COVER TO COVER

1956: A WORLD WRITTEN AT ONCE—PART I

MARTIN AVELAR

November 10, 2026

1956 was a very good year for books. Seventy years later, we return to James Baldwin, Albert Camus, João Guimarães Rosa, Naguib Mahfouz, Erich Fromm, and others to ask what, beyond a publication date, unites them and where the comparisons come apart. From the Brazilian backlands to a room in Paris, their characters struggle with desires they cannot admit and beliefs they can no longer trust. This two-part essay reads those books together and ponders how long readers had to wait to do the same.

Seventy years ago, a former gunman in the Brazilian interior began telling a stranger about the devil. A colonial official waited for a transfer from Paraguay. An American in France remembered the man he had loved and abandoned. In Cairo, a father imposed a morality at home from which he exempted himself elsewhere. All four appeared in print in 1956.

The books are João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands), Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama, Albert Camus’s The Fall, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk. Around them gather Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba, Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Chemmeen, Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. A year capable of accommodating all of these works deserves attention. Their proximity becomes more interesting, however, when we stop admiring the list and ask what the date explains. Could they have appeared a year earlier or later with much the same effect? Did 1956 supply a particular pressure, or are we imposing an order available only in hindsight?

The temptation is to begin with the news. In February, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes in a closed session of the Soviet Communist Party congress. In the autumn, Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising while Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. But a novel published in May cannot be responding to tanks arriving in November.

Riobaldo, a retired jagunço, recounts the years he spent riding with armed bands in the Brazilian backlands. We hear only his side of the conversation. He wants his visitor’s opinion on the existence of the devil, a question on which the old gunman has a considerable personal stake. If there was somebody there the night he went to make his pact, Riobaldo can at least account for what followed. The more troubling possibility is that he stood there alone.

Riobaldo also wants to talk about Diadorim, the companion he loved during the campaigns. He can summon up a glance more readily than he can say what passed between them. Rosa gives this man who doubts his own account an extraordinary command of Portuguese. Riobaldo can coin a word when the language has failed to provide one. Settling what he meant by something he said or did forty pages earlier is another matter.

Di Benedetto gives his colonial official three dates, 1790, 1794, and 1799. Each time we find him in Paraguay. Don Diego de Zama expects a transfer from the Spanish crown and makes the mistake, familiar to anyone who has waited for a letter, of counting the days spent waiting as progress toward an answer. Riobaldo can talk for hundreds of pages without needing anything from the coast. Zama would go tomorrow if somebody there would sign the paper.

The long intervals do a good deal of the novel’s work. Four years have gone by between sections, then five. A promotion might still come. It will have to compensate Zama for considerably more than it would have the first time.

Gallimard allows Albert Camus one small word beneath La Chute: récit. On the American jacket of The Fall, Knopf takes the death of Thomas Mann as an occasion to announce a successor. Justin O’Brien, who translated the book, gets the narrow strip below.

One November night in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Clamence passes a young woman leaning over the parapet of the Pont Royal. He has walked on some distance when he hears a body strike the water. There is a cry, then another, farther downstream. He stops. He never turns round. By the time he tells this story in an Amsterdam bar, the woman has been waiting rather a long time for her place in the conversation.

Camus gives the lawyer a listener whose replies we have to infer, much as Rosa does with Riobaldo’s visitor. Clamence takes an interest in the man across the table that should make anybody sitting there uneasy. He is quite prepared to concede, in exquisite detail, what sort of man walks away from a drowning woman. The question he has been working up to is what his listener would have done.

On the French cover of Mongo Beti’s Le pauvre Christ de Bomba, Bomba gets the red capitals. On the English cover, Christ gets a patchwork robe and a sky full of stars. The account of the mission inside is entrusted to Denis, the boy who accompanies the priest.

Two diaries from Cameroon appeared that same year. Denis accompanies Father Drumont on a tour of his mission in Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba. Toundi works in the French commandant’s house in Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy. A missionary has good reason to be grateful for a boy who attends to his words. It hardly occurs to him that the boy may also be keeping a record of what he does.

Toundi learns about the commandant’s wife and her lover. His intimacy with the household, an ordinary condition of the job, now makes him dangerous to the people who employ him. He ends up beaten and mortally injured. Clamence, all this while, is free to order another drink and decide how much his companion ought to know.

A small loss in translation: the word vie. Ferdinand Oyono called his novel Une vie de boy in 1956. Ten years later it appeared in English as Houseboy. Toundi’s employer could have supplied the English title. For the life, we have Toundi’s diary.

From her window in Palace Walk, Amina can see the minarets of the mosque of al-Husayn. Her husband, al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, spends his evenings out in Cairo. She needs his permission even to go and pray. While he is away she makes the visit, and a car strikes her on the way home. A broken collarbone is difficult to keep from a husband. When he learns where she has been, he sends her back to her mother.

Mahfouz sets the family’s story in the years leading up to the Egyptian revolution of 1919. He had finished the trilogy before the revolution of 1952 and was still waiting to publish it. By the time Palace Walk reached Egyptian readers in 1956, a family’s memory of one confrontation with Britain could be read in the middle of another. That coincidence belongs to the history of reading the novel. Mahfouz had already done his work.

In Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, the trains keep time for Mano Majra. The villagers know when to get up, pray, and go to sleep by what they hear from the railway. During Partition a train arrives carrying the dead. Singh has spent enough time on the ordinary timetable for the reader to feel the disturbance before anyone in the village knows its cause.

Khushwant Singh’s novel appeared in Britain as Train to Pakistan and in the United States as Mano Majra, both in 1956. One title names the train, the other the village where it stops.

In Chemmeen, Karuthamma loves Pareekutty, a Muslim trader’s son, and marries Palani, a fisherman. In the fishing community where she grows up, a man’s safety at sea depends upon his wife’s fidelity on shore. A young woman’s private attachment can therefore become a matter on which everyone who watches the boats come in feels entitled to an opinion.

The passage to Giovanni’s Room comes through the social cost of desire. Baldwin’s David can imagine an acceptable future more readily than he can inhabit his relationship with Giovanni. His fear of what love would make visible helps destroy the possibility of loving. In postwar France, an American’s geographical escape fails to become an escape from the judgments he carries within him. The pressures of the 1950s appear with unusual immediacy in the novel’s own route to publication: Baldwin’s established publisher rejected it. A Black American author’s book centered on white characters and love between men unsettled expectations about both his subject and his permissible career.

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems was number four in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. Sixty-six years later, Nicolas Richard’s French translation kept all four letters of Howl. To read them on the cover, one has to turn the book.

Ginsberg put into the opening of Howl the company David spends much of Baldwin’s novel trying to disown. The poem names its friends, addresses its lovers, and gives its accumulating clauses the pace of a man trying to get everybody in before he runs out of breath. In 1957 its publisher faced an obscenity prosecution.

Erich Fromm gives the prospective lover in The Art of Loving the eye of a real estate buyer. A property might be worth more than its asking price once somebody has seen what can be done with it. People make much the same calculation, he suggests, when choosing a partner. Each hopes to do a little better than looks, income, and social standing would ordinarily allow. There is some comedy in finding this argument in a book whose title might lead a reader to expect advice on becoming more desirable. Fromm thinks most people have already devoted quite enough ingenuity to getting themselves chosen.

There are limits to what these writers can be made to say in chorus. Amina wants to leave the house for an afternoon. Zama wants the government to send him somewhere else. David gets all the way to France and takes his old judgments with him. The accident of a common date lets us put them in one another’s company. Who, in 1956, could actually have read all three?

Erich Fromm wrote The Art of Loving in English. As a volume in the World Perspectives series, it came equipped with a globe and four arrows. On the German cover of Die Kunst des Liebens, love has the whole green field to itself.

Martin Avelar was born in Belo Horizonte in 1974 and studied literature at the University of Havana. His books include “The Ethics of Arriving in Portuguese” (2009) and “Words Detained in Transit” (2016). Neither has been translated, though a French publisher recently asked for the second to be released from confinement.