1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 41
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1900s
The Apes of God
Wyndham Lewis
Lifespan | b. 1882 (Canada), d. 1957 (London)
First Published | 1930
First Published by | Arthur Press (London)
Original Language | English
A monstrous, exhaustive, and, some would argue, exhausting work of English modernism, Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God has an exuberant, infectious energy nevertheless. The novel is a satirical group portrait of the artistic pretensions of London upper-class society during the 1920s, a period described by Lewis as “the insanitary trough between the two great wars.” The book’s critique is specifically aimed at the self-delusions of the “art world” and those who think they live in it. With hints of Pope and Swift, Lewis reworks the standard features of eighteenth-century satire, reveling in physical exaggeration, building up some characters to mock heroic heights, and reducing everything else to absurdity. However, Lewis goes farther than simply reheating 200-year-old satire by inventing a fresh and unusual prose style—almost a Cubist reinvention of fiction—to support his belief that art must do more than passively ape existing forms.
The book follows an impressionable young innocent, Dan Boleyn, as he is guided by his mentor, Horace Zagreus, on a voyage through London’s gallery of pseudo-artists—the “Apes” of the title—who subject him to confusing, misleading diatribes on the meaning and practice of art. Once the reader becomes accustomed to Lewis’s unique style, the plot gathers pace, as the various characters are assembled at Lord Osmund’s Lenten party. Lewis’s satire engages physical and ideological prejudices with a zest that is hard to condone, not least the continual racist, especially anti-Semitic, and sexist stereotyping. If it is often difficult to like Lewis’s severity and the limited space it leaves for humans to distinguish themselves from apes of ideology, there is nevertheless plenty to relish in his style and his satirical provocations. DM
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Monica
Saunders Lewis
Lifespan | b. 1893 (Wales), d. 1985
First Published | 1930, by Gwasg Aberystwyth
Given name | John Saunders Lewis
Original Language | Welsh
Saunders Lewis’s novel Monica is a frank and poignant portrayal of sexual obsession and the shortcomings of a relationship based on physical passion. Monica is a sexually frustrated young woman, shut away in the family home taking care of her sick mother. When Monica’s outgoing sister, Hannah, brings home a fiancé, Bob, Monica is overcome with jealousy and lust. She encourages Bob’s secret attraction to her, until Hannah catches them kissing and Monica and Bob are forced to leave town to get married.
Throughout, the reader is aware of Monica dissembling, from her claim that her nighttime walks around the city streets were not aimed at catching a man, to her contention that she did not break up the relationship between Hannah and Bob. At last, when falling pregnant removes the sexual attraction that binds Bob to her, Monica begins to see her own behavior in a different light.
Lewis’s novel has been considered one of the earliest existential novels—even the first—as Monica’s soul-searching leads her to realize that “her vacuous fantasies had been a veil between her and the nothingness of existence.” The novel was accused of immorality for its openness about sex, prostitutes, and venereal disease, and because of the author’s apparent objectivity. But to the modern reader, the novel seems explicitly moral; Monica despairs and meets her death, and Bob catches venereal disease after one night of infidelity. ClW
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Insatiability
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Lifespan | b. 1885 (Poland), d. 1939 (Ukraine)
First Published | 1930, by Dom Ksiazki Polskiej
Pseudonym | Witkacy
Original Title | Nienasycenie
Described by Czesław Miłosz as “a study of decay; mad, dissonant music, erotic perversion,” Insatiability is Stanisław Witkiewicz’s second novel and his diagnosis of the state of Poland before the Second World War. Poland has become a military dictatorship, staffed by cynical, pleasure-seeking aristocrats: morally vacant, intellectually decadent, and doomed. But Poland is also Europe’s last firewall before a truly insatiable enemy, the horde of Chinese Communists that has already overrun Russia. The Chinese owe their invincibility to Murti-Bingism, a mystical cult whose followers take a pill inducing contentment, passivity, and obedience.
The novel’s hero, Baron Genezyp Kapen, is a handsome and vital young officer, greedy for experience and adventure. But he cannot reconcile himself to life’s earthy realities. His erotic initiation by the aging but magnetic Princess di Ticonderoga leaves him both fascinated and repelled by sex. Stripped of both his romantic and political illusions, Genezyp begins a series of infatuations and assaults that culminate in his murder of his bride—a virginal aristocrat and dedicated Murti-Bingist—on their wedding night. Genezyp’s decline into madness parallels Poland’s submission to Chinese invasion and the chemical panacea of Murti-Bing
Genezyp’s combination of naive lust and disgust for reality foreshadows the crises of existentialism, and—like many of Witkiewicz’s works—Insatiability greatly influenced the Theatre of the Absurd. MuM
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The Waves
Virginia Woolf
Lifespan | b. 1882 (England), d. 1941
First Published | 1931
First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)
Given Name | Adeline Virginia Stephen
The cover for the first edition of Woolf’s poetic novel was designed by the novelist’s elder sister, the painter Vanessa Bell.
“I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death—Percival—others through sheer inability to cross the street.”
The Waves, though Virginia Woolf’s most experimental piece of writing, is nevertheless endlessly rewarding. It shares many of the preoccupations of her other novels: experiments with time and narrative; the representation of lives in biographical writing; and the unfixing of identities. It also pushes the “stream of consciousness” in new directions: becoming an exploration of the relationship between inner life and the “impersonal” elements of waves and water, rather than a narrative technique.
Woolf uses the time span of a day to explore the temporality of a life, or lives—the movement of the waves defines the passage from dawn to dusk and provides a structure for the novel. It was conceived as “prose yet poetry”—the six selves of the novel are represented by “dramatic soliloquies,” and interspersed with “poetic interludes” that describe the passage of the sun across the sky and the rhythms of the tide.
The Waves traces the six lives from childhood to middle age, but seeks to show continuities rather than developments. “We are not single,” as Bernard (the novel’s chief chronicler) remarks. The characters speak their thoughts as separate entities, rarely in dialogue, yet the novel brings them together by listening in at synchronous moments in their lives and by regrouping them at various stages. The Waves is concerned with the experience and articulation of identity through a fascinating discourse that cannot be named either as speech or as thought. LM
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To the North
Elizabeth Bowen
Lifespan | b. 1899 (Ireland), d. 1973 (England)
First Published | 1932
First Published by | Constable & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
With its manically driven characters, consumed by a new age of locomotion, and a plot that is hurled forth by car, bus, and plane, Elizabeth Bowen’s mid-career novel offers startling insights into the effects of technological acceleration on the fabric of everyday lives. From the opening setting (in a house on the Abbey Road before a “funnel of traffic and buses”
), to the narrative’s apocalyptic climax, Emmeline Summers seems knowingly committed to the most destructive uses of travel, ever hurdling stability in favor of the unknown. This willing attraction to peril leads to her surrender to the sadistic Mark Linkwater—an escape from one form of domestic claustrophobia to a relationship at best glacial, at worst insufferably cruel. Her sister-in-law Cecilia finds herself suffocated with a similar inevitability, which only serves to highlight “how precious had been her solitude.”
Bowen invites the reader into a denatured realm, conveying the most intimate consequences of mechanization on her protagonists as they become gradually estranged from one another. To the North anticipates the fallout of modernity’s love affair with the machine, evoking the sinister reification of transport as an inherently positive force. Stylistically, too, the novel’s austere timbre complements this pattern of encroachment. The book’s impersonal narrative voice seems to impersonate the harmful pressure of mechanical networks on the basis of human will. DJ
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The Thin Man
Dashiell Hammett
Lifespan | b. 1894 (U.S.), d. 1961
First Published | 1932
First Published by | A. Barker (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1934
At the center of what marks out The Thin Man from the mass of hard-boiled fiction is the detective, or in this case, detectives. The investigator of old, the Sam Spade or Marlowe, is defined solely in negative relief by the crimes he deals with; when there is no crime, he is reduced to near invisibility, returned to the office, waiting for the phone to ring and bring the next case. In contrast to this, the investigators of The Thin Man, Nick and Nora Charles, are not only married, but married to each other, with a beloved schnauzer in tow, and the vibrancy of their social life is clearly detailed. They are far removed from the mythical solitaries of conventional film noir investigation, living it up in a luxury hotel room, and attending glittering parties as a backdrop to the case they are working on.
What Dashiell Hammett clearly realizes is that the corruption he sees as characterizing America is at work everywhere, in every space and strata of society, and is represented as such. This is a novel where the deception, mistaken identity, and extreme narrative convolution of the genre do not form the entire world, but are moved beyond its parameters, juxtaposed with social and personal relationships. It must be seen as marking the culmination of Hammett’s writing, where the world of the cynical meets the vibrant American fantasy city of F. Scott Fitzgerald. SF
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Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Lifespan | b. 1894 (England), d. 1961 (U.S.)
First Published | 1932, by Denoël & Steele (Paris)
Original Title | Voyage au bout de la nuit
Given Name | Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
Céline’s darkly comic masterpiece is a savage attack on patriotism, colonialism, and life in general; this is the jacket of a 1935 edition.
“Love, Arthur, is a poodle’s chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride.”
Journey to the End of the Night is a groundbreaking masterpiece that has lost none of its startling power and ability to shock. Loosely autobiographical, the first-person narrative traces the experience of the young narrator, Bardamu, from being a twenty-year-old volunteer in the army at the start of the First World War to becoming a qualified doctor at the beginning of the 1930s. During this period, he has a nervous breakdown, travels to Central Africa and the United States, then returns to France to complete his medical studies. The novel is characterized by a brash, vibrant, gritty prose, a deeply sardonic wit, and scathing cynicism. Still lyrical and eloquent throughout, it is full of slang, obscenities, and colloquialisms. Bardamu has an uncompromisingly bleak view of humanity—“mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor,” he claims—and although he is mostly concerned with the latter he has little but contempt for both. All we can be sure of is pain, old age, and death. From such an unpromising outlook, however, Céline extracts incredible humor that never ceases to entertain. The influence of Céline’s original, anarchic, and corrosive novel is inestimable; William Burroughs was a noted admirer. In Céline’s mordant view of lowlifes we can see an obvious precursor to Beckett’s pessimistic antiheroes. This book is vital to our understanding of the development of the novel. AL
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The Return of Philip Latinowicz
Miroslav Krlezˇa
Lifespan | b. 1893 (Croatia), d. 1981
First Published | 1932
First Published by | Minerva (Zagreb)
Original Title | Povratak Filipa Latinovicza
After twenty-three years of absence, Philip Latinowicz returns home. The idea of return disturbs the progression of this novel, making its narrative move in several directions at the same time. Miroslav Krlezˇa sustains the temporal complexity of the novel by writing in a strikingly visual manner, a mode that is reflected in the fact that the main character is an accomplished painter, who thinks about his art incessantly. At the beginning of the novel, however, Philip’s experience of life is as isolated, fragmented, and alienated as his own past. Philip never knew his father, and during his childhood his mother was a cold, distant figure, who eventually turned him away from home after he stole some of her money and spent a feverish night in a brothel.
The novel is shockingly candid in its portrayal of sex and physicality. Ultimately, however, it is not sensuality that redeems Philip, but his art. As the novel progresses, Philip is able to reestablish his artistic vision, especially through his relationship with Bobochka, femme fatale and former wife of a minister, who is stranded in the provinces with the man she once ruined. And yet art has limited powers—even though Krlezˇa in the end rebuilds his main character, Philip’s return to life is effected through an almost ritual slaying (one suicide, one murder) of characters that could neither conform nor escape the confines of provincial morality. IJ
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The Radetzky March
Joseph Roth
Lifespan | b. 1894 (Ukraine), d. 1939 (France)
First Published | 1932
First Published by | G. Kiepenheuer Verlag (Berlin)
Original Title | Radetzkymarsch
The Radetzky March ranks as one of the finest European historical novels of the twentieth century. In evoking a specific milieu—the provinces of the Habsburg Empire during its final years of ceremonial grandeur and political instability—the text draws in part on Joseph Roth’s childhood at the empire’s periphery and on memories of a supranational pride in an almost abstract conception of “Austria.” The prototypically Austrian march of Strauss the Elder recurs as a leitmotif in the narrative, symbolizing tradition, order, and belonging—qualities that are gradually lost as the infrastructure of the Empire begins to crumble.
When Lieutenant Trotta saves the life of the Emperor at the battle of Solferino, he becomes the “Hero of Solferino.” Neither he nor the generations that follow are able to live up to the expectations his legend creates. His grandson, Carl Joseph, is an undistinguished soldier who feels most at home in the borderlands of Galicia, in which parochial definitions of both nationality and identity seem irrelevant. Carl Joseph’s death during the First World War represents not so much a personal tragedy as the end of an era. This novel explores the complexities of family and friendship, translating a sense of nostalgia for a lost age into an unsentimental historical narrative. The atmosphere of imperial Austria has rarely been so convincingly and lovingly evoked. JH
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The Forbidden Realm
J. J. Slauerhoff
Lifespan | b. 1902 (England), d. 1990
First Published | 1932, by Nijgh & Van
Ditmar
First Serialized in | Forum
Original Title | Het verboden rijk
The works of Dutch poet and novelist J. J. Slauerhoff are a late flowering of the decadent Romantic tradition, with the artist cast as an alienated outsider futilely wandering the face of the Earth—a role Slauerhoff literally fulfilled through a career as a ship’s surgeon. Innovative in technique and original in its imaginative conception, The Forbidden Realm dramatizes the author’s uncomfortable relationship with himself and the late imperialist world.
The novel tells the stories of two men separated by centuries of history. One is the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Camões, a seafaring bard of empire. The other is a nameless wireless operator on a contemporary merchant ship, an obvious alter ego for the author. The two men’s lives develop a strange mirroring: the wireless operator is shipwrecked, as Camões had been, and then travels to the Portuguese colony of Macao, where Camões spent years of exile. The wireless operator ends up alone in Macao undergoing a total loss of identity that he welcomes as a liberation from his hated self.