1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 50
First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)
Given Name | Henry Vincent Yorke
Henry Green’s fifth novel, Loving, tells the uneventful story of an English aristocratic household in Ireland during the Second World War. The narrative of its little round of daily events is split between the servants of the house and their masters. Upstairs we follow the comedy of well-bred, largely hypocritical emotionalism played out by the lady of the house, Mrs. Tennant, and her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Jack. Downstairs the parallel comedy of restricted hopes and sensational fears is acted out by the star of the drama, the butler, Charley Raunce, and his staff. Raunce falls in love with a servant girl, Edith, and their daily round of flirtations and confessions of desire leads to a fairy-tale ending capped by the cliché “happily ever after.”
What sets this book apart from other comedies of manners is the great sensitivity with which Green, the son of a rich Birmingham industrialist, reveals that the experience of loving is rooted in and cannot escape the experience of class relations. The novel exposes the contradictions of class society by tracing the limits imposed on even the most passionate longing by the accidents of birth and social status, and by the deep impression of emotional habits accumulated through physical labor or the freedom from it. To each social class, there belongs its own experience of love and its own manner of believing that love transcends class. Far from reducing the love story to sociology or historical analysis, Green’s novel is suffused with a beautiful and implicit pathos. KS
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Animal Farm
George Orwell
Lifespan | b. 1903 (India), d. 1950 (England)
First Published | 1945
First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)
Given Name | Eric Arthur Blair
The cover of a 1954 Latvian translation of Animal Farm: the book was banned in Soviet bloc countries, but circulated clandestinely.
George Orwell’s fable of the animals who take over Manor Farm but are betrayed by their leaders has become a powerful myth of freedom for the post-Second World War generation. Its purpose was to destroy another myth, that the Soviet Union was a socialist state; the difficulties that Orwell faced in getting his book published confirmed his view that the British intelligentsia was in thrall to the Soviet system. Animal Farm was based on Orwell’s own experience in the Spanish Civil War, when the left-wing militia in which he fought was ruthlessly eliminated for not being communist.
Animal Farm is a masterpiece of controlled irony, focused on essential developments in the rise of the Soviet state, but tied to Orwell’s knowledge of rural life. Major, an elderly white boar representing Karl Marx, declares the animals’ “duty of enmity towards Man and all his ways.” When revolution comes, all animals shall be equal. Unfortunately, the pig Napoleon (Stalin) and his fierce dogs (secret police) take over, working to death the carthorse Boxer (the Soviet people) and exiling Snowball (Trotsky). There is pathos in the carthorse Clover’s realization that the seven founding commandments are now one: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” Such irony confirms the book’s support of genuine revolution. AMu
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1900s
The Bridge on the Drina
Ivo Andrić
Lifespan | b. 1892 (Bosnia), d. 1975 (Yugoslavia)
First Published | 1945, by Prosveta (Belgrade)
Original Title | Na Drini ćuprija
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1961
“Theories such as yours only satisfy the eternal need for games, flatter your own vanity, deceive yourself and others. That is the truth, or at least how it appears to me.”
Ivo Andrić’s work The Bridge on the Drina recounts the turbulent history of the famous Mehmed-pasha Sokolovich Bridge in Visegrad, Bosnia. In the novel, Andrić chronicles the period from the building of the bridge in the sixteenth century to the start of the First World War in 1914 and the complete dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Strictly speaking, The Bridge on the Drina is more a chronicle than a novel, organized into a series of vignettes describing the life of the local population in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and its transformations over the course of centuries. Given the recent Bosnian bloodshed, the novel provides a fascinating insight into the dynamics and the history of tensions between the local Christians, Muslims, and Jews. A beautiful piece of writing set in a rich local dialect, the book is also a story of language itself. The social and cultural changes brought on by successive rule of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires are reflected in the populace’s vocabulary, their thoughts, bodies, and attitudes. Throughout, the bridge endures as a symbol of continuity.
Even though the novel concludes in 1914 with the retreat of the Austro-Hungarian forces, the bridge itself witnessed further historical strife during the 1990s. This, perhaps, is an incentive for a more cautious reading of Andrić, where the bridge emerges not so much as a metaphor of possible coexistence among nations but simply as a stage for the relentless flow of history. IJ
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Christ Stopped at Eboli
Carlo Levi
Lifespan | b. 1902 (Italy), d. 1975
First Published | 1945
First Published by | G. Einaudi (Turin)
Original Title | Cristo si è fermato a Eboli
Christ Stopped at Eboli has been variously described as a diary, a documentary novel, a sociological study, and a political essay. Its author is equally difficult to categorize. Carlo Levi trained as a doctor, but later devoted himself to politics, literature, and painting. Between 1935 and 1936, during the Abyssinian war, he was exiled to Gagliano, a remote hill town in the “foot” of Italy, because of his opposition to Mussolini and the Fascist regime. Christ Stopped at Eboli, Levi’s account of the exile, refers to Eboli, the central town of the region, which he was occasionally allowed to visit.
The title of the book is a metaphor for the isolation of the people of this remote region, their poverty and deprivation of little concern to the middle-class Fascist party. Levi chronicles his life in the malaria-ridden village, while painting unsentimental portraits of the inhabitants, from the Fascist mayor to Giulia, a woman who had more than a dozen pregnancies with more than a dozen men. To the stoical peasant community, Levi is a figure of authority to whom they turn for support in their daily struggles against disease and poverty. But his attempts to help them with limited medical supplies is mostly in vain; in a world where a stethoscope has never been seen, the impact of his medical knowledge proves negligible. His novel, however, was an international sensation and, in a move toward social realism in postwar Italian literature, brought to the attention of the Italian public a long-neglected part of their own country. LE
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Arcanum 17
André Breton
Lifespan | b. 1896 (France), d. 1966
First Published | 1945
First Published by | Brentano (New York)
Original Title | Arcane 17
The high point of the Surrealist movement, which André Breton had headed in France, was over by 1944, and Europe was in the midst of an exhausting war. Written from Québec in the months following D-Day, Arcanum 17 has much to say about the role of the artist during war, and the role of war in the work that will follow its aftermath. Yet Breton’s text is neither gloomily pessimistic nor nostalgic; it has a quiet, if cautionary, optimism for the future of Europe and her artists. This is reflected in the title, which refers to the major arcana tarot card, the Star, that depicts a beautiful young woman emptying upon the earth two urns, labeled love, and intelligence.
Arcanum 17 is neither an essay nor a narrative, although it combines musings and opinions on art and war with a variety of literary themes. These include personalized accounts of Breton’s life and his lover during this period, and evocative, poe
tic descriptions of the dramatic Canadian landscape. The main literary leitmotiv is the legend of Melusina, which A. S. Byatt was to draw on later in her novel Possession (1990). Melusina keeps her fidelity to the man whose curiosity banishes her from the human realm; from this stems Breton’s call for women to take the reins of power from the destructive hands of men. Arcanum 17 is a poignant exploration of personal and European loss; it is also a testament to the fascinating maturation of a thinker whose youthful writings had been at the forefront of artistic change in France. JC
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Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Lifespan | b. 1903 (England), d. 1966
First Published | 1945
First Published by | Chapman & Hall (London)
Full Name | Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Written toward the end of the Second World War, Brideshead was partly a nostalgic tribute to an upper-class world.
“‘I have been here before . . .’”
Arguably Evelyn Waugh’s best novel, and certainly his most famous, Brideshead Revisited follows the aristocratic Flyte family from the 1920s through to the Second World War. The novel is subtitled “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,” and the narrator first meets Sebastian, an aesthete from the Catholic Flyte family, at Oxford University. The two form an intense friendship. Charles is a serious, earnest student, but there is a tension between the scholasticism of his undergraduate pursuits and his artistic ambitions. His friendship with Sebastian enables him to loosen his grip on the conventional values that had until then structured his life, and the pair’s decadent lifestyle encourages Charles’s artistic development. During their breaks from Oxford, they spend time together at Brideshead Castle, the home of the Flyte family, and Charles comes to realize that Sebastian’s faith is one that he cannot always understand: to him it seems naive and inconsistent.
Sebastian’s continual heavy drinking increasingly drives a wedge between him and Charles; however, Charles’s relationship with the Flyte family overall remains strong. Years later, after they have both married unhappily, Charles falls in love with Sebastian’s sister, Julia. But Julia’s strong Catholic beliefs eventually become insurmountable to a continuing relationship.
Waugh had converted to Catholicism himself in 1930, and in many ways Brideshead Revisited can be seen as a public expression of his own belief, and an exposition of divine grace. Within the novel he explores a complex interdependency of relationships and, in particular, the overarching importance of religious faith, which, although not always prominent, ultimately prevails. JW
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Bosnian Chronicle
Ivo Andrić
Lifespan | b. 1892 (Bosnia), d. 1975 (Yugoslavia)
First Published | 1945, by Drzavni zavod Jugoslavije
Alternate Title | The Days of the Consuls
Original Title | Travnicka hronika
Andrić’s novel explores the ethnic complexities of his native region; although he was born in Bosnia, his parents were Croats.
“‘. . . we don’t want visitors.’”
Bosnian Chronicle is part of the Nobel Prize-winning author Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian Trilogy. Comprising three novels published in 1945, the only common factor between them is the setting. Bosnian Chronicle, like Andrić’s other masterpiece The Bridge on the Drina, deals with Bosnia and her history.
The novel, subtitled “The Age of the Consuls,” tells of the rivalry between the French and Austrian consuls in an out-of-the-way, old-fashioned Bosnian town called Travnik, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We watch as the two once gifted men compete for the attentions of the Turkish vizier-in-residence, while at the same time pettily sabotaging the plans of their rival. Two men with a great deal in common, the consuls are forced to act out in microcosm the war their two nations are waging in Europe. Andrić moves, Tolstoy-like, across the vast political and emotional domains that form the canvas of his novel. Discontent stirs in the bazaars in Travnik and Serbo-Croatian peasants revolt. Mohammedans, Christians and Jews take arms against one another. Tension builds and explodes. All the while, the two consuls are gradually destroyed by their hard life in the East.
Andrić masterfully portrays the two consuls as fish out of water; he shows the bonds that connect the East and the West but, crucially, shows Bosnia as a land that will remain forever alien to the consuls. Just as poignantly, he emphasizes their similarities and the tragedy that is their inability to take comfort in one another. On a grander level, Bosnian Chronicle is a far-reaching, dense, epic, and lyrical meditation on the history and condition of the author’s homeland. On a more detailed level, it is a moving portrait of cultural misunderstanding and energy needlessly crushed and wasted. OR
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The Tin Flute
Gabrielle Roy
Lifespan | b. 1909 (Canada), d. 1966
First Published | 1945
First Published by | Société des Éditions Pascal
Original Title | Bonheur d’occasion
French Canadian author Gabrielle Roy’s first novel, The Tin Flute, centers on the lives of Florentine Lacasse and her mother, Rose-Anna, in the slums of Montréal in the final years of the Depression. It paints a harshly realistic picture of the everyday struggle of the poor, and their ardent dreams of a better life. With a wealth of observational detail, Roy weaves a compassionate drama of the family’s battle for everything from food, clothing, and a place to live to self-respect and life itself.
Central to the story is Florentine. The only member of her family with a regular job, she sees in her mother the image of a life she is determined to avoid at all costs. Desperate when she find herself pregnant and abandoned, Florentine discards her romantic dreams and marries a man she does not love. It is only on the last pages of the novel, when Florentine glimpses the man she once loved, that she realizes that she has escaped her poverty, and is now loved, cared for, and secure.
As they communicate and interact with each other, each of Roy’s characters seems isolated within their own inner struggle. Roy penetrates this inner turmoil, showing up the contradictions within each. The Tin Flute’s stark realism and focus on urban life formed a remarkable departure from Quebec’s literature of the time, heralding a move away from the sentimental, romanticized image of the province that had dominated French-Canadian literature for the previous three centuries. ClW
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Andrea
Carmen Laforet
Lifespan | b. 1921 (Spain), d. 2004
First Published | 1945
First Published by | Ediciones Destino (Barcelona)
Original Title | Nada
In its time, Carmen LaForet’s Andrea was new and daring, because it recreates the sordid, hostile environment of a great city and of family relationships marked by suspicion and egoism. The novel was even classified as alarmist, and although the plot and viewpoint are simple and even flat, the young author, at age twenty-three, displayed remarkable ability in creating an atmosphere of sordid passions, cruelty, and hatred, perplexing and astonishing the main character, Andrea.
Andrea travels, full of hopes and illusions, to Barcelona to study philosophy and literature. She lives in the house of her grandmother with her mother’s family, individuals who are not only incapable of affection but who are also of restricted mental and moral equilibrium: the music lover Román, a sinister maniac mixed up in smuggling activities that end in his suicide; an unsuccessful painter who mistreats his wife; and the unbalanced Angustias, who seeks to suppress her frustrations in a convent. All are unwelcoming, reproaching Andrea for the debt she owes them for taking her in.
The expressiveness of the style and the description of the setting meant that this novel was received by Spanish exiles as a social denunciation, something that was not inte
nded by the author. Today the novel stands out for its naive narrative power (which won it the first Nadal Prize) and the fact that it was an essential part of the regeneration of the novel in Spain’s postwar era. M-DAB
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1900s
The Death of Virgil
Hermann Broch
Lifespan | b. 1886 (Austria), d. 1951 (U.S.)
First Published | 1945
First Published by | Pantheon Books (New York)
Original Title | Der Tod des Virgil
“Overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory . . .”
A great masterpiece of European modernism, this exploration of the relationship between life and death moves like a great prose poem through its four sections entitled “water,” “fire,” “earth,” and “air.” It was begun during the author’s internment in a concentration camp and continued during his exile from Nazi Vienna.
The novel takes place over the last twenty-four hours of the life of Virgil and is located primarily in the palace of Augustus in Brundisium. Virgil has returned to Italy to die and brought with him the newly completed Aeneid. During his descent into death he debates with himself, the emperor, and his friends about the use of poetry, the relationship between religion and the state, and the nature of totalitarianism. His decision to burn the manuscript mirrors Hermann Broch’s own concerns as he carried the half-completed novel with him to America.