1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  This thought-provoking exploration of human evil and original sin reflects the society of the time and is steeped in Golding’s experiences of the Second World War, when he witnessed the isolated savagery of desperate men unconfined by the rules of civilized society. Although the gripping story is confined to a small group of boys on a small island, it explores issues central to the wider human experience. EF

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Mandarins

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Lifespan | b. 1908 (Paris), d. 1986

  First Published | 1954

  First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)

  Original Title | Les Mandarins

  Henri, the struggling writer at the center of The Mandarins, begins his new novel by wondering, “What truth do I want to express? My truth. But what does that really mean?” His words express the questioning that lies at the center of Simone de Beauvoir’s novel, which probes the changing conceptions of identity and artistic practice in postwar France.

  Focusing on a group of intellectuals in Paris in the immediate years after 1944, The Mandarins explores, on an almost epic scale, the repercussions inherent in coming to terms with both France’s terrible legacies of war and Nazi occupation and the new concerns arising with the reconstruction of Europe and the beginnings of the Cold War. At the novel’s center are Henri, editor of the left-wing magazine L’Espoir, and his former lover, Paula, who is struggling to cope with their separation. The other central figure is Anne, psychoanalyst and mother of Henri’s new lover, Nadine, whose brief extramarital affair and growing sense of personal and political emptiness force her to the edge of suicide. The novel focuses on the interactions between Henri, Paula, Anne, and Nadine, as well as a host of minor characters, centered around the fortunes of L’Espoir and the continuing fallout of the war.

  Unwavering in its determination to expose often uncomfortable truths about postwar society, The Mandarins is a richly rewarding and epic portrait that determinedly connects the personal and the political on every level. AB

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Bonjour Tristesse

  Françoise Sagan

  Lifespan | b. 1935 (France), d. 2004

  First Published | 1954

  First Published by | Julliard (Paris)

  Given Name | Françoise Quoirez

  When Cécile, a precocious fifteen-year-old, leaves boarding school to live with her widowed libertine father, Raymond, she enters into a world of decadence that is a far cry from her strict convent-school days. Gallivanting between Paris and the French Riviera, the golden-skinned duo embraces a hedonistic existence, consisting of short-lived affairs, glittering characters, and every luxury imaginable. But their life of gay frivolity is threatened two years later when Raymond believes he has fallen in love with Anne Larsen, a former friend of Cécile’s mother who moves within more staid, intellectual circles. Fearing for her freedom, Cécile, the quintessential enfant terrible, invokes the help of her lover, Cyril, and her father’s former paramour, Elsa, to intervene. But her cunning plot proves to have tragic consequences, forever coloring her future happiness with tristesse.

  Written when she was just eighteen years old, Françoise Sagan’s first novel was an instant international best seller. With its description of overt sexuality, celebration of wealth and opulence, and intimation of same-sex desire, the novel shocked and titillated its first readers, paving the way for a permissive French society. Simmering beneath the façade of the jaded ingénue is the unsettling portrait of a child who will do anything to maintain the life outlined for her by the only parent she knows. BJ

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  Death in Rome

  Wolfgang Koeppen

  Lifespan | b. 1906 (Germany), d. 1996

  First Published | 1954

  First Published by | Scherz & Goverts (Stuttgart)

  Original Title | Tod in Rom

  Playfully alluding to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Death in Rome provides a satiric and chilling updating of Mann’s masterpiece. Despite its setting, Wolfgang Koeppen’s novel is designed to answer the question: what will become of postwar Germany?

  That country is represented in the novel by four members of a single family. The patriarch, Gottlieb Judejahn, is an ex-SS officer who has run away from facing trial in Germany; his son, Adolf, is in the process of becoming a Catholic priest. Joining them are Gottlieb’s brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, a high-level bureaucrat, and his son, Siegfried, a composer. Siegfried, to whom all of his family represent the horror of a war he wants to forget, narrates, and Koeppen focuses on his inability to escape his childhood in Nazi Germany, even in his music. Adolf, similarly horrified by his father’s actions, cannot achieve the absolution he looks for as a priest due to his own actions in childhood.

  As the four characters interact in the setting of a chaotic postwar Rome, Koeppen paints a bleak picture of the aftereffects of the Third Reich. All are locked in a seemingly permanent state of inaction; ironically, it is only the monstrous Judejahn who is able to take comfort in continuing violence.

  It may be that Death in Rome presents an almost uninhabitable world to the reader, but it is one in which justice, if not mercy, is highlighted and celebrated; the reader is never able to forget the seriousness of the sins of the past. AB

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Sound of Waves

  Yukio Mishima

  Lifespan | b. 1925 (Japan), d. 1970

  First Published | 1954, by Shinchosha (Tokyo)

  Given Name | Hiraoka Kimitake

  Original Title | Shiosai

  This simple, intense love story is set on a remote Japanese island, and tells of the love between Shinji, a poor young fisherman, and Hatsue, a beautiful pearl diver. The lovers become the subject of jealous gossip, and Shinji is accused of having stolen Hatsue’s virginity. Her furious father restricts Hatsue to the house, and forbids Shinji to see her again. He has promised her hand in marriage to Shinji's rival, Yasuo, the boorish and arrogant son of a wealthy family. But later he relents, and sets the two suitors a trial in which they have to pit themselves against a storm at sea. It is Shinji, noble and hardworking, who wins the test and regains the respect of the village and is reunited with his beloved Hatsue.

  Although the likely setting of the story is the Shima Peninsula, home of Japan’s famous female pearl divers, it was written after Yukio Mishima had visited the Mediterranean and become immersed in the literature of ancient Rome and Greece. The Sound of Waves thus represents an interesting fusion of styles—the plot is as sparely and delicately constructed as a Japanese miniature, but the lyrical descriptions of island life and the healing, redemptive power of the sea are suggestive of a more romantic tradition. This novel is much less graphically violent and sexually explicit than his later works, and captures the feelings of first love with an evocative tenderness that reveals a gentler side to the man hailed as one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century. TS

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Unknown Soldier

  Väinö Linna

  Lifespan | b. 1920 (Finland), d. 1992

  First Published | 1954

  First Published by | WSOY (Porvoo)

  Original Title | Tuntematon Sotilas

  This is Band of Brothers without the varnish. Linna has written a grim and gritty account of a Finnish machinegun company caught up in a doomed attempt to fight the onslaught of Stalin’s tanks and infantry invading their motherland in 1941. Splattered bodies, piercing bullets, harrowing hand-to-hand trench warfare, summary executions, bullying upper-class officers, brief relief with booze and women—all this “explodes” the myth of honorable warfare. The coarse language and often cowardly, insolent, and terror-stricken behavior of the working-class soldiers was shunned by Finnish politicians, literary critics, and
patriots more used to unquestioning depictions of warfare. Moreover, Linna had the gall to question why the Finns were fighting this war with the Nazis in the first place.

  Linna’s eye for realism in the warfare of the sub-Arctic forests, stems from his own experience as a squad leader of a machinegun unit on the Eastern Front. That, and being a factory worker himself, helps him imbue his colorful squaddies with very human fears and foibles. The earthy dialog also rings true, for example, “I’m a Finn, I eat metal and I shit chain,” and one of the characters, Rokka, has come to mean an insubordinate but brilliant soldier in Finnish. That does not prevent them meeting pointless, random, and terrifying deaths—such is the nature of warfare. The Unknown Soldier became the country’s biggest-selling novel, and was turned into a movie twice (1955 and 1985). JHa

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  I’m Not Stiller

  Max Frisch

  Lifespan | b. 1911 (Switzerland), d. 1991

  First Published | 1954, by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt)

  Original Title | Stiller

  Original Language | German

  Widely considered Switzerland’s greatest literary figure of the last century, Max Frisch was a novelist, playwright, diarist, and journalist. The popular and critically acclaimed I’m Not Stiller is a remarkably sustained narrative, which combines anguish and humor to explore issues of identity, self-loathing, and humanity’s intense longing for freedom.

  The novel begins with the arrest at the Swiss border of a man traveling under a false identity. He claims to be Mr. White from America, but the Swiss authorities believe him to be Anatol Stiller, a famous sculptor from Zürich, who has been missing for six years. In prison, the man is asked to write down his life story in order to prove his identity. In the process he tells not only stories of the past few years of his life, but also of his meetings in the present with Stiller’s wife, Julika, and other important people from his past. Through these accounts we learn about his life before the disappearance and are able to piece together a picture of this deeply troubled character. Stiller writes about himself as if he is another person—a self he has attempted to escape from, but which he now has to confront anew as he is slowly compelled to accept both his past and his real identity.

  An ironic exploration of an extreme existential crisis, this is also a touching portrayal of a failed marriage and a social critique of Swiss conformity. Complex, psychologically profound, and intellectually challenging, it still manages to be entertaining, funny, and poignant at the same time. AL

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Ragazzi

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Lifespan | b. 1922 (Italy), d. 1975

  First Published | 1955

  First Published by | Garzanti (Milan)

  Original Title | Ragazzi di vita

  Ragazzi di vita, translated literally into English as Boys of Life, is the story of a group of boys who live in the slums of Rome during the years immediately following the Second World War. One of the notable aspects of the Italian edition is that it contains a glossary of words in the “Romano” dialect for the Italian reader unfamiliar with it. Those acquainted with the Italian cinematographic neorealism of the period will know that the use of regional dialects and of non-professional actors was common in the films of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, and other directors.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini was an unorthodox Marxist who thought that the emphasis on exploitation, alienation, and marginalization needed to be supplemented by an analysis of the mechanism of integration in modern, liberal democracies. Hence the ambiguity of the sociopolitical condition of the sub-proletariat in Pasolini’s novels of the later 1950s; the class occupies the unique position of running the simultaneous risk of complete integration or complete marginalization. But Pasolini’s achievement here is his non-sentimental portrayal of the choice between joining a banal, all-encompassing mainstream, or accepting life on a hopelessly bleak periphery. Today better known as a director, Pasolini’s literary status was established by Ragazzi di vita, and it is more than worthy of the best aspirations of the Italian neorealist movement. DSch

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Recognitions

  William Gaddis

  Lifespan | b. 1922 (U.S.), d. 1998

  First Published | 1955

  First Published by | Harcourt Brace (New York)

  Original Language | English

  It is in pursuit of the real that this immense novel explores every imaginable way that cultural products can be forged, or counterfeited. Paintings are faked, ideas for novels are stolen, plays are plagiarized, book reviews are paid for, and somebody in a Paris café has “a fake concentration camp number tattooed on her left arm.”The main character, Wyatt Gwyon, is an artist whose skills are appropriated by an unscrupulous art dealer and a gallery owner to produce work by the nonexistent Flemish painter van der Goes. Feeling himself to be unreal, Wyatt insists to his wife, Esther, that being moral “is the only way we can know ourselves to be real.” She asks him pointedly if women can afford to be moral. In this novel, no thought is effective, no discussion concludes, and no narrator intervenes on behalf of truth.

  Almost every character here is an American, but the context is European high culture. You need to know Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian to get the many jokes. The same scenes recur at the end as at the beginning, so this novel resembles a snake swallowing its tail. Based on confused conversations—often at parties or in cafés—the word predominates, but the physical evidence of corruption is that the characters keep tripping up and falling down. Bodily incompetence eventually extends to the built environment when a hotel collapses and an organ-player brings down upon himself an entire church. The Recognitions was an influential “sleeper” novel: Thomas Pynchon is Gaddis Americanized. AMu

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Burning Plain

  Juan Rulfo

  Lifespan | b. 1917 (Mexico), d. 1986

  First Published | 1955

  First Published by | Fondo de Cultura Económica

  Original Title | El Llano en llamas

  With this collection of fifteen stories (which became seventeen in later editions), Juan Rulfo was recognized as a master. Post-revolutionary scenes in Llano Grande in the state of Jalisco overcome the rural limitations of these tales about the Mexican Revolution. The popular language is artistically developed and the life of the peasant appears representative of an archetype of neglect, at the margins of folklore.

  Rulfo’s stories are about what has happened and what cannot be changed (in “The Man” and “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”). Rulfo explores the mechanisms of power and the faces of violence, often within the framework of family relationships being torn apart (“No Dogs Bark,” “The Inheritance of Matilde Arcángel”). The majority of Rulfo’s characters are alone and feel that they are culprits (“Macario,” “The Hill of the Comrades”). As a result, they are traveling or wandering with no true purpose (“Talpa,” “They Gave Us the Land”), and they speak ceaselessly in the face of dumb or nonexistent interlocutors (“Luvina,” “Remember”). The skillful handling of temporal structure and narrative voices, together with the dexterous balance between reality and fantasy, remote from magical realism, means that the great originality of these stories and their author would be enough, with only one other novel (Pedro Páramo), for him to be considered one of the greatest writers of his time. DMG

  See all books from the 1900s

  1900s

  The Quiet American

  Graham Greene

  Lifespan | b. 1904 (England), d. 1991 (Switzerland)

  First Published | 1955

  First Published by | Heinemann (London)

  Movie Adaptations Released | 1958, 2002

  This novel is, in some sense, an allegory for the end of paternalistic European colonialism in Indochina and the beginning of zealous Ameri
can imperialism. Set in Vietnam during the early 1950s, it recounts the conflict between Fowler, the jaded English journalist, and Pyle, the idealistic American spy, for the affections of Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman anxious for a Western husband to provide shelter from poverty and prostitution. Phuong is constantly associated with the Vietnamese landscape and flora, but also with the intoxicating opium and an aura of unintelligibility. Pyle is young and wealthy and offers the promise of financial security, whereas Fowler is old and jaded, offering only the prospects of a continuing and unsatisfactory informal union. For these reasons, the book has most frequently been read as prophetic and critical of America’s role in the Vietnam War.

  Typically, Graham Greene’s novel is not contained by the limitations of its genre and expands from this central allegory to offer a study of masculinity and responsibility. The novel is infested with references to what is manly. It seeks to puncture the mock heroics of soldiers and, by extension, journalists, in an attempt to undermine the reverence for physical action usually found in thrillers. Finally, it questions Fowler’s desire for disengagement in the face of conflict, suggesting that to be a man requires him to take a moral responsibility for events. LC