the Acadamie Francaise to publish in support of the resistance.  Mauriac is another good example of how a well known European author can be totally obscure in the USA.  For example, this book is the only English language edition of his work which appears on the first page of his Amazon author search results- the rest are all French editions. 

  Vipers' Tangle struck me as an extremely French novel, about Monsieur Louis, a wealthy lawyer who becomes obssessed with disinheriting his family.  Told in the form of a confessional journal entry, Louis gradually reveals that the Vipers' Tangle/Knot refers not to the family he hates itself, but rather the situation inside his heart.