There is a pop-nihilism throughout. “Playing it as it lays” comes to Maria as advice from a deceased world, from parents who are as outmoded as her hometown, which was levelled to make way for a missile range. Maria is a character unbounded and helpless, and her decline gains momentum through a loveless marriage, the suicide of a friend, and a traumatic abortion that becomes the focus of the book. Maria is eventually incarcerated in the same mental institution as her daughter—Maria’s only link to a world of unalloyed emotional life.
Didion’s forbears settled the Sacramento Valley in the 1850s and a version of the pioneering spirit pervades the directionless drift of Maria, typified by her relentless freeway driving. This slice of 1960s abjection, written at the end of that decade, avoids moral lessons or resolution in preference for unadulterated exposure. It succeeds thanks to Didion’s skill at creating character out of her highly stylized sentences. DTu
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1900s
Jahrestage
Uwe Johnson
Lifespan | b. 1934 (Germany), d. 1984 (England)
First Published | 1970, by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt)
Full Title | Jahrestage: Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl (Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl)
“History can demolish one’s house.” Uwe Johnson
Jahrestage is Uwe Johnson’s masterpiece, a magisterial sweep through German history from the days of the Kaiser and ending in 1960s New York. Born in a part of eastern Germany that became Polish territory, Johnson left East Germany for West Germany, before eventually settling in Kent, England. There, while recovering from a breakdown, caused by the discovery that his wife was spying on him for German Democratic Republic secret services, he finished Jahrestage.
Published in four volumes, Jahrestage (meaning Anniversary) describes 365 days in the life of Gesine Cresspahl. Gesine lives in New York with Marie, her daughter from a past relationship with Jakob Abs, the protagonist of Johnson’s earlier novel Mutmaßungen über Jakob. The ten-year-old Marie makes Gesine talk about the past: in the narrative that follows, one year in New York becomes the lens through which German history is filtered. Gesine moves back in time, to her family in a small village in Mecklenburg. The story is interwoven with that of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and links back to the time of Wilhelm II and the Weimar Republic, before returning to the present in a divided Germany. Marie takes the information in her stride; Gesine realizes that she will always be a stranger in the United States, but prefers exile to a return to Germany.
Jahrestage is technically fascinating because of its complex use of overlapping time levels that shape the narration, but the formidable length of the novel has put off many readers. A recent film version by Margarethe von Trotta (2000) is helping to restore Johnson to his place among the most important writers of postwar Germany, on the same level as Günther Grass and Heinrich Böll. MM
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1900s
A World for Julius
Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Lifespan | b. 1939 (Peru)
First Published | 1970
First Published by | Barral Editores (Barcelona)
Original Title | Un mundo para Julius
“The writer is a surprised being.” Alfredo Bryce Echenique
A World for Julius could be defined, essentially, as a novel of education and the confusing journey towards maturity. Between the ages of five and twelve, the youngest child of an upper-class family in Lima, who loses his father soon after he is born, truly discovers the world and learns how people’s behavior is determined by their surroundings. Alfredo Bryce Echenique traces the movement of his young protagonist, Julius, through a series of social worlds; a world of the faded old palaces of the descendants of the viceroys; the world of dazzling new palaces built by speculators who spend their days shuttling between parties and playing golf; the world of expensive colleges, where the pleasures of music and caresses are learned, but also the pain of blows and humiliations; and the world of the hovels of the servants and the tenements of a more impoverished and alienated middle class. Through these experiences, the child discovers death (that of his unknown father, his favorite sister, and the most motherly of the maids) and also the meaning of friendship and love (meager in the case of his mother, stepfather, and his siblings; sincere and sometimes moving in the case of the maidservants).
Bryce Echenique’s novel ends ambiguously—refusing to reveal which of these multiple worlds will turn out to be the dominant one for Julius, to which of them the adolescent will be delivered, and whether he has actually learned enough to carry them on his shoulders. Typical of the author is his mastery of a very free use of speech, bold changes of perspective, and an autobiographical tone that varies between the ironic and the sentimental. These characteristics gave his writing a new direction that placed him firmly in the boom generation of Spanish-American fiction. DMG
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1900s
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
Lifespan | b. 1928 (U.S.)
First Published | 1970
First Published by | Random House (New York)
Given Name | Marguerite Ann Johnson
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of five volumes of singer, poet, actress and writer Maya Angelou’s autobiography and is a milestone for African-American writing. In her distinctive lyrical prose, Angelou recounts the first seventeen years of her life, discussing her unsettled childhood in America in the 1930s and her changing relationships. When her parents separate, Maya and her brother Bailey, three and four years old respectively, are sent from their parental home in California back to the segregated South, to live with their grandmother, Momma, in rural Arkansas. Momma provides a strict moral center to their lives. At the age of eight, Maya goes to stay with her mother in St. Louis, where she is molested and raped by her mother’s partner. With her brother she later returns to stay with Momma before returning again to live with her mother and her mother’s husband in California. The book ends with the birth of Maya’s first child, Guy.
Angelou became a prominent figure in the American Civil Rights Movement, fighting for African-American rights during the 1960s. She became a close associate of Malcolm X, and later of Dr. Martin Luther King. When King was assassinated in 1968, Angelou was inspired by a meeting with James Baldwin and cartoonist Jules Feiffer to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a way of dealing with death of her friend, and to draw attention to her own personal struggles with racism. Against the backdrop of racial tensions in the South, Maya Angelou confronts the traumatic events of her own childhood, and explores the evolution of her own strong identity as an African-American woman. Her individual and cultural feelings of displacement are mediated through her passion for literature, which proves both healing and empowering. JW
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1900s
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
Lifespan | b. 1931 (U.S.)
First Published | 1970
First Published by | Holt, Rinehart & Winston (N.Y.)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1993
This is Toni Morrison’s first novel and recounts the life of the Breedlove family after they move from the country to set up home in Lorain, Ohio (also the author’s birthplace). The Breedloves’ dislocation, and the descent into madness of their daughter, Pecola, becomes a powerful metaphor for the difficulties of trying to inhabit a space of black identity that is not already part of a racist mythology.
The novel suggests that the categories of gender, race, and economics are enmeshed in determining the fate of the eleven-year-old tragic heroine. Pecola’s obsessive desire to have the bluest eyes is a symptom of the way that the black female body has become dominated by white masculine culture. Morrison offers a typically powerful critique of the way that black subjectivity continues to be repressed in a commodity culture. The complex
temporal structure of the novel and the restless changes in point of view are in part an attempt to imagine a fluid model of subjectivity that can offer some kind of resistance to a dominant white culture. The adolescent black sisters who relate the narrative, Claudia and Freda MacTeer, offer a contrast to the oppressed Breedlove family in that here they exercise both agency and authority.
In this early novel, Morrison’s writing not only captures the hidden cadences of speech; she writes with a keen sensitivity to the protean quality of words. She offers a poetry infused with the promise of alternative modes of being in the world. VA
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1900s
The Sea of Fertility
Yukio Mishima
Lifespan | b. 1925 (Japan), d. 1970
First Published | 1965–1970
First Published by | Shinchosha (Tokyo)
Original Title | Hojo no umi
Published in four volumes, The Sea of Fertility is Mishima’s final work. It first appeared in serial form in the Japanese literary magazine Shincho. Volume One, Spring Snow, is set in the sequestered world of Tokyo’s imperial court in around 1910 and depicts the hopeless love between the young aristocrat Kiyoaki Matsugae and his lover, Satoko. Kiyoaki keeps a distance from Satoko, until her engagement to a son of the Emperor makes the impossibility of their love all too real. At this point, their desperate but passionate affair begins, witnessed by Shigekuni Honda, Kiyoaki’s closest friend. When Kiyoaki dies, Honda embarks on a search for his reincarnation.
The protagonists in the later volumes (Runaway Horses and The Temple at Dawn) bear the shade of Kiyoaki—as a political fanatic in the 1930s, as a Thai princess before and after the Second World War, and, in the final volume (The Decay of the Angel), as an evil orphan in the 1960s. The idea of this reincarnation nourishes Honda until the final volume. The ending suggests that human life is irretrievable and its end inevitable. In a stunning finale, Honda finally realizes the impossibility of reliving the past and reviving the dead. The novel, which some consider to be the Japanese version of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, provides us with a fabulous insight into life and the experience of memory. KK
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1900s
Rabbit Redux
John Updike
Lifespan | b. 1932 (U.S.), d. 2009
First Published | 1971
First Published by | Alfred Knopf (New York)
Pulitzer Prizes | 1982, 1991
Rabbit Redux, John Updike’s second novel in his four-volume “Rabbit” series, takes place in 1969, ten years after the end of Rabbit, Run. Set in the small town of Brewer, Pennsylvania, the Rabbit series describe the life of Harry Angstrom, nicknamed “Rabbit,” as he progresses from high school basketball star to young husband and father, and finally through middle age and into retirement.
Updike’s Everyman, now in his thirties, is uncomfortably aware of being on the verge of middle age. Set against the surreal background of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Rabbit Redux charts, through Rabbit’s own chaotic personal life, the positive and damaging changes to small-town America, brought about by the collision of traditional values and hierarchies and the irresistible rise of 1960s counterculture. When his apparently conformist marriage begins to crumble, Rabbit must acknowledge the wider events that are occurring in the lives of those around him, pitting him against his working-class Midwestern roots. Rabbit’s certainties about life begin to crumble, threatening his relationships with his family and colleagues. However, Rabbit is granted unexpected spiritual growth that changes his life.
Rabbit Redux not only describes but lovingly captures the feeling of the 1960s, plunging the reader into a world characterized by confused sensuality and political chaos, but also a touching and expansive hope for the future. AB
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1900s
Cataract
Mykhaylo Osadchyi
Lifespan | b. 1936 (Soviet Union), d. 1994 (Ukraine)
First Published | 1971
First Published by | Smoloskyp (Paris/Baltimore)
Original Title | Bilmo
This book is one of the seminal texts of Soviet underground literature of the 1960s. It describes the arrest and imprisonment of the author, Ukrainian journalist and poet Mykhaylo Osadchyi, on various charges of anti-Soviet and pro-Ukrainian activities—“crimes” that he had been unaware of committing until he was arrested for them.
In general, Ukraine’s underground literature had less impact internationally than similar works from Russia. This was partly due to the difficult logistics of smuggling it out of the country, but also because both the world human rights community and most professional Sovietologists considered that in the case of Soviet matters analysis should focus on the “center”—Moscow and Leningrad. The strength of ethnic self-identification and desire for cultural autonomy and political independence in the non-Russian republics was largely disregarded.
Cataract (the title refers to the disorder that obscures vision) is not simply a factual account of the writer’s trial and arrest, but also of his prison dreams and fantasies—dreams that some readers have seen as symptoms of incipient insanity, but which are better perceived as allegorical of the degradation and denigration of the individual psyche under the Soviet system, in everyday life no less than in prison or labor camp. Brilliantly written by an insightful writer, Cataract not only documents a specific historic situation but is also an enduring proclamation of the human spirit in adversity. VR
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1900s
Group Portrait With Lady
Heinrich Böll
Lifespan | b. 1917 (Germany), d. 1985
First Published | 1971
First Published by | Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Cologne)
Original Title | Gruppenbild mit Dame
“The Author is far from having insight into all aspects of Leni’s life, yet everything . . . has been done to obtain the kind of information on Leni that is known to be factual.”
What Heinrich Böll creates in his Nobel Prize-winning novel is an ensemble of transitory identities. The novel leads into the German past between 1890 and 1970. Psychological insights from the perspectives of various characters are hetero-geneous and convincing. We encounter young intellectuals, a Jewish nun, a female freedom fighter, a notorious upstart, a political opportunist, and stupefied Nazis. Yet, one person remains a matter of pure conjecture: Leni Pfeiffer. She is the lady in the center of the portrait around whom the series of interviews, letters and personal stories revolve. Leni is seen through the eyes of the narrator, who tends to mystify his blond and allegedly naïve protagonist. Nevertheless, her character resists cliché; her insistence on overcoming racial and social limits points to a subversive, intelligent character.
Böll’s writing is bound up with the aims of Gruppe 47 (Group 47)—a literary association founded by Alfred Andersch and Walter Richter in West Germany in 1947. These authors responded to the gulf that had been opened between them and those German intellectuals who had fled Nazi rule. Initially, the authors of the Gruppe 47 felt the need to cleanse their language of Nazi propaganda by advocating a sparse realism. In Group Portrait With Lady, the naturalistic narrative indicates the complexity of real life, particularly toward the end of the novel, when the narrator reveals his partiality by actively participating in the events. MC
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1900s
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S. Thompson
Lifespan | b. 1939 (U.S.), d. 2005
First Published | 1971, by Random House (N.Y.)
Full Title | Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
“‘How about some ether?’”
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Thompson’s novel has one of the most recognizable first lines in modern fiction. It tells the story o
f the narrator’s chemical-fueled sojourn in and around Las Vegas in the manic company of his Samoan attorney, on an assignment to cover an off-road dune-buggy-and-motorbike race called the Mint 400 for a New York sporting magazine. Having spent his advance on a trunkload of illegal drugs, the pair begin their adventure at a crazed pitch, abandoning any sense of personal responsibility. This frenzy intensifies when they hit the city and, among other questionable decisions, decide to hole up in a hotel which is hosting the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
The heroes’ self-indulgence is simply American over-consumption turned up many notches in a parodic take-off of thoughtless consumerism. At the same time, the journey is an extreme but somehow admirable celebration of traditional American freedoms, in Nixon’s first term as president, while the war in Vietnam is being waged, and scandalously punitive jail sentences are being handed out at home for draftcard burners and marijuana smokers. Fear and Loathing is experienced through doors of perception, which are set so fantastically awry that no one can be said to know for sure what just happened, what is happening, and what might happen. The book provides an invigorating and hilarious demolition job on the ultimate postmodern city, suggesting that the best way to resist Vegas’s rapacious demands is to screw yourself up so entirely beforehand that you are altogether unable to respond in the way which the city commands that you do. RP
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