The tone throughout most of the novel is sardonic and understated, yet The Bells of Basel ends on a note of touching faith in human progress. If the rot at the heart of French society is unsparingly documented in the novel, so, too, are the tools required to transform it. AB
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1900s
The Nine Tailors
Dorothy L. Sayers
Lifespan | b. 1893 (England), d. 1957
First Published | 1934
First Published by | V. Gollancz (London)
Full Name | Dorothy Leigh Sayers
The Nine Tailors reaches beyond Sayers’s earlier work in its scope and ambition, creating a rich cast of characters in a vividly realized setting. The action takes place in a Fenland village and is centered on the parish church, Fenchurch St Paul. While the closed community setting is typical of the “Golden Age” detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, Sayers does not succumb to cozy and comfortable Englishness, instead depicting a rural world shadowed by secrecy and guilt, and a desolate landscape, whose flooding has deliberately Biblical overtones. The novel also uses campanology, or bell ringing, in highly ingenious ways, as regards both structure and content, interweaving with it the detective plot and its subsequent unravelling.
Unfortunately, Sayers never completed her biography of the nineteenth-century writer Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone, which has been described as the first English detective novel. A great admirer of Collins as a “plot maker” who managed to draw together romance and realism, Sayers was inspired by his example; The Nine Tailors has strong echoes of The Moonstone, not only in the details of the crime, which again revolves around a jewelry theft, but in the skillful orchestration of subplots. The Nine Tailors was the novel that secured Sayers’s growing reputation as one of the finest twentieth-century detective novelists and as a writer who brought the “clue puzzle” into the broader traditions of the English novel. LM
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1900s
Auto-da-Fé
Elias Canetti
Lifespan | b. 1905 (Bulgaria), d. 1994 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1935
First Published by | Herbert Reichner Verlag (Vienna)
Original Title | Die Blendung
This neglected masterpiece of German modernism offers a mysterious and indirect analysis of the perils of bookishness, and the darkness that ensues when the bookworm turns. Prophetically, this bonfire of the vanities attempts to dissect the social madness that was engulfing the German-speaking world. Echoing the dark comedy of Kafka, Elias Canetti’s “K”—Peter Kien—is a creature of the mind, determined to resist socialization in preference for a life of scholarship, but lacking worldly defenses. The novel details his series of encounters with creatures whose rapacious interests generate an extraordinary comedy of competing delusions.
Peter Kien, an obsessive scholar of sinology, has a large personal library. Beset by nightmares of his library going up in smoke, he stupidly marries Therese, the scheming and deluded housekeeper he has employed to look after the library. Descending into varieties of hallucinatory mania, Kien is ejected from his library by his “wife” and enters a nightmare underground world. After sundry misadventures at the hands of Fischerle, a crooked, hunchbacked dwarf with delusions of becoming the world chess champion, he becomes embroiled again with Therese and Bendikt Pfaff, proto-Nazi caretaker and retired policeman. Kien’s brother, a Parisian psychologist, adds interpretative confusion to the dark brew before the book’s violent logic of disintegration precipitates the final inferno. Dark, terrifying, disturbing, and funny. DM
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1900s
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Horace McCoy
Lifespan | b. 1897 (U.S.), d. 1955
First Published | 1935
First Published by | A. Barker (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1969
“‘Your Honour,’ Epstein said, ‘we throw ourselves on the mercy of the court. This boy admits killing the girl, but he was only doing her a personal favor.’”
Overlooked at the time of its initial publication, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was critically rehabilitated in the 1940s by the Parisian noirist Marcel Duhamel, who favorably compared Horace McCoy to Hemingway. The novel’s protagonists, Robert and Gloria, dream of Hollywood stardom, but in the bleak tawdriness of Depression-era Los Angeles they find only monotony, emptiness, and ultimately death. In the guise of the dance marathon, a form of spectacle in which contestants endlessly circulate around an arena over a period of days in the hope of being the last pair standing, McCoy found the perfect metaphor for life’s randomness, absurdity, and meaninglessness. Battling exhaustion, Robert and Gloria fail in their pursuit of the cash prize when the event is ended by a bizarre accidental shooting. Set adrift, Gloria’s insistence that life has no meaning persuades Robert to realize her morbid ambition.
The dance marathon is used to comment on the exploitative nature of popular forms of entertainment and on the ways in which human life has been organized and debased under capitalism. Unlike the sugarcoated banality of most Hollywood movies, the dance marathon is unpredictable, painful, violent, and nihilistic. The dance contestants are commodities—cattle, or rather horses, who can be shot once their value has been utilized. Here are the seeds of McCoy’s social critique but, like the dance marathon itself, it is a critique that leads nowhere and yields nothing. AP
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1900s
The Last of Mr. Norris
Christopher Isherwood
Lifespan | b. 1904 (England), d. 1986 (U.S.)
First Published | 1935
First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)
Original Title | Mr. Norris Changes Trains
This intriguing novel portrays a series of encounters in 1930s Berlin between the narrator, William Bradshaw, and the mysterious and sinister Mr. Norris. When Bradshaw first meets Arthur Norris on a train bound for Germany, he notes that his eyes were “the eyes of a schoolboy surprised in the act of breaking one of the rules.” Always on the move, always involved in shady deals, Mr. Norris somehow manages to elude the scrutiny of the authorities.
The tone of the book is comical, at times farcical, but it is set in the final years of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Nazi power provides an ominous counterpoint to the carefree café society that Isherwood depicts. This atmospheric evocation of a world on the very brink of ruin introduces us to a gallery of damned souls, prisoners in their own city, hounded by a ruthless new social order determined to expose and eradicate them. Their only hope resides in flight, but even this option is fraught with the risk of arrest. As the communists are driven underground, the rise in the tally of beatings and shootings fuels a feverish proliferation of gossip and rumor. Against the backdrop of Berlin’s descent into civil war, Bradshaw’s position remains one of detachment—he positions himself as an observer, passively witnessing the collapse of civilization from the shadowy wings of a theater of the absurd. TS
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1900s
Untouchable
Mulk Raj Anand
Lifespan | b. 1905 (Pakistan), d. 2004 (India)
First Published | 1935
First Published by | Wishart Books (London)
Founding Editor of | Marg
“Untouchable could only have been written by an Indian . . . no European, however sympathetic, could have created the character of Bakha because he would not have known enough of his troubles.” So wrote Mulk Raj Anand’s friend E. M. Forster in the preface of this simply told tale of a day in the life of a sweeper from the lowest caste in India’s class system who collects human excrement, making him and his like ritually unclean and therefore not to be touched. “They think we are dirt because we clean their dirt,” says Bakha. But bumping into someone from a higher caste becomes a catastrophe in social terms, poisoning the untouchab
le’s life.
The story follows Bakha’s search to make some sense of his low-born position. After meeting and then rejecting the message of a Salvationist missionary called Hutchinson, he talks to a follower of Gandhi who says all Indians are equal and gives great hope to the sweeper. But it is the third, more technological, solution that potentially can be his salvation. The flushing toilet with mains drainage can get rid of such appalling epithets as “low-caste vermin” once and for all. The sweeper wonders whether Machine or Mahatma might be his savior.
This was the first of several works depicting the lives of India’s poorer castes, while attacking the social yoke under which they burdened. Anand’s prose translates Punjabi and Hindi streettalk into a sympathetic English style, which has led many reviewers to call him India’s Charles Dickens. JHa
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1900s
Independent People
Halldór Laxness
Lifespan | b. 1902 (Iceland), d. 1998
First Published | 1935 (Reykjavík)
Original Title | Sjálfstætt fólk
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1955
Lost in a blizzard and close to death, Bjartur, the proud, stubborn, brutal, and often idiotic hero of this extraordinary novel, begins to hallucinate. As the snowstorm tears at him, its claws become those of Grimur, the mythical demon from Icelandic sagas. He fights his way, step by step, reciting all the poetry and ballads he can remember in a desperate attempt to stay awake. Finally, close to collapse, he reaches the safety of another crofter’s hut, exhausted but victorious.
In essence, this novel is a reclamation of Iceland’s mythical past, an attempt to redefine the sense of nation and history through those most often ignored. It gives voice to the ancient farming communities, their wit, their sufferings, and their conflicts. Full of tough realism, the novel’s pages reek with the stink of sheep dung, of smoke and stone, and of deep, endless drifts of snow. It focuses on Bjartur and his fight to remain independent and free from debt during the early years of the twentieth century, through the prosperity of the war years to the economic crisis and growth of socialism after the war has ended. In hard, poetic, and often beautiful prose Laxness charts the struggles of Bjartur’s growing family, the death of his first and second wives, and the longings and unfulfilled dreams of his three children.
Laxness, who spent much of his childhood on farms similar to those described, wrote over sixty literary works and is considered the undisputed master of Icelandic fiction. JM
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1900s
Nightwood
Djuna Barnes
Lifespan | b. 1892 (U.S.), d. 1982
First Published | 1936
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
Introduction to the Original Edition by | T. S. Eliot
Nightwood has the reputation of a great novel written by a poet, a reputation partly fostered by T. S. Eliot’s suggestion that the book will appeal primarily to readers of poetry. The prose style of the book is indeed remarkable, possessing varieties of urbane wit and a kind of modernist baroque seemingly schooled in Jacobean dramatic poetry. A pioneering representation of love between women, Nightwood makes uncomfortable reading for anyone looking for positive images of lesbian identity, but however troubling, this is a hilarious and stylish book.
Set mostly in Paris and New York, the novel suggests a cosmopolitan drift of bohemians and exiles in Europe. At the center of the novel is the dangerous figure of Robin Vote, who more or less ruins her husband, Felix Volkbein, their child Guido, and the two women who love her, Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge. Counterbalancing the destructive allure of Robin Vote, Doctor Matthew O’Connor administers the healing power of distractingly outlandish monologues. What at first seem like windy exercises in rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake are gradually revealed as humane deflections of the suffering otherwise threatening to break out. The doctor’s unorthodox efforts are finally reduced to drunken rubble by the wheels of this dark fable. A book to reread many times. DM
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1900s
At the Mountains of Madness
H. P. Lovecraft
Lifespan | b. 1890 (U.S.), d. 1937
First Serialized | 1936
First Serialized in | Astounding Stories magazine
Full Name | Howard Phillips Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft’s most effective novel begins as a tale of exploration at the cutting edge of science. Airplanes and drilling devices are shipped to Antarctica in 1930, just as the mapping of the continent begins in earnest. But this “awful place,” more ancient than any other continent, is not so easily opened up to materialist exploitation. Soon enough, an entirely new history of the world is in evidence, one that undermines all previously held views of science and nature, a vision that contains vast alien cities buried beneath the ice and the awesome and awful survivors of its heyday.
The positive and efficient first-person narrative of the geologist, Dyer, patiently and didactically explains the wonders of new technology. Only when the first survey group, isolated by a storm, begins to radio back of highly unusual finds in a cavern beneath the surface, do events begin to unravel. From then on, Dyer and his companion, the student Danforth, are on a downward spiral of discovery that attacks every notion of time, space, and life, until Danforth’s speech is reduced to disconnected fragments, recalled only in dreams.
Deeply influenced by Poe, Lovecraft’s horror tends to be implied and offstage, but this effectively deepens the abounding philosophical horror felt by the protagonists. This intriguing blend of gothic horror and lost-world scenarios within a more modern genre framework can be rediscovered in many contemporary narratives, especially film. Lovecraft achieved little success in his lifetime but his work resonates with themes that consistently inspire later generations of writers, science fiction as much as horror. Largely due to his Cthulhu stories, called Cthulhu Mythos by August Derleth, Lovecraft is today the subject of a large cult following. JS
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Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
Lifespan | b. 1897 (U.S.), d. 1962
First Published | 1936
First Published by | Random House (New York)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1949
Told five times between 1835 and 1910 (while Sutpen rests from hunting his absconded French architect with a pack of slaves), this is the peasant-to-planter story of Thomas Sutpen, of his plantation (called “the Hundred”), and of Bon, his possible son who may be black and who, if black and acknowledged, will bring the house down.
The gaps and contradictions exposed by multiple narration beg epistemological questions concerning how we know what we know of historical matters. But given that in Absalom, Absalom! the questions arise from a regionally specific labor problem—that of the denied black body within the white, whose coerced work gives substance to the face, skin, sex, and land of the white owning class—those questions must be recast. “Who knows what and how do they know it?” is reformed as, “How, knowing that their face, skin, sex, and land are made by African-American labor (the good inside their goods), can they go on denying what they know?” Faulkner’s answer would seem to be that to acknowledge their knowledge (or for Sutpen to face Bon as his son), would be to cease to be themselves.
That William Faulkner should begin to think such unthinkable thoughts about his own ancestors in Absalom, Absalom!, even as his region continued to depend for its substance on bound black workers (bound by debt peonage rather than chattel slavery), may explain the structure of this work, undoubtedly one of the greatest of modernist novels. RG
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1900s
War with the Newts
Karel Capek
Lifespan | b. 1890 (Czech Republic), d. 1938
First Published | 1936
First Published by | Fr. Borový (Prague)
Original Title | Valka s mloky
This science-fiction dystopia begins with the discovery, by a portly sea captain, of some peculiar salamanders, or newts, that he is able to train. The amphibians are exceedingly intelligent, stand upright, and are able to develop the powers of speech. With financial backing, the captain sails around the Pacific with his newts, fishing for pearls. The newts multiply rapidly and soon the business is a huge international concern. Within years there are considerably more newts than people—some have even graduated from universities—and they are beginning to run out of the shallow water areas they inhabit. The newts are slaves, exploited second-class citizens, until one day they present the world with their own demands.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 44
