Finally, I see myself represented in a Nobel-winner (Pamuk at Right)
Orhan Pamuk was raised in Istanbul and continues to revel in the city to this day. It is for him what New York is for Woody Allen or Dublin is for James Joyce This makes sense as his family has long standing ties to the city and the mixture of aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbors influenced his life from early childhood and deeply inform his choices as a writer. Also…it probably made it easier for him to be a goof as the picture of young Orhan suggests.
Though he spent some time in the United States and elsewhere, Istanbul has long remained his base of operations and his muse. As Turkey modernized, struggled with modernization, questioned its place and reiterated itself, Pamuk has felt the same tumultuous relationships himself. When he won the Nobel Prize in 2006 it was with clear consideration for his unique view of local melancholy (huzun), challenges to identity, parallel lives, and alienation. Or to put it in the more succinct words of the Swedish Academy: in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city[, Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”.
Works
The germs of this project started twenty years ago, when Pamuk won the Nobel Prize and I picked up Snow from the high school library the same day. While I didn’t fully understand the fluid and digressive writing at the time, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the conflict between and within people trapped in a blizzard and a world outside of their control. This summer, I read Silent House: a much earlier novel with a more blunt style that again captured rival political views within people struggling against their perceived confinement.
“In a brutal country like ours, where human life is ‘cheap’, it’s stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.” —Snow
“We’re not stupid! We’re just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction” —Snow
Pamuk’s Silent House is fictional, but this feels about right
““You can’t start out again in life, that’s a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you’ve finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn’t understand before, in order to understand life.” —Silent House
“That passion for listening to stories leads us astray every time, dragging us off to a world of fantasy, even as we continue to live in one of flesh and blood”. —Silent House
Message
While Pamuk’s writing style is in keeping with other 21st century winners (to wit: long complex sentences that reflect consciousness), the content of those sentences feels less dreamlike and more defensive. Things never go very deep, and only memory and history pull us away from reacting to what’s in front of us. Be ready, any moment could challenge your very soul.
Position: #5 Center Back
I often put more aggressive writers up in the attack, but the role of memory, personal history, and the stolid steadiness of Pamuk’s Istanbul existence makes me think of him much more as someone in the defensive line. It also fits with the style I sense, constant vigilance and regular preparation to leap into action. Also given that Pamuk is someone who, by his own admission, imagined his childhood glory as being an 89th minute substitute, I like the idea that, after spending most of the game clearing the ball away, he would join a final box crash in the hope of heading in a goal.
(Sidenote: I drew that idea of his fantasy from a fabulous interview Pamuk gave to Der Speigel in 2008 talking about how soccer also matches these battles for the game and the supporters. It’s an excellent read and clearly indicates how firmly his fandom resides in his mind.)
Next Time–October means DOUBLE NOBEL FC!
First–I’ll post my Pre-Announcement Predictions
Then–Half-way through the month I’ll post thoughts on Knut Hamsen (while rapidly reading the work of this year’s laureate)
Louise Gluck is (as of this writing) the most recent American Nobel Laureate (U-S-A! U-S-A!). She spent her childhood as a second generation American from Jewish immigrant families on Long Island in New York City. The more suburban life reflected her family’s comfort and education (and the now famous factoid that her uncle invented the Xacto Knife, and her dad helped sell it). While she was a gifted student, her own struggles with mental health and anorexia led her to pursue only the classes she wanted (rather than a formal degree program) at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University.
Those courses clearly worked for her as she soon saw her work published in a host of popular American magazines throughout the 70s and 80s before starting to release poetry collections. Much of her work reflected the darkness of her experiences and mental health needs, but always in ways that amplified some connections to universal questions and experiences. The Swedish Academy felt the same way giving her the 2020 Nobel Prize “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Works
I set up a Fable Book club to read one of Gluck’s more recent collections with 2014’s Faithful and Virtuous Night (a play on words with those noble k-nights…get it?), and while it was mostly me shouting into the void (you know, for a change of pace), there were some solid pieces I took away with me.
Midnight
Speak to me, aching heart: what Ridiculous errand are you inventing for yourself Weeping in the dark garage With your sack of garbage: it is not your job To take out the garbage, it is your job To empty the dishwasher. You are showing off Again, Exactly as you did in childhood–where Is your sporting side, your famous Ironic detachment? A little moonlight hits The broken window, a little summer moonlight, Tender Murmurs from the earth with its ready Sweetnesses– Is this the way you communicate With your husband, not answering When he calls, or is this the way the heart Behaves when it grieves: it wants to be Alone with the garbage? If I were you, I’d think ahead. After fifteen years, His voice could be getting tired; some night If you don’t answer, someone else will answer.
A Work of Fiction
As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow envel- oped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars? I stood a while in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently de- stroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.
Message
Gluck’s work is often grounded in slice of life observations, little banal moments that might otherwise pass you by but contain within them the kernel or nugget of deeper understanding. Her tendency is not to simply say it, but instead to present it, consider it, question it and leave it to the reader to ponder further. You can find meaning through reflection during life’s little moments.
Position: #2 Right Back
Like Hermann Hesse (who I read around the same time), I felt pretty nonplussed about Gluck’s work. There were moments sure, but nothing that really grabbed me or stood out. She seemed to constantly be asking questions that sometimes connected, but most of the time…didn’t.
This all reminds me of nothing so much as a wing player who makes frequent hopeful crosses and attempts only to find nobody at home on the other end (I had tickets to watch Adrian Heath era Minnesota United…if you know, you know). By asking the questions again and again, there’s a little hope that maybe, just maybe, one will connect and hit home…but it’s much more of a law of large numbers issue than supreme talent. I decided to put Gluck back in the formation because her style strikes me as far more traditional than innovative, and I’m not sure she would have the mentality to cut in like an attacker might. So like Romaine Metanire of old…I’m putting her in at Right Back.
Maybe this is too harsh, as ever I’m open to other interpretations.
Next Time: 1986 Honoree–Wole Soyinka (the first–and so far only–west African winner)
Nelly Sachs started out as the daughter of a prosperous family in Berlin, Germany. Then perhaps the greatest shroud of the 20th century, Nazi power, stretched out and covered her world with darkness.
Fortunately, poetry saved her…literally actually. Having developed an appreciation for and then correspondence with the first female Nobel Literature Laureate (Selma Lagerlof, 1909), she was able to emigrate to Sweden with her mother and avoid the reign of terror imposed by Hitler and the Nazi regime. Once there she continued to grow her skills as a writer, translating a tonnage of Swedish correspondence and poetry, while still making room for her own work processing the traumatic reality of seeing your homeland attack you and your family.
Though Sachs’ mental health was permanently affected by her trauma, the writing that she said captured the “tragedy of the Jewish people” was integral in winning the Nobel in 1966 “for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength”
Works
O the chimneys
“O the chimneys Oh the ingeniously devised habitations of death When Israel’s body drifted as smoke Through the air We welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep, A star that turned black Or was it the a ray of sun.”
Someone will take the ball
Someone will take the ball from the hands that play the game of terror.
Please note that the image that partners “Someone Will Take the Ball” is intentionally the dumbest possible illustration for a very serious subject…because humor is a defense mechanism.
from Eli “the murderers sowed my people in the earth. O may its seed be full of stars …. I was only half sown, lying already in the grave, knew already how warmth leaves the flesh– how motion leaves the bones– heard already the language of the bones when corruption sets in– language of the blood when it congeals– language of the dust striving anew after love.”
Message
Sachs greatest challenges and greatest successes were born out of the tragedy she and her fellow jewish German citizens endured: the Holocaust and the associated displacement of all involved. Unsurprisingly this difficult experience anchors everything she writes, and while it is strange, unnerving, and sometimes absurd, it is also a call to action and an act of defiance. You find strength through pain.
Position: #5 Center Back
With a theme like that, there’s really no doubt in my mind: Sachs is an enforcer of the first order. She would be the kind of player who would cut you in half and dare you to get up again. She’s so focused on these skills that she’s not about to threaten to score herself. But the defensive intensity is enough that any goals scored against her would be coupled with shoves and elbows from then on (just imagining her battling Hermann Hesse makes me smile). With an attitude that fierce and a temprament to boot, she very clearly lines up in my mind with the “‘the hell you lookin’ at?!?” defensiveness of Montanans I grew up with.
Honestly, part of me is feeling a little awkward taking Sachs pain and running it through this bizarre exercise, so if you feel like I should apologize, let me know.
Next Time–Time for the other half of the ’66 Winners: Shmuel Yosef Agnon whose writing Sachs said offered a more hopeful counterpoint to the tragedy in her work.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is one of only two black African authors to win the Nobel prize. Unlike the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, he was born and raised on the Eastern coast of the continent in the Sultanate of Zanzibar (part of present day Tanzania), but had to flee the country shortly after he finished his high school education due to an overthrow of the Islamic ruler of the island.
Displaced from his home, Gurnah was pushed into life as a refugee, in a moment that clearly shaped (but did not dictate) his work thereafter. He immersed himself into studies of literature and became a professor first in Nigeria and then at the University of Kent. Throughout this time he also wrote a small selection of lauded and awarded novels (though they weren’t considered big sellers) leading both him and others to believe the announcement of his name was “a prank” or “a joke”. But the Nobel truly did award him “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
Works
I read/listened to his latest novel: Theft, and liked it enough that I’m certainly planning on reading/listening to more later. A few key quotes I loved:
“Does beauty like hers make its own rules, disregarding responsibilities and duties?”
“What do these people (foreigners/tourists/volunteers) want with us? Why do they come here? They come here with their filth and their money and they interfere with us and ruin our lives for their pleasure, and it seems that we cannot resist their wealth and their filthy ways … Volunteer! You see them in their big new cars, bringing us their goodwill. They should stay in their own country and do their goodwill there.”
(This is as perfect an encapsulation of my old colleague’s claim that I and those like me were part of “the New Raj”)
Message
Obviously, as someone who spent several years teaching in post-colonial systems and studying the legacy of British colonialism, I’m biased…but fortunately, so is Gurnah, so we’ll get along fine. Impressively, if unsurprisingly, he doesn’t opt for a simple lesson about that flag planting frenzy, instead I’d say he turns a careful eye on the human scale of the shifts and argues colonialism’s legacy lives on in those with a will to power who adopt its lessons.
Position: #3 Left Back
Gurnah reminds me of a full back, he’s wide ranging, flexible and fluid, able to react to whatever is thrown at him. He often reacts to the world that is flung in his face, but he can still cut in and be dangerous in a way that echoes Tolstoy, Ishiguro, Jane Austen and Scotland star Andy Robertson (yes, I linked a Liverpool player to Leo Tolstoy and I stand by it!)
In another crass attempt to get someone to leave a comment on my posts, I’ll just point this out: Gurnah makes 4 Left Backs, but I only have 1 Right Back and 1 Left Winger…am I going to hard on the position I played back in my AYSO glory days? Or have I been fair to put progressive/socialist leaning players on the left?
Next Time (pingponging back from the most recent decade to the first one) 1906 Honoree–Giossue Carducci
Elfriede Jelinek is the first female writer we’ve covered in our Nobel Laureate reread project, and she is a truly distinctive voice in contrast to what else we’ve read in this project.
Jelinek was born in Austria shortly after the fall of the third reich but with a family that connected both to Austrian high society and Czechoslovakian Jewish community. She began her writing career as a poet before moving into fiction and then drama, all the while maintaining frequent poetic interludes that border on free verse stream of consciousness (the kind that is…challenging to parse). While she has long been widely appreciated in German literature, but less widely known in translation. She was taken aback by being given the Nobel in 2004: “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power”. She was not alone as one member of the Swedish academy resigned following her prize calling her work: “whining, unenjoyable public pornography”, and “a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure”. She’s also had a documentary that calls her a “linguistic terrorist”.
Jelinek still writes, but as someone who struggles with agoraphobia and paranoia, she did not accept the award in person (like Jean Paul Sartre 40 years before).
Works
“Erika distrusts young girls; she tries to gauge their clothing and physical dimensions, hoping to ridicule them”–The Piano Teacher
“We made these nothings [athletes] into greats, into disturbers. Into heavyweights. We commoners, we who can never get used to our lives. The quiet want to be loud, but the loud don’t want to be quiet”–The Sports Play (Die Spielstruck)
“As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace; football is a kind of Geiger Counter of civilization, a catalyst for good as well as bad.” (2012 Interview)
Message
Elfriede Jelinek is a truly combative writer. While the Nobel committee first cited her musical flow, I found myself considering another aspect of her writing the committee also noted. Her works “present a pitiless world where the reader is confronted with a locked-down regime of violence and submission, hunter and prey.” The psycho-sexual drama of The Piano Teacher (as seen in the well regarded 2001 film) is all about hunter and prey. While sports is all about two opponents, her play about sports builds that to an extreme degree leading to violent confrontations and ideological duels. To me, her writing seemed to revolve around a rather dark and dire message: we must constantly struggle–with one another for power, and with ourselves for control.
Position: #3 Left Back
That combative confrontational tone put me in mind of a defender, especially an aggressive one who might both attack down the flank and also have to rush back to stop others, so I’m going to play Elfriede as a fullback. (I’m also tipping my cap to her socialist politics by putting her on the left side, and using the colors of my favorites at Freiburg who also have a fondness for defensive Austrians.) While there’s some real powerful ideas in Jelinek’s work it is also QUITE difficult to understand and “mass of text shovelled together” seems a fair critique to me. I’ll gladly acknowledge she can do some impressive things, but it’s often hard to wade through the confusion to find it.
Now there are definitely flaws with my assessment so…for the 14th time, I invite someone, anyone to write a comment rather than just leave a like. Would I see it differently if I saw her work performed on the stage or the radio? Would it be different if my German was stronger? If I wasn’t blinded by my masculinity? Seriously, anybody, help me out here…
Next Time, 2024 Honoree ??
We’ll cover the possible contenders at the start of October and review the winner in November. Then start this whole mishagosh over again in January with the 20 year cycles of ’05 Winners
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.
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
William Butler Yeats won the Nobel Prize in literature for his poetry in 1923. The committee noted “his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. The nation in question was Ireland, but the from and expression in question is something else.
Yeats was a part of an artistic family and carried on the family business quickly. He adopted the style of the time in his early years. He celebrated all things artistic, beautiful, and emotional while studying and employing references to otherworldly and the occult. As he aged, and as the country around him became a hotbed, first for revolution and then sectarian violence, he left behind some of the more philosophical studies and became more physical and combative, but remained just as artistic.
Works
Renoir’s The Umbrella’s (whose Irish owner partly inspired “To a friend…”)
To a friend whose work has come to nothing
NOW all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours’ eyes? Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
–1913
Jacob Wrestling with an Angel (by Gustave Dore)
The Four Ages of Man
He with body waged a fight, But body won; it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart; Innocence and peace depart.
Then he struggled with the mind; His proud heart he left behind.
Now his wars on God begin; At stroke of midnight God shall win.
–1934
Message
In poetry, every work deserves to be judged on its own accord and its own merits. No poet adopts a single perspective or message, but their style often evokes a common trend. So it is with Yeats.
These works do a very good job of capturing the idea that one must be ever ready. It’s an aggressive defensiveness, and a robust reaction to the challenges of life. You should expect to face difficulty, and you should prepare to fight through it.
Position: #4
Yeats strikes me as a center back, but not your typical stout and serious center back. He’s more overeager, like someone who played striker as a kid, but kept being moved back on the pitch as they grew older. Now their job is to stop attacks, but they still yearn to be set loose at the spear of the attack. As time goes on he grows more blunt and aggressive than before. In short he’s both more physical than he needs to be and a little more confident in attack than he ought to be. It makes him a dangerous defender (both to the opponent and to his own side).
What do you think? Should Yeats end up somewhere else on the field? Did I critically misunderstand his style? Leave a comment below.
MacKenzie's Boot Room 