2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

UPDATE: Alice Munro (1931-) was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "mastery of the contemporary short story." Brava! As I wrote below, she is one of the best writers today, and as the Nobel Committee notes, has achieved utter mastery with the short story form. 

Alice Munro (AP/Peter Morrison)

If you haven't read any of her fiction, you can find some free online examples here on Open Culture. Among these, "Free Radicals" and "Runaway" are favorites. One of her earliest stories, "Boys and Girls," is also available at the link.

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According to the Swedish Academy, tomorrow it will announce the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Every year, usually a week or so before the award announcement, I post my annual blog entry about this award and the writers I hope will win, in the process tossing around a few guesses and suppositions, before concluding that no one I would be championing would be considered. (I have read that if one is a literature professor one can officially nominate writers, but I also think this comes with the proviso that one must be invited to do so, literature professor or not, by the Swedish Academy. I am officially a literature professor, among other things, but I would want to chance harming the possibility that a writer I admire might be cooled out because an unknown was writing letters on her or his behalf.)

Haruki Murakami

Last year the literature award went to Chinese fiction writer Mo Yan, someone whom I don't think I'd ever mentioned. I don't read or speak Chinese and cannot vouch for Mo's work at all, though the English translations do not appear to elevate it, at least in my opinion, outside the ordinary.  The year before that the poet Tomas Tranströmer received it. I repeatedly broached his name, in 2005, 2006, and 2009, not so much because I was a huge fan of Tranströmer's, but mainly because it kept popping up in online shortlists, he was a widely known and internationally renowned poet, and he was fairly prodigious in his output. 

Not that that matters; some Nobelists (T. S. Eliot, Elias Canetti, etc.) have produced relatively little, while others (Doris Lessing, J. M. G. LeClézio, etc.) have produced quite a bit. Quality is not the same thing as bean-counting; ultimately it should come down to the sustained quality of the work, though Alfred Nobel, a multimillionaire dynamite executive, stressed idealism. This has kept a few potential Nobelists away from Stockholm, though given some of the recent winners, like Mario Vargas Llosa, a politically conservative author whose works include a great deal of controversial material, and Elfriede Jelinek, one of the most unreadable fiction writers of the late 20th century whose novel The Piano Teacher is a model of anti-idealism, it's probably fair to say that the Swedish Academy is not following the letter of Nobel's will. (Which is a good thing.)

Ladbrokes' betting agency annually draws up an odds list of potential winners. I've cited these before too. Topping this year's list is Haruki Murakami, a leading Japanese writer and one of the most inventive contemporary novelists. Japan's Nobelists include two quite original figures: Yasunari Kawabata, the 1970 winner, whose prose demonstrates almost gnomic compression and who committed suicide not a few years later; and Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 winner, who primarily writes about his developmentally disabled son, though he has managed to transform this narrative constant in several works of great originality. Murakami, whose work can be divided into more straightforward realist fiction (Norwegian Wood is an excellent example of this) and work that incorporates speculative elements, sometimes very successfully (the stories in The Elephant Vanishes and After the Quake exemplify this, as does his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), and he has written several masterpieces, as well as extremely ambitious giant works that demonstrate a writer of tremendous skill and daring, so the Nobel Committee could do far worse.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Also high on Ladbrokes' list are Canadian Alice Munro, one of the best short fiction writers of the late 20th and early 21st century (and a huge favorite; whenever I have the opportunity, I teach her work); Svetlana Aleksijevitj (Alexievich) a Ukrainian author and journalist whose work I once assigned in a "Situation of Writing" course some years ago at Northwestern; Joyce Carol Oates, about whom I'll say nothing, out of decency; Peter Nadás, a Hungarian novelist whose books look enticing but which, at least the ones I've seen translated, are as large as my living room; former Swedish Academy member and playwright Jon Fosse, who probably should not be rated this highly; Ko Un, the highly ranked Korean poet whose name is a perennial (and whom I featured in my poetry month posts a few years ago; Assia Djebar, the very gifted Algerian feminist author who used to teach at NYU and became the first woman of Arab descent, I believe, to gain a seat in the Académie Française; Thomas Pynchon, an author I once avidly read and enjoyed, though I have not been able to bear his more recent work, but who would at least have to emerge from hiding in plain sight, I surmise, to receive the medal and speechify if he were honored; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the great Kenyan fiction writer and thinker who would be a first for his country and Eastern Africa below the Sahara; and Adunis, the highly lyrical Syrian author who also would be a great choice for a number of reasons.

It very well could be any of these writers (please, Swedish Academy, not Joyce Carol Oates if you are going to pick an Anglophone fiction writer; you have Munro and countless other authors to choose from, so please, just don't do it, and if it must be an American writer, there are so many others who don't just churn books out, but actually have created art), or some writer who is far lower on Ladbrokes's list, like Nuruddin Farah, or Yves Bonnefoy, or Michel Tournier, or Duong Thu Huong, or Leila Aboulela, or Juan Goytisolo, or Mia Couto. Any of them would be very deserving. (They also have Junot Díaz, Jonathan Franzen, Shyam Selvadurai, Bob Dylan, Maya Angelou, and other unlikely winners--this year--in the mix too.) 

Several authors I always advocate for--Wilson Harris, Jay Wright, Adelia Prado, Maryse Conde, Kamau Brathwaite, etc.--are not even on Ladbrokes' list. Then there are writers that I am completely aware of who very well could emerge as top choices. Herta Müller strikes me as someone along these lines, but certainly there are many others. Perhaps they will surprise us all and give a joint award, something that should have happened more often, so that Nicanor Parra and John Ashbery, or Alexander Kluge and Ama Ata Aidoo, or Prem Ananda Toer and Elena Ferrante, an author whose work engraves itself on the inside of your consciousness. Another good choice among younger authors would be Alain Mabanckou. He is really one of the best Francophone and African authors writing today, and each of his last four books has been very good to exceptional. (Broken Glass is, I think, the finest of them.) In general poets and dramatists are selected less frequently these days, it appears, though this could be either genre's year. The streak of Europeans also ceased last year, so that's something too. And then there are newer literary genres; will the committee decide to do something radical and award the prize to a graphic novelist? Someone working in hypertext, since this year's Chemistry prize went to three researchers who work heavily with computers. I doubt so, but I guess we will see. 

Adelia Prado

As I type this, I have on the table beside me a novel by the late Robert Bolaño, one of the great figures in contemporary literature, who wrote more and better and far more original work than many people on Ladbrokes' tally, but who died too young--too early--to merit consideration. He joins the ranks of quite a few major authors, writing since the Nobel Prizes were first awarded, who were completely overlooked, including Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, César Vallejo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Raja Rao, Jorge Luis Borges, and many more, were totally passed over, for various reasons. I think Philip Roth is going to join this group too, though who can say? I used to think it might be the great Mozambican writer José Craveirinha, one of the finest in his language and a major figure in African poetry, as he had already received the Camões Prize, the most esteemed award for a Lusophone author, and published quite a bit, but he passed away in 2003. There is the problem of translation, of course, but perhaps someone will bring the most deserving authors' work into Swedish, or English, as I once read that most of the Academy members do read English. (In Craveirinha's case, I hope to rectify that one of these days.) 

On a final note, ccording to the Nobel Prize site, the most popular literature laureates, in order, are John Steinbeck, Rabindranath Tagore, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Seamus Heaney, Gabriel García Márquez, Winston Churchill, Pablo Neruda, William Golding, and Albert Camus. The site unfortunately does not clarify what "popular" means. Sales? Website hits? Queries? Books about them?  Does anyone know?

How Nobel

Haruki Murakami at MIT, in 2005 (Wikipedia)

Almost every year since I've been blogging here I present a short brief on the imminent Nobel Prize in Literature, arguably the world's most important literary award. Only once have I accurately named one of the writers who ended up winning, and then only in passing: Harold Pinter, the late, highly original British playwright, screenwriter, actor, and political activist, and 2005 recipient. Among the many writers I've hoped would be recognized, none have. I did call yet again last year for a poet to be honored after 15 years of that genre being overlooked, in favor of fiction, and the Swedish Academy, to its credit and no intervention of mine, honored the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. He was a widely acclaimed choice, though he did fall within the recent trend of the Academy looking within Europe's borders (or just outside).

Beyond Mario Vargas Llosa, J. M. Coetzee and Orham Pamuk, every laureate since 2000 has been European (and once could make a case for including Turkey within the European matrix). I also am including Doris Lessing, who was born in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), and spent her formative years in Zimbabwe, but writes in a European language and has lived most of her adult life in the UK, and V. S. Naipaul in that group, though he hails originally from Trinidad and Tobago, but he has long been not just a virtual but an actual Briton. There has never been a laureate from Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, Lebanon, South Korea, Kenya, Cuba, Jamaica, Indonesia, Haiti, or quite a few other countries with vibrant literary histories, traditions and cultures. And, as I need not remind anyone, the list of deceased extraordinary writers who were overlooked since the establishment of the Nobel Prize in Literature is vast, while some of those who have been honored (René Sully Prudhomme, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, etc.) have vanished into the pages of oblivion.

If one trusts Ladbrokes betting line, this year's winner will be Haruki Murakami, the Japanese fiction writer, whose magnum opus, 1Q84, appeared early this year in English translation.  For critics in Japan and across the globe the mammoth tome confirmed his status as one of the most inventive and important living contemporary authors.  I'm a huge fan of Murakami's and think he is deserving, but I also think there are many other authors, some older and with fewer hours left on their clocks, such as the great poet Adonis (Adunis), or Guyana's Wilson Harris, or Nicaraguan poet Claribel Alegría. Anti-poet Nicanor Parra is another. There apparently has been a kibosh on US writers since Toni Morrison's prize in 1993, and in 2008 in Horace Engdahl, then the Permanent Secretary to the Swedish Academy, spelled out the reason, describing US literature as "too isolated, too insular," and decried US writing (unfairly, of course), attributing to authors a critique of the American publishing industry: "They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature.... That ignorance is restraining." As I said, I thought then and think the criticism was unfair, and unfairly mischaracterizes all US literature by looking only at a portion of the whole. I take it, though, that the US, despite having a number of deserving writers, will be overlooked again this year.

Back to Ladbrokes, after Murakami, the Irish fiction writer William Trevor is high on the list, as are Mo Yan, a Chinese writer; Canadian writer Alice Munro; the Hungarian Peter Nadas; Cees Nooteboom, a Dutch fiction writer; and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the great Kenyan innovator.  Unaccountably Bob Dylan is also high on the list. I must be the only person I know not to have leapt, at some point, on the Bob Dylan train, but I'm willing to own that. (He has written some amazing songs, but I also think people just go overboard with their praise of him.) Ultimately it will come down to the academy members and their aesthetics and politics. Any of those leading the Ladbrokes list, save Dylan, or many of the others on its rolls, would be a great choice. Or perhaps the Swedish scholars and writers will surprise us, with another amazing writer still under the radar. It's unlike, but not impossible. Just no Dylan, please. Please. We'll know in any case Thursday morning.

ADDED TRIFLE:

Why Albert Einstein never received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of relativity.

Murakami's 1Q84 + New Lispector Translations for ND

Once upon a time, when I was younger, and certain writers published new books, if I could afford to, I would rush to the nearest bookstore to purchase the books as soon as they hit the shelves. I grew out of that around the time I went to graduate school and found myself with little money for anything beyond rent, food, basic clothes, and so on, and in the years since that kind of attentiveness to favorite writers' new works has never returned, but occasionally the announcement of particular books will spur me, if not the day they're released, then shortly after, to buy them. If, of course, I can afford to. I had heard murmurs about Haruki Murakami's extraordinary new novel(s), 1Q84, published in multiple volumes in Japan and in one giant volume this month by Alfred A. Knopf, but in the hurlyburly of preparing for and then beginning classes this fall, I'd forgotten about it, until a university colleague and fellow Murakami-phile, Nathan M., reminded me of it.  Our discussion of Murakami's new book jogged my memory of having seen it a few times when I was at Kinokuniya in New York this past summer. A branch of that store, which features in Murakami's works, including this one, sits right across 6th Avenue from Bryant Park and has a perfect little cafe for taking a library break, but I wasn't thinking at all about when the English translation would appear. And then, shortly after talking about the book and invoking Murakami in my undergraduate class (though we're not reading him this year), I was in Unabridged Books in Boystown and saw the book, and said, budget buster or not, I ought to get it. Only the hardcover (and perhaps the e-book, I haven't checked) version is out, and at 932 pages it's as big as a paving stone and as heavy. And it costs a cool $30.50. Perhaps I should have waited until the paperback(s) appear...next spring? Two translators, the acclaimed Jay Rubin (Books 1 and 2) and Philip Gabriel (Book 3), have brought it into English, and I don't read any Japanese, but my cursory glance suggests the prose flows as fluently, with Murakami's signature quirks, as ever. I don't know when I'll get to it; though I blogged about Roberto Bolaño's 2666 even before it was published it took my another year to purchase the English translation (the three-volume boxed paperback set) and several more years to read it the first time, after which I reread it again this summer. I hope to get to this Murakami volume this spring, but I have a very heavy required reading load right up through April, and a K-2 of books backing up before this so perhaps I will complete my rendez-vous during the summer. Every peep has revealed something strange and interesting, so I might not be able to wait that long. If you're curious about the novel, you can get a précis here.

A day or so after I bought 1Q84 I read Sam Anderson's somewhat problematic but still intriguing New York Times Magazine article "The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami," his account of his encounter with Murakami and (Murakami's) Japan. I say "problematic" because the article opens with the sort of annoying orientalism that should have gone the way of the Mikado. It's like Lost In Translation but without the interesting actors or acting or mood. Had he really never seen any films about Japan, read any other Japanese authors, never read a single history or sociological or anthropological or travel book about the country? At any rate, once you get past that bit, it really is an interesting, relatively brief record of an encounter--a portrait, though not really a profile, unless that terms suggests not getting beneath the surface or seeing other angles--of Murakami's life and work, and of Anderson's recognition of how distinctive he is in relation to Japan, yet how deeply rooted in aspects of Tokyo, at least, Murakami also is. Most of what even semi-regular Murakami fans already know about him receives a bit of treatment here, but I did find his account of how a trip on one of Japan's main highways led to the opening scene of the new book. In that scene, playing in the taxi is Leos Janacek's 1926 tribute to his country, his Sinfonietta, a piece of music that Murakami describes as "'probably not the ideal music'" for the experience. He goes on to say that its "weirdness" was the reason he chose it, and that "that is not a popular music at all." In Japan, I suppose, though it's nationalistic and militaristic Czech music--Janacek removed the "military" from the original title, brass fanfares tend not to be unpopular, and there are folkloric elements woven in, so I would imagine it's probably a bit more popular, at least in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, than Murakami credits it. Anderson, who I gather has never heard it before either (ugh!), describes it as: "busy, upbeat, dramatic--like five normal songs fighting for supremacy inside an empty paint can. This makes it the perfect theme for the frantic, lumpy, violent adventure of 1Q84." What? I rather like the Sinfonietta myself, and once even played a CD featuring the rousing opening for C (who wasn't impressed), but I was thinking of all the dreary cab rides I've been in over the years, some with awful pop music, some with chatty cab drives, one (and C will attest to this) with a religious fanatic who kept taking his hands off the wheel and assuring us that God would take care things, etc., and in any of those cases, I would much rather hear a lively brass fanfare than what I experienced. At any rate, one fascinating aspect of Janacek's piece is that he derives all of the subsequent movements from the cheerful opening motif, which is scored for brass and percussion, and never sounds like, well, John Philip Sousa (not without his charms either). I also have now heard several radio discussions of Murakami's new book, which hav included bemusement about Janacek's music (as well as the mangling of his last name--yah-NAH-chick!), so I include a Youtube video below of the opening two movements, with Rafael Kubelik conducting the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. Does this sound like music in a paint can? Really?

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While at the bookstore I noticed what looked like a new New Directions edition of Clarice Lispector's penultimate, and best known novel, The Hour of the Star, which appeared just before she passed away, in 1977.  What I spotted turns out not only to be a new edition, but a new translation of this remarkable work, by Benjamin Moser, who wrote the authoritative English language biography of Lispector, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press, 2009). In it he traces not only Lispector's life and work, but the development of her thought, showing how her early engagement with Baruch Spinoza deeply marked not just the content of her works, but also its forms and its language. Moser, who also writes for Harpers and The New York Review of Books, has now brought into English what appears, at least from my reading of it, a version of Lispector's novel that is much closer to the original Portuguese. One thing that most readers do not know, but as I believe I've mentioned on this blog before, is that the longstanding English translation, by Giovanni Pontiero, I believe, not only changed key bits of text, but left out portions. A scholar of Brazilian literature and a scholar of Hispanophone literature who was reading the text for a paper both confirmed that this editing and bowdlerization had occurred, though most readers, including I, have fallen in love with the earlier English version of the text. Moser's Lispector is a bit wilder, and he discusses this in a thoughtful afterword that helps to orient the reader to the text. I almost wish it could have been exchanged with the foreword, by Colm Tóibín, which doesn't really add that much in a prefatory sense, though it would be fine after one read the book. 

The next 4 newly translated volumes
to be published, which
will form a portrait of
Lispector when placed together

From Moser's postscript and from the front matter it appears that New Directions will be publishing new translations of several more of the books, which Craig Morgan Teicher's September 27, 2011 article in Publishers Weekly confirms. New Directions will issue new translations of Lispector's highly praised début, Near to the Wild Heart; The Passion According to G. H., Lispector's greatest existential and spiritual exploration; A Breath of Life (Um sopra de vida: pulsações, her last, posthumous, highly abstract, metafictional book, which has not been translated into English); and Água Viva, which Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz translated as The Stream of Life, and published with University of Minnesota Press in 1989. Hélène Cixous, who brought worldwide attention to Lispector, wrote the introduction this earlier version; I wonder who New Directions will get to introduce it. Thank you, New Directions, and, as with Murakami's tome, when these appear, if I have the scratch, I will be getting them, and urging the university and other local libraries to do so as well. Fellow readers and teachers, take note!

From Moser's "Translator's Afterword" (p. 80):

Clarice Lispector's weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produces [sic] sentences--often fragments of sentences--that veer towards abstraction without ever quite reaching it. her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning, but never to discard it completely. 

Paradoxically, the better one's Portuguese, the more difficult it is to read Clarice Lispector. The foreigner with a basic knowledge of Romance grammar and vocabulary can read The Hour of the Star with ease. The Brazilian, however, often finds her extremely difficult. This is because her subtle rearrangements of everyday language are so surprising that they often baffle the reader, particularly the reader with little experience of her work. 

And from his new translation, here is the narrator, the often strange, sometimes repellent, always beguiling Rodrigo S. M., describing the novel's protagonist, heartbreaking, hapless Macabéa (p. 29):

She had what's known as inner life and didn't know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams. These dreams, because of all that interiority, were empty because they lacked the essential nucleus of--of ecstasy, let's say. Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn't know that she was meditating because she didn't know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing. Except she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise shed'd get lost in the successive and round emptinesses inside her. She meditated while she was typing and that's why she made even more mistakes.

There's so much more. From Copyright © Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1977, 2011. Translation Copyright © Benjamin Moser, 2011.