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