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1900s
The Lost Steps
Alejo Carpentier
Lifespan | b. 1904 (Switzerland), d. 1980 (France)
First Published | 1953, by Edición y Distribución Iberoamericana de Publicaciones (Mexico City)
Original Title | Los pasos perdidos
The Lost Steps, the third novel by this Cuban author born in Lausanne, saw a change in his usual approach; it is one of his few nonhistorical works, and it is not set in the Caribbean world. Alejo Carpentier here tells the story of a contemporary pilgrimage in search of the origins of civilization and of personal identity. This is the most autobiographical of his works. Indeed, there is no absurdity in seeing a reflection of the author in the figure of the South American musicologist and composer, who gives up his comfortable position in the EU to begin a search for primitive musical instruments in the depths of the Venezuelan jungle.
Told in the form of an artificial diary, the journey is a flight from both creative sterility and sterile relationships with his wife and lover. In the forest, the protagonist finds the instruments he is looking for, as well as the telluric half-caste Rosario, his perfect complement. He also finds the inspiration to continue writing an unfinished cantata that would never be completed in the modern city. With passion and art at last within his grasp, there is only one thing missing: a reason to stay in the jungle. To yield to the temptation of returning would be a fatal error, but during his stay nature has closed off the route, and a return proves to be impossible. In a final image placing the erudite wanderer by a river that can tell him nothing, Carpentier manages to express the predicament of the modern artist, lost between two irreconcilable worlds. DMG
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1900s
The Hothouse
Wolfgang Koeppen
Lifespan | b. 1906 (Germany), d. 1996
First Published | 1953
First Published By | Scherz & Goverts (Stuttgart)
Original Title | Das Treibhaus
Set in Bonn in the early years of the West German government, The Hothouse describes the final days of an idealistic politician, Keetenhueve, before his dramatic suicidal leap into the Rhine. The novel caused a scandal in Germany when it was published, largely because of Koeppen’s unsparing look at what were then extremely new corridors of power, and in which he diagnosed an already spreading web of compromise, cynicism, and even corruption.
Koeppen himself famously described the book as “a novel about failure,” but Keetenhueve’s failure moves the reader because it is a failure in which idealism and justice are equally defeated. The novel opens with the death of Keetenhueve’s young wife, Elke, who, haunted by her family heritage and Keetenhueve’s neglect, succumbs to alcoholism and dissipation. Like Elke, all of the novel’s characters have difficulty in coming to terms with the past; guilt about Nazism hampers any efforts to change German society. Keetenhueve, for all his failure, offers a heroic side to the reader, fighting against a remilitarization of the country and arguing for the interests of peace. Although that argument ends in defeat, its eloquent and impassioned expression in the pages of Koeppen’s novel make this a seminal work about early postwar Germany and the effects of political power on the individual. AB
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1900s
The Long Good-Bye
Raymond Chandler
Lifespan | b. 1888 (U.S.), d. 1959
First Published | 1953
First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1973
The British first edition jacket plays up the thriller’s traditional appeal to voyeurism, rather than more sophisticated literary aims.
“No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”
A work of Raymond Chandler’s maturity, written a good decade after Philip Marlowe first became a household name, The Long Good-Bye has a good claim to being his finest achievement. With The Big Sleep (1939), he began to graft mainstream literary sophistication onto the generic templates of pulp gumshoe fiction, and The Long Good-Bye can equally be read as a significant work of American fiction.
After helping Terry Lennox to escape to Mexico, private detective Philip Marlowe finds that he may have unknowingly abetted the flight of a murderer; not only that, Terry apparently kills himself as well, leaving Marlowe with a bewildering knot of unsolved problems and posthumous responsibilities. The puzzle aspect in Chandler’s novels is often a pretext for a larger and more world-weary social observation, and this is particularly true here; as Marlowe’s quest for solutions leads him into the corrupt, leisured world of Idle Valley, the novel’s larger satirical purposes come into focus. Away from the downtown “mean streets,” Chandler can indulge Marlowe’s cultured side more (referencing Flaubert is not common in 1950s crime novels). And it is right that the initial detective premise somewhat recedes into the background: in Chandler’s world, the solving of a crime cannot return us to innocence. If the detective genre is often turned to more serious and resonant literary purposes nowadays, this was a possibility opened up by the laconic, deadpan example of The Long Good-Bye. BT
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1900s
The Go-Between
L. P. Hartley
Lifespan | b. 1895 (England), d. 1972
First Published | 1953
First Published by | Hamish Hamilton (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1971
L. P. Hartley’s semi-autobiographical novel is constructed around the retrospective narrative of Leo Colston. Now an elderly man, Colston thinks back to his boyhood and the summer he spent at the affluent family home of his school friend. During his stay with the Maudsley family, Leo becomes embroiled in the socially unacceptable relationship between his friend’s older sister, Marian, and Ted, a local farmer.
Leo becomes the “go-between” of the book’s title, facilitating an illicit sexual relationship that defies the restrictive class conventions of Edwardian England. Made aware of sexual desires, he views them with a mixture of fascination and horror. His role in enabling this relationship is a catalyst for Leo’s coming of age, precipitating a loss of childish innocence. In his adult revisitation of these events, Colston’s disapproval of Marian and Ted is clear. But the sense of nostalgia is not limited to a loss of sexual naivety: the novel is heavily inflected with the class dynamics of Edwardian society, and inherent in Colston’s reflections is a longing for a way of life permeated by class differences that function to his advantage. In this quintessentially English novel, Leo’s epiphany occurs during a cricket match, which for him represents the “struggle between order and lawlessness, between obedience to tradition and defiance of it, between social stability and revolution.”
This novel is of interest for its unusual take on the familiar theme of love divided by social barriers, but also for the studied honesty of Leo’s narrative. JW
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1900s
The Dark Child
Camara Laye
Lifespan | b. 1928 (Guinea), d. 1980 (Senegal)
First Published | 1953
First Published by | Plon (Paris)
Original Title | L’Enfant noir
African fiction mogulist Chinua Achebe once criticized The Dark Child by Laye Kamara (who is erroneously published as Camara Laye in the West) for being “too sweet.” He was undoubtedly referring to the unpoliticized musings of its first-person narrator Fatoman, first as a child in a small Muslim village and then as a young man negotiating a new urban existence. But for Western audiences the novel was an early example of francophone African literature, recording for the first time aspects of local daily tribal life, including circumcision ceremonies and details of the goldsmithing trade.
Written when Kamara was in Paris studying mechanics, the novel is autobiographical, charting with a distinctly nostalgic tone Kamara’s own childhood in Upper Guinea. As the ch
ild of parents reputed to have supernatural abilities, Kamara was a product of the esteemed Malinké tribe, and grew up in a Muslim community far from the influence of France. It was only when he traveled to Kouroussa and later to Conakry and Paris that he faced the dichotomies of village and city, Africa and Europe.
In 1956, Kamara returned to Africa and eventually took up a government post, where his disagreements with post-independence president Sekou Touré saw him in and out of prison, and eventually exiled. Kamara’s inability to readjust to life in Africa is expressed in a sequel, A Dream of Africa (1966), which is distinctly political, and as such reinforces the novelty of The Dark Child. JSD
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1900s
A Day in Spring
Ciril Kosmac
Lifespan | b. 1910 (Slovenia), d. 1980
First Published | 1954
First Published by | Presernova druzba (Ljubljana)
Original Title | Pomladni dan
A few days after the end of the Second World War, Ciril Kosmac’s protagonist wakes one May morning to his first day at home after fifteen years of exile and battle. Stirred by fresh encounters with sights and objects familiar from childhood and early youth, he undergoes emotional events in which memories, retaining all the purity of raw experience, weave through a present toned down and tinged with nostalgia, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. The result is a portrait of delicate poignancy, threaded with a vitality that alternates with loss and sorrow in a mutually enriching flow.
The returning man finds himself suspended between two worlds—one is the world of banishment, mute and alien in spite of fifteen years of familiarity, the other is the world of village life on the shadowy side of a hill washed by the Idritsa river. This personal state of abeyance and reckoning unfolds against the backdrop of parallel uncertainties and internal resettlings in the wider social context, with Slovenia gaining part independence from Austro-Hungarian rule after the First World War, and finally, after the Second World War, gaining full autonomy from Italy and joining Yugoslavia. It is owing to Kosmac’s masterly ability that his narrative, while retaining a light symbolism, never degenerates into allegory: the political world is so intimately welded with the personal world that they become indistinguishable, and individual fate seeps seamlessly into shared, communal destiny. MWd
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1900s
A Ghost at Noon
Alberto Moravia
Lifespan | b. 1907 (Italy), d. 1990
First Published | 1954
First Published by | Bompiani (Milan)
Original Title | Il Disprezzo
Like most of Alberto Moravia’s work, this novel is a political accusation: capitalist culture reduces the intellectual to a mere producer of goods. Riccardo Molteni, the protagonist, is a failed intellectual who betrays his ambition to become a playwright and sells his soul to consumerism to make money by writing screenplays. He convinces himself that he does this to pay for the apartment he bought to make his wife, Emilia, happy. Molteni increasingly loses sight of reality and becomes incapable of noticing what is happening around him, unable to see that his wife no longer loves him. In a nostalgic and regretful way, he carries on loving a semblance, or a “ghost,” of what Emilia once was (hence the English translation of the novel’s title).
Molteni takes refuge in Greek myths, with their protagonists who lived in a world where the relation ship with reality was straightforward and unmediated. When faced with the challenging task of transforming the Odyssey into a movie, Molteni discovers that a text such as Homer’s holds the key to his existence. Odysseus and Molteni are united by a similar destiny. Their wives, Penelope and Emilia, despise their passivity and self-assurance. Molteni is excessively confident that Emilia is faithful and disregards the producer’s courtship of her. She is hurt, and feels she is being sold cheaply to secure her husband’s occupation. Her contempt for him grows and is finally shouted into his face before she abandons him on the island of Capri. RPi
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1900s
The Story of O
Pauline Réage
Lifespan | b. 1907 (France), d. 1998
First Published | 1954
First Published by | Pauvert (Sceaux)
Original Title | Histoire d’O
Pauline Réage is a complex mask. It is the pen name of Dominique Aury, itself the pen name of Anne Desclos, a French journalist and translator who became one of the most infamous pornographers of all time when she published The Story of O in Paris in 1954. “Réage”—a name invented specifically for The Story of O—was apparently told by her lover, Jean Paulhan, that no woman could ever write an erotic novel. The Story of O is her response. The novel is one of the most thorough and challenging ripostes ever made in a lovers’ quarrel.
The novel is distinguished less by its plot than by the manner of its prose, in particular the control exercised by Réage in her depiction of O’s private musings and reflections during and after her submission to acts of torture and humiliation. The intense erotic effect is achieved by a kind of mismatch between language and psychological content. If the language were made to imitate the full violence of O’s mental and physical suffering, it would often be shattered and reduced to an incoherent scream. Instead, the prose is constrained by Réage and proceeds unruffled and at an unvarying pace through a series of degraded sexual episodes, leading eventually to the disappearance of O behind yet another mask, that of an owl. The most tightly fitted mask is style itself. The Story of O is a shocking novel and at the same time a masterfully boring one. The deep erotic joy of suffering, it tells us, is rooted in the terror of boredom. KS
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1900s
Under the Net
Iris Murdoch
Lifespan | b. 1919 (Ireland), d. 1999 (England)
First Published | 1954
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Full Name | Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch’s first published novel, Under the Net, captures the exuberant spirit of freedom in postwar Europe. Jake Donaghue, the novel’s swashbuckling first-person narrator, is a rootless, impoverished young writer who relishes this freedom. He has no home, no commitments, and no permanent job and conducts relationships based only on a woman’s ability to provide sex and shelter. But chance, misfortune, and a series of hilarious misunderstandings startle Jake into an awareness that others have existence outside his perception of them, and that the world holds mysteries that he can barely imagine. A stark period of depression and a candid renegotiation of his love life follows. Jake finally becomes an aspiring novelist committed to producing work that engages with the world that he has begun, at last, to see.
Beneath the surface of the fast-moving narrative lies a wealth of philosophical questioning: Murdoch contests existential ideas of freedom; she asks what it means to be in love; and she rigorously questions what makes a good writer and what constitutes good art. Underlying these ideas are the questions of how accurately thought can be translated into language (language is the “net” of the title) and how far art distances us from reality, rather than bringing us closer to it. But Jake’s visits to The Laughing Cavalier at the Wallace Collection in London, and to the Fontaine de Médicis in Paris, illustrate Murdoch’s belief that art is not divorced from the real world and that, in particular, “art and morality are one.” AR
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Lord of the Flies
William Golding
Lifespan | b. 1911 (England), d. 1993
First Published | 1954, by Faber & Faber (London)
First Movie Adaption Released | 1963
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1983
The first edition of Golding’s novel appeared at a time of public concern about the destructive nature of human beings.
A staple of many a schoolroom, Lord of the Flies is a gripping e
xamination of the conflict between the two competing impulses that exist within all human beings. On the one hand, there is the instinct to live peacefully, abide by rules, and value the moral good over the instinct for immediate gratification of desires. On the other, there is the impulse to seize supremacy through violence, sacrificing the individual at the expense of the group.
This is the story of a group of young schoolboys marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during the war. Alone, without adult supervision, the boys begin by electing a leader, Ralph, who narrowly defeats Jack in the vote (Jack is elected head of the hunt). The moral conflict at the novel’s heart—between good and evil, order and chaos, civilization and savagery, the rule of law and anarchy—is represented by the differing characters of sensible, levelheaded Ralph and savage, charismatic Jack. As the boys split into two different factions, their island society is plunged into chaos. While some behave peacefully, working together to maintain order and achieve common goals, others rebel, generating terror and violence. Frightened, the boys become convinced there is a monster on the island, and when one of them, Simon, realizes the beast is not an external figure, but exists within each and every one of them, he is murdered.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 57
