Abdulrazak Gurnah Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Abdulrazak Gurnah on Gravel Heart
(via YouTube.com)

I haven't blogged much this year, for a variety of reasons, but I did want to post a brief item about this year's Nobel Laureate in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah. A native of Zanzibar (now a constituent part of Tanzania) who emigrated to the UK in his teens, Gurnah (1948-) is a fiction writer, critic and emeritus professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. The Swedish Academy praised Gurnah for his "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents," which is an excellent and concisely encompassing description of Gurnah's short fiction and ten novels, which include his debut, Memory of Departure (1987), the highly acclaimed Paradise (1994), By the Sea, which was listed for the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Book Prize), Desertion (2005), and his most recent, Afterlives (2020). 

In being named Nobel Laureate last week Gurnah becomes the first Black Nobelist in Literature of the 21st century, the Black literature prize winner first since Toni Morrison in 1993, and only the sixth African writer over all to receive the Literature Prize. He also is the first ever native of what is now Tanzania to receive a Nobel Prize. Congratulations, Abdulrazak Gurnah!

As some J's Theater readers may recall, in the lead-up to each year's Nobel Prize in Literature I used to post my thoughts, speculations, critiques, etc., but after the award to Bob Dylan back in 2016 and the scandals that led to the temporary cessation of the award a few years later, I thought to myself, why bother? Clearly the Academy, which was and perhaps still riven by internal issues, remains Eurocentric in its outlook, has made some dodgy selections in recent years (cf. the last two laureates (2019 and 2020)), is determined to go its own route, whatever the damage the public's feelings about its legitimacy and judgment. 

The Gurnah choice seems like a very good decision on the merits and in light of the recent flubs, and while there are numerous other figures, not least Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whom I might have selected first, I believe Gurnah is an important and vital writer and critic--one of the greatest of his generation--and gilds the Nobel Prize with his receipt of this international honor.

More writeups about Gurnah's Nobel honor:

Guardian UK: Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

NY Times: Abdulrazak Gurnah is awarded the Nobel Prize in literature

All Africa: Tanzania: Nobel Prize Winner Abdulrazak Gurnah: An Introduction to the Man and his Writing

PBS: Watch Abdulrazak Gurnah wins Nobel Prize in literature

The Standard: Gurnah's win of the Nobel Prize raises hope for African writers

Publishers Weekly: Abdulrazak wins 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

Cape Talk/MSN: Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah opens up about his books and 2021 Nobel Prize win

Brittle Paper: 10 novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah

The Complete Review's writeup on Abdulrazak Gurnah's Nobel Prize

As Ignoble Scandal Unfolds, No 2018 Nobel Literature Prize

One of this site's perennials used to be my fall Nobel speculation posts. These would usually appear a week or so before the Swedish Academy named that year's Nobel Prize in Literature laureate each October. My predictions, often wrong and far off the mark, would follow a private email exchange with fellow writer Reggie H., who is and remains one of the most avid and discerning readers I know. We would toss out names to each other, and then I'd post a long-ish speculation about whom the Swedish Academy might select from the large pool of excellent writers across the globe.

Several suppositions shaped my choices: The Swedish Academy, though it had elected a woman, author Sara Danius, to lead it as its Permanent Secretary (i.e., Director), has mostly comprised 18 (or nearly that many) white, middle-aged and senior Swedish male academics, critics and writers. One of its prominent members, Horace Engdahl, was on record as denouncing contemporary American literature for its parochialism: "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." (Yes, by some lights, no by many others.)  Throughout its history, the vast majority of winners have been European men, or wrote in European languages if they lived on other continents (see most of the African winners).

Additionally, most of the Nobel laureates have produced work that was clearly in one genre--poetry, fiction, drama, and to a far lesser degree, historical or critical nonfiction--even if they wrote in a variety of genres; radical formal innovation, outside of some notable examples, has been rare among the winners. I also took into account that certain countries or language groups with significant literary traditions--Brazil, South Korea, India, Algeria, Iran, Nigeria, Cuba, Argentina, etc. have been completely or mostly overlooked. Writers working on other languages--like those of southern India, for example--were like to be ignored completely. Lastly, the charge for this elite body has been, as per Alfred Nobel's will, to give the award for work of "an idealistic nature," and not, as I have always interpreted it, for groundbreaking, lasting, culturally or politically impactful and resonant literature. 

Thus, while some of the widely acknowledged great writers of the 20th century from across the globe but writing in European languages--William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, etc.--have received the award, many more, including James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Wilson Harris, etc., did not, for a variety of reasons some known only the Swedish Academy. Meanwhile, writers who will most certainly fade into the shadows even of their own literatures have been recognized (Mikhail Sholokov, to give one example, Pearl S. Buck and Jaroslav Seifert two others), despite the temporary bump in attention the Nobel gave them. The limitations I note above therefore should lead anyone to approach the Nobel Prize in Literature with considerable skepticism, as Tim Parks argued in the New York Times today. Yet, because of its longstanding global reach, its sustained history and its sizable purse (roughly about $1 million dollars, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending upon the Swedish kroner's exchange rate), it remains the premier honor in the international literary world.

Or it did, perhaps up to the point two years ago when, bizarrely, the Swedish Academy passed over countless superlative living writers, particularly poets, and awarded the honor to Bob Dylan, a songwriter and composer who proceeded to act out by initially not acknowledging his selection, and then left the Academy hanging as to whether he would even show up to accept the prize. (Perhaps embarrassment left him somewhat socially paralyzed.) I am all for eccentricity in choice--Camilo José Cela, anyone?--and vision, but this pick struck me as the worst kind of spasm of Baby Boomer fanboy-ism, a comfort-foodish but also cynical thumb in the face of readers and writers everywhere. It was also, I imagine, an attempt to spark controversy and appear relevant, which is not exactly the purpose of the Nobel Prize in literature, though it succeeded on the first account. I could not bring myself to write about the absurdity of the 2016 debacle. This past year's winner, Kazuo Ishiguro, one of Great Britain's most highly regarded fiction writers, however, seemed like a compensatory, safe choice. Ishiguro is, at the very least, a writer, and one of great accomplishment.

What was unknown to the wider public until last fall, however, was the extent of the maelstrom engulfing the Swedish Academy, a result of snowballing sexual harassment and abuse allegations by 18 women against photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, the 71-year-old husband of one of the Academy's permanent members, poet Kristina Frostensen, and friend to many others. In another literary world-specific instance of the #Metoo movement, he has been accused of using his position to coerce women into sex, including raping them, at his apartments as well as Swedish Academy-owned venues in Stockholm and Paris; allegations of his inappropriate behavior date back to the early 1990s up through to quite recently, when he is reported to have groped Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria. Adding to the controversy, Arnault also is alleged to have leaked the names of Nobel winners at least seven times before they were publicly announced, hinting that Frostenson may have revealed them to him in advance, and providing bookmakers with a potential windfall. In addition, though not a member of the Academy, Arnault co-owned and ran a cultural center, the Forum, in Stockholm, which received Academy funding, so its and his affairs were part of its purview.

In response to the cumulative allegations, some of which date back more than 20 years, several members of the Academy resigned, and former head Danius severed all Academy ties with Arnault and the Forum, then ordered a legal review of Arnault and his cultural center. For her troubles, however, Danius was ousted by fellow members from her post, though she remains an Academy member. The mounting crisis spurred the Nobel Foundation, which oversees and awards all the prizes, to issue a statement postponing the prize for 2018, given the jury's diminished ranks--it now lacks enough members to form a quorum--and the public glare on its internal turmoil. Instead, it will name two winners in 2019. As the acting permanent secretary, scholar Anders Olsson has put it, "Confidence in the academy from the world around us has sunk drastically in the past year...and that is the decisive reason that we are postponing the prize."

Because of its depleted ranks and a rule that members of the jury cannot resign or retire, the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, had to step in to change the rules to allow the resigning members to leave and new ones to be added. Only 10 of the current 18 members are active, and most of those remaining carry the taint of the Arnault debacle. As the Der Spiegel article I link to above notes, one option could be for the Nobel Foundation to replace the 232-year-old Swedish Academy, which has awarded the prize since 1901, with another one in the country or based elsewhere. For example, what about a rotating set of "academies," based in a different country every two years? (The Nobel Foundation, however, says no, the award will most likely stay in the Academy's hands, but that it needs to take the necessary steps to reform itself.). Another option might be to limit terms of service and cycle members in and out and, most importantly, bring in artistic and critical authorities from outside Sweden, while also requiring gender parity, age and racial-ethnic diversity, and a clearer statement of what the prize aims to reward. Critic Ron Charles argued in the Washington Post that the Swedish Academy should skip more than one year to get its act together. He even quoted some of Dylan's doggerel to underline how ridiculous the 2016 choice was. Perhaps several years of joint awards, to address the huge gaps in writers and writing the Academy has missed, might also be in order.  Why just two in 2019? What about two for the next ten years, or twenty?

Or, as Tim Parks asks, should there even be a Nobel Prize? Does it matter? Beyond sales surges, however temporary. Even if we account for the limits of any group of judges to assess quality in literary works written in a variety of languages, is there not value in calling attention to works that might merit wider attention based on their assessed excellence, beauty, social and political resonance? Scrapping the Nobel would be dramatic, but does anyone think that some other existing award, like the Man Booker, or the Neustadt International Prize, or a new prize created with funds from one of the world's small but growing ranks of billionaires, would not take its place? Moreover, as I point out in the previous paragraph, what should the Nobel Prize, when it returns, honor? Is Alfred Nobel's specific search for works "of an idealistic nature" still stand? What does "idealistic" even mean in today's world of perpetual war, mass inequality, almost uncontrolled technological advances, and climate change? Should we start honoring those SFF writers who offer glimpses, amidst their dystopias and post-apocalyses, of a better world? It is so unfortunate that Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler did not live to enjoy this possible turn of events, unlikely as it may be.

At any rate, then, this fall there will be no Nobel laureate in literature. Maybe the very idea marks an impossibility. On the other hand, as the continued popularity and acclaimed global performances and adaptations of works by figures such as William Shakespeare--who died far too early to be considered for a Nobel, of course--demonstrate, some writers and some works do translate, or can resignify, despite cultural barriers. So, in two years, we will see who the reconstituted Academy, if it can reconstitute and reform itself, selects.

Poem: Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer
(World Literature Today)

In 2011, Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015), a highly regarded but perhaps not widely known Swedish poet, translator and psychologist, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. I wrote a short blog post about him and featured some of his poems. I did not, however, delve into a discussion of his biography, since it was up at the Nobel site, and I was somewhat indifferent to his selection. Given some of the bizarre Nobel literature choices (save Alice Munro) since Tranströmer, and the ongoing scandals linked to the Swedish Academy, which awards the literature Nobel, Tranströmer's honor looks like a recent high-water point for that organization.

His poetry certainly holds up; a lyric poet to the core, he has a gift for creating mystery and drama out of observations of everyday life, and a skill for utilizing metaphor to suggest great depths below and beyond the surface of the visible world. There is something charged and spiritual in so many of his poems that while I think it might be wrong to call him either a metaphysical or a religious poet, he is, I think it fair to say, a poet of the spirit and, conversely, of immanence. In the three poems of his I quoted back in 2011, you can see this most directly in "Strophe and Antistrophe" (I love that title), when he is describing both reality and something within and beneath--beyond--it: "Sudden change: beneath the float of heavenly hulls / glide the tethered ones. / Stern high, at an impossible angle, / leans the carcass of a dream, black / against a pale red strip of coast."

The sensory and sensuous apprehension of the world pulses dialectically in these lines, which paint a picture, but not a verisimilitudinous one. Instead, it is painterly in the stricter sense, of capturing what lies in in the mind, before the eyes and fingertips, while being interpreted and transformed by them. As it turns out, Tranströmer was alert to how other artists might be engaging with the world around them, and in "Vermeer," his short poem about Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), the Dutch Golden Age painter, whose exquisite intimate portraits had to wait several centuries before they received widespread acclaim. Careful, slow, deliberate, with an exceptional eye and gift for depicting light, he is now praised as an Old Master.

In "Vermeer," beautifully translated by Samuel Charters and which I am borrowing from the Painters and Poets blog, Tranströmer is chattier than usual, and appears to have devised a formal game for himself, which entails repeating "wall," one pictorial element that appears in the first of the images below, in nearly all of the stanzas. One way to read this repetition apart from being a result of observation and description of the paintings is by noting some of its possible metaphorical meanings; a wall of time separates us from the lifeworld and vision of Vermeer, and no amount of research can make him, his process or his perception of the world fully knowable. (David Hockney created a stir when, a few years ago, he argued and demonstrated the several of the Old Master painters like Vermeer, may have used optical devices, including special lenses and camerae obscurae, to produce works of such pinpoint precision.) That has stopped writers and even Hollywood from trying, though; Vermeer's iconic "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (one of its many names) spurred an eponymous 1999 historical novel, by Tracy Chevalier, which then became a belauded 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson--as well as an allegedly dreadful 2008 play, which I've never seen.

Yet what does a work of art--a poem, a short story or novel, a play--about someone from the past do but allow us another means to "know" that gone world, to access, imaginatively, its vistas, its landscapes, including of feelings? Like a filmmaker with magic powers, Tranströmer is taking us into Vermeer's scenes, his world--"straight through the wall into the bright studio / into the second that goes on living for hundreds of years"--captured and preserved for posterity in these paintings, aware of course that in so doing, it can disorient us--"it hurts to go through walls, it makes you sick / but it is necessary"--but, as so many of these poems have shown, that defamiliarization is salutary in the end. A new sense of language, of time, of space, of ourselves and others, however brief and temporary, is important, so that, like the "emptiness" and against the nihilism, we can say as the paintings--and something within them--say, "'I am open."

VERMEER

by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Samuel Charters

No sheltered world . . . on the other side of the wall 
        the noise begins
the tavern begins
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, 
        the din of bells
and the mentally disordered brother-in-law, the bearer
        of death that everyone must tremble for.

The great explosion and the delayed tramp of rescuers
the boats that strut at anchor, the money that creeps
        into the pocket of the wrong person
demands piled on demands
Cusps of gaping red flowers that sweat premonitions 
        of war.

Away from there and straight through the wall 
        into the bright studio
into the second that goes on living for hundreds 
        of years.
Paintings titled The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter --
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking 
        inside her.
On the wall behind her hangs a wrinkled map of 
       Terra Incognita.

Breathe calmly . . . An unknown blue material is nailed
       to the chair.
The gold upholstery tacks flew in with unheard-of speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been anything but stillness.

The ears ring with either depth or height.
It's the pressure from the other side of the wall
that leaves every fact suspended
and holds the brush steady.

It hurts to go through walls, it makes you sick
but it's necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of yourself --
Whether you know it or not it's the same for everyone,
everyone except little children. No walls for them.

The clear sky has set itself on a slant against the wall.
It's like a prayer to emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers,
"I am not empty, I am open."

Tomas Tranströmer,"Vermeer," from Painters and Poets, originally in Art and Artists: Poems, an anthology of ekphrastic poems by Emily Fragos, Knopf, 2012. Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer, Emily Fragos, 2012. All rights reserved.

Here are a few Vermeer paintings that Culture Trip's Lani Seelinger recommends you see if you are unfamiliar with his work. Tranströmer's poem explicitly references the first two, I believe.

The Little Street (1657–58), oil on canvas,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Music Lesson or A Lady at the Virginals
with a Gentleman, c. 1662-65, oil on canvas,
Royal Collection, Buckingham Palace

View of Delft, 1659-60, oil on canvas,
Mauritshuis, the Hague

RIP Mari Evans & Derek Walcott

Within the last few weeks, two major Black poets, Mari Evans (1919/1923?-2017) and Derek Walcott (1930-2017), have passed. Unsurprisingly, there has been much more coverage of Walcott, an internationally renown poet and playwright, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, than of Evans, who probably is best known among afficionados of 20th century Black Women's writing and the Black Arts Movement. In both she was an invaluable voice. As I have come to do when thinking about the rich constellations of Black poetries throughout history, I see them as part of a continuum, a point I doubt will be mentioned in obituaries of either. Both poets probed their intersectional identities in part through an investigation of history and contemporary society, and both drew upon the oral traditions in which they had grown up, to different but parallel ends. With their passing, the poetry world has lost two significant voices.

Evans was the older poet, an African American, a native of Toledo, Ohio, and did not publish her first book until she was already 40 years old. It was around this time, in the late 1960s, which marked the rise of the Black Arts Movement, that she began teaching, a profession in which she made her mark. In 1970, she issued her second volume, I Am a Black Woman, which stands alongside early books by Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Lucille Clifton, and Carolyn Rodgers as exemplars of the new Black women's poetry that still continues to influence Black poets writing in the US and globally today. In this collection's poems you can see the themes, the style, the fierceness that would appear in all of Evans's later work, and you can also see how it serves and continues to function as an important counterweight to the sometimes masculinist, misogynistic discourse that marked some--but not all--poetry by Black Arts male poets.

A feminist, politically progressive, a poet drawing from vernacular traditions but possessing a keen sense of the line, and of humor, Evans would go on to publish four more books of poetry, as well as writings for children and plays, while also pursuing a career as a poetry professor at a number of institutions. I had the pleasure of hearing Mari Evans read a few times, though I never got an opportunity to speak with her at length. A longtime resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, she died there on March 10, 2017. Here is one of her most famous poems, "I Am a Black Woman," from the AfroPoets website, and I hear echoes of it in so many poems being written today, even as they take different approaches to the themes Evans so movingly articulated in her work:

I Am a Black Woman

I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night
Can be heard
humming
in the night


I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea
and I/with these hands/cupped the lifebreath
from my issue in the canebrake
I lost Nat's swinging body in a rain of tears
and heard my son scream all the way from Anzio
for Peace he never knew....I
learned Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill
in anguish
Now my nostrils know the gas
and these trigger tire/d fingers
seek the softness in my warrior's beard


I am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed 

Copyright © Mari Evans, 2017. All rights reserved.

I have written about and posted a few poems by Derek Walcott over the years, including back in 2006, when I ran into him at a New York bank branch, spoke with and snapped a photo of him, upsetting the customer assistant who was handling his business. (A subsequent encounter at Sea Grape--which nearly shares the name of his 1976 collection--a wine store on Hudson Street, was without incident, and he was warm and gregarious, though I still think he really had no idea who I was beyond a vag with Boston.) I wrote about him again in 2008, when I posted "As John to Patmos," the first poem by him I ever read, when I was in junior high and I happened upon it in a poetry anthology my class was using. If I remember correctly,  we were not assigned Walcott's poem but the poem's final lines immediately drew me to it. I did have the pleasure of meeting Walcott a few times over the years, including all the way back to the early Dark Room Writers Collective days, when he read with Martín Espada. His delivery of his poems that night was as unforgettable as the lead up to the event, when several Dark Room members had to go fetch him, I think, and later, as his inimitable entrance into the Dark Room house, with a little entourage. Every reading thereafter I always measured by that first one, and he rarely disappointed.

Even before I'd met him in person, I'd heard about him as a teacher, including the good--his brilliance in finding ways to help poets reshape and perfect their poems, his many nuggets of wisdom, his sharp eye--and the bad; the year before I started college, he was called out for having sexually harassed an undergraduate student, and he was called out again a few years later for the same behavior. His life's complexities and complications are there in the work, which drew upon a range of traditions, including English formalism and Caribbean orality and its trove of storytelling and myth-making. The rich fusion of this poetics is apparent from the very beginning; Walcott's first book, In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, was more accomplished than the second or third books of highly praised poets. It reaches its apogee, I think, in the later work, particularly his masterpiece Omeros (1990), which stands as one of the great long poems of all time in English, and a landmark in Anglophone, Caribbean and Black Diasporic literature.

Here is the 1lth section of "The Schooner Flight," another of my favorite Walcott poems. You can find the entire poem here, on the Poetry Foundation's website.

From "The Schooner Flight"

11 After the Storm

There’s a fresh light that follows a storm
while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake   
I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion   
marrying the ocean, then drifting away
in the widening lace of her bridal train
with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.   
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,   
a light rain was falling, with the sea calm.

Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face   
like a girl showering; make these islands fresh   
as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,   
every hot road, smell like clothes she just press   
and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;   
whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:
the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,   
is clothes enough for my nakedness.   
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide   
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs   
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied   
if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.   
Open the map. More islands there, man,   
than peas on a tin plate, all different size,   
one thousand in the Bahamas alone,   
from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,   
and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,   
the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,
and the one small road winding down them like twine
to the roofs below; I have only one theme:

The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart—
the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know,   
vain search for one island that heals with its harbor   
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow   
doesn’t injure the sand. There are so many islands!   
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.   
But things must fall, and so it always was,   
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;   
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one   
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.   
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,   
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.   
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.   
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam   
as the deck turn white and the moon open   
a cloud like a door, and the light over me   
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.   
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” from Collected Poems 1948-1984. Copyright © 1990 by Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved. Source: Poems 1965-1980 (Jonathan Cape, 1980)

RIP Kelly & Antin + Dylan A No Show So Far + Nobel Thinkers

Brigit Pegeen Kelly (Academy of American Poets)

I was very sorry to learn via Twitter that poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly had passed away. I still have not seen an obituary so I will write only what I know about her, which is that she was born in California in 1951, had taught for many years at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and was the author of several acclaimed books whose lyricism is nearly peerless. James Merrill selected her first collection, To the Place of Trumpets (1987), for the Yale Younger Poets Series prize, and her second collection, Song (1995), received the  Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, The Orchard (2004), was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics' Circle Award.

I was fortunate to meet and hear Kelly read and speak when she came to visit Northwestern back in 2008 as part of the Creative Writing Program's annual Festival of Writing. I remember that she was very shy and asked that we have a guided conversation, providing her with the questions in advance, which was a departure from the usual approach, but she participated without a hitch, and I still have the notes I took from her responses. Best of all was her reading, in which the poems themselves set the air on fire. Lyric poetry can be many things, and Kelly's work represents the best of one stand in that larger tradition; the poems achieve what a great deal of literature, as Oscar Wilde suggested aspires to, "the condition of song," while being very much in and of a contemporary idiom, shot through with traces of myth and ritual, and with emotion so profound that in a lesser poet it might overwhelm the art.

Kelly's output, though slender, was of the highest quality. Right after her reading I blogged one exquisite example of her work, "Iskandariya," which can stand against entire books, to put it kindly. Lastly, I know that one of her finest acts in the literary world was selecting for the National Poetry Series Leadbelly, the first collection by one of my favorite fellow poets, Tyehimba Jess. To her family I send my sympathies, and to her I say, Rest in Peace and Poetry.

Poet David Antin's death today marked another loss for the world of literature. Born in New York City in 1932 and a graduate of City College and NYU, Antin began his career as a translator of business manuals and fiction before shifting to poetry. He and his wife Eleanor Antin, the well known conceptual and performance artist, moved to southern California in 1968 so that he could take up a teaching position in San Diego, and by 1971, Antin had begun to pioneer his improvisatory audience-and-context specific poems, or "talk-pieces," for which he became quite famous. I unfortunately never had the opportunity to see Antin perform live, but have read his books for years, and have watched some of his more recent performances, including several in Paris in 2011. You can find one here. May he also RIP.

***

Bob Dylan, by Andyp57

After last week's literary absurdity--or postmodern coup, as you may see it--in which the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to songwriter Bob Dylan, for "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." Yeah, OK, if you say so. (Compare the Kelly poem above to most of what Dylan has written, and...well, maybe don't, if you don't want to throw up your hands in exasperation.) At any rate, the Baby Boomers' beloved bard from Hibbing, Minnesota, has not seen fit to respond publicly to his Nobel prize benefactors--out of indifference? embarrassment? truculence?--and instead actually removed a note on his website mentioning the honor. Swedish Academy member Sarah Danius, who made the award and, with a mostly straight face, compared Dylan to Homer and Sappho, the first the originator of the Greek epic tradition, and the second one of the great figures in early European lyric poetry, seems fairly unconcerned by this, but another member, writer Per Wästberg, who holds Chair No. 12, publicly commented that Dylan's silence was "impolite" and "arrogant."

Wästberg is correct, but then, what did these 17 (one chair is empty) powerful figures think would result when they made what can charitably be described as a "category error," to quote The Conversation, or, to put it another way, as a travesty against the very idea of literature as we know it? (Forgive me, but do Dylan's lyrics, as "poems," hold up against the best 50 random contemporary Anglophone poets of his generation or subsequent ones? NO. And what about the other major poets, writing in a wide variety of languages, who died without even being considered at all for the Nobel Prize, which is for better or worse the most important literary prize in the world.) As I posted on Facebook and elsewhere that I doubted any number of other superb and original English-language songwriters--take Stevie Wonder, say, or Rakim, or Joni Mitchell--let alone any major non-English song writers or singers (Caetano Veloso, Miriam Makeba, Gilberto Gil, etc.), or, to truly invoke the oral tradition, spoken word poets from anywhere, or non-European oral poets and storytellers, like African griots, would be considered at all, and certainly not anytime soon. Does anyone think they will?

After this year's pick perhaps the 2017 prize might--and ought--go to Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, among other entertainments. The Simpsons has been innovative and increasingly global in its influence for several decades now. I can vividly recall a Brazilian poet I know making an analogy in which he cited The Simpsons as if it were standard Brazilian TV entertainment. And it is. In fact, why even consider poets, fiction writers, playwrights, nonfiction writers, creators of hybrid written and imagistic forms, etc. (Or someone who can actually sing?) That's so 20th century and pre-post-literary, no?

Here are award-winning writer Caille Millner's funny and on-point thoughts in the San Francisco Chronicle about Dylan's (non-)response.

***

In reviewing the case I made a few weeks ago for potential Nobel honorees, I realized that I had completely overlooked one set of recipients whose predecessors the Swedish Academy had recognized, to a limited degree, in the past. I am talking about critical nonfiction writers, particularly philosophers and essayists, which is to say, authors working primarily in and known for work in this genre, whether they also created in other literary forms.

Among this group, past Nobel Laureates include philosophers Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Jean-Paul Sartre, historians Theodor Mommsen and Rudolf Eucken, and the conservative British politician Sir Winston Churchill.  Before this year's debacle, the most recent Nobel Prize recipient was a creative journalist, Svetlana Alexievich. I decided for a change to crowdsource potential picks should the Swedish Academy return to primarily written genres and forms and bestow its kröner on one of the living critical or philosophical pathblazers of our era.

Among the suggested winners, according to the great folks who posted on my Facebook page, were:

Giorgio Agamben, K. Anthony Appiah, Alain Badiou, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Anne Carson (who'd of course qualify, I'm sure, as a poet, and who has also probably been nominated by now), Fidel Castro, David Chalmers, Noam Chomsky, Edwidge Danticat (also a major fiction writer), Samuel R. Delany (also one of the major living fiction writers), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nelson George, Henry Giroux, Jürgen Habermas, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Saul Kripke, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Malabou, Fred Moten, Reza Negarestani, Sianne Ngai, Martha Nussbaum, Derek Parfit, Paul B. Preciado, Avital Ronell, Sarah Schulman, Peter Sloterdijk, Gayatri Spivak, George Steiner, Charles Taylor, Haunani Kay Trask, Paul Virilio, Alice Walker (a major fiction writer, of course), and Slavoj Zizek.

There are many more potential candidates, including perhaps Houston Baker, Jr. Vint Cerf, Angela Davis, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Basil Fernando, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Paul Gilroy, Byung-Chul Han, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Rem Koolhaas, Humberto Maturana, Brian Massumi, Bill McKibben, Charles Mills, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Thomas Nagel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Linda Nochlin, Michel Onfray, Arundhati Roy (also an excellent fiction writer), Thomas Scanlan, Peter Singer, David Suzuki, Tvetan Todorov, Sherry Turkle, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Sylvia Wynter, to name just a few. Strangely--or perhaps not, given the preponderance of academics on the prize-judging committee--this fertile orchard of brilliant minds, nearly all of whom have produced  important critical--if not creative in the usual sense--literature, apparently is not under consideration at all.

This leads me to think that perhaps just as the Nobel Prize organization, broadly understood, created a new prize in economics in 1969, to be issued by the Royal Bank of Sweden, "in memory of Alfred Nobel," some enormously wealthy Swede--Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA--with a somewhat dicey background, like Nobel's, might spiritually ennoble herself/himself/theirselves by creating a series of new "Nobels," in important fields, including environmental science, mathematics, applied engineering, and critical--and humanistic?--thought. This may not help the creative writers among us, but it may mean recognition for more of the world's greatest minds. Would this be a bad thing? Who would you choose?

Updated: Perennial Post: Who'll Receive the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature?

UPDATE:

ABSURDITY (A short Nobel Prize in Literature play*)

Swedish Academy Guy 1: Ngugi should get it.
SA Guy 2: Ko Un. Very good poet, I hear. I don't read...Korean?
SA Guy 3: Um, is Philip Roth dead?
SA Guy 4: That Brazilian guy...what is his name? You know. Guys?
SA Woman: Any women???
Quorum: Dylan!!!

*In memory of playwright, activist and provocateur Dario Fo (1922-2016), 1997 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

***

Can Xue (Bellelettrista.com)

Another year, another year of speculation: who will win the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose announcement has now been pushed back to next week? (The same thing happened 11 years ago.) Almost every year that I've blogged here, I've devoted longish columns to forecasting about this most widely known, recognized and publicly exalted (and execrated, in some quarters) of literary prizes, and more often than not, I've been wrong about the possible winners, though I have at times tossed out names of people who did go on to win. Cast a wide enough net and you will catch something.

Some of the potential honorees who appeared in my first J's Theater wish list back in 2005 are no longer with us. Assia Djébar, Carlos Fuentes and E. L. Doctorow (the latter two my former teachers), to name a few, have departed for that distant library in the heavens. (Still others I pointed to in subsequent posts, like Andrée Chedid, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Mahasveta Devi, also have passed since that initial post 1l years ago.) One writer I did state ought to win, Harold Pinter, received the prize that year, though I can't say I singled him out. (I was and remain a fan of his work.) While I have frequently mentioned Patrick Modiano as a fascinating case study (of a writer who essentially writes the same book over and over) to my students, I did not think he'd slip past far more inventive and compelling French writers like Yves Bonnefoy or Michel Tournier (both of whom died earlier this year). Remaining on the French tip, I still am baffled by J. G. M. LeClézio's win in 2008.

Prior Nobel posts: 2005 - (2005 discussion of Pinter) - 2006 - 2007 - 2008 - 2009 (1) - 2009 (2) - 2010 - 2011 - 2012 - 2013 - 2014 - 2015.

In any case, as many critics, I included, have noted, the prize--which is the result of ideologically tinged choices by a relatively tiny committee of Europeans but has global ramifications--has in recent years increasingly turned towards European literature, with roughly 11 honorees out of the last 15 either born or based on that continent. Additionally, only 4 of the 15 have been women. The imbalance is not only one of region and gender but of genre: only one writer working primarily as a poet, Tomas Tranströmer, has been awarded, and the same is true in terms of drama: since 2000 only dramatist Harold Pinter has received the award. (Elfriede Jelinek writes both fiction and plays, but I believe she received the award based on her novels.) Last year's winner, Svetlana Alexeievich, practices a form of creative nonfiction that had not been highlighted among prior winners, though a few past laureates, including former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and philosopher Henri Bergson have been recognized for nonfiction prose. I also don't think an openly gay or queer writer has won in some time, but I could be wrong. That appears to be a blind spot among the Nobel judges.

(And as I have pointed out many times in the past, quite a few of the greatest writers were completely overlooked by the Nobel committee. That is going to continue to happen with a prize going to only one writer per year, most of whom are European and male, and which overlooks work by women, work that is very formally innovative, politically complicated, and work not regularly translated into major European languages. One writer about whom I'll post soon, Elena Ferrante, strikes me as potentially falling in this category, not just because of the controversies that have swirled around her "identity," but also because her dazzling, profound work is also so popular, within and outside Italy.)

So: instead of a long argument about the history of the award, a rundown of good or bad prior choices, and so on, here's a short list of people I think are deserving. I should point out that I tweeted thoughts to Shigekuni about his Nobel Prize list, and we have some overlap. I also found Two Lines Press's conversation, arranged in betting fashion, intriguing, though I wish they'd gone a bit deeper with their praise and critiques. I admire a number of the writers they include, some of whom make my list. A third and superb run-down of the global greats appears at The Birdcage. One thing that I think should occur is more double prizes, or even a triple prize, as sometimes occur in the Chemistry and Physics categories. Some of the writers listed below are getting up there in age, so rather than dragging things out, honor several in one swoop, and be done with it!

(I should point out that Ladbroke's list is out, and as usual, it includes some of the usual suspects and some idiosyncratic choices. These are the folks the bettors think might win. At the top is Haruki Murakami, a writer whose work I'm quite fond of, but who should not be selected over any of the people listed below. Yet again, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates are high on the list. Others who appear include John Banville, Jon Fosse (I read him for the first time a few years ago and was charmed), Peter Handke (politics may doom him again), Peter Nadas (he wrote a giant novel, which always impresses people), Amos Oz (I'm a fan), A. B. Yehoshua (also a fan of his), Adam Zagejewski (beloved by comp lit people), Juan Marsé (hmm), Kjell Askildsen (never read him but I know he's controversial), and Doris Kareva (never read her). Note that other than Murakami, Adonis (in second place at 6/1 odds), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (fourth at 10/1 odds), Oz and Nadas, all of the other writers are...European! Do scroll down for some of the interesting choices below.)

Frankétienne (Allison Shelley for
The New York Times)

Anyways, here's my list:

‡. Adonis - One of the major poets in contemporary Arabic literature, enchantingly lyrical and formally daring, he'd be a timely pick, and probably should have received the Nobel Prize a few years ago.

‡. John Ashbery  - Perhaps the most influential living English-language poet, 89 years old and still writing and publishing.

‡. Tahar ben Jelloun - Prolific, intense, and a major living North African and Francophone fiction writer.

‡. Can Xue - She has been labeled by male critics as crazy, but this self-taught genius is a lodestar in Chinese-language literature. Her chances of winning the prize right now are probably low, however, because of the recent award to Mo Yan and a prior one in 2000 to Gao Xiangjin. From what I can tell based on the translations of the work of all three, Can is the best and most aesthetically daring of these three.
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‡. Juan Goytisolo - Among living Spanish-language writers, he is a pathblazer, and his trilogy, which includes Count Julian, is a landmark in Hispanophone literature. One of my favorites of his works is a much more modest but highly inventive and entertaining work, The Garden of Secrets. He's openly gay and has harshly criticized European colonialism, so he may never win.

‡. Nuruddin Farah - One of the most important writers of East Africa, an author of influential, engaging and beautiful novels, Farah would be a great choice.

‡. Frankétienne - Haiti's powerhouse, a master artist in Caribbean and African Diasporic literature, this author has left his mark in numerous genres, and should have won the Nobel Prize over some of the lackluster picks of recent years. He has predicted his death will come in 2020, so get on it, Swedish Academy!

‡. Patricia Grace - Grace has deeply enriched New Zealand and Maori literature, Grace is the author of numerous highly praised novels, collections of short stories, and children's books. She received the 2008 Neustadt International Prize.

‡. Wilson Harris - Guyanese-British, utterly original, prolific, and now 95 or so. One of my heroes and one of the greats.

‡. Kim Hyesoon - I cannot read Korean, but I am highly persuaded by poet Don Mee Choi's excellent translations of Kim's work. No writer from Korea has ever won the award, so Kim would be  a positive first.

‡. Ismael Kadaré - An Albanian writer, and thus a European, though Albania remains figuratively and literally on the margins of Europe. I have read only one of his novels and it was as good as the novels I've read by any of the last 10 laureates, and outrageously funny.

‡. Laszlo Krasznahorkai - As European fiction writers go he is in a category of his own. His Seiobo There Below is, like past laureate J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello an innovation on the novel form deserving the highest praise. I believe his health is stellar, but I think it should go to several others who are older and more frail first. But very deserving.

‡. Abdellatif Laâbi -This Moroccan poet's oeuvre ranks among the finest in contemporary Francophone and North African literature.

‡. Antonio Lobo Antunes - I have long been a fan of his, but I cannot ever forget how my Azorean teacher, guiding me through Portuguese conversation, dismissed him as a writer who needed "the dictatorship" and "war" to have something to write about. She was much more positive about other Portuguese writers like Jorge de Sena, Fernando Namora, and of course, José Saramago, who received the Nobel Prize.

‡. Friederike Mayröcker / Alexander Kluge - German-language writers haven't had to suffer long droughts in recent years, but these two are so original they deserve some kind of major honor. Mayröcker is an Austrian poet and playwright, while Kluge is a German fiction writer, philosopher and filmmaker. Their work looks like no one else's. Both are up there in years, so give it to both of the if one is even in the running.

‡. Cormac McCarthy - His prose is singular, his scope is narrow, and his work is most certainly not of an "idealistic" nature, which was Alfred Nobel's charge for the prize, but when McCarthy is on, he is really on. I should note that I am rereading The Road with my graduate seminar now, and it is even more moving than my first reading of it. Blood Meridian is one of the greatest and most disturbing American novels of the last 50 years too.

‡. Nicanor Parra - He is 102. (102!!!) His poems are scrumptious morsels that make you go Wow. He is a pioneer of "anti-poems." His oeuvre is considerable, inventive, and impressive. He should have received the Nobel Prize two decades ago.

‡. Adélia Prado - One of Brazil's leading poets, highly readable, a poet of daily life, desire, the soul laid bare, prolific, and the recipient of many national awards. Very consistent and consistently very good.

‡. Ngugi wa Thiong'o - A pioneering, politically engaged and prodigious writer who has transformed the landscape of African literature. An excellent choice.

‡. Ko Un - Again, I don't read Korean, but his name has popped up for years as a potential winner. He's a poet so that would be a plus no matter what.

‡. Jay Wright - If there were a prize solely for originality and daring, or for lyric excellence, Wright would have won it long ago. He is one of the main predecessors to poets like Nathaniel Mackey. He's 81....

‡. Raúl Zurita - One of the leading Latin American poets, highly original, compelling ironic and strange, and quite prolific. He also wrote against the Chilean dictatorship while living under it.

Who Will Receive the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature?

UPDATE: Svetlana Aleksijevitj/Alexievich, a Ukrainian native now long resident in Belarus, and author of several major works of nonfiction and fiction, including Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of History of a Nuclear Disaster, her masterpiece, was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.

You can read more about Alexievich's life and work here. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of History of a Nuclear Disaster was translated into English by Keith Gessen and has been republished by Macmillan Publishers (and Picador). A documentary based on this work is forthcoming next year.

The Swedish Academy's official announcement, with more information about Alexievich, is here.

***

This is Nobel Prize week, and as I have done nearly every year over the last decade, I cannot help but speculate on this blog, which began in 2005 with a focus on literature, about this year's winner in the literary category. The honoree will be announced tomorrow, I believe. (Here are my posts from 2005 (and after Harold Pinter won in 2005); 2006; 2007; 2008; 2009; 2010; 2011; 2012; 2013; and post-award to Patrick Modiano in 2014.)

My batting average has admittedly been poor, in part because I keep thinking that the Swedish Academy, which awards the prizes, will end its focus on Europe in favor of the broader literary world, and yet for the past decade, the annual prizes have been weighted towards European writers, or, in the case of Alice Munro--whose work I am a huge fan of--writers of European descent across the globe. The last 15 Nobelists include Patrick Modiano (2014); Alice Munro (2013); Mo Yan (2012); Tomas Tranströmer (2011); Mario Vargas Llosa (2010); Herta Müller (2009); Jean-Marie Gustave LeClézio (2008); Doris Lessing (2007); Orhan Pamuk (2006); Harold Pinter (2005); Elfriede Jelinek (2004); J. M. Coetzee (2003); Imre Kértesz (2002); V. S. Naipaul (2001); and Gao Xiangjin (2000).

Three of these writers, LeClézio, Lessing and Coetzee, come from Africa, but all are of European descent; one, Vargas Llosa, is Latin American, and again, primarily (wholly?) of European descent; and two come from the most populous country on earth, China, which before the selection of Gao, an exile living in France, had never had a Nobel Laureate in literature. Of this gathering, I wholeheartedly endorsed the selections of Munro, Tranströmer, Pinter, Coetzee, and Kértesz. I did not know of either Mo's or Gao's work before their selections. I have long been a fan of Modiano's, as my linked post above makes clear, but I think there are better Francophone fiction writers, with far greater range, such as Michel Tournier, or the much younger Alain Mabanckou (French-Congolese), and in any case, because of both Modiano's and LeClézio's awards, France's greatest living poet, Yves Bonnefoy, was overlooked yet again.

 Orhan Pamuk was clearly a political choice, and is a fine writer, but I slogged--as if wading through mucilage--through several of his books, including Snow and Black Book. Each had great moments and set pieces, but in general, I am not a fan. I may be alone in this judgment, though. I do think Müller is an exceptionally gifted writer and have written before on the blog about her prose, particularly in Nadirs, but there are other German-language writers of great talent who should have been higher in the queue, like Alexander Kluge, one of the true originals in any language. I also believe Vargas Llosa is prolific and not the worst choice, but with so many other talented Latin American fiction writers who have been overlooked, I thought his selection was a wasted choice. Lessing's selection made an important political point, though I do not like her work at all, and it was a very good choice to select writers from China, about whose literature I am completely ignorant (though I have since read one novel by Mo Yan in translation and am trying to catch up). Meanwhile, a path-blazing writer like Assia Djébar (of Algeria), for example, who in some key ways renovated the literature of her country while adding a vital voice to contemporary letters, not only was passed over, but passed away in the meantime.

Of course the Europeanist slant is the Swedish Academy's prerogative. They are Europeans, after all, and hold the literatures of that continent in the highest regard, which should hardly be a surprise. Yet the Nobel Prize has long been a global literature prize, sometimes given for a lifetime's achievement, and at other times for a work or series of works that seem to capture the spirit of the age. Many of its winners have been major innovators in their national and global literatures, and have had an outsized influence on writing that follows. Others have been eccentric choices that few people knew of and perhaps even fewer read today. And then there have been other choices like Jelinek that remain confounding. Her choice, in fact, led one member of the committee to resign in disgust. I am not sure if it merited that level of response, but apparently the rancor around her selection was significant.

So: given the tendencies of the Swedish Academy, who will they choose tomorrow? Critic and book lover Shigekuni makes some smart picks on his eponymous blog. High at the top of his list is someone I have repeated touted since 2005, and one of my favorite writers in the world, the highly original Guyanese-British writer--there really is no one who writes like him--Wilson Harris, who is now 94 years old, and who published his last novel several years ago. Harris would be an excellent and inspired choice, but for that reason I doubt it will happen. Another writer from the Anglophone world that Shigekuni points to is John Ashbery, now 88. Ashbery is one of the writers who survives from the remarkable generation of American poets born between 1925 and 1935, whose oeuvres still loom larger in our national literature, and he has been, like Harris, utterly original as he has also become, without question, one of the most influential poets not just in the English language, but globally. (To the dismay of some, I should add.) I am not sure, however, whether Ashbery's recent poetry, which sometimes reads like a parody of his best work, may have harmed his chances.

Shigekuni additionally mentions Nathaniel Mackey, another major American--and African American--poet (and fiction writer), who has finally begun to receive his due. Given two of Mackey's (and our) direct literary ancestors, the extraordinary poets Jay Wright and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, are still alive, I almost feel that either or both of them should receive the award first, but any of these authors, but especially Harris, Wright and Brathwaite, would be excellent. An African writer that Shigekuni cites, the Nigerian fiction writer Buchi Emecheta, strikes me as unlikely, though she certainly has a large and strong body of work. I have feeling that as with Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, one of my perpetual favorites, Nicaraguan fiction writer Claribel Alegría, and Brazilian poet Adélia Prado, all of these incredibly talented will continue to be overlooked by the Nobel committee, though the work of any of them should the award. Two other Latin American poets who probably will be passed over but who merit the award are Raúl Zurita, the singular, innovative Chilean poet so beautifully translated into English by poet Daniel Borzutzky, and his fellow Chilean Nicanor Parra, who is aging towards the clouds at 101--yes, he is 101 years old!--but whose poetry still cuts like a well-honed razor.

Other writers Shigekuni mentions who would be top choices, and one of whom may emerge as the Prize recipient, include Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose prodigious writing not only sets a high standard but also helped to spark a crucial shift in African and decolonialist/post-colonial writing in general when he elected to write in Gikuyu, a language indigenous to Kenya, rather than in English. Ngugi also has been outspoken politically throughout his career, and as Shigekuni mentions, was jailed and went into exile as a result. Another is the lyrical master of Arabic poetry Adonis (Adunis, pen name of Ali Ahmad Said), a native of Syria, who has more than established himself as one of the leading figures in his language. Adonis's poetry is politically aware and clear-sighted, and has been widely and deeply praised. (I featured one of his poems back in 2005; in 2013 I had the almost inexpressible pleasure of meeting him in person, and shared a photograph of him on J's Theater.)

My thought is that given the turmoil in the Middle East, and the fact that the Swedish Academy has not honored a poet since Tranströmer and few others in the last 15 years, as well as no writer working in Arabic since Egyptian fiction writer Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, Adonis will be the pick, though it very well could be Ngugi, who more than deserves it. Ladbrokes, the betting site, has Ngugi third at 6/1, and Adonis twelfth at 20/1 but either really should be a top choice. Will the Swedish Academy do the right thing, or will it be one of the usual suspects high on Ladbroke's list? First there is the Ukrainian writer Svetlana Aleksijevitj, whose work I am not at all familiar with, though I know she is a journalist of some note.  Also high on their list are Japan's Haruki Murakami, a writer I do enjoy reading and have taught many times; Joyce Carol Oates (???); and Jon Fosse, whom I read as I was writing Counternarratives, and found compelling and somewhat like a more abstracted Pinter.

Also on the list are perennials Philip Roth; Peter Handke, who may be disqualified because of the controversy that still surrounds his pro-Serbian statements; John Banville, a writer's writer I think is very good but perhaps not Nobel-worthy; and Nawal El Sadawi, the Egyptian feminist I remember reading in my early 20s with enthusiasm. If it must go to a European writer, and it isn't one of the very senior figures like Bonnefoy, Lászlo Krazsnahórkai, who received last year's Man Booker International Prize, and whose most recently translated book into English, Seiobo There Below (New Directions, 2014), merits the epithet "sublime," ought to be the choice. That novel is peerless, and, like the late Roberto Bolaño's 2666, represents a possible, vital path for other writers to follow. (Krasznahórkai) currently is in New York City, so I am angling to find a way to meet him before he heads back to Hungary).

Lastly, there are the Swedish Academy's geographical gaps. Since Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in 1913, no writer from that country has received the Nobel, yet India abounds in superb writers, as does much of South Asia in general. No Korean has won the award, though Ko Un is often cited as a likely choice. Indonesia's literature also has gone unrecognized. In the Americas, Brazil's rich literary tradition has never been honored with a Nobel; should it go to a Brazilian, I predict it will be either Lygia Fagundes Telles, now up in years, or the prodigious João Gilberto Noll, from the far south of the country, who published, as my colleague put it, several very "strange"--but to me striking--novels several decades ago, and who seems to be at the top of favorite lists among Brazilianists I know. (I had the pleasure of meeting Noll several years ago at a dinner in Evanston, and though he had lived and taught for a while in the United States, we rambled about haltingly, more because of my nerves than his, in Portuguese.)

Whomever they pick, the Swedish Academicians will certainly spur us to comment. If it's an obvious choice, we'll say, Of course we knew this was coming. If things go as they have of late, though, we might just be saying, well, of course I knew Mia Couto (Mozambique) or Patricia Grace (New Zealand) was going to receive the award! But really, we didn't! I will most certainly update this blog post either way.

Patrick Modiano Wins the Nobel Prize

Patrick Modiano (© SIPA)

For many years, as some of my students will attest, I have shared with them my ongoing fascination with writers who essentially write the same book over and over. By "same book" I mean these writers take what might thought of as a core text, however fully articulated in its first published version, and then rewrite it over and over, with some variation. Though I have often expressed my interest in such projects, it is not because I do so myself; I am constitutionally incapable of doing so. A senior writer I admire greatly once asked, with interest and perhaps concern for my career, why I had not written multiple variations on Annotations, suggesting that they might have gotten published. (And created a brand?) My general approach, however, seems to be to condense two--or multiple--books into one, as my slender oeuvre will suggest. Each book, however small or large, stands as its own creature, and multiple ones.)

Yet I have always urged my creative writing students to write any book they produce at the very least twice, the second time to perfect what they attempted the first (another bit of advice I've never been able to follow so far, for the reasons outlined above). In so doing, I tell them, they will written two books instead of just one, meaning potentially two to publish, and experience has taught me that many readers have little problem with reading an improved variation on a previous book. (The same seems true of movies.) Nearly all writers in the United States, are rewarded for being productive, and for publishing, hiring, award, etc., purposes, two is better than one, four than two, six than three, etc. Some writers manage to make a lifelong career of this.

To take one example, John Ashbery has essentially written the same book over the last 25 years (, after producing sometimes quite distinctive books over the first 25-30 years of his career (think Some Trees through A Wave). Our current US Poet Laureate, the great Charles Wright, also has rewritten, with slight variations, the same book--poem--over his last half-dozen collections. In fiction, nearly all (though not A Little Lumpen Novella, for example) of Roberto Bolaño's final ten published novels and story collections are variations on a core book, with similar characters, themes, techniques, etc. Bolaño, in my humble opinion, had the skill to transform each book into something distinctive, however. And certainly there are many more. Oe Kenzaburo has repeatedly written a variation on the same book: a writer has a child with developmental disabilities, and the rest of the plot follows from there. Oe usually finds engaging ways of addressing this theme.

Another writer I deeply admire, Alexander Kluge, also has done this; you could conceivably take any of this story collections, beginning with Case Histories (Lebensläufe), through the most recent ones, and, accounting for an increasingly radical concision, interchange them. The depth of and variation in the content, however, is impressive. Alice Munro, who received the Nobel Prize two years ago, has also been accused of rewriting variations on the same story, too narrow subject matter, and so on, though close study of her skill at varying her subject matter offers a master class on prose fiction. One could say of another favorite of mine, Harold Pinter, that his early works and the late ones could conceivably read as the same work, with slight changes (characters, scenarios, development of style, etc.). The same is true of the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, whose work I acquainted myself with earlier this year.

By "same book" I do not mean works merely marked by a consistent style, carry-over characters, etc. Anyone familiar with Toni Morrison's style, say, or Christine Brooke-Rose's formal playfulness, could spot one of their books. You can spot a sentence by Henry James or William Faulkner on the other side of the library door. But each of their books is clearly different in terms of structure, content, and so on. Nor do I mean a serial writer, like Marcel Proust, whose A la recherche du temps perdu, or Anthony Powell, whose A Dance to the Music of Time, or Nathaniel Mackey, who in both poetry (The Song of the Andoumboulou) and fiction (From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate), has produced a series of texts which, in the eyes of the author, are intentionally part of and constitute a larger, continuous work.

I say all of this as a prelude to noting that this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the French author Patrick Modiano, is one of the great literary replicationists of our or any era. The Nobel committee praised him in its citation "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation." Modiano has, since his outrageous, highly controversial first novel, La place de l'étoile (still untranslated as a whole into English, but roughly, The Place of the Star, the doubled meaning of the actual Parisian address, where the Arc de Triomphe stands, and of the yellow star the Vichy Government forced Jewish residents to wear embedded in the French term--you can find an excerpt, translated by Pepe Karmel, on Agni's site here), written the same book over and over, or rather, variations on the same, fairly narrow theme, characters, and plots. In fact, one could say that his entire body of work functions as a vast, continuous investigation of the same concepts, themes, ideas, and characters, with variations. Yet in Modiano's hands, when he is writing at his best, this repetitiveness ascends to the status of considerable emotional power and beauty.

I am neither a scholar of French literature nor of Modiano's work, but I have read several of his books, mostly in English, as well as two in French, and I can say that you can pick up almost any Modiano novel--or, in the case of Dora Bruder, which could also be read as nonfiction--and you will encounter the following: characters who vanish or forced to do so; some reference to the German Occupation of France, the Vichy collaboration, and, in the background, the terrors of the Holocaust and World War II; a meditation on time, memory and loss; ethical complexity, such that many of his main characters are neither easily categorized as good or bad; and some element of mystery as a narrative mode, though not in the direct form of the mystery genre per se. There is also his precise, occasionally lyrical French--we are not talking about Proust, for example here, but work that reads stylistically almost like his inverse--prose, which is deceptive in its simplicity. In some, of course, this combination works better than in others.

One of the best that I read a few years ago is the 1995 novel Du plus loin de l'oubli (Farthest from Oblivion, translated as Out of the Dark, by Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Rather uncannily, though perhaps because I'd mentioned him to my graduate fiction class, I wrote to a friend shortly before the Nobel announcement that:

Modiano tells the same story over and over and over, but sometimes, he can be very original and striking. Out of the Dark is one of my favorite of his books. It’s about this guy who meets a couple and falls in love with the woman. They run away to Britain, but after a short period of time, she leaves him. The husband seems to be a criminal or gangster. Then, years later, he meets the woman again, this time briefly. Turns out she’s married, but he’s still smitten, only he realizes he cannot have a life with her, though he remembers their youth and the excitement of that earlier moment. Third time, years later, he sees her again, but now he does not even try to catch her attention; the memory is enough. That’s the whole novel. But it’s thrilling. What you can do with art, man!

That's basically it. Of course the plot is a bit more complicated than I outline above, but Modiano often manages to achieve complexity with carefully chosen details, brief lyrical passages, and shifts in rhetoric and perspective.

His 1978 novel, Rue des boutiques obscures (Street of Dark Shops, translated as Missing Person by Daniel Weissbort, Boston: David R. Godine, 2004), which received France's most prestigious fiction prize, the Prix Goncourt, is a mystery novel that fails at that genre, yet manages to be utterly enthralling. Set in 1965, the novel concerns the protagonist Guy Roland, who mysteriously lost his memory and identity 15 years before, at which point his soon-to-retire boss in a Parisian detective, (Baron) Constantin von Hutte, created the new one for him. The novel explores Roland's search for his past self, through his interviews with people who may have known him under his prior guises, as (Jimmy) Pedro (Stern) (McEvoy), a Salonican Jew and "broker", later to "disappear," only to return as an envoy at the Dominican embassy, who'd married a beautiful young woman, Denise Coudreuse, of French and Belgian Christian background, and then, when the stranglehold of the Gestapo and their Vichy authorities and foreign collaborators grew too tight, attempted to slip away with her to Switzerland via the mountains separating that country from France.

I'll say no more except that Modiano manages to do quite a bit with impressive narrative economy, to give a history lesson while appearing not to, and to create a constant air of menace, psychological but also at times almost corporeal, with the slenderest of means. Many threads remain hanging but, once you set the book down, you begin to piece them together. For example, was it Hutte, the former tennis champion, who rescued Pedro in the Swiss snow? Did Pedro, working in concert with the Argentinian embassy, create the story that Salonica's archives--which would have contained family histories, thus making it easier to identify Greek Jews there--had been destroyed? Was it not Oleg de Wrédé who'd arranged to entrap Pedro and Denise? And, more broadly, was not Pedro's story a version of Modiano's mother's and father's stories, only without the stranding at the border? Missing Person is, as the Nobel committee noted, a masterpiece of the highest order, though, as I noted at the beginning of this paragraph, as a mystery novel, it most certainly fails.

I'll mention one other work of his that suggests his innovativeness and gifts and is worth reading, though I did not like the book was much, despite its evident skill and haunting elements. I am talking about the 1997 text Dora Bruder (translated by Joanna Kilmartin, University of California Press, 1999), which could either be a novel or a work of memoiristic nonfiction. In it, Modiano explores the disappearance of a girl, Dora Bruder, who was nearly his father's contemporary, during the period of the Occupation. Dora Bruder, a young Jewish girl, Modiano learned by reading a 1941 Parisian paper, had run away from a convent school, but whereas this would mainly provoke parental concern and censure under normal circumstances, under Gestapo rule, the stakes rose incalculably. Her parents, frantically searched for her, placing the notice that Modiano discovers, and from this he begins to assemble a mystery backwards--much as in Missing Person--with elements of fictional narration, as well as nonfictional speculation and meditation woven together uneasily. What we come to grasp is not only Modiano's own troubled youth after the war, but the perilous path, parallel to Dora Bruder's Modiano's father, like all French citizens of Jewish faith and ancestry, found himself on. Utterly saddening is the moment when Modiano finds Bruder's name on a 1942 list of people deported to Auschwitz. Had his own father suffered the same fate, he and we realize, there'd have been on Patrick Modiano.

So, on the whole, I recommend his work, and while I do think there were more deserving French (Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy, etc.) and Francophone (Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Leïla Sebbar, Frankétienne, Edouard Maunick, etc.) writers, as well as other writers who might have been considered, like the pioneering figure Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or perennial favorite Haruki Murakami, or writers whom I mention every year who seem never to receive enough consideration (Jay Wright, Wilson Harris, etc.), Modiano is not a bad choice. Prolific, distinctive, and capable of doing a great deal with very little. That's not a bad epigraph.