Original Language | German
“This awful thing which was his life acquires a meaning.”
Berlin Alexanderplatz ranks alongside the work of James Joyce and John Dos Passos both as one of the great urban epics of the 1920s and as an attempt to innovate the novel genre. Utilizing a montage style that owes much to cinema, the novel is as much about a place as it is about a “story.”
At one level, the novel can be thought of as a morality tale; its main protagonist is the ex-convict Franz Biberkopf, and his vain attempt to become a “decent” human being. Biberkopf is an archetypally naïve “little man,” around whom the playful narrator constructs a complex narrative of crime, temptation, and betrayal. Franz attempts a variety of jobs, loses his arm in a bungled robbery, becomes a pimp, falls in love, and is finally betrayed and framed for murder by his nemesis, Reinhold. Alfred Döblin populates working-class eastern Berlin with a memorable cast of shady underworld characters, and is wonderfully sensitive both to the rhythms of their speech and to the patterns of their lives.
However, the novel is chiefly remembered for its style. The narration incorporates and evokes the sensations of the city, and suggests a sense of the speed, contrasts, and bewildering simultaneity that define it. In a conscious rejection of traditional conceptions of the novel, the multilayered narrative gives free rein to the competing discourses of the metropolis. The reader is greeted with newspaper reports, exchanges between random characters, advertising hoardings, street signs (literally, in the form of illustrations), and lines from popular songs. Additionally, biblical and classical allusions suggest, again in playful manner, Döblin’s desire to create a modern epic. The effect is exhilarating, and what one initially assumes will simply form the setting—the city of Berlin—becomes the star of the show. JH
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1900s
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
Lifespan | b. 1898 (Germany), d. 1970 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1929, by Propyläen (Berlin)
Original Title | Im Westen nichts Neues
Given Name | Erich Paul Remark
“One could sit like this forever . . .”
The epigraph of All Quiet on the Western Front states that the intention of the book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, but an account of a generation, including the survivors, “destroyed by the war.” But rather than a warning, or even a statement of self-defense, this epigraph, marked by its simplicity and clarity, is a one-sentence declaration, however quiet, that what follows is a story of destruction.
In the polarized political debates of the Weimar Republic, the First World War was not a topic but a touchstone for all else. How you understood the war, its origins, its conduct, surrender, and defeat, was the index to your understanding of the past and to your understanding of how liveable or damaged the future could be. Given this interpretive context, the pacifism of the novel could satisfy neither left nor right ends of the critical spectrum in interwar Germany. But Erich Remarque’s text does not assume or argue for pacifism; it simply enacts it as an appalled response to the daily efficiencies of organized slaughter. It is this quiet, certain, yet exploratory demonstration of the utter inhumanity of war that constitutes the magnificence of All Quiet on the Western Front as an anti-war novel.
Central to Remarque’s achievement is the voice of Paul Bäumer, the novel’s nineteen-year-old narrator. He is one of a band of front-line soldiers whose experience of war strips the mythology of heroism bare, leaving the tedium, the earth-shaking fear, the loneliness, and the anger of men whose bodies are neither protected nor honored by military uniforms. The novel ends with the disappearance of Bäumer’s voice; it is replaced by the polite brevity of the report of his death on a day in which all was quiet on the Western front. PMcM
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1900s
The Time of Indifference
Alberto Moravia
Lifespan | b. 1907 (Italy), d. 1990
First Published | 1929, by Alpes (Milan)
Original Title | Gli indifferenti
Given Name | Alberto Pincherle
“. . . it also seemed to her, because of some fatalistic taste for moral symmetries, that this almost familial affair was the only epilogue her life deserved.”
Alberto Moravia’s early masterpiece, produced when he was eighteen, was written after the murder of Matteotti, who openly opposed Mussolini in parliament, when the Fascist regime enjoyed popular consensus. Although the work does not contain explicit references to the Italian political situation, the story of a middle-class family, depicted as helpless victims of the corruption of their social entourage, clearly has a political message.
The central motif highlights the inadequacy and incapacity of the characters to deal with reality, marked by an indelible and congenital weakness. Mariagrazia, her son, Michele, and daughter, Carla, although afflicted by a serious financial crisis, keep up appearances and carry on a life of ostentatious bourgeois wealth. Slowly but inexorably they drift toward a miserable end. Michele, the central character, is oblivious to the dramas around him, indifferent to a reality that is disintegrating before his eyes. He is painfully unable to play by the social rules of his class, or find the moral energy to react and rebel against them. He tries to eliminate Leo, his mother’s—and later his sister’s—loathsome lover, but (farcically) his gun is not loaded. With this novel, Moravia commenced his long-term investigation into the human condition. He went on to pursue the themes of conformism, contempt, and tedium as he portrayed the limitations of a social class at the end of its historical trajectory, yet profoundly unable to renovate and transform itself. RPi
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1900s
Living
Henry Green
Lifespan | b. 1905 (England), d. 1973
First Published | 1929
First Published by | J. M. Dent & Sons (London)
Given Name | Henry Vincent Yorke
By any standard, Henry Green was a precocious writer. He began his first novel, Blindness, while at school, and completed it while still a student. His next novel, Living, was published in 1929, before his twenty-fifth birthday. It is the story of a working-class community in Birmingham, or rather, a story about the self-expression of that community in the largest sense, with “expression” considered both as the inventiveness of colloquial and workplace speech, and as the optimistic social or antisocial behavior of working people.
Partly because it is a story about expression and not simply about people’s lives, Green took on the challenge of finding a prose style through which the difficulties of expression could be expressed. As a result, this is Green’s most linguistically adventurous novel, and readers may at first find themselves baffled by the omissions of definite articles and the strange disappearance of nouns. The prose reads jerkily, as though it had been composed under the duress of an artificial word limit and constrained to skip the decorum of grammar. However, Green did not intend to imitate the lives of workers; rather, he aimed to evoke—through the atmosphere of grammatical compression—the economy of expectations and desires characteristic of the working-class community, and the dependence on simplicity of self-expression. Green conveys this effectively and movingly, allowing his narrative to carry the constrained language along with it. KS
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1900s
I Thought of Daisy
Edmund Wilson
Lifespan | b. 1895 (U.S.), d. 1972
First Published | 1929
First Published by | Scribner (New York)
Original Language | English
Edmund Wilson is remembered mainly as an influential literary critic and editor (he worked at both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker) who was among the first to recognize the emerging talent of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Ernest Hemingway. However, like many—if not most—critics and editors, he always
aspired to be a writer.
I Thought of Daisy is only barely fictional; the story is really a thinly disguised roman à clef. It starts out by following the anonymous narrator as he returns to New York from a long stay in 1920s Paris. He quickly falls in love with both the literary scene in Greenwich Village and one of the scene’s most talented writers, the poet Rita. The character Rita is, in fact, based on Edna St. Vincent Millay, who in 1923 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and with whom Wilson had a short-lived affair. In the book, the affair falls apart as the narrator becomes disillusioned with left-wing, Modernist values. Deciding that his life lacks a moral core, he returns to an old mentor from his college days, Professor Grosbeake. The Professor leads him toward a less cerebral approach to life, which in turn leads him to fall in love with the titular Daisy, an all-American chorus girl.
The book’s significance is widely thought to lie in the way it attempts to bring Proustian sensibilities to bear on the American literary scene. Given Wilson’s stature as a literary critic, this attempt was to have lasting influence. PH
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1900s
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
Lifespan | b. 1899 (U.S.), d. 1961
First Published | 1929
First Published by | C. Scribner’s Sons (New York)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1954
A Farewell to Arms is set in Italy and Switzerland during the First World War. The very sparse and unadorned style of Ernest Hemingway’s narrator, Frederic Henry, provides a realistic and unromanticized account of war on the Italian front and is typical of the writing style that was to become the hallmark of Hemingway’s later writing. Henry’s descriptions of war are in sharp relief to the sentimental language of his affair with Catherine, an English nurse he meets while recovering from an injury in Turin.
The novel has been particularly praised for its realistic depiction of war; this has often been attributed to personal experience. However, while there are strong autobiographical elements in the novel, Hemingway’s combat experience was more limited than that of his protagonist. He did work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, but for the Red Cross and only for a few weeks in 1918. Hemingway also fell in love with a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky; but, unlike Frederic Henry, Hemingway’s advances were subsequently rebuffed.
A Farewell to Arms established Hemingway as a successful writer and also as a spokesman of “The Lost Generation,” a group of American intellectuals who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and whose outlook—shaped by the experience of the First World War—was cynical and pessimistic. BR
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1900s
Passing
Nella Larsen
Lifespan | b. 1891 (U.S.), d. 1964
First Published | 1929
First Published by | A. Knopf (London & New York)
Original Language | English
Nella Larsen’s novel explores the complexities of racial identity in early twentieth-century New York. Its central character, Irene Redfield, is a member of the African-American bourgeoisie that became increasingly fashionable and visible in New York during the Harlem Renaissance era of the 1920s. Irene is married to a doctor and dedicates her life to charitable and social causes. However, her accidental meeting with childhood friend Claire Kendry—who has concealed her mixed parentage in order to assume a white identity—serves to reveal the insecurities and anxieties that lie beneath this seemingly complacent and comfortable life.
At its most obvious, the novel offers a satire of the mores, pretensions, and ambitions of the Harlem Renaissance. The novel’s main concern is with exploring the consequences of Claire Kendry’s deliberate subversion of early twentieth-century America’s stridently enforced desire for racial purity, which both confounds and demonstrates its power. Claire has married a wealthy, racist white American and many of her subsequent actions—from bearing his child to introducing him to Irene—involve the risk that her “true” identity will be revealed. Larsen explores this difficult territory, which is fraught with assumptions about authenticity, purity, and knowledge, by skillfully providing the reader with a silhouette of what cannot be said. In the end, it seems that Irene’s own deep ambivalence about Claire is the most dangerous and unstable force of all. NM
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1900s
Look Homeward, Angel
Thomas Wolfe
Lifespan | b. 1900 (U.S.), d. 1938
First Published | 1929, by Grosset & Dunlap (N.Y.)
Full Title | Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life
“Men will often say they have ‘found themselves’ when they have really been worn down into a groove by the brutal and compulsive force of circumstance.”
On one level, Look Homeward, Angel is a portrait of the artist as a young man writ large, with the action transferred to a small but affluent hill town in North Carolina. Thomas Wolfe is no modernist, however, and lacks Joyce’s subtle, ironic touch and Flaubertian control of his material. Yet in these shortfalls lie his distinct qualities, for instead he gives us sheer exuberant expression. Wolfe is an old-fashioned writer in the tradition of Whitman and Melville; he “tried the hardest to say the most,” wrote Faulkner, who considered him the greatest writer of his generation, as well as the “best failure.”
The narrator is budding artist Eugene Gant, an idealistic young man governed by an active imagination and a yearning for transcendence. Yet he is incapable of belief in the conventional idea of God, and equally unable to shake off a firmly held determinist view of the human condition. Eugene’s growth from infancy to early manhood is a journey characterized by his quest for self-knowledge and his resultant loneliness and frustration. The real quality of the novel, however, lies not in the portrayal of Eugene’s struggle to find a place in the world, but in the rich, vivid account of the life that surrounds him. At the heart of the family saga lies a compelling tension between Eugene’s parents; his father is a heavy-drinking, womanizing, yet lovable man, while his mother is practical and hard-working, keeping their family of ten afloat despite her husband’s hell-bent intention to destroy it. AL
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1900s
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
Lifespan | b. 1894 (U.S.), d. 1961
First Published | 1930
First Published by | A. Knopf (London & New York)
First Serialized in | Black Mask magazine, 1929
Along with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett is more or less synonymous with the change in the detective story from the model of the master detective trying to solve the apparently insolvable crime to a more “everyday” approach. This change was evidently influenced by factors such as the rapid growth of urban space, big business, and corruption, all of which seem to characterize the era following the First World War in North America.
Taking a broad scope, Hammett introduces throughout his work a number of different protagonists, a series of locations both real and fictional, and very “open” descriptions. Hammett’s style revels in increasingly convoluted plotting of its crimes, favoring an apparently endless series of twists and turns, in contrast to Chandler’s all-enveloping miasma of corruption.
Hammett’s character Sam Spade is only one in a series of detective protagonists. Spade moves through a violent, sleazy world, where the characters are all selfish, two-timing double-crossers. Spade is as prone to strokes of insight and masterfulness, in the vein of Sherlock Holmes or Dupin, as he is to brawling, cussing, and outbluffing thugs. Above all else, The Maltese Falcon mirrors this composite nature; it is at heart a fusion of detective stories, where elements from the reverential past of the genre meet scenes of action and adventure, played out in a world where reverence is only going to get you either robbed or killed. SF
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1900s
Her Priv
ates We
Frederic Manning
Lifespan | b. 1882 (England), d. 1935
First Published | 1930 by P. Davies (London)
Original Title | The Middle Parts of Fortune
Pseudonym | Private 19022
The uncensored (and original) version of this novel, called The Middle Parts of Fortune, is rumored to have come about when the publisher, Peter Davies, locked his recalcitrant and inebriated author in his study and demanded he write a war novel before he was released. During the War Books Controversy, a series of novels were published that irrevocably altered the way the war was depicted in literature; this is one of the most lucid of these graphic, uncompromising, and scandalous texts.
Frederic Manning’s novel was originally published in two volumes under his army serial number: Private 19022 (his name did not appear on the spine until 1943). In contrast to the officer-experience theme that became popular through the writing of Graves, Sassoon, and Blunden, Manning’s semi-autobiographical text follows the life of Private Bourne: drunk, freeloader, and raconteur. It is perhaps this emphasis on the lower ranks of the army that has led to the continued success of the book, alongside concentration on the mundanities and discomforts of trench life. Unlike the more dynamic constructions of the other war books, ostensibly very little happens here, concerned as it is with the aftermath of battle and the gradual preparation for another attack, in which most of Bourne’s companions are killed. In this way, The Middle Parts of Fortune is a far more accurate depiction of wartime life and one that still has the potential to subvert the war experience. EMcCS
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 40
