Round-up - One-Day Novels
Ten classics that take place over a single day
Dear classics readers,
Happy Bloomsday! Today, June 16th, is the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place – between 8am and the small hours of the following morning – and every year the whole of Dublin turns out to celebrate.
We are going to be celebrating Dallowday on Wednesday this week, with a real-time read-along of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf – and last November, we read another one-day novel in real-time: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, which takes place on the Mexican Day of the Dead.
To celebrate Bloomsday, here are ten more circadian classics that take place over a single day, organised by the day of the year on which they take place.
Here you will find libraries and gulags, con men and toilet-cleaners, murderers and replicants.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)
Date: January 3rd
Setting: San Francisco
World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn’t ‘retiring’ them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal – the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard’s world things were never that simple, and his assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit – and the threat of death for the hunter rather than the hunted . . .
[UK:] SF Masterworks | 208 pages
[US:] Del Rey | 240 pages
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1981)
Date: February 2nd?
Setting: a small Colombian town
Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople knew it was going to happen - including the victim. But nobody did anything to prevent the killing. Twenty seven years later, a man arrives in town to try and piece together the truth from the contradictory testimonies of the townsfolk. To at last understand what happened to Santiago, and why . . .
[UK:] Penguin | 128 pages | translated by Gregory Rabassa
[US:] Vintage | 128 pages | translated by Gregory Rabassa
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (1962)
Date: February 8th
Setting: Camp 17, Siberia
This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string or a single match in a world where survival is all. Here safety, warmth and food are the first objectives. Reading it, you enter a world of incarceration, brutality, hard manual labour and freezing cold - and participate in the struggle of men to survive both the terrible rigours of nature and the inhumanity of the system that defines their conditions of life.
[UK:] Penguin Modern Classics | 144 pages | translated by Ralph Parker
[US:] FSG | 208 pages | translated by H. T. Willetts
A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin (1947)
Date: March 20th
Setting: Leicester?
Katherine Lind is a refugee who has become a librarian in a wartime Northern town. One winter’s day, she receives a telegram: and her thoughts drift back to falling in love with her pen-pal, Robin Fennel, on a glorious summer exchange. But on his return from the army, their reunion is not what they imagined . . .
[UK:] Faber & Faber | 256 pages
[US:] Hassell Street Press | 256 pages
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson (1938)
Date: spring?
Setting: London
Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamour that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.
[UK:] Persephone Books | 256 pages | preface by Henrietta Twycross-Martin
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch (1945)
Date: September 21st
Setting: Brundisium (modern Brindisi, Italy)
It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar’s enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil’s life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem – and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.
[US:] Vintage | 496 pages | translated by Jean Starr Untermeyer
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (1956)
Date: a Saturday, autumn
Setting: New York
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as ‘the type that loses the girl’) and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope . . .
[UK:] Penguin Modern Classics | 128 pages | introduced by Cynthia Ozick
[US:] Penguin Classics | 144 pages | introduced by Cynthia Ozick
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
Date: November 30th
Setting: Los Angeles
Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover, Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George’s determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul’s ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation.
[UK:] Vintage Classics | 176 pages
[US:] FSG | 192 pages
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand (1935)
Date: winter (December or January)
Setting: Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, India
Bakha is a proud and attractive young man, yet nonetheless he is an Untouchable – an outcast in India’s caste system. It is a system that is even now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this vivid re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, Anand pours a vitality, fire and richness of detail that earn his place as one of the twentieth century's most important Indian writers.
[UK / US:] Penguin Classics | 160 pages | introduced by Ramachandra Guha
Gentlemen Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (1937)
Date: summer (December or January)
Setting: The South Pacific
Halfway between Honolulu and Panama, a man slips and falls from a ship. For crucial hours, as he patiently treads water in hope of rescue, no one on board notices his absence. By the time the ship’s captain is notified, it may be too late to save him . . .
[UK / US:] Boiler House Press | 186 pages | introduced by George Szirtes | afterword by Brad Bigelow
Are there any other one-day novels you would recommend? Let me know in a comment below.
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
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"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a fantastic read. My English teacher recommended it to me around the same time I was learning about Russia under Stalin. So important to see the human element to the millions that were sent to Siberia. The trading of tobacco and trying to get as much into a tin as possible seems to have stuck in my head.
A fantastic round-up, Henry (with the added benefit that most, apart from Ulysses, are also readable in a day). Happy Bloomsday.