This is the second part of my February 2024 book haul. While the first part features books written by Asian writers, the second part features books by non-Asian writers. Without more ado, here are the books I obtained last month. Happy reading!

Title: Henderson the Rain King
Author: Saul Bellow
Publisher: The Viking Press
Publishing Date: 1959
No. of Pages: 320

Synopsis:

Bellow’s glorious, spirited story of an eccentric American millionaire who finds a home of sorts in deepest Africa. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: We
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin
Translator (from Russian): Natasha Randall
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 2007 (1920)
No. of Pages: 532

Synopsis: 

The citizens of the One State live in a condition of ‘mathematically infallible happiness’. D-503 decides to keep a diary of his days working for the collective good in this clean, blue city state where nature, privacy and individual liberty have been eradicated. But over the course of his journal D-503 suddenly finds himself caught up in unthinkable and illegal activities – love and rebellion.

Title: Solaris
Author: Stanislaw Lem
Translation (from French): Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox
Publisher: Harcourt
Publishing Date: 1970 (1961)
No. of Pages: 204

Synopsis:

When psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds himself confronting a painful memory embodied in the physical likeness of a past lover. Kelvin learns that he is not alone in this, and that other crews examining the planet are plagued with their own repressed and newly real memories. Could it be, as Solaris scientists speculate, that the ocean may be a massive neural center creating these memories, for a reason no one can identify?

Long considered a classic, Solaris ask

Title: The Strudlhof Steps
Author: Heimito Von Doderer
Translator (from German): Vincent Kling
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2021 (1951)
No. of Pages: 839

Synopsis: 

The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the early twentieth century, a vast novel crowded with characters ranging from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat to an innocent ingenue to “respectable” shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventures, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is Vienna, which Heimito von Doderer renders as distinctly as James Joyce does Dublin or Alfred Döblin does Berlin. Interweaving two time periods, 1908 to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, the novel takes the monumental eponymous outdoor double staircase as a governing metaphor for its characters’ intersecting and diverging fates. The Strudlhof Steps is an experimental tour de force with the suspense and surprise of a soap opera. Here Doderer illuminates the darkness of passing years with the dazzling extravagances that is uniquely his.

Title: The 42nd Parallel
Author: John Dos Passos
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Publishing Date: 1960 (1930)
No. of Pages: 365

Synopsis:

U.S.A. is the great three-volume complex by America’s greatest living novelist. The master design began with The 42nd Parallel, was continued with Nineteen Nineteen and completed by The Big Money. It is universally acclaimed as the classic portrait of a whole American generation, which fought the first of the century’s wars to achieve the illusion of the 20’s and experience the disillusion of the 30’s. Alfred Kazin has said of this book: “Technically, U.S.A. is one of the great achievements of the modern novel, yet the book lives by its narrative style, the wonderfully concrete yet elliptical prose which bears along and winds around the life stories in the book like a conveyor belt carrying Americans through some vast Ford plant of the human spirit. U.S.A. is a national epic, the first great national epic of its kind in the modern American novel… but the great thing about U.S.A. is that though it sweeps up so many human lives together and intones their waste and illusion and defeat to steadily, we seem to be swept along with them, and to see each life perfectly at the moment it passes by us.” This is the first one-volume edition to contain the Reginald Marsh illustrations.

Title: Nineteen Nineteen (1919)
Author: John Dos Passos
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Publishing Date: 1960 (1930)
No. of Pages: 412

Synopsis: 

U.S.A. is the great three-volume complex by America’s greatest living novelist. The master design began with The 42nd Parallel, was continued with Nineteen Nineteen and completed by The Big Money. It is universally acclaimed as the classic portrait of a whole American generation, which fought the first of the century’s wars to achieve the illusion of the 20’s and experience the disillusion of the 30’s. Alfred Kazin has said of this book: “Technically, U.S.A. is one of the great achievements of the modern novel, yet the book lives by its narrative style, the wonderfully concrete yet elliptical prose which bears along and winds around the life stories in the book like a conveyor belt carrying Americans through some vast Ford plant of the human spirit. U.S.A. is a national epic, the first great national epic of its kind in the modern American novel… but the great thing about U.S.A. is that though it sweeps up so many human lives together and intones their waste and illusion and defeat to steadily, we seem to be swept along with them, and to see each life perfectly at the moment it passes by us.” This is the first one-volume edition to contain the Reginald Marsh illustrations.