There are some virtuoso comic moments, such as when, in the process of losing his virginity against a wall outside Mirage nightclub, Scully carries on a conversation with a mate peeing on the other side of the wall. But the humor is layered with bleak desperation. The flow of language is fast-paced and colloquial, and the plot holds some dark surprises. The narrative skillfully deploys a double perspective. Interspersed with Scully’s first-person narrative are pages from his girlfriend Francesca’s diary that undercut his understanding of events and tell, in particular, about her feelings for Scully’s friend, Xavier “Balls” O’Reilly. The claustrophobia of Scully’s life creates disturbances in him that he cannot confront directly, bringing his tale to an inexorable conclusion of madness and violence. RM
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1900s
Dirty Havana Trilogy
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Lifespan | b. 1950 (Cuba)
First Published | 1998
First Published by | Anagrama (Barcelona)
Original Title | Trilogía sucia de La Habana
These sixty narratives, drawn from the life of the poor, form a continuous apocalyptic fresco of Havana in the early 1990s. Nearly everything is told by a single narrator, Pedro Juan, a cynical former journalist and writer. A sharp, erudite rogue, or, rather, a hyper-eroticized ascetic, he sees everything from the vantage point of his attic in Central Havana. On foot, on a bicycle, or in buses and dilapidated trains, he looks for the opportunity to participate in everything or to struggle against it. But everything is reduced to misery and distress. Also everything is sex: the only nourishment for the body and the only spiritual relief in this capital of sorrow where, if “temperance” is a virtue, it is because it minimizes organic and psychological disorders.
But in this trilogy there is a distinct sign of a strengthening ethic: the multiple climaxes of desolation are immediately followed by new forms of hope—perhaps the only thing that is not dragged down in this world. The ability to see beyond (the benefit of an apparently useless objective, or privileged overseas utopias) and the will to survive in ever more extreme situations make these characters superhuman. With an allegedly anti-literary style (yet stylish in its economy of phrase, risky jargon, and visionary power), Gutiérrez has constructed and described an urban landscape unknown in Spanish-American literature. DMG
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1900s
Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño
Lifespan | b. 1953 (Chile), d. 2003 (Spain)
First Published | 1998
First Published by | Anagrama (Barcelona)
Original Title | Los detectives salvajes
“You never finish reading, even if you finish all your books, just as you never finish living, even though death is certain.” Roberto Bolaño
The first publication of Savage Detectives shook the international literary scene. The novel has been compared to the greatest Latin American novels of the twentieth century and has been widely awarded. Roberto Bolaño’s book relates a long journey, a quest with elements of a Homeric odyssey, a generational Diaspora, and a beatnik delirium.
The novel starts in Mexico City. The year is 1976, and a teenager’s diary tells how his life changes when his passion for literature leads him to enter a phantasmagorical avant garde group. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are the founders and also the savage detectives who, on New Year’s Eve 1976, embark on a desperate voyage in search for an enigmatic Mexican woman writer who disappeared shortly after the Revolution. That is the starting point of a twenty-year journey that takes them through all five continents. Always told in the first person, the narrative is nonetheless related from a variety of perspectives. In the process, we are introduced to a wide range of characters and this constitutes a significant aspect of the novel’s appeal.
Before the novel was published, Bolaño was a cult figure for a happy few. With this work, sales shot up. Bolaño was seriously ill, and he knew it. During the five years he had left, he wrote frenetically, leaving a monumental legacy. Savage Detectives is the perfect introduction to his literary world. CA
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1900s
Disgrace
J. M. Coetzee
Lifespan | b. 1940 (South Africa)
First Published | 1999
First Published by | Secker & Warburg (London)
Booker Prize | 1999
Coetzee stirred up controversy with his apparently bleak and pessimistic vision of the condition of post-apartheid South Africa.
“Follow your temperament.”
South Africa after the end of apartheid is a country in which social and political structures that had once seemed immutable have crumbled, and many among the once-dominant white population are forced to make difficult adjustments. David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old professor at a fictional university in Cape Town, is less troubled by the demise of institutionally sanctioned racism than by the entry of the country into a global culture that devalues his lifelong devotion to literature, to Romantic literature in particular. When an ill-judged seduction of one of his students results in a disciplinary hearing, he cannot bring himself to go through with the required public breast-beating and gives up his job, plunging into an unknown future.
J. M. Coetzee’s novel, which had begun in the vein of campus satire, turns darker with Lurie’s visit to his daughter, Lucy, on her small farm in the Eastern Cape. In an attack by three black men, Lucy is raped and Lurie burned; Lurie’s appalled sense of a fundamentally changed world is exacerbated by his daughter’s refusal to make her violation public, or to abort the child that she has conceived. His response is to dedicate his time to an animal shelter, where the region’s unwanted dogs are put down, and to work on an opera that becomes less performable as it develops. Distanced from his daughter, he nevertheless hopes for a new relationship of “visitorship.”
Disgrace caused fierce debates in South Africa over its portrayal of the new social and political order. Yet the novel’s ethical stance is more challenging than its painful realism about some of the country’s problems. Does Lurie’s dedication to animals and to musical creation represent some kind of redemption after a life of self-centered sexual predation? DA
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1900s
As If I Am Not There
Slavenka Drakulić
Lifespan | b. 1949 (Yugoslavia)
First Published | 1999
First Published in | Feral Tribune (Split)
Original Title | Kao da me nema
The Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić is one of the most insightful and evenhanded observers of recent Balkan history. Her novel As If I Am Not There is set in Bosnia in the years 1992 and 1993. The narrative tells of the horrifying experiences endured by S.—a schoolteacher of mixed Serbian and Bosnian heredity—when Serbian forces enter her village. S. spends months in an all female compound of a Serbian concentration camp where she is subjected to continual sexual violence and beatings. The novel culminates with her arrival in Scandinavia as a refugee—pregnant, homeless, and ambivalent about her unborn son, conceived during a gang rape in the camp. What is more, S. is unable to find an individual or a community who will listen to her story without judgment.
Told in sparse, unflinching detail, without recourse to literary tricks, this is a haunting novel. Simply narrated but morally complex, As If I Am Not There establishes some powerful links between warfare, masculinity, sexual violence, and the female body, but avoids offering simplistic conclusions. Most strikingly, the novel refuses to demonize Serbia in its depiction of the war, and the use of initials to identify characters means that questions of nationality and religion are handled with great subtlety. In effect, the initials ask us to see each character in his or her own light, as an agent and an actor, as flexibly rational, but possessing the potential for terrifying irrationality. SamT
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1900s
Pavel’s Letters
Monika Maron
Lifespan | b. 1941 (Germany)
First Published | 1999
First Published by | S. Fischer Verlag (Frankfurt)
Original Title | Pawels Briefe
In this reconstruction of family history, Monika Maron explores the lives of her parents and grandparents under three German regimes; the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and the German Democratic Republic. Part of a wider genre that examines twentieth-century German history through the lens of family history, the narrative focuses primarily on the tragic story of Pavel, Maron’s Jewish grandfather, who perished at the hands of the Nazis in 1942. Maron’s perception of her grandfather has been colored by her GDR upbringing and by the values of her mother, who is unable to come to terms with her daughter’s emigration and literary success in the former West Germany. Maron attempts to gain a fresh perspective on her grandparents’ lives in Poland and West Berlin before 1939, by piecing together conversations with her mother, old family photographs, and visits to Poland.
Maron’s aim for her reconstruction of family history is both straightforward and ambitious: “not to find anything specific, but just to go there and imagine what their life was like, to search for the thread that connects my life to theirs.” The book is set in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall, and, as such, is as much a confrontation with the former East German state as it is with the legacy of National Socialism. Written in a simple, episodic style, Pavel’s Letters is both an intimate family history, and a moving, universal tale set against the history of twentieth-century Europe. KKr
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1900s
In Search of Klingsor
Jorge Volpi
Lifespan | b. 1968 (Mexico)
First Published | 1999
First Published by | Seix Barral (Barcelona)
Original Title | En busca de Klingsor
“I should clarify that I, Gustav Links—a man of flesh and blood just like you—am the author of these words. But who am I, really?”
The Second World War has just come to an end and American physicist turned soldier-spy Francis P. Bacon is given the job of uncovering the identity of Klingsor, a man who supposedly controlled the direction and nature of scientific research in Nazi Germany. Bacon enlists the help of German mathematician Gustav Links and the mysterious Irene, who he promptly falls in love with. Links is the narrator of the story and the narrative includes his and Bacon’s separate lives before and during the war.
Volpi uses these foundations to take the reader on a journey into the scientific and political climate of the 1930s and 1940s. In their pursuit of Klingsor, Bacon and Links meet with some of the finest physicists of the age: Schrödinger, Bohr, and prime suspect Werner Heisenberg. Volpi moves the plot of the spy thriller to its devastating climax while, at the same time, considering the weightier issues of relativity, certainty, and chance, re-imagining the characters and struggles of the physicists who battled to build the first atomic bomb.
Unlike many novels with such a wide scope, In Search of Klingsor is never overly earnest or sanctimonious. Rather, it moves on at a pace that allows for the development of the mystery while at the same time introducing the reader to the scientific thought of the day. Volpi has said that he writes thrillers to relax, but in his exploration of game-playing, chance, and rage, it is clear that his ambition stretches beyond mere relaxation. OR
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1900s
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
Dubravka Ugresic
Lifespan | b. 1949 (Yugoslavia)
First Published | 1999
First Published by | Fabrika knjiga (Belgrade)
Original Title | Muzej bezuvjetne predaje
“I absorb people's misfortune”
Roland the Walrus, which died on August 21, 1961, had the surrealistic contents of its stomach put on display in the Berlin Zoo. The narrator reads the list of contents and finds herself, as we find ourselves, trying to find some structure, some inner logic to their randomness. This becomes one of the central metaphors of an extraordinary novel of exile, remembrance, and loss. The Berlin flea markets, the contents of an old handbag, photograph albums, and a series of seemingly random events are all described in a prose of quiet beauty and melancholy.
Through the interconnected stories and encounters with various artists and friends, Dubravka Ugresic creates a collage effect full of multiple layers of meaning and interconnectivity. The characters she describes—real or imagined—allow her to explore the relationship between memory and identity and, in particular, the different methods used to cope with the lack of both. Ugresic went into exile in 1993 and left a country tearing itself apart. The wars and bloodshed that followed turned friend against friend, renewed old hatreds, and forced thousands to leave the country.
The novel attempts to capture the slow and constant sense of loss and displacement caused by exile, and the disappearance of anything one could call home. Its scattered, Postmodern method of narration moves between magic realism, diary entries, essayistic prose, and even a recipe for caraway soup. This allows the author to recognize herself as a kind of museum exhibit, as are all those who have left behind a home that no longer exists. She refers many times to the two different types of exile, those with photographs (ties to the past) and those without, and the novel is Ugresic’s attempt to create and explore her ties. JM
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1900s
Fear and Trembling
Amélie Nothomb
Lifespan | b. 1967 (Japan)
First Published | 1999, by A. Michel (Paris)
Original Language | French
Original Title | Stupeur et tremblements
“I was senior to no one.”
No one ever said that bridging the gap between East and West would happen easily. In this novel about a Belgian employee of a Japanese corporation dealing in everything from Canadian optical fibers to Singaporean soda, the problems of reconciling the new faith in a global village with traditional, insular societal norms are conveyed with satiric delight.
Fear and Trembling relates the experience of Amélie as she begins a one-year contract on the bottom rung of a massive Japanese corporation. Having been partly raised in Japan, she is simultaneously native and foreigner, but her nativeness serves to ostracize her as much as her foreignness (she is punished for understanding Japanese). The novel describes the process by which her Western background counts against her and she finds herself facing one degrading and very public demotion after another in an effort to emphasize her inability to be truly integrated into the company’s culture: she is moved from mindless photocopying to the full-time cleaning of a restroom used only by herself and her immediate superior, Fubuki Mori, an exquisitely beautiful and dangerously proud woman for whom Amélie develops a self-destructive infatuation. The attitude of the company toward Amélie is encapsulated in the book’s title. Apparently, the traditional attitude that Japanese expected foreigners to adopt on meeting their emperor was one of “fear and trembling.”
Amélie Nothomb’s attack on what is presented as crazed labor relations in a massive Japanese corporation is not entirely vituperative—she exhibits a sympathy to people obedient to their sense of honor and tradition. In this satiric and thoughtful novel, East and West are both ridiculed with a certain fondness for the foibles of every individual. JuS
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2000s
Contents
Bartleby and Co.
Celestial Harmonies
Under the Skin
The Human Stain
White Teeth
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
The Devil and Miss Prym
The Feast of the Goat
I’m Not Scared
Atonement
Soldiers of Salamis
Austerlitz
Life of Pi
The Correct
ions
Platform
Snow
Nowhere Man
Everything Is Illuminated
Kafka on the Shore
The Namesake
Vernon God Little
The Successor
Lady Number Thirteen
What I Loved
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Your Face Tomorrow
Cloud Atlas
The Swarm
Suite Française
The Master
The Book about Blanche and Marie
2666
The Line of Beauty
The Accidental
Mother’s Milk
Measuring the World
The Sea
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Carry Me Down
Against the Day
The Inheritance of Loss
Half of a Yellow Sun
Falling Man
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Blind Side of the Heart
The Gathering
Kieron Smith, Boy
Home
The White Tiger
Cost
American Rust
Invisible
The Children’s Book
2000s
Bartleby and Co.
Enrique Vila-Matas
Lifespan | b. 1948 (Spain)
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 104
