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