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Delta of Venus
Anaïs Nin
Lifespan | b. 1903 (France), d. 1977 (U.S.)
First Published | 1977
First Published by | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (N.Y.)
Original Language | English
Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus is a collection of strikingly Freudian erotica written for the titillation of an aged but wealthy collector at the rate of a dollar a page. Each story is a self-contained erotic episode or series of episodes, but the whole has the mark of a novel since some characters, notably the prostitute, Bijou, recur in several places. The action occurs throughout in a stylized urban and suburban Paris as distinctive and amorphous as that in Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris. The evocation of evenings in the cold studios of failing artists, the fumes of drugs, the sound of cheap music, and the rain in the gutters make Nin’s tales of sexual encounter her own most impressive prose-poem: a kind of Le Cul de Paris.
Unlike the formulae of mainstream pornography, Nin’s work touches upon homosexuality, incest hermaphroditism, interracial affairs, fetishism, and pedophilia, and its depiction of heterosexual love-making is remarkable for the genre. Everyone who takes part in the erotic cycle of tension and release, and the class of prudes who attempt to remove themselves from it, is on the road to or from a personal pathology. The characters are in helpless thrall to infatuations, repressions, and deep-seated hatreds that can only be allayed in their brief obliteration through orgasm. Bijou, however, is Nin’s most remarkable creation, a voluptuous cipher and part-owner of a body placed permanently on display, endlessly enticing to men and women alike. Her total immersion in the performance of sex scarcely allows for an inner life worth having, but the unavailability of a “real” Bijou, set against the descriptions of her total sexual availability, proves much more intriguing than the recklessly conventional introspection and motivations of the other protagonists in the book. RP
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1900s
The Beggar Maid
Alice Munro
Lifespan | b. 1931 (Canada)
First Published | 1978
First Published by | Macmillan of Canada (Toronto)
Original Canadian Title | Who Do You Think You Are?
Brought up in relative poverty, largely by Flo, her stepmother, Rose is educated out of her class. She is courted and won by Patrick, the scion of a wealthy family, who venerates her as the beggar maid in a pre-Raphaelite painting. Rose’s loyalties are divided between her married life in the Vancouver suburbs and the harsh values she has left far behind geographically, but which are too deeply internalized to ever be fully rejected.
Alice Munro is best known as a short-story writer, and the gestation of The Beggar Maid was marked by conflicts with publishers who, at the start of her international career, were expecting her to switch to writing novels. What she produced in The Beggar Maid is something between a successful hybrid of the two forms, a sequence of stories marking out the stages in Rose’s life so far. There is continuity, but also gaps in between. The marriage disintegrates, and Rose takes up a nomadic lifestyle as an actor and teacher, her choice of profession mirroring Munro’s suggestion that we are all playing a series of roles.
In later episodes, such as “Simon’s Luck,” Munro explores the excruciating torments brought by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, as the old inhibitions are thrown out, only to be replaced by less explicit, more ambiguous rules of conduct. No one can summon desire as strongly as Munro, or the shame of disappointment. Munro’s finely nuanced writing gives us no easy answers, no heroes or villains, just an understanding of the fickle turns of fate. ACo
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1900s
Requiem for a Dream
Hubert Selby Jr.
Lifespan | b. 1928 (U.S.), d. 2004
First Published | 1978
First Published by | Playboy Press (Chicago)
Original Language | English
The destruction of the characters in Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream is made all the more tragic because they bring their demise on themselves. The novel depicts the attempts of the four protagonists to escape the normality of their lives—by selling drugs, in the case of Harry, Tyrone and Marion, and by appearing on a television game show, in the case of Harry’s mother Sara. Both modes of escape are rooted in addiction; to the heroin that the younger characters take but also want to sell, to the slimming pills that Sara takes in preparation for her dreamed-of television appearance, and to television and dreams as inextricably related entities.
The most striking horror of Requiem for a Dream is the degree to which the characters are able to ignore the evidence of their senses in order to continue towards the dream they have allocated themselves. This is seen most clearly in Sara’s mental and physical deterioration through her abuse of slimming pills and amphetamines, and in Harry’s willful blindness to the impracticalities of selling heroin as an addict, and to the severe infection that leads to him losing his arm. It is the anesthetizing process that all of Selby’s protagonists effect on themselves, and on each other, that renders them unable to escape the paths they set in motion. As the novel unfolds it becomes clear that this is not solely an internal process, but one that is performed on them by their society, where chasing a dream at all costs is encouraged constantly. SF
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1900s
The Singapore Grip
J. G. Farrell
Lifespan | b. 1935 (England), d. 1979 (Ireland)
First Published | 1978
First Published by | Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London)
Full Name | James Gordon Farrell
“The city of Singapore was not built up gradually, the way most cities are. . . . It was simply invented one morning early in the nineteenth century by a man looking at a map.”
Set in Singapore just before the Japanese invasion in the Second World War, The Singapore Grip is the final book in Farrell’s Empire Trilogy that began with Troubles and the Siege of Krishnapur. In each book, Farrell takes a critical view of the British Empire, representing its demise through a cast of characters, both fictional and historical, whose lives are irrevocably changed by events beyond their control.
The money that Farrell received from the Booker Prize for the Siege of Krishnapur helped him fund a trip to Singapore in 1975, where he began the meticulous research into the history and people of the era about which he was to write. For the Blackett family, Singapore in 1939 was a world of tennis and cocktail parties. But as Walter Blackett, the head of Singapore’s oldest and most powerful rubber firm, Blackett and Webb, struggles to contain strikes by his workers, there are signs of a change in the air.
As Blackett struggles to break the strikes and fend off his daughter’s unsuitable beaux, the fixed boundaries between classes and nations begin to crumble. In Farrell’s account of Singapore’s fall to the Japanese and the end to British superiority in the region, he creates a vivid portrait of Singapore at a historical watershed. The novel is lengthy and leisurely, but full of suspense and humor. Quietly and humorously critical of the conventions and ideologies of empire, Farrell anticipates a style of postcolonial writing that came to be embodied by authors such as Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie. LE
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The Sea, The Sea
Iris Murdoch
Lifespan | b. 1919 (Ireland), d. 1999 (England)
First Published | 1978
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Booker Prize | 1978
Charles Arrowby is a washed-up thespian who retires to a dilapidated house by the sea to write his memoirs. Former colleagues and lovers descend upon his coastal retreat and stir up some unhappy memories, but it is with the appearance on the scene of Mary Hartley, with whom Charles has enjoyed an unconsummated fling many years previously, that the story
threatens to take a more tragic turn. Alternately pathetic and absurd, Arrowby’s self-absorption is ridiculed by the narrator in a number of comic set pieces. But his efforts to evade the past are doomed to failure and Arrowby’s development into a character worthy of our sympathy must be accompanied by a painful self-understanding.
The sea referred to in the novel’s title is not only the source of the dominant strain of imagery; it is itself a major protagonist. As a force of indeterminacy and flux, it is a counterpoint in the narrative to the deluded and narcissistic efforts of Arrowby to freeze the past into an image of his own myth-making. In a way that bears closest affinity to The Tempest, Arrowby’s Prospero-like pretensions to orchestrate the lives of those who trespass upon his island is an egotistical tyranny that also must be surrendered in time for the denouement.
Iris Murdoch’s gift for elevating even the most seemingly banal of events into the focus of enduring philosophical and ethical questions is nowhere more convincingly wrought than in this novel by a writer at the peak of her powers. VA
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1900s
Life: A User’s Manual
Georges Perec
Lifespan | b. 1936 (France), d. 1982
First Published | 1978
First Published by | Hachette (Paris)
Original Title | La Vie, mode d’emploi
Dwarfing its contemporaries like “a Pompidou Center amongst bus shelters,” as one reviewer put it, Georges Perec’s gargantuan work won the prestigious Médicis Prize in 1978. The novel seeks to write the teeming minutiae of everyday life as well as provide engaging narrative. It is also an astonishing exercise in form. The book is a portrait of a Parisian apartment block. We move around the building, each room allocated a chapter. Ever a fan of puzzles and games, Perec uses mathematical formulae to generate prepared lists of objects each of the ninety-nine chapters should contain, while a tortuous chess problem determines the route of the narrative.
The central conceit is equally labyrinthine. A rich Englishman named Percival Bartlebooth sets out to organize his life around a fifty-year project: “an arbitrarily constrained program with no purpose outside its own completion.” His aesthetic endeavor entails the production and destruction of a number of paintings, resulting in nothing. Lest this nullity seems to reflect Perec’s own aesthetic gesture, we must be aware that his writing is experimental, not existential. A member of the Oulipo (“Workshop for Potential Literature”) group since 1967, Perec keeps to Oulipian maxims, seeking to reunite literature with the disciplines from which it has been separated, like mathematics or game theory. DH
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The Back Room
Carmen Martín Gaite
Lifespan | b. 1925 (Spain), d. 2000
First Published | 1978
First Published by | Destino (Barcelona)
Original Title | El cuarto de atrás
This novel, which won the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 1978, was the beginning in Martín Gaite’s work of an intimate journey with autobiographical roots, not unrelated to her earlier novels but moving forward from them. The mixture of fiction and reality, the coexistence of a character part fantastic and part demonic (“the man in black”) with personal memories, and the formalized structure of the story with much dialog, lead to innovative and imaginative results. Written in the first person and dedicated to Lewis Carroll, the novel opens by singing the praises of the “world of dreams.” But it is not revealed whether it is reality or the writer’s imagination that sees the arrival of the mysterious character during a tempestuous night of insomnia—when she was trying to write a novel—with whom she talks about memories, writing, fears, love, and literature.
Martín Gaite recreates the irrational imprecision of daily life as it happens, often without being understood, in stories that are linked together in some surprising ways. At dawn, the confused writer is awakened by the arrival of her daughter; she is no longer on the sofa but lying on her bed. Who telephoned, what happened? In the room is a little gilt box brought by the visitor, and sheets of paper with the title “The Back Room,” the completed novel. Closing the circle, this novel begins with the same words as the story that we have just read. Is this a true fiction, or a life dreamed? This is a strange work of unresolved mystery. M-DAB
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1900s
The Virgin in the Garden
A. S. Byatt
Lifespan | b. 1936 (England)
First Published | 1978
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Given Name | Antonia Susan Drabble
The Virgin in the Garden is the first part of a tetralogy (latterly known as the Frederica Quartet) that was completed in 2002. The four novels, set between the 1950s and 1970s, take as their anchor point the life of Frederica Potter, her family, and friends. Beginning in Yorkshire in 1953, the year of Elizabeth II’s coronation, The Virgin in the Garden recounts Frederica’s coming of age. The novel’s center is the staging of a verse drama about the Virgin Queen, Astraea, written by Alexander Wedderburn to celebrate the coronation. Frederica’s competitive nature drives her to desire only the title role in Wedderburn’s play. Stephanie, Frederica’s sister, although as intellectually capable as Frederica, instead chooses domesticity by marrying the local vicar. The comedy of Frederica’s attempts to lose her virginity is adept and amusing, as is the sense of both time and place that A. S. Byatt conjures. The lightness of the social comedy of Frederica’s story is offset by a rather dark subplot involving the mental deterioration of Frederica’s younger brother, Marcus.
Many critics have noted parallels between the relationship of Frederica and Stephanie and Byatt’s own relationship with her sister, the writer Margaret Drabble. As the tetralogy developed, Byatt played down the novels’ historicity and their comedy (the third novel, Babel Tower, reads more like a thriller than a social comedy). She also went on to develop a more sophisticated model of what the historical novel ought to be in Possession (1990). VC-R
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The Cement Garden
Ian McEwan
Lifespan | b. 1948 (England)
First Published | 1978
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
First U.S. Edition | Simon & Schuster (New York)
“I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.”
As is the case for many of Ian McEwan’s novels, The Cement Garden elaborates upon short stories published in his two inaugural collections: First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978). Both stories and novel are preoccupied with sexual maturation and initiation, incest, and violation, yet these surface continuities are ultimately less significant than their deeper proximities of form and structure. The Cement Garden shares the economy of the short story, with its calibrated presuppositions, pressure-cooker plot, and claustrophobic prose.
Set during a hot, indeterminate post-war summer, the novel describes the inexplicable yet inevitable actions of four children following the deaths of their parents. In an atmosphere of disturbing intimacy, the children begin to explore their adolescent sexuality, both alone and with each other. McEwan proceeds by juxtaposition rather than justification or discursive explanation. Events are simply placed alongside their responses, with a disconcerting gap where the reassurance of explanation might otherwise reside. In this world, morality is not merely forestalled: it is a dialect with which the story’s language does not quite coincide. Instead, events follow their own logic, which we, as outsiders, can only translate. As a result, the final, incestuous sexual coupling of its climax becomes a perverse celebration, provoking the regeneration not only of the children’s shared memories, but also their family. DT
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Hitch
hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Lifespan | b. 1952 (England), d. 2001 (U.S.)
First Published | 1979
First Published by | Pan (London)
Series Published | 1980–1992
Douglas Adams’s “trilogy in four parts” began life as a BBC radio series in 1978. This, the first book, combines the science fiction genre with pithy, tongue-in-cheek humor and some underhand satire directed at everything from bureaucracy and politics to bad poetry and the fate of all those biros . . . . When the Earth is destroyed to make way for an intergalactic motorway, hapless Everyman Arthur Dent finds himself journeying through the galaxy with his friend, Ford Prefect, who turns out not to be from Guildford but from Betelgeuse Five. Ford’s job is as a writer for the eponymous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a brilliant fusion of travel book and electronic guide. Insights from the guide punctuate the narrative, providing hilarious explanations of the workings of the universe. The well-observed and eccentric characters, and a suitably bewildered Arthur, provide a rare kind of chemistry in a work of fiction that is well plotted, well paced, and surprisingly sophisticated.
Adams combines extraordinary inventiveness with an understanding of science, shamelessly flouted in the name of chuckle-out-loud wit. He affectionately mocks the planet while putting it firmly back in the center of the universe. AC
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 80
