The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), perhaps the greatest poet of post- war Rъssia, was scorned and persecuted in his native country. From his school years he never wanted to be anything but a poet; his refusal to contribute to socialist society in a more practical way led to his being considered a "social parasite," and to his being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972. His poems have an apparently innate lyrical quality, and deal with transcendent issues of life and death with a graceful and undogmatic hand. Brodsky wrote little poetry in his mature years, concentrating instead on essays and criti- cism; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987. So Forth (1995) is a good collection of his poems.

Pearl Buck (1892-1973) was born in America but spent much of her youth in China, where her parents were missionaries. Her novel The Good Earth (1931) made her famous; it distills her deep affec- tion and respect for the Chinese people, and was influential in win- ning American popular support for China in the face of imperialist domination and Japanese aggression. Though its language now seems rather stilted and its values reflect missionary hopes more than Chinese realities, it remains worth reading both for its well- wrought plot and as an important document of its time.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) wrote many books but is truly famous for one, The Master and Margarita (1930s). The book was correctly perceived by the Russian authorities as a satire on life under Stalin and therefore banned. (It was finally published in heav- ily censored form in 1966, and in an unexpurgated edition in 1973.) It depicts the bizarre and often very funny relations between the Master (a writer), his mistress Margarita, and the Devil; the plot is intercut with scenes from the Masters novel set in Jerusalem in the time of Christ. It is an odd but brilliant and compelling book.

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was a prolific and talented writer, but his reputation rests almost entirely on one novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), and that in large part because of the impact of the powerful 1972 film version starring Malcolm McDowell. The mor- dant and darkly humorous dystopic world of Burgess's novel now looks, in retrospect, like a harbinger of the rebellious spirit of the Sixties; but the book retains its power both to shock and to please the reader.

Нtalo Calvino (1923-1985) is generally regarded as Italy's great­est modern writer of short stories and novйis. His work is richly imaginative, and blurs the line between reality and fantasy; he was deeply interested in folk tales, which in turn profoundly influenced his own work. Representative of the best of his mature fiction is If

on a Winters Night a Traveller (1979); it is confusing, nonlinear, nonsequential, often parodistic; a tale of a novel within the novel, interspersed with still other seemingly unrelated stories. It is not easy reading, but it is rewarding to read.

Truman Capote (1924-1984), novelist, short-story writer, social butterfly, a New Yorker who remained firmly rooted in his native South, was above ali a writer, and more seriously dedicated to his craft than he sometimes let on. He found fame early with Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), his semiautobiographical novel of a teenager in search of his identity, and enhanced his reputation with the novella Breakfast at Tijfany's (1958). His best book is In Cold Blood (1966) a "nonfiction novel" (a genre he claimed to have invented) about a brutal murder and the trial and execution of its perpetrators.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964). DDT seemed like a miracle when it was developed during World War II, and in some ways it was; cer- tainly it saved the lives of thousands of American soldiers who would otherwise have died of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. But after the war DDT and other long-lasting pesticides began to be used in agriculture without restraint; and then the birds started to die. Rachel Carson—whose 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us combined good scientific observation with a talent for poetic description—was the one who put the picture together; her book Silent Spring (1962) galvanized the nascent environmental move­ment and ultimately sparked an environmental revolution. The book itself is still a wonderful read, both as an indictment of human stu- pidity and greed, and as a principled call to action.