The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio

 

His debut book written when he was twenty-three.  Now he says the book is almost a joke.  A surprising claim since the book takes itself very seriously, particularly with the intense final part of the interrogation of the title.  The interrogation is between amnesiac Adam Pollo & doctor Julienne R. in a hospital room.  Simplified the interrogation between the two characters goes along with “why are you mad?” “why are you mad?” “I’m not mad” “Neither am I, and let me explain why…” and explain he does.  Pollo’s arguments are is like trying to catch air; you can try to understand but it each point will disapper in your hands.  It’s so complicated that it must be simple.  Maybe it is a joke on those who take their literature seriously, i.e: the French. 

  Each chapter is numbered by letters in the order of the alphabet.  A, B, C etc…the book begins with a quote from Robin Cruesoe and a note from the author.

  I enjoyed the acute descriptions, even if it did border on the maniac, as if it was the descriptions, not the story, that was really important.  Certainly a young man’s book, intellectual boy trying to survive memory, isolation and intelligence, getting himself arrested so he can argue with those of institutional health profession with maddenly complex theories; but what else are young men supposed to write?

  It has an interest in anthropology and tribal behaviour. Clézio spent some time in the jungle later on in his life.  This, in part, shows how the individual produces culture from the raw material that surrounds him and how modern insanity/ sanity is a consequential reaction to the universe. 

  It’s a short book but it does not feel minimalist like some previous French Nobel Prize Winners, such as Albert Camus, but actually quite expansive with an expensive use of language.  It is rich in theory and for those who wish for their books to be top heavy then Clézio is the perfect author.  Others may find that they will get too bogged down in a plot that is going no-where.

   This pleasure from isolation and the feeling of being lost like a child I have felt at the end of term in university.  Lots of students went away back to their homes but I stayed and wandered the campus completely alone.  It was clear and cold like frost on a statue and I was almost delirious with pretending to be a dog or a ghostly angle.  Typical french philosophical novella but it seems to go beyond philosophy, as the description goes beyond description, and is determined to penetrate consciousness.  Arrogant it may seem but it also seems that to reach that secret place Clézio has to be arrogant in order to go beyond it.  Or the novel could be a set up and it’s interpretation the punchline.  It’s an admirable experiment and for the young man it showed he had a hell of a lot to give and was probably expected to be great.  It makes me want to read more of him to see what else he has described and experimented with. 

Nobel Prize Winner 2013 Possibilities

-->A hundred days there is until this year’s candidate for the Nobel Prize will be announced and so now seems like a good time to begin my predictions for it.  Over the next few weeks I will be going through a list of possible candidates and examining their worth and likelihood of winning.  I am interested in the idea of being able to ‘figure out’ the Nobel Prize as in working out how to win it and the possibility of guessing who will get it.  Let’s see how this will pan out. 

  I’ve put together a list of ten possible candidates and will be posting about them in the upcoming weeks running up to the annoucment in October. 

In alphabetical order:

Margaret Atwood

Paul Auster

Howard Barker

Jaques Derrida

Umberto Eco

Michael Frayn

Kazuo Ishiguo

Gabriel Josopovici

Milan Kundrea

Alberto Manguel

These predictions will not just be about this year but will hopefully be an ongoing ever changing list until I get it right, well we’ll see how likely that will be, won’t we?

Why Murakmi Won't Win the Nobel Prize

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Of course I may be wrong, he might, it’s just that I think it would be highly unlikely.  Japan seemed to be desperate for another Nobel Prize Winner.  There last one was Kenzaburo Oe in 1994, high time for another, they seem to think.  And who is their best writer at the moment?  It seems to be Huraki Murakami.  The Japanese press really wanted Murakami to take the Swedish prize and to some he appeared to be a reasonable choice.  There is no doubt of his popularity and I try hard to think of another contempory Japanese writer still alive.  His books can be charaterised as post-modern, engaged with modern feelings and ideas.  They fizzle and dazzle and sparkle in public acceptance.  They appeal to what is mysterious, confusing, dream-like.  His books dance.  Yet Mo Yan, a Chinese writer, won last year’s prize.  Murakami is indeed a very good writer, but not, I think, a Nobel Prize candidate.  Why?  Well let us explore this issue of what makes a writer likely to win the Nobel Prize.

  First we need to understand exactly what the Nobel Prize is awarded for.  In Alfred Nobel’s will the prize is to be given to ‘the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’ in the given year.  The prize can be awarded to any nationality but the candidate has to be alive.  Now acknowledging the most outstanding work is not the difficult bit as great literature will make itself known with volume.  The tricky part is the ‘ideal direction’ as it is at best a subjective value and at worst a vague guess.  Whose ‘ideal direction’?  What’s the goal?  Which ideal? 

  The will has been interpreted in many ways and I imagine that it is the job of the committee to argue for a particular interpretation that favours a particular writer.  How I would like to be a fly on the wall for those meetings.  This means that writers as varied as Samuel Beckett and Herman Hesse can be eligible for the award.  The award is supposed to go for the most deserving candidate not the most popular and so despite Murakami’s immense popularity he will not win it by that alone.

  So this leaves us with his books:  ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicals’, ‘Kafka On the Beach’, ‘The Wild Sheep Chase’ and most recently ‘IQ84’.  Having only have read one of them, it was the Bird Chronicals, but knowing a bit about his style and themes I will give you my opinion of Murakami as a Nobel Prize candidate. 

  First I will say that he should be read, his books are fantastic, and fantastical, journeys into everyday life where the strange and the ordinary mix and mingle.  Secondarily the main restriction from him winner the Nobel Prize is mainly what I find to be a superfical populism that pervades his work.  This is not to say that he is a superfical writer as he is able to produce the odd profound moment.  What I mean is that his style of writing is very current, very much in vogue with our times.  This is one reason for his popularity.  He is a writer that speaks to our interconnected, globalised world.  He is deep within the zeitgeist and this is the problem.

  I would imagine that one reason why the Nobel Prize Committee will not award him with the prize as he may not have lasting appeal.  Sure he’s popular now but will he still be read in ten, hell even five, years time?  They aren’t certain enough yet.  It’s important to point out that there are many Winners who are no longer read, such as Kawabata or Anatole France, so just because he’s not being read in the future will not necessarily prevent them from giving out the prize.

  Another thing is that he has not produced the most outstanding work in the field of literature at the moment.  I can think of others more deserving, and I will be giving these potentials an airing in their own posts in the future, and others who work at a higher plane than Murakami.  There may seem to be a lot going on in his books but what is there underneath the dancing?  Compare to a book like ‘Soul Mountain’ by Gao Xingjian who looks at a divided indvidual searching for meaning in his life in the countryside while trying to decide whether he should live in or outside a community, to the rest of humankind.  Yes, Murakami deals with the meaning of life but only in a very adolescent way, extenstialism as a lifestyle not a sentence as it is in ‘The Outsider’ by Albert Camus.  Even comparing him with fellow Japanese writer Oe a book like ‘Somersault’ does all Murkami can do and much more, seriously more people should be reading Oe he’s brilliant.

  Am I saying that Murakami will never win it?  Like I said at the beginning, I don’t know.  If he writes more books, which by the look of it he is bound to do, then it is certainly fesiable that he could win it, depending on who else he is contending with at the time, but I would not bet on it.  Is he a good writer?  Definitely, and a lot of fun, which sometimes the Nobel Prize literature can be barren of (we need more Dario Fo’s) so by all means read and enjoy.  But on who I would bet on?  That needs it’s own post, which I will do soon in the future. 

If you have an opinion, and it's a good chance that you do, comment below on whether you think Haruki Murakami could, or should, win the Nobel Prize. 

The Homecoming by Harold Pinter

 

Families can be difficult beasts.  You got to live with them and you can’t choose who they are.  Strangely families no longer dominate stories in the way they once did and in some ways we are poorer for it as they can offer writers rich material to work from.  In Harold Pinter’s ‘The Homecoming’ becoming a successful son does not automatically mean occupying a position of power within your own family.

  Teddy, an academic living in America, has come back home to London with his wife to visit his family but some unpleasant intentions for her are revealed and Teddy is powerless to intervene.  Sexual tension permeates throughout this play as Teddy’s siblings are clearly sizing her up right from the very beginning and though outwardly his brother, Lenny, is very warm and loving underlining his actions is a desire for his wife, Ruth.  As much with Pinter the key theme is power play between individuals and treating people as property. 

  It is cold and though raising some emotion is, in itself, not very emotional, it is in some ways calculated and undoubtedly very precise in its use of language.  Indeed it’s precision is such that it cuts to the bone and chills to the core and this is one of the reasons why Pinter is considered to be one of the great playwrights in the last few decades.  His command of words is absolute and uses them to an exceedingly great effect.

  One feels sorry for poor old Teddy, a doctor of philosopher but unable to gain any real respect from his family and unable to protect his wife from their advances.  There’s nothing graphic in this play as most of the menace comes from what is being hinted at, from what is being suggested.  The comedy is present too.  Take this example of it:

‘Lenny:  …what do you teach?

Teddy: Philosophy.

Lenny:  Well, I want to ask you something.  Do you detect a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism?

Teddy:  That question doesn’t fall within my province.’

Like ‘The Birthday Party’, and maybe all of his work, the comedy only increases the tension not relaxes it, as it should. 

  The world in a Pinter play is like our world only it is skewed and strange to the point of absurdity.  Something like a blend of Ionesco and ‘Eastenders’.  It’s still recognizable and the relationships, and the tensions writhing within them, are relatable yet it is almost as if they live in an alternative reality, something more akin to sci-fi than to kitchen skin.  This is what makes plays like ‘The Homecoming’ interesting because it takes something known, parent-child relations, and turns it into something unexpected, something weird and horribly funny that perhaps only the reaction of silence is the most appropriate response.

  It is in the family that a perfect hostage situation can appear, appealing to emotional blackmail better than any jobbing terrorist might, as it poses the question:  where do you turn when your family are turning against you?  No clear answer is made only audible questions after questions and then silence.

  Pinter is famous for his pauses, the Pinter pause as it came to be known because he used it so frequently in his work, and like his words uses it to extraordinary effect.  However the pauses aren’t really supposed to be pauses as Pinter in an interview once said that the stage direction beat was a more accurate word for what he wanted but silence reigns gloriously for dramatic effect.

The Notebook by Jose Saramago

  

What do you do when you have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and your books are read and celebrated all over the globe at the beginning of the new millennium?  Why, keep a blog of course!  And this is exactly what Jose Saramago in his book ‘The Notebook’ does.  It’s a relatively new medium and as a blogger myself I find it useful for convey information and ideas to an audience with virtually no cost but there are problems for the ordinary person turned blog writer:  they may not write anything of either interest or use.  Enter Saramago who as an experienced writer raises the level of blogging from doggerel to Literature, sometimes with a capital L.  He is a wonderful example to us all who wish to write for the Internet.  Of course he does not need a blog but he does this after being asked by one of his friends to keep one and it helps that he has plenty to say and never seems to run out of things to say.

  What Saramago has to say is usually about politics, including recent events such as the 2008 financial crash, the rise Barak Obarma and other things.  In this regard he is not ambivalent, he is of the communist ilk and his opinions are regularly come from the Left side of the political spectrum.  Literary tributes are also the order of the day as he respects those who have passed away and those who have achieved awards.  And occasionally he plugs a new book but he is very tactful about this.

  The posts, or, if you are old fashioned, entries, are short and do not go into much depth.  While this would be a weakness in other columns here it works to be fed bite-sized chunks of comment as he usually returns to his subject later on.  Reading Saramago is much like reading a secular book of devotions from a literary saint giving food for thought more or less everyday and though in long sessions he may become tiresome with his, in the end, predictable view on politicians he is delightful if taken in small portions. 

  Interestingly he does have some more descriptive pieces that might be a work-in-progress or simply an exercise in writing.  I found that these were a good antidote to the relentlessly political speculations that are good if you have an appetite for politics but not so much if you want to know how a writer of his stature goes about the business of writing.  For as much as he talks about that subject he may very well know as much as us, which is both a comfort and a question.

  It gives hope to the blog-turned-book that they do not all have to be about the minutiae of everyday life nor all out rants against the world.  They can be about the cultivation of the intellect and the compassion for culture.  But what Saramago displays best in this book is his imagination, which he carries in spades, and this is probably what has made him one of the best writers, not only in his own country, but in the whole world.  Now that he has passed it will be sad not to have more books like Seeing, Blindness and The Double but he has left us with an impressive legacy for us to explore at our pleasure, and, occasionally, our edification.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

  
Old age gets little press but Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ is a great antidote to youth.  The old man of the title is a fisherman who while becoming less and less able to fish still does so determinedly.  He goes out to sea like usual with help from a boy who cares greatly for him and fishes as usual.  He fishes without luck until a giant fish gets hold of his line and takes him far out to sea where he has to contend with sharks and the elements threatening his survival.  This is man vs. nature where man is trying to dominate the world he lives in despite its reluctance to be mastered.  It is about the human will to succeed and the stupid stuboness to achieve it.  It is like a summerised version of ‘Moby Dick’ where the animal represents the mystery and wild nature of the universe however in Hemingway’s version the natural can be conquered, even if it does damage the conqueror in doing so.

  Hemingway’s sparse poetic style does the story wonders as it only needs bare simplicity to achieve his aims and it is all the more stronger for it.  So much can be packed in a short space, such as this passage: ‘Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way.  Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive.  The boy keeps me alive, he thought.  I must not deceive myself too much’.  It’s written from the gut and from the heart of a hyper-masculine world where man is always on a journey to prove himself to himself.

  There is nothing supernatural about the fish or mystical about his voyage, it is set in what can be seen and nothing else is to be expected from it.  The old man gains and loses from it but there is no absolute conclusion, no final verdict just struggle and bittersweet victory.  It’s nice to see that what could be the old man’s last fishing trip brought him his best fish to date as it implies his life, in the end had worth.

  There is great heart in the boy that helps the old man, a vision of kindness and friendship admist the cruel world of the sea, and of youth serving and respecting the experienced.  Life is tough but there are reasons to be hopeful and optimistic about it, just expect to fight.  

   

The Outsider by Albert Camus

  

If the argument that the novel is better at shorter fiction, say novellas, than the perfect example of the form would be ‘The Outsider’ by Albert Camus, a work that has had significant impact on me and has hit me harder than any other book I have read.  The book is the story of a man who, in the space of hundred pages, encapsulates an entire life by a few actions.  The sun is used as a metaphor for the stark nature of life, the clear-cut nature of his life and the burning of existence that occurs. 

  It begins with the immortal lines ‘Mother died today.  Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.’ And continues with the same flatness and indifference that characterises the narrator Meursault.  What is life and its purpose?  Great questions that are examined under Camus’ moral microscope.  Meursault doesn’t cry at his mother’s death and he kills a man but what does that mean against the absurdity of living?  Camus was often called an existentialist and is linked with Jean-Paul Sarte but he would state that this is not entirely the case.  It’s not a bad starting point for discussing the absurd and the meaning of morality and certainly gives plenty food for thought.

  For Meursalt he is happy with life as it is even when his boss offers him a promotion he declines seeking nothing more that what he has.  He is not a loner either as he has friends to call on but one feels that even if he did not have them he would still be the same person, not more or less happier for it.  He has romantic interests too but does not want to get married.  He is not like a usual member of society, the book implies, and he does not believe in the conventional traditions that others are invested in.  In a world of hypocrisy he lives true to himself and is not stirred to feel any emotion that he does not really feel.  The one time emotion comes to the forefront is when the prison Chaplin does his service and gets a volley of rage from Meursalt who does not believe in God and, therefore, has no need of a Chaplin.

  The killing of the Arab on the beach while the sun beats down is an iconic moment in fiction and is an image that hinges on life and death.  When asked why Meursalt killed the man he replies: “Because of the sun”.  The sun in this book, I think, is a metaphor for the piercingly clear view on life Meursalt has and it is the light he is blinded by and the heat that oppresses him.  Where the phrase ‘we are condemned to be free’ comes from I have forgotten but it encapsulates his condition and becomes his motivation and his end.  It is in the court scene that he says to himself that he realises that he is guilty, which is not so much the verdict of the jury but a label he has lived with but never defined. 

  Meursalt, before he is hanged, has the idea of execution by a revolver that only has five bullets loaded, that way you could still hang on to some hope that you might live and go on to live a better life, but his fate is determined and there is no way out.

  Camus’ other novels are not as pessimistic as this one, although you could argue that Meursalt’s attitude is actually optimistic, but I think this is just one variation, one manifestation of the absurd in life and one that will get you to face life in stark colours.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Compartmentalization is the theme under dissection in Lessing’s novel of the makeup of a woman who is in the communist party, who is a wife, who is a writer and much more.  It has a very structured framework that contains four separate notebooks, an extra notebook and a broken up novella.  In this structure Lessing explores various aspects that makes up a human being and how these elements should be fused together, not divided. 

  In the political notebook (red) the narrator marks the latter days of the communist party and it’s breaking up, it’s dysfunction.  The notebook that details Anna’s life as a writer (black) shows the difficulties of having your own voice and the strength needed to resist being changed for the sake of commercial value.  There is a notebook for her relationships and her emotions (yellow), and a notebook for the events of the day (blue).   But the last notebook, the golden notebook, unites all these different ties together giving a complete picture of this narrator who we have gotten to know through her different interests.

  In her introduction Lessing says that having left school at fourteen she went in to observe some classes to see how children were being taught and asks the questions ‘Why are they parochial, so personal, so small-minded?  Why do they always atomize, and belittle, why are they so fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the whole?  Why is their interpretation of the word critic always to find fault?  Why are they always seeing writers as in conflict with each other, rather than complementing each other…simple, this is how they are trained to think.’ 

  She is a doctor who gives her diagnosis of the western way of life, challenging assumptions and penetrating systems.  Lessing’s problem in this novel is the problem of being a full and complete human being in a world of divided interest and competing ideas.

  In her Nobel Prize speech she used the platform for her political observations and it is the same in her novels as her politics and her literature cannot be separated.  To say that she has a message is true but is it fair to say that her preaching undermines the flesh and blood of her characters, that her plots are molded on her ideology?  There is more to Lessing than her politics and she controls her writing so that her message is never the overriding force and driving influence, she is interested in a wider spectrum of life.  It has been said that we read Lessing in order to find out what is going on and if one wants to find out more of life than reading her is not the worst way of going about it as her analysis of life is an educating experience.  

  The novella that runs through the book is called ‘Free Women’, which has a certain amount of irony seeing that the writer of it, Anna, is in a lot of ways a trapped woman.  Having a story written by one of the characters in the novel gives the book a flavour of post-modernism but in the end it seems to me to be an anti-postmodern book seeing how it is wholeness not separateness, not relativity, that is the main virtue.  Clever-clever tricks may be all very well but it is storytelling that has to triumph if it is to be worth something.

  In the end Anna renounces the communist party and her character in the novella gives up writing, her identity broken down ready to be re-made into something new.  It’s a mature piece on changing through finding out about oneself either by new experiences or painful situations.