The Search Warrant by Patrick Modiano

 Someone may be boring, it may not be deliberate but is something of their makeup as a person that they are undoubtedly boring.  Such boredom may be so extreme that it could constitute as an attack.  This is the boredom I have found in Patrick Modiano’s The Search Warrant, a short book that was hard to get in England as his books are not normally translated into English.  A fact that, after winner the Nobel Prize, must surely change.

   

The novella is about searching for another person’s story, uncovering a person’s movements, maybe even their thoughts at that time, as a way of finding your own story.  The narrator, apparently Modiano himself, found a notice in the Paris Soir about a girl named Dora Bruder, age 15, who in 1941 disappeared.  A decade long survey into the girl is the content of the book.

  

 When I say I found boredom in this book I was not, necessarily, bored by the book.  More that I found that the boredom of the dry facts of the case of a girl, who escapes the convent she was attending and ends up in the concentration camps of those times for being a Jew, was telling me something.  That it was best to surround the material in boredom as a way of stifling the pain the story brought to the author.

  

 The book eventually hinges on the time when Dora goes on the streets during the winter months of which there is no record of her being anywhere from one end of the season to the other.  Where she was or what she was doing is a complete mystery and it’s one that haunts Modiano as he agonises about his own family and his own future.  The completeness of her disappearance during that time is I think a symbol of the indigestible nature of the holocaust and as how, Martin Aims has discovered in his new book, Primo Levi says that we do not need to try to understand it in it’s totality.

  In the middle of the book there is the account of the German writer Fredo Lampe and his book Am Rande der Nacht, which Modiano describes:

‘For me, name and title evoked those lighted windows from which you cannot tear your gaze.  You are convinced that, behind them, somebody whom you have forgotten has been awaiting your return for years, or else that there is no longer anybody there.  Only a lamp, left burning in the empty room.’

Perhaps Modiano is waiting for a return to the years of innocence, that where once proclaimed to be the time before poetry was killed, but that hope is as empty as the room.  The lamp in the empty room encapsulates what the writer himself has on occasion felt, an emptiness that has to fill itself up with research, research into another human being to be able to pull himself out the cold numbness that was possibly a symptom of the times.  How soon after this did Jean-Paul Sarte write Nausea?

   

For most of the book I was unconvinced about it.  Just what was it?  With it’s detail to place names I kidded myself into thinking that it was a book like what W.G. Sebald would write.  And really that’s not a bad way of looking at it.  It is about specific places, and it is about documentation and it is about how the memory of an event can either be magnified and remembered forever or how even big events can be difficult to recall.  This book is a type of psycho-geography mapping out not only French cities but aspects of the human heart and it’s grief.  In this book Modiano does not only generalise a horrofic event but he details an individual life that was plucked out and cut short, a story from thousands of maybe similar and not so similar people as Dora Brunder.  What is this strange ability for us to pick out a single person amidst wholesale human tragedy and to mourn for those which we have not met.

The last paragraph is great and convinced me of the book’s worth.  It is such an ending that makes me see why Modiano was picked to be this year’s winner.  I would like to read more of him, so I wonder if any of my loyal readers would be good enough to get me Ring Roads for Christmas?  It would be most appreciated.  

Three Writers Who Should Have Won The Nobel Prize (But Didn't) by George Jones

Well, it’s that time of year again – the Nobel Prize for Literature is about to be announced. While it’s impossible to predict who will win, it’s easy to look back at those who should have won, but didn’t. And since I like doing easy things, that’s what I’ll do.

 

3. Philip K Dick

 

What Did He Write?

 

Some of the greatest short stories in literature. Dick followed the time honoured sci-fi tradition of “mindblowing ideas first, everything else second”, all though for him it was more like “mindblowing ideas first, enough amphetamines to kill an elephant/mildly inconvenience Keith Richards second, everything else third.” His stories were entirely built around mindfucking the reader in as many different ways as possible, up to and including a bounty hunter who chases down humanoid robots, only to suspect that he may be a humanoid robot; the Antichrist taking over the world with gumball machines; a man who pays to have memories of being a spy on Mars implanted in his brain, but turns out to have actually been a spy on Mars; and many more. You may recognise a couple of those as the plots of famous films, and that’s because, if you’ve seen a sci-fi film made in the last thirty-odd years, chances are the filmmakers got some of their ideas from Philip K Dick. Total Recall and Blade Runner are both adaptations of his work, and countless other films have been influenced by him. The man was one of the best short story writers of all time, and his ideas make Inception look like the straightforward thriller that it actually is.

 

So Why Didn’t He Win?

 

It’s simple – he was a sci-fi writer at a time when the literary establishment was even more snobbish than it is now. When Dick was around, most “serious” readers considered sci-fi to be little more than pulp escapism, if they considered it at all. Even today “genre writing,” as idiots call it, is looked down on – if you were writing sci-fi, fantasy or horror back in Dick’s day, you had to resign yourself to a career in the literary ghetto.

 

Significant Works

The Man in the High Castle, “Faiths of Our Fathers,” “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”

 

2. Sylvia Plath

 

What Did She Write?

 

Angst. Just, so much angst. Along with Anne Sexton, Plath pioneered confessional poetry, which is a style you may recognise from that diary you kept as a teenager. The difference is, unlike teenage you, Plath was a genius. Her poetry contains some of the finest depictions of depression and mental instability ever written, all rendered in the most exquisite language possible. Plath could take anything – bees, a cut thumb – and use it as a jumping-off point for an excavation of the deepest depths of the soul, but above all else, she had a phenomenal ear for language.

 

So Why Didn’t She Win?

 

The Nobel Prize can only be awarded to living writers, and by the time Ariel – the collection on which her reputation mostly rests – was published, Plath was no longer in that category. She committed suicide in 1963, making her ineligible for the award.

 

Significant Works

 

Ariel, The Bell Jar

 

1.     Sarah Kane

 

What Did She Write?

 

Sarah Kane was one of those rare writers who makes the rest of us look like amateurs. Between 1994 and 1999, she wrote five plays and one short film, all masterpieces. Her work deals with themes of violence and depression, and so it is characterised with tedious regularity as “depressing” and “shocking” – usually by extremely tedious people. Yes, she wrote about depression; yes, her work can be almost unbearably harsh; but she was not some immature writer out to shock. A sense of compassion characterises all her writing, and no matter how bleak it may be, love and kindness shine through every word. Not despite, but because of the darkness and the horror, Kane’s plays are, quite simply, beautiful. On top of that, she wrote some of the most insightful critiques of our society’s attitude to gender that I have ever read. There is a reason why Kane is at the top of this list – she was one of history’s truly brilliant minds, a writer who made it her mission to create a new form for each work. Every one of her plays is unique, not only in the context of wider theatrical conditions but in the context of her own body of work.

 

So Why Didn’t She Win?

 

If you noticed the dates I gave earlier, you’ll probably be able to figure out why. Yep, she killed herself (seriously, writers, stop doing that). Eventually, the depression that was one of Kane’s constant themes was what killed her, on the 20^th of February 1999, meaning that she was only writing for five years – nowhere near long enough to be considered by the Nobel Committee. On top of that, her plays were reviewed almost entirely by monumental fuckwits[1] (other wise known a the British press) who were incapable of looking past the violence of her plays to the humanity at their core. At the end of the day, the theatrical establishment has never liked anything truly original, and even today Kane is viewed in many quarters as being dependent on cheap shock and spectacle. But those of us with half a brain recognise her as a playwright of staggering genius, regardless of what the intellectual pygmies in the papers think.

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[1] Insert link to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/reviews/article-1326742/Blasted-Cannibalism-nudity-The-Loony-Left-love-it.html

Ruminations on Modiano –The Nobel Prize for Literature 2014 by Mike Fish

At midday on Thursday, the French novelist Patrick Modiano was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014. Like many around the world intrigued by this most politicised of awards in the arts, my initial reaction was one of an internal bemused “Who?” After doing some digging (By which I mean using the laptop mouse to gradually passively scroll down through a live feed of updates on The Guardian’s website), it transpired that the man is regarded as something of a national hero in France and more than arguably justified in his receiving of the prize. Apparently, he was eating lunch in a restaurant with his wife when the news finally reached him three hours later, leading him to respond with a delighted chuckle and his wife to burst into tears of joy. This only makes me like the man even more, if not yet on a wholly artistic level. 

There is however, a problem with the very nature of this article. I dislike opinion columns, which the modern media is constantly excruciatingly submerged in, like a water-boarded Ocelot. I also am not fond of competitions and prizes, which for the most part remove the transcendental nature of artistry out of the artist and turn us into jumping dolphins, actively searching for the hoop which is marked ‘1st Place’ or ‘The Finest of Our Generation’. There is a wonderful Irish poet of our time by the name of Michael Longley, a man whom I have heard read his work and have had the pleasure of meeting. I’m willing to bet that the majority of you once again echo: “Who?” He is a poet from the same generation of and close friends with Seamus Heaney. When Seamus was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1995, Michael Longley was being interviewed on radio. When asked as Seamus’s friend how he felt about the news, he replied that he was angry and upset, for 

now there was to be only one ‘great Irish poet’ of their generation. Such is the nature of awarding prizes in the arts. Seamus, through no fault of his own is now regarded as THE POET of his time and many other great poetic writers have been consigned to a collective cultural amnesia. For my own part as an actor, much of my time reading is spent emerged in play scripts rather than novels and stand-up rather than short stories. I can however, bring my own emerging sense of what it means to be an artist to these proceedings and attempt to piece together some positivity for this article. 

Modiano was unfamiliar to many before he was awarded this prize. Now, his name is being echoed throughout the library halls and the campuses of literature students. If there is indeed any artistic merit to be found in this prize underneath the layers of political 
pseudo-bureaucracy, it is the simple act of a relatively unknown author being recognised 

for his work and for a whole new audience to embrace that which he has to offer. Perhaps this could set an interesting precedent for authors like him with extraordinary talent to win the prize in the future. When Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 for being a poet, the speech which he subsequently delivered focused not on his poetry as expected, but on the Irish Theatre and the local struggles of setting up such an unprecedented institution in Ireland like the Abbey Theatre. Even in accepting a prize, Yeats continued to surprise, taking struggles of the relative unknown and bringing it into the global consciousness. This is where the creation of art never stops and the recognition of work aids and complements it, rather than hindering and placing the creator on a pedestal. 

Congratulations to Mr. Modiano and his ‘art of memory’; I raise a glass to him and look 
forward to seeing what 2015 brings to recognition.

http://www.michaelfishactor.com

Winner of the Nobel Prize For Literature 2014

French novelist Patrick Mondiano has been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature:


'for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation'


I congradulate him and wonder how quickly a copy of Ring Roads will be in the shops.


This year this blog is doing something special.  Over the next few weeks I will be getting guest bloggers to write a response to this event from a variety of positions and points of view.  I will be doing my very best to get out a review of one of his books at some point as well so there is plenty to look forward to.

The Nobel Prize For Literature 2014

It would be a shame for this blog, the purpose of which is for to discuss and review books by Nobel Prize Laureates, if it did not do something prior the announcement of this year's Prize, which happens tomorrow.  So having a bit of time I've decided to go through the infamous Ladbrokes' betting list surmising four candidates biographies and maybe a snatchet of their writing style.  It is not necessarily an accurate mark of the Academy's choosing process, and it shouldn't be reflected as such, but it gives me a starting off point to make comment on the various writers involved.  I won't be predicting, the predictions I made last year still stand, but merely giving you a flavour of who is in the running for the Prize.  I'll look at the first four, candidates on the list Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Haruki Murakami, Svetlana Aleksijevitj and Joyce Carol Oates; starting with Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.

Ngugi was born in Kenya, where he has a troubled history, writing a play, The Black Hermit, before moving to England and writing the first novel in English from a writer from West Africa.  His early style was realistic but it has changed to more magical realism, the thing that makes him consistent is his interest in colonisation.  He was imprisoned for writing the play I Will Marry When I Want  where he then wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, a Kenyan language, called The Devil On The Cross while in solitary confinement on prision issue toilet paper.  He now writes only in Gikuyu encouraging other African writers to write in their own languages rather than European ones.  Political and humorous he shows he has the strength of character that could make him a Nobel Prize Winner.

Haruki Murakami is back on the list, even after I have dealt with him last year (http://whatihavegottenupto-thebookspy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/why-murakmai-wont-win-nobel-prize.html) he comes back.  I won't talk about why people think he should win but I'll say a little about his background.  Running a jazz club in Tokyo his mind was far from being dedicated to writing.  He was watching a baseball game when the idea, apropos of nothing, formed that he could write a novel.  So he got to it, wrote it and won first Prize in a literary competition.  Soon he gave up running his bar, much to the amazement and concern of his friends, in order to write full time.  Maybe it is this fact that makes me hope that he doesn't win: sheer jealously.  Influenced heavily by Western writers he has a magical quirk of telling melancholic tales in a post-modern vein.  He has written The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Kafka On The Shore, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, and most recently Colourless Tazukuru Tazaki.and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Svetlana Aleksijevitj was born in the Ukraine and has written about the Chernobyl disaster in her book Voices From Chernobyl as well as about the Afganistan war, Boys of Zinc, and World War II, The Unwomanly Face of the War and Last Witness: the Book of Unchildlike Stories.  Her technique of 'mixing eloquence and wordlessness' conveys the rawness of a world reduced of humanity, in a dangerous atmosphere with political and media silence over important events.  She, like Ngugi, has been persecuted as well as prolific giving her the mettle of a Nobel Prize Winning candidate.  

 

Joyce Carol Oates was born in New York publishing her first book, With Shuddering Fall, when she was twenty-six and has gone on to write A Garden of Earthly Delights, them and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart.  I could write a whole post just by listing the titles she has written as she writes, and wins an award, every year since 1967.  Clearly she is formidable in terms of production and she seems to have a very sharp, tough edge to her, giving her fiction more than a bit of bite (one of her novellas is entitled Rape: a love story).  A very strong candidate.

Now that I have written about these incredible writers it makes me want to be more adventurous with my reading, which is really the only real effect the Prize should have on the public.  But maybe you disagree, if so, write in the comments below.

Oh and to those who have put bets on for Bob Dylan to win the Prize, well, good luck to you- if someone re-defines Alfred Nobel's will in the next day then maybe he'll have a chance.

Sources Used:

http://www.gradesaver.com/author/ngugi-wa-thiongo/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C5%A9g%C4%A9_wa_Thiong'o

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruki_Murakami
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3644603/A-conspiracy-of-ignorance-and-obedience.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Alexievich
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Carol_Oates