Skipping, skipping, skipping

I'm now skipping over three Nobel winners because of the "read it already" rule.

Camilo José Cela (1989) is perhaps an answer to those who think the Prize only ever favours lefties, or those who have been persecuted by their own government. Although his novel La Colmena was banned, he otherwise seems to have been - at least - comfortable in Franco's Spain. The wikipedia entry suggests he informed on fellow writers, and he seems in general to have been fairly unpleasant. I've read some of La Colmena and some of his travel writing. He'll continue to be useful as a reminder of how drab isolationism can be.

Naguib Mahfouz (1988) is more worth a look. His novels are anti-drab: sprawling stories of life in Cairo, written in what I presume is an Arabic style of extravagantly flowery description. He seems to have negotiated the pressures of writing in an Egypt undergoing transformation and the challenges of nationalism and fundamentalism quite gracefully but not without personal danger. Of these three writers he's the one I'd recommend. Try Adrift on the Nile, if only because the translator is Frances Liardet. I met her once. She was lovely.

Joseph Brodsky (1987) was a Russian-American poet and essayist. His poems seemed to feature quite regularly in the magazine Encounter, which I used to see in our school library. It was financed by the CIA. Anyway, the poems seemed quite dull, and as they were, it seems, self-translations from the Russian, he qualifies for that exemption too. Also, and I can't stress enough how trivial this point is, how could anyone want to read the poetry of a man who looks like this?

So I can happily go back to 1986 and Wole Soyinka, even though I fear that this is another one who'll suffer from being a playwright.

Nobels: 1990: Octavio Paz

I think I had heard of Octavio Paz before I started this project but I certainly hadn't read anything by him. I've been reading rather randomly through this selection of his poetry, in a parallel text with translations by various people (and of varying quality - I'll come back to this).

My Spanish reading level is just about good enough to read poetry, but the translations help with some of the obscure words. I'm enjoying the book very much, eventually. As with Walcott, the real quality seems to be in the longer works but his style is completely different. Heavily influenced by Eliot in his early works, the ones that enchant me most are those that were influenced by visits to India. There's a kind of extended imagism about them, where time is slowed down and non-linear while the language spins around the subjects. These poems need many readings and I think I'll be carrying this book around for some time.

In this project I'm largely ignoring poetry in languages I don't know, largely because with poetry I don't trust translations (I'll come back to this). But it's also struck me that so much understanding of poetry depends upon familiarity with the tradition it lives in. So for example you'd miss a lot in Bret Harte if you weren't familiar with Walt Whitman. The only other Spanish poet I've read in any depth is Pedro Salinas but even that connection is useful and helpful here: there's a similar kind of music in the language, even though Paz's style is much looser and (as it happens) Whitmanesque. Conversely, it can be instructive to see the ways in which non-anglophone poets adopt and adapt the influences of people like Whitman and Eliot.

But let's turn to the translations. There are some very odd choices made by the translators here and since I haven't banged on about translation theory for a while, I'll give a few examples. The poem Viento Entero (translated as Wind from all Compass Points) begins with the phrase El presente es perpetuo - a phrase that acts as a kind of refrain through the poem. Paul Blackburn translates this as The present is motionless, for some reason avoiding the obvious perpetual (and the alliteration that goes with it). Maybe he thinks this is a more evocative concept. Maybe he thinks the alliteration is clunky. Maybe he's right (he isn't) but it's not a translator's job to improve a text.

The poem, like many of Paz's, is formally loose. There's certainly no rhyming scheme and no fixed metre. Lines are indented at will presumably with the intention of highlighting key words. Blackburn generally respects and preserves that, but again feels the need to add something. One line reads [los ninos] Rezan orinan meditan. He gives this as [the boys] Pray       pee       meditate  and those extra spaces are completely unnecessary.

But that's my theory of translation: translations should be as close as poss to the original, losing as little as poss but adding nothing. Maintaining strangeness, even if that might mean keeping infelicities. I know many disagree. But if a translator-poet feels the original work needs improving the better strategy is to write your own poems, write them better.

Nobels: 1991: Nadine Gordimer

Another book from South Africa, this one written (1974) and set in apartheid times, although there's a continuous sense here that time is running out for the white minority. Like J M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer is one of those writers where the Booker meets the Nobel (a good thing to remember if you ever go on Pointless).

This was a much more difficult read than Disgrace: more modernist in its structure, with varying points of view and narrators and a much more elliptical timeline. Also there's a lot of loving description of the landscape. The protagonist, Mehring, owns a farm and seems generally devoted to it, but hidden in the title is the sense that he wants to keep it just as it is. For example, he rebukes his son for wanting to throw rubbish out of the car window. This goes with a political conservatism too: while the situation of his black workers is lightly described - there's very little "look how appalling this is!" commentary - the separation of white and black society is stark. Interspersed through the book are quotations from a book on The Religious System of the Amazulu and hints of a kind of mystical bond between the Africans and the land, which Europeans like Mehring (and presumably Gordimer) can't share. His ownership of the farm is time-limited.

I don't really know why it took me so long to finish this book. Mehring isn't an attractive character - and neither is anyone else in the book - and it's hard to care about him. Other characters flit in and out of the story and you hardly get the chance to know them. For example, Terry, Mehring's son, who is probably gay - which would have been shocking in that society - but Mehring pushes that aside, as does the book. There seem to be a lot of issues that are raised in the book but not fully worked through.

There's enough here, though, to make it clear that Gordimer was a very gifted writer. She died in 2014 and is largely forgotten now, I think. With apartheid gone, we don't need to read about it anymore may be the thinking. But I suspect we shouldn't forget apartheid as a system, an extreme example of a dehumanising approach to others which is still thriving in many parts of the world.

Nobels: 1992: Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott, born in St Lucia in 1930, won the award for

a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment

and that all makes perfect sense. He was obviously astoundingly well-read in English poetry from an early age and, perhaps more importantly, had the drive and determination to pursue his career outside what I imagine must have been a very limited cultural scene in his homeland. His poems show that he learned from his contemporaries, particularly in USA and alongside the somewhat stiff diction, there's the influence of more conversational, even confessional poets. They are, I suppose, key works for anyone considering post-colonial literature and the way writers negotiate the use of an imperial language to resist imperialism.

Here's an extract from "The Schooner Flight" from the 1980 collection, The Star-Apple Kingdom which is Walcott at, for me, his best.

Unlike with Seamus Heaney, I haven't attempted to read this book straight through. It's particularly inappropriate because Walcott wrote lots of very long works (eg Homeros) which are only extracted here. Those are the books that should be read like novels. And perhaps that experience would be better. I wasn't often entranced by the shorter poems, despite the enormous craft in them. Maybe in reading the longer works, the flow is more seductive - Bruckner rather than Mendelssohn, let's say. But I didn't get the simple, irrational pleasure that poetry can give to encourage me to read more.

The selection I have been reading is an ex-library book from Northern Ireland, and has the beautiful soft plastic covering that librarians love. It was only borrowed four times and is almost pristine. Every time I pick it up I get that old familiar feeling of wondering if it's overdue for return yet.

Nobels: 1993: Toni Morrison

My excuse would be that I don't read much contemporary fiction. Why haven't you read anything by this black, American woman?

It's a fair question and I don't want to be hard on myself or you. There is an understandable reluctance to read something that has so little connectedness with one's own life, and a fear that it won't make much sense. How can I possibly relate to the life of a pre-teenage black girl living in desperate poverty in small-town, racially divided America in the 1940s?

On the other hand, it's precisely for those reasons that a book like this can be so enjoyable. I asked the good people of Twitter to suggest which book by Toni Morrison I should read. This was the winner. It's her first book, and although I had some doubts about the technique (which, I'm glad to say, she retrospectively shares in the afterword to this edition) once I'd started it there was no stopping me.

It combines, like novels should, a heartfelt personal story with complicated ideas about racial and sexual identity. These are experiences and ways of thinking that would never come to me. It's good to reach out for them, and Toni Morrison goes right to the top of that list of writers I want to read more of, once I've finally got past Sully Prudhomme.

Nobels: 1994: Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburō Ōe, the 1994 winner, wrote in the extraordinarily fast-changing post-war Japan. He's clearly a forebear of Murakami but, on the evidence of this book, so much better. The Silent Cry was published in 1967 in Japan and the translation came 21 years later.

The title of the translation, although presumably approved by Ōe, is terrible (more suited to a Channel 5 afternoon telemovie); another example of titles losing their idiosyncrasy in translation. (The Japanese title, 万延元年のフットボール (Man'en gan'nen no futtobōru), translates as Football in the first year of Man'en - which needs a decent knowledge of Japanese history to make any sense.)

That title and an alarmingly overwritten (or overtranslated) opening paragraph hardly disposed me to this book.

But, dear reader, I pressed on and as the temperature of the prose dropped I found myself increasingly drawn in to what is a weird and strange story - precisely the kind of encounter I have hoped 
for from this Nobel exercise.

The narrative format isn't anything outlandish. An unreliable first person (these days there is no other kind) pushes the story along and helpfully the novel is divided into chapters of about 20 pages each.

There's a decent page about the book on Wikipedia but it does retell the plot in detail so don't go there if you don't want to spoil the plot. It would have helped me, however, to know something about Japanese history from 1860 to 1960. Literary translators seem to think footnotes are admissions of defeat, but some would help here. If they are acceptable in classic English novels to explain references that most current readers won't get, why not in translations?

But I'm grateful that the book has led me to learn more about Japan's history. And it was, above all, an engrossing read. I can't help feeling it would be more so if I knew more about the cultural background. I also think this book would strongly reward a second reading, but there's no time for that now. Off I go to a book whose title rhymes with this one.

Nobels: 1995: Seamus Heaney

I have skipped over the 1996 winner, Wisława Szymborska, on my "no lyric poetry in translation" rule and I could have claimed exemption on this one. Of course I've read some of Heaney's poems, and his translation of Beowulf which didn't excite me greatly. But instead I took the chance to read en masse this 1990 collection.


It's a generous selection from a huge body of work, and makes apparent that Heaney's work was incredibly varied both in subject matter and in form. Reading the poems in sequence isn't something I'd normally do, but at times it felt like a running commentary on the recent history of Northern Ireland was weaving in and out of the other concerns - nature, memory, language - more or less strongly as the times demanded.

Those times aren't so far away and his clear, undogmatic approach must have been hard to maintain among the clashing certainties.

As with Beowulf I don't find myself intimately drawn to the poetry, despite fully accepting the enormous skill and artistry. That's just one of those things: just something that doesn't quite click with me. Heaney and Derek Walcott are the only English language poets to have won the Nobel in recent years: are they really the best there has been? The question itself seems ridiculous.

This one, from his first collection, for its topicality.

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Nobels: 1997: Dario Fo

I'm admitting defeat on this. It's like poetry in translation only worse. These are plays and written by someone with an obvious relish for slang and dialect. In performance in translation I understand that Fo allowed and encouraged liberties to be taken to localise the plays. Within this collection there's a short example of this, in which part of Mistero Buffo is translated into Lallans, but mostly these are straight translations: to be read rather than to be performed.

And they don't work as such. Mistero Buffo, for example, is a series of short dramas based on the way minstrels (giullari) would have performed them and there's also a lot of reference to puppetry. In English terms we'd be looking at mystery plays made into pantos  with bits of Punch and Judy thrown in. The cultural gap is too big, and so stagings would have to use the text as a starting point. Even more than usual with theatre the productions would be a shared endeavour. No doubt Fo's own stagings were terrific - he enjoyed great popular success - but his ability in that is simply not available to me.

It's a similar, but less serious situation with the best known play in this collection, Accidental Death of an Anarchist. As a good playwright, Fo leaves a lot for the actors to do. So much so that I can't form an opinion on how good a playwright he is.

He's another example of the Academy's tendency to give the prize to writers who have suffered persecution and censorship. As I've said before, I don't have a problem with that: it's entirely legitimate to use the prize as a plea for freedom of speech. The Wikipedia article on Fo is long and detailed about this.

Fo seems to be somewhat forgotten now but his concern about the hidden power of right wing politicians may become horribly fashionable again.

Dario Fo, Plays 1 Methuen 1992

Nobels: 1998: Jose Saramago

The rules of my game are that I don't revisit Nobel winners whose work I already know. This definitely includes Jose Saramago, the 1998 winner. I've read many of his novels and it's a case where I owe a lot to the Nobel panel for making me aware of a writer whose books I admire and enjoy so much.

The pinnacle of his work, I guess, is Blindness but read some other books by him before that. Among the horrors of that story you need to trust the author implicitly, so get to know him and his highly individual style on something less stressful: The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian peninsular detaches itself from Europe and sails out into the Atlantic, might suit these times.

Nobels: 1999: Günter Grass

Another short book read slowly, Cat and Mouse by 1999 winner Günter Grass is a fictionalised memoir of adolescent life in Germany early in the second world war.

It wasn't, by any means, a difficult read and I don't really know why it took me so long. The narrative content is quite slight: young men  crossing over into adulthood, a transition that in this case has the consequence of inevitable involvement in killing and risking being killed (along with the usual sexual and social problems). The restraint of the book is in how unspoken that consequence is; although the material effects of being at war are always present - scarcities of many kinds - it's not something the narrator (Pilenz) and his antihero (Mahlke) talk about much. It's a kind of banality: behaviour and destiny that would have seemed absurd in peacetime become rapidly normalised.

I see that this book is part of a "Danzig Trilogy", of which the first part is the much better known Tin Drum, and I suspect that across the three books there's a kind of mythology established, in which the wider significance of the Cat and Mouse references find a place. Clearly Grass is saying something about what Germany was like then, but I'm not sure I can detect what he's saying about what Germany was like at the time he wrote (1961).

If I were not on this self-inflicted quest to trainspot Nobel winners I'd take time to read more by Grass and I can't say that about all the writers I've discovered so far.

Günter Grass, trans Ralph Manheim Cat and Mouse Penguin 1966

Nobels: 2000: Gao Xingjian

I've taken a shamefully long time to read this very short book, a collection of narratively inconsequential short stories. I suspect I have the same problem here as I have with lyric poetry: the translation can only hint at how the language works with a sentence like this:

"What" is not to understand and "what" is to understand or not is not to understand that even when "what" is understood, it is not understood, for "what" is to understand and "what" is not to understand, "what" is "what" and "is not" is "is not", and so is not to understand not wanting to understand or simply not understanding why "what" needs to be understood  or whether "what" can be understood ... 

The Nobel citation talks of "an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity" but I really didn't find bitter insights; and "universal validity" seems to be another way of saying that the stories cover unexceptional events.

So, to put it kindly, I didn't love this and have no urge to read any of his novels (the fact that they are called Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible doesn't help much either).

On we go, to someone I really should have read before.

Nobels: 2001: V S Naipaul

Finally a rainy, thundery day (there was no possibility of riding a bike this day) gave me the perfect chance to finish Naipaul's breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas. According to Wikipedia it took him three years to complete it, and it sometimes felt it would take me that long to read it.

It's a long (600+ pages) and detailed account of the life of Mr Biswas, set in relation to all the generally ramshackle and overcrowded places he inhabited - to say he called them home would be inaccurate.

You've probably gained the correct impression I found this a bit of a slog. What kept me going, apart from a sense of duty to this blog and its handful of readers, was the occasional insight into the character of Biswas and his family, and into Trinidadian society, a dazzling mixture of cultures on the verge of decolonisation as the second world war presaged the collapse of the British empire. I suppose I can't avoid the word Dickensian, in that respect, but the plot is too linear to be gripping. There are no twists, just a procession of episodes, while Biswas's social and economic status remains more or less static. Perhaps that's the subversive point: we expect the hero of a novel (of this size) to develop and change, and Biswas just doesn't.  The novel is peopled Dickensianly with a bewildering array of extended relatives, so much so that a list of characters would have been helpful. (I don't know why novelists don't do this. I suppose they think it's an insult to their story-telling prowess, or an insult to the reader's reading memory.) Naipaul has said "there was a short period, towards the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart", and that shows. He doesn't give the little reminders of who's who that a more considerate writer would.

It's often funny, although very soon you realise the underlying bleakness isn't going to go away. The laughter is bittersweet. Linguistically it's sharp, with  an enjoyable mix of  registers and languages of the characters - sometimes Hindi, sometimes English (sometimes colonial, sometimes colloquial, gradually becoming more American) - giving some glimpse of the excitement and possibilities of a multi-lingual society and making the surface of the prose glittering and fun.

I'm not tempted to read any more fiction by Naipaul on the basis of this, though. I'm interested in the comments about his non-fiction and travel writing in that Wikipedia article and someday maybe I'll look into them.

Nobels: 2002: Imre Kertész

A writer of whom I am sure I had never heard before, Imre Kertész was and wrote in Hungarian. As far as I can tell this book, Fateless, fairly closely follows his own history. A secular Jew in Hungary as the Second World War was nearing its end, he was taken away one day to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. The book describes the treatment a similar boy, Gyuri, received in the camps and his final liberation in 1945.

It's a sparsely-told account. Gyuri is deadpan, with a touch of autism about him in the way he affectlessly describes what happens and strives to discern some logic in it. Ultimately, and especially in the final chapter after his return to Budapest, Gyuri is making the case that life stories aren't demonstrations of fate or destiny at work, but are just sequences of events. (The original title, Sorstalanság, means fatelessness, which gives a better sense of the rejection of implied meaning in narrative.) Whether we can assume that the book is saying that the holocaust has made meaningful narrative obsolete is another question.

Unusually, with this book I noticed the typeface. It's not typical of faces used for novels and is more reminiscent of, say, French poetry. Here's a sample. It's a smart choice by the publisher: it suggests a coolness that's inherent in the text.

This was a good, enthralling read, something that I would never have picked up but for the project I've undertaken and I'm so glad to have read it.

Next up is the longest book I've tackled here so far. I'm already disposed against it for that reason, and it may be some time before you find out what it is and whether I overcome my bias.

Nobels: 2003: J M Coetzee

In a parallel universe I am doing a blog about Booker prize winners and this is where those two universes meet. J M Coetzee won the Nobel in 2003 and the book of his that I have been reading, Disgrace, won the Booker in 1999.

It's a relatively conventional narrative - certainly in comparison with Jelinek - about an aging South African teacher of literature, whose life takes a turn for the worse when he seduces one of his students. At one stage his employment status is reduced to that of dead dog disposal man. At the same time, though, he achieves some kind of redemption, but it's not as pat or simplistic as that may sound (or would be, in the hands of a less honest writer).

The technical accomplishment of the book - the sheer dexterity of the writing and the development of the story, the pacing, the dialogue - is stunning. Coetzee was clearly in total command of his craft when he wrote this.

What's more difficult is the moral, even political infrastructure. The hero, David Lurie, isn't a particularly endearing character (he isn't meant to be). His sexual drive is unflatteringly depicted and there's a strong hint of incestuous guilt about his relationship with the student. And while the book is ostensibly about his out-of-placeness in an evolving South Africa - he has an entirely European frame of cultural reference, knows virtually no Xhosa - I found it more engaging on the conflict between generations. His daughter feels more at home in an African South Africa than he does, in spite of what happens. He's so flawed that, although you can sympathise with his feelings of loss, you also have to doubt the value of his world as it was.

It isn't comfortable or comforting, however, but the best books aren't. For the sheer quality of the writing I'd recommend Coetzee and may one day read more by him. But next up for me is a writer I (and you, I bet) had never heard of.

Nobels: Pinter and Lessing

I've skipped over Doris Lessing (2007) and Harold Pinter (2005) because I had already read at least one work of each. Them's the rules.

Doris Lessing's citation called her an "epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Her most important book was probably The Golden Notebook (1962) a fundamental text of 20th century feminism and probably still worth reading (it's a very long time since I did).

Harold Pinter is probably better known. His plays seem pretty conventional now but that's because they changed theatre in Britain, which is quite an achievement. Perhaps it's his screenplays that will last best: The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between three particular stand-outs.  The citation says that he "in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms". He hated Tony Blair and I think the feeling was mutual.

Nobels: 2004: Elfriede Jelinek

Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the prize in 2004. She was virtually unknown in Britain at the time, and because she has the nerve (da noive!) to be Austrian and to write in German, a thick, pun-ridden, allusive German, there clearly must have been some mistake.

Her work is dense and modernist, with an elusive narrative thread and shifting points of view, but is centered on two themes: the willful amnesia of Austrian society about its part in twentieth century history, and the tendency of men to dominate women, both linguistically and physically. There's a long and detailed survey of her work by Nicholas Spice at the other side of this link.

My own German isn't good enough to read this book in the original, but from the preview of the ebook on the German Amazon site, I can see how playful and difficult it is. The translation by Joachim Neugroschel is fittingly roughcast: it doesn't have the "smoothness" that's so often praised by monolingual reviewers. A smoother translator would never have dared to use the phrase "Little shop of whorers" (p 48) to describe a peepshow, for example but as far as I can tell it's exactly the kind of almost-clever, almost-trite pun Jelinek loves.

Once again, though, I'm puzzled by the translation of the title. In German it's "Die Klavierspielerin" which simply means "The (female) Piano Player". You can make a case that Piano Teacher is a better title (in that it foregrounds the pupil/teacher relationship that's a vital part of the plot), but Jelinek could have called the book "Die Klavierlehrerin" and didn't. Why would a translator try to improve on what the author decided?

Anyway, the book itself is one of those where I feel like an alien visitor to the planet, watching people behave in ways that I will never understand. I think that's my problem, and that other people will find it easier to relate to what goes on. It's the same bewilderment I get from knowing that some people like the books of Michel Houellebecq: I'm sure they do, but I really can't see why. Actually, this is the kind of book he would write if only he had any talent for writing or for understanding people. Largely (I think) an exploration of the writer's own obsessions, but at least Jelinek gives her characters some depth and her writing is always quirky and intriguing.

Apparently this is her least challenging book so I don't think I'll read any others.

Elfriede Jelinek, trans Joachim Neugroschel: The Piano Teacher Serpent's Tail 1988

Nobels: 2006: Orhan Pamuk

I skip over Doris Lessing and come to Orhan Pamuk and his third novel The White Castle. It is a short book (<150 pp) but it felt much longer, and not in a good way.

The story is quite sparse: an unnamed narrator, an Italian scholar, in captured into slavery in 17th century Istanbul. His owner, a Turkish scientist (more or less) called Hoja, works with him on a range of projects under the patronage of the Sultan, culminating in the invention of a military machine which ultimately proves ineffective in battle. During their collaboration their identities become almost fused, but towards the end one of them runs away and is reported to have gone to Italy and resumed the narrator's pre-capture life.

The whole point of the narrative is in the relationship between the narrator and Hoja and you can find material there for considering the following Big Questions:

- how and how far can a man know himself
- the differences between eastern and western philosophies of:
-- the self
-- the universe
-- dining tables
- the use and misuse of narrative
- our old friend, the unreliable narrator

It's in the nature of these things that no firm answer is given. Indeed, the whole narrative, and the framing narrative (an introduction by a fictitious modern scholar) is self-undermining.

It's compulsory to mention Borges in this context, and I was reminded of the way Borges constantly irritates me: huge intelligence put to the service of luxurious games. I think the worst thing is the way there's no anchoring of the play of ideas to any solidity of emotional involvement. But that's just me. Lots of people love this sort of thing and I can't possibly say they're wrong. I won't be searching out any of his other books.

Pamuk's Nobel citation says that he "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures", which is about as bland as you can get. As with Alexievich a few years later, it's likely that the award was in part a reaction to the state-supported attacks on some unpopular opinions. Pamuk spoke up about the death of Armenians at the hands of Turkey, a subject that is extremely contentious, and the Academy - rightly, I'd say - wanted to defend free speech. You can read more about it at Pamuk's wikipedia entry.

Nobels: 2008: J M G Le Clézio

J M G Le Clézio won the prize in 2008 for his life's work, as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".

I'm not sure about that. Here's the only book of his I've read, which I picked up a couple of years ago in the Blackheath Amnesty booksale. I'm grateful that I've now given myself the incentive to read it.

The short book is a memoir about Le Clézio himself, and increasingly about his father, tracing his history as a doctor, trained in London but mainly practising in British west Africa (now Nigeria and Cameroon) before and during the Second World War. He seems to have been always a fairly contrary man, but the experience of colonialism and war made him a hard, unforgiving one, bitter at the destruction of what seemed a kind of Eden.

It's beautifully written, capturing the sights, sounds and smells of Africa, while avoiding any over-simplification or sentimentality.

It hasn't been translated into English and is probably hard to find so there'd be no point in my recommending it. Le Clézio seems better known in France as a novelist, though, and if you find one of his novels on sale - perhaps at the Amnesty sale on 16 June - it'd be worth a go.

Nobels: 2009: Herta Müller

I could have skipped over Herta Müller, but shouldn't really. Before I started writing these entries, she was one of the first laureates I searched out, simply because I hadn't heard of and probably should have. So this entry is relying on my memory of what I read a few months ago.

She writes in German but lived under the Ceaușescu regime in Romania until exile (to Germany) in 1987. The book I read, The Land of Green Plums, is clearly, although not explicitly, about life under that oppressive government. The West's relationship with Romania was always uneasy; it was given a lot of leeway on the enemy's enemy principle, and it was only with fall of Ceaușescu around Christmas 1989 that the extent of the totalitarianism became more widely known. The book was published in 1994.

It's quite a depressing book. As well as the ideological oppression, the country was dirt poor, hence the (English) title: unripe plums were coveted, and they are fairly obviously symbolic of pervasive stunting. The pervasive joylessness, lightened only by occasional tiny victories, is convincingly portrayed. When I read it, I was deeply concerned about the tide of authoritarianism rising in this country, headed by a xenophobic and illiberal prime minister and aided by economic decline. We're a long way from Ceaușescu, of course, but nothing's impossible.

So I would recommend it, as a warning from recent history.

(Incidentally, let's look at that title: Land of Green Plums. The German title is Herztier, which literally means Heartbeast. I think the German word is as made-up as the English would be, and its significance is explained in the book. Why not translate it literally? I'm seeing a trend in these books for the translated title to be more generic than the original. Lituma en los Andes became Death in the Andes and Rue des Boutiques Obscures has been translated as Missing Person which is much less intriguing. But less perplexing too and I suppose that's the point. Translators and their publishers don't want any obstacle putting potential readers off.)

Nobels: 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of those South American writers everyone is supposed to like but I can't really get into. Still, it's surprising I've never tried him before. On the basis of this one, Death in the Andes, I don't think I'll try again and what follows is, I'm afraid, a list of reasons why.

First the title. The original is called Lituma en los Andes and Corporal Lituma is the principal character. He previously featured in an earlier novel, Who Killed Palomino Molero? and so the original title is both a bit of branding and - perhaps deliberately - reminds us of Tintin books. The English title removes both of those and doesn't replace them with anything. It's too generic.

The translation is by Edith Grossman, a highly regarded translator from Spanish but I often found the tone incongruous. Lituma often refers to women as "broads" and while no doubt this accurately conveys contempt and a certain misogyny in the character, the word just seems dated, and the kind of thing Frank Sinatra would have said. Is it still current in US English?

And threaded throughout the book there's the story of Lituma's adjutant Carreño's romance. Lying in their shack at night, he listens to the younger man's story, making interjections which you know are meant to be funny, but aren't. Humour is very hard to translate.

The main story, though, is of disappearances. Three men from an isolated building camp in the Andes disappear and Lituma's job is to investigate what happened to them. He eventually finds out, but doesn't - can't - do anything with the knowledge. But there's no ambiguity left for the reader on that central issue.

Meanwhile the story has been intercut with tales of innocent people being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Maoist terrorists are about. Horrifying tales, for sure, and in some ways the most compelling parts of the book, as the victims gradually realise what is happening, but barely connected with the main narrative. To be positive, you could see it as two books for the price of one.

The worst thing, though, is the inelegance of the writing. I don't think it's just the translation. Clunking similes and worn-out expressions plod past wearily. It's quite a late book in Vargas Llosa's career (1993). Maybe all his best work was earlier. Not a recommendation from me, then, but I'm quite sure a lot of people will disagree.

Mario Vargas Llosa Death in the Andes trans Edith Grossman Faber 1997

Nobels: some skipping

As I mentioned at the outset, I'm going to skip over some laureates. Mainly those I've read before but also some where the difficulties of reading and/or appreciating the work aren't worth it.

But it's only fair I should mention those I've skipped.

Kazuo Ishiguro 2017. I've read Remains of the Day (who hasn't?) and obviously it's a damn good book but it didn't inspire me to read anything more by him. My loss, almost certainly, but it struck me as too perfect in a way. The imitation of a buttoned-up, emotionally repressed butler was impressive but somehow loveless. That may be the point, but the eventual warming was something completely linguistic.

Bob Dylan 2016. Everyone knows Bob Dylan. What to say about him? There's only thing more boring than a Dylan fan raving on about him, and that's a Dylan sceptic ranting on about him. I'm in one of these groups and that's all I need to say.

Mo Yan 2012. I've read one of his books. I can't even remember which one. It didn't make much of an impression.

Tomas Tranströmer 2011. A Swedish poet. "His poems captured the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature" according to Wikipedia. While I could perhaps find some of his poetry, with translations you may be able to tell if lyric poetry is good - and I'm sure his is - and you may be able to know if it's full of smart ideas, but you can't appreciate it fully.

So that brings us to Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). Fairly surprisingly, I've never read anything by him. However the postie has just delivered Death in the Andes, which is pleasingly short, so I'm on it.

Nobels: 2013: Alice Munro

Picture by J Munro

My exploration of Nobel prize winners will obviously present me with some writers I've never heard of, and some I have heard of but had no idea of how good they were. Alice Munro is one of those.

(If you want to go off short stories, take a creative writing class. For practical reasons, short stories are all anyone ever does and for the most part, they all, including the ones you write, are terrible. At least half the people on the course, including you probably, are doing it for therapy and while that's great, it's something you ought to and get out of the way before you start expecting other people to read what you've written. And of course you have to be nice about them, and in return other people are nice about your stories and inevitably a low standard becomes the norm. You forget what a good short story is like.)

These stories (I'm reading Selected Stories which covers Munro's early years, from 1968 - 1994) are just brilliant. I've been reading them slowly because they are packed solid with observation and nuance. She is a very kind writer, although it's a kindness based on knowledge: her characters' thoughts and feelings are coolly examined, in all their complexity and contrariness, and, if not fully understood, fully accepted. The longer stories approach the scope of novels: an entire life portrayed in 30 pages. Of course the stories are mostly female-centred, but no apology is needed for this. They also focus on people from disadvantaged communities and the conflicts they face in their life between their past and their future. So, unless you are Jacob Rees Mogg, you can relate to them.

I strongly recommend these stories. And with a run of male authors coming up - Mario Vargas Llosa and Orham Pamuk to start with - I'll be saving some to read in between.

In researching this post I've found that the Royal Canadian Mint commemorated Munro's award with a coin. It's a pretty naff design (in my opinion) but contrasts sadly with Britain's recognition of its writers: the most modern writer to figure on English currency is Jane Austen. Again, how many times do we need to say, one thing that Britain does well is writing: why don't we celebrate this?  

And I also found this: a contentious but provoking defence of women novelists.

As if they needed one. 

Nobels: 2014: Patrick Modiano

pic by Frankie Fouganthin CC BY-SA 4.0

Patrick Modiano is a French writer with a complex racial background. His novels are said to frequently explore questions of identity and memory, particularly with reference to French history during the second world war. His Nobel citation referred to "the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation".

It's no surprise to find that he was a pupil of Raymond Queneau, and as well as that writer, I picked up reminiscences of Michel Butor and Georges Perec. I should have heard of him but, like most people outside France, hadn't until he won the prize.

The book that I read for this entry, Rue des Boutiques Obscures (translated into English as Missing Person) is fairly short, around 250 generously spaced pages, and easy to read: any philosophy is woven lightly into the narrative. It won the Prix Goncourt in 1978.

The basic story is of a narrator, initially known as Guy Roland, who has suffered amnesia and is trying to piece together his earlier life. He frames the question as one of identity (the opening sentence is "Je ne suis rien"/"I am nothing") and his initial search is for a name to give himself.

As the quest goes on, the reader is more interested in the question of why he has forgotten everything, a question that is only partially answered.

The book uses a variety of narrative techniques, from straightforward first person narration, unattributed third-person passages, and documentation. Set mainly in Paris, it also travels to Megeve in the French Alps for one of the most atmospheric sections.

Like Perec's La Disparition there's a hidden theme, a void at the heart of the book, the unspoken horror that might explain the amnesia. An amnesia which we can transfer to the whole of French post-war history, I think.

The writing isn't always perfect. There are some tics that irritate. No character is introduced without a perfunctory description of the colour of their hair, and minor characters tend to be greyish men of around sixty, with no other attributes.

But on the whole it's a really good, provocative book. I would be tempted to read more by Modiano.

Nobels: 2015: Svetlana Alexievich

Pic by Elke Wetzig CC BY-SA 3.0

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belorussian documentarist. The book that I have read, Boys in Zinc, is based on interviews with former soldiers in the Soviet action in Afghanistan from 1979 - 1989 and with their family members - most often mothers.

It's a fairly harrowing read. The descriptions by the soldiers of what the war was like are often detailed and distressing, as of course they should be. But the testimony is not just about the nature of war, but is set among the collapse of the Soviet Union - in part triggered by the war - and spans a change in attitudes towards the soldiers. There's a general sense of grievance that soldiers went off to Afghanistan on rhetoric that evoked the Great Patriotic War and promised them hero status, but returned to a society that saw the war as a terrible mistake, a crime even, and wanted nothing to do with the veterans.

The edition I've been reading (Penguin 2017, translated by Andrew Bromfield) includes a selection of documents about "Boys in Zinc on trial". After publication two of those interviewed sued Alexievich for (broadly speaking) libel. By this time Belarus was an independent country, and much less reformed than most of the former Soviet states. There's a suspicion that the suits were brought on the instigation of the government and army, to denounce the way the interviews had portrayed the former Soviet army. The result was mixed. Alexievich had to pay some damages.I suspect the legal action only highlighted the problems her book reported.

And presumably was a factor in her winning the Prize. With Alexievich we run straight into one of those questions that always plague the prize: does the Academy have a political agenda in making the award? Oh dear, here we hit the problem of "what is political?". Just yesterday an MP accused the opposition of trying to make the death of a homeless man a political issue. And in America, anti-gun protestors are sometimes accused of bringing politics into the debate. It's an irregular verb: I apply common sense; you bring politics into it; he she or it has an ideology.

The campaign against Alexeivich was a political campaign which threatened freedom of expression. Of course the Nobel academy should take that into account and can reasonably use the award as a means of defending literature itself.

A worthwhile read about a subject not many of us know much about. As a start on this Nobel project, it's what I hoped for: I've been led to something I would never have read otherwise, and enjoyed it.

Coming next: depending on the postal service either Alice Munro or Patrick Modiano.

Nobel Prize winners

I'm starting a project to read and blog about books by winners of the Nobel prize for literature. Here are some initial thoughts and ground rules.

1. I'm going to skip over winners where I've already read some of their books. This means, for example, that I won't be reading many of the British and Irish winners. (Britain and Ireland have done remarkably well in this award, by the way, usually prompting a response of utter indifference from the establishment in Britain at least. That's a shame; it's one thing Britain can still be proud of.)
2. This means I'll probably be reading lots of books in translation ...
3. ... and so I might skip over poets in a language I don't know at all (eg Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish winner in 2011 and, I believe, a robot in disguise). I don't believe that "poetry is what gets lost in translation" but a huge part of my enjoyment of poetry comes from the way language is used abnormally - difference in register, syntactical quirks, etc - and that may not come across well.
4. But I'll try to read French and Spanish books in the original.
5. Generally I'll be working backwards, but it will depend on what I can find. It might be tricky to get hold of anything by Sully Prudhomme (1901) these days, but it will be a long time before I have to try.

I'm skipping over Kazuo Ishiguro (2017) and Bob Dylan (2016) and so I start with Svetlana Alexievich and her book Boys in Zinc.

Caroline Blackwood: On the Perimeter

Just after Britain's been congratulating itself on 100 years of some women being given the right to vote - oh, weren't we so enlightened! - this book from just 34 years ago probably gives some idea of what attitudes to suffragists were really like.

Caroline Blackwood visited the peace camp at Greenham Common in March 1984 and the persistent thread of her short account is the sexualised abuse directed at the women. Auberon Waugh (whose comic viewpoint on "relentless women's issues" Matthew Parris has recently praised and mourned) alleged that the women smelled of "fish paste and bad oysters". The press had described them as "belligerent harpies", "a bunch of smelly lesbians" and "screaming destructive witches". Every night British troops protecting the American base would shout abuse at them. Youths from Newbury would attack the camps, pouring pig's blood over the improvised "benders" in which the women were trying to sleep. Bailiffs would wilfully destroy every possession they could.

It's really not far from the kind of abuse that women's suffrage campaigners had been suffering just 80 years earlier and of course it says more about male fears than it does about the actual conditions at the camp or what the women were actually doing. What the women were actually doing looks to have been incredibly boring. In Blackwood's account, they saw themselves as witnesses, rather than agents. Of course they knew they could not stop deployment of the missiles but they could ensure that it was noticed. They were a small voice against the threat of nuclear annihilation.

One of the more amusing aspects of the book is the account of court proceedings. Women would be charged for various offences and the cases would then descend into drawn-out arguments about the details of what happened and the reliability of prosecution witness being asked to describe accurately, so that there should be no reasonable doubt, what had happened in the darkness months ago. Undoubtedly, one of the women's tactics was to tie the court system up with these ridiculous hearings.

There was even an echo of the "cat and mouse" treatment received by suffragists. The conditions at the camp were so appalling that some women wouldn't mind too much a short stay in Holloway, just to get warm and dry. Sentence over, they'd return to the camp with renewed vigour.

It's possible to argue that the women's views were wrong and their tactics were badly chosen, I suppose. Blackwood questions and disagrees with one particular practice as unnecessary and unhelpful provocation. But the reaction to the camp, from the authorities and from individuals, now seems so excessive; it's hard to believe it happened.

And yet in similar circumstances today, we know exactly the people who'd be condemning and slandering the women involved. Many of those who've recently sought to borrow prestige from female emancipation, as if it were something freely given by an enlightened state, would be piling into the scrum of disapproval. There'd be an army of frothing men lining up with their sexual disgust barely disguised as common sense and "good-natured lightheartedness, even kindness" about "relentless women's issues".


Caroline Blackwood: On the Perimeter Flamingo Books, 1984