– XXVIII –

Unfulfilled ambitions? Reminisces of paths and possibilities not taken? This is no tragedy. You just described in actuality, the kitchen sink drama of life. 

Jenny Erpenbeck Wins the International Booker Prize 2024

Jenny Erpenbeck wins the International Booker Prize 2024, with her novel: “Kairos.”

Jenny Erpenbeck is one of the most remarkable German language writers currently at work; whose novels reckon with and wrestle with the individual and personal histories and their relation to historical and sociopolitical moments, which change course and direction. Growing up in East Germany, Erpenbeck recalled with casual indifference that she was asleep when the Berlin Wall was in its initial stages of being torn down. While the world and the city partied at the conflux of the divided city reconciling, Erpenbeck was tucked in for the night, surrendering herself to tomorrow. For Erpenbeck, the Berlin Wall was merely the edge of the world for her, a mundane place where her family had outings or partook in picnics. The wall lacked the grimness depicted in western media. Throughout her novels, Jenny Erpenbeck maintains an accountancy of history and time, both in its historical developments and consequences, but also the personal and emotional driftwood, always at risk of being washed away or bowled over by the more substantial and transformative waves.

“Kairos,” her International Booker Prize winning novel is no different. With the dissolution of East Germany as the backdrop, Erpenbeck traces the disintegration of a love affair, between a young student and an old writer. Of course, the novel is not just a testament to the imbalances of love as power; the whirls of passion which inevitably burn themselves out; it provides testimony on the nature of art, power, and culture. If anything, “Kairos,” uses the love affair and its damaging ignition and turbulent end, as allegory of the end of an era, a nation, and a city. An era of immense gains and new found freedoms, undercut by the complete collapse and loss of an entire reality. The International Booker Prize jury praised, Michael Hoffman for his beautiful translation, by embodying the layered and eccentric language of Erpenbeck, with her run on sentences, but also expansive emotional resonance and vocabulary. It was marvelous to hear

“Kairos,” is a novel of intimate secrets and passions, but also the imbalance and cruelty of passionate love, while branching out and being infected by the historical and social changes of the time, which threaten to complete upend one’s own understanding and certainty on reality. “Kairos,” proves Jenny Erpenbeck herself to be one of the most important contemporary German writers at work currently writing today. This award also cements Michael Hoffman as one of the most important translators currently working, and this is the first time the International Booker Prize went to a German language writer and a male translator.

Congratulations to Jenny Erpenbeck, a very well-deserved award!

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

Alice Munro Dies Aged 92

Hello Gentle Reader,

Few names are as lauded and admired in Canadian literature and the short story format as Alice Munro’s. There are few who are considered her contemporary or equal in master of the short story form, and those who are: pay tribute to their debt to Munro. Despite her gigantic status as literary icon, Munro, never appeared distant or celestial. There was no insistence that she was a regular and or normal person, she merely was, who also happened to be a magnificent writer. Munro’s warmth and graciousness are equally praised in addition to her literary achievement. As the “Master of the Contemporary Short Story,” as the Swedish Academy declared, when announcing Alice Munro as a Nobel Laureate in Literature (2013), Munro proved herself to be an incisive and psychological portraitist, whose narratives were less interested in parading fact and dissecting the narrative to its sequential events; instead, Munro evoked narratives and embedded them with a sense of joy undercut with an understanding of tragedy. Admired for her stories which celebrated the everyday and the common, Munro often seemed perplexed by this sometimes-unintended backhanded compliment. Her characters were housewives, chambermaids, civil servants, farmers. All in all, ordinary people; but their lives were extraordinary, full of personal heartbreaks, open secrets, private tragedies, moral hypocrisy (and decay), through the expansive and isolative Canadian landscape, and the often-puritanical Canadian small town, with its social scriptures and edifices. The short story structure also changed in Munro’s hands. Time, once reserved only for the novel, was employed in full in Munro’s work. Short stories were no longer limited in the temporal space in which they could cover, they were capable of moving decades into the future and backwards, providing a long view of the characters progressions through their lives, and all their successes and failings, providing a humanistic and extensive overview of a life. “The Love of a Good Woman,” opens with this narrative perfectly, providing a beautiful full circle portrait of a cast of characters and their private failings, misunderstandings, and even crimes. The extraordinary tragedy of the ordinary is also beautiful captured in Munro’s work. Infanticide, sexual exploitation, murder, domestic abuse, illness, these are no longer sensationalist themes or tropes, but are sculpted in beautiful and understated prose, completive void of ostentatious exaggeration, and are remarked with an almost blunt matter of fact recount. Having retired from writing in 2012 with her final collection “Dear Life,” the world has come to accept there will be no more Alice Munro stories in the future, but now with her death, its resounding clear that the world has lost one of its great psychological surveyors who celebrated and elevated the ordinary to extortionary heights. Who through hard work and dedication, with a strict adherence to form, finally ensure the short story got its overdue recognition as a literary form of equal respect.

Rest in Peace Alice Munro.

 
Thank You for Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary  

Paul Auster, Dies Aged 77

Hello Gentle Reader,

Paul Auster is one of the most well known and regarded postmodernists of American literature. Just as cerebral as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo; Auster became famous for his pastiche and slipstream novels, defying the psychological and realistic narrative premises often associated with literary fiction, and playfully explored themes of identity, chance, coincidence, loss, grief, and one’s sense reality (or their perception of it) being altered, or becoming alienated from it. Styled, the Brooklyn Bard, and though regarded as a New York literary institution, Brooklyn, remained the haunting ground of Paul Austre, in similar fashion to James Joyce’s Dublin, Philip Roth’s New Jersey, or Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. Brooklyn became immortalized in Auster’s literary universe through his “New York Trilogy,” (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” “The Locked Room,”) this trilogy of novels, not only infiltrates the noir mystery genre, but inverts the medium into a postmodern portrait, whereby the nature of identity and reality are deconstructed, examined, and left in a state of post-structuralist disarray. Identity and reality are not static elements in Auster’s work, its palpable, adaptable, and changeable. Throughout “The New York Trilogy,” identity is both lost and replaced. Identity in turn becomes an increasingly metafictional conundrum for the writer, whereby fictional reality and the intrusion of autobiography or reality can become difficult to delineate. The enduring appeal and success of “The New York Trilogy,” showcased the promise of an otherwise brilliant writer and foreshadowed a brilliant career. Auster did not disappoint. What followed suit was a brilliant and prolific literary career, with a variety of interests in different literary mediums, Auster continually returned to the pen and paper out of curiosity, interest, and enduring appreciation for the literary. Paul Auster was always that unique blend of late postmodernism, echoing sentiments of rockstar appeal for being new and exciting, while also being a writer whose literary depth defied superficial criticism challenging his credentials and charging him as an imposter. Throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s, Auster remained a fashionable and hip postmodernist, never coming to rest on his laurels, and bask on previously treaded ground, and continued to produce on a novel a year, his last one “Baumgartner,” released just last year, and was heralded as a beautiful novel tracing the aches of memory and the spiraling delirium of old age, grief, and loneliness. Of his generation, Paul Auster, is perhaps the most accessible and enjoyable. What both endears and confounds, is perhaps the contrariness of his work. Auster’s language literary language is lucid and agreeable, never twisting itself into an esoteric code or enigmatic linguistic puzzle, but his narratives and plots delight in breaking and warping the conventions of narrative, much to the irritation of critics and theorists. Paul Auster’s death is an immense loss to contemporary American Literature. Truly one of the greatest postmodernist writers of its canon, an unequivocal and unapologetic practitioner of the form and style, while remaining a inherently American sensibility.

Rest in Peace Paul Auster.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary