Free The Modern Library by Colm Tóibín, Carmen Callil

per cent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decision-making process’. She is an anthropologist and scientist, and uses these skills to analyse and describe the story of Charlotte Douglas, who comes to Boca Grande from North America and misunderstands almost everything. The narrator will die, ‘very soon (from pancreatic cancer)’, she tells us early in the book, and the tone of the narrative has a hardness, an impatience and an urgency, and the sense of someone pushed into making short, sharp observations about people and things. The narrator is at her sharpest when she describes her husband’s venal, stupid family, her own wayward son, and of course the musings and antics of Charlotte Douglas. (‘Charlotte would call her own story one of passion. I believe I would call it one of delusion.’) This is a book which lends itself to constant re-reading – watch how Didion uses single-sentence paragraphs, openings and endings; there is not a word out of place.
    Joan Didion was born in California and lives in Berkeley. Her best journalism is included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979) and Miami (1987). Her extraordinary memoir of the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, The Year of Magical Thinking , won the National Book Award in 2005.
    Age in year of publication: forty-three.
     
     

Isak Dinesen 1885–1962
     
1958 Anecdotes of Destiny
     
    ‘I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser,’ says Isak Dinesen, speaking through Mira Jama, who tells the first of the five tales in this collection.
    Isak Dinesen is most famous for her autobiographical account of her life in Kenya, Out of Africa (1937), but her fictional work is equally exceptional, and unlike the fiction of anyone else. Though Danish, she generally wrote in English and then translated her work into her native tongue, but this cannot account for the particular quality of her work. Patrician, fantastic, Dinesen’s English has unusual beauty and great technical skill. She uses it to explore themes of desire, freedom, artistic endeavour, destiny and the aspirations and inspirations of the human spirit.
    In this way the five tales in Anecdotes of Destiny are closely connected, and in the writing itself images of angels, birds and, always, the sea, enclose each story. Most famous is ‘Babette’s Feast’, in which Babette, a famous French chef, changes the lives of the members of an obscure and puritanical religious sect living on a Norwegian fjord. In other long stories, ‘The Diver’, ‘Tempests’ and ‘The Immortal Story’, all the influences of the great sources – the Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, the Bible – are put to her sophisticated use, creating a fairy-tale world all her own, full of crystal visions and sibylline marvels.
    Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen. She lived in Denmark and in Kenya. Babette’s Feast was successfully filmed in 1987.
    Age in year of publication: seventy-three.
     
     

E. L. Doctorow 1931–
     
1975 Ragtime
     
    Ragtime , using stylish sentences and light cadences, tells the secret and unsecret history of the United States at the turn of the century. It is a novel of public drama, murder trials, teeming immigrants, political upheaval, vast wealth, Victorian values and secret longings . It is peopled by Freud and Jung, Houdini and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford (‘Henry Ford had once been an ordinary automobile manufacturer. Now he experienced an ecstasy greater and more intense than that vouchsafed to any American before him, not excepting Thomas Jefferson’) and J. P. Morgan (‘He was a monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital whose sovereignty was everywhere granted’), but its main protagonists are heroic figures in search of justice in this swiftly changing society.
    Doctorow tells these stories with great verve and passion, as though he is inventing a myth of origin for the United