CONTENTS INTRODUCTION HEROES AND LEGENDS • 3000BCE–1300CE Only the gods dwell forever in sunlight • The Epic of Gilgamesh To nourish oneself on ancient virtue induces perseverance • Book of Changes, attributed to King Wen of Zhou What is this crime I am planning, O Krishna? • Mahabharata, attributed to Vyasa Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles • Iliad, attributed to Homer How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there’s no help in truth! • Oedipus the King, Sophocles The gates of hell are open night and day; smooth the descent, and easy is the way • Aeneid, Virgil Fate will unwind as it must • Beowulf So Scheherazade began… • One Thousand and One Nights Since life is but a dream, why toil to no avail? • Quan Tangshi Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams • The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu A man should suffer greatly for his Lord • The Song of Roland Tandaradei, sweetly sang the nightingale • “Under the Linden Tree”, Walther von der Vogelweide He who dares not follow love’s command errs greatly • Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Chrétien de Troyes Let another’s wound be my warning • Njal’s Saga Further reading RENAISSANCE TO ENLIGHTENMENT • 1300–1800 I found myself within a shadowed forest • The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri We three will swear brotherhood and unity of aims and sentiments • Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong Turn over the leef and chese another tale • The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer Laughter’s the property of man. Live joyfully • Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais As it did to this flower, the doom of age will blight your beauty • Les Amours de Cassandre, Pierre de Ronsard He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall • Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe Every man is the child of his own deeds • Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes One man in his time plays many parts • First Folio, William Shakespeare To esteem everything is to esteem nothing • The Misanthrope, Molière But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near • Miscellaneous Poems, Andrew Marvell Sadly, I part from you; like a clam torn from its shell, I go, and autumn too • The Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Bashō None will hinder and none be hindered on the journey to the mountain of death • The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Chikamatsu Monzaemon I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family • Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others? • Candide, Voltaire I have courage enough to walk through hell barefoot • The Robbers, Friedrich Schiller There is nothing more difficult in love than expressing in writing what one does not feel • Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Further reading ROMANTICISM AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL • 1800– 1855 Poetry is the breath and the finer spirit of all knowledge • Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life • Nachtstücke, E T A Hoffmann Man errs, till he has ceased to strive • Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Once upon a time… • Children’s and Household Tales, Brothers Grimm For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley All for one, one for all • The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas But happiness I never aimed for, it is a stranger to my soul • Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes • Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass I am no bird; and no net ensnares me • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! • Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë There is no folly of the beast of the Earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men • Moby-Dick, Herman Melville All partings foreshadow the great final one • Bleak House, Charles Dickens Further reading DEPICTING REAL LIFE • 1855–1900 Boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart • Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert I too am a child of this land; I too grew up amid this scenery • The Guarani, José de Alencar The poet is a kinsman in the clouds • Les Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire Not being heard is no reason for silence • Les Misérables, Victor Hugo Curiouser and curiouser! • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart • Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky To describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible • War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view • Middlemarch, George Eliot We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne In Sweden all we do is to celebrate jubilees • The Red Room, August Strindberg She is written in a foreign tongue • The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James Human beings can be awful cruel to one another • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain He simply wanted to go down the mine again, to suffer and to struggle • Germinal, Émile Zola The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky • Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it • The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde There are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men’s eyes • Dracula, Bram Stoker One of the dark places of the earth • Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Further reading BREAKING WITH TRADITION • 1900–1945 The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes • The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle I am a cat. As yet I have no name. I’ve no idea where I was born • I Am a Cat, Natsume Sōseki Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin • Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori • Poems, Wilfred Owen Ragtime literature which flouts traditional rhythms • The Waste Land, T S Eliot The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit • Ulysses, James Joyce When I was young I, too, had many dreams • Call to Arms, Lu Xun Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself • The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran Criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment • The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann Like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars • The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald The old world must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn! • Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board • Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston Dead men are heavier than broken hearts • The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler It is such a secret place, the land of tears • The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Further reading POST-WAR WRITING • 1945–1970 BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU • Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen • The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland • Poppy and Memory, Paul Celan I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me • Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul • Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov He leaves no stone unturned, and no maggot lonely • Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett It is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other • The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima He was beat – the root, the soul of beatific • On the Road, Jack Kerouac What is good among one people is an abomination with others • Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe Even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings • The Tin Drum, Günter Grass I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks. • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew • Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt • Catch-22, Joseph Heller Everyday miracles and the living past • Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did • In Cold Blood, Truman Capote Ending at every moment but never ending its ending • One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez Further reading CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE • 1970–PRESENT Our history is an aggregate of last moments • Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel • If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino To understand just one life you have to swallow the world • Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another • Beloved, Toni Morrison Heaven and Earth were in turmoil • Red Sorghum, Mo Yan You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel • Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey A historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment • Omeros, Derek Walcott I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy • American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river • A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth It’s a very Greek idea, and a profound one. Beauty is terror • The Secret History, Donna Tartt What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are • Blindness, José Saramago English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa • Disgrace, J M Coetzee Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories • White Teeth, Zadie Smith The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one • The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood There was something his family wanted to forget • The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen It all stems from the same nightmare, the one we created together • The Guest, Hwang Sok-yong I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer Further reading GLOSSARY CONTRIBUTORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS COPYRIGHT INTRODUCTION Storytelling is as old as humanity itself. The tradition of capturing the events and beliefs of communities reaches back to a time when humans first sat by a fire and told tales. History was preserved in the form of legends and mythologies that were passed down from one generation to the next, and offered answers to the mysteries of the universe and its creation. Written accounts emerged at the same time as ancient civilizations, but at first the invention of writing met simple, prosaic functions – for example to record transactions between traders or tally quantities of goods. The thousands of cuneiform clay tablets discovered at Ugarit in Syria reveal the already complex nature of the written form by 1500 BCE. Writing soon evolved from a means of providing trading information, to preserving the oral histories that were integral to every culture and their customs, ideas, morals, and social structures. This led to the first examples of written literature, in the epic stories of Mesopotamia, India, and ancient Greece, and the more philosophical and historical texts of ancient China. As John Steinbeck so succinctly put it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1962: “Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.” Miss Bingley of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice may have been talking fatuously when she declared: “How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”, but this sentiment rings true for many of us. Despite the almost limitless diversions that face readers today, literature continues to satisfy a spiritual or psychological need, and open readers’ minds to the world and its extraordinary variety. There are works penned hundreds of years ago that continue to enchant and amuse to this day; complex postmodern texts that can be challenging in the extreme, yet still hold us in their grip; and new novels that feel so fresh that they read as if words have only just been invented.