Jaroslav Siefert spent most of the 20th century being buffeted by some of the greatest forces of social upheaval you could imagine. A Czech student who saw the shell shocked and pained soldiers return from the Great War only to watch in horror as the Nazis siezed his country there after and then hail the Russians as liberators only to sour on them and confront the Soviet explotaition of Czechoslovakia as well. Seifert loved poetry, and while he made his living as a journalist it’s his poetry that won him international recognition and respect, culminating in the 1984 Nobel Prize “for his poetry which endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man”
Works
“Life is a beautiful long dream if you just live what’s in front of you”
–About Childhood (translated by me with help of Google Translate)
“I cannot tear my eyes away from that picture. It is mine, and I also believe it is miraculous.”
“Old Tapestry”
Message
In a lot of what Seifert writes, there’s a sense of difficult and being weighed down (see Background for a sense as to all the stuff that weighed him down). But at the same time there is a joy and inspiration that he culls even from these moments of bleak oppression. I translated the “About Childhood Poem” illustrated above and read it to the boys (as I had intended to from the start of this project). While Owen saw it literally as watching your kids in a river bank, Alex thought it was more about not giving up, and I saw it as appreciating the moment. Honestly, chances are that we’re all right: there’s beauty in every moment, despite the cruel whims of politics.
Position: #7 Left Winger
Seifert’s ability to speak to both trauma and hope, both defensiveness and optimism, makes him an ideal attacker who can still be an asset on both sides of the ball. He doesn’t seem to have the breadth or scope of a central midfielder, but he seems like an ideal attacker who can make the needed moves both with and without the ball. In addition to the Eastern European heritage I can easily imagine him in Vozdovac highlight reels, so his colors reflect that team.
Obviously, reading a dozen or so poems by a man doesn’t make me an expert. Come on Czech literary geniuses bring on the criticism, I’m ready!
Next Time, Contraversial 2004 Honoree: Elifriede Jelinek
Sartre is a byword for an entire philosophical school one of the leading voices in the Existentialist movement wondering what is the purpose of life and can our freedom ever be truly purely experienced. Born and raised in Paris, he used the city of lights as his home base as he dove head long into the serious questions of the day. His award was given “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age,” a big phrase that in this case, might just be an understatement.
Works
“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
Sartre’s best known quote about soccer
“Every movement of a [teammate]…is decoded in the very movement which it occasions in another fellow member….Mediation for a given goalkeeper or center-forward is the pitch itself in so far as their common praxis has made it a common practical reality…As soon as [a player] takes up [one position] the common situation of the whole team is also modified.”
–Critique of Pure Reason, page 473 (This is the real idea, the other one is just a footnote)
Message
I mean, there’s a tonnage of them. Existentialism concerned itself with the nature of life itself, so there was…plenty of ground to cover. In reading his plays again though, the thought that came back to me again and again is how control is power, power is control. Humans simultaneously want it and fear it.No Exit plays with the question of how much anyone can control the (after)lives of others. The Respectful Prostitute considers how the “immoral” individual is at once dependent on the powerful authorities, and yet also able to overwhelm the authorities with their own powers (be they sex or truth). Dirty Hands covers the power of idealism and the power of compromise–both how people wield them, and how they are slaves to them. With all this in mind I’m putting Sartre at the heart of the team.
Position: #10 Attacking Midfielder
Sartre was a football fan (how much of a fan seems to be up unclear), but when you consider the fantasy of him lacing up a pair of boots and heading on to the field himself, you have to reckon with the fact that he clearly had more creativity, ideas and invention than anyone else. He could do more with power and control than anyone else I’ve read for this project, so it makes sense to put him at the center of the offense (and in the role with the greatest history of being a diva) the #10 job.
Think about his soccer quotes (given above). In Sartre’s eyes a team is made up of where all the players are in a moment, but every moment a player moves (which is pretty much all the time) it is changing. There’s no absolute reality or permanence, it’s always something new and different. So you have to focus on existing in the moment rather than worrying about the past or the future.
I genuinely think this would make him a superb attacking midfielder: creative, inventive, able to dismiss past hurts or future worries and just make the play he thinks is right in the moment. But I suppose others might see it as a limitation–he might have a hard time anticipating challenges, or be impossible to coach…(after all, he is the only Literature laureate to refuse to turn up for his award) so while I rate him highly, I don’t know what others would say.
What do you think? Is Sartre the free-wheeling creative force that this team has been waiting for? Or are would he have been so indifferent and apathetic that any moments of brilliance would have been undone by him announcing that he’d rather ponder a dandelion on the field than receive a pass from TS Eliot?.
Jennsen (far Left) in Singapore in 1902 (denstoredanske.lex.dk)
Jensen was a bit of a nomadic spirit in an age of expanding empires. He went from a medical student to a foreign journalist to a historian, poet, and novelist. After a hiatus during the second world war, the Nobel committee made him its first new recipient in five years: “for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style”
The day exposes mercilessly The cold rails and all the black mud, The waiting room with the chocolate vending machine, Orange peel, cigar stubs and burnt-out matches, The day gapes through with spewing gutters And an eternal grid of rain, Rain I say from heaven to earth.
How deaf and irremovable the world is, How devoid of talent its creator!
The day dawned so mournfully, But look – the rainfall gleams now!
Do you grudge the day its right to fight? After all, it is light now. And the smell of soil sets in between the rusty iron struts of the platform Mixed with the rank breath of the rain-dust – A hint of spring. Isn’t that consoling?
They Caught the Ferry
Message
It was a little hard to track down Jensen’s work (even in Danish it wasn’t easy to come by). If I were to judge by my extremely limited sample, I might say that he focuses on the ebb and flow of emotion is a universal experience. At times he’s bubbling over with hope, at times he’s mindful only of loss. The characters in his short film are confident, crazed, and terrified in short order. He seems to know that each emotion will only last until the net one comes.
Position: #3 Left Back
Like a daydreaming kid with equal turns doom and hope, I can see Jensen running down the flank thinking about a possible attack, only to realize he’s out of position and go screaming back the other way, and yet…being totally happy and natural doing it. I may never write like him…but that’s exactly how I played soccer during my youth, so I appreciate it.
As ever we’d love to hear from people with other thoughts. I see you clicking like, why not write the words “I liked it” below. Or give me a link to more of Jensen’s work so I can get a fuller understanding of him.
Next Time, OH BOY, One of the guys I already read: 1964 Honoree–Jean Paul Sartre (But to have some fun, I’ll try reading him in French)
Wladyslaw Reymont had a rather adventurous life for a failed tailor. He scrupulously studied his family’s struggles with money, but rather than try to provide for them, he ran off to join a travelling theater group (don’t get any ideas Owen). When he failed there he returned to Warsaw, wrote somewhat successfully and then got his big break when he got in a train accident and landed a nice settlement. With that financial independence, he had more time to write, and delivered his award winning works including the specifically namechecked: “great national epic, The Peasants“. (I read the first volume of The Peasants)
Works
‘The wind is always blowing in the face of the poor’
“In front of the crowd, and of the twinkling sinuous lines of tapers moving on, there gleamed a silver crucifix; following this came the holy images, dimly seen through a haze of cambric, and surrounded with flowers and lace and ornaments of tinsel. The procession arrived at the great church door, through which the sun irradiated the clouds of incense that it pierced; and the banners stooped to pass, the breezes made them float and flutter and flap, like the wings of some great green and purple birds”
Wladyslaw Reymont (trans. by Michael Dziewicki) p. 68
“Ah me! for in this world there is naught but trouble, and wailing, and woe! “And evil increases and multiplies, as doth the thistle in the woodlands! “All things are vain and to no purpose…like tinder-wood, and like the bubbles which the wind maketh on the water and driveth away. “And there is no faith, nor hope, save in God alone”
Wladyslaw Reymont (trans. by Michael Dziewicki) p. 179
Message
Is it possible to have the message that everything stinks? It seems overly simple, but that’s the biggest takeaway I had from reading Reymont. I’m not alone, the Nobel website itself notes that his other work presents a similarly “dark vision of man”. The whole book I read seemed to obsess with pointing out how the “simple farmers” were petty, venal, greedy, bitter and cruel to one another. Sadder still, the volume of The Peasants that I read might have been his peppiest, even though the climactic celebration of a wedding allows people to ignore the brutal and lonely death of a farm hand (yeah…it gets worse for characters after that). Just to ice the stink cake, he makes sure to throw in a healthy dollop of anti-Semitic stereotypes that go beyond the general “everyone stinks” to really castigate (and in other works specifically blame) people of a different faith.
Position: #5 Center Back
Reymont’s cynicism brings to mind the brutality of Central defenders whose primary value seems to lie in fouling other people right before they score. Like the legendary Spanish Cynical-Foul Folk hero Sergio Ramos…only, you know…much, much worse…and injured…and even more unlikable. Man, I’m hoping I can find literally anyone who will replace this schmo.
Did I totally misread Reymont? Is his writing more anti-capitalist than anti-Semitic? Did I get a cruel translation? Come on Polish literary scholars…let me hear from you.
Jose Echegaray might have been the smartest person we’ve read about yet. He seems to have been able to do pretty much everything. He read classics by age 12, was an engineer, a diplomat, taught himself German so he could read philosophy treatises and was working on massive Mathematics textbooks when he passed away. Throughout that whole time he was also a writer, specifically of plays which many likened to an Iberian Ibsen*. He shared the 1904 honor with Frederic Mistral, but was honored for his unique works, including “the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner, have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama”
*Not to be confused with an Iberian Ibson, which would make them a Spanish substitute for local Minnesota legendary midfielder Ibson.
Works
Echegaray’s works are all high level 19th century melodrama, and were ideal for the early days of cinema (though mostly in Spain only). But he had a keen ear for conversations and confusions between characters, as shown in the piece I read for this project: Son of Don Juan.
Don Juan: What are you thinking of? Ah! Pardon! I must not disturb you. Lazarus: You don’t disturb me father. I was thinking of nothing important. My imagination was wandering, and I was wandering after it. Don Juan: If you wish to work–to write–to read–and I trouble you I shall go. Ha. I shall go….Do you want me to go? for here I am…going.
Son of Don Juan, Act II aka You kids dealing with me in 10 years.
Message
Echegaray’s style is…a bit much for a modern reader. He seems to have a penchant for melodrama in that, he wrote a bunch of melodramas. In the modern age, melodrama is a bit silly, a bit farcical and a bit easy to dismiss, but for a long time that was the style, and Echegaray did it better than almost anyone. For someone as immersed in complicated high brow pursuits as Echegaray clearly was it is apparent that he was, at the root of it all someone who had no shame in his feelings. It’s good to have big feelings.
Position: #11 Winger
Echegaray certainly seems to have been a thoroughly talented master of all trades, it would make him an excellent attacker who can link with other players, but the melodramatic tendencies make him also a prime candidate for Nobel FC’s resident flopper. I just picture someone touching his monocle chain and leaving Echegaray writhing in mid-air like a final tongue of smoke leaving a doused fire. While he was a life long Madrista, I have him in Oaxaca’s colors, as their flair for the dramatic look seems best for our purposes.
Am I too harsh on Echegaray? Do you think he belongs elsewhere, or at least would have been more of an engineer constructing things than a ham emoting all over the place?
Born to a long line of passionate defenders of Provence in southern France, Mistral retained his devotion to his homeland even while nations rose and France, the French language, and Parisian culture overwhelmed the pastoral south. Though he often ran away from school in his childhood, he found a love of learning and especially his local language. Eventually his commitment to writing in and raising awareness of the Provencal dialect earned this award from the Swedish Academy: “in recognition of the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Provençal philologist”
Works
Mistral’s poetry is fairly wide ranging, but the most recognized works are some long form narrative poems. In that spirit I read his most widely known work Mireio. It tells the story of a simple young love story in pastoral Provence, but also manages to weave in harvest song, murders, sea monsters, and family strife. Naturally, it was made into an Opera.
Production of Mirelle (From Phil’s Opera World)
“We’d climb the turret-stair, my prince and I, And gladly throw the crown and mantle by, And would it not be blissful with my love, Aloft, alone to sit, the world above? Or leaned upon the parapet by his side, To search the lovely landscape far and wide,
“Our own glad kingdom of Provence descrying, Like some great orange-grove beneath us lying All fair? And, ever stretching dreamily Beyond the hills and plains, the sapphire sea; While noble ships, tricked out with streamers gay, Just graze the Chateau d’If, and pass away?”
From Canto III of Mistral’s Mireio
Message
Mistral seems bound and determined to challenge the assumptions of the powerful. Parents want to control their kids, but the kids might be right. The Parisian upper crust might sneer and the peasant folk, but the peasant folk have as much poetry and artistry as the hoity toity. Also, Provence is great…but that’s less a literary theme and more just his personal mantra.
Position: #2 Right Back
Granted, as our first French writer honored, I may be leaning on my adoration of the Grenoble defense and their stalwart ways, but Mistral also seems to have a truly daring instinct, a flair for the dramatic and the dangerous. At times it makes his return to more standard romantic fare deeply disappointing. In that way I kept picturing him running head long down the sideline twisting up defenders and playing gorgeous passes, only to suddenly remember he also had to defend and being forced to haul buns back to defense. Maybe there’s some deep running connection to Mathys Tourraine I don’t yet know about.
Mistral might be my new favorite discovery of this project. I’d go so far as to say I’d rather cover Mireo than Romeo and Juliet with students, and I’d rather have the chaotic joy of Mistral on the wing than sturdy solidity in defense. Am I nuts? Hit up the comment section below and state your case.
Next Time, the Nobel couldn’t make up their mind so we’ll do this again with the other 1904 Honoree–Jose Echegaray
As you might guess from a name with this many slashed o’s, Bjørnsterne was Norwegian. He was part of the so called “Four Greats” in Norwegian writing of the 19th century. While Henrik Ibsen is the best known, Bjørnson was part of the Norwegian Nobel committee…and as you’ll find out, having a connection with powerful people helps a little. Still Bjørnson was a quality writer, and was particularly lauded for “his noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, which has always been distinguished by both the freshness of its inspiration and the rare purity of its spirit” (which is saying something as he only wrote one book of poetry. There were lots of essays, newspaper articles, and some plays and books, but the poetry was all I could find at the library)
Works
From: “Song for Norway”
Yes, we love this land that towers Where the ocean foams; Rugged, storm-swept, it embowers Many thousand homes. Love it, love it, of you thinking Father, mother dear, And that night of saga sinking Dreamful to us here.
1859 (This also became the Norwegian National Anthem)
From: “Norway, Norway!”
Norway, Norway, Rising in blue from the sea’s gray and green, Islands around like fledglings tender, Fjord-tongues with slender, Tapering tips in the silence seen. Rivers, valleys, Mate among mountains wood-ridge and slope Wandering follow. Where the wastes lighten, Lake and plain brighten, Hallow a temple of peace and hope. Norway, Norway Houses and huts, not castles grand, Gentle or hard, Thee we guard, thee we guard, Thee our future’s fair land.
Message
As you can tell, Bjørnson’s primary message is that Norway is awesome (also awesome…if my translation is right, his name translates to “Bear-star Bear-son”). One of his primary ways of getting there is through the realism that marks him and the other Four Greats. His writing names some of the best things around and how it moves him. Digging deeper into his work we might say that his message is that the world and the space around us is powerful, beautiful and inspiring just as it is, and to appreciate what there is. (Not unlike JM Coetzee…only older and more unkempt)
Position: #8 Central Midfielder
Bjørnson does not exactly strike me as a great or inspiring writer that I want to go back to. But it’s clear that he loved his country and wanted to be a leader in the arena of politics, literature, diplomacy, and just about everything. It makes him seem a bit like the noisiest voice in your recess pick up game, even if he is far from the best player out there. He would run here, there, and everywhere, like a box-to-box midfielder who is a bit past their prime. (And obviously, since he’s all about Norway, I put his crest in the Rosenborg White and Black.)
I realize that this critique is probably going to rile up Norwegian literary scholars (they are one of my biggest demographics). So by all means bring on your arguments to the contrary!
Next Time:
We’ve gone throughout the year with seven reviews (one for every twenty years). I’m tempted to start going in ten year increments (all the old nominee posts were done and dusted by the end of June)…but I’d like to make sure that I can keep this pace up before I commit. So we’ll stay in 20 year increments to prepare for the 2024 honoree next fall. But there will be extra posts because there was a double laureate in 1904 (Shocked face).
Fosse is only the fourth Norwegian to win the highest award in literature, and the first one in almost a century (but there’s totally not a Swedish Norwegian rivalry…goodness no). Born in Southwestern, Norway (in the town of Haugesund…a frequent opponent of our favorite Rosenborg sides), he committed himself to writing after an early accident left him confronting mortality. But while he was always a writer, he almost opted to focus instead on being a rock ‘n’ roll musician. He opted to continue studying and building his authorial voice being called (in different turns) a Modern Ibsen, or a Norwegian Beckett, culminating in the Nobel committee naming him its laureate “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”
Works
God is so far away that no one can say anything about him and that’s why all ideas about God are wrong, and at the same time he is so close that we almost can’t notice him, because he is the foundation in a person, or the abyss, you can call it whatever you want
all good art has this spirit, good pictures, good poems, good music and what makes it good is not the material, not matter, and its not the content the idea, the thought, no, what makes it good is just this unity of matter and form and soul that becomes spirit…prayer and confession and penance all at once…
God is love and love is inconceivable without free will…
Jon Fosse from A New Name (parts VI and VII of the Septology, published 2022 in translation by Damion Searles
Message
Stream of conscious writing isn’t my favorite, and it can be almost impenetrable, but Fosse’s work was surprisingly smooth and comforting. Everything in the work I read A New Name played beautiful with random chance, doubled identities, parallel realities and the indescribable unity of everything. If I can put an overly simplistic button on it, I would say: there is an absurdity to everything we say and think and do, and that absurdity is part of the beauty of life.
Position: #8 Box to Box Midfielder
Fosse’s style is so fluid, so wide ranging, and so impossible to pin down (intentionally so given the stream of conscious style) that the only position that can do him justice is the #8 role, where he has the freedom to push forward or drop back as he pleases. And indeed, he, his work, and everything he offers can be both fulcrum of the attack and anchor of the defense all at the same moment.
Sound off in the comments below to share your thoughts on the newest member of the Nobel FC Family
Next Time (Rewind the Clocks, we’re going to catch up on one that we missed in our Mess of 03’s, and another Norwegian to boot) 1903 Honoree–Bjornsterne Bjornson
In just a few days, the Nobel committee will announce the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. They will join an elite group of writers from around the world, and a small selection of those writers who we have read, reviewed, and classified as members of Nobel FC: The only Fantasy Football team where the Fantasy is that these people would ever play.
I’ll try to read the author in question as soon as I can, and write their post by the beginning of November, but I wanted to take a moment to consider who will be joining this august group.
How does the “draft” work
In Professional Sports there are annual “drafts” where teams select from a collection of players not yet in the league. They study and examine their abilities, debate the best choice, and then “draft” someone to become a part of their organization.
The Nobel Prize is a little like that. The “Team” in question is the Swedish Academy (of Literature). They collection of players not yet in the league is literally everyone on earth, who has yet to be awarded the Nobel, is living, and who wrote something. (Literally, they have awarded a prime minister for stirring speech writing, and a folk singer for his lyrics.)
That’s a big field so they take in nominations from other Academies of Literature around the world, professors of universities, living laureates, and presidents of Authors’ guilds. That is still a very big field so they narrow it down to five finalists: study and examine the writers abilities, debate the best choice and then “award” someone the Prize.
This process has been a little controversial over the years. After all, why do the Swedes get the final vote? (Alfred Nobel said so) Does the fact that the Swedish Academy is mostly old, white, male, Europeans explain the fact that most of the laureates in history have been old, white, male Europeans? (Yes) Will they try to be more inclusive in the future? (Yes, though they kind of had to after a pretty ugly scandal).
So Who Could be “Drafted” This Year?
We don’t know the top 5 candidates, or even the top 100 candidates who got nominated, and we won’t for another 50 years (long after the internet, including this post becomes a time capsule for aliens). But we have a list of likely candidates from gamblers and prognosticators. (I’ll toss out 11 here)
The leading favorites are Can Xue, a Chinese author who frequently challenges the increasingly authoritarian establishment in Beijing, and Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer (and one of my wife’s absolute favorites) who writes book that have a following in seemingly every country on earth. However, given that the Nobel likes writers who court a little political controversy, Murakami seems less likely than Xue. It’s also been more than 10 years since an Asian Writer was awarded the prize, so you could argue that Xue/Murakami would get an overdue award.
Of the last ten laureates 4 have been from Western Anglophile countries, and 2 have been French. So other plausible candidates like American Thomas Pynchon, Global Indian/Brit/American Salman Rushdie, Canadian Anne Carson and Australian Gerald Murnane and Frenchman Pierre Michon seem to be plausible if the Academy doesn’t try to break from it’s old habits of just cycling through the West’s heaviest hitters. (YAY FOR HEGEMONY!)
If they wanted to award a Western literary heavyweight but NOT someone who writes in a frequently awarded language, then they could consider Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, or Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu. Then again they have given out 3 awards to similar writers in the past ten years, all of whom were political, but one of whom (Austrian Peter Handke) had massive PR blowback due to his excuses for genocidal dictators.
Beyond Europe and Asia, the oddsmakers and the pundits don’t have many options. Perennial contender Ngui wa Thiong’o of Kenya looks to represent Subsaharan Africa, while Mexican poet Homero Aridjis is judged the best bet from Latin America (an area of the world not awarded since 2010)
Analysis: Who will it be? Who should it be?
In articles analysing a team’s draft-day decisions, writers look at two things. What they think the team leaders will do, and what the author themselves would do if they had a chance.
Having already read books by Murakami and Rushdie, I read a few well-recommended lines from the other nine and came up with this analysis.
The Academy Will Pick
The Swedish Academy tends not to prioritize the best selling or most widely acclaimed author available, they prefer those who have something artistic to offer in their work and especially if they have something beyond the purely personal to uncover. At times that leads them to revel in awarding obscure writers, and in the last three years, awarding more diverse picks.
So I think they will pick: Can Xue. I only read very brief exceprts from her work…but even that seemed weird and obtuse. Critics claim her work is often plotless, but that’s not a negative in the hands of the Nobel Committee. She’s got art, she’s got style, she’s got a point of view. She’s got to be the favorite.
Honorable mentions: John Fosse, Mircera Cartarescu, Homero Aridjis.
I Would Pick
If left up to me, I would try to award a writer from outside the common-sphere of Nobel winners (ie Western Europe/America and white men). A more diverse writer with a point of view that connects to the wider world would be the ideal for me. Artistry is something I think lies in the eye of the beholder, so better to be clear than artful in my eyes.
So I would pick: Homero Aridjis. Admittedly, I only looked at four of his poems, but he evokes a universality similar to Paz and Neruda, while also considering the broader scope of history and nature–which might suit the climate change conscious Academy/myself to boot.
Honorable Mentions: Salman Rushdie (I still think of him as an Indian writer despite his increasingly American identity), Ngui wa Thiong’o, Louise Erdrich (totally left field pick, I also wanted to offer a woman of color)
Who would you pick?
Leave a comment below, please, even alien overlords, comment with your pick.
Next Time…I rush to judgement on whomever our winner is Jon Fosse
I’m awarding myself 2 Nonsense points (1 if they’re on the 11, 2 if they’re in my Honorable mentions, 5 if I actually call it…see how long it takes me to get to 11)
Our first laureate from outside of Europe, John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa back when the country was fiercely divided between the white colonists and the native black population. Living with this unjust and racist system from his childhood shapes what Coetzee writes about throughout his career and helps him to always balance the powerful and the marginalized in his space. It’s also why the committee made sure to point out how he finds countless ways to “[portray] the surprising involvement of the outsider”
Works
From The Death of Jesus
“You have a false understanding of what it means to read. Reading is not just turning printed signs into sounds. Reading is something deeper. True reading means hearing what the book has to say and pondering it— perhaps even having a conversation in your mind with the author. It means learning about the world— the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be.”
–2020
From “Youth”
What is the point of coming all the way from Cape Town to London if he is to be quartered on a housing estate miles outside the city, getting up at the crack of dawn to measure the height of bean plants? He wants to join [the government], wants to find a use for the mathematics he has laboured over for years, but he also wants to go to poetry readings, meet writers and painters, have love affairs. How can he ever make the people [in the government office]—men in tweed jackets smoking pipes, women with stringy hair and owlish glasses—understand that? How can he bring out words like love, poetry before them?
Published in Granta (2017)
Illustration from New Yorker
From “The Better Player”
I have played sports (tennis, cricket), I have done a lot of cyccling, bit in all of this my aspiration has simply been to do as well as I can. Winning or losing–who cares? How I judge whether or not I have done well is a private matter, between myself and what I suppose I would call my conscience.
–Letter written to Paul Auster year 2009
Message
Literary criticism of Coetzee tends to emphasize a few things: the sparsity of his prose, a degree of absurdity in how plainly bizarre things are stated, and a degree of desperation and disaster that the protagonist uses as a source of strength. In that sense another quote from his letters to Auster stands out: both an elite tennis player and a great artist elicit a common response in Coetzee: “I can see how it was done, but I could never have done it myself, it is beyond me; yet it was done by a man (now and again a woman) like me; what an honor to belong to the species [he/she] exemplifies”. In a humanity marked by a quest for transcendency, Coetzee’s work highlights how beautiful and powerful our fleeting and daily thoughts and experiences can be. Whether it be watching a backhand, biking to the shops, parenting a stubborn child, or reacting to an author’s work, that is where the power of humanity comes.
Position: #11 Winger
The main work I read for this was The Death of Jesus. The book opens with a depiction of a young boy playing as a winger. While I doubt that Coetzee’s choice was personal, it does seem apropos for the author himself. Like a speedy winger charging towards goal, Coetzee is direct, driven and transparent in his objective. At times he fails (Death of Jesus often got overwhelmed by the religious allegory rather than the more engaging humanity of a flawed father–something I know quite well), but the failures seem to drive him and his characters to stand back up and do the same thing again. You likely know what Coetzee is up to, but he can still put it past you with ease. (As such, the player he reminds me of most is his fellow South African Bongokhule Hlongwane, though the team colors I applied here suit Emelec as Guyaquil feels more of a fit for the urbane Coetzee and more fitting for the Spanish medium of Death of Jesus).
One complication with all this, I am basing my interpretation on evidence from after Coetzee’s prize winning works were published. Have you read his other lauded work? Does it change your opinion to read Waiting for the Barbarians or Disgrace? Leave a comment below…please (seriously…someone is reading these, right?)
MacKenzie's Boot Room 