– XXXII –

Autumn has become my favourite season, it's austere and assured, free from summer's insecurities and youthful fallacies; and while winter is honest, its philosophy of cruel to be kind, overpromises the benefits. As for spring? That green sprite is but a waif's whisper.

Thoughts Regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024

 

—    I —

 

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Norwegian playwright and prose writer Jon Fosse with the prize motivation:
 
            “For his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”
                                                                                              
Jon Fosse had long been considered a potential and perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for over a decade. By the 2010’s, Jon Fosse held the honour of being the most performed contemporary playwright in the world. European theatres were happy to stage his intense slow burn theatrical texts; while American and English theatregoers tepidly responded to stagings of Fosse’s plays.
 
The Nobel Prize in Literature has a reputation of honouring some of the greatest playwrights over the past century. From George Bernard Shaw, whose acerbic wit retains its caustic bite; to the ever innovative and daring Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, who could be considered the progenitor of the monumental Theatre of the Absurd, which became the defining theatrical form of the postwar years, popularized by Samuel Beckett and his nihilistic comedies of existential dread, shutting the doors on the grim everyday dramas of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill, who in turn usurped the prevailing vaudevillian form; then comes the inheritors of Beckett, the comedy of menace and the pregnant pause of Harold Pinter, who uncovered the truth in everyday prattle. Of course, where does one place the ever-uncategorizable Elfriede Jelinek, whose plays push the limitations and boundaries of an extremely physically confined form, and exist within the purely linguistic, embodying the pyrotechnics of language, its inherent power both politically and economically, and its susceptibility for corruption; all the while performing textual gymnastics, equally provoking and enraging.   
 
Jon Fosse, follows in the same vein as Beckett and Pinter, by continually rejecting the previous realistic and naturalist forms of theatre in favour of something more ephemeral. Where Samuel Beckett, populated his bleak landscapes with tramps and vagabond clowns, lost within an apocalyptic landscape of absurdity and comically fumble like marionettes without agency. Fosse’s theatre in turn is equally bleak, but comedy is replaced by an otherwise elemental force, with the drapery of some vague sense of Catholicism, while abandoning its characteristic pomposity. Where Beckett employed comedy, Fosse employes mysticism. Fosse’s dramatic works in turn are renowned for their simple scaffolding narratives and modest language, filled with long pauses and dead space, which intensify an atmosphere that is tense with anxiety and dread. The play “Somone Is Going to Come,” the tenseness of the plot is built on the understanding that someone will arrive, which harkens back to both Beckett’s absurdities and Pinter’s comedies of menace; and when they do arrive a crescendo of turmoil is unleashed. In a more mature play, “A Summers Day,” an atmosphere of danger is replaced with a somber lyrical austerity. “A Summers Day,” presents the story of an old widow, who one fateful summer day looks out her window into the foreboding fjord, whereby she reminisces the rueful day her husband rowed out into a storm and disappeared. Fosse’s layering of time is masterfully used within this play, as past and present waltz around each other, commenting on the power of love and the yearning ache of loss. Here again, however, Fosse’s language is the real masterclass in form, a rhythmic repetitive language of back and forth and long pauses, starving off the entrapments of sentimental gushing narrative. The shadow of subtext is the greatest power of Fosse’s plays, which elevate these otherwise bleak and intimate (almost purgatory) settings into nucleuses of the human condition, commenting on the nature of memory, love, loneliness, existential alienation, faith and hope.
 
Jon Fosse’s prose continues to embody his dramatic texts austere and simple language. Crafted with long lugubrious sentences, they are renowned for their repetition and rhythm. Novels such as “Aliss at the Fire,” “Morning & Evening,” and “A Shining,” are short novels, but rapture with Fosse’s signature language, the tidal movement of slow-moving sentences swaying back and forth, which create a hypnotic and enveloping sensation. “Aliss at the Fire,” and “Morning & Evening,” are perfect examples of Fosse’s playfulness of time being a layered phenomena rather than linear arrow or record. A few reviewers have described Fosse’s prose as being psychological realism utilizing an indirect stream of consciousness prose; while this perspective has merit, Jon Fosse’s work is more ethereal in vision then cerebral. Memories emerge and infuse the narrative just as the ambiguous geography (which is usually a fjord), and there is an inclination of the divine, but it too defies theological allegiance. Once again, it’s the language, the repetitive cursive language swelling, sweeping, teeming, rolling and crashing ashore which is the defining feature and style of Fosse’s work. Readers, should slow down and slip into the tidal rhythm of Fosse’s language in order to appreciate his prose.
 
In 2015, Jon Fosse won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for his trilogy of novel(las): “Wakefulness,” “Olav’s Dream,” and “Weariness.” Translated as an omnibus edition and titled “Trilogy,” the set of novels recount the luminous love and tragedy of Asle and Alida, who forsaken and weary, search and attempt to fashion themselves a good enough life for themselves and their child. The trilogy shows the depth and range of Fosse’s skill, crafting a narrative full of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, crafting a parable of injustice, resistance, crime, redemption, and of course the transcendent endearing power of love. Despite their flaws and their mistakes, Asle and Alida are beautiful characters bound by circumstance and tragedy, and yet Fosse writes about them tenderly and provides bittersweet redemption. After the publication of the Trilogy, I thought it was only a matter of time before Jon Fosse would receive the award. Fosse, however, did not rest on his laurels after publishing trilogy. He would follow up with an even bigger narrative portrait, which is now considered his magnum opus: “Septology,” or “The Other Name: I-II,” “I is Another: III-V,” and “A New Name: VI-VII.” A seven novel sequence which explores the eternal questions of the human condition regarding one’s decision to lead their life a certain way and not the other, posed between the doppelgangers of the aged Asle and Asle. One a painter and devote catholic, whose preparing for his annual Christmas exhibition reminiscing about his life, in his solitary home out in the western Norwegian countryside; the other lives in Bjørgvin (Bergen) and while also a painter, finds himself consumed by loneliness and alcoholism. These two versions of the same man who diverge on two different paths and lives, wrestle with the eternal questions about life and death, faith and hopelessness, shadow and light. Jon Fosse’s “Septology,” is a transcendental meditation on the philosophical conundrums of existence, and rather than seeking to provide answers, hypnotically sways within the ambiguities, delighting in the lack of certainty of the human condition. “Septology,” is considered one of the most important novels of the 21^st century.
 
In awarding Jon Fosse the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy decided on a laureate who has no political dimensions in either their work or personally expressed views or opinions. Fosse is a purely literary choice, whose work can only be assessed through a literary lens. Even critics, who find his plays boring and droning or prose and sentences long and winding, will reluctantly cede that there is merit to Jon Fosse’s work. For over a decade Fosse has been considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature; by 2015 it became a matter of when Jon Fosse would receive the award, not a matter of if. Despite being a safe choice by the Swedish Academy, Jon Fosse is a welcomed laureate, lacking in controversy, with a strong solid bibliography to support the award, and the award recognizes not only his brilliant and singular prose, but also his accomplishments as a dramatist, who has carved out a niche corner of the stage for his ethereal plays. 
 
Now, on October 10 the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mats Malm, will emerge from the famous white and gold gilded doors and announce this year’s laureate. In years past, previous Permanent Secretaries would then mingle with the assembled journalists and engage in interviews, providing an overview of the laureate, any works they would recommend, and any interesting information as to how the academy came to their conclusion. In 2007, the literary statesmen Horace Engdahl, referenced Doris Lessing being seriously discussed for many years, and the publication of her autobiographies represented another uptake in her work, forcing the academy to re-examine her contributions to literature again. In 2014, the infectiously excited Peter Englund, delighted in shocking the world with the announcement of Patrick Modiano, and expanding on the decision to award the prize to a canonical French writer, who remained unknown to the world; Englund glossed over Modiano’s lack of readership in other languages, while defending the authors playful pastiche and exploitation of the detective novel, and his continued investigation into the nature of memory and identity; and the psychogeography of Paris. While in 2017 the ever-graceful Sara Danius, announced her final Nobel Laureate, the English novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, and provided the recipe to his literary style: a mixture of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, with a dash of Marcel Proust, which you stir (but not too much). These personal touches by the Permanent Secretaries always imbued a sense of character and charm into the Nobel Prize announcements.
 
In the post-scandal years, the announcement of the Nobel Laureates in Literature and the subsequent interviews have become an otherwise stagnant and stilted affair. The event is now managed and staged. All the gold (even if it was gilding) has been curated into nothing more then a dust covered shadow of its former glory. Mats Malm currently rattles of the Nobel Laureates name and the prize citation, in the subsequent languages he has command over, and then relinquishes the remaining press conference to the chair of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, Anders Olsson. While Anders Olsson is an accomplished academic, literary historian and critic, these qualifications do not endow him with charm offensive necessary to be a front facing and engaging public relations representative for the Swedish Academy. Since the 2018 & 2019 prize announcements, Olsson’s approach to the announcement is one of somber sermon than enlightening engagement. The remainder of the announcement press conference, consists of Olsson lecturing from lectern and droning on like an outdated clergyman. The event has become more about endurance then enjoyment. This current itineration of the prize’s announcement is dreadfully dull and boring. Its previous incarnation may have been more unscripted and sporadic, but at least it was concise and entertaining. In preparation for this year’s award, I intend to listen to the laureate’s announcement and then wait for the press release to be published on the Nobel website. Olsson’s dry lecturing is rather heavy for the early hours.
 
As for the Swedish Academy in turn, this is the first time in over thirty years the academy is at a full roster. In 1989 two members recused themselves (remember before the bylaws were changed, election to the Swedish Academy was a lifetime appointment) due to a lack of condemnation and response from the Swedish Academy regarding the death decree that was issued against Salman Rushdie. Both Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten symbolically resigned and refused to participate in the Academy’s work further, citing the academy’s lack of support and defense of a writer and freedom of speech as an appalling derelict of duty. In 2016 the Swedish Academy, finally made an announcement of their support of Salman Rushdie; though were silent once again after the attempted assassination and stabbing of Rushdie in 2022. Since 1996 due to conflicts with the then Permanent Secretary Sture Allen and his successor Horace Engdahl, Knut Ahnlund participated minimally within the academy’s workings; by 2005 he publicly announced his own recusal from the institution, blaming the decision to award Elfriede Jelinek the previous year as the ultimate decision to recuse himself. The subsequent decades saw members die, scandal, and a flurry of resignations. Now with the induction of David Håkansson to Chair No. 3 and Anna-Karin Palm to Chair No. 16, the Swedish Academy is finally at a full roster. How this changes the academy’s workings, and whether or not more members will introduce greater debate and perspectives is unknown; but for the Swedish Academy itself, it finds itself full bodied and complete.
 

—    II —

 

The Nobel Prize in Literature is never short of criticism. One of the few awards which can be easily weighted and commented on by the public, the Nobel Prize in Literature inevitably provokes debate and discussion. As one commentator put it: it’s a matter of taste. One pointed criticism leveraged against the Nobel Prize in Literature and by extension the Swedish Academy is the glaring imbalance between male laureates (103) and female laureates (17). Previously, entire decades have been awarded exclusively to men, such as the 1970’s and 1980’s. This is not to say that previous laureates are not some of the greatest writers of their time and still have resounding impact; but the notion that there never was a female writer of equal literary merit and match does not retain water. However, in the Swedish Academy’s defense, they can only evaluate on whose been nominated. If no female writer has been nominated (or too few), the Swedish Academy is cannot be held responsible, as they can only evaluate and assess potential candidates based off those nominated. It is not a stretch to believe that some academics or nominating institutions would overlook or willfully neglect to nominate female writers. After a 25-year drought between Nelly Sachs sharing the Nobel Prize in Literature with Shmuel Yosef Agnon in 1966 and Nadine Gordimer winning the prize in 1991; there has been a concentrated effort to award more women writers. Over the past 33 years, 11 of the 17 women laureates have been awarded.
 
Over the past six years, the Swedish Academy begun to operate on a conventional alternating cycle, between awarding a male writer and a woman writer. Starting retroactively in 2018 with the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, the Swedish Academy has awarded three female writers, with the last one being the French writer Annie Ernaux in 2022. Many speculators and commentators believe (and not wrongly) that by the rules of precedence the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature has a high probability of going to a woman writer. Caution should always be exercised when framing obligations and expectations towards the Swedish Academy. Notoriously fussy and fickle, the academy and members are convinced of their ordained position as an authority on what constitutes great literature, and as such do not appreciate the notion that others can dictate or influence their decisions. The Swedish Academy may choose to award a female writer this year; but to expect them to award a female writer on the singular understanding that its an alternating cycle of conventional precedence, does feel underwhelmingly boring. Almost predictable. While it can be appreciated that the Swedish Academy is making a conscientious effort to induct more women laureates into the Nobel Pantheon, doing so simply to round out or inflate the numbers cheapens every female Nobel Laureate, which is an optic the Swedish Academy weighs with equal importance, as all eleven previous female Nobel Laureates from Nadine Gordimer in 1991 to Annie Ernaux in 2022, have all been exceptional. Of course, not without controversy, as in the case of Elfriede Jelinek for example; but each one is a consummate and talented writer, tackling the weighted subjects of the human condition; no different then their male counterparts, even handling the subjects with more subtlety and weight, completely abandoning the panache polemics of their male colleagues. Others have become masters of their forms, completely expanding the forms potential beyond their preconceived limitations. Many in turn were also great innovators both in language but also in creating new forms and literary modes of expression in which to mull over the weighted complexities of the human experience, specifically of the 20^th century. To expect the Swedish Academy to award a female writer simply because its 2024 and Jon Fosse was awarded last year is a cheap perspective. If the Swedish Academy chooses to award a woman writer this year, the expectation that they will be able to match and deliver on the same caliber as previous laureates is pretty high, and an unenviable situation. In that regard, there’s a hope the Swedish Academy does away with the cycle, in order to mitigate the sense that they are fulfilling quotas, and regain a sense of agency thereby thwarting expectations, and sparing potential women writers from the disbarring criticism that they were only awarded based on the nature of their sex, and not their literary qualifications. Naturally, however, the Swedish Academy will inevitably remediate the gap between female and male laureates, and in the near future award two female writers in a row. It’s a matter of when, not if. Preferably though, when this hypersensitive environment of identity politics have faded once more, and the laureate can be assessed on the nature of their work and literary contributions, rather than the metrics of their sex.
 

—    III —

 

Nobel Speculation is never complete without the abundance of lists formulated, discussed, and debated around the internet. An interesting addition is a placeholder Wikipedia article is formed, vaguely providing its own speculation, rattling off quite a few different writers, but not issuing any allegiance or certainty to whether or not they have a chance. Gentle Readers, if you are able to see the article, before the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature, it’s a unique list full of writer’s worth looking into, regardless of their chances of receiving the prize. It also documents the current Swedish Academy members who are on the Nobel Prize Committee. This year’s members are:
 
            Anders Olsson, Committee Chair – Chair No. 4
            Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy – Chair No. 11
            Ellen Mattson – Chair No. 9
            Steve Sem-Sandberg – Chair No. 14
            Anne Swärd – Chair No. No. 13
            Anna-Karin Palm – Chair No. 16
 
Anna-Karin Palm, is one of the newest members inducted to the Swedish Academy along with the linguist, David Håkansson of Chair No. 3. She also replaces the previous Nobel Committee member Per Wästberg of Chair No. 12. The induction of Anna-Karin Palm also ensures that the Nobel Committee is split between three men and three women. This comes as no surprise after the 2018 scandal and subsequent fall out, as the Swedish Academy has been accused of overlooking women members, and as part of their reconciliatory efforts the Swedish Academy has made an increased effort in recruiting women. As for the placeholder article on Wikipedia and subsequent list, a fascinating compilation of writers is assembled, but it could not be considered absolute or complete. Its interesting to note quite a few Swedish writers were included on the list. Its an unwritten rule, but the Swedish Academy has shown great apprehension at awarding Swedish writers. When Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, then Permanent Secretary Peter Englund was quick to squash and dismiss any notion of Scandinavian bias, and by and large everyone accepted Tomas Tranströmer as an accomplished and remarkable poet, who had long been rumoured to be in contention for the prize since the 1990’s. A few stand out names on this year’s placeholder article include the following:
 

          Kerstin Ekman
          Tua Forsström
          Katarina Frostenson
          Lotta Lotass

Steve Sem-Sandberg

          Per Wästberg
 

What binds theses writers together is the fact that they are all or were a member of the Swedish Academy. After the 1974 boondoggle, my understanding is the Swedish Academy revised its bylaws once more prohibiting any member of the Swedish Academy from eligibility for the award. This nullifies the candidacy of Tua Forsström, Steve Sem-Sandberg and Per Wästberg, who are all members of the Swedish Academy. Kerstin Ekman, Katarina Frostenson, and Lotta Lotass, have all formally resigned from the Swedish Academy after the 2018 Scandal. Kerstin Ekman, as previously noted, was inactive since the 1980’s, while Lotta Lotass had become inactive within the academy since 2016 before formally resigning after the 2018 Scandal. As for Katarina Frostenson, while regarded as an esoteric, opaque, and impenetrable poet, her resignation from the Swedish Academy was contentious, due to allegations and accusations of conflict of interest, breaking the Swedish Academy statue of secrecy, among other allegations of ethical violations. I don’t know what the Swedish Academy statues prohibit or allow regarding the resignation of former members and their own candidacy for the prize, but I can’t imagine the Swedish Academy would accept their nominations lightly, considering the lasting stain of the 1974 prize. On a minor note of clarification, Tua Forsström is a Finnish national but Swedish language poet, she is to my knowledge the first Finnish writer to be elected to the Swedish Academy. Another note of clarification, is Rosa Liksom is a Finnish writer (both national and language), but is listed as Swedish in the placeholder article. Naja Marie Aidt as well is a Danish writer who has been mistakenly classified as a writer Dutch writer.
 
The list of course includes the usual suspects and candidates, from Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Murakami Haruki, and António Lobo Antunes; to the more eccentric and obscure, such as the Icelandic writer Vigdís Grímsdóttir, Finnish writer Antti Tuuri, the Spanish poet Pere Gimferrer whose literary languages include Castilian and Catalan; and the Brazilian writer Luiz Ruffato. In all it’s a myriad of names worth exploring and looking into. Of course, each writer listed has as much chance of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature as any other, though granted some have a greater likeliness then others. The list also presents a very limited perspective regarding the global perspective of world literature. For example, only two writers from India are listed: Anita Desia and Amitav Ghosh, and both of their literary languages are English. The only South Korean writer listed is Ko Un, and while the pre-eminent Korean poet has been internationally recognized and often considered a perennial candidate for the award for decades, in 2018 Ko Un was accused of using his literary status and privilege to take advantage of younger female poets. Since then, Ko Un’s reputation with South Korean society has been tarnished with the removal of his poetry from text books and declining sales figures. Beyond the controversy, South Korea has made a considerable investment in promoting their cultural exports abroad, including literature. South Korean novelists such as Han Kang, Bae Suah, Hwang Sok-yong and Yi Mun-yol are now recognized figures abroad, and are often speculated as being potential Nobel Laureates (in the event of Han Kang, she is on the younger side, but will most likely be considered a serious contender in the next seven or eight years); while the poet Kim Hyesoon is recongized as a defining feminist voice in South Korean poetry. The list also has extensive gaps or limited offerings from around the world, as no Greek language writer is listed, and a small offering from the African continent, South America, the Middle East, and Asia outside of the major nations. This of course highlights the problem the Swedish Academy faces within their mandate to recognize great literature from around the world. Its vastness and linguistic variety go beyond the Swedish Academy’s ability to properly evaluate. While Anders Olsson said in 2019 that the award has changed in perspective:
 

“[ . . .] Now we are looking much more for the global totality. I mean we have, really. It's necessary for us to widen our perspectives more and more. Previously we had a more, let's say, Eurocentric perspective of literature and now we are looking all over the world.”

 
The task is still herculean in scope and impossible to satisfy. Even the placeholder article has a pronounced tilt towards European and English language writers. This of course is not a criticism; the Swedish Academy shoulders a colossal albeit doomed task. As much as Anders Olsson would like the Nobel Prize to take on a more global perspective, a jury of 18 Swedes is not capable of adjudicating or fulfilling that mandate. Even with the assistance and support of external experts, the Swedish Academy is ultimately to small to take on the global approach that they aspire. What is important, however, is that they do aspire for it.
 
One of the interesting discoveries I found from last years Nobel Speculation, was the Swiss poet Klaus Merz, affectionally referred to as the watchmaker poet, for his economical poetry whose virtues are brevity and concision. Merz’s poetry is exquisite in its detailed instrumentation and understatement. While early poems were compared to haikus for their imagistic orientation and succinctness, Merz’s poetry was never reduced to an engineered schematic or soulless automation, spinning on preordained and designed gears and movements. Concision does not mean the amputation of palpability or soul; it merely means in Klaus Merz’s hands the ostentations and ornamentation are aptly abandoned in favour of the filigree of subtlety. Despite Klaus Merz not being listed on the placeholder article, his countrymen and prose writer, Peter Stamm is. In a fashion similar to Klaus Merz, Peter Stamm’s novels and stories are renowned for their clean, plain, and icy tone, acute psychological acuity, and meticulously crafted austerely precise prose. I always think of Peter Stamm as that quintessential mid-century modern writer, one of streamlined minimalism, and matter of fact detail. The terms forensic, scaled, and severe have equally been used with regular frequency. Peter Stamm’s prose is an act of literary accountancy, scrupulous, unadorned, and sparse. Stamm is not a writer whose sentences are weighted in lengthy lugubrious deliberations, they have a refined draughtsman’s touch, hard lined and exactingly measured. Every word and sentence are measured up; there is no room for frivolity. In equal turn, Stamm’s examination of his characters psychology is equally surgical, drilling and boring into his characters skulls with a confident hand. While not renowned as a great stylist or provocateur of language, Peter Stamm’s brutalist unadorned prose gives way to detailed character studies, where the spectrum of human fallacy, tragedy, and cruelty. In this regard, Peter Stamm is a writer exploring the psychology of the human condition, with a psychopathological fixation on cause and affect, specifically the Darwinian destiny for disappointment and hardship. Peter Stamm is a difficult writer to clearly define. Through prose that can be described as crystalline and unadorned, even brutalist in their concrete geometric assembly. Stamm has described his writing as being curious about describing the events as they’ve happened or the aftermath of events, not a writer interested in action or content, but the landscape of the events, their aftermath, one’s relationship to it, and in turn their understanding and recollection of the events. Peter Stamm’s literary style appears agreeable to the Swedish Academy’s current trending tastes—be it clinical acuity or unmistakable austerity—yet, often it seems Peter Stamm’s forensic psychological autopsies exist only in that procedural form. They examine and dissect the events, the character, the entire purview, but stop before probing further. Peter Stamm’s literary accountancy does not stray into the realm of speculative or theorization. Minute craftsmanship provide the necessary inclinations of hidden depths, for the readers to ultimately plunge into.  
 
Beyond the placeholder Wikipedia article, there’s no Nobel Prize in Literature speculation without peering into the misguided pseudo-oracular world of the betting sites. At this time the first-tier top contenders (10/1 or lower) for the award are two Asian writers, Can Xue followed by Murakami Haruki. The second-tier (16/1 – 11/1) is made the usual suspects with the addition of startling new name for the betting sites to consider at such low odds: Ersi Sotiropoulos; followed by Gerald Murnane, Cesar Aira, Margaret Atwood, and Thomas Pynchon. The third-tier (20/1 – 17/1) is once again made up the usual suspects, with some suspicious names. Anne Carson finds herself in the third tier alongside Pierre Michon, newcomers Carl Frode Tiller and Norbert Gstrein. The fourth-tier (25/1 – 21/1) is made up entirely of perennial speculated candidates, Adunis, Don DeLillo, László Krasznahorkai, Mircea Cărtărescu, Péter Nádas, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Salman Rushdie, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and the new inductee Kanai Mieko. Other honourable and notable mentions included on the betting sites are: Emmanuel Carrere, Ananda Devi, David Grossman, Hamid Ismailov, Homero Aridjis, Karl Ove Knausgård, Andrey Kurkov, Michel Houellebecq, Ryszard Krynicki, and Ivan Vladislavic.
 
The betting sites are interesting barometers, taking the temperature and adjusting accordingly to the publics perceived interests in the award, and candidates they deem likely to win (or likely to win by the publics standards). For years now, Can Xue has been considered a top contending perennial candidate. There is no writer quite comparable to Can Xue. While critics have designated her as the Chinese Kafka, its only an attempt providing some delineating definition to her otherwise amorphous form, which defies categorization and classification. Can Xue is absolutely singular in form, described as the foremost practitioner of the avant-garde literature, as her work continually explores the limitations of narrative and literary modes of expressions and then moves beyond them. Xue’s novels are often structureless and formless; images are layered on top of each, but rather than have an implied systematic approach to construct some semblance of order, Xue continually defies this expectation. This often leads critics to refer to Can Xue’s work as both impenetrable and performative based, lacking the pre-conceived expectations of underlying foundation of narrative or structure. Instead, Can Xue continue to explore surreal fever dreamscapes. Last year, this surveyor of the surreal and strange was heavily theorized to be the running contender for the award, which ultimately went to the transcendental tidal oriented playwright and novelist Jon Fosse. Yet, Can Xue has returned to the forefront of the betting sites and obviously occupies even a greater curiosity of the reading public. It is difficult imagining the Swedish Academy whole heartedly endorsing Can Xue however. Despite being one of the most daring, controversial, and perhaps brilliant (depending on who you ask) writers currently at work, Xue is often ignored or dismissed as being to cerebral, outlandish, and incoherent. Before her international reputation expanded over the years, Can Xue remained unappreciated and ignored in China, with some critics arguing she was certifiably insane early on. Since the death of the Swedish Academy member and sinologist Göran Malmqvist, its difficult to see the Swedish Academy having the knowledge and willingness to understand contemporary Chinese literature and cultural writers. There again lies another scenario, before his death Göran Malmqvist may have soured on the idea of Can Xue, either by outrightly dismissing her work or having built a strong enough case against recognizing her with the Nobel Prize in Literature, members of the academy may be uncomfortable with contradicting these arguments. Of course, this is pure speculation. The last Chinese language writer to receive the award, Mo Yan was marked by considerable controversy and political criticism, for Mo Yan’s apparent comfort and friendliness with the Chinese government. There where then further criticism over the appearance of ethics violations between the relationship of Göran Malmqvist and Mo Yan, as Malmqvist was Mo Yan’s translator, and the two were known friends. If the Swedish Academy decided to award Can Xue, they would certainly have awarded a writer of daring, if albeit an incomprehensible vision. If anything, the betting sites are skiing on the coat tails of last years speculation.
 
There are some writers who are included as expected, if only because they have been speculated about for years, as in the case of Murakami Haruki, who (in my humble opinion) no longer has the quality or the seriousness of literary artistry to be considered a candidate for the prize. His recent output has been described as weak and superficial, and is more concerned with building a brand name then strong literary convicted works. To my understanding his most recent novel published in Japan is a remix of one of his earlier novels “Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” The inclusion of Murakami only recognizes his hordes of fans and devoted readers who militantly advocate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. While they have been disappointed in the past with Murakami not being announced as the years laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, hopefully they will be disappointed again this year. Despite, Murakami being the most popular Japanese writer currently working today, there are more and more Japanese writers’ language writers finding themselves in translation, proving that Murakami’s stranglehold on the world stage is diminishing. No surprise, however, as for years English language publishers have continually sought the next Murakami cash cow. While no writer has yet to fulfill that need, a diverse group of Japanese language writers have broken free from Murakami’s shadow, which includes Kawakami Mieko and Ono Masatsugu.
 
It is interesting to observe Kanai Meiko listed on the betting sites. Her recent novel “Mild Vertigo,” was recently published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, who has three pre-emptive Nobel Laureates in its catalogue: Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux, and Jon Fosse. The novel itself has been praised by critics for its disquieting narrative exploring the interior life of a Japanese housewife, with all entrapments, flights of fantasy, mundanity, drudgery and lifelessness. Yet Kanai layers the narrative with stimuli and thoughts, the entire world becomes a cacophony of white noise channeled through the narrator: an otherwise ordinary housewife, who is trapped within the societal expectations of motherhood, femineity, marriage, and domesticity, to the point she is erased. Through the continued stream of consciousness and external nodes and information, the narrator is gradually entombed and smothered. Any semblance of her own being is amputated or stilted or dissolved entirely. Her efforts must be towards housekeeping, child rearing, and being a dutiful wife. In “Mild Vertigo,” Kanai Mieko tunes to the channel of late-stage capitalism with torrential its torrent of never-ending stimuli, and explores the erasure of an individual lost within this world of continued monetization (and ironically enough, this was before the era of social media and influencer culture). Little of Kanai Mieko’s work has been translated into English, an early short story collection “The Word Book,” showcased the authors interest in extreme postmodernism and metafictional games. There’s very little else for readers to assess. In Japanese Kanai is renowned as a film critic, with some of her pieces apparently making their way into “Mild Vertigo.”
 
Fluid is the term that Tawada Yōko has used to describe her writing. A talented expatriate novelist, Tawada navigates not only differences in literary style and historical development in it contextual structures, but also shifts between two different literary languages depending on her mode of composition. For novels, Tawada writes in her native Japanese, while short stories and essays, she composes in her adopted German. Language for Tawada is clearly an artificial construct, which she delights in dissecting and deconstructing, proving that language as an artificial endeavour which also subjugates and captures reality within a defined and oppressive notion of meaning. In this regard, reality does not influence language, rather language provides the necessary infrastructure to define and delineate reality, which ultimately changes our perception and relationship to it. Tawada Yōko’s is a writer who traverses between boundaries and borders be it linguistically or geographically, while Tawada has described her work as being a state of continuous translation, sharing neither allegiance to Japanese or German, but playfully exploring the contrariness and strangeness of either language. In German, Tawada is more prone to engage in more experimental experiments with language, inventing neologisms then she is in her predominately Japanese language work. Tawada Yōko’s exploration of boundaries and borders, from national, to linguistic, geographic, and even existential, showcase her as one of the most innovative writers currently at work in both Japanese and German, the fluidity of her work and its global perspective, showcases Tawada as a groundbreaking and innovative writer, whose linguistic examination have not been awarded since Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller.
 
At long last it seems Ogawa Yōko is finally gaining traction within the English language publication sphere. Early on, publishers eyed her up as a potential female Murakami and often attempted to market her within that realm, as another eccentric and quirky Japanese language writer whose work veers into the complex implausible dreamscapes; little did they realize that, that is not Ogawa’s style. Her initial publications “The Diving Pool: Three Novellas,” “Hotel Iris,” and “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” showed the range of Ogawa’s work. “The Diving Pool,” for example is an earlier work, showcasing an early interest in the grotesque and the macabre of the mundane. “Hotel Iris,” was equally as dark in its dissection of desire and its subsequent psychosexual response played out in a relationship built on domination and submission. Then “the Housekeeper and the Professor,” in turn was marketed as a saccharine eccentric love story involving mathematics and memory loss. The short story collection “Revenge,” returned to menace and disturbed realities of “The Diving Pool,” whereby the subtlety of the grotesque in the mundane blooms and spoors like ravenous mould. Ogawa’s really breakout came with her early novel “The Memory Police,” which thankfully being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020, and was considered a timely allegory for the pandemic, as it details the phantasmagoric dystopia world, whereby manufactured and directed amnesia erases memories and objects in a bureaucratic fashion, and enforced by the titular memory police. Four years later and another novel “Mina’s Matchbox,” is translated into English, and again veers into the peculiar world of “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” with its physical claustrophobic narrative and delight in domestic details, but also veers into the slanted off-kilter eccentricates (there’s a pygmy hippo as a mode of transportation). Ogawa’s thematic concerns are memory, the act of remembrance, in addition to loss and abscence, destruction and redaction of memory, and by extension our relationship with history and the external world. These are themes shared by many recent Nobel Laureates in all of their variations. Then of course there is Ogawa Yōko’s style, a blanched and bleached literary approach to writing, often described as a ‘natural,’ language by her translators, which again fits into many recent Nobel Laureates, whose literary sensibilities were known for their strict pruning, austerity, clinical acuity, and otherwise plain prose. The late Ōe Kenzaburō praised Ogawa for her subtle psychological insight into the human condition and her clear lyrical literary language. An established figure in the French language, Ogawa Yōko has been emancipated from the reputation and shadow of Murakami, and made a name for herself on her own merit. Ogawa’s work is diverse in theme, scope, and narrative; yet, her short story “Afternoon at The Bakery,” is perhaps the greatest litmus test of her style and capacity as a writer. Through matter-of-fact prose and the accumulation of detail, Ogawa describes a simple errand of a mother going to a bakery to buy her son a strawberry shortcake for his birthday. This otherwise wholesome moment is quickly subjected to the viscerally grotesque, when the mother reveals her son is dead, still in the same crystalline prose, deprived of emotional sensationalism. This is Ogawa’s strength capturing the stillness and inaction of her characters as their world teeters on the precipice of ruin, or when reality is confronted and defaced by the gruesome or macabre, be it the ghost and tragedy of loss or a severed tongue found in a pocket, and the quaint cellophane of normalcy is confronted with the reality of its own decaying ruin or violent vandalism and violation which completely alters one’s perspective and expectation of reality.
 
Seeing Ersi Sotiropoulos listed with such stellar odds is a surprise and delight. Only two Greek writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature in the mid-century: Giorgos Seferis (1963) and Odysseus Elytis (1979). Both of them poets. Giorgos Seferis a disciple of the high modernism of the early 20^th century utilized a Hellenic flare to recognize history and literary tradition, employing the Homeric myths with contemporary speech; but his poetry also explored exile, wandering, and travels. As for Odysseus Elytis, he was the vassal of the sun, the great sun drinking poet, whose work had a touch of the surrealism, but infused it with the Mediterranean light and sea. As for Ersi Sotiropoulos, she’s more postmodernist to Giorgos Seferis high modernist Hellenic modernism and Odysseus Elytis surreal spiritual poetry. Sotiropoulos’s work is disinterested in the normal convents of narrative, often described as circuitous in nature, in a manner similar to a cul-de-sac. The 20^th century was a contentious century, its early decades marked with history defining wars and crippling postwar periods. Tragedy and horror were their defining attributes, and from there, the militia industry and technology expedited its advancement. While the world moved on from the ashes of the Second World War, faced with the inhumane horrors of the holocaust, the sheer depravity and indignation of all the war crimes, and the new nightmare of the nuclear bomb, a new war formed, one that was colder and fought with ideological posturing and diplomatic swipes. The humanism and democratic values created and championed by the ancient Greeks had all but been tramped and ground into the earth. Even Greece was not immune from this authoritarian disease, as a military junta took control in the 1970’s. This century has equally been punitively punishing on Greece. After the 2004 summer Olympics, five years later the country would dive into an economic crisis, which not only destroyed their financial institutions, but drained their charitable accounts, and eroded their political infrastructure. Greece was discussed as a poor sickly creature. While endowed with ancient and proud history, its contemporary circumstances not only reduced it, but diminished it to a state of poverty and bankruptcy. Ersi Sotiropoulos is a surveyor of this world; and while she celebrates good principles and the philosophies of ancient Greece, they are not absolute or absolved of scrutiny. In her yet untranslated novel “Eva,” Ersi Sotiropoulos surveys the destitution of the financial crisis and gives it a very human face, an all too familiar visage. Her masterful novel “Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees,” employees the upcoming Olympics as it floats through the lives of the four characters and their disenfranchised lost youth. “Landscape with Dog,” showcased Sotiropoulos as a natural talented practitioner of the short story, as each story is a dark glistening shard of glass, capturing through precise language the faults, failures, and silent ambiguities of human relationships, these otherwise simple scenes of daily life are punctuated with the power politics of relationships. With Ersi Sotiropoulos being listed so high on the betting sites list, I wondered to myself: what do they know that I don’t? Truth be told, they know nothing more then myself, but as a reader who enjoys her Ersi Sotiropoulos, it would be an absolute pleasure if Sotiropoulos won the prize.
 
The recent death of Ismail Kadare, proves the Swedish Academy can be misguided or petulant in their deliberations and decisions. Kadare inevitably joins a long list of writers, who in spite of their perceived and speculated candidacy, would never receive the award. Despite the Swedish Academy’s oversight Ismail Kadare will continue to be read and appreciated. Sadly, the Swedish Academy have painted themselves into another corner regarding awarding the poet Adunis, who is considered one of the defining and revolutionary forces of contemporary Arabic poetry. Despite this, the Swedish Academy be it their own insularity or eccentricities has routinely refused to award Adunis the Nobel Prize in Literature. Perhaps they are under the misguided notion that to award Adunis the Nobel would be considered a trite event, to obvious for their taste; akin to pining a medal on Mount Everest declaring it the tallest mountain in the world. Regardless, the Swedish Academy and its members continually propagate and pontificate the notion that they are merely connoisseurs of great literature, which they refuse to define, instead abstracting an ephemeral enigma that incites further indignation and questions, as in the case of a recent decision where the notion of what constitutes poetry was up for debate. In any matter if the Swedish Academy wants to adjudicate literature and doll out medals to writers of great literature, surely it comes to reason that they inevitably would have to concede the medal to an obvious choice, such as Ismail Kadare or Adunis.
 
László Krasznahorkai, Mircea Cărtărescu, Péter Nádas are three titans of global literature. László Krasznahorkai has long been favoured and appreciated by literary hipsters, for his dense labyrinthine novels of oozing lava-oriented text. His early complex novels “War and War,” “The Melancholy of Resistance,” and “Satantango,” have rightfully earned Krasznahorkai the moniker “master of the apocalypse,” as these novels in their own manic and deranged way suffer beneath the deluge of the intolerable squander of the human condition and its most primordial fallacies; in “The Melancholy of Resistance,” it is entrapment of ideologies and push of resistance; in “Satantango,” it’s the misrepresentation and belief of false idols, who are only so keen to take advantage of desperation; while “War and War,” burrows into the mania of a suicidal obsessive clerk, whose obsession with some obscure text, not only tortures him but is his only tether to the world. Throughout it all László Krasznahorkai has risen as one of the most original and complex writers of contemporary Hungarian and world literature. Fellow countrymen, Péter Nádas is of equal renown, large doorstop novels of equal complexity, wrestling with the eternal themes of the human condition; yet, László Krasznahorkai turned his attention towards novels which became more concentrated and allegorical on manufacturing of creative processes and the act of creation, Nádas is more historian, investigator, and archivist. In “Shimmering Details, Volume I & II,” Péter Nádas traces his and his family’s history throughout the 19^th century and 20^th century, dredging up, polishing, and curating the shimmering details which season their lives, and connecting these details and other random facts amongst the backdrop of history to create constellations of lives. In turn Péter Nádas novel “The Book of Memory,” is a postmodern Proustian feat, a multilayered novel narrating three parallel stories of infatuation and heartache. It’s a complex read and immediately conferred that Nádas a writer of merit and weight, who inherits the modernist mantel and continues to the explore the complexities of memory, consciousness, and language. Few writers are writers of ideas anymore, Péter Nádas is a bastion defense to preserve literature as a medium in which to wrestle and explore ideas in their fullness. There’s no writer quite like Mircea Cărtărescu whose dense novels are not burdened with detail but are saturated with it. For Cărtărescu the void is not an inky black hole or gaping maw of nothingness, it is a psychedelic kaleidoscope. While few of Mircea Cărtărescu’s novels have been translated into English, what has become available proves that Cărtărescu is of a singular vision, his novels are flooded with bombastic barque language and vivid explosive imagery, which continually layer onto each other to create a bewildering, dazzling, and disorienting experience for readers. A recent translation of Mircea Cărtărescu’s novel “Solenoid,” is a freewheeling narrative which sprouts beyond the grounded seed work of a diarists account and voyages into the discussion of philosophy, psychology, mathematics, physics, all the while being intercepted and pelted with the absurdities of daily life, be it authoritarian bureaucracies which have obviously taken Kafka as instructional material; to the outlandish and strange. As a testament to the appreciation for such refreshing complexity, Mircea Cărtărescu received the International Dublin Literary Award this year for “Solenoid.” All three writers are titans, and yet each one is renowned for their dense prose, their complexity of their novels, and their uncompromising and unapologetic vision and force. Recent laureates have exercised greater restraint with their literary work, rendering their novels in prose that is bleached, blanched, and scalped clean. They do not revere the ostentatious, the burdensome baroque, or vividly chart the cosmos and interior as these three writers do. Hopefully their sense of flourish and celebration of the complexity plays to their favour, rather then being a detriment.
 
Three other writers have taken home some significant international literary awards this year as well, which may highlight their chances of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not appearing on any betting site or the placeholder Wikipedia article, is the Brazilian poet Adélia Prado who received the Camões Prize this year. Adélia Prado is a late blooming poet, having not started to have her work published until she was in her forties (now in her late eighties), Prado has garnered much attention for her sensual and ripened poetry, paradoxically combining the rigidity and sanctimonious prudishness of devote Catholicism with imagery that is carnal and corporeal. Adélia Prado merely dismisses this contrariness as eroticism of the soul, and not veering into the depravity of sexual discourse. In 2014, Adélia Prado won the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award, which only affirms the renown of her poetry. What is enjoyable about Adélia Prado’s poetry is the quotidian and the divine crossing the stage in turn. Recently, Ananda Devi was announced as this year’s winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, cementing Devi’s as one of the most important literary voices of Mauritius. While J.M.G. Le Clézio hailed from Mauritius, the French writer’s work was more ethnological and ecological in its concerns, wandering and traversing a variety cultures and ways of life across the world, which were written about in poetically adventurous prose (this is of course, after Le Clézio abandoned the literary tricks of the Nouveau roman). Ananda Devi remains rooted in Mauritius, rather than flying from it, and uses the small island nation as a petri dish to examine with a social anthropologist’s acute eye the intertwining of identities and diverse cultures within a small multicultural nation in a postcolonial landscape. Devi was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature with her novel “Eve Out of Her Ruins,” which is considered her most important novel. Through brutal poetic honesty and urgency, Ananda Devi details the lives of four young Mauritians who seek to create a life for themselves and a sense of identity, freed from the customary precedence of violence and fear which runs rampant through the small island nation. “Eve Out of Her Ruins,” is a polyphonic novel, with each character and monologue provide their own rhythm and cadence. The Neustadt International Prize for Literature has only elevated Ananda Devi’s literary reputation abroad and on the international stage. Mia Couto in turn has added another feather to his cap, the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages. Previous recipients include Ida Vitale, Emmanuel Carrère, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Claudio Magris. Mia Couto has long been considered one of the most important literary voices of Mozambique. Couto’s novels are known for blending and blurring the line between realism and mythical interference, which often leads critics to quickly establish and process Couto as a magical realist writer. Yet, the defining feature of Couto’s work is language. Mia Couto’s magpie eye for language and appropriating words, slogans, and sayings from other languages and reconfiguring them into Portuguese; this linguistic scavenging was highlighted by the Neustadt International Prize for Literature jury when awarding Mia Couto the prize in 2014. Recently, Couto has finished his “Sands of the Emperor Trilogy,” which has gradually been translated and published into English. Defining features for some recent Nobel Laureates to be awarded the prize is the recent publication of what is considered their crowning achievement. For Jon Fosse it was his Septology and Olga Tokarczuk it was “The Book of Jacob,” perhaps with the completion of the “Sands of the Emperor Trilogy,” Mia Couto is being assessed anew. Even without the trilogy, Couto is one of the most innovative and inventive writers coming from the African continent. When the young writer joined the revolutionary freedom movement, Frelimo in Mozambique’s fight for independence, Couto was not chosen because of his suffering or denied because of his privileged background, but was chosen because the revolution needed its poets, and Mia Couto has indeed been Mozambique’s greatest literary cultivator and celebrator.
 
Of course, the greatest disappointment with Nobel Speculation and reviewing other lists is all the writers missing. Where’s Doris Kareva or Magdalena Tulli? How can someone overlook Agi Mishol? How disappointing not to see Gyrðir Elíasson included in speculative conversations. Yet, it has come to my attention that Jon Fosse is a fan, which hopefully guarantees Elíasson’s nomination. It’s a sad reminder to see Eeva Tikka not mentioned, which is realistic all things considered, but it would be nice to have her work published in English, the few samples available are certainly intriguing enough to leave one wanting something more substantial. It comes as no surprise to see that Fleur Jaeggy is looked over, she is a dry ice precisionist, and her cool detached prose with its clinical examining tone may dazzle readers, while leaving them frost bitten. The greatest fun though of Nobel Prize in Literature speculation is of course learning about new writers and their work, its enough to fill the shelves for the coming years and certainly keep any reader entertained with new writers to explore. Why is Bae Suah dismissed as a potential laureate? While its true that Han Kang has received more recognition in translation with awards and appreciation for her polished and emotionally searing prose; Bae Suah is more cerebral, complex, and daring, with her novels described as antinovels, as they deconstruct and autopsy conventional narrative forms. If the Swedish Academy is looking for a dark horse, Bae Suah is more then qualifying. Esther Kinsky’s profile is rising in English translation as well. Again, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Kinsky’s prose is beautiful and dense, occupying that Sebaldian space between history, essay, travelogue, and fiction. While Jenny Erpenbeck is seen as one of the leading frontrunning German language writers, Esther Kinsky should not be easily dismissed.
 

—    IV —

 
October is on the horizon as September winds down. In two weeks, we will finally learn who this years Nobel Laurate in Literature will be. At this point, there’s no writer which jumps out as being the frontrunner or expectant laureate. While Can Xue is considered the bookies favourite, there is a current of hesitation which undercuts any certainty. For awhile now Can Xue has been considered a top tier contender for the prize, but her work is singular and strange and to quote many readers and reviewers: an acquired taste. Starting in 2020 with Louise Glück, the Swedish Academy’s began to express a certain appreciation for a style that is austere as it was measured, with a proclivity for polished refinement. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s prose in turn is known for its casual and loose form, refuting ostentatious showmanship. Annie Ernaux turned the pen into the scalpel and scaled back and bleached her prose to the point of it was clinical unburdened with the poetics of niceties, and engaged in a personal examination in contrast with the social. While Jon Fosse’s language is imbued with a tidal rhythm the back and forth, akin to a boat adrift on a moonless night, rocking in the wave’s eternal currents, but the language eschews pyrotechnic poetics. Can Xue does not fit into this precedence. Of course, this precedence is only commented on via an external matter, it is not necessarily a metric that is being applied at all, but it does show a certain preference by members of the Swedish Academy. For the sake of argument though, the Swedish Academy has also shown an interest in writers who have expanded or revolted against the traditional literary forms. Svetlana Alexievich remains a complex laureate to classify. Are her works considered journalism or historical cartography? Alexievich has described her work as “documentary novels,” or “novels of voices,” whereby Alexievich collates the testimonies of the lived personal human history of some of the most defining and catastrophic events of the past century, which included the role of women soldiers in the Red Army during the Second World War; the scarring trauma of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster; and the plight of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable democratic landscape. Peter Handke’s literary career began as an iconoclast, revolting against the apologist, morally concerned, penance-oriented positions of writers of the previous generation, who sought to repent and atone for the moral failings of and depravity which spewed from the Second World War; this generation included fellow laureates Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. Handke turned his attention away from social reparations and atonements, and sought to explore the limitations and periphery of language, battling with it and revitalizing it away from the stain and political stench of the Nazis corrosive touch. The later Handke moves language into state which both reflects and rediscovers reality, while Handke’s characters and narratives often veer into the cerebral, absurd, or nightmarishly incoherent. Either way Can Xue has as much chance as any other writer.
 
Of course, it is ill advised to speak with any sense of confidence regarding speculation of who will be the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. There’s no crystal ball or tea leaves or stick formation or any astrological charting, which will provide the necessary insight to predict and navigate the predilections and deliberations of the Swedish Academy. Some writers, we inherently believe have more chance and opportunity then others. In turn (and perhaps illogically) those who are deserving often find themselves casually dismissed; but even then, the Swedish Academy has a reputation of thwarting all expectations, by awarding laureates who are best described coming completely left field, with one laureateship still causing a stir and debate of whether or not their work can be described as literature. 
 
This is the first year in which I’ve been forced to step back from more engaged speculation, and while its apparent, I have nothing to offer in regards to insight, I do maintain that the Swedish Academy is in an unenviable position, burdened with a herculean task and shackled further by their self-imposed mandate to evaluate and adjudicate world literature; to honour and recognize literary greatness. Its impossible, certainly for an academy made up of 18 members, who despite their professional and academic backgrounds and linguistic talents, still could not possibly be called upon to evaluate the whole of world literature with any true holistic approach. Inevitably the work must be done in piecemeal, and with an ever changing—and at times incomplete—roster, the Swedish Academy’s evaluations are noted for tipping heavily in certain directions. Yet, they make the effort, and while they are not always successful, their efforts are insightful and interesting. Here’s hoping on October 10 we get a surprise Nobel Laureate, in the matter of an interesting writer to discover and delve into. One of those more obscure writers, whose work is begging for a greater audience.
 
Until then Gentle Reader.
 
Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary
 

The Booker Prize Shortlist 2024

Hello Gentle Reader, 

After longlist which the judges stressed was not about the immediate pressing issues and concerns of today, and then turn face and engage in rhetoric that alluded to the writers being more concerned with immediate social issues; the shortlist also has raised a few eyebrows. Following is this year’s shortlist:

            Charlotte Wood – Australia – “Stone Yard Devotional,”
            Anne Michaels – Canada – “Held,”
            Yael van der Wouden – The Netherlands – “The Safekeep,”
            Percival Everett – United States of America – “James,”
            Samantha Harvey – United Kingdom – “Orbital,”
            Rachel Kushner – United States of America – “Creation Lake,”

For the first time in the Booker Prize’s history, the shortlist is almost made exclusively of women. The American author Percival Everett is only male castaway amongst a feminine sea. Everett’s novel “James,” takes the titular character from the American classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and dusts off the cliches and embodies him with a more complex character and hell filled history. Everett proves himself to be an accomplished pastiche writer, forging Twain’s signature parody and satire rooting the novel within its source material, but introduces elements of horror, adventure, and children’s story to examine the framing of race through language, stereotypes, and cliches, to change those narratives. Samantha Harvey’s novel “Orbital,” relays the experience of six astronauts stranded on a space station orbiting earth (much like the current astronauts abandoned above earth). “Orbital,” is described as a science fictional pastoral novel, and indeed dire elegy as it reflects on earth below and the ever-present reality of climate change becoming an ever-present reality and dangerous reality. Rachel Kushner in turn tackles very immediate and present realities in her novel “Creation Lake,” eco-radicals on the verge of terrorism, the absurdity and asinine rhetoric of a post-truth political age, a mounting anticorporation sentiment, all wrapped up in the conventions of a cheap espionage novel that attempts to engage in philosophical digressions. Charlotte Wood’s novel “Stone Yard Devotional,” touches the climate crisis in turn, but enters a quieter and more personal contemplative world, as a conservationist retreats from the world into a monastic life, despite having no attachment or faith in God or any religious proclivity. Yet, from there she reflects on her mother death and ruminates on the nature of forgiveness, grief, and the loss of hope.

Anne Michaels emerges as the dark horse candidate with her novel “Held.” A poet by trade, Anne Michaels is a consummate wordsmith refusing to engage in prosaic language or linear narratives. “Held,” is an elliptical kaleidoscope where dazzling and polished snapshots which grapple with Michael’s persistent themes of memory, history, extended and everlasting trauma, and the human capacity for love and to heal. The novels architecture is collage based, whereby different characters and stories cycle through. The repetition of association and motifs propels the narrative and burrows deeper into the characters consciousness. Rather than sculpting and defining, Anne Michael’s provides exquisite flashes of insight to detail her characters rather then delineate them into stationary existence both in reality and time, as the novel fluidly maneuvers through the 20^th century recounting four generations of a family. For Anne Michaels time is not an obstacle but a current.

Yael van der Wouden remains the first Dutch writer to be nominated let alone shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and her novel “The Safekeep,” is the only debut work on the shortlist. “The Safekeep,” pathologically examines the guilt of history and one’s own denial of their failure and perhaps complicity in the atrocities. Taking place 15 years after the Second World War the novel described as a society failing to come to terms with the fate of the Dutch Jews. The stoic, sour, and ill-tempered Isabel resides alone in her childhood home after her moth dies. Her life is ordered by routine and indignation towards her brother disapproving of them in turn, for the one is gay and the other a dreaming romantic fool, who sends his fiancé to Isabel, like a lamb to slaughter, which only ignites an even more twisted and erotically charged narrative. Yael van der Wouden explores themes of repression both on a macro and personal level, which moves further and further away from other shortlisted titles and their socially concerned novels.

The shortlist certainly has its standout and stellar novels, but also provides enough suspicion on topics they judges felt compelled to highlight or single out. When they attempted to dismiss the longlist as novels concerned with the pressing concerns of today, they failed to sell point and the shortlist only distills that some of the novels have more topical agendas then others. There is nothing wrong with that, but don’t attempt to conceal this glaringly obvious fact.

Best of luck to the shortlisted writers.

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

 

M. Mary

Elias Khoury Dies Aged 76

Hello Gentle Reader, 

Elias Khoury was a renowned novelist, journalist, playwright, and public intellectual. Khoury greatly opposed the authoritarian governments that run through out the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a staunch defender of freedom of speech, and critic to the acceptable promotion of holocaust denial in the region. A proponent of the hopeful Arab Spring, Khoury celebrated the small victories, while lamenting the missed opportunities. Elias Khoury’s literary work explored universal concepts of collective memory, identity, war, exile, plights of the refugee and displacement. Khoury’s novels “Little Mountain,” and “Yalo,” directly dealt with the Lebanese civil war, which Khoury also fought in and was injured. “Little Mountain,” is a triptych of perspectives from a Joint Forces fighter, a distressed civil servant, and a chameleonic third, whose shifts and shapes between fighter and intellectual. These three perspectives provided a panoramic and layered review a lengthy and brutal civil war. In “Yalo,” the civil war is returned to once again, but from the perspective of a prisoner, whose accused of rape. Interrogated by means of beating and torture, the titular Yalo save himself by telling a new story through each interrogation. In this confinement and brutal oppressive regiment of torture, Yalo also discovers himself and reconciles with his own past and sense of history. What separates Khoury away from being a simple political oriented writer, is not only a lushness of prose and flourish for the poetic, but the human ability to transcend the horrors and achieve or strive for something greater. Khoury was a novelist who traced not only political horror and destitution, but explored the vastness of love, memory, and the resilience of the human spirit. In “White Masks,” Khoury creates a mystery, as a journalist seeks to piece together the ambiguity of a civil servant’s suspicious death, his body discovered in a mound of garbage. Through his investigation, the journalist hears how the Lebanese civil war still reverberates within the citizens and survivors. How the horrors and actions of those fretful events have carved deep wounds and trenches within the citizenry. Beyond his creative prose, Elias Khoury was an accomplished journalist in his own right and edited many publications throughout his lifetime. At his death, Arabic literature has taken a direct hit to one of its most important and steadfast writers, who stood on the sanctified grounds of democratic values and freedom of speech. The driving ideals of revolution, which now find themselves once again under threat and attack.

Rest in Peace Elias Khoury.

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

M. Mary

– XXXI –

Pity the poets, chronically underappreciated, all the while being offered as the greatest compliment and title. 

A Little Party Dress

Hello Gentle Reader, 

August is summer’s au revoir. While the days persist with scrutinizing and punishing heat, they conclude quicker. August evenings maintain and retain their own quality. Whereas June is a month of uneven temperament. Spritely and green, while dour the next, pouring rain. July burns with enthusiastic fervor, and while the plants celebrate the newfound sunlight, they too become parched and pray for rain. In July’s unabashed brilliance and burning, insects are awakened and begin their assault. Swarming and swamping the unexpected, the uninitiated, and the casual summer holidayer with glee. August settles in. Surviving crops and flowerbeds who have not wilted or burned by the sun’s inquisition, have blossomed, ripened, and bloomed; while the harvest lurks like a shadow around the corner. August evenings deserve special mention. The light softens into a sherbert afterglow; August compliments itself with oranges warmth, abandoning the briskness of a still uncertain season. The clouds are more apt to blush in the evening light, rather than radiate in burning reds, all the while entertaining a blue tint. The evenings do moderate themselves, and one should be reprimanded if they say ‘cool off,’ or inject the accusation that there is a ‘chill,’ in the air. August evenings provide a necessary reprieve and entice the young to go out, embrace the night and enjoy it.  The evening skies in turn are equally changed by August’s arrival. Less convoluted by summer haze, with the few stars capable of pushing through the light pollution glitter away. There are absences as well. Mornings are reluctant and tiresome. The sun pulling itself over the horizon with exhausted enthusiasm. The robins are gone. Those harbingers of spring. Bringers of dawn with their insistent twilight twitterers have since packed up and moved on for the season. A crow’s caw rings hollow, beckoning winters bite and hunger. With August aglow, winter is held back for now, but as the threshold of autumn, winter will inevitably begin to thread its frost in the morning, tracing its filigree across windowpanes.

The essay is the most mercurial and undefined literary form. In part thanks to academia and school, the introduction to the essay as a literary form is framed through a punitive perspective. Dry, boring, rigid, and constrained. The essay is the peak of academic vanity and exercise in frivolity. Research is conducted, followed by composition, ending with grading and subsequently deleted or abandoned of no consequence. Merely a taskmaster’s exercise, both futile and expected. The ability to write an essay marked one of those pre-requisite skills in engaging with the absurd ladder of the expectations called life. The essay is drilled to students as a compositional form with strict demands regarding mechanics and templated structure. Teachers and professors never indulge or reveal the essays fluidity or flexibility. Thankfully, editors and anthology series, such as “The Best American Essays,” seek to curate and expand the notion of what an essay is, beyond the limiting scholastic perspective which readers are inherently conditioned and oriented to. While writers such as Montaigne (the forms progenitor), Phillip Lopate, M.F.K Fisher, Adam Gopnik, Malcom Gladwell, Patricia Hampl, and Thomas De Quincy, prove that the essay is by far the most engaging and accessible form. Free of poetry’s strict discipline and adherence to form, line, rhythm and rhyme; while being completely disinterested in the concerns of novels or stories. The essay in turn, has been the prosaic medium for other writers, whereby they can drop fiction as a façade and engage in topics a writer is interested in, be it purely literary, personal, or inconsequently veering into the realm of public and political discourse. For a writer like Doris Lessing, the essay was both a natural medium for her early sociopolitical diatribes and then her scrutinizing candor of a century of ceaseless upheaval, existential threats, and upwelling change. For P.L. Travers, the essay presented the author as a serious scholar, as she resented continually being referred to as a children’s writer. While the beloved Mary Poppins character and series of novels brought her fame, fortune, and the love of readers, Travers found her young readership tiresome. P.L. Travers poured her intellect and anthropological curiosity into analyses and examinations of myth and folklore. Sadly, those critical texts and essays never found the same readership that her beloved Mary Poppins had.

For the late French writer, Christian Bobin, the essay was a chimeric entity. For Bobin, the essay was the natural form for his work, which lacked poetry’s rigours and intensity, demanding unwavering compliance and loyalty with historical poetic traditions, schools, and established formats. All the while impoverished regarding the basic ingredients and spices to properly define itself within the context of a piece of fictional prose. Rebellious still, Christian Bobin embraces the gilding of lyricism, without cheapening a poet’s appreciation and proclivity for language. For Bobin language is malleable. A material which can be kneaded and shaped. Bobin’s language is not static or didactic in application. Rather, its generous engulfing, where even the author embraces being swept away in the linguistic tides. This is of course where Bobin diverts from poets. Rather than distill and refine language to its ethereal essence, measured in precise lines and syllabic counts, Bobin embraces the freeform of prose. Christian Bobin’s essays are not without concern or topic. While they indulge in the finery of lyricism, they are meditative and contemplative. Not as grandiose as philosophy, grappling and wrestling with eternal questions of being, meaning, and value of existence; or proposing and arguing the nature of divinity in either a theological or personal context. Bobin’s essays observe, refine, and reflect reality through a multitude of facets. Where Annie Ernaux is the personal ethnographer, documenting and examining social waves, political events and movements with herself as the vantage point; Christian Bobin is the observer adrift within the aesthetics of reality and memory. A writer of purely literary terms, abandoning the need for social commentary and political discourse. Everyday life is enriched, enlivened, and enhanced by Bobin’s prose, as Bobin himself said, he writes to get out of himself. This otherwise brief and intensely lyrical essays are merely exercises of intrapersonal emancipations.

Encounters involving clouds, wildflowers, a voice, parable, a butterfly in flight, the frantic flee of sparrows, a spark of memory, each one is masterfully captured in prose not marred by its poetic flourish and allegiances, but encapsulating, showcasing the fully breadth and appreciation Christian Bobin has for the literary language, and its ability to provide aesthetic context to the experiences of the everyday. Mistaken marketing professionals and publicists, often misapply the notion that Christian Bobin is a writer of some special kind of self-help book. As if somehow his essays will support or facilitate readers to have some form of self-actualizing event. They couldn’t have missed the point of Bobin or his prose. “A Little Party Dress,” is not a book about providing meditative guidance to curate further gratitude or finding the happiness in the small joys of life. These are not testaments or exercises on mining or developing happiness habits. These are beautiful essays and pieces of prose which verve continually and unapologetically into the poetic. An image, a thought, a memory becomes the anchor point where by Bobin dives in further, without consideration or concern for any goal or directive purpose. By and large, the language is not only the operational mechanism, it is practicality the point of the book. It is the authors purpose to observe the everyday capture it within the limitations of language, and in turn get lost within the description of language and the tangents that arise. The sojourns into metaphysics; or the parable of Jonah enveloped by a whale, and a fickle god’s renouncement of his earlier judgement to smite in his indignation. There are examinations of fatigue from today’s world of rush and instant gratification, beautifully captured within the essay “May He Be Left In Peace,” whereas the existential anatomy of the businessman is dissected in “Promised Land.” A personal favourite was the titular ending essay: “A Little Party Dress,” a beautiful essay built of cubist images to finish up the collection, while sitting on the patio in the waning light of an August evening as summers heat burns off.

Unfortunately, under translated in English, Christian Bobin was often a bestseller in France. Bobin’s popularity may have stemmed from the European publishers and book market being less concerned with the marketization and taxonomical classification of a texts form. Fragment is as much a literary composition as essay or prose poem, readers are far more interested in the words use of language and their execution. “A Little Party Dress,” is one of the few collections of Bobin’s work available in English. There are two other collections of essays as well as appreciative reader pseudo-biography of Emily Dickinson, who Christian Bobin admired and adored; in addition to a meditative study and appreciation of the Saint Francis of Assisi, who was Bobin’s spiritual mentor. The defining feature of Christian Bobin’s work is heightened refined and distilled lyricism, never ostentatious but revealing in its craftsmanship. The fluidity of form between fragment, essay, poetry, and even diary, define Christian Bobin as a writer of his own caliber, however niche and eloquent they may be. As August burns itself into autumn with September’s yellowing leaves and harvest on the horizon, and October’s austere bone picked fields framed within gnarled knotted tree branches, with glowing pumpkins harkening and enticing the soul to return; it was pleasure to read a writer who captures the transience and fleetingness of everyday life and the passage of time.

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

M. Mary