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.

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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

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.