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.