1900s
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
Lifespan | b. 1944 (U.S.)
First Published | 1982
First Published by | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (N.Y.)
Pulitzer Prize | 1983
“You better not never tell . . .”
The Color Purple documents the traumas and gradual triumph of Celie, a young African-American woman raised in rural isolation in Georgia, as she comes to resist the paralyzing self-concept forced on her by those who have power over her. Celie is repeatedly raped by her father, and gives birth twice as a result of the abuse, but assumes the children have been killed when her father secretively disposes of them. When a man proposes marriage to Celie’s sister, Nettie, their father pushes him to take Celie instead, forcing her into a marriage as abusive as her early home. Nettie soon flees that home, first to Celie and her husband and then out into the wide world. By the time of her reunion with Celie almost thirty years later, Nettie has met and traveled to Africa with an African-American missionary couple, whom she discovers to be the adoptive parents of Celie’s children. In Africa, Nettie lives among the Olinka, whose patriarchal society and indifference toward the role of Africans in the slave trade underline the prevalence of exploitation.
Celie narrates her life through letters to God. These are prompted by her father’s warning to tell “nobody but God” when he makes her pregnant for a second time at the age of fourteen, and she writes to God with the unselfconscious honesty of someone who thinks nobody is listening. As she builds relationships with other black women, and especially with those women engaging forcefully with oppression, however, Celie draws strength and insight from their perspectives and develops a sense of her own right to interpret herself and her world. Her independence develops symbiotically through her expanded firsthand and secondhand experience of the world until she is able to construct her relations to others according to her own values. AF
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1900s
A Boy’s Own Story
Edmund White
Lifespan | b. 1940 (U.S.)
First Published | 1982, by E. P. Dutton (N.Y.)
Trilogy | A Boy’s Own Story (1982); The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988); A Farewell Symphony (1998)
A Boy’s Own Story is a coming-out novel significant not only for its timing, being one of the first, but also for its frank portrayal of a young teenager’s anxious self-conception, growing up gay in 1950s America. Based to some extent on Edmund White’s own story, the narrator is eccentric and slightly creepy. However, the boy’s precociousness, combined with his physical self-disgust and ambivalent sexual shame, make the novel a quintessential narrative of teenage angst and self-discovery.
The veneer of seedy sexual exploration defines the boy’s journey toward young adulthood in a conservative social climate that pathologized homosexuality. Though never in doubt of his orientation, the boy undergoes psychoanalysis in an attempt to cure his “impossible desire to love a man but not to be a homosexual.” This impossible desire is fulfilled in the final pages of the novel by his shocking betrayal of a teacher he lures into a sexual liaison. This event dramatically marks the boy’s entry into an adult world of sex and power.
White lyrically evokes a poignant longing for love and highlights the disorienting lack of romantic narratives for gay people. In stubbornly creating, articulating, and undermining its own fantasies, the novel is effectively a Postmodern fairy tale of a brutally repressed desire. At the time of its publication, it affirmed a history and a material and psychic presence for the gay community at a moment of crisis with the emergence of Aids. CJ
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1900s
If Not Now, When?
Primo Levi
Lifespan | b. 1919 (Italy), d. 1987
First Published | 1982
First Published by | G. Einaudi (Turin)
Original Title | Se non ora, quando?
By the time of his death in 1987, Primo Levi had established his reputation as a writer of the Holocaust, a survivor who bore witness to the horrors of Auschwitz. Perhaps inevitably, the broader range of his writing has been relatively neglected (science fiction, poetry, and drama).
Described as Levi’s most conventional novel, If Not Now, When? tells the story of a band of Jewish partisans, and their acts of resistance against the Germans as they journey through Eastern Europe toward Italy from 1943 to 1945. “For the most part,” Levi notes, “the events I depict really did take place. . . . It is true that Jewish partisans fought the Germans.” Levi continues to bear witness, but this time in the shape of a novel: imaginary characters, omniscient narrator, period reconstruction, description of landscape. Levi views it as “a story of hope,” even if set against the backdrop of massacre. In fact, at key moments, Levi refuses to tell that story of death and extermination: characters disappear (“Immediately hidden from sight by the curtain of snow, they vanish from this story”), and events are not depicted (“But what happened in the courtyard of the Novoselki monastery will not be told here”). Described by Philip Roth as less imaginative in technique than Levi’s other books, If Not Now, When? was defended by Levi as an account of Ashkenazi civilization: “I cherished the ambition,” he once acknowledged, “to be the first (perhaps the only) Italian writer to describe the Yiddish world.” VL
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1900s
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
Lifespan | b. 1888 (Portugal), d. 1935
First Published | 1982, by Ática (Lisbon)
Pseudonym | Bernardo Soares
Original Title | Livro do Desassossego
The Book of Disquiet is presented as the “factless autobiography” of Bernardo Soares, a solitary assistant bookkeeper whom Pessoa has met in a Lisbon restaurant. In a fragmentary text broken up into hundreds of short sections—some bearing titles such as “The Art of Effective Dreaming for Metaphysical Minds”—Soares reflects on art, life, and dreams, observes the changing weather and street scenes of central Lisbon, meditates upon the futility of existence, and recommends techniques for living a pointless life.
Fernando Pessoa is best known as a Modernist poet who published his poems as the work of “heteronyms”—pseudonymous personae with fictional biographies and radically different writing styles. Soares is a “heteronym” closer to the author himself than any of the others. He shares Pessoa’s sense of being “the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.” The published text has been assembled from fragments of prose scribbled on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes that were found in a trunk after Pessoa’s death. Several versions exist, based on different selections and arrangements of the material; in principle, readers are welcome to create their own book by following their own path through the text. As the core of the author’s stance is the rejection of “real life” and action in favor of dreams and sensations, not much happens externally. But the life of the mind is celebrated in texts that are vigorous, rich, aphoristic, and paradoxical. RegG
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1900s
Baltasar and Blimunda
José Saramago
Lifespan | b. 1922 (Portugal)
First Published | 1982, by Caminho (Lisbon)
Original Title | Memorial do Convento
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1998
Many magical realist novels fail to live up to either half of that label, but José Saramago’s Baltasar and Blimunda successfully creates an imaginary world in which the wildest fantasies take on the objectivity of everyday reality, while real historical events have the heightened quality of fairy tale or nightmare.
The novel is set in Portugal in the early eighteenth century. An absolute monarchy ruthlessly exploits an impoverished population, over whom the inquisition exercises a reign of terror. Baltasar is a soldier who has lost a hand in one of the king’s wars, Blimunda a woman with magica
l powers whose joyful and independent life is contrasted with the cruelly constrained lives of the women of the royal family. The rendering of the couple’s relationship is a masterly depiction of erotic love.
Two historic projects dominate the novel’s structure. One is the construction, on the king’s orders, of the vast convent of Mafra—now a major tourist attraction. Saramago depicts the building of the convent, on which thousands of laborers worked in conditions of near slavery, as an act of oppression on an epic scale. The other project is the attempt of a Jesuit priest, Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, to invent manned flight—another historical fact.
There is finally no escape from historical reality for any of the central characters. The lovers are doomed by their circumstances. Yet Saramago, a left-wing humanist, leaves us in no doubt that their lives have been worthwhile even in defeat. RegG
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1900s
The Sorrow of Belgium
Hugo Claus
Lifespan | b. 1929 (Belgium), d. 2008
First Published | 1983
First Published by | De Bezige Bij (Amsterdam)
Original Title | Het Verdriet van België
Covering the years 1939 to 1947, this intense and vivid novel is set in anti-Semitic West Flanders, where young Louis Seynaeve emerges from childhood and adolescence amid the deprivations and moral conflicts of the Second World War.
The story begins in the convent school where Louis and his friends form a secret society in resistance to the stern rule of the Sisters, and where his imagination vies with his ignorance to satisfy a hunger to know and understand the world—a complex of fragmented loyalties, rumors of war, and impending invasion by the Germans. This first part, “The Sorrow,” has a child’s confused perspective, with its unintentional comedy uncannily rendered. In the second section, “Of Belgium,” the saga of the Seynaeve family continues under Nazi occupation. Friends and relatives become complicit with the new regime, Louis’s parents actively participating—his father as publisher of propaganda, his mother as secretary and mistress to an officer. As a wartime chronicle, this rich and dense novel is unusual for its eccentric characters and lively dialogue, and for being a portrait of the artist at the same time—Louis’s brilliant tendency toward invention results in his developing into a novelist by the book’s end.
Hugo Claus is one of only a handful of Belgian writers to live solely by his creative output, which includes works of poetry, drama, movie scenarios, and short stories, as well as longer fiction, essays, and translations, and an opera libretto. ES
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1900s
The Piano Teacher
Elfriede Jelinek
Lifespan | b. 1946 (Austria)
First Published | 1983, by Rowohlt (Berlin)
Original Title | Die Klavierspielerin
Nobel Prize for Literature | 2004
Elfriede Jelinek’s oeuvre is embroiled in her critique of capitalist and patriarchal society, and her construction of human intimacy. The prose is relentless in its exploration of the unlived sexuality of voyeurism, addressing as it does the woman’s appropriation of the male rights to sexual looking.
In this unnerving, painful portrayal of a woman’s sexuality, the protagonist, Erika Kohut, is a woman given over to the uncertain pleasures of looking—from peepshow to porn film, to the couple on whom she spies in the meadows of the Vienna Prater. But Jelinek also binds the looking to the experience of heterosexual sadomasochism at its most violent edge: “Erika seeks a pain that will end in death.” As Erika attempts to contract the terms of her own torture with her student lover, Walter Klemmer, Jelinek embeds her sexuality in her unsettling tie to her mother, to a form of maternal love that demands, above all, the daughter’s submission: “never could she [Erika] submit to a man after having submitted to her mother for so many years.”
Contributing to a literature committed to the exploration of sexual dissidence, Jelinek also brings her readers up against the anxiety that has haunted feminist responses to women’s sadomasochism. Refusing either to condemn or to celebrate Erika’s desires, Jelinek sustains her critical gaze, even against the usual pleasures of reading and writing: “I strike hard,” she has commented, “so nothing can grow where my characters have been.” VL
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1900s
The Life and Times of Michael K
J. M. Coetzee
Lifespan | b. 1940 (South Africa)
First Published | 1983
First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)
Booker Prize | 1983
“He is a simpleton, and not even an interesting simpleton. He is a poor helpless soul who has been permitted to wander out on the battlefield . . . of life . . .”
This novel uses the enduring South African pastoral ideal to challenge the myths that sustained the apartheid regime. Michael K, a hare-lipped nonwhite who is brought up in a home for unfortunate children in apartheid-era South Africa, becomes a gardener in the Sea Point district of Cape Town, where his mother works as domestic help. When she begins to die, he tries to return her to the farm in the Karoo where she was born, but she dies in transit. Michael continues his journey alone to scatter her ashes on the abandoned farm. He stays on, growing pumpkins and living a simple existence off the land. Meanwhile a civil war is raging. Accused of aiding the insurgency, Michael is arrested and interned in a labor camp, where he refuses to eat. He escapes and returns to Sea Point, where he lives as a vagrant.
The second part of the novel is a diary, written by the medical officer of the internment camp, in which the officer recounts his attempts to get Michael to yield something of significance. But very little passes Michael’s misshapen lips: food is rarely consumed and speech rarely emanates. Michael’s refusal to be part of any system undermines all the officer’s own certainties in his own hierarchical world.
This is a remarkable tale of a simple man. The richness of the novel lies in the enigma and resistance that Michael poses both to the authorities and to the reader. J. M. Coetzee is careful to preserve the unknowable quality of Michael K by eschewing any overarching interpretive framework ABi
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1900s
Waterland
Graham Swift
Lifespan | b. 1949 (England)
First Published | 1983
First Published by | Heinemann (London)
Guardian Fiction Award | 1983
When narrator Tom Crick’s wife, Mary, kidnaps a child from a local supermarket, it creates a firestorm of publicity. In the lead-up to his final days as a secondary school history teacher, Crick examines his own history and childhood to try to work out just how things went so wrong. He recalls the silent, inscrutable, mentally disabled brother who eventually committed suicide; his own feeling of guilty implication in the death of a neighborhood boy; and the dangers he and Mary faced when trying to procure an abortion after their teenaged sexual experimentation. The procedure, alluded to as a fearful quasi-religious rite presided over by high priestess Martha Clay, widely supposed to be a witch, renders Mary sterile and permanently traumatized. Even the lyrical story of Crick’s parents’ romance does not escape the sinister shadow of a silent crime and its tragic fallout.
The metaphor of land reclamation plays a significant role in Crick’s assessment of the consolations of storytelling and historical narrative. Crick sees history not as the march of progress, but something more like the constant, cyclic battle against the encroaching waters of England’s East Anglia Fens. As Crick debates the value of history with one particularly insistent student, he advances the idea that narrative cannot be justified by appealing to its beneficial consequences, but to its power to fend off nothingness—the only resource people have against despair. AF
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1900s
LaBrava
Elmore Leonard
Lifespan | b. 1925 (U.S.)
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nbsp; First Published | 1983
First Published by | Arbor House (New York)
Full Name | Elmore John Leonard, Jr.
Elmore Leonard’s razor-sharp portrayals of the underbelly of American urban life have forged his reputation as one of the sharpest, funniest, toughest, and most insightful contemporary American writers. LaBrava is certainly the best example of Leonard’s effortless mastery of a form he would come to make his own: part mystery, part suspense, part crime, part thriller, part urban treatise.
Enter Joe LaBrava, an ex-Secret Service agent and photographer whose style, like Leonard himself, “is the absence of style,” or rather whose work is without artistic pretensions. LaBrava befriends Jean Shaw, an aging movie actress famous for her femme fatale roles in the 1950s, who is herself plotting with Richie Nobles, a grinning redneck psychopath, to defraud a friend of hers, Maurice, of $600,000. Nobles, in turn, has fallen in with Cundo Rey, a Cuban go-go dancer whose preference for leopard jockstraps barely conceals his own pecuniary ambitions. What delights about LaBrava is Leonard’s ear for dialogue and the skillful way in which he brings these characters into collision with each other, shifting points of view in order to generate suspense. As the characters strive to twist circumstances to suit their own ambitions, they take on a life of their own, but in spite of the novel’s self-referential nods (whereby Jean Shaw’s movies bleed into the “reality” of the plot), Leonard resolutely avoids Postmodern trickery. In the end, this is not a dissertation on literary artifice but a cracking good read. AP
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 84
