Winner of the Nobel Prize 2017

The Nobel Prize Winner of 2017 is Kazuo Ishiguro,

"who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world"

I wrote this about him in my prediction series a few years ago:

'For some reason Ishiguro reminds me of Oran Pamuk though I now how distinct they both are from each other.  What I am reminded of is the attempts of the individual to reconcile him with the world around them.  Like in ‘Snow’ ‘When We Were Orphans’ is about getting caught in political situations when the main characters have personal problems that they would much rather solve than the wider underlying conditions of society.  It’s not that the characters do not care about the world in which they live but simply they are displaying the fundamental problem of being an individual who acquires personal burdens while expected to be part of something bigger and, almost therefore, more meaningful.  It is a universal trickiness that people have to deal with but the writers’ style is marked into this worldwide condition and therefore making it their own while being applicable to the reader, whoever they might be.' 

A belated congratulations to Ishiguro for the award. 

'4321' Countdown to Paul Auster's Nobel Prize?

Writers work at their craft for years.

They do all sorts to survive; maintaining their finance and their mental well being on little.  Word after word, sentence after sentence, writers walk their lonely path to an undisclosed destination.  They can bring out book after book, and story after story, never to get attention, never to become something that may amount to something else.  They are the hopeful.  But by reaching a grand old age they may finally produce a fruit of such tender care that they are restored youthful again.

Dear readers I present to you 4321: Paul Auster's Great American Novel.

America has a knack of producing big novels about big themes taking hours and pages of time to both read and write.  It has to in order to cope with the sheer scale of everything giving writers no end of fair copy.

Paul's offering is along the same direction and at the same time a total reversal of everything we know and expected of the Great Life of Ferguson, a man who lives so fully that he occupies no less then four lives, each one similar and yet wildly different.

To give an understanding of what this novel means to the Genre of Novels it is important to understand that Paul's account of Ferguson obeys a total understanding of the Art of the Novel and a total disregard to how a story is put together.

Let us begin with chronology.  Stories work by Starting-Middling-Ending with focus on Highs and Lows and Development of Character.  The conception of this novel envisions one character with four lives and consequentially has four startings, four endings and a hell of a lot of middling, with massive fluctuations of highs, lows and a forked development of character.

The tone is big in theme and scope yet the details are highly nuanced, carefully put together and a work of supreme art.  Though easily readable this, be assured, is unusually complex craft that takes more than simple dedication but also an intricate understanding of not only how novels work but how films work and how politics work and how having sex works, which is not only an astounding level of detail but also of endurance.

In this sturdy American box he puts in metric tons of mainly French Continental Philosophy, Avant Garde twitches, touches and flourishes and his own chance encounters testing his abilities and stretching his talents until they seem to be unable to go any further, yet the ease and grace and suave skill he puts into all of this is not only admirable but it is a balm for the heart.  Leaving the book one comes away with not merely feeling that Paul's intellectual capacity is at full flow but that his heart is on full strength and the two are beautifully combined in a book to live in.

Paul's back catalogue involves many seemingly strange and odd stories fashioned in the oldest of ways where he has consistently experimented and stayed true to the traditions of novel writing adding to the canon a truly great book, which, to this viewer's eyes suggests a full bloodied candidate to the Nobel Prize.

One hopes that the Committee finds such a book worthy enough to award it's author the highest award for literature, which is not to do disservice to his many other books that have led him to this almighty summit of a lifelong mountain Auster has valiantly climbed through all weathers and conditions, doing us the service of making his view deeply readable.

As an almost lifelong fan of your work I congratulate you and thank you for such generosity of imagination that you have willingly shared with us and wish you all the best for it's consequences and varied possibilities.

Fini          

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Love After Death

Derek Walcott has, at the age of 87 and on Saint Lucia, has died.

Only recently I have realised how important a poet Walcott has been to me.

Walcott's personal epic poem Omeros summoned my attention well before by dissertation tutor could point out it's brilliance.  Even once being aware at that late stage I would have given it more than a passing look judging by his shorter previous poems for my tutor, with his brilliant literate mind, devoted much of his time to that Nobel Laureate.

My encounter with Walcott started long ago, though only have I recently known it, with his poem Love After Love, one of the few poems I discussed at length with my three, equally brilliant, Secondary School English teachers at a exam revision workshop where I was the only attendee.

Since then I have had his Selected Poems and have enormously enjoyed his poem about heroines in literature, then also dabbled with his version of the tale of Odysseus set in his own island, which is as much about his equality to The Western Canon as it is about Jamaica.

He was deeply lyrical, deeply intellectual and a sheer passionate titan of Literature, as recognised by the Swedish Academy in 1992 with his Nobel Prize.

Author of a surprising amount of theatrical work as poetry, of which I have yet to see a production.  I hope dearly that I will be granted that chance.   

Nobel Prize Announcement 2016

Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016:

'for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'

Oh boy.

At least one reviewer, namely me, will have to eat their words (a strange taste, if you ask me), having previously dismissed Dylan as an impossibility, but then, this is 2016 where, apparently, the laws of the earth need not apply.

I'm not the best person to comment on Dylan's songwriting abilities.  I've only listened to one of his albums, the one that has 'Tombstone Blues' on it and it was alright.  I've no complaints or real problems with the choice but, it has opened up a small floodgate.

What is literature?  Is now a good question.

What is it now to the committee?  Will Pink Floyd now have a chance of getting it?

What the committee have done is put the cat amongst the pigeons as there was not a critic alive that would have seriously expected this.

But in the sense of goodwill I congratulate Bob Dylan for his achievement, and will have to do something for the first time for this blog.  Buy some vinyl.

Accidental Death of a Playwright

Dario Fo has died earlier on today, coincidentally the day of the Nobel Prize Announcement, in a hospital in Milan.  He was 90 years old.

Known for his satirical farces his love for the jester imbued his writing.

I watched 'Accidental Death of an Anarchist' in the Aberstwyth Art Centre Theatre and very much enjoyed his fast-paced wit and knockabout jokes, including the joke about Noah and the fish, of which I have forgotten the punchline.

He leaves a legacy of 80 plays.

Each His Own Wilderness by Doris Lessing

TONY:
              Do you know what it is you've created, you and your lot?  What a vision it is!  A house for every family.  Just imagine- two hundred million families- or is it four hundred million families?  To every family a front door.  Behind every front door, a family.  A house full of clean, well-fed people, and not one of them ever understands one word anyone else says.  Everybody a kind of wilderness surrounded by barbed wire shouting across the defenses into the other wildernesses and never getting an answer back.  That's socialism.  I suppose it's progress.  Why not?  To every man his wife and two children and a chicken in the pot on Sundays.  A beautiful picture- I'd die for it.  To every man his front door and his front door key.  To each his own wilderness.

Even in Tony's own family they are shouting at each other and never getting an answer back; non-communication isn't simply between neighbours but it is within families; even, sometimes, within the people themselves.
  If you thought the 50s was about bland conformity then have another look at Doris Lessing's play 'Each His Own Wilderness', where, as we see, it was charged with debate, disagreement and discussion.
  Tony, a returned soldier back from his stint of national service despairs at the mess and chaos of his mother's life, an activist campaigning against the H-bomb.  He yearns for the order of the army and begins to make plans to order the house.  His mother, Myra, is uninterested in her son, being wrapped up in her own plots and schemes to wind up the government.  And her love life is becoming unmanageable.
  The long suffering Mike Ferris, a left-wing politician, becomes yet another victim to Myra's long list of love-victims, a consequence of her irresponsibility.  In many ways Tony is the maturest out of all the characters.  He is a steady man with a level head who merely wishes to re-decorate the house.  Rosemary is the innocent, the babe in the wood, about to marry middle-aged architect Philip Durrant.:

ROSEMARY:
                           What's the matter with being safe- and ordinary?  What's wrong with being ordinary- and safe?

  The conflict between son(s) and mother(s) is given the drawing room treatment, but it isn't a gathering of professionals having cocktails as in a T.S. Eliot drama speaking in high verse, but of socialists and soldiers digging into each other with cutting remarks.  The usual spikiness of Lessing's writing comes through like sharp little daggers and is perfectly put to good use in a drama such as this.
  The political details etch this piece in a place and time and Lessing does a good job of recording the feelings of people during this time.

TONY:
                  One half of this lot are bogged down with the emotionality of the Spanish Civil War, and the other half came to a sticky end with Hungary.  If you'd cut them open you'd find Spain or Hungary written on their soft hearts- but not Britain.  Certainly not poor old Britain.     

  It is a play about the different generations, 50's politics and domestic squabbles.  Yet for the period details it has aged well.  The dialogue is sharp and the relationships between each characters develops satisfyingly, which has a hot kick to it as few come out of this without some critique on their personality.
  I was lucky enough to be in London when The Orange Tree theatre was putting it on.  Lessing only wrote two or three plays so a staging of one was quite the event.  It is a shame that her playwriting output was so small, as it is evident that she can 'do' them, and it is the type of mature drama that can often be lacking.  She is very much writing as a modern Virginia Woolf or George Eliot.

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".