S.Y. Agnon's speech at the Nobel Banquet

S.Y.Agnon received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. His acceptance speech is a laudatio of his roots and a blessing for his gift of words. Unfortunately, I feel some translation clumsiness, but the main message is still clear.

The winner: Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, it was announced Thursday morning in the Grand Hall at the Swedish Academy. The 74 year old Peruvian novelist, essayist and playwright has been active in the political life of his home country. In announcing the award, the Nobel committee cited "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Mario Vargas Llosa speaking in Mexico in September 2010. Credit: Mario Guzman / EPA

The next Nobel?

I was thinking during the week-end, following a discussion about a former laureate, who will be the next Nobel prize winner in literature? It is one of the categories I am always interested in. For the rest, I am not highly qualify to judge and utter too many opinions. Another one, the "Peace", I am convinced it is mostly politicized and don't have too many expectations. But literature...

And basically, I was thinking, what if...it will be Amos Oz? Because it is about politics here too, even the quality of the works are going far beyond the temporary divisions.

I love Oz's writings, from the children stories to the love novels. And the poetry. The contact was mostly mediated by translations, with the exception of some poetries accompanied with the English version, but still was able to fully feel the force of his words. As in the case of David Grossman, another favorite of mine, I was often disaponted by the incongruence of the political statements. Too late, too contextual, too stereotypical and biased for not being disappointed enough. Because I was expecting more intellectual strength and coherence, and the force to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. A force that I was always rely on in their writings.

Wait and see.

Esterhazy Peter

on writing:

"My admittedly conscious use of language, I think, was not conscious. It was my hand or my stomach that knew. In short, I didn’t approach writing from the vantage point of theory, but from the side of practice – much like a stonemason".

Literature and science

An article about how to interpret what we are reading and what, why and how we are understanding what we are reading. One of my observation is that, the altruistic reader is hard to find, as in many situations what we are looking to and through books is to find answers to our questions, more or less personal. The interest we share in books could be our interest in looking for solutions. Mostly when it is about pure literature. As in the case of understanding and open ourselves to our - non-Western cultures - the temptation is rather to use our patterns of thinking than to open to new ideas and thoughts.

Another observation I have after reading this article is that even we have books for centuries and centuries and the quantity of writing - in the online contemporary era - is increasing in an accelerate rhythm, our knowledge about the rationality and mechanisms of our brain faced with the written page is minimal.

Who are our readers and why we are reading ?

My newest discovery is

Andrew Crumey

Mr. Nathan Zuckerman is leaving the stage

"Nathan Zuckerman is sick. I've read this, is in the book. He recently underwent a prostate surgery, perhaps Alzheimer is waiting to share its part too...". "Oh, you mean Philip Roth? Impossible. Can believe is true...And he's not even 70. It will be such an incredible loss". "Yes, they are not too many people like him these days. You know, he was involved in Operation Skylock, the Demyanuk case". "Illness don't spare anybody. I undestood him so well after reading the story of Alexander Portnoy. Psychanalitically speaking, I can understand a whole lot how his life is now".

And the dialogue could continue, be enriched and diversified. It's not an exchange of words about weather or the last events from the life of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. It touch the abuse of biography in interpreting the fiction and yes, in many cases, the "elitist" interpretation of a piece of literature is badly and irremediably affected by a narrow focus on the life of writer. I can guess the hidden smile of Thomas Pynchon while reading - I can bet he's connected to Internet - the desperate efforts to identify him. Nobody saw him for almost 20 years, no interviews, public readings, we don't know how his personal life is going on. For sure, his works are cryptic and only the stubbornness of a detective-skills literary critic will help us to reveal the inner personal substance of his wonderful novels.


The first chapter of Exit Ghost

Writing in the Dark, By David Grossman

The Independent

Reviewed by Michael Glover

Sunday, 23 November 2008

The Israeli novelist David Grossman has always written from a position of impassioned embattlement. Born in the 1960s, he has matured as man and writer during the very same decades that Israel itself has been coming into being as a self-sufficient state and nation. His books have alternated between fiction and non-fiction, tacking between one and the other.
For Grossman, there is no possibility of creating a body of writing which is not intruded upon by politics. This new book, a slim volume of essays which characteristically shifts from fiction to politics and back again, reflects upon his own maturing as man and writer, and it continues to ask – as his fiction always asks – the most difficult and searching questions of the state to which he belongs.
In this book Grossman analyses his own fictional procedures. What has his writing been good for? How has it helped him to engage with the day to day realities of life in a fragile state surrounded by enemies? Fiction, he argues, has helped him to fight back against the entrenched belief that Israel is a victim. He speaks of claustrophobia, even of a sense of suffocation. How to rid oneself of such feelings? Writing about reality is one way of fighting back, of throwing off the miasma of fear, impotence, paranoia. Why? Because to tell a story is one way of organising the world, and by so doing one changes that world. It is to know yourself, and to know, to get level with, and even to encompass, that ever threatening Other. It is a way of coming to know that Other from within as yet another striving human being such as oneself; even to delve down as far as those parts of him "that deter and threaten".
This is a powerfully humanistic vision for fiction. It gives back to fiction a mighty role for good, if what Grossman says is true. "Literature," he thunders, "reminds us of our duty to demand from ourselves the right to individuality and uniqueness." The message sounds almost touchingly old-fashioned, that literature should be thought to be capable of offering us counsel and even be capable of healing us of our terrible, distorted perceptions of reality. Can literature really be that important?
Yes, says Grossman, to a novelist such as himself who grew up in an atmosphere of silence – the silence of the unspoken horrors of the Holocaust – and fragmented whispers; who grew up in a society haunted by the dread of death; who grew up in a society which has known strife, both internal and external, for the best part of 40 years, and which still longs for the easy sense of everydayness that more settled societies enjoy almost as a matter of course. Literature has its place of honour amid all this terrible fragility. Why? Because literature, at its best, individualises; it plucks the reader out of the anonymous masses. It "redeems for us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of the millions". '
This kind of vision has no time for the nonsense of abstruse theorising about the nature of fictive language. Literature is weaponry in a battle to the death against the forces of destruction and unreason.
Grossman's words have a tremendous, forceful eloquence about them, from first to last. They are a delight to read, and all the more so because his English is slightly fractured, slightly odd. Their power reminds one of the poems Miroslav Holub wrote under Communism. Here are writers witness to injustice, fighting back against the corrosive power of ossified attitudes and partial truths.
Will they still sing quite so impressively, and quite so eloquently, when Israel achieves that state of peaceful normality, that lovely continuum of existence for which Grossman longs with all his heart and soul? What will there be left to write about then? What will it be like to write without the quickening dread of the enemy at the gates?