In an essay published after his suicide in 1935, Raymond Roussel reveals that the starting point for his novel was not an impression of Africa at all, but a particular linguistic resource: the way in which a single word can have two or more different meanings. In one variation on his key writing technique, Roussel would start out with a homonym and then assign himself the task of writing a story, or inventing a scenario, which would get us from baleines (corset stays) to baleines (whales). This is a travelogue that takes us nowhere because, however far away from the initial term we go, the narrative only ever contrives to get us back to where started—from baleines to baleines. Language is no longer at the service of fiction. Rather, fiction is at the mercy of language; novels are generated in the dark space between a word and its repetition. KB
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1900s
Fantômas
Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
Lifespan (Allain) | b. 1885 (France), d. 1970
Lifespan (Souvestre) | b. 1874 (France), d. 1914
First Published | 1911, by A. Fayard (Paris)
Original Language | French
First published in 1911, Fantômas was a sensation in the authors’ native France and, although still relatively unknown to the English-speaking world, it continues to occupy a prominent place in the popular imagination across Europe and the globe. With the original Fantômas serving as inspiration for an extraordinary thirty-one sequels, various movie versions, and a successful comic book in Mexico, this mysterious creation lives on.
The eponymous “hero” of the novel is a masked arch-criminal, an amoral genius at war with bourgeois society. Fantômas is without history and without motive, a nightmare made flesh, an enigma whose physical existence is only confirmed by the trail of corpses he leaves in his wake, or the tantalizing swish of a cape at an open window. He is pursued by the brilliant but perpetually frustrated Inspector Juve. As Fantômas rapes, murders, and swindles his way through the Paris night, the very mention of his name comes to inspire fear in the hearts of all God-fearing citizens.
It is strange that this violent, crudely written tale should enjoy such staying power, as well as being a notable inspiration to both the Dada movement and the Surrealists. An uncanny work that reflects the paranoia, confusion, and thrill of the modern city, it communicates a feeling of Old World morals under threat, and exploits ongoing concerns. Fantômas casts a long shadow; it appeals to both the primal and the intellectual imagination. SamT
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1900s
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
Lifespan | b. 1862 (U.S.), d. 1937 (France)
First Published | 1911
First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
Ethan Frome is a limpid account of mental isolation, sexual frustration, and moral despair in a turn-of-the-century New England farming community. The novel recounts the story of Frome’s burgeoning desire for the mercurial Mattie Silver, a destitute relative of his wife, Zeena, and traces the logic whereby the two lovers attempt to destroy themselves, with unexpected and harrowing consequences.
Frome stands at the heart of the story; his withered personality is the bitter fruit of a harsh environment and an inward-looking community. He is a man of hidden depths who intuits an abundant reality beneath the surface of prosaic life, and whose sociability is granted no outlet in an isolated community. An interplay between external environment and inner psyche is dramatized here; the inarticulacy of the characters is central to the novel, which is framed by the words of a narrator whose knowledge of the history he recounts is unreliable. We are left with disconcerting questions about moral choice and agency, the role of environment in determining behavior, and the conflict between social mores and individual passions. Ethan Frome focuses primarily on the suffering of its eponymous protagonist, but it also depicts the social conditions that enable the formation of so manipulative a figure as Zeena. AG
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1900s
The Charwoman’s Daughter
James Stephens
Lifespan | b. 1882 (Ireland), d. 1950 (England)
First Published | 1912
First Published by | Macmillan (London)
Original Language | English
The poet and novelist James Stephens was born and reared in a Dublin slum, and started his adult life as a clerk in a solicitor’s office. All of his work carries with it an edge of claustrophobia, a haunting sense of loneliness amid overcrowding. But Stephens was in love with the idea of the imagination, and the Dublin of his work is at once a place of confines and of liberation, of small rooms and open streets, of the press of necessity and the beauty of a silk dress glimpsed in a shop window.
The Charwoman’s Daughter is the strange, wistful story of sixteen-year-old Mary, the only child of her fiercely protective widowed mother. It is also a story about Dublin and about how we see that city. Usually depicted in Irish fiction as a man’s town, a place trapped in its history, and home to big, busy conversations and random, unregulated encounters, this Dublin is both domestic and urban.
Mary and her mother live in a one-room tenement flat that is home to the rituals of their bitter love. By day her mother cleans the houses of the Dublin rich, while Mary makes observations as she walks through the city. The imaginative richness of her insights makes the city come alive as a place that is both strange and wonderful, remote yet friendly. It is this sense of discovery and the bitter-sweet richness it brings with it that makes this such an unusual but compelling Dublin novel. PMcM
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1900s
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
Lifespan | b. 1875 (Germany), d. 1955 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1912, by Hyperionverlag (Munich)
Original Title | Der Tod in Venedig
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1929
When renowned author Gustave von Aschenbach, with uncharacteristic spontaneity, travels to Venice, his attention is captivated by a young boy whose blond curls and exquisite proportions seem to embody the Greek ideal of beauty. Watching Tadzio soon becomes the focus of Aschenbach’s days; and then, of his existence. On board the ship to Venice, Aschenbach looks on with horror as a simpering old man with a painted face mingles with a group of young men. But by the close of the story, Aschenbach has become that man, as, intoxicated, he pursues Tadzio through the passages and canals of an infected city.
Death in Venice, as Mann maintained, is about the artist’s loss of dignity, but Mann also examines the relationship between art and life. Aschenbach believes that with labor and discipline he can master life and even mold it into art. But Tadzio’s Dionysus, inspiring unstructured emotion and unruly passion, forces him to recognize the fallacy of that belief. The mythical elements of the novel offer a context for the portrayal of homosexuality. Written with subtlety and profound psychological insight, Death in Venice is a vivid account of what it is like to fall in love.
The novella was perhaps Mann’s ideal artistic form (Death in Venice runs to a mere seventy pages): from the first hints of foreboding to the final pathetic climax, this is a masterwork of its genre. KB
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1900s
Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence
Lifespan | b. 1885 (England), d. 1930
First Published | 1913
First Published by | Duckworth & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
In Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence compellingly describes the Nottinghamshire countryside and the mining community with which he felt such a deep connection. Bold in the honesty with which it tackles the subjects of family, domestic strife, class struggle, gender conflict, sexuality, industrialism, and poverty, Sons and Lovers is also alive to the natural world that it evokes with an intensity verging on mysticism.
The n
ovel’s key theme is the relationship between the boy Paul Morel and his mother, a ubiquitous maternal presence with great ambitions for her gifted son. Their powerful bond excludes the father, a poorly educated miner, who is treated with disdain by the mother, an attitude the boy internalizes as his own as he becomes a man. Urgent class issues thus overlap with volatile psychosexual questions. Paul lives out his mother’s frustrated aspirations through education and art; but the almost incestuous relationship between mother and son threatens to prevent him from developing a separate adult identity and from forging mature sexual relationships with other women.
Sensitive to the social position of an intelligent woman such as Gertrude Morel, who is as trapped by the mining community as her embittered husband, it also captures the frustrations of adolescent love, the confusing allure of different kinds of sexual relationships, and the violence of male rivalries. AG
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1900s
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Robert Tressell
Lifespan | b. 1870 (Ireland), d. 1911
First Published | 1914
First Published by | G. Richards (London)
Original Language | English
This book remains perhaps the pre-eminent classic of English working-class literature, yet the first-time reader may well be surprised at its tone. Although at the heart of the novel there is an intelligent, passionate, and sustained attack on capitalism, there is also a violent bitterness directed at those workers who fail to see the necessity of socialism, and in this way, deliver their children into exploitation.
This is a strange kind of novel, where the reader’s attention is held not by any trick of suspense or narrative flow but rather by the minute exploration of lives led under the heel of profit. The whole story is vividly fuelled by anger, directed mainly at those who are duped by their bosses; it is implied that the employers themselves can hardly behave in any other way. But the book is not only about the working class in a conventional sense, it is also about the nature of work itself, and how the possibility of pride in one’s work is destroyed and ridiculed by the demands of greater “efficiency.” Inevitably, the worker is forced to perform rapid, slapdash work, which removes all genuine satisfaction through labor, as with the protagonist who has much to give to his chosen “craft,” but who is constantly denied by “the system.” The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is thus in tune with the broader socialist movements of Edwardian England that we now tend to associate with such figures as Ruskin and Morris. DP
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1900s
Platero and I
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Lifespan | b. 1881 (Spain), d. 1958 (Puerto Rico)
First Published | 1914, by La Lectura (Madrid)
Complete Edition | 1917, by Editorial Calleja
Original Title | Platero y yo
The subtitle of this book, An Andalusian Elegy, and the fact that its author chose to dedicate it to the great teacher Francisco Giner de los Ríos (who read it with admiration), together provide two important keys to its interpretation. First, Platero and I is a personal recollection of a part of Andalusia (the surroundings of Moguer, near Huelva), amounting to a full display of aesthetic Spanish regionalism; and second, it is a demonstration of the intention to teach sensibility to both children and adults.
This story succeeds in both of its aims. It is the simple (but only apparently so) tale of a poet on holiday (“dressed in mourning, with my Nazarene beard”) and Platero, his “little, furry, soft” donkey. The text is written in the form of short pieces (some would see them as prose poems), while the story summons up a joyful world of children, the boisterous life of animals in the fields, a frieze of peasants ranging from the entertaining to the mischievous, and some unforgettable landscapes described with adjectives of almost Fauvist colors. But not everything is so happy: “Platero” and his owner are also witnesses of gratuitous cruelty, incomprehension, and sorrow. And in the end the little donkey dies. Few works of Spanish letters are so clearly associated with the aesthetic enjoyment and the ethical imperatives: morality and beauty. JCM
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1900s
Tarzan of the Apes
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Lifespan | b. 1875 (U.S.), d. 1950
First Published | 1914
First Published by | L. Burt Co. (New York)
Original Language | English
Ideologically, the Tarzan series has so little to commend it that it is surprising the books have not been subject to a more severe pounding. It is also perhaps ironic that, while factions are liable to ban or even burn more recent fictions, Tarzan still happily occupies a position in the popular canon, even becoming the subject of a Disney movie and subsequent ongoing cartoon series. Narratively, it is exciting, dynamic, often surprisingly well written, and full of all the classic tropes one expects from good pulp fiction—survival against the odds, an unknown land, fierce adversaries, dramatic fights, and beautiful women. That said, the underlying subtexts of the book are racist, sexist, utterly formulaic, and overridingly imperialist, ultimately championing the figure of the white supremacist male. In Tarzan of the Apes, the eponymous hero conquers (in order) the apes, lions, and elephants, black tribesmen, degenerate sailors, professors of theology, women, and the British, before returning his ire to the tribesmen again.
Today Tarzan, like W. E. John’s Biggles series, goes largely unread, with its considerable strengths largely forgotten—early discussions of ecology, the importance of Burroughs’s writing on heroic texts, and the often piercing social commentary. Overall, the mythology of Tarzan, who first communicates with Jane Porter via written notes, and then in French, eschewing the sexually primal “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” has superseded the real text. EMcCS
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1900s
Locus Solus
Raymond Roussel
Lifespan | b. 1877 (France), d. 1933 (Sicily)
First Published | 1914
First Published by | Librairie Alphonse Lemerre
Original Language | French
Strange and extremely difficult, Ramond Roussel’s self-published novels and poems were ridiculed in his lifetime. Now, though, Roussel is enjoying fame for his solitary adventures into language, which have had a decisive impact on a number of key thinkers and writers of the twentieth century, from Michel Foucault to New York poet John Ashbery.
Locus Solus is marked by a macabre theatricality, and proceeds by unveiling a series of fantastical scenes: cats, teeth, diamonds, and dancing girls are showcased among a host of complex mechanisms. Our guide is the brilliant scientist and inventor Martial Canterel, who is taking a group of colleagues on a tour of his lonely estate—the solitary place of the title. The impressive central exhibit is a huge glass cage, in which eight elaborate tableaux vivants are on display. Only, the actors that we suppose are playing dead are, in fact, dead. Canterel has transformed corpses into automata by injecting them with a fluid of his own invention: revived by “resurrectine,” the dead players are doomed to re-enact the key moments of their lives. Moments, of course, that were meaningful precisely because they were thought to be unique and unrepeatable. The kind of language machine that Roussel invented to write this and other novels operates at the switch-point where a word divides to mean two different things. His fiction is always dangerously close to mimicking the show of meaninglessness that is the central spectacle of his strikingly peculiar novel. KB
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1900s
Kokoro
Natsume Soseki
Lifespan | b. 1867 (Japan), d. 1916
First Published | 1914
First Published by | Iwanami Shoten (Tokyo)
Original Language | Japanese
Kokoro is a novel that captures the changes in mentality that Japan experienced during a period of rapid modernization at the end of the nineteenth ce
ntury. Set in Tokyo, in around 1910, this three-part novel traces the relationship between a young man, the narrator, and an old man, whom he calls Sensei (meaning “teacher,” but suggesting the relationship of master and disciple). Sensei is haunted by a stigma in his past, which hangs over the entire novel.
Parts one and two of the novel revolve around the deaths of the narrator’s father and of Sensei’s friend, and his frequent visits to the graveyard where they lie buried. The narrator becomes preoccupied by Sensei’s secret, and his anxiety grows. One day a letter arrives, delivering Sensei’s confession of his guilt in a tragic love triangle, and his sense of multiple self-contradictions. He is torn between morality and possessiveness, intellect and emotion, death and life. He suffers from the impossibility of understanding his and others’ kokoro (the soul or the inner workings of the mind).
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 32
