Umberto Eco- Prediction

 

Probably the most well known candidate on my list but does he stand a chance?

There is one thing that may hinder Umberto Eco’s chances of winning the Nobel Prize.  His bestseller, ‘The Name of the Rose’, which was very popular, it was made into a film with Sean Connery, for a novel involving semiotics and other academic subjects.  But general popularity is not necessarily help to convince the committee you deserve the Prize, it can actually hinder your chances, partly the reason why Arthur Miller and Salman Rushdie haven’t been given it.  Is this fair?  Yes he is popular but he is also serious about literature and his popularity does not seem to detract from his intellectual pursuits.  

I’ve read ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ and I was very impressed with it.  I thought it could be two hundred pages shorter but it contained a very well thought out story and some interesting ideas, memorable scenes and great characters.  The story is about a small group of men who devise a system for creating conspiracies involving the Knights Templar, which at first they do as a joke but slowly it becomes something more and actually starts to threaten their lives.  It’s a book about how stories and certain beliefs can become dangerous in the minds of some people.  It’s a great intelluctual thriller that’s worth pursisting with.

  Eco’s greatest strength would be his interested in complex ideas and their relation to ordinary humans and how they work with or agaisnt them.  He’s similar to Orhan Pamuk constructing his stories in a post-modernist world.  I think he would be a very suitable candidate but I would not be surprised if the committee would think of him as being too obvious a choice.  He’s not your usual best seller as he doesn’t compromise, or at least not too much, his scholally ideas.  He is just able to do that rarest of things, to write a highly critically acclaimed novel while being popular with the general public.  

It gives me hope for the reading public if they are putting books like ‘The Prague Cemetary’ on the best selling list.  How has a writer like him become so popular?  He writes thrillers that have driving plots and a certain readability but that does not make him necessarily easy.  He’s more interesting then the usual thriller writer who injects cerebral content to his chases, captures and fight scenes.

 He is also a writer that touches the emotion and writes in moving moments that counteract the mind games.  His female character in ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ was an island of rational sanity amongst the mounting madness of the male characters and gave a gentle speech about how parts of the body have come to mean many different things and so one ultimate meaning is impossible to construct.  

One of the things that left a bad taste in my mouth was towards the end where Eco had created these wonderfully well rounded character only to then dispose of them one after another.  It seemed careless and insensitive.  That and I think it would be better if it was shorter and more focused but others may think that it’s length gives it layers of possible meaning and that may be justified, just not to me.

  
So Eco is a good candidate and I’m sure he’s been on the list for a while but it’s a question of whether he can overcome the committee’s prejudices of success.  I hope he does and I hope to read more of him, ‘The Island of the Day Before’ looked like a good book, maybe I’ll start with that. 

If you think Umberto Eco should win the Nobel Prize please comment below.

Next week I'll be looking at Michael Frayn.

Now it's audience participation time! If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways: - by being my patron on Patreon.com -give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee -Buy one of my literary books -Share this blog on your social media -Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book -Follow me I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog. Live long and prosper.

The Gods Shall Have Blood by Anatole France

  

It’s funny sometimes how little one can remember of a book even from a great book.  I spent the whole of the first volume of Prousts’ ‘In Search Of Lost Time’ diligently reading, but after I had finished not a single scene could be brought to mind.  It’s similar with ‘The Gods Shall Have Blood’, I know that I enjoyed it but I can’t really remember what happened.  The book is about a young earnest man in the time of the French revolution and his sense of justice is such that he becomes appointed as a judge for the Health and Public Safety Committee sending guilty men to their deaths.  The point of the book is how our noble idea of justice can make people into the worst of criminals.  It certainly would have made Les Mis a more interesting film if it had based it’s story on this.

  I would like to read it again to see if it was a fault of the book for being forgettable or me for not being attentive enough.  I would like to read more of France and blimey is there plenty of him to read.  It is curious how few people read France anymore or even have heard of his name.  If I read more of him I might find out why that is.  It is true that a lot of Nobel Prize Winners do get forgotten but that is part of the reason why I do this blog, to see if I can find out why it is some get forgotten while others, such as Rudyard Kipling, seem like they will always be remembered. 

  I do remember that there is a love story and I think the young man tries to use his new influence and power to get her.  She possibly refuses and so he takes out his disappointment by passing tough sentences on others.

  I will probably do another post on this book if I get round to reading it again, but for now I think I’ll leave it at that.

Jaques Derrida- Prediction

 

It’s not only novelists who can win the Prize but philosophers can too.

I’ve been looking forward to this one.  It should be fun.  I have the task of trying to explain and summerise the philosophy of Jaques Derrida’s Deconstructionism with clairty in just under six hundred words.  Don’t worry, I’ve got this.  Right let’s start with the basics.  Derrida is a French philosopher by trade, he studied at the top schools and got some of the top marks.  He is certifiably, capital S smart.  No question, no doubt.  As to what kind of philosopher he is, well he could be described as dangerous, as an intellectual terrorist as he deconstructs Western philosophy from the ground up.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.  Let’s talk about his take on literary criticism, which I am far more comfortable in doing, it is, let’s say, my bag.  Tradional critcism holds it that the writer knows all, that they create a perfect world with unity and cohesion and that this can be, through various methods, be interpreted and understood as the writer intended.  Then along came Derrida who said that the writer does not know all, that their world is not perfect and does not have unity or cohesion and that any one meaning cannot be gained from the text.  Instead the text is rife with contradictions, with fissures and cracks and it is the job of literary critcism to widen these gaps and blow apart the seemingly polished surface. 

  Forgive me if I am off the mark, I have only a brief encounter with Derrida and this is what I have gathered.  I have only glanced at his work but have watched the film with his name for the title, which is about him so that at least is something.  To the lay person his works are quite unreachable, even to the educated person it may be a stretch to be able to really understand him (and the cynics would jeer that of course continental philosophy is nothing but nonsense).  A well read person trained in philosophy would have a better chance and this is his ideal reader as what may seem obscure is only a subtle reference to something Heidegger said or that Hegel had written about, so for the philosopher he is a rich mine to dig in.  He did say, in the film, one thing that has stuck in my mind.  He said that ‘the eyes do not age’ that the eyes remain the same from birth to death.  Though I cannot validate this, and perhaps if a doctor or a medical professional is reading this they can put me straight, but it is an interesting image.  The eyes, whose job is to perceive, are always a child’s and so is the philosopher always asking ‘why?’.  Make of it what you will.

  Is he a Nobel Prize candidate?  Doubtless he is as what may disuade the ordinary person attracts the committee who value complexity, sophistication and productivity, Derrida is a perfect candidate.  Creating you own philosophy is something that the Literature Prize can rival the science prizes, implying a progression of sorts.  It may be a false progression but it is too early to say that and possibly progression in philosophy maybe impossible.

First Love and other Novellas by Samuel Beckett

 

Known for his classic ‘Waiting For Godot’ Samuel Beckett’s prose fiction generally gets less attention and what a shame this is.  Beckett is peerless in prose and works with servre clarity of vision, a master in the manipulation of language combined with a compassion for those at the margins of socitey.  Though this book contains four novellas, ‘The End’, ‘The Expelled’, ‘The Calmative’ and ‘First Love’, I actually think this is really just one story broken up and rearranged.  There are repetitions that give it away such as the cowpat with the love heart drawn in it and the same reaction to a dying plant.  It’s not as complicated as some of his other writings, such as the maddening ‘Play’, evoking a child-like simplicity in a more pastoral time, early Twenith Centuary, in a more pastoral place, Ireland, while combining the streets of the city, Paris.  With these novellas Beckett first uses the French language after making the decsion, to pare down his writing and give him fewer options I think, to write completely in French.  He merges convosational talk with obscure allusions.  His homeless characters seem to be naturally educated but unable to control their lives satisfactorily.  Often they are searching for a place to lay their head ending with a type of trandenscental despair or beign indifference.  ‘So there it is’ he seems to be saying ‘Now what?’.

  It is poetic without being typically lyric but he does possibly romanticise a vagabound life although it can’t be said that his characters are happy with their situation, they just seem to have been born into it and can do little about it.  Written with huge pathos for the human condition to be wandering from philosophy to philosophy without satisfaction trying to find a place between the dirt and the sky where there can be home.  Bleak, yes, but inspiring with such purity that it cleaneses out the pallet leaving it afresh for new possibilities.  It’s very easy to read, I managed it in two days, but it gives you enough to get your teeth into such as how to cope in a loveless world.  The last sentence of the first novella is beautiful where the character after being unable to find anywhere to live sinks in a boat:

‘The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to the end or the strength to go on.’

It is stark and bold and as Harold Pinter has put it: ‘He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going.  He bring forth a body of beauty…’ I couldn’t agree more, for all the dark light there is unmistakable beauty that radiates out from his lonely characters who are alien even to themselves and who walk in a strange universe that is indifferent to their survival.  Not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach, it has guts and strength and determined will.  Writing like polished crystal it is multi-faceted and demands reapeated readings.

  Beckett’s known for his drama but I would highly recommend his prose works as well.  They are rich and rewarding if tough and uncompromising.  These are long poems and would be good if read out loud as each word seems to be carefully chosen for just the right effect.  He has written novels, a so called trilogy, but if you want a quick glimpse into Beckett’s world then this is a good introduction to the French writing Irishman, and of course fail better.

Howard Barker- Prediction

 -->Obscene and challenging is Howard Barker a writer working in the ‘ideal direction’?

I first encounter Barker in my first term of University.  A group was putting on ‘A Wounded Knife’ and I went to watch to see what it was like.  I was astounded.  The play had such strength and clarity of vision that it swept me up with it’s poetic force, it’s political manipulations and it’s surreal humour, this, I thought, was Theatre.  And so Barker has been with me ever since.  Know I’m in a good position to comment on Barker as I went to Aberystwyth University where he has links with and whose plays are produced frequently.  I was surprised that I had not heard of this dramatist of caliber before and really it seems you have to be either in Aberystwyth or Exeter, where his company is based, to know of him.  This seems to me a great shame as it is worthy drama he writes, but as he said to me when I briefly met him “It shows you what the English will and will not put up with”, and indeed this is fair comment.  After all his works are confrontational, difficult and at times downright unpleasant.  Though one of his plays was recently put on at the National Theatre so things might be changing.

  This complexity and prolific nature, and by God he is prolific putting out plays, poetry and theory almost every year, if not every month, so despite being introduced to quite a few of his plays I have barely scratched the surface, makes him a clear contender for the Nobel Prize.  Certainly he is the strongest contender I have looked at so far as he ticks all the boxes that candidates have normally displayed in the past.

  ‘A Wounded Knife’ is about the death of a King and his subsequent revenge of those responsible for it by grudge bearing individuals.  It has one of my favourite lines: “I was driving with a murderer and a moralist, one said ‘go faster’, the other ‘go slower’”.  He has been described as an anarchistic Shakespeare and the comparison to Shakespeare is not an ideal one and is actually, to an extent, justified.  Barker deals with a wide variety of characters from workmen to nobility, philosophers and plotters, who create a matrix of interconnecting relationships that develop and change over time.  The stories are immaculately plotted and the poetry of the dialogue is at the forefront of the drama.  He investigates different ideologies of the political spectrum as well as meditating on Christian theology.  Heady stuff but with Barker what you get is a full-blooded, full spirited, and full cerebral experience.  It’s what I love about him.

  A criticism I’ve heard about him is that he often lets his obscenities cloud what is otherwise excellent writing, particularly in ‘The Castle’ where the C-word is often employed.  I accept he certainly is obscene in places, perhaps needlessly so, but I do not think it is enough to detract from his overall project.

  A typical utterance of his characters is like this, taken from ‘The Love of a Good Man’:

 

BISHOP:  Why God likes pain. (Pause) Always being asked that one, why God is so very fond of pain. (Pause) Because He is.  Wriggle round it as we might, it’s inescapable He must like pain.  His own and other people’s.  He must approve of it.  And this is as good an occasion to mention pain as any.  Better than most, in fact.  Because we are situated in a sea of it.  An Atlantic of stilled agony. (Pause.  He examines his fingers a moment) Well, I will not apologize for Him.  I am always apologizing for Him.  It’s getting a bit much.

The historical is vital for Barker, having, I think, studied History, ‘The Love of a Good Man’ is set on the gravesite of Passchendaele, ‘The Castle’ in the time of the Crusades and ‘The Power of the Dog’, dramatising a meeting between Churchill and Stalin, at the time of the world wars.  He invigorates history with poetry and is an endless source of inspiration for him.

  Barker is certainly someone who I would happily put money on getting the Nobel Prize but just because I think he deserves does not mean he will get it.  I wholeheartedly hope that he will be awarded with it soon.

Does Howard Barker deserve the Nobel Prize?  Leave a comment with your opinion.

Next week I’ll be looking at Jaques Derrida.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann: Part One

 

Oh boy.  After reading Herman Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ I thought that some more ideas minded German literature would do me some good and so I picked up Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’.  Great, I thought, the mountain as a metaphor for intellectual study and reflection, right up my street.  But I had bitten off more than I could chew.  It’s tough.  It requires first rate concentration and iron stamina to get through and so far I’ve still a long way to go. 

  I was about half-way through before I had to put it down.  It was too much.  The dense complexity of literature has, I think, reached it’s zenith with this book.  It is one of the hardest books I’ve ever had to read and I’m not even done with it yet.

  This is a promise that I will read it and give it a fair outing in Part Two of this post and who knows maybe it might get better.  In any way I need a mental rest before contemplating picking it up again.

  The story is about Hans Castorp who visits his friend in a santorium before becoming ill himself and having to spend the next seven years there.  Hans is an engineer and a young man who has yet to experience the world and in the santorium he experience’s the philosophy of Herr Settembrini and Frau Chauchat.

  It is confusing and generous in it’s expounding humanism and in a certain sense sensually pleasing.  The concept I love but it is beyond me and as sincere in its searching intellect I am unable to follow it.  So why continue reading it?  I do want to be able to say I read one of the most difficult books in literature and also I do want to see if it gets a bit easier to digest.

  This, I believe, is different to what he usually wrote so I will have to read more of him in order to put him into a suitable context.  

Paul Auster- Prediction

 

Paul Auster is easily one of my favourite novelists but is he a contender?

I first started reading Auster’s ‘New York Trilogy’ at college due to a teacher’s offhand recommendation.  I started it but didn’t finish it until later and the plot device certainly intrigued me. 

  The story is about a man who receives a call asking for the ‘Paul Auster Detective Agency’, the man is not Paul Auster and so puts down the phone.  The phone rings again asking for the ‘Paul Auster Detective Agency’ and this time the man accepts the case.  The man is not a detective but is, uncannily, a detective writer.  

The story leads the man to a place of uncertainty and narrative trickiness that is post-modern crime.  In this story narrative authority, word play and the question of identity are all explored in this misguiding three-part novel.  It’s a novel that had a big impact on me.  Never had I encounter a writer so willing to play games with genre and to question the text within the text I was indeed engaged and fascinated.

My first Auster book was ‘Oracle Night’ and what a splendid introduction that was to him.  Sidney Orr comes out of the hospital and buys himself a new notebook, he being, yes, a writer, and begins to write a new story from nowhere as if the book is possessing him.  It’s a ghost story without ghosts and it’s terrifying.  It will make you question the reality you live in and the happiness you have.  Its gut wrenching and emotional while also being clever and manipulative in the best sense.  Auster is also economical with words, being also a writer of poetry shows, for his use of words is exact and weighed for just the right impact.

  
There are other books ‘The Book of Illusion’ about silent film, ‘Leviathan’ about the deconstruction of a man’s identity, ‘In The Country of Last Things’ about a post-apocalyptic New York, just to name a few, all great books in different ways.  His talents as a storyteller are immense and it’s only as I write this post that I really realise just how remarkable he really is.  His done more or less everything: identity politics, literary games, grandfather-father-son relationships, growing up, art, language, sexual exploration and grief. 

  
He’s even written the ultimate post-modern novella with ‘The Scriptorium’ where a writer, seemingly Paul Auster himself, is tormented by the characters he has badly treated in his novels.  Incredibly self-indulgent and goes to the extreme of intertextuality, which is both good and bad in different ways.

  
And he keeps on writing: ‘Invisible’, ‘A Man in the Dark’ and ‘Sunset Park’ have all come out in recent years and I don’t think he’s going to slow down.

  
Is he good enough for the Nobel Prize?  There have been worse candidates and his commitment to writing stories dealing with serious ideas and serious emotions is not in question.  Also he has warmth, for which I hope the committee does not hold against him as I think it is one of his prized characteristics.  So I like to think that he could win it and I would be very happy to see him have it, but something in me says that in some ways he is unsuited for such a prize because of his down-to-earth nature, despite his dealings with abstractions and metafiction.

Does Paul Auster deserve the Nobel Prize?  Leave a comment to say why or why not.

Next week I will be looking at dramatist Howard Barker.

Now it's audience participation time! If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways: - by being my patron on Patreon.com -give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee -Buy one of my literary books -Share this blog on your social media -Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book -Follow me I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog. Live long and prosper.

Auto Da Fe by Elias Canetti

If you were to go blind would it not be logical to kill yourself because you could not read?  This is one of the many challenging questions Auto-Da-Fe by Elias Canetti poses to us and it’s a difficult one for bibliophiles to answer, certainly it gives me pause to think and there are many moments like that in this book.  There is a lot of action in it but it is also very meditate and intellectual about various issues, namely about being intellectual; it has meat as well as veg.

This is a big building of a book, multi-storied and multi-leveled.  It tackles big subjects with gusto and prowess.  It is about the problem of overspecialization, of being bookish in a world of physical violence and the need for outside influence.  Very influential on Iris Murdoch, there are those who may detect the similar presentation that is almost cartoonish or grotesque, Canetti uses symbols and images to convey his messages in this surreal story.

  
Peter Klein owns a large collection of books and they are his pride and joy.  He values learning and reading immensely and tries to pass on his knowledge to others when he can, as the first pages show.  During the course of the book he his forced out of his own home by his wife and has to live for himself outside his comfortable world of books.  He meets a chess playing hunchback dwarf who guides him and helps him plot out his revenge though even he is a dubious character.  Apparently this dwarf is a chess champion but he won’t ever let anyone play a game with him, leaving us to wonder is he as good as he says he is or is he only good because he says he is?

  
It’s a very timely novel that explores a situation where books are under threat from barbarism, where those who care for it not a jot and those who dedicate their time to study infiltrate the library are cast out to the streets.  In our time of library and university cutting a whole new swathe of people should be reading this book. 

  
There are faults with Klein as he is far too specialised to really cope with the outside world and has no street smarts whatsoever and it is only because he finds someone who can help him.  In the later part Klein’s brother, a psychiatrist comes to his aid and dangerously delves into his brother’s mind.  This book is a tragedy of modern intellectuals and gives fear and terror to the book loving people of his Germany, but it equally relates to our times of fanatics and book burning ideologues, both religious and secular.

  
It can be at times a dense book, often packed with ideas and complexities and yet it still has, in its style, simplicity akin to fable and it is, in a lot of ways, a fable.  Peter Klein is a knight errant, a cuckolded character that you might find in Chaucer, on a quest to re-gain his property.  You are with Peter and are one his side but even this does not make him immune to our wondering what exactly is he good for?

  
The ending is fantastical and is elevated to such heights and leaves a lasting impression.  Auto-Da-Fe has been a book that I have been found wanting to draw and paint pictures based on it as it provides many instances that could be captured by the visual medium.  I would love to direct an animated film adaptation of this book and I can see it clearly in my mind.   

This is one of my favourite books, possibly my favourite 500 pages one at least, and I urge you, who may be interested, to read this book and feast on the delights and disgusts that it offers.

Now it's audience participation time! If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways: - by being my patron on Patreon.com -give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee -Buy one of my literary books -Share this blog on your social media -Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book -Follow me I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog. Live long and prosper.

Margret Atwood- Prediction

 Just to clarify I don’t know a lot about Margaret Atwood but I have heard one or two things about her and let me present to you what I think of her as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

  She deals in big ideas.  This is a major plus when considering a reasonable candidate.  Her most famous novel is ‘The Handmaiden’s Tale’, which I believe is about a dystopian society and is up there with other similar fiction.  I’ve never read any of her novels but it seems to me that she writes big full blooded Literary novels dealing with complicated characters and fascinating ideas.  Her recent apocalyptic novels, ‘Oryx and Crake’ and ‘The Year of the Flood’ seem to have her at an imaginative high and she does seem boundless, exhilarated by the rush of words and the structure of narrative, which is highly commendable personality traits for a writer of Nobel Prize caliber.  Remember it’s not always about having one excellent book.  A candidate will need to have a few excellent books for the committee to be able to choose from.

  Being prolific is also a plus in this game as it gives the committee a good idea at how consistent she is in her writing and also follow her development as an artist.  She’s written fiction: ‘Surfacing’, ‘Lady Oracle’, ‘Cat’s Eye’, short fiction: ‘Dancing Girls’, ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’, ‘Good Bones’, Poetry: ‘The Circle Game’, ‘The Animals in That Country’, ‘Power Politics’ and non-fiction: ‘Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature’ ‘Days of Rebels’ and ‘Second Words’.  Her output is vast and there seems to be very little that she will not touch.  Another great personality trait for a writer: fearlessness. 

  That she is a woman is an important feature for books such as ‘The Handmaiden’s Tale’ but it is not necessarily to her advantage, in fact it is difficult to discern if gender has a role with the Nobel Prize.  It probably does but I think it is more about how you use your gender or how you transcend it.  Women such as Herta Müller and Toni Morrison have won it so it is not impossible for her to win it.  In fact her chances appear, on paper, to be pretty good. 

  She seems to have a great range in her work and includes almost everything in it and saying everything that could be said.  Not only does she cover wide ground but she also produces big books that surely contain some gargantuan epics.  I can imagine her books to be whirlwind adventures with very thoughtful descriptions and scathing critique on society.  This gives a better chance at getting the Nobel Prize as candidates often have many interests and are not so narrow minded when writing over the course of most of their life.  No doubt she has enough raw material to work from and her inspiration seems to be never ending much to the jealousy of other writers and so if she carries on like this, (and with the hope that she will be with us for a while yet) I would think it very likely for her to win the Prize in the next few years.

  If she does win it it would make her the first Canadian to ever have the Nobel Prize, which would be a scoop.

Does Marget Atwood deserve the Nobel Prize?  Let me know in the comments.

Next week I look at Paul Auster.