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Twentieth century
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Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
1902-1968
The title of quite possibly John Steinbeck's best known work
refers to a line from a Robert Burns' poem To a Mouse, hinting
simply at the tragedy of the tale. The novella tells the story
of George and Lennie, two migrant workers who have been let off
the bus miles from the California ranch where they work. George
is a small, sharp man with dark features, and Lennie a mentally
subnormal, shapeless giant who is deeply devoted to George and
relies on him for protection and guidance. Camped out for the
night, this unlikely couple share a dream of starting a farm
together. Back on the ranch, the men meet Slim, the mule driver
who admires their friendship. He gives Lennie one of his puppies
and convinces the two men to include him in their dreams of
buying a piece of land and setting up home. But the dream is
shattered when Lennie accidentally kills the puppy and, without
meaning to, breaks the neck of a woman on the ranch. Fleeing a
terrible death at the hands of a lynch mob, Lennie encounters
George, who gently reiterates the story of the idyllic life they
will share together, before shooting his friend in the back of
his head. When the mob arrives, Slim realizes that George has
killed his friend out of mercy and leads him away.
This is a story about brotherhood and the harsh reality of a
world that refuses to allow such idealized male bonds to be
nurtured. George and Lennie's unique relationship approaches
that ideal, but it is misunderstood by the rest of the world,
who cannot comprehend true friendship, instead undermining one
another and exploiting weakness wherever it can be found. But
perhaps the real tragedy of the novel lies in the depiction of
the death of the great American dream as a reality, exposing it
as exactly what it purports to be: merely a dream.
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The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
1902-1968
It is something of a
commonplace these days to talk of The Grapes of Wrath as a novel
that has become profoundly ingrained in the consciousness of
America, and yet no other writer chronicled the catastrophic
period of the Great Depression in the 1930s with the same
passion and political commitment. As Steinbeck's masterpiece,
its place in the canon of great American literature is confirmed
by the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded in 1940 (the same year it
was adapted for film) and the Nobel Prize for Literature that
the author received in 1962. It is concerned with the Joad
family, who lose their Oklahoma farm and head west with dreams
of a better life in California. As the journey unfolds, they and
thousands of other "Okies" flocking westward converge along
Highway 66, telling each other tales of injustice and relishing
the plenty that lies ahead. What they find in California is
exploitation, greed, low wages, hunger, and death. In a stunning
indictment of the savage divisions that those with money seek to
extend and exploit, Steinbeck represents the desperation of the
family as the threat of violence, starvation,and death begin to
eat away atthem.lt is only wrath, a defiant solidarity, and
constant sacrifice that allow them to maintain their dignity.
Steinbeck has been criticized in the past for a perceived
sentimentality in his characterization of the Joads, but while a
reader is inevitably drawn into their plight, they are only ever
actors in a tragedy that is bigger than they are. This is above
all a political novel, and the defeats, the mud, the hunger, and
the maltreatment all carry a political charge, a condemnation of
injustice (and those in positions of power who create it), and a
validation of the quiet anger and dignified stoicism of the
common man in response.
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Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
1905-1980
Sartre's Nausea is that rare
thing in literary history— a "philosophical" novel that succeeds
in both of its endeavors. The novel is at once a manifesto for
existentialist philosophy and a convincing work of art. In fact,
it succeeds to such an extent that it blurs the distinction
between literature and philosophy altogether. Nausea details the
experiences of thirty-year-old Antoine Roquentin, a researcher
who has settled in the French port of Bouville (a thinly
disguised Le Havre) after several years of travel. Settling
down, however, produces a series of increasingly strange
effects. As Roquentin engages in simple, everyday activities,
his understanding of the world and his place in it is
fundamentally altered. He comes to perceive the rational
solidity of existence as no more than a fragile veneer. He
experiences the "nausea" of reality, a "sweetish sickness," a
ground-level vertigo. He is appalled by the blank indifference
of inanimate objects, yet acutely conscious that each situation
he finds himself in bears the irrevocable stamp of his being. He
finds that he cannot escape from his own overwhelming presence.
This is a delicately controlled examination of freedom,
responsibility, consciousness, and time. Influenced by the
philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the literary stylings of
Dostoevsky and Kafka, Nausea is the novel that announced
existentialism to the world—a system of ideas that would go on
to become one of the most significant developments in
twentieth-century thought and culture. The notion that"existence
precedes essence"is writ large for the first time here, several
years before Sartre "formalized" his ideas in Being and
Nothingness (1943) and before the horrors of the Second World
War had intensified their impact.
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Goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood
1904-1986
'"I am a camera," Isherwood writes, "with its shutter open,
quite passive, recording, not thinking." What he offers us are
snapshots and newsreels of Berlin during the last days of the
Weimar Republic. The city is caught in the eerie calm of an
apocalyptic hurricane, the brief window wedged between the First
World War and the distant thunder of the indomitable Third
Reich.
Isherwood, the narrator and observer, is detached and numb as
though shell-shocked— what he is witnessing hasn't been
witnessed before. The demimonde he inhabits is a fatalistic
free-for-all, fueled by a growing despair so great that the only
recourse is a dance of abandon, the last and most memorable song
of the dance band on the Titanic as the iceberg looms. It is a
world of lost souls, where the great have fallen, where the good
do what they can to make ends meet, where everything is for sale
and virtue is an unaffordable luxury. Former socialites must
take in lodgers, prostitutes mingle with opera singers, and
Isherwood stumbles through opportunities with his fellow
expatriate and co-lodger, the aspiring nightclub singer, Sally
Bowles. Sally is a perfect emblem of the time: tragic and blind
to consequences, capricious and predatory and deadened by
alcohol and sex. This is a melancholic though unsentimental
novel about a world that will soon no longer exist.The hedonism
of the Weimar is fading and soon will be eradicated. Sally grows
distracted and disagreeable.The Jewish Landauers' tenuous safety
will soon be destroyed. Rudi, the communist youth, will have his
idealism prove fatal. Innocence will be lost.
With his understated and dispassionate prose, Isherwood throws
the massive and terrifying events of 1930s Berlin into relief;
his genius is chilling.
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Coming Upfor Air
George Orweli
1903-1950
Coming Up for Air is a biting satire on post-war society In the
1930s, a singularly unpleasant tale about an equally unpleasant
man, but also a prophetic anticipation on social development.
George Bowling, the protagonist, seems to typify stereotypes of
the lower middle class—it is better to complain than to act,
everything was always better in the past, and society is going
to the dogs. Yet the novel is far more complex than this and
truly deserves the apocalyptic moniker of "Orwellian."
Bowling is an apparently mundane everyman who feels a bitter
revulsion for his fellow man and continually harps back to the
days before 1914. Tiring of his wife Hilda, Bowling returns to
Lower Binfield, the heart of middle England, where the
residents, who regard the past as a foreign country, are not
only blithely indifferent, but utterly subservient to the status
quo. Ultimately, the only thing that the self-aware Bowling has
to look forward to is the same series of ideals presented
through the looming specter of the coming war. Bowling's bitter
resentment and Orwell's wry, dark, observational powers in a
world that is increasingly turning away from the big questions
show a dark undertone to British society, as well as
highlighting the continual social unease of "dumbing down."
Moments such as George's purchase of a hot dog that tastes like
fish demonstrate not only the potency of observation, but also
the disappointing reality of modern consumables.
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Animal Farm
George Orweli
1903-1950
Orwell's fable of the animals who take over Manor Farm but are
betrayed by their leaders has become a powerful myth of freedom
for the post-Second World War generation. Its purpose was to
destroy another myth, that the Soviet Union was a socialist
state; the difficulties that Orwell faced in getting his book
published confirmed his view that the British intelligentsia was
in thrall to the Soviet system. Animal Farm was based on
Orwell's own experience in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939),
when the left-wing militia in which he fought was ruthlessly
eliminated for not being communist.
Animal Farm is a masterpiece of controlled irony, focused on
essential developments in the rise of the Soviet state, but tied
to Orwell's knowledge of rural life. Major, an elderly white
boar representing Karl Marx, declares the animals' "duty of
enmity towards Man and all his ways." When revolution comes all
animals shall be equal. Unfortunately, the pig Napoleon (Stalin)
and his fierce dogs (secret police) take over, working to death
the carthorse Boxer (the Soviet people) and exiling Snowball (Trotsky).There
is pathos in the carthorse Clover's realization that the seven
founding commandments are now one: "All animals are equal but
some animals are more equal than others." Such irony confirms
the book's support of genuine revolution.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orweli
1903-1950
Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of Orwell's most powerful
politically charged novels, a beautifully crafted warning
against the dangers of a totalitarian society, and one of the
most famous novels in the dystopian genre. Winston Smith is a
low-ranking member of the ruling party in London whose every
move is monitored by telescreens. Everywhere Winston goes, the
party's omniscient leader, Big Brother, watches him.The party is
trying to eradicate the possibility of political rebellion by
eliminating all words related to it from the language, creating
sanitized "Newspeak." "Thoughtcrime" (thinking rebellious
thoughts) is illegal. Winston, who works at the Ministry of
Truth altering historical records for the party's benefit, is
frustrated and oppressed by the prohibitions on free thought,
sex, and individuality. He illegally purchases a diary to record
his thoughts and spends his evenings wandering the poor areas
where the "proles" live, relatively free from monitoring.
Winston starts an illicit affair with Julia, a fellow party
employee, but they are caught by a party spy, and in Room 101,
Winston is forced to confront his worst fear. Giving up his love
for Julia in terror, Winston is released, his spirit broken and
his acceptance of the party complete.
In 1949, at the beginning of the nuclear age and before
television was mainstream, Orwell's creation of a telescreen-monitored
world just a single generation into the future was
terrifying.This is an important novel not only for its stark
warning against abusive authority (and its somewhat ironic
contribution to modern television content), but also for its
insights into the power of manipulating language, history, and
the psychology of fear and control.These issues are perhaps even
more pertinent today than when Orwell penned his novel.
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I, Robot
Isaac Asimov
1920-1992
I, Robot is one of the great
classics of science fiction. Ostensibly, it is a collection of
short stories, but the fact that they are all linked together as
they explore the twin subjects of robotics and philosophy
warrants the book's inclusion in a list of great novels. In I,
Robot Asimov coined the term "robotics" and set out the
principles of robot behavior we know as the Three Laws of
Robotics, followed by science-fiction writers ever since. The
three rules read: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or
through inaction allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot
must obey orders given by human beings except where such orders
would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its
own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with
the First or Second Law.
The stories are connected by robo-psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin,
who works for the corporation that manufactures intelligent
robots, and her discussions with a reporter who is putting
together a profile of her career. Dr. Calvin reflects on robot
evolution and discusses how little humanity really understands
about the artificial intelligence it has created. Each story
illuminates a problem encountered when a robot interprets the
three fundamental laws, and something goes awry. Although I,
Robot was published in 1950 and includes stories from the 1940s,
when computing was in its embryonic stage, Asimov's vision of
the future of software is startlingly accurate and insightful.
Asimov's writing is certainly not top-drawer, and the
characterization is often weak, but the scientific style, the
blend between fact and fiction, and the stunning insights into
the world of robotics, from which so much else has developed,
make this one of the most important works of science fiction in
the history of the genre.
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Foundation
Isaac Asimov
1920-1992
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, of which this is the first
book, is one of his earliest and best known works, which he
began when he was only twenty-one. It helped to redefine the
science-fiction genre with its seamless interweaving of science
fact with fiction. Foundation is set in the future, when the
world is barely remembered, and humans have a galaxy. The book
introduces Hari Seldon, a brilliant visionary and
psychohistorian whose job is to use mathematics and probability
to predict the future. Seldon does not have the ability to
prevent the decline of humanity that he predicts. Instead, he
gathers together the galaxy's top scientists and scholars on a
bleak outer planet and sets out to preserve the accumulated
knowledge of humankind and begin a new civilization based on
art, science, and technology. He calls his sanctuary the
Foundation and designs it to withstand a dark age of ignorance,
barbarism, and warfare he predicts will last for 30,000 years.
But not even Hari has foreseen the intense barbarism lurking in
space or the birth of an extraordinary creature whose mutant
intelligence will destroy all he holds dear.
With his scientist-populated Foundation, Asimov became one of
the first writers to theorize that atomic power would
revolutionize society. In addressing the ways in which the
Foundation responds to the problems Seldon has predicted, the
author raises issues about traditional religion as the
controlling drug of the masses, and the rise of science as the
new faith for humankind.
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Molloy
Samuel Beckett
1906-1989
Beckett is better known for his plays than for his novels, but
his novels are the greater achievement. They are the funniest
prose alive. Molioy, written initially in French, then
translated into English by Beckett and Patrick Bowles, is the
first novel in the trilogy finished off by Malone Dies and The
Unnamable. Although they complete the trilogy, these two later
novels proved inadequate to the job of putting an end to the
decline begun in Molloy, which extends into everything that
Beckett would go on to write.
Beckett is the great master of every possible shade of decline
and its unrivalled comedian. Molloy is probably the funniest of
all his writing. lt is made up of two stories, each the
doppelganger of the other. In the first, the wretched cripple
Molloy stumbles through a lost thread of episodes peopled by his
insensible mother, a litter of comic citizens, a policeman, and
a grotesque feminine captor named Lousse, before ending up
dumped by Beckett in a ditch. His place is then surrendered to
Moran, whom Beckett dispatches, together with his son, on a
quest to find his predecessor, a quest that Moran pursues with
furious inertia only to find that Beckett has declined to
contrive a meeting between them. He trudges home to find his
bees turned to ash.
Beckett nails all the perks of fiction (all the events,
sympathies, and glitter of fiction's "real life") into their
smorgasbord and buries it. His stories are all the confessions
of a syntax addict whose phantom fix is total disagreement with
himself.
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Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
1906-1989
For those readers who easily tire of colorful fiction, Malone
Dies will be as revitalizing as anything in the language.
Following the departure of Molloy, .Malone Dies is Beckett's
attempt to winnow down still more violently the nib of his
fiction. The stories are what the language uses to get away from
itself, and they are ah going nowhere. Early on in Malone Dies
we are spoon-fed the story of the sorrows of young Sapo Saposcat,
a fake and abortive bildungsroman in a suite of ludicrously
colorless episodes so boring that even Beckett cannot bring
himself to keep up his ventriloquism of it. Later he tries his
hand at a love story, where the protagonists manage at great
effort and discomfort to act out what are surely the most
repulsive sex scenes in any comedy.
When the language of Malone Dies begins to resemble a novel, it
is always faking it. As each consecutive excuse for a story is
dumped, we are dragged back into the scene of syntax addiction
and the parody of mystification over life and death, endlessly
knocked on the head by casual remarks such as "ideas are so
alike, when you get to know them," and endlessly restarted. So
it goes until the brutal finish of the book, in which Beckett is
perhaps more nearly terrified than anywhere else in his fiction
by the corner he has crushed himself into and by his failure to
lose control of language even in that corner. The fundamental
horror and optimism of Beckett are that true claustrophobia is
possible only in paradise.
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Watt
Samuel Beckett
1906-1989
This novel represents an essential stage in the development of
Beckett's fiction. As Watt progresses, it literally unravels and
collapses. The recognizably linear comic opening is easily
identifiable with the Joycean style that characterized the
preceding Murphy. It becomes increasingly fragmented, however,
as the formal, temporal, and syntactical structures break down;
the "Beckettian" world of his later work begins to take hold.
In the opening chapter, we encounter the titular character, who
meets a number of misfortunes in the shape of a porter pushing a
milk can and an irate lady who pelts him with a stone. Watt
rests in a ditch before continuing his journey to the house of
Mr. Knott, his subsequent employer and the center of the novel's
impending collapse. Upon reaching his destination, Watt takes
his position as the first-floor servant, gradually progressing
up the floors, and closer to Mr. Knott. Knott himself is a
mystery, less a character than a presence, a singularity, and it
is under his service that Watt's obsession with exhaustive
logic, the source of the novel's formal fragmentation,
increasingly takes control. The role of multiple unreliable
narrators assumes a central importance heir for the first time
in Beckett's work, as do the great formal innovations,
particularly in terms of temporal structure. Watt is essential
reading for the spectacle of a writer developing his style on
the page and for a demonstration of the strict order and Intent
that underpin Beckett's chaos.
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The Unnamable
Samuel Beckett
1906-1989
The Unnamable marks the conclusion of Beckett's drive toward the
reduction of the novel form begun in Watt, and it is only
logical that a move away from prose writing into drama
immediately follows.This is the third part of the trilogy that
begins with Molloy's haunted detective story and progresses
through the deathbed hallucinations of Malone Dies. In The
Unnamable, Beckett attempts formally to address a question he
has been skirting around in his previous work; what is left of a
novel once the story, characters, fictional space,and narrator
have been removed?
The first notable quality of The Unnamable is the way it makes
such indispensable use of its status as the third part of a
trilogy. The end of the preceding novel, Malone Dies, begins to
falter and die along with its narrator, spluttering and
collapsing in a series of logical and syntactical breakdowns.
Finally it is silent, and a turn of the page leads to all that
is left of the novel—the disembodied voice in the darkness,
"where now, who now." This voice is the voice of the unnamable,
the "voice" of the novel, a ghost of sorts, exposed with no
world to inhabit, no characters to speak through, and no events
to describe, so speaking only of itself. In The Unnamable
Beckett seems at last to have reached the core, speaking of the
succession of previous Beckett characters as one and the same.
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How It Is
Samuel Beckett
1906-1989
Following the Second World War, nothing occupied Beckett so much
as the idea that his writing should be as difficult to imagine
and to desire as it possibly could be. There is nothing in the
English language comparable with How It Is, a novel that both
ends and cannot ever end itself with every sentence. It ends not
only itself, but also the whole tradition of the novel conceived
from the nineteenth century onward, as a grand historical effort
to bring literature up to date with the infinite detail of
social and moral existence. Detail is erased and replaced by an
exhausting round of repetitions and automatic verbal reflexes,
uttered by a body barely crawling through mud, listing the
contents of a sack, straining to contrive even the outline of a
story or remembrance as if empty and straining to defecate.
Beckett ejects from his last full-length novel even the
caricature of linear narration that sustained him through The
Unnamable, sinking instead into a prose so unsustainable and so
much like pathological or obsessive utterance that it barely
allows the composition of a paragraph. We now receive only the
poltergeist of grammar, only the leveled succession of clauses
without punctuation, none and all of which are subordinate
clauses.There is the shadow, or recollection, of a plot,
flickering through the language. But read this book for what it
does to how language is and to how we are in consequence. In its
most suspended animation, Beckett's prose turns into poetry.
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The Judgeand His Hangman
Friedrich Durrenmatt
1921-1990
Written while he was flourishing in postwar Germany as a
playwright, novelist, essayist, theater director, and painter,
Friedrich Diirrenmatt's The Judge and His Hangman weaves a
suspenseful tale of murder in a remote part of Switzerland. The
stark minimalism of the author's Brechtlan theatrical work is
counteracted in this atmospheric novel, in which words paint
foreboding and thrilling backdrops to the tale of Police
Commissioner Barlach, who is investigating the murder of a
fellow police officer, Schmied. Barlach, an ageing and dying man
whose investigative faculties have not yet taken a backseat to
his physical frailties, hands over the bulk of the detective
work to his colleague Tschanz. The two of them launch into a
harrowing investigation (Barlach is brain; Tschanz is brawn),
but there are very few clues: a bullet on the side of the road,
beside the car in which Schmied, dressed in evening clothes, was
murdered, and an entry—a single"G"—in the victim's diary on the
night he was killed.This last clue leads Barlach and Tschanz to
the home of the cold and brilliant Gastmann. This mysterious man
is involved in clandestine international relations—and his
associations serve to heighten the novel's intrigue.
Although Durrenmatt set aside his distinctly Brechtian style in
his non-dramatic prose, he did not turn away from using art as a
springboard for political criticism, and The Judge and His
Hangman, the first of his books to be published in America,
addresses the theme of modern detective work in a way that is
far from secondary to its mysterious plot. Critiquing policing
methods is bound up inextricably both with the plot and with an
equally important study of human imperfection. It is this last
aspect in particular that causes this piece of crime fiction to
stand apart from the hundreds of novels written in the genre.
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A Ghost at Noon
Alberto Moravia
1907-1990
Like most of Moravia's work, this novel is a political
accusationrcapitalist culture reduces the intellectual to a mere
producer of goods. Riccardo Molteni, the protagonist, is a
failed intellectual who betrays his ambition to become a
playwright and sells his soul to consumerism to make money by
writing screenplays. He convinces himself that he does this to
pay for the apartment he bought to make his wife, Emilia, happy.
Molteni increasingly loses sight of reality and becomes
incapable of noticing what is happening around him, unable to
see that his wife no longer loves him. In a nostalgic and
regretful way, he carries on loving a semblance, or a "ghost,"
of what Emilia once was (hence the English translation
ofthenovel's title).
Molteni takes refuge in Greek myths, with their protagonists who
lived in a world where the relationship with reality was
straightforward and unmediated. When faced with the challenging
task of transforming the Odyssey into a movie, Molteni discovers
that a text such as Homer's holds the key to his existence.
Odysseus and Molteni are united by a similar destiny. Their
wives, Penelope and Emilia. despise their passivity and
self-assurance. Molteni is excessively confident that Emilia is
faithful and disregards the producer's courtship of her. She is
hurt, and feels she is being sold cheaply to secure her
husband's occupation. Her contempt for him grows and is finally
shouted into his face before she abandons him on the island of
Capri.
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Bonjour Tristesse
Francoise Sagan
1935-2004
When Cecile, a precocious fifteen-year-old, leaves boarding
school to live with her widowed libertine father, Raymond, she
enters into a world of decadence that is a far cry from her
strict convent-school days. Gallivanting between Paris and the
French Riviera, the golden-skinned duo embraces a hedonistic
existence, consisting of short-lived affairs, glittering
characters, and every luxury imaginable. But their life of gay
frivolity is threatened two years later when Raymond believes he
has fallen in love with Anne Larsen,a former friend of Cecile's
mother who moves within more staid, intellectual circles.
Fearing for her freedom, Cecile, the quintessential enfant
terrible, invokes the help of her lover, Cyril, and her father's
former paramour Elsa, to intervene. But her cunning plot proves
to have tragic consequences, forever coloring her future
happiness with tristesse.
Written when she was just eighteen years old, Francoise Sagan's
first novel was an instant international best-seller. With its
description of overt sexuality, celebration of wealth and
opulence, and intimation of same-sex desire, the novel shocked
and titillated its first readers, paving the way for a
permissive French society. Simmering beneath the facade of the
jaded ingenue is the unsettling portrait of a child who will do
anything to maintain the life outlined for her by the only
parent she knows.
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I'm Not Stiller
Max Frisch
1911-1991
Widely considered Switzerland's greatest literary figure of the
last century, Max Frisch was a novelist, playwright, diarist,
and journalist. The popular and critically acclaimed I'm Not
Stiller is a remarkably sustained narrative, which combines
anguish and humor to explore issues of identity, self-loathing,
and humanity's intense longing for freedom.
The novel begins with the arrest at the Swiss border of a man
traveling under a false identity. He claims to be Mr. White from
America, but the Swiss authorities believe him to be Anatol
Stiller, a famous sculptor from Zurich, who has been missing for
six years. In prison, the man is asked to write down his life
story in order to prove his identity. In the process he tells
not only stories of the past few years of his life, but also of
his meetings in the present with Stiller's wife, Julika, and
other important people from his past. Through these accounts we
learn about his life before the disappearance and are able to
piece together a picture of this deeply troubled character.
Stiller writes about himself as if he is another person— a self
he has attempted to escape from, but which he now has to
confront anew as he is slowly compelled to accept both his past
and his real identity.
An ironic exploration of an extreme existential crisis, this is
also a touching portrayal of a failed marriage and a social
critique of Swiss conformity. Complex, psychologically profound,
and intellectually challenging, it still manages to be
entertaining, funny, and poignant at the same time.
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
1899-1977
The first publication of
Lolita, by risque Parisian press Olympia, caused widespread
outrage. The violent erotic passion of the novel's protagonist
and narrator, Humbert Humbert, for the twelve-year-old Lolita,
and the intensity and extent of Humbert's abuse of her, remain
genuinely shocking, particularly in a culture preoccupied with
child abuse and the sexualization of children.
Written in Nabokov's characteristic immaculate style, this
violent and brutal novel poses fascinating questions about the
role of fiction. Is it possible for us to find beauty, pleasure,
and comedy in a narrative that is ethically repugnant? Can we
suspend moral judgment in favor of aesthetic appreciation of a
finely tuned sentence or a perfectly balanced phrase? The
answers to these questions remain unclear, but in pitting
substance against style, in balancing the ethical so delicately
against the aesthetic, Nabokov invents a new kind of literary
fiction. Humbert's abduction of Lolita and his fleeing with her
across the U.S. in a crazed attempt to outrun the authorities
make this novel an inaugural work of postmodern fiction, as well
as a kind of proto-road movie. Humbert is an old-world European,
a lover of Rimbaud and Balzac, who finds himself displaced in
the shiny world of corporate 1950s America and entranced by the
lurid charms of gum-sucking, soda-drinking Lolita. The story of
this encounter between venerable age and crass youth, between
Europe and America, between high art and popular culture, is the
story upon which many of the novels and films that come in the
wake of Lolita are based. Without Lolita, it is difficult to
imagine Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 or Tarantino's Pulp
Fiction. It is a mark of its originality and power that, after
so many imitations, it remains so troubling, so fresh, and so
moving.
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Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov
1899-1977
This short comic novel brought Vladimir Nabokov his first
National Book Award nomination, widespread popularity, and first
commercial success. An early example of the 1950s campus novel,
it follows the experiences of the hapless Russian emigre
Professor Timofey Pnin. As a teacher of Russian at Waindell
College, he inhabits the rather strange and detached world of
academia, and he struggles to adapt to American university life.
Physically awkward and an implacable pedant, Pnin's greatest
misfortune is his inability to marshal English idiom, and much
of the comedy of the book arises from his idiosyncratic use of
the language. However, his ultimately dignified conduct ensures
that his character cannot be reduced to the pared-down
stereotype offered by the somewhat uncharitable narrator, and in
comparison with his other non-American colleagues he is an
undeniably decent man.
Evolving out of a series of short stories originally published
in the New Yorker between 1953 and 1955, the book has been
criticized for appearing more as a series of discrete sketches
than a novel. This criticism is unfair, however, as—in keeping
with Nabokov's concern for thematic rather than plot-driven
cohesion—the novel returns to Pnin's inability to feel
physically or linguistically "at home" in North American
culture. Above all, the unmistakably deft Nabokovian style, with
its extended linguistic digressions and offbeat humor, make this
novel a comic masterpiece and a real joy.
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Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
1899-1977
Entering a web of reflections, imputations, madness,
neighborliness, gayness, exiled royalty, murder, and literary
criticism, it is hard to discern any stable world outside the
text of Nabokov's novel. With astonishing literary dexterity,
Nabokov takes to considerable lengths here the notion that
writing need be about nothing but itself. The novel is divided
into two parts: the four cantos of the poem "Pale
Fire,"attributed to invented author John Shade, and their
annotated exegesis written, after Shade's death, by his friend,
neighbor, and editor, Charles Kinbote.The poem and its notes,
along with Kinbote's explanatory preface and index, form the
novel's entire substance. Shade's poem is an apparently
uncomplicated reflection upon his life, his daughter's suicide,
and his Christian thoughts on the nature of divine order.
Kinbote's notes suggest that he believes himself to be Charles
the Beloved, king of an obscure European country called Zembla.
Escaping to the United States from revolution, Charles
pseudonymously took up a post at Words mith University alongside
his favorite poet, John Shade, whom he befriended and whose work
he claims to understand. In his opinion/'Pale Fire" is really a
coded history of Zembla. Is Kinbote an editor, a stalker, a
madman, or an academic? Or is he a fiction supplied by a Shade
writing his own annotations? Welcome to the funhouse.
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The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R.Tolkien
1892-1973
The Lord of the Rings is actually three books—The Fellowship of
the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. It follows
on from the story of The Hobbit, which Tolkien had published
well over a decade earlier, further exploring the world of
Middle Earth and war that would determine the fate of all men.
Like The Hobbit, it is the story of an unlikely hero—a
childlike, unassuming hobbit, Frodo—whom fate has destined for
greater things. At the beginning, elves, dwarves, hobbits, and
men come together under the wizard Gandalf's watchful eye to set
off on a journey to destroy the magic ring, which Bilbo Baggins
had found in The Hobbit. The ring holds inside it the essence of
evil and therefore must be destroyed before Lord Sauron can find
it and plunge Middle Earth into darkness. Through a series of
misadventures, the fellowship either die or become separated.
Only Frodo, his loyal friend Sam, and the wasted creature
Gollum—who had fallen for many years under the ring's power and
is now its slave— are left to return the ring to the fires of
Mount Doom, which is the only way to destroy it.
The book is about power and greed, innocence, and enlightenment.
Ultimately, it describes an old-fashioned battle of good against
evil, of kindness and trust against suspicion, and of fellowship
against the desire for individual power. Tolkien's evil is an
internal force—most evident in the"good"and "bad"sides of the
character Gollum,who epitomizes the struggle to be good. This is
also a story about war, no doubt drawn from Tolkien's own
experience, and how enemies in life are united in death, the one
great equalizer. If there is a message, it is that there is
little point to war and that the search for ultimate power is
futile in a world where togetherness will always (justly) win
out.
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Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
1890-1960
Pasternak's epic story of the
love affair between Lara and Yuri, set against the historical
and geographical vastness of revolutionary Russia, was banned in
the USSR from its first publication in Italy until 1988. While
Pasternak was silenced by the Soviets, he won extravagant
plaudits in the West, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1958.
It is a bitter irony that this divergence between Soviet and
Western responses to Doctor Zhivago has had such a profound
influence on the way that the novel has been read. Pasternak has
been caricatured by both the West and the East as a writer who
prioritizes a romantic Western concept of individual freedom
over the iron cruelties of the socialist state. In fact, rather
than being in any simple sense counterrevolutionary, the book is
a subtle examination of the ways in which revolutionary ideals
can be compromised by the realities of political power. The
relationship between Lara and Yuri, one of the most compelling
in postwar fiction, grows out of a fascination with the
possibilities of revolutionary justice and is closely interwoven
with it. The novel is driven by the struggle to achieve a kind
of perfect truth, in both personal and political terms, but its
drama and pathos are found in the failure of this striving
toward the ideal and in the extraordinary difficulty of
remaining faithful to a personal, political, or poetic
principle.
One of the most striking things about the novel is the Russian
landscape itself which emerges with a wonderful spaciousness and
an extraordinary beauty. It is from its elegiac encounter with
the vast landscape upon which this drama is played out that
Doctor Zhivago produces an extraordinary sense of happiness and
a sense of the boundlessness of historical and human
possibility.
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Homo Faber
Max Frisch
1911-1991
Homo Faber is a tragicomic tale of the alienation of modern man
and the dangers of rationalism. Walter Faber is a fifty-year-old
Swiss emigre working as an engineer for UNESCO. He is a
punctilious creature of habit with a strongly held view that
science and reason can account for things. The novel begins
when, on a flight to Venezuela, his plane is forced to land in
the Mexican desert. This disruption to his ordered life and a
chance meeting with the brother of his erstwhile best friend are
the beginnings of a series of events that force him to confront
his past.
Before the war Faber was in a relationship with a German Jew,
Hanna, who became pregnant. He offered to marry her, she
refused, and he went away, understanding that she would
terminate the pregnancy. But in Mexico he learns that Hanna in
fact married another. This shock discovery creates a fissure in
his rationalist armor that will crack completely by the time he
is united with Hanna and the daughter he never knew he had.
Walter's failure to address his emotional side, and his dogmatic
belief that he can control his environment through logic make
this reunion anything but happy. Frisch is a master of irony,
used here to full effect to produce a troubling, ambivalent work
that leaves you torn between feelings of sympathy and contempt
for his perfectly realized but deeply flawed creation.
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
Truman Capote
1924-1984
Breakfast at Tiffany's is a charmingly naughty fable, capturing
in crystal a glorious moment of New York during the last gasp of
American innocence. The story is the reminiscence of a writer in
New York during the Second World War. With Holly Golightly,
Capote has given us one of the most indelible heroines in
fiction. Pushing the boundaries and paving the way for the
revolution to come, Holly is a gamine—sexually free, hedonistic,
a prostitute. She lives for the moment, damns the consequences,
and makes up her morality as she goes along. Like her cat
without a name, she is unfettered, untameable. The novel's
unnamed narrator meets Holly when she climbs through the
writer's window, to escape an overzealous and unmuzzled John.
They become fast friends, and the narrator is swept up in
Holly's thrill-seeking subsistence living. At the core they want
"happiness" and connection, dreams that seem like fate to those
young enough to hope. But hints of darkness cloud their lives.
The novel was a turning point for Capote. Gone is the lyrical
Southern gothic of his early writing. Here he takes his place
among New York's glitterati. Daring in its day—promiscuity and
homosexuality are discussed openly—it may have lost its ability
to shock, but its charm does not diminish. A fresh breeze off
the East River—from a time when such a thing was still possible.
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Cat and Mouse
Gunter Grass
1927
Grass was born in Danzig in 1927 and with Cat and Mouse, the
central work in the Danzig Trilogy (the others being The Tin
Drum and Dog Years), he attempts to recapture the past of that
city and understand the impact of Naziism upon it.The novel
presents wider historical events through the eyes of a small
group of children, allowing the author to ground the narrative
in his memory of the city and its people. Its central and
elusive figure, Joachim Mahlke, dreams of becoming a clown and
becomes instead a war hero. He is an outsider and possibly a
Pole who refuses to bow to the pressure the regime places upon
him to conform and to believe. His mysterious life satirizes
Nazi preoccupation with heroism and hero worship; the other
children hold him in awe and reverence, while he holds the
regime in something approaching contempt. His desire to be a
clown stems from his desire to perform for others, to be watched
and admired, and it enables Grass to explore the contradictions
at the heart of many of those raised to the rank of hero within
the Nazi era.
The story, told by his friend Pilenz, is written as a
confessional, a format that deliberately mirrors and engages
with the postwar attempts to "confess" the Nazi past and thereby
receive absolution.The novel moves between comic fantasy,
brutality, realism, and myth; between moments of almost lyrical
beauty and horrific violence. It is also in constant dialogue
with its own storytelling, the distorting power of memory, and
the impossibility of reconciliation.
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Solaris
Stanislaw Lem
1921-2006
Science fiction has always been an obsessively debated literary
category. For outspoken Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, who spent
much of his career dismissing American science fiction as kitsch
commercial fodder, its shortcomings were all too plain. It is no
small irony then that his 1961 novel Solans has become one of
the undisputed classics of the genre, spawning two cinema
adaptations (Andrei Tarkovsky's in 1972 and Steven Soderbergh's
in 2002). Predictably, Lem poured scorn on them both.
The initial premise of Solaris is almost textbook: human
scientists try and fail to make contact with aliens from the
eponymous planet. Solaris is covered by an oceanlike organism
whose intelligence outwits them continually.Their attempts to
understand it are thrown back on themselves; their experiments
reveal only their own psychological weaknesses. Kris Kelvin, the
protagonist, is gradually destroyed by memories of his suicidal
lover, whose image, regenerated by Solaris, haunts him. The
other characters are in turn plagued by unspecified traumas.
Perhaps what the movies could never capture is the book's
distinctive tone: dispassionate academic language describes
inexplicable phenomena on the planet that our protagonists can
never hope to comprehend, By revealing the absolute alienness of
that oft-imagined fantasy world beyond our blue planet, Lem
suggests a new literary hybrid. Part Kafka, part Huxley, here is
an unmapped mutation of sci-fi that is compelling precisely
because of its refusal to be explained.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich
Aleksandr Isayevich
Solzhenitsyn
1918
This contemporary literary classic is quite literally what it
says it is: a single day in the life of a prisoner in a
Stalinist labor camp in 1951. Ivan Denisovich Shukov is punished
with three days in solitary confinement for not getting out of
bed, but the threat is idle, and he only has to wash a floor
before being taken back to breakfast. As the day goes on, the
reader gains insight into the workers' suffering and
companionship, and the uneasy coexistence between the prisoners
and guards. At the end of the day, Ivan is lucky to be rewarded
with a few extra mouthfuls of food from another inmate and
thanks God for getting him through another day. This day, we
find out at the end, is just one out of 3,653 of Ivan's prison
existence. Ivan is an unlikely protagonist for Russian
literature of this time, being a peasant, a normal man, and
possibly illiterate. He represents the uneducated and persecuted
mainstream of Soviet society. Despite his background, however,
Ivan develops an inner dignity as he builds some meaning out of
his mundane and degrading camp existence, transcending his
surroundings with a spiritual intensity.Throughout,the story
reverberates with the desperate dehumanization of the prisoners;
the unjust punishments and arbitrary rules that reduce men to
mere numbers. Yet despite the degradation a hope rings out as
the twin strengths of camaraderie and faith help the men to
survive.
Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin in a
private letter, spending eight years of his life in labor camps
similar to the one he describes here. In 1962, he became famous
with this novel's publication^ landmark event in the history of
Soviet literature. This memorable work was the first public
recognition of the existence of the labor camps and the hideous
conditions endured by their inmates.
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Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
1922
Felix Hoenikker, father of the A-bomb, is without sin.
Rationality abjures abstracts such as morality; he is a man of
hard science. Be it nuclear weapons or turtles, Hoenikker is a
whirring brain needing occupation. Takeaway his turtles, and he
can blow up Hiroshima. It is when hard science falls to soft
humans that things get messy. But Hoenikker's"greatest"creation
is Ice-nine, an isotope of water that freezes at room
temperature, creating a chain reaction—like the A-bomb or the
children's game of cat's cradle—elegant, never ending, and
ultimately pointless. Whereas the A-bomb fell short of total
annihilation, Ice-nine will do the trick. John, the narrator,
while researching a book on the day the bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, stumbles across the Books of Bokonon. Bokonism baldly
declares itself a bunch of "shameless lies"; Truth plays no part
in religion.The least it can do is offer some comfort. Vonnegut
creates a religion in order to mock religion. He also targets
technology, the big, destructive twentieth-century lie, which
supplants it. The end of the world comes as a roaring whimper,
the result of carelessness and laziness—technology and stupidity
are a very dangerous alchemy indeed. In Cat's Cradle Vonnegut
reveals the meaning of life: there is none. But he is a master
and can make even the end of the world funny. The serious
implications come to us later, after we have our breath back.
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Kurt Vonnegut
1922
"A sum of money," Kurt Vonnegut tells us in the first sentence
of what is his fifth novel, "is a leading character in this tale
about people ... "The sum of money In question is vast,
constituting as it does the core of the Rosewater Foundation, a
charitable organization set up as a tax shelter by Senator
Lister Ames Rosewater of Indiana. It is a sum that can inspire
hatred, ruin lives, and create and destroy dreams. Eliot
Rosewater, who inherited the directorship of the foundation, is
perhaps the man most affected by the money. His avaricious
opponents claim it has driven him mad and has destroyed his wife
and marriage; however, his loose coterie of whores, drunkards,
arsonists, and various volunteer fire departments see it as the
cause of his saintliness. For Eliot Rosewater has committed what
can be considered a cardinal sin in capitalist America: he wants
to share.
Privilege, however, is a sacred trust, and one of the mandates
of the lawyers in charge is "the prevention of saintliness on
the part of our clients." So the battle between good and greed
ensues, with opportunistic young lawyer Norman Mushari, assisted
by Fred Rosewater—the "filthy-minded insurance bastard" and
atrophied knot at the end of the poor branch of the Rosewater
family tree—attempting to have Eliot declared insane.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a merciless satire on wealth and
entitlement, a brilliant and biting diatribe against capitalist
America that is hilarious and written without charity. It is
also vintage early Vonnegut and marks a move away from the
science fiction of his previous books, for which he is so
well-known. Here we have a tale of holy innocents just trying to
get by and make sense of a modern world.
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The Joke
Milan Kundera
1929
Milan Kundera's first novel is set in Czechoslovakia in the
1950s and 1960s. The original joke of the title refers to the
spurned principal narrator Ludvik's decision to send his
adolescent sweetheart a postcard bearing the inscription
"Optimism is the opium of the people! The healthy atmosphere
stinks! Long live Trotsky!" Although his original motivation
forwriting this provocative card is little more than a petulant
reproof, the implications of his actions prove far-reaching.
Ludvik is expelled from the Communist Party, and his compulsory
national service is spent in a virtual no-man's land of paid but
inconsequential manual work. His bitterness at his expulsion
from the party, his anger at those responsible for his
concomitant removal from university, and the difficulties he has
forming intimate relationships with others inform the novel's
events. Ludvik attempts revenge against the man who had him
expelled from school by seducing his wife. He soon discovers
that his adversary has been given a welcome excuse to get rid of
his wife, and the woman has, unpredictable fallen in love with
Ludvik—he again finds himself at the wrong end of a joke. As
Ludvik himself asks, "What if history plays jokes?" This vexed
question is a preoccupation of the novel, which offers a closer
political focus and a narrative more directly plot driven than
Kundera's later work.
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The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
1891-1940
In 1966, almost thirty years after the author's death, the
monthly magazine Moskva published the first part of The Master
and Margarita in its November issue.The book had circulated
underground for many years before surfacing into the public
arena. Had it been discovered during Bulgakov's lifetime, there
is little doubt that the author would have "disappeared" like so
many others—despite the dubious honor of being named as Stalin's
favorite playwright for a short period. The Master and Margarita
has survived against the odds and is now recognized as one of
the finest achievements in twentieth-century Russian fiction.
Sentences from the novel have become proverbs in Russian;
"Manuscripts don't burn" and "Cowardice is the most terrible of
vices" are words with a special resonance for the generations
who endured Soviet totalitarianism's worst excesses. Its
influence can be detected further afield—from Latin American
magic realism to Rushdie, Pynchon, and even the Rolling Stones
("Sympathy for the Devil" is said to be inspired by
Bulgakov).The novel is composed of two distinct but
interconnected narratives. One is set in modern Moscow; the
other in ancient Jerusalem. Into these Bulgakov inserts a cast
of strange and other¬worldly characters that includes Woland
(Satan) and his demonic entourage, an unnamed writer known as
"the master," and his adulterous lover, Margarita. Each is a
complex, morally ambiguous figure whose motivations fluctuate as
the tale twists and turns in unexpected directions. The novel
pulsates with mischievous energy and invention. By turns a
searing satire of Soviet life, a religious allegory to rival
Goethe's Faust, and an untamed burlesque fantasy, this is a
novel of laughter and terror, of freedom and bondage—a novel
that blasts open "official truths" with the force of a carnival
out of control.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1928
Widely acknowledged as Garcia Marquez's finest work, One Hundred
Years of Solitude tells the story of the fictional Colombian
town Macondo and the rise and fall of its founders, the Buendla
family. Revealed through intriguing temporal folds, characters
inherit the names and dispositions of their family, unfolding
patterns that double and recur. The mighty Jose Arcadio Buendia
goes from intrepid, charismatic founder of Macondo to a madman
on its fringes. Macondo fights off plagues of insomnia, war, and
rain. Mysteries are spun out of almost nothing. This beguilingly
colorful saga also works out a wider social and political
allegory—sometimes too surreal to be plausible, at times more
real than any conventional realism could afford. An
exemplification of so-called magic realism, this allegorical
texture incorporates a sense of the strange, fantastic, or
incredible. Perhaps the key sociopolitical example is the
apparent massacre by the army of several thousand striking
workers whose dead bodies seem to have been loaded into freight
trains before being dumped in the sea. Against the smoke screen
of the official version, the massacre becomes a nightmare lost
in the fog of martial law. The disappeared's true history takes
on a reality stranger than any conventional fiction, demanding
fiction for the truth to be told. While the novel can be read as
an alternative, unofficial history, the inventive storytelling
brings to the foreground sensuality, love, intimacy, and
different varieties of privation. Imagine the wit and mystery of
the Arabian Nights and Don Quixote told by a narrator capable of
metamorphosing from Hardy into Kafka and back in the course of a
paragraph. Garcia Marquez may have spawned clumsy imitations
whose too clever inventions merely tire, but this is a strange
and moving account of solitude.
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