The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960). In the context of modern Russian literature Pasternak's greatest contribution was in the field of poetry, where his avant-garde and sometimes abstruse verse was unpopular with Soviet authorities but had a great influence on younger poets. His popular fame, however, rests on his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957-58); written with the scope of a Dostoyevsky or a Tolstoy, the noveFs elegiac account of lives disrupted by the Russian Revolution was banned in the USSR and circulated only clandes- tinely. When Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, he was denounced as a traitor and a cultural saboteur; only with the end of the Soviet system was he given, posthumously, the public honors that his work had earned.

Georges Perec (1936-1982) was one of the most innovative and inventive prose writers of recent times. In the late 1960s he became one of the leading lights of the Workshop for Potential Literature, a French writers' group dedicated to developing experimental new lit- erary forms. Perec is known in the English-speaking world primarily for his 1978 novel, Life, A Users Manual, which uses a montage technique to describe a large apartment building in Paris and tell the life stories of ali of its inhabitants; it is a fascinating window into the contemporary French literary sensibility.

Harold Pinter (1930- ) has employed his spare, uncompromising dramatic vision and his talent for writing vivid, taut dialogue to transform the character of postwar British theater. Discarding the old ideal of the "well-made play," clear in its dramatic focus, self- contained, and unambiguous, Pinter created a theater where ambi- guity, menace, humor, and open-endedness combine to leave audi- ences with a feeling of unease as well as gratification. Despite the dark and sometimes difficult nature of his work, Pinter has become a significant figure in commercial theater on both sides of the Atlantic. Of his many plays I would recommend particularly The Caretaker (1960), in which a stranger insinuates himself into, and disrupts, the secure and stable relationship of a pair of bachelor brothers.

Robert Pirsig (1928- ) captured perfectly the mood of the Sixties' counterculture movement with his book-length essay Zen and the Art ofMotorcycle Maintenance (1974). Drawing upon and updating the themes of the road trip and Zen consciousness that had been explored by Jack Kerouac in the 1950s, Pirsig used the image of a cultivated harmony of man and machine to illustrate the importance of "quality" as a transcendent goal of the human experience. Whether the book will seem like more than a period-piece curiу fifty years from now is unclear; this may be the paradigm of a "tem- porary classic." For the moment it's well worth reading.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is notable both as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and as an editor who had a profound influence on Eliot and Joyce. Pound was deeply learned in classical and East Asian poetry and was a fine and creative translator; his own verse showed both classical grounding and stunning innovation. His best and most influential collection of poetry is Personae (1926). Pound was justly criticized for the odious opinions he expressed late in life; his verse outlives his personality.

Anthony Powell (1905- ), despite a long and successful career as a writer, would not rise above the crowd of very good modern British novelists were it not for his remarkable twelve-volume series of autobiographical novйis, A Dance to the Music of Time, beginning with A Question of Upbringing (1951). In a voice noted for its ironi- cal detachment and its unusually frank honesty (but with no unseemly confessional breast-beating), Powell dissects his own life, especially his intellectual and emotional life, in the context of British society at mid-century.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925- ), Indonйsias most important writer, has spent much of his life in prison or under house arrest for his leftist political views and his outspoken criticism of the govern­ment. His best-known novel, This Earth of Mankind (1980), is the impassioned, romantic story of a cruelly oppressed young Javanese journalist in the waning years of Dutch colonial control of the East Indies. The novel was written while Pramoedya was confined to the prison island of Buru; the story of the journalist Minke is continued

in the other three novйis of the so-called Buru Quartet: Child of Ali Nations (1980), Footsteps (1985), and House of Glass (1988).