1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

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  1900s

  Kiss of the Spider Woman

  Manuel Puig

  Lifespan | b. 1932 (Argentina), d. 1990 (Mexico)

  First Published | 1976

  First Published by | Seix-Barral (Barcelona)

  Original Title | El beso de la mujer araña

  Kiss of the Spider Woman is Manuel Puig’s most acclaimed novel, and also the most original despite the simplicity of its approach. Two prisoners share a cell in the Argentina of the military dictatorship: Molina, a homosexual window dresser, a frivolous, egocentric character, imprisoned for corruption of a minor, and Valentín, who is there for “subversion” and is obsessed by the woman he has abandoned to follow the revolutionary struggle. To distract them from the periodic torture sessions to which they are subjected by the political police, Molina begins to tell Valentín tales of the old romantic movies that he loves. At first reluctant, Valentín joins Molina in his world of glamor and sentimentality, impatiently looking forward to the next story. Molina, for his part, comes to commits himself to Valentín’s cause.

  Here film becomes a powerful metaphor, as the situations of the characters in Molina’s movie plots find parallels in the relationship between the two men, which passes from indifference to friendship, and from compassion to love. The novel at the same time forms a fascinating intersection between the question of “compromise,” so prominent in the debates of the 1970s, and the prerogatives of fantasy and imagination. SR

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  Almost Transparent Blue

  Ryu Murakami

  Lifespan | b. 1952 (Japan)

  First Published | 1976

  First Published by | Kodansha (Tokyo)

  Original Title | Kagirinaku tomei ni chikai buru

  Rendered in excruciating, often repugnant detail, Ryu Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue describes the day-to-day existence of a group of nihilistic youths living near an American army base in an unnamed Japanese port town. The narrator, Ryu, and his friends have rejected the formulaic lifestyle of the “straights”—including job security, family, and most importantly, moral constraints. Rather, they devote their shared existence to drugs, sexual orgies, and music. Seemingly without a plot, the novel outlines the boredom, alienation, and subsequent depravity of a generation lacking purpose.

  Written when he was only twenty-three, Ryu Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue refuses to spare the reader’s sensibilities. The audience is forced to partake in a catalog of graphic sexual violence and drug-induced frenzies, unable to avert its gaze from the unpalatable. But beneath the meticulous descriptions of the grotesque is a stark portrait of a universal loneliness, reminiscent of Albert Camus or Franz Kafka. Straying away from the introspective trend of postwar literature, this enfant terrible of the Japanese art world annihilates the Japan of snowcapped mountains and cherry blossoms, exposing the underbelly of a culture in flux. Dividing readers and critics alike, Almost Transparent Blue won the prestigious Akutagawa Literary Prize in 1976, and became an instant bestseller. BJ

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  In the Heart of the Country

  J. M. Coetzee

  Lifespan | b. 1940 (South Africa)

  First Published | 1977

  First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)

  Nobel Prize for Literature | 2003

  In the Heart of the Country, J. M. Coetzee’s second novel, is a tale of madness, lust, and fantasy in the heart of the South African veld. Magda is the spinster daughter of a widowed white farmer on an isolated farm. When her father seduces the young bride of their African servant Hendrik, Magda collapses into jealousy, alienation, and an ambivalent desire for the love and sexuality she has never known. Feeling herself to be dried-up, barren, sexless, and unused, Magda believes that she has been spoiled for all others by her lifetime of isolation with her distant and oppressive father—a “spoiling” that in her fantasies becomes an act of paternal rape.

  Coetzee’s stark, dense prose achieves a kind of dark poetry as Magda struggles to fill in the void of her life with words. In enforced seclusion from history, time stretches before and behind Magda without meaning or event, and through her incessant weaving of stories she strives to pull this life into some kind of significance. Language fails, and her mind begins to consume itself. In the Heart of the Country is the story of a woman that history has abandoned, but the book does not itself abandon history in its journey into the inner psyche. Shocking, challenging, and disturbing, this is one of the earliest of Coetzee’s fictional explorations of the webs of sexual and racial oppression bequeathed to South Africa by its history of colonial rule. VM

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  The Engineer of Human Souls

  Josef Skvorecky

  Lifespan | b. 1924 (Czechoslovakia)

  First Published | 1977

  First Published by | Sixty-Eight (Toronto)

  Original Title | Príbeh inzenyra lidskych dusí

  The Engineer of Human Souls centers on protagonist Danny Smiricky, a Czechoslovak writer in exile in Canada who has lived under both the Nazi and Communist regimes. Considered by the Czech authorities to be a controversial and divisive writer, Danny is continually hounded by the secret police. The plot zigzags between past and present as incidents in Danny’s life trigger flashbacks from his past life in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. He adopts various guises during his comedic adventures and escapes as a fugitive in order to avoid persecution.

  While it is a hilarious satirical black comedy, the novel is also a somber portrait of life as a Czech immigrant in postwar Canada. The seven chapters closely relate to writers who are included in the course that Danny is currently teaching at a university in Toronto, all of whom—Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Conrad, and Lovecraft—feature largely throughout the novel.

  Josef Skvorecky was born in 1924 in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia. His first novel, The Cowards, written in 1958, was condemned by the Communist Party. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, Skvorecky and his wife left for Canada, where he worked as a lecturer and founded the Sixty-Eight Publishers, who published banned Czech and Slovak books. Skvorecky has received numerous awards and was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1992. RA

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  Quartet in Autumn

  Barbara Pym

  Lifespan | b. 1913 (England), d. 1980

  First Published | 1977

  First Published by | Macmillan (London)

  Booker Prize Nominee | 1977

  A successful novelist in the 1950s, Barbara Pym was abandoned by publishers in the 1960s, her subtle, gently humorous novels regarded as unsellable in the new brash cultural climate. In 1977, her admirers, who included the poet Philip Larkin, succeeded in attracting public attention to the long-neglected novelist. Quartet in Autumn was published—her first novel to appear for sixteen years—to critical acclaim.

  Quartet describes the lives of four office workers approaching retirement: Marcia, Lettie, Norman and Edwin. All four live alone. Marcia is a woman veering from dottiness towards outright madness. She has developed an obsession with the surgeon who performed her mastectomy. Although she buys tinned food regularly she never eats, slowly dying of malnutrition while the tins accumulate. Lettie is sane and sensitive but painfully isolated, humiliated and patronized by all around her. The irascible Norman, “like a tetchy little dog,” passes his life snapping at people and cars, while Edwin is a self-satisfied incense-sniffer, seeking out the most gratifying church services to attend.

  The plot is a web of missed encounters: The nearest approach to an emotional relationship between the characters is Marcia’s fleeting interest in Norman. Quartet in Autumn is saturated in loneliness and death; this is a book for readers ready to face some of the darkest truths of life. RegG

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  The Hour of the Star

  Clarice Lispector

  Lifespan | b. 1920 (Ukraine), d. 1977 (Brazil)

  First Published | 1977

  First Published by | Livraria José Olympio Editora

  Original Title | A Hora da estrela

  Clarice Lispector is known internationally as one of the great exponents of the short story, and the delicacy, evanescence, and unremitting intensity of her work do not translate easily into more extended narrative modes of fiction. In her final novel, The Hour of the Star, she is stretched to her formal limits. This novel operates in familiar territory for Lispector and traces the tragic life and sudden death of a poor young black Brazilian woman, Macabéa, who travels from the backwoods of Alagoas to Rio, where she ekes out a precarious existence as a barely functioning secretary. Lispector’s peculiar abilities to evoke the inner lives of oppressed, uneducated, and inarticulate women are triumphantly displayed here. Her strategies for giving a voice to the voiceless include a constant humor, sometimes laconic, sometimes shot through with a wild despair.

  Lispector’s tremulous narrative evokes a game of life and death, in which it is the author’s sacred duty to redeem her characters from oblivion. Lispector as narrator talks of her relationship with Macabéa, and gives some sense of the passionate fragility with which she negotiates her sacred task as author: “As the author I alone love her. I suffer on her account. And I alone may say to her: ‘What do you ask of me weeping that I would not give to you singing?’” Lispector dedicated this book to a series of great composers, clearly aware that her work is as untranslatable as beautiful music. Lispector must be read, not written about. MW

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  Song of Solomon

  Toni Morrison

  Lifespan | b. 1931 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1977

  First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)

  Given Name | Chloë Anthony Wofford

  Song of Solomon opens with a desperate and lonely man attempting to fly, watched by a woman who is in the early stages of labor. The novel goes on to tell us the story of this baby, the first black child to be born inside the Mercy Hospital on Not Doctor Street. His laboring mother was allowed into the hospital because of the commotion following the failed flight from its roof and because his father had been the town’s first doctor. The circumstances of this child’s birth—the desires, disappointments, and dispossessions that infuse it—are the questions that he grows up to eventually resolve.

  The child, Macon Dead Jr., is the son of the richest black family in a Midwestern town, and has a privileged, if largely loveless, childhood. His parents are long estranged. It is only when Macon becomes familiar with his paternal aunt’s family that he learns of a family history rich in secrets and stories that he needs to gain access to. His desire for manhood takes him on a quest and he returns to the South and to the folklore from which he has been estranged. Macon finds a family history that explains him to himself and lets him, finally, possess his name. It is not until he returns home, however, and realizes the damage that his former privileged casualness has wreaked, that he learns the responsibilities that come with this knowledge. NM

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  The Wars

  Timothy Findley

  Lifespan | b. 1930 (Canada), d. 2002 (France)

  First Published | 1977

  First Published by | Clarke, Irwin & Co (Toronto)

  Governor General’s Award for Fiction | 1977

  The Wars was a bestseller and is the third novel in a total of eleven. Timothy Findley’s Canadian childhood and adolescence were marked by family conflict, the events and aftermath of the Second World War, and an early realization of his homosexuality. Through these seminal experiences can be traced the recurring themes of his work—mental illness, sexuality, war, and the sufferings of the vulnerable.

  The Wars is a Postmodern narrative made up of a series of personal testimonies, letters, and diary entries interspersed with the reflections of the researcher who has brought them all together. He is attempting to construct a cohesive history of Robert Ross, a nineteen-year-old Canadian who enlisted as an officer in the First World War, and the effect is a convincing documentary-style text.

  Findley portrays the damage wrought on a sensitive middle-class boy whose innocence is stripped brutally from him through a series of traumatic events. Amid the carnage, love grows, not only for a fellow officer and a glamorous girl back home, but for the most blameless victims of all—the animals. Robert’s rape at the hands of his comrades is emblematic of the nature of war in general—the rape of humanity. Finally broken by the insanity that surrounds him, Robert commits the last desperate and ambiguous act toward which the trajectory of the narrative speeds. Is this an act of cowardly insanity or clear minded heroism? A rejection of life or its beautiful affirmation? GMi

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  Dispatches

  Michael Herr

  Lifespan | b. 1940 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1977

  First Published by | Alfred A. Knopf (New York)

  First UK Edition | 1978, by Pan Books (London)

  Ostensibly journalism, Dispatches is above all great literature. The book charts the year Michael Herr spent in Vietnam (1967–68), where he witnessed some of the most brutal fighting and significant events of the war, including the Tet offensive and Khe Sanh siege. It is a carefully structured, finely wrought work that reads at times like a memoir, but with the impact and intensity of live action reporting. There is little by way of conventional journalism, but only a frank, raw account of what it felt like to be there.

  Herr is unsentimental yet sympathetic in his treatment of the “grunts,” the regular soldiers. He brilliantly captures the verve and wit of their slang as well as the fear, boredom, and drug-fueled insanity of the Vietnam experience. His astonishing prose ranges from a soldier’s crude cynicism, “that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period,” to lyrical evocations of the jungle where “your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet.” The book is an exploration of man’s seemingly intractable need for thrill-seeking and the terrible fact that war is the ultimate hit. It does not shy away from the absolute horror of the war and yet it also shows how nothing can possibly match the feeling of being so alive. This is all too clearly illustrated to the reader by the disquieting fact that the book is utterly compelling to read. AL

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  The Shining

  Stephen King

  Lifespan | b. 1947 (U.S.)

  First Published | 1977

  First Published by | Doubleday (New York)

  Movie Adaptation Released | 1980

  “‘I don’t believe you care much for me, Mr. Torrance. I don’t care. Certainly your feelings toward me play no part in my own belief that you are not right for the job.’”

  Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson, is well established as classic cinema. The immense popularity of the film, however, has perhaps eclipsed the achievement of Stephen King’s novel as an exceptional and thrilling piece of storytelling. When Jack Torrance takes the job as caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel for the winter, he thinks it will provide the perfect setting in which to soothe damaged bonds between himself, his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny, and to put an end to his long-lingering unfinished play. Nothing could be further from the truth. Marital tension, alcoholism, the destructiveness of feelings of guilt, writer’s block, telepathy—not to mention wasps’ nests—all converge in King’s Jack Torrance more subtly and even more disturbingly than Kubrick manages to depict on screen. Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of this novel, however, is the way that King handles and narrates the experience of a psychic/telepathic five-year-old boy who has a direct link to his father’s
growing insanity. As a character, Danny is neither clichéd nor overblown.

  What is fascinating about this book is the balance it provokes between internal and external worlds, and the questions it raises about whether madness comes from the inside out or vice versa. It is also a novel about voices, the telepathic voices received and transmitted by Danny, but also voices as they come in the shape of histories: the history of Wendy and Jack’s marriage; their private histories; the sinister history of the Overlook that Jack discovers in a scrapbook in the basement. Histories in The Shining become dangerous and destructive. It is, without a doubt, among the most sophisticated of King’s novels and is filled with some of the most disturbing and intriguing of all King’s characters. PM