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.