THE WEEK IN BOOKS
Dominique Guiou, John Dugdale and Maya Jaggi
The Guardian
Saturday October 11 2008
An ‘engagé’ wins the Nobel, betting on the Booker, and Istanbul goes
to Frankfurt
This year the Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to a real
French writer – a writer who started when he was very young and is
still going strong today. In 1963, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio did
the unthinkable by winning, while still an unknown novelist of 23, one
of France’s top literary prizes, the Renaudot, for his debut novel,
The Interrogation. He has not stopped writing since, with some 30
books to his name, including Désert (1980), which received a prize
from the French academy. The Interrogation was the work of a young
man but, 40 years later, it is still as pertinent as ever.
That is not to say that his work has not developed enormously
throughout his career. He has gone from being a rather "difficult"
young writer influenced heavily by the avant garde to a more accessible
author who has made his voice heard on numerous political and social
issues from pollution to exploitation. Le Clézio has also managed
to do something very rare in France: to be loved by both the public
and the critics. To please both, and to know how to impress both, is
very special. He is what we in France call an "engagé", a humanist –
and, above all, a great writer.
Dominique Guiou, Le Figaro0D
Le Cl̩zio was a surprise choice as winner of the Nobel Рbut,
fascinatingly, not to Ladbrokes. Evidently possessing an uncanny
ability to second-guess the secretive cabal of Swedish worthies
who pick the laureates, the bookies had made Le Clézio their 2-1
favourite, ahead of far better-known figures such as Amos Oz, Philip
Roth and Haruki Murakami. Even though the Academy picking a fifth
European author in a row – following Doris Lessing in 2007, Orhan
Pamuk in 2006, Harold Pinter in 2005 and Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 –
seemed unlikely.
The academy specialises in strange, windy citations, and true to form
hailed Le Clézio as "author of new departures, poetic adventure
and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the
reigning civilisation".
That at least makes his work sound more exciting than that of his
immediate predecessors: Lessing was praised for "subjecting a divided
civilisation to scrutiny", Pamuk for disclosing "the melancholic soul
of his native city", Pinter "uncovered the precipice under everyday
prattle" and Jelinek revealed "the absurdity of society’s clichés
and their subjugating power".
Recent Nobel choices have provided bonanzas for their British
publishers – especially Harvill Secker who publish Coetzee, Grass,
Kertész and Saramago.
In the case of Le Clézio, however, they were caught napping. The
only English translation from the past five years listed on Amazon
is Wande ring Star, from the small US publisher Curbstone.
John Dugdale
An Indian or an Irishman will be named as this year’s Booker winner
on Tuesday, if the bookies are to be believed. William Hill makes
Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture 5-2 favourite, with Amitav
Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies at 7-2; while Ladbrokes reverses the order,
offering Ghosh at 2-1 with the remaining four authors at 4-1 or
5-1. Paddy Power has Ghosh at the remarkably short odds of 7-4 and
Barry at 3-1. Don’t take this, though, as any indication of the likely
outcome. Until the shortlist appeared and both were omitted, the
bookies had Salman Rushdie and Joseph O’Neill as frontrunners. Last
year’s winner, Anne Enright, was a 12-1 outsider, and no favourite
has won since Yann Martel in 2002.
JD
Alice Munro appeared at the New Yorker magazine’s recent festival
in Manhattan, drily revealing to her interviewer that when her first
book appeared the local paper’s report was headlined "Housewife Finds
Time to Write Stories", and that her father decided to take up writing
late in life on the assumption that "if Alice can do it there should
be no problem".
Sticking to short fiction was not her original plan, Munro said,
but she now recognises she needs to know when a project will be
completed, and so is unsuited to working on anything more open-ended –
"you might die while writing a 500-page novel".
The Canadian writer talked of a per iod when she gave up writing two
years ago, worried that an author’s constant need to observe was
robbing her of experiencing life as "an ordinary person". Happily
she soon realised she "wasn’t very good" at this, managing only
"three months, maybe" of being ordinary.
JD
Istanbul’s bookshop windows are full of copies of Orhan Pamuk’s
first novel since his 2006 Nobel prize, with its retro photo of a
high-society family in a car tinted flamboyant pink. Artist manqué
Pamuk designed his own cover for the book, Museum of Innocence,
a filmic melodrama of a 1970s love affair in which a man collects
objects touched by his beloved before her death. For the first time
in so long, a relaxed Pamuk says on his balcony, "the media are sweet
to me". About 100,000 copies were sold in 10 days.
A swift German translation was commissioned for next week’s Frankfurt
book fair, which Pamuk will open on Tuesday alongside the Turkish
president, Abdullah Gul, marking Turkey’s year as guest of honour. The
tag is "Turkey in all its colours" – a seemingly bland coinage by
Turkish publishers that is revolutionary for the culture ministry
that signed up to it. In the teeth of an official nationalist ideology
guarded by the military since the Kemalist republic’s birth in 1923,
stressing a unitary Turkish ethnicity, publishers led by Muge Gursoy
Sokmen of Metis are proclaiming Turkey’s diversity, with Kurdish,
Armenian and Jewish a uthors – mirrored in art exhibitions and music,
from ghazals to jazz. Pamuk feels he is representing a book culture
led by "westernisers" and pro-EU intellectuals against stifling,
insular nationalism.
President Gul, a former radical Islamist whose AK party favours EU
membership, has been lunching writers and artists. Several authors
bound for Frankfurt, including Pamuk, Elif Shafak and Perihan Magden,
have been prosecuted under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code,
which prohibits "insulting Turkishness" – notably by mentioning the
Armenian massacres of 1915-17. Publishers say it is too early to
tell how the April amendments of 301 – sought by the president but
criticised by some as cosmetic – will bite.
Magden, "traumatised" by her trial and by "fascists and fanatical
Kemalists out in the streets", published a novel last year, Escape,
about a mother and daughter on the run, at a time when she had two
bodyguards. For her, the threat comes not from the AK party, but from
secular ultra-nationalists and a "military democracy". Headscarves
are an issue of a rising class threatening an army elite: "Girls who
were locked in their villages want to go to university and wear a
headscarf. It’s not a fundamentalist threat – I welcome it."
The lawyer who led the prosecution of Pamuk is among the 80-plus
people now charged in the bizarre Ergenekon case – an alleged
ultra-nationalist coup conspiracy involving death threats an d
assassinations, including the 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, editor of
the Turkish-Armenian paper Agos. In Dink’s office, where the walls
bear photographs of his funeral, when tens of thousands of Turkish
mourners marched under the banner "We are all Armenians", his lawyer,
Fethiye Cetin, says the "only way to overcome the trauma of the past
is to talk; being silent destroys everybody". Her 2004 memoir, My
Grandmother (out in Britain earlier this year), about the relative she
discovered had been Armenian, adopted by a Turkish officer after the
massacres, was a bestseller. She feels it left a "crack in official
state ideology in the minds of people".
An estimated two million Turks have at least one Armenian grandparent.
Murathan Mungan, a novelist and playwright who has Kurdish, Arab and
Bosnian grandparents, feels his plays were not taken into the state
theatre repertoire because he used Kurdish names. Mungan, who also
describes himself as the first openly gay author in Turkey, says his
fight is against "conservatives on the right and the left". Other
writers, including Shafak, seek to recover a language lost in the
1928 alphabet and language revolution which, in its drive to "purify"
Ottoman Turkish of Persian and Arabic words – perhaps two-thirds
of its vocabulary – sunders young Turkish readers from their own
literary heritage.
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