A Note About Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco has died in his home in Milan.  He was 84 years old after having written popular intellectual thrillers such as In the Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.  Although not a Nobel Prize Winner I feel I ought to note him here.  If an obscure blog can attract so many readers with his name than that indicates the scale, and depth, of his popularity, which should be recognised.

In his advice to aspiring writers he says: "Go step by step.  Don't pretend immediately to win the Nobel Prize, because that kills every literary career".

The Wind Blows Away Our Words by Doris Lessing

The Afgans keep teaching the lesson that no army against it seems to learn.  Written in the great year of 1987 this account of the Muhjahadin, by Doris Lessing, one wonders what could stop military intervention in Afganistan as the growing history of defeats and failures makes no dent to imperial enthusiasm for domination of that land.

 As a professional underdog and fighter for life Lessing is the ideal writer to be able lend a sympathetic ear to those under resourced warriors while being clear eyed enough to describe their situation without undue romance.  They are a people who are born into the struggle of life taught to fight and defend themselves from birth.  At the time it was the Russians who were trying to invade.  Their aircrafts destroyed with home made grenades by the resourceful Afgan Resistance.  It was of their ongoing survival through winters, of which some lose toes to frostbite, and famine, managing for long periods on nothing but grass, that impresses Lessing.   They fight continually against all that attacked them on not much more than determination to retain their freedom.

An unnamed military man in the Afgan army of some superiority explains the motivation of the fighters:  "You will have heard, I am sure, more than you need of Jihad, but in my view Jihad is too simple a concept, used as the West tends to use it.  The Afghan fights first of all for himself, his family, his village, his own people.  He fights for a combination of these reasons, and he fights for his religion.  When you hear the word 'Jihad', and you will have heard it a thousand times a day, remember how complex it is, this Holy War"               

It is a short book that goes straight to the people involved in the day-to-day battle, the 'most independent people in the world', composing a clear picture of the difficulties of their life in permanent fight.  There is beauty and heroics in the background of ongoing suffering recorded with control and strength.

Lessing's part in the war is her fight against the media portrayal of Afganistan in such moments as this, which I will quote in full:

"Two years ago I was in Toronto, and the Wall Street Journal asked to interview me.  The young woman who came said she would like me to talk about what interested me.  Impressed by this novel approach by a journalist, I said I would like to talk about Afganistan, which had been fighting the Russians for five years, with little or no assistance from the outside world.  Her face showed she was already losing interest.  I said it was unprecedented for a war to be fought for five years by virtually unarmed people against a super power, while the world took virtually no notice.  She murmured, at once, 'Vietnam'- as I expected she would.  I said that the Vietnamese had been armed, equipped.  I said that a million Afghan civilians had been murdered by the Russians.  There were five million Afghans in exile- it was as if a third of the population of the United States had taken refuge from an aggressor in Canada.  At this she announced that it was all very hard to believe.  The interview then continued on all too familiar lines.  When it was printed, there was no mention of Afghanistan.  Since then, the Wall Street Journal has been, as we say, 'very good' about Afghnistan.  But anyone involved in this business knows that there is a wall of indifference, both in Britain and in the United States, and this is so strong, so irrational, one has to begin asking why"    

Cassandra is invoked at the beginning of the book and Lessing imagines a scene:

'It is amusing to imagine (because the thing is so unlikely) a secret conference called by the nations, who have agreed to set aside all the slogans and battle cries and the circling for better positions just for the duration of the conference, which will discuss: "What is the matter with us, what is wrong with mankind, that we can't listen to Cassandra?  It is as if the world, as if we, were being dragged along by some undertow of stupidity too powerful to resist, and all the sharp, frantic, desperate cries of warning are like gulls glinting as they wheel over the scene, and then dip and vanish, screaming, If you do this, then that must follow- Surely there must be something we can all do, together; perhaps we can learn to listen..."'  

For one curious to understand what refugees go through and how they face the demands of life this is a good starting point to deeper reflection.

Literature In Practice

Here is the test: has, over the years, reading these great books of literature and working out what makes them great helped me to understand and cope with life in the face of deep loss?

My interest in the Nobel Prize begun when I was at Uni and it has become a very big part of my life.  I have spent at least one dedicated year buying books by Nobel Prize Winners on a weekly basis.  In terms of money spent I would think it would easily be in the hundreds of pounds, in terms of time reading, reviewing and looking at those books it has also been substantial.  The collection was at least three or four bookshelves all double stacked, a layer of books in front of another layer of books, with books lying on top horizontally.

Because of a series of complex circumstances that have occurred in the last few months I know have almost nothing of that collection left.

The number of Andre Gide books, of which I began buying before even knew about the Prize, and the large number of books by Anatole France that I had been amazed to get, along with borderline rare books like Jacinto Benavente's collection of plays are no longer in my possession.  Others books that I don't remember have gone and I am putting some effort to preserve the blankness of my memory of what I had.

Some remain with me.  Most of what I had of Doris Lessing is still around, some of Samuel Beckett is here- very glad that Mercier et Camier is still around- and most importantly the best book in the whole collection, Auto-Da-Fe by Elias Canetti, is still with me.  From this I can keep going without the grief being total.

These lost books can be replaced with time and at this moment that this blog really comes into its own as a record of what I had, what I enjoyed and used, and that eases the loss.

For all that I did not read I am glad that I managed to have read as much as I could and put some of it to good use.

Some books I know I won't see again, others won't be too difficult to get hold of, every year there is at least another shelf to read from a new Winner, it all keeps going- as Beckett says 'I can't go on.  I'll go on'.

What is incredible is how people have managed to find this blog and have commented on it, which is wonderful.  I am very grateful for every person who wanders onto these pages and stay to explore what I have to say.

To everyone who has kept with me I wish you a very merry Christmas and a very happy New Year with love and solidarity.

All the best.






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Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2015

Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for this year 2015.

It was given to her for her "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time"

I wrote this about her last year considering her to be a candidate for the Prize:

'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 has been persecuted as well as prolific giving her the mettle of a Nobel Prize Winning candidate.'

She is the fourteenth female Nobel Prize winner for Literature.

This blog may has it's quiet periods but it will always try to cover the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature each year.  
 

Congratulations Svetlana for your achievement! 

Gunter Grass

 

Gunter Grass died on April 15 2015.

I have not read any of his works other than a few poems, of which I found delightful.

Praised by the Nobel Prize Academy for  "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history" he is an intriguing choice, mainly for the revelation that he was a member of the Waffen-SS in World War II.  Should have the title be stripped from him?  Is he still in the 'ideal direction'?  If the Academy knew about it would they have chosen differently?

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