World Book Review

Though Brave New World is less famous than George Orwell’s 1984, it arguably presents a world that more closely resembles our own: a world of easy sex, readily available and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, information overload, and mass production.  Juxtaposing Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopias, the critic Neil Postman commented: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Narrated by the Compson siblings—Benjy, a source of shame for his family due to his diminished mental capacity; brilliant and obsessive Quentin; and Jason, the cynic—as well as Dilsey, the powerful matriarch of their black servants, The Sound and the Fury is a tragedy of haunted lives. As each of these characters reflect on the fourth sibling, beautiful and free-spirited Caddy, Faulkner paints an indelible portrait of a family in disarray. While The Sound and the Fury was dismissed by its author as a “splendid failure,” it is now considered a masterpiece and played a crucial role in Faulkner being awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Set in the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby tells the story of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, his decadent parties, and his love for the alluring Daisy Buchanan. Dismissed as “no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that” (The Chicago Tribune), The Great Gatsby is now considered a contender for “the Great American Novel.” Fitzgerald wanted to title the novel “Trimalchio in West Egg,” but both his wife and his editor preferred “The Great Gatsby.” Fitzgerald gave in, though he still thought that “the title is only fair, rather bad than good.”

Written as an homage to Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, Ulysses follows its hero, Leopold Bloom, through the streets of Dublin. Overflowing with puns, references to classical literature, and stream-of-consciousness writing, this is a complex, multilayered novel about one day in the life of an ordinary man. Initially banned in the United States but overturned by a legal challenge by Random House’s Bennett Cerf, Ulysses was called “a memorable catastrophe” (Virginia Woolf), “a book to which we are all indebted” (T. S. Eliot), and “the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness” (Edmund Wilson). Joyce himself said, “There is not one single serious line in [Ulysses].