See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Swimming-Pool Library
Alan Hollinghurst
Lifespan | b. 1954 (England)
First Published | 1988
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Somerset Maugham Award | 1989
On its publication, Edmund White hailed the novel as “the best book about gay life yet written by an English author.”
When Alan Hollinghurst published The Swimming-Pool Library, he was already well engaged in the literary scene, having published two collections of poetry and being on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement. This, his first novel, is an exuberant narrative of gay life set in 1983, which portrays the hedonism of “the last summer of its kind there was ever to be,” before the Aids crisis had really taken hold. By turns enraptured with the present and nostalgic for the past, the novel revels in the company of men and ubiquitous gay sex, while conducting the reader to a finely pitched denouement.
Two lives are contrasted here, that of Lord Nantwich, an ex-colonial administrator in Africa, and William Beckwith, a young gay man of independent means. After saving the aging peer’s life, William is subsequently persuaded to write Nantwich’s biography and comes into possession of his diaries. These provide a parallel narrative, and it becomes apparent that, though the two men are generations apart, their lives contain disquieting similarities. Racism and queer-bashing endure—even fifteen years after the legalization of homosexuality, the harassment of gay men persists as the arrest of William’s best friend by an undercover policeman, himself gay, uncannily echoes the circumstances in which Nantwich served a prison sentence in the 1950s. For all the licentious liberty, the machinery of oppression is never far away in this novel, and further, the whiff of nostalgia for the alluring eroticism of the outlaw highlights the underlying complexity of desire. The shadowing of contemporary gay liberation with the dangers of the illicit homosexual life is a reminder, lest we become complacent, of our connection and debt to past defeats as well as present victories. CJ
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie
Lifespan | b. 1947 (India)
First Published | 1988
First Published by | Viking (London)
Fatwa Issued | 1989
The fatwa declared by Ayatollah Khomeini on Rushdie extended to his translators and publishers, several of whom were attacked.
This is the book that triggered riots around the world in 1988 and 1989, brought a fatwa (death sentence) upon its author from Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and forced Rushdie into hiding for over a decade. The “Rushdie Affair” represents a seminal moment in literary history, in which a host of religious and political tensions crystallized explosively around one novel and its Indian-born, British-educated author.
Written in a playful, magic realist style, The Satanic Verses is a transcultural view of the world as perceived by two Indian migrants, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta. In the moment of genesis that opens the novel, both men fall into Britain, angel-like from the sky, when their plane is bombed by terrorists. British racism and the colonial legacy affect these characters in different ways, driving Gibreel into delusional, psychotic dream sequences in which he appears as the Angel Gabriel, bringing divine revelations to the Islamic Prophet. Meanwhile, the sycophantic Anglophile, Saladin, becomes more devilish by the minute in a physical mutation he cannot control. A multitude of Black and Asian British characters probes postcolonial migrant experience in the novel. Mixing words, worlds, histories, fictions, dreams, delusions, and prophesies, Rushdie’s style is an exercise in cosmopolitanism.
In Gibreel’s dream sequences, set in and around Mecca, Rushdie asks what makes a “new idea,” Islam, stick fast, while a multitude of other ideas fail to take hold of the imagination. The answer to this question lies in the Prophet’s “ramrod-backed” conviction that his idea is absolute and pure. In fictionalizing the Prophet’s life, however, and by inserting a psychotic character into the role of angel, Rushdie offended millions of Muslims worldwide and provoked a sense of outrage that persists today. SN
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
David Markson
Lifespan | b. 1927 (U.S.)
First Published | 1988
First Published by | Dalkey Archive Press (Illinois)
First UK Edition | 1989, by Jonathan Cape (London)
It must be a fantasy most, if not all, of us had at some point in our lives: you are the last person left alive on earth. This is what happens to Kate, the protagonist of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Or does it? “In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street,” the work begins, but the reader never learns anything about what precedes this beginning other than through Kate’s interior monologue. The story that unfolds leaves open two basic possibilities: Kate can be trusted, in which case she lost a son in a fire she probably caused, and now is, for some unknown reason, the last representative of humankind; or she cannot be trusted, in which case she lost a son in a fire she probably caused, and subsequently went mad, now imagining she is the last representative of humankind.
This theme of trust, in others and oneself, and its relationship with language is what fully justifies the book’s title. It is, in fact, a fictional interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought, and the turmoil and torment of Kate’s voice reads like an uncanny echo of what lies behind Wittgenstein’s philosophical texts. As her knowledge of the past and her personal memory becomes ever more unreliable, we realize that there can be no knowledge of the present and no sense of self without it. The brilliance of this underrated author lies in the subtlety with which doubt creeps in and finally engulfs the reader as well. DS
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Paradise of the Blind
Duong Thu Huong
Lifespan | b. 1947 (Vietnam)
First Published | 1988
First Published by | Phu nu (Hanoi)
Original Title | Nhung thiên duong mù
This sensuous, evocative novel is a journey into the shattered heart of Communist Vietnam: its potency is such that Huong’s work is still effectively banned in her homeland. The story is told from the perspective of Hang, a young migrant worker in a Russian textile factory, as she travels across Russia to see the Communist uncle whose actions caused her loved ones unremitting and almost unforgivable suffering, yet who remains, thanks to the cultural strength of family ties, at the core of their existence.
Lovingly detailed yet excrutiating in its painful honesty, Paradise of the Blind brings a sensual intensity to the daily life of rural Vietnam and the harsh routines of the city fringes—you can almost smell the offerings on the family altar, taste the texture of duck’s blood custard, or feel the slime of the duckweed that clogs the village ponds. Hang’s widowed mother, her spinster aunt, and her Communist uncle all do their best, in their very different ways, to live by the conflicting rules of a peasant society hurled headfirst into cultural revolution, at immense cost to themselves.
Huong digs deep below the picture-postcard images of paddy fields, bamboo, and water buffalo, conical hats and bicycles, into a country of old religions, ancient hatreds, and huge transition. This is a novel of wonderful, elegiac power that delivers powerful insights into a changing Vietnam. TSu
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Foucault’s Pendulum
Umberto Eco
Lifespan | b. 1932 (Italy)
First Published | 1988
First Published by | Bompiani (Milan)
Original Title | Il pendolo di Foucault
“Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos . . . and she guessed it was the Pendulum’s business, not hers.”
Everything is open to interpretation in this novel, which is why we should not overlook the fact tha
t the narrator is the namesake of Dorothea’s scholarly husband in Middlemarch. Umberto Eco’s Causabon also wants to rewrite the messy confusion of world history as a single, coherent narrative, but, unlike Eliot’s Causabon, who is convinced of the truth of his project, Eco’s character is well aware that his story is just one version.
Foucault’s Pendulum is a vast, sprawling novel all about the desire for meaning. Causabon, Belbo, and Diotallevi work together at Garamond Press, researching a book on the histories of secret societies. In what starts out as an elaborate joke, they feed all the explanations and interpretations they can find into Belbo’s computer, and end up recreating the Plan of the Knights Templar. The Plan is the ultimate conspiracy theory: each apparently unconnected historical event takes on new significance in the context of a synthesized story in which everything accounts for everything else. This is a dangerous game, and one that will eventually catch up with its players. Foucault’s Pendulum is a novel that has all the elements of a detective fiction, apart from the final (dis)closure; an alternately compelling and frustrating narrative in which everything points to a greater truth outside of itself—only that truth is, precisely, the fiction. KB
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Gimmick!
Joost Zwagerman
Lifespan | b. 1963 (Netherlands)
First Published | 1989
First Published in | De Arbeiderspers (Amsterdam)
Given Name | Johannes Jacobus Zwagerman
“When I’m dead, you can do what you want with my books; remove them from the shops, burn them—gone is gone.”
Joost Zwagerman
After a highly acclaimed prose debut at age twenty-three, Gimmick! three years later became Joost Zwagerman’s conclusive breakthrough. In this novel, set in Amsterdam in 1989, the author lets main character Walter “Raam” van Raamsdonk talk us through seven months of contemporary and decadent consumer society lifestyle. Raam and his friends, Groen and Eckhart, are elite young Dutch artists. Spending their evenings at the nightclub De Gimmick, Groen and Eckhart produce their works to earn money for sex, drugs, and rock‘n’roll—since everything has been done before, why not? Raam, on the other hand, has been unable to make art ever since he was left by his girlfriend. Trying to stay in the game in a spoiled world, Raam crumbles.
With snide commentary, Zwagerman takes on the yuppie culture, trying to discover a raw, real life beneath it. Combining spontaneity with literary refinement and his praised sense of nuance, Zwagerman allows his characters to speak for themselves. Raam’s world of cocaine, money, a broken heart, and failed affairs is bound up with questions of personal authenticity in a postmodern world, the fear of losing oneself in love for someone or something else, and the unavoidable loss of innocence. Is the fabulously fabricated inferior to true experience; is there a difference at all? Who are you, and what do you want? At the end of the novel, Raam is resting in bed with a woman, bleeding from his nose: “I want a taxi,” he says. MvdV
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Obabakoak
Bernardo Atxaga
Lifespan | b. 1951 (Spain)
First Published | 1989, by Erein (San Sebastián)
Original Language | Basque
Given Name | Joseba Irazu Garmendia
Bernardo Atxaga’s novel, its title translated loosely by the author as “Stories from Obaba,” was awarded the National Prize for Literature in Spain one year after it was first published in the Basque language, Euskera. True to its name, the work comprises a series of short stories, all of which spring from the memories and imaginations of the inhabitants of Obaba, a mythical setting in the Basque Country. These exquisitely compassionate, funny, and often moving tales guide the reader on a journey through an imaginative landscape of both the world and the human mind, from Bavaria to Baghdad, encountering along the way an indigenous tribe of the Upper Amazon, mountain climbers in Switzerland, and a fanatical murderer in China, together with the childhood memories of the narrators and protagonists themselves.
Obabakoak’s appeal lies not only in its narrative diversity but also in its juxtaposition of personal and universal themes: the individual plight of the author and the history of literature; the Basque Country, with its minority language, and the rest of the world, with its abundance of ancient and widespread languages. At a time when Basque nationalism and separatism are at the heart of a long-standing controversy, Atxaga’s take on his homeland is refreshingly depoliticized, focusing instead upon the individual’s relationship with the land and the community, while retaining the universality invoked by the protagonists’ flights of imagination. LBi
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Inland
Gerald Murnane
Lifespan | b. 1939 (Australia)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | Heinemann (Melbourne)
Patrick White Award | 1999
Inland belongs to the genre of metafiction, the literary method prematurely ignited by Laurence Sterne in the 1700s and adopted by writers such as John Barth, Robert Coover, and John Fowles in the late twentieth century. Essentially a mode of writing concerned with the process of its own making, metafiction dares to refer to both its author and reader, to the unavoidable instability of its “truth,” and to its reliance on extraneous writings that inform its own existence.
Instead of having a linear plotline with a tangible narrator, the novel acts as a window on to several shifting worlds, occasionally and vaguely locatable in America, Australia, and Hungary. Borrowing various personas, from reclusive Magyar author to Australian adolescent, the narrator explores human themes such as life, death, sexual impulse, nature and man’s imprint upon it, and the importance of recording it all with the written word.
Highly autobiographical in places, Inland exposes the inner workings of the author’s artistry, demonstrating how a writer’s imagination and memory merge to give a novel its form. In keeping with Gerald Murnane’s actual life story, a life spent almost constantly “inland” in Australia, this novel illustrates the possibility of crossing borders and seas via the act of writing. In its detail, as well as its omissions, Inland offers an alternative philosophy, underlining most of all the literary power to create parallel lives through a harnessed imagination. LK
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving
Lifespan | b. 1942 (U.S.)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | W. Morrow (New York)
Full Name | John Winslow Irving
Just like the narrator in the novel, John Irving’s mother always refused to reveal the identity of his father.
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice . . .”
John Irving’s novels characteristically revolve around intricate plots and memorable comic characters, leaving his work balanced somewhere between literary and popular fiction. A Prayer for Owen Meany is widely considered to be his finest work.
A rich and deeply comic account of faith, doubt, and memories, the novel also reflects on American culture, and is probably Irving’s most autobiographical. In Toronto in 1987, a troubled and past-obsessed John Wheelwright narrates the story of his early life, remembering the time he spent during the 1960s and 1970s with his friend, Owen Meany. He remembers Owen as a weird, luminous-skinned dwarf, whose underdeveloped vocal chords shaped the sound of his bizarre, nasal voice (which is represented in the text in capital letters) and led him to bear the brunt of many cruel pranks. He also remembers Owen as the person who accidentally killed his mother.
John writes on the first page that Owen Meany is the reason he is a Christian; the rest of the book serves to narrate the story of how and why this happened, of how John discovers his own spiritual faith. The main theme of the book is the relationship between faith and doubt in a world—or at least in the world according to John—
in which there is no obvious evidence for the existence of God. The most important symbol is Owen himself, who embodies the relationship between the natural and the supernatural that is at the heart of the novel. For all his strangeness, Owen represents the spiritual condition of humankind; the difference between Owen and most other people is that he knows he is the instrument of God. Owen’s fatalistic faith centers on his prophetic knowledge of his own heroic death, for which he prepares all his life. EF
See all books from the 1900s
1900s
Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel
Lifespan | b. 1950 (Mexico)
First Published | 1989
First Published by | Editorial Planeta Mexicana
Original Title | Como agua para chocolate
“From that day on, Tita’s domain was the kitchen . . .”
Each of the twelve chapters of Laura Esquivel’s delightful love story, set in Mexico, bears the name of a month and opens with a recipe. This fascinating combination of ingredients results in a book as earthy and full of flavor as the cuisine it describes. Thus the recipes become as integral a part of Like Water for Chocolate as food is to our daily lives. It is the story of Tita, the youngest daughter of the all-female De La Garza family, who is forbidden to marry by the matriarch Mama Elena because of a Mexican tradition that dictates that the youngest daughter must care for her mother until her death.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 92
