The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Nikos Kazantzakis (1885-1957) was a prolific and gifted writer whose work is virtually synonymous with modern Greek prose litera­ture. He is known in the West primarily for Zorba the Greek (1946; even better known from the 1964 film starring Anthony Quinn), told in the first-person by an effete urbanite who comes to Crete to run a mine and is fascinated by the exuberantly unfettered but also some- how barbaric character of one of his workers, the eponymous Zorba. The book reaches a tragic climax when the narrator intrudes his emotions into the life of the Cretan community, unaware that he is violating a harsh and unforgiving social code.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was the leading spokesman for the Beat Movement of the 1950s. The Beatniks, so-called, were a loosely organized (at best) group of writers, musicians, and artists who saw themselves as being in rebellion against Amйricas postwar materialism, and especially against the suburban conformity of the 1950s. Autobiographical, like ali of Kerouac's works, On the Road (1957) is a breathless, formless, episodic account of the narrators car traveis across the United States, and his sometimes bizarre encounters with artistic and eccentric folk en route. The book's fas- cination with alcohol, speed, marijuana, and nonmarital sex of vari- ous sorts ali seems a bit quaint today; one marvels at how little it took to shock both the middle class and the literary establishment a couple of generations ago.

Lau Shaw [Lao She] (1899-1966), like Lu Hsьn a writer of Chinas May Fourth generation, made his early reputation as a writer of humorous action novйis. His one masterpiece is a more serious book, the Chinese title of which could be translated as Hsiang [Xiangl the Camel (1936), telling the grim life story of a young rickshaw puller in Beijing. Try to find Jean James's accurate translation, Rickshaw (1979); the unauthorized translation by Evan King, titled Rickshaw Boy, became a bestseller in the United States in 1945 but is a bowdlerized travesty with a tacked-on happy ending. The novel that Lau Shaw actually wrote is a far tougher and more gripping book than that.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was one of postwar Britain's best poets, and the one whose reputation seems to me most likely to con­tinue to grow after his death. Larkin himself lived a crabbed, often rather unhappy life as a provincial university librarian, a situation that seemed to fit the unsparing scorn that he poured into his verse for a wide range of targets: upper-class boorishness, middle-class complacency, working-class sloth, among others. His great talent was to channel this misanthropic jaundice into superbly inventive

language and beautifully disciplined verse; unlike some poets, his work can be enjoyed even in very large helpings. Try his Collected Poems (1993).

John LeCarrй (1931- ). It would be easy to dismiss LeCarrй (real name: David J.M. Cornwall) as simply a "genre writer," but few writers get to re-invent their genre. In The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and its sequeis (and sowing in the fertile ground plowed by Graham Greene), he transformed the spy novel from a simple entertainment of white hats vs. black hats to a dark and morally ambiguous tale of the pretty bad holding out against the truly awful; he became something like a poet of the Cold War.

Claude Lйvi-Strauss (1908- ) is the founder of the system of cul­tural analysis called structuralism. Lйvi-Strauss originally applied the method to the analysis of mythology in the service of anthropology; he sought to learn how people in different cultures use myths to mediate not only their systems of religious and social beliefs but their practical responses to actual situations. His methods were then adapted by literary scholars and other academic researchers in the humanities. Lйvi-Strauss wrote both for specialists and for general audiences; his more popular books are highly readable and even entertaining, as well as erudite. He presented some of his early field- work in South America in Tristes Tropiques (1955), and developed his methodology more systematically in Structural Anthropology (1958) and The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1964).