NOBEL LITERATURE PRIZE: THE EUROPEAN CANDIDATES

Cafe Babel, France
Oct 5 2006

The Nobel committee in Stockholm will announce its decision shortly
First the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek in 2004, then the Englishman
Harold Pinter in 2005… in last years European literature showed it
had many potential laureates for the Nobel literature prize. Here are
the European potential candidates, a few days before the announcement
in Stockholm.

Milan Kundera: "Literature should destroy all certainties."

Though ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ was widely received in
1984 and his works have known great public success, Milan Kundera
has not been inundated with awards. He received a Prix Medicis for
‘Life is Elsewhere’ (1973) and a Prize from the Academie francaise for
his essay ‘The Art of the Novel’ (1987). Born in 1929, Milan Kundera
came from an artistic family. Encouraged by his father, a pianist, he
studied music before moving onto literature and cinema in Prague. His
first poems were published in 1957. Living in the Soviet controlled
Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera was a loyal and appreciated militant
communist until 1967. However, he soon disagreed with the Party line
and published ‘The Joke’, a harsh critique of the Stalinist system.

Kundera finally ended his involvement with the Party when the red army
invaded in August 1968 and haulted the wave of democratic reforms. He
was expelled from the Communist Party and his books were banned from
publication. In 1975, he left Prague and took refuge in France. At
first he worked as a professor at Rennes, and then taught at the School
of Higher Studies in Social Sciences. He obtained French citizenship
in 1981 and his French language novels such as ‘Identity’ (2000) or
‘Ignorance’ (2003) enjoy great success.

Orhan Pamuk: "The power of writing comes from reflection."

Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul and was brought up by a
middle class Francophile family from the Halic quarter. After studying
architecture and journalism, he spent three years in America before
devoting himself to writing. Pamuk has often been criticized for being
too detached from reality and having travelled little. For Orhan Pamuk,
the novel is the greatest invention of Western culture.

Inspired by the duality of the Turkish culture, half-way between the
East and West, he epitomises the young literary tradition in Turkey.

Thanks to works such as ‘The Black Book’ (1990) or ‘The New Life’
(1995), Pamuk was the first Muslim intellect to defend Salman Rushdie
and subsequently refused the title of ‘State Artist’. In 2005, he was
jailed for "deliberately insulting the Turkish identity": he had said
that the Turks had killed 300,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians.

Antonio Lobo Antunes: "My work delves deep into the realm of
depression"

A major literary figure, Portuguese Antonio Lobo Antunes was born in
Lisbon in 1942. Following in the footsteps of his father, a reputable
neurologist, he became a psychiatrist while pursuing his interest
in literature and notably the French classics. Even though his first
collection of poetry was published in 1955, he didn’t devote himself
entirely to writing until the beginning of the 1980s, after the success
of his second book ‘South of Nowhere’ (1985). During his military
service in the 70s, he worked as a doctor in war-torn Angola. Haunted
by this experience, Antonio Lobo Antunes wrote ‘Getting to know the
Inferno’ which recounts the adventures of a young doctor working in the
psychiatric services in 1981. His works regularly criticize Portuguese
society, its institutions, politics and problems though the author
asserts his Portugal is completely ‘fictional’. It is nevertheless
hard to forget that he grew up in the time of the Dictator Salazar.

Peter Esterhazy: "Great history strongly effects our everyday lives."

Often compared to Boulgakov and sometimes Kafka, Peter Esterhazy,
born in 1950, burst onto the international literary scene in spring
2000. In ‘Celestial Harmonies’ (2000), the author describes the life
of his family, one of the great Hungarian aristocratic dynasties which
was robbed of its possessions by the communists. Two years later,
he published ‘Revised Edition’ after discovering in the national
archives that his father had been a communist secret police informer
for more than 20 years. A betrayal worthy of a Greek tragedy. His first
book displays a forceful style and his second great emotion. The two
works try to understand how history can destroy lives. Days after the
commemoration of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the novelist stated
that the muted bells of peace do not ring over Eastern Europe.

Copyright: Milan Kundera (Gallimard) ; Pamuk et Esterhazy (J.

Sassier/ Gallimard); Antònio Lobo Antunes (Mathieu Bourgois)

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