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The Enchanted Wanderer
Nicolai Leskov
Lifespan | b. 1831 (Russia), d. 1895
First Published | 1873 (Russia)
Original Title | Ocharovanny strannik
Original Language | Russian
Nicolai Leskov is the least well known of the giants of the Russian novel. In the English-speaking world, he has been eclipsed by others such as Tolstoy and Gogol, possibly because his are the most purely Russian stories of them all, defying incorporation into the western European realist or psychological novel traditions. English translations of his stories are liable to be read as parodies of some stereotyped fable, or even as comedies, in places approaching the manner of Beckett. This is a great part of his appeal: to read him requires that we abandon all anticipation of plot and reader-style empathy with “real” characters. We must submit to the logic of the storyteller who knows by heart but not, apparently, by head, what he wants to tell us.
The Enchanted Wanderer is a vast reel of improbable misfortunes and adventures narrated by the hero to an audience on board a ship. The wanderer is enchanted, because at every step of his life some new adventure befalls him, from the most exotic and magical to the most ludicrously mundane. The great German literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote that the now almost lost craft of storytelling always depended on stories excluding psychological explanations for the actions of their characters: the lack of explanation sets the imagination free. Leskov is the great practitioner of that wonderful and beguiling craft. KS
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1800s
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Lifespan | b. 1840 (England), d. 1928
First Published | 1874
First Published by | Smith, Elder & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
Joseph Poorgrass wheels a barrow of apples to Bathsheba’s residence in this idyllic illustration by Ditz of Hardy’s novel.
The pressures of late Victorian modernity, felt acutely in Thomas Hardy’s later work, barely touch the world of Far from the Madding Crowd. The minor rustic characters seem to come from an earlier age, and Hardy here first applies the name “Wessex” to the topographical and imaginative landscape where his greatest novels are set.
However, Hardy’s vision already encompasses injustice and tragedy. Fleeing from her husband, Bathsheba Everdene spends a foggy night beside a swamp, and shivers to see at sunrise its “rotting tree stumps” and the “clammy tops” and “oozing gills” of the fungi growing there. Nature has its poisons, as humanity has its ills. Of the five main characters, two are pathologically destructive: Sergeant Troy is dashing, but selfish and heartless, and Farmer Boldwood is in love only with his own obsessional desire. Fanny Robin, an innocent betrayed, prefigures Hardy’s vindication of the “fallen woman” in Tess of the d’Ubervilles, but where Tess becomes defiant, Fanny remains passive. Even Bathsheba, independently minded, kind-hearted, and inconstant, causes more sorrow than joy. Only Gabriel Oak is thoroughly good, and he must wait until the last chapter for his reward. Plot and characters are strongly rather than subtly drawn, but the vivid presence of the natural and cultural background is striking. Among the memorable images: Gabriel’s shepherd’s van, like Noah’s ark in the fields; a sheared ewe rising from her fleece “like Aphrodite from the foam”; the Weatherbury church, with its gargoyles; and the great medieval threshing and shearing barn nearby. This world, encompassed within a few square miles, is so intimately known and powerfully depicted that it makes our current global landscape feel drab and featureless. MR
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1800s
Pepita Jimenéz
Juan Valera
Lifespan | b. 1824 (Spain), d. 1905
First Printed | 1874, by J. Noguera for M. Martínez
First Serialized | 1874, in Revista de España
Original Language | Spanish
Among the consequences of the Spanish Revolution of September 1868 were philosophical polemics that opposed, on the one hand, traditional religious experience, and, on the other, the new vitalist and even materialist moral principles, of which diplomat and novelist Juan Valera was a firm upholder.
The theme of Pepita Jiménez—also the name of the protagonist—is a literary depiction of the religious climate in which Spaniards of the middle and upper classes existed in the last third of the nineteenth century. In a social world of landowners, Don Luis de Vargas, a would-be mystic who is training to be a priest, meets the beautiful Pepita, widow of an octogenarian, who is being courted by his father, Don Pedro de Vargas. The young pair fall in love and “sin,” creating a moral conflict with profound theological ramifications. The Church demands remorse, loyalty to their earlier vows, and the renunciation of lustful human love. Pepita demands the restoration of her virtue and marries Luis. In an added psychological twist, Luis, the recognized natural son of Don Pedro, wishes through his priesthood to wash away the sin of his father.
The narrative structure is free and imaginative; it incorporates the devices of discovered documents, written correspondence, and a narrator who completes what the letters fail to do, rounding off the figure of the vindicated Pepita. M-DAB
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1800s
The Crime of Father Amado
José Maria Eça de Queirós
Lifespan | b. 1845 (Portugal), d. 1900 (France)
First Published | 1876, by Tipografia Castro Irmão
First Serialized | 1875, in Revista Ocidental
Original Title | O crime do Padre Amaro
The first and most famous novel by Portugal’s foremost nineteenth-century writer, The Crime of Father Amaro is a scathing attack on religious hypocrisy and the narrowness of provincial life.
The priest of the title is a weak young man forced into the priesthood without faith or vocation. He arrives in the provincial town of Leiria, a smallminded haunt of petty vice and malicious gossip. Bored and irked by celibacy, Amaro soon finds an outlet for his lively lust with an attractive young parishioner. Although the reader may identify with the lovers, José Queirós ultimately permits no illusions about an affair that is satisfyingly torrid but crude and exploitative. Amaro is a mediocrity, priggish at heart and keen for personal advancement. He is learning the ropes of corruption and his lover must eventually pay the price for this education.
As the plot unfolds to its brutal, unsentimental conclusion, the author shows some sympathy for his limited and hopeless characters, but none for the society and the church that have made them what they are. The continuing power of the story to shock, at least in Catholic countries, was shown in 2002 when a Spanish-language movie version caused a first-rate scandal in Mexico. RegG
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1800s
Drunkard
Émile Zola
Lifespan | b. 1840 (France), d. 1902
First Published | 1877
First Published by | A. Lacroix (Paris)
Original Title | L’Assommoir
“She was a mattress for the soldiers to lie on before she was twelve—and she’s left one leg down there . . .”
In Émile Zola’s own words, this is “a work of truth, the first novel about the common people that does not lie and that smells of the common people.” The narrative details the fluctuating fortunes of Parisian laundrywoman Gervaise Macquart, whose determination to transcend the slum milieu through hard work is ultimately thwarted by circumstance. Gervaise’s roofer husband suffers a fall and stops working. His ensuing alcoholism drains Gervaise’s assets and seduces her into the fatal l‘assommoir (bar), affecting her moral and physical dissolution. Urban vicissitude is linked with moral improbity; individual misfortune linked with environmental disintegration. Gervaise’s tragic, pathetic decline is inexorable, as her alcoholism leads to infidelity, inertia, squalor, alienation, and prostitution.<
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Zola’s insistence on his novel’s ethnographic credentials deflected accusations that it actually caricatured working-class life. Its authentic and innovative use of street language; its lewd, sexual frankness; anti-clericalism; anti-officialdom; its general filth, deprivation, and bad manners, were deemed immoral, unpalatable, and potentially inflammatory by conservative critics. L’Assommoir stakes a serious claim for working-class experience and popular culture as aesthetically worthy, formally challenging material for the artist. And in overthrowing artistic conventions and inciting debate on the appropriate form and material for modern art, it earns its place as one of the first truly modern novels. GM
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Lifespan | b. 1828 (Russia), d. 1910
First Serialized | 1873–1877, in Russkii Vestnik
First Published | 1877, by M. N. Katkov (Moscow)
Original Language | Russian
Anna Karenina is claimed by many to be the world’s greatest novel. Whether or not that is the case, it is one of the finest examples of the nineteenth-century psychological novel. Leo Tolstoy analyzes the motivation behind the actions of the characters, though without any moral judgement. Alongside the omniscient narration, Tolstoy frequently employs interior monologue, a stylistic innovation for the novel form that enables him to present his characters’ thoughts and feelings in intimate detail.
Rebellious Anna Karenina succumbs to her attraction to a dashing officer, Count Vronsky, and leaves her loveless marriage to embark on a fervent and ultimately doomed love affair. In doing so, she sacrifices her child and subjects herself to the condemnation of Russian high society. Anna’s tragic story is interwoven with the contrasting tale of the courtship and marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya, which closely resembles that of Tolstoy and his own wife. In his search for the truth, Levin expresses views about contemporary society, politics, and religion that are often taken to be those of the author himself.
The novel is valuable for its historical as well as its psychological aspects. Despite its length, Anna Karenina draws readers into a breathtaking world that is vital and all-consuming in its realism. SD
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1800s
Martín Fierro
José Hernández
Lifespan | b. 1834 (Argentina), d. 1889
First Published | 1872–1879, by Imprenta La Pampa (Buenos Aires)
Original Language | Spanish
Martín Fierro is a narrative poem raised to the level of an epic in the literature and identity of Argentina. The name of the protagonist appears in the titles of the two original parts, Martín Fierro the Gaucho and The Return of Martín Fierro. In the first part, the gaucho’s life in the pampas is evoked in the course of more than 7,000 verses. Happy and free until he is recruited to fight against the Indians on the frontier, his days then become so miserable that he decides to run away. Having found his house torn down, he embarks on the life of a drifter, which leads him to crime. He escapes from the police with the help of Cruz, a providential character with whom he decides to live among the Indians; they turn their backs on a world that has no place for them.
The second part describes their lives among the Indians, but Cruz dies and Fierro, having killed an Indian in Part One, has to flee again. A chance meeting with his children and Cruz’s son turns the poem into a succession of parallel stories that take a picaresque and uplifting direction. The epic poem comes to its end after a contrapuntal song between Fierro and a dark-skinned character, the brother of the man Fierro had killed.
The interest of the unexpected events, the originality of meter, and the skillful narrative (the complexity of which is only revealed at the end) transforms into poetry this ideological critique of the treatment of the gauchos during the founding of the Argentine nation. DMG
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1800s
The Red Room
August Strindberg
Lifespan | b. 1849 (Sweden), d. 1912
First Published | 1880
First Published by | A. Bonniers Förlag
Original Title | Röda rummet
The Red Room is often described as the first modern Swedish novel. Using Zola’s naturalism and Dickens’s social criticism Strindberg revitalized a stale, conventional tradition. Because its social and political satire was a little too close to the bone, its initial reception was controversial, but the novel is now recognized as a watershed in Swedish literature. In the opening chapter, with its famous bird’s-eye view of Stockholm, Strindberg’s vivid prose sparkles with energy and invention. The hero of the novel, the young and idealistic Arvid Falk, resigns from the Civil Service in disgust at the corruption he sees everywhere in the Establishment. He wants to become a writer and joins a group of bohemian artists, but struggles to free himself from his own prim and puritan inclinations. Falk’s radical and reforming spirit is gradually softened, and he is tempted to adopt the selfish view of life advocated by the conservative journalist Struve. As so often in Strindberg, it is the tension between irreconcilable opposites that provides the narrative energy.
The subtitle, Scenes of Literary and Artistic Life, reveals a series of satirical excursions into the worlds of the arts, religion, government, and finance. The focus is on man in society, sometimes at the expense of in-depth characterization. But many of the minor characters—like the carpenter who threatens to reclaim the lost beds of the working classes from affluent middle-class ladies who offer him charity—are memorable in an eccentric Dickensian way. UD
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1800s
Ben-Hur
Lew Wallace
Lifespan | b. 1827 (U.S.), d. 1905
First Published | 1880
First Published by | Harper & Bros. (New York)
Original Language | English
Prompted by a casual discussion about the life of Jesus, Lew Wallace began writing his epic tale of revenge and adventure with religious themes in mind, and Ben-Hur was the result; a parable that counterpoises Judah Ben-Hur, a Jew from Jerusalem, with the concurrent life of Jesus Christ.
When Ben-Hur accidentally dislodges a roof tile and it hits a Roman official, he is wrongly accused of murder and sent to the galleys by his former friend, Messala, a Roman noble. The seeds of epic struggle and redemption are sown when a stranger offers Ben-Hur a glass of water, and from this point his struggle to attain citizenship and Christ’s mission are inextricably linked. The popularity of the 1959 Hollywood epic, with its spectacular chariot race, perhaps overrides the blend of religious parable and adventure that obviously adapted itself so well to the stage (it was adapted for the theater in 1899, and proved enduringly popular) and then the screen. However, the film is that unusual breed, a strong adaptation of the text that takes on its key motifs without losing the religious intensity. Ben-Hur is characteristically remembered for elements that comprise only a tiny part of the text itself: an event rather than a narrative, and a set piece rather than a gradually unfolding epic. However, the text has lost none of its forceful message, while simultaneously representing the author’s desire to appraise some of the central tenets of Christian belief through the figure of an apparently ordinary man. EMcCS
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Nana
Émile Zola
Lifespan | b. 1840 (France), d. 1902
First Published | 1880
First Published by | A. Lacroix (Paris)
Original Language | French
Nana exposes a licentious Parisian sexual economy, hooked on prostitution and promiscuity. The respectable classes indulge in drunken orgies, homosexuality, sadomasochism, voyeurism, and more. An influential aristocrat, Count Muffat, is the epitome of this degradation and chastisement. His familial, political, and religious status is compromised by his infatuated devotion to Nana. She is an ostensibly lumi
nous yet inherently tainted figure: debt, misogynistic violence, a dysfunctional family, class background, and an ultimately fatal sexual disease temper her success. Her eventual physical corrosion is horrific, reflecting the total corruption and disfigurement of both state and society. It is no coincidence that Nana’s death throes take place against the backdrop of a screaming mob galvanized by the Franco-Prussian War, where the ultimate violent ruin, collapse, and purification of this stage of French history is completed.
Today’s readers will discover an extraordinary prescience in the correlation in Nana of society’s obsession with sex, celebrity, and power. A conscious emphasis on exploitation and disgraceful revelation is paramount in a novel that opens with a theatrical striptease, before going on to revisit connected themes of sexual and economic exhibitionism. Determinedly realist and deliberately explicit, Nana is a spectacular novel, which indicts a public appetite for voyeurism and sensationalism that is still alive and healthy in the modern world. GM
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 21
