Birth Year Project:
You supply your birth year, I respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been done, I'll do an update. So far, we’ve done 17 years altogether, between 1944 and 1989. [See BYP Index in navigation bar.]
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post.
Well-Known/Bestsellers:
The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy1
Dr. No, Ian Fleming
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak [English trans.]2
Anatomy of a Murder, Robert Traver3
Exodus, Leon Uris
Four Literary Novels:
Common People, Philip Callow 4
Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote
The King Must Die, Mary Renault 5
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe6
Eight From the Rest of the World:
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe [Nigeria]7
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, Jorge Amado [Brazil]
I Live, Laila Baalbaki [Lebanon]8
Sixty Stories [stories], Dino Buzatti [Italy]9
The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût [Dutch Indies]
The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa [Italy]
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, Nawal El Saadawi [Egypt]10
Where the Air Is Clear, Carlos Fuentes11
Special Mention:
The Underground City, Harold L. Humes 12
My List:
The End of the Road, John Barth
Krapp’s Last Tape [play], Samuel Beckett13
Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell14
The Rack, A. E. Ellis15
Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac16
Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, Penelope Mortimer17
Dud Avocado: One of the all-time great god-awful titles—I seem to remember making fun of it in an earlier post. Nonetheless, I just discovered that the novel was in fact on the bestseller list. What do I know? A young American woman’s sojourn in Paris in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
Here’s her page at the press, NYRB:
https://www.nyrb.com/collections/elaine-dundy
Pasternak: Ordinarily, I date a book by its year of publication in its original language. Dr. Zhivago (and certain other books from authoritarian countries) is an exception. Pasternak’s text had been smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. and published in Italian in 1957; the following year, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari it appeared in English; it was a novel with gravitas enough to matter in the publishing landscape of that year. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation came out in 2007—I’ve yet to read this, but their version of War and Peace was, I thought, terrific.
Some of the novel’s text dates from Pasternak’s youth, but it wasn’t completed until five years before his death in 1960. The novel’s plot, the plot of Pasternak’s own life, and the book’s publication history are each complex.
From his Wiki:
Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize. In 1989, Pasternak's son Yevgeny finally accepted the award on his father's behalf. Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Zhivago_(novel)
Anatomy of a Murder:
My wife’s family comes from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (where people are known as Yoopers (down-staters are called “trolls,” because, ha ha, they live under the (Mackinac) bridge (pronounced Mack-in-awe).
Up the road from Marquette is a village with a general store, an old inn, and the remains of a mill where, a hundred-some years ago, the Brunswick Company made bowling pins from U. P. maples. The village also has a bar locals call the LBJ (Lumberjack Tavern). Inside, the walls are adorned with black-and-white movie stills—Joseph Cotton, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Jimmy Stewart, George C. Scott . . .
One night in 1952, an Army Lieutenant, Coleman Peterson, shot and killed the LBJ’s owner, Mike Chenoweth—Peterson’s wife had accused Chenoweth of rape. This murder case would become the bestseller, Anatomy of a Murder, written by Peterson’s attorney, Michigan Associate Supreme Court Justice, John Voelker, under the pen name Robert Traver. [Spoiler alert: Voelker won the case for Peterson.]
Otto Preminger directed the film (1959). It was shot in the U. P., the trial scenes in the Marquette County Courthouse. Duke Ellington won a Grammy for the score.
Common People: A late addition to my list . . . it continues to amaze when I find major writers (in this case, British) that I’ve never so much as heard of. Here’s Wiki on this work:
In his second novel, Common People (1958), Callow continued his autobiographical exploration of the life of Midlands artists. The novel's protagonist, Nick Chapman, is torn between his dream of pursuing a career as an artist in London and his desire to settle down and "know common joys" in his home town of Woodfield. Common People was chosen as one of the Sunday Times best books of the year by John Betjeman, who said that Callow's writing "sounds like a genuine cry from a class usually silent in the literary world."
Renault: The pen name of British writer, Eileen Mary Challans, known for novels set in the ancient world. She was also known for writing openly gay/lesbian characters (she and her partner lived in South Africa to escape the homophobia and censorship in England).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_Must_Die
Sillitoe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_and_Sunday_Morning
Achebe: Considered the father of modern African literature. This novel is the first of his “African Trilogy”—followed by No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinua_Achebe
I Live: Have you read any Lebanese writers? I wasn’t sure if I had, then I remembered Rabih Alameddine [born in Jordan to Lebanese parents], who wrote I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001)—and what writer hasn’t had trouble finding the right door to enter their novel through? Gimmicky? Maybe, but it works. Also: An Unnecessary Woman (2013). Anyway, both are good reads. And I remembered Elias Khoury, whose Gate of the Sun (1998) is waiting on my Kindle; he’s written ten other novels, including Yalo (2002).
I thought I’d better check out what Ann Morgan has under Lebanon on her site:
https://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/thelist/
So a few more:
Always Coca-Cola, Alexandra Chreiteh (2011)
I Killed Scheherazade, Joumana Haddad (2010)
Wild Mulberries, Iman Humaydan Younes (2008)
June Rain, Jabbour Douhaiy (2006)
Oh Salaam!, Najwa Barakat (1999)
Samarkand, Amin Maalouf (1988)
Baalbakki is from an earlier generation. Here’s a bit from her Wiki:
. . . the first novel by the Lebanese writer Laila Baalbakki . . . first published in 1958 and was chosen as number seventeen of the 105 best Arabic novels of the 20th century by the Arab Writers Union. Its publication marked the beginning of a period in which many novels by Lebanese women appeared, and it dealt with the lives of young Arab women finding new ways of living in defiance of traditional gender roles. The novel was banned for immorality in Lebanon in the same year that it was published, and together with Baalbekki's second novel A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon, it led to the author going to court to defend herself against a charge of degrading public morals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Live
Buzzati: I’m including this collection because I want to know his name (if you don’t). I first read a short piece of his, “The Falling Girl,” in a 1989 anthology: Sudden Fiction International (Robert Shapard and James Thomas, eds.). That story was a turning point in my understanding of flash fiction—his use of time was strangely, powerfully elastic. I recommend tracking it down (it may be available online).
You can check out Buzzati here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dino_Buzzati
El Saadawi: A distinguished Egyptian writer with a long rich career. This was her first book—as with Buzzati, I’m including it so you’ll know her body of work, especially her gripping short novel, Woman at Point Zero (1977) [a new edition with preface and introduction is available]. From the jacket: This classic novel has been an inspiration to countless people across the world. Saadawi's searing indictment of society's brutal treatment of women continues to resonate today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawal_El_Saadawi
Fuentes: This was his first novel and it put him on Mexico’s literary map. My wife had a college prof who encouraged us to read Fuentes’s mysterious novella, Aura (1962) [there’s a note on it at Reading Projects [7]: Oddball Novels].
I remember finding his early novels quite challenging; the first one I finished (other than Aura) was The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), the stream of consciousness memories of a dying man. Fuentes was a giant in Latin-American literature, also a public intellectual who served for a time in Mexico’s diplomatic corps. He was a prolific novelist—also story writer, playwright, and essayist. His biggest success in the U.S. was The Old Gringo (1985), which imagines the fate of writer Ambrose Bierce in the Mexican Civil War.
Humes: To make sense of this writer you have you read about him. Try these three:
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/doc/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_L._Humes
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=137
Krapp: Beckett is a fascinating figure—I always thought he had the gaze of a raptor eyeing prey . . . but he was, in fact, a brave ex-pat Irishman who worked for the French Resistance, and a generous fellow writer, despite the existential bleakness you find in the work. There’s far too much to say about him for a note. Whether or not you read the novels, you should know the plays Waiting For Godot (first performed 1952), Endgame (1957), and 1958’s Krapp’s Last Tape; they were composed in French—for its purity of expression, he said—then translated into English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett
Balthazar: Book Two of The Alexandria Quartet. See the note on Mountolive at Birth Year Project: 1959.
The Rack: This was the only novel by playwright, Derek Lindsay, based on his own treatment for TB. Naturally, it drew comparisons to Thomas Mann’s classic, The Magic Mountain (1924). I’m including a link to a Guardian review below. I’ve just now read a bunch of reviews left at Goodreads . . . it’d been a while since I read this, but I was quite impressed with it—more than some of these readers, who emphasized the novel’s intensity, due to its account of the character’s “barbaric” medical treatment, but I remember the poignancy of his attraction to/love for a sightly under-aged (17) young woman who visits him, and the final outcome of that relationship. It’s hard not to view this aspect of the novel through the lens of our raised sensitivity to predatory men. But I don’t recall the story being creepy in that way . . . which is either an indictment of my own dimness or the difficulty of applying modern standards to works of the past. It’s more a story of suffering and longing, the acceptance of truth.
I also just learned that the 1958 edition was abridged by some 60K words; judging from comments from readers of the “restored” edition, the tighter edition (which I must’ve read) would be the better choice. I’ve talked elsewhere (and will again) about Valancourt Books, an American press devoted to reprinting Gothic, horror, LBGTQ+, and other less mainstream works—theirs is the edition I read. It’s important to remember that the novel received high praise from the likes of Graham Greene when it appeared.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/21/the-rack-by-ae-ellis-review-a-masterly-map-of-suffering
https://www.valancourtbooks.com/the-rack-1958.html
Kerouac: My favorite book of his. The characters are easily identified versions of his crew, in particular Japhy Ryder, based on poet Gary Snyder, who introduced Kerouac to Buddhist thought. (By the way, Snyder is 94 now and still at it.)
I gobbled this stuff up in my youth. Reading some of Kerouac in later life was less fun (the stuff seemed pretentious—and there was a deep sadness that I must not have understood before). Be that as it may, Kerouac’s writing is a necessary alternate story to the received idea of the postwar years as a period of prosperity, conformity, conservatism, etc. Besides reading the primary texts, there are lots of memoirs by the Beats and nonfiction accounts by others. Here are some pages that recommend some of these:
https://www.beatdom.com/12-essential-books-beat-generation/
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/beat-generation
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2017/03/02/where-start-beat-generation
Mortimer: Another important save by NYRB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Mortimer
Was literally thinking about Dr. Zhivago earlier today - twilight zone moment...allegedly it took Pasternak 40 years to write it - obviously very good for us that he persisted!