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.