Doris Lessing

There seems to be something of a curse when I buy books as a week later the author of said book drops down dead.  Doris Lessing has died at the age of 94 last November.  She was the oldest Nobel Prize Winner when she won it in 2007.  She has left behind her a rich and varied legacy where she explored group politics, feminine identity, the colour bar, the God that failed and cats.

  I have only read two books by Lessing but it certainly seems like a lot more.  The Golden Notebook was highly enjoyable as it contained four aspects of one person and a slightly related novella interweaving.  I enjoyed the scenes when the main character, Anna Wulf, a writer, has lunches with TV people she is trying to sell her story to but they wish to change the more important political messages into something easier to swallow.  I was captivated with sorrow in the scenes where Anna pins up atrocities from the newspaper, and held in pity when her neighbour goes blind.  The scenes when she is in the communist party offices at the time when people were becoming ex-reds is also interesting as a period piece. 

  

 Lessing could always do this; have a lot to offer.  Often she will try to do everything that a novel can do: emotion, ideas, description, comedy, and the whole shebang.

  

 In The Good Terrorist she uses a small Marxist group in Britain to view her condition of England and it becomes an exciting, challenging, novel about delusion and political commitment.

  

 I’ve wanting to read Shikasta for a while but I’ve ended up reading two of her books at the same time: Walking In the Shade and The Grandmothers.  Which one I shall do for her tribute is yet to be seen.     

Selected Stories- Alice Munro

This marks an important moment in this blog’s history; it is the moment I actually respond to the news of a new Nobel Prize Winner.  This year it is Alice Munro and what makes it interesting is that firstly she is Canadian, the first Canadian to win the Prize much to Margaret Atwood’s chagrin, and secondarily she is primarily a short story writer.  The academy is making a bold statement by choosing Munro as a winner highlighting the value and importance of the short story.  Munro has been, I think, working quietly in the backwaters of literature honing her craft to no-one’s particular attention.  One reason why they might have chosen Munro over Atwood is that Atwood, at the moment, is a very obvious choice.  Munro is a surprise.  

   

Here it is my job to sharpen my scepticism and take a close look at the writings of Munro to see whether she does deserve to be better known and whether she does write the most ideal literature in an ideal direction.  I am using the Vintage version of Selected Stories which is big enough to give a good idea of what Munro is like as a writer in her early, middle and mature periods.

   

I have read ten stories by Munro so far and for nine of those stories I liked and thought were good but it was the tenth that made me understand why she had won the Nobel Prize.  The story in question is ‘The Beggar Maid’, which is about a woman’s conflicting feelings towards a man who loves her.  It is a story whose characters are drawn out with the utmost skill and precision where you can have a huge range of emotions towards them from being sympathetic to outright dislike and many, many grey shades in between.

  

 What I really like about her stories is that she packs whole worlds of experience and personal journeys that takes for other writers a whole novel to achieve.  It helps that they are also very readable as well as being very subtle.  These are highly sophisticated and polished stories that readers will get a lot out of.  This is what the ‘ideal direction’ for literature should be as the Nobel Prize Committee sees it.  

 I am reminded of Italo Calvino’s idea of the future of literature, that literature should have ‘lightness’, and though Munro deals with big emotions she does do it in the small form with lightness of touch.  The committee could be saying that the ideal direction for literature at the moment should deal with the local, the details of small town life with the significances that the people have in their lives.  It should be not exactly minimalist but cut back, not simplified but refined.  Comparable winners to Munro would be, to my mind, Henrich Böll and Ernst Hemingway with, perhaps, a bit of Isaac Bashievis Singer without quite so much religion. 

  

 There we go, no controversy here, just a reaffirmation of the committee’s decision but it’s an honest opinion, as honest as I can make it.  Of course this does not make her the greatest writer in history or even the greatest living writer, if there can be such a thing, the giving of the Prize is mostly symbolic of people’s (and by people I mean those who can suggest their chosen writer, Professors of Literature and the like, to the Nobel Prize Committee) prejudices at that particular time.  This is not to suggest that the winner is chosen on a whim as the decision is made methodically and communally with much, I imagine, discussion and argument over the better part of a year.  Munro is simply another writer whom for people wishing to know what the ‘experts’ of literature believe to be an example of ‘great literature’ for their benefit, education and enjoyment.  She also gives me another reason to put up a post on a blog.  

  

 In conducting the predictions I am surprised at just how much interest Umberto Eco has got, who has way, way more page views then any other writer I have written about.  However it was always going to go to the writers who don’t shout their names too loudly, or have too much press time and media coverage.  It is disappointing that the winner was not one of my predictions, though there were many writers I thought about afterwards whom I did not mention who could have won it just as well as Munro.  Next year I will start my predictions about two months before it is announced but I will not repeat any writers that I have predicted this year.  Instead I will be looking at the other writers that I did not get round to this year as well as writers new to me that I might discover between now and then.

Quote

 ‘“Each year Per reads one work by every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and also the complete works of his favorite from his previous year’s reading.  And you see, each year the task becomes a bit more difficult, because there has been another winner, you see.”…“It’s is safe to say that I have read more deeply into Henrik Pontoppidan than most,” Per Nygren said.’ – fromt The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2013 Announcement

After my late last post I discovered as soon as I posted it the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2013.  It is someone I did not even consider, it is the Canadian Alice Munro.  I say congratulations for the achievement to her whom the Academy have called 'master of the contemporary short story'.  Now it is my job to read one of her books and see if she is as worthy as any of the writers I have forward in the last month or two ago.  I am very much looking forward to it.

Alberto Manguel-Prediction

  

This prediction is based on one book, The Library At Night, and he is included because of his writing about reading and the love of reading.  It’s a great book for bibliophiles as he tackles the subject of libraries from different angels, historical, personal, psychological, and more making an interesting scholarly work that is also clearly a labour of deep love.  This is the only reason why I think he could win the Nobel Prize.  I doubt he will but I wouldn’t mind.  

Milan Kundera-Prediction

  How Milan Kundera hasn’t already got a Nobel Prize amazes me.  I’ve only read The Unbearable Lightness Of Being but that, for me, is enough to say that he deserves the prize.  That book is really one of the very, very few books I’ve read that when reading had thought that what I was actually doing was listening to music.  He is a rhythmical writer who knows how to bring his themes up again and again while putting on the necessary variations to make the whole experience at every point fresh as anything. 

 

He deals with sex as well as philosophy, a combination that has proven popular, living as a self-confessed hedonist.  In Unbearable he analyses the psychology of the concentration camp, of the protest and the use of tanks on civilians but he deals with these heavy themes with the lightness of his wit and his pleasure.  It is this dialogue of the light and the heavy that revolves with peculiar motion that makes it one of the great modern classics that is possible comparable to Italo Calvino.  There is also a stand out moment of tragic comedy involving a celebrity at a protest and a land mine that made me laugh with visceral on a train across Europe (passengers nearby probably looked at me with wonder than saw the book and then thought it was justified).

 

He plays with ideas and offers new ones for stale identities needing a restoration.  Kundera is the breath of fresh air where we may breathe clearly while facing our inherited problems and concerns that comes with the job of being human.  I can’t stress enough how remarkable he is as a writer Unbearable has been one of the best reads in my recent life.  Though he has said that the novelist should only produce seven novels so that there is enough for the casual reader as well as the hardened fan I think he has gone over this limit but then it seems hard for a writer of his caliber to ever stop writing.

He deals with many issues and personalities with searing insight and comprehension of the human condition in an incredibly readable way.  He reminds us of our old humanity in a new way and no doubt is in the ‘ideal direction’ and is, I would argue, the best of writing.  I should make this post a bit longer but what else is there to say other than to state his brilliance?  I yearn to read more of him and I have The Joke, Immortality and The Book of Laughing and Forgetting ready on my bookshelves.

   
So Nobel Prize Committee if you are reading this then give Kundera his deserved Prize and you will have my everlasting thanks.

Now this is where you hit a paywall- well not exactly a paywall more like a moat you can swim across- but what I'm saying is that if you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me by going on Patreon.com and search for Alistair David Todd-Poet. 

I only ask for the lowest possible donation ($1) so that you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night sweating about bills and tax.  Two reasons I ask you of this is 1) It would mean a lot to me and 2) I can buy more Nobel Prize Winning books. 


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Gabriel Josopovici-Prediction

 

My inclusion of Gabriel Josopovici on this list comes down to two things:  The book ‘Contre-Jour’ (with it’s fantastic cover) on my shelf and his other book about modernism.  I’ve not read either of them but what I make my judgment on is the quotes on the back and it’s high praise indeed.  It’s not that his work is good that tips me off but it also the suggestion that he is moving in an interesting fashion.  He is one who not only writes well but also has a vision.  It strikes me that he purposeful writes European literature and knowing how the committee can be euro-centric this may be to his advantage.

  There may not seem to be much to base a prediction on but I think that in not reading Jospipovici’s books I can tell that he would be considered a candidate.  In this fashion he is a bit like Aberto Manguel whom I know little.  He’s a serious thinker of literature demonstrated in his book about modernism asking what happened to it?  So it is likely that he would bring that into his books.  Everything about ‘Contre-Jour’ screams high literature from the Pierre Bonnard painting to Josipovici’s name.  If he is, like the Guardian says, ‘one of the very best writers now at work in the English language’ than there is no reason why he cannot be a candidate for the Nobel Prize.