Tag: Nobel Prize

And the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature goes to…

…at about 16:00 min

Annie Ernaux!

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022 is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux,

“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

Press Release
6 October 2022

A very short formal announcement I must say – and not as punctual as one is use to (presumably their winner could not be contacted; follows, she wasn’t sitting by the phone! is that a diss? hope so!). Here is the biobibliography (that’s a mouthful!) on the Nobel website (and as pdf). How delighted I am I need not say; for, on Ernaux, I have said enough in the past.

(Ig)noble intentions

The yearly hullabaloo of the Nobel Prize for Literature! What is noble for one is ignoble for another.

The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk I know only from reputation, that is, from another prize – the International Booker in 2018 – so I can’t say very much at all. Both that then book honoured, entitled Flights; seemingly a flight of fancy into the fragmentary nature of life and living, and her more recent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, that the review just read suggests as a very original work, have been widely praised. She is in fact more and longer known (and published) in Germany than in the English speaking world, so I will try to get to her work some time soon. Scandal factor: just middling. Feminist, youngish, leftish, politically engaged, controversial in homeland. What’s new?!

Peter Handke. Scandal factor: high! Oh my! Are they blöd oder what! Did they (that is, the new Committee put in place after the scandal(s) that led to the postponement last year) not see it coming! For the obvious reasons of language and familiarity, the furore has raged more on this side of the Atlantic, though that is often so with Nobel controversies given the (unfortunate) coincidence (?) that the announcement usually approximately corresponds with the Frankfurt Book Fair.

No, I haven’t read Peter Handke. And of that, I can at least convince myself, I am somewhat ashamed. He is after all an integral part of the contemporary German literary canon – for better or worse. And why haven’t I? Well I was here and about when the old Yugoslavia was falling apart and new nations were being built and tyrants were aplenty. Handke stood there very much alone amongst European intellectuals in positioning himself alongside the Serbia of Slobodan Milošević and cohorts. So it was in the charged climate of the Balkans 1990s that I first became aware of him, his story, his history, and as a consequence shied away from the writer Handke, and then when the dust settles it is very difficult to get back. These years on, and his political naiveté or moral shortcomings remain (or better said, become again) a matter of controversy, especially for those with a personal stake because of their heritage or sympathies. I get that. Of taking sides, of black and white.

But Handke’s literature, his aesthetic? It is the latter which the Committee holds so high in coming to their decision, as if aesthetic can be as disassociated from the politic as the artist may be from the man? Reasonable people here can come to a different conclusion. Bret Stephens offers in The New York Times his opinion, with which I am mostly in agreement, and is worth reading.

Would anyone want to contemplate all those (prize winners or not) who wrote like angels (some of the time) but were anything but (maybe a lot of the time)? Dickens, Twain, Hamsun, Sartre, Pound, Dahl, Mann, Hemingway, Mailer, Grass … all men I know! The Woolf! The Stein! Sontag. Complex lives all. Ambiguity aplenty. Some got a (the!) gong, some not. Just a very few of the very many with moral shortcomings or sympathies (or more) towards political extremes or accused of discriminating, racist or abusive behaviour.

What to do? It’s complicated.

It occurs to me now that I have in fact read something by Handke – well sort of. A few years ago now, a really nice German translation of that highly unusual marriage diary Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne wrote (in German “Das Paradies der kleinen Dinge”) came my way, and Peter Handke wrote a prologue of sorts that I (think I) remember thinking was just as unusual but I can’t remember exactly why, except that I liked it. What a literary iteration that is!

Will I read him now? I don’t know.

On Toni Morrison

A few days later and the tributes, and love, for Toni Morrison have no end! Amongst the many, Jesmyn Ward has contributed a longer piece at The New York Times. I have read in the last days so much in this vein from younger, a lot younger, writers – black, women but not only – who Ms. Morrison has touched and inspired, who have learnt her lessons on the power of language to pass on to new generations – beyond her literary greatness this too will surely be an enduring legacy.

And here is her 1993 Nobel Lecture – whereby that latter word can not adequately describe the beauty of her words and the narrative voice she chooses, and in audio to be heard as she delivered it twenty-six years ago.

That this should have been said a quarter of a century before an Internet gone haywire and a President equally so:

…The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas…

 Toni Morrison – Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Tue. 13 Aug 2019.
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

In life Toni Morrison pleaded with words – the words of her novels, stories and essays – for a greater human language that is universal in its embrace of the individual, the “other” – not in its “sameness”. It was not the cacophony of unintelligible sound that doomed The Tower of Babel, rather an unwillingness to share in the myriad of other languages – cultures, points of view. She says: “…unmolested language surges toward knowledge not its destruction …We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

It was certainly the measure of this most remarkable life.

Memories never quite lost

I have just completed reading, and in one sitting – well its pages only number 100 odd! – Patrick Modiano’s Schlafende Erinnerungen. As a matter of convenience I read it in German; in the French original it is titled Souvenirs dormants and in English Sleep of Memory (whereby one could wonder why not “Sleeping Memories” – but that is a thing with memories, we never quite know what to do with them, nor what they do to us!)

This was Modiano’s first work after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, and I seem to recall at the time the usual disenchantment in the English speaking universe when one of their own misses out (again!). Certainly I didn’t know him at all, but it was apparent that in Germany he had an appreciative readership amongst Francophiles and literati sorts, and his books seem to be constantly in print. I did then read his first novel La Place de l’Étoile, written in 1968 when he was just 22 years old, and was at once perplexed and captivated by the unusual voice (not to mention the subject matter of German occupation and collaboration and where all that can lead – but that is another thing again, and something that I will return to) and on reading this new work I recognized immediately this almost dream-like quality in Modiano’s writing that is really quite singular to him.  (It must surely be that this is a characteristic of the original French (and Modiano works in general) so I must say Elisabeth Edl seems to capture this beautifully in her German translation.)

Out of the present, the 70 year old narrator Jean remembers his youth in the Paris of the early sixties and in the telling weaves a fine tapestry of fragmented memory of people and place. (Wonderfully illustrated at one point by the metaphor of the Metro plan that lights up on selecting a destination). As if in a trance, Jean takes us with him as he revisits ghosts from this past; those women (enigmatic all in one way or another and beautifully portrayed) who left his life as they entered it, shrouded by mystery, but live still along the boulevards, in the cafes and apartments of his memory, where secrets as dark as the light of a Paris night are shared.

Sleep of Memory is to me a profoundly haunting literary jewel, and if someone were to say (and I have heard it said) that Patrick Modiano somehow seems to write the same story over and over again, then I would reply that is because perhaps that is the only story. 

Which has led me back to this impossible book from Julian Barnes! And I should say this so favoured (by me) and very British of writers of a certain age has much in common with the quintessential Parisian Modiano (also of a certain age), most particularly in their consideration of the elusive nature and inherent imperfections of memory. I know only that Barnes is a Francophile and worships at the altar of Flaubert.

And on (literary) jewels, another Modiano book has come to my attention: La Petite Bijou (2001) translated into English only in 2016 as Little Jewel!