The Magus by John Fowles

Moving on in the books published in 1966 in 1001 Books we come to the seriously hard to follow and then hard to forget, The Magus by John Fowles. The 1968 film version starring Michael Caine is just as confusing with Caine himself saying that no one knew what it was all about. Despite this intro, it is a book worth reading.

 

Combining grey London and sun-soaked Greece, the novel follows Nicholas Urfe as travels to teach English on a Greek island. He endures a stage-managed masque that just when the reader feels they are on top of has another misunderstanding/confusion to undermine our confidence and Nicholas's in the interpretation of what is really going on. In Greece there is the confusion surrounding twins and psychology and ambiguity plays a large role.

Fowles, born in 1926, himself taught English in Greece after leaving university which inspired the novel. An outstanding pupil, it was at university after completing military service that, inspired by Sartre and Camus, he became interested in writing and questioned both himself and the establishment. Although The Magus was Fowles' first book he started writing, both The Collector and The Aristos were published before it.

The Vice Consul by Marguerite Duras

The Vice-Consul by Marguerite Duras is on the 'published in 1966' list of to-read books. Duras was born in 1914 in Vietnam. 1001 Books states that the novel "might be categorized as a nouveau roman", a literary term coined in France in the 1950s to describe experimental styles of writing, explaining that it "rejects traditional conventions of realist fiction, such as morality and psychology, in favor of the visual, even cinematic, description of action."

 

Drawing on her experiences, The Vice-Consul follows two stories, that of a young pregnant Vietnamese peasant girl turned from home by her mother and characters in the French Embassy in Calcutta, particularly the Vice-Consul of Lahore who through several actions creates a scandal.

It is Duras's style of writing that draws attention to this novel, the question of the identity of the writer telling the tale and the identity of the subject of the story.

Born in Saigon, then in French Indochina, her parents had responded to a campaign by the French Government for workers in the colony. Her father falling ill soon after arrival returned to France where he died and her mother stayed with the three children living a difficult life in relative poverty due to bad investments in Cambodia. As a teenager she has an affair with a rich merchant and left for France to study aged seventeen.

Duras joined the French Communist Party after completing her studies and worked for the government representing Indochina. During the war she worked for the Vichy government but was also a member of the Resistance. For his involvement her husband was transported to and survived the German prison camp Buchenwald. Born Donnadieu, Duras took her name in 1943 when her first novel was published, using the name of the village where her father originated from.

As well as being the author of many novels she was the screenwriter of the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). She struggled with alcohol through her adult life and died aged 81.

Wide Sargasso Sea -Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea is on my list of books published in 1966 in 1001 Books... Already having read this I am not going to approach it again although it is short and an extremely rewarding read with its embedded literary connections. I will however crib the comments and add a few more from the 1001 Books comments.
  Author Jean Rhys

Rhys was born in 1890 in Dominica in the Caribbean, Wide Sargasso Sea  was published when Rhys was seventy-six. It is her 'literary response to Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel, Jane Eyre'. It explores the story of Rochester's first wife, the insane Bertha Mason whose mother was from Martinique and also the relationship between the Caribbean and Europe. Through the novel's three part structure Rhys makes connections between 'the story of Jane Eyre and the violent colonial history underpinning it.' In Rhys's exploration of the marriage Bertha is seen as a 'tragic victim of a complex historical moment.'

1001 Books comments that when Rhys wrote the novel she was ' an elderly woman existing in alcohol-soaked poverty in a primitive Devon cottage.' Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, she was educated from the age of sixteen in Britain while living with her aunt. Mocked for her accent and seen as an outsider she was unsuccessful in drama school and not wanting to return home became a chorus girl and began writing.

In 1919 she married the first of her three husbands, French-Dutch journalist and spy Jean Lenglet with whom she had two children, a son who died young and a daughter. In 1924 she met Ford Madox Ford in Paris who encouraged her and suggested she change her name. Lenglet was in prison due to currency irregularities and she began an affair with Ford after she moved in with him and his partner Elizabeth Bowen, fictionalised in her novel Quartet.
 Rhys and Ford

Rhys and Lenglet divorced in 1933 and the next year she married editor Leslie Tilden-Smith and published Voyage in the Dark. They moved to Devon in 1939 and her next novel Good Morning Midnight was published. Disappearing from public view in the 40s, after Tilden Smith's death in 1945 she married in 1947 his cousin, solicitor Max Hamer. During this time she lived unhappily in Bude, Cornwall then in Devon. Hamer, convicted of fraud, spent most of the marriage in prison and died in 1966. It was in '66 after being absent from the public eye the Wide Sargasso Sea was published by Diana Athill of Ándre Deutsch after Rhys spending years working on it.

This review of the Jean Rhys biography The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini sounds particularly interesting.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/jean-rhys-prostitution-alcoholism-and-the-mad-woman-in-the-attic-1676252.html