Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome: The Nobel Prize 2016

On waking up on the morning of the 13^th October, fragments of dreams bubbled up into my consciousness. First, I recalled being captured by aliens who wanted to take me to their home planet for dissection and other despicable things I’ll refrain from mentioning. Then, a news item popped up: Bob Dylan, that paragon of lyricism, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. WTF, I thought, what did I drink last night that made my brain dream up such ridiculous drivel. Then came the absurd idea that I actually had heard or read that Dylan had in fact won the prize the previous day; but, even given the long history of averageness being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, this seemed too crazy even for a dream. There followed a major struggle between the dream and reality hypotheses, until I was awake enough to realize that, yes, Bob Dylan, who invented lyrics of, as yet, unmatched pseudo-profundity-and-lyricism by using a rhyming dictionary and drugs, got the Nobel Prize in literature, hard to stomach even when Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Borges, Nabokov, Updike, and Auden, did not (*teeth grinding*). Up to now getting the prize came with a suspicion of mediocrity, now it is a certification of it. Words are the keyword. When you listen to singers (which they are) like Dylan, Cohen, and Waits, it’s the words that resonate because there's the melody that separates the words or phrases, so that it’s not about the whole of the lyrics. It's different to a Sinatra or Nat King Cole, or Simon and Garfunkel, where you follow the whole thing with absolute clarity and as a continuous whole, even country music, perfect lyrics too, much better than Dylan; and there's a category in between too. And sub-categories. But this is a discussion about music; literature doesn't come into it. Was this just a mistake, or a malicious attempt at promoting populism and subverting literature?

The reality is that there oft is no meaning behind the lyrics, they are poorly written, especially his later works and if anybody but Dylan had penned them any Dylan fan would laugh at their nonsensical amateurish nature. Most Dylan fans know this but won't admit it to each other (it's a classic case of the Emperor's new clothes syndrome). Dylan has not been relevant for decades. To award him a Nobel Prize in this year is laughable. It's akin to those meaningless lifetime achievement awards they hand out at the Oscars: populist feel good shite.

He, through no fault of his own, has robbed a worthy winner such as António Lobo Antunes (or many other vastly superior writers than Dylan) of the prize and recognition. I'm sure Dylan feels awful. I know I would.

I love Dylan fans trying to work out the complex meanings behind his simplistic lyrics.

NB: I’m fully prepared to get stick from that multitude of Dylan fans out there… Let them come, baby…

The Portuguese Soul: "As Naus" by António Lobo Antunes

Published 1988.

Wenn ich dieses Buch in fünf Minuten zusammenfassen könnte, was könnte ich schreiben? Der Versuch den Inhalt des Romans auf weninge Sätze zu reduzieren, ist es sehr schwer.

Camões wander durch die Strassen von Lissabon und schleppt den Sarg mit dem Leichnam seines Vaters mit sich – für mich ein Symbol für das portugiesiche Weltreich. Ich könnte hinzufügen: stellen Sie sich einen Camões vor, der durch “Lixboa” streift und in einem Sarg seinen verwesenden Vater mitbringt, einen Pedro Álvaro Cabral, der nach seiner Verflucht aus “Loanda” nun von dem “Milizen der UNITA” verfolgt wird und sich von seiner Frau, einer dunkelhäutigen Prostituierten, aushalten lässt, einen Heiligen Francisco Xavier, der als Zuhälter arbeitet, einen Pater António Vieira, der in betrunkenem Zustand Predigten halt, einen pensionerten Vasco da Gama, der dem Kartenspiel verfallen ist und mit einem König D. Manuel, der eine Blechkronte trägt, in einem rostigen Ford Cabrio durch die Stadt fährt, der wahnsinnige D. Sebastião ist ein Drogenanhängiger, der in Tanger von Oskcar Wilde in seinem Streit um eine Beutel Gras niedergestochen wird und stirbt usw.

Die Handlung des Romans entwickelt sich auf zwei Ebenen: einer realer als Ausgangspunkt, welche die Geschichte der zahllosen Heimkehrer erzählt, deren Habseligkeiten am Ufer des Tejo verstreut herumliegen und einer fiktiv-historischen Ebene, die unablässig um die Symbole aus dem glorreichen Zeitalter der Entdeckungen kreist und ebenso wirkliche wie barocke Bilder aus fünfhundert Jahren portugiesischer Geschichte kreiert. Ein Aspekt der ersten Ebene, dem besondere Aufmerksamkeit gezollt wurde, ist die implizite Kritik an der überstürzten und chaotischen Art und Weise, in der sich der Rückzug aus den Kolonien nach der Nelkenrevolution abgespielt hat.

Es Geht in dem Roman umm eine Karnevalisierung der poretugiesichen Geschichte. Lobo Antunes verknüpft in seinem Roma Figuren, Orte und Gegenstätande aus verschiedenen zeitlichen Zusammenhängen und lässt einen fragmentarischen Diskurz entstehen, der von einem, nicht selten durch Alkohol bei den Erzählerfiguren ausgelösten, stream-of-consciousness gekennzeichnet ist. So erzeugt der Autor seine Halluzinatorischne Atmosphäre. Immer wieder wurde zudem auf Parallen zu Faulkner in Lobo Antunes’ Erzähltechnik hingewiesen. Ich hebe dioe besondere ästetische Qualität der Prosa von Antunes hervor, die aus dem “Chaos” in Grammatik, Erzählperspektive udn Chronologie entstehe.

Die Schlussszene. Mit der Lobo Antunes "As Naus" ausklingen lässt, ist von entscheidender Bedeutung für das Verständins der ideologischen Vorstellungen, die dem Roman zugrunde liegen. Faulkner hat die Weissheit mit Löffeln gefressen: “The past is never dead, it's not even past“(Die Vergangenheit ist nicht tot, sie ist nicht einmal vergangen”)

NB: Ich musste dieses Buch noch einmal lessen, diesmal auf Portugiesisch…Nächstes Mal vielleicht auf Deutsch…oder auf Englisch…

.

E tinha de escrever algo em Português: querem perceber o que significa ser português? Um livro intenso, poético e original. A alma portuguesa, embalada pela glória do passado, arreigada no presente inesperado, imerecido, esquivo. Uma nação, um povo, prisioneiro nos meandros da saudade, regressado a si mesmo, de si mesmo desconhecido, rejeitado. Soberbo.

(And I had also to write something in Portuguese: do you want to glimpse what it means to be Portuguese? An Intense, poetic, and original book. The Portuguese soul, lulled by the glory of the past, rooted in the unexpected, unmerited, and elusive present. A nation, a people, prisoner in the intricacies of nostalgia, left to its own devices, unknown even to itself, rejected. Superb.)

If anyone out there wishes to buy it, can find here a superb English translation by none other than the also superb Gregory Rabassa (one the greatest living translators of Portuguese literature into English).

In my view, António Lobo Antunes is the most German of the Portuguese authors. Every time I read him, I get the feeling I'm reading a translation from German into Portuguese...I think it was Harold Bloom who said Lobo Antunes is one of the living writers who will matter most in the long run. Now that we come again to that particular time of the year, it always surprises me why José Saramago won the Nobel Preis in Literature and Lobo Antunes didn't. Alas, the ways of the Nobel Prize committee are inescrutable...

Literature Without Balls: "A General Theory of Oblivion" by José Eduardo Agualusa, Daniel Hahn (translator)

(Cover from the Portuguese Edition by D. Quixote Publishing House: “A Teoria Geral do Esquecimento”)

Published 2015 (English Edition), published 2012 (Portuguese Edition)

“If I had the space, the charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.”

I read this in the original Portuguese when it came out in 2012. And as soon as I got the English edition, I just had to re-read it, not because the book is a masterpiece (far from it), but because I was curious to know how Daniel Hahn had been able to render the Portuguese into English. And so on with the task of reading both editions in parallel. When I got to the 3^rd chapter, something jarred my reading of the English edition. I'll transcribe the text from the Portuguese edition first:

“Monte regressou ao carro. Os soldados empurraram os portugueses até ao muro. Afastaram-se alguns metros. Um deles tirou uma pistola da cintura e, num gesto quase distraído, quase de enfado, apontou-a e disparou três vezes. Jeremias Carrasco ficou estendido de costas. Viu aves a voarem no céu alto. Reparou numa inscrição, a tinta vermelha, no muro manchado de sangue, picado de balas:

O luto continua.”

In Hahn’s translation this became:

“Monte walked over to the car. The soldiers pushed the Portuguese men up against the wall. They took a few steps back. One of them pulled a pistol from his belt, and in a movement that was almost absent-minded, almost annoyed, he pointed it and fired three times. Jeremias Carrasco was lying on his back. He saw the birds flying high in the sky. He noticed an inscription in red ink on the bloodstained, bullet-pocked wall:

“The struggle continues.”

In bold where the problem lies. “Luto” means “to mourn” not “to struggle”. I quite understand, Hahn wanting to extend the metaphor, but it shouldn’t be done at the expense of having a “proper” translation. There’s a world of difference between “to mourn” and “to struggle”. I’d have translated as “The mourning continues”, but maybe it’s just me being picky.

What about the book itself? Was the nomination for the shortlist of the Man Booker International 2015 deserved? I’m not sure. I’ve never been a huge fan of Agualusa’s fiction. After Saramago and Lobo Antunes, the literature in Portuguese has been on the path of too much lightness, with the exception of Gonçalo Tavares, who sometimes relies too much on Kafka. Mia Couto hovers above them both in my humble opinion. 

I thought the way the main character’s isolation, while the war was taking place outside, was depicted quite interestingly, but this time round, as before, I think there was something missing. Perhaps more sincerity, engagement, and maturity in the narrative. Most of the literature in Portuguese being produced nowadays is more worried about the aesthetic and the form than to creating credible characters. In essence some of the most recent literature in Portuguese has become too Flaubertian, turning books into limited and self-aware cryptic narratives. After reading two or three I can discern a notorious absence of independence. They’ve all become “The New Authors of the Portuguese Language”, stamping them with “They are now the new kids on the block”. This kind of thing is never good. Compare the Portuguese Literature with the Cuban. Each Cuban author was able to maintain a proper voice, keeping all the flavour of each author’s idiosyncrasies. Compare Guilhermo Cabrero Infante, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Leonardo Padura. We cannot even say they came from the same literary mold. I call the kind of literature being written now in Portuguese as “Literature-Without-Balls”. Literature with nice turns of phrase is not enough. Gutsy authors is what we really need.  Stringing nice sentences together lacking in colour and vitality is démodé and boring as hell.

2015 Lisbon Book Fair - 1st iteration

My annual pilgrimage...

Book signings:

(António Lobo Antunes, one of my favourite living Portuguese authors, signing my favourite book: "Memória de Elefante" which unfortunately does not have an English translation...)

(Frei Bento Domingues)

(José Rodrigues dos Santos)

(Richard Zimler)

(Fernando Ribeiro, Moonspell's vocalist and front man)

(Ricardo Araújo Pereira, one of Benfica's most fervorous fans)

Book Haul #1:

(Portuguese Chefs using Bimby which isThermomix's name in Portugal; I've said elsewhere that Bimby is my favourite Robot...Forget about Python, Raspberry lol. Sweet rice coming out for lunch today!)

("The supracelestial place" by Frederico Lourenço: One of my favourite Portuguese authors)

(Vasco Graça Moura translates Gottfried Benn; Vasco was our most distinguished poet and translator when it came to German Poets; now that he's no longer with us, I don't know what we'll become of us...This is one of the books that started my infatuation with the German Language; I read it a long time ago at the Goethe Institute; now it's all mine! "My precious"...)

(Portuguese authors from our Azores' island; it's going to be a journey of discovery even for me...)

(I've read all of the Sjöwall/Wahlöö Beck-decalogy in German a long time ago; I wonder how he'll fare all by himself ...)

(Chronicles taken from his blog)

(one of my favourite physics' books; I used it in college. Now I've found a battered copy for 2 cents...)

("Beim Häuten der Zwiebel" by Günter Grass. Oh my...I hope my German is up to the task...I believe my command of the German laguage will be seriously tested...)

(Classical Computer Science)

(Classical Computer Science)

(Classical Computer Science)

(signed 1st edition)

(signed 1st edition)

(SF in collection)

(after 11456 steps, and because being sated with books is not enough, the body needing sustenance as well, how about a "burrito"? "Schmackhaft", even with the temperature very high, around 33ºC...)

Reality-behind-the-surface Literature: "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher" by Hilary Mantel

11:40 pm 24 October 2014

This is my first Mantel. I’ve been postponing reading the first two volumes of the Cromwell trilogy, waiting for the third volume to come out predictably in 2016. One does not tackle a twice-awarded-writer-with-the-Man-Booker-Prize without having everything in one big bundle to make a proper assessment...Nevertheless here goes my first take on Hilary Mantel, for what it’s worth.

One of my favourite things in life is reading that truly astounding book at the right juncture in time, ie, a book that mysteriously echoes and enriches my current thoughts. I think this was one of those (imperfect/perfect) books. There is a peculiar comfort in reading a book whose structures and operations mimic what, I think, literature should be all about. One of the things I like the most about literature is to read it and later on write about it. Literature for me is all about a set of interlocking conventions (a system), and how we can read this so-called system into something meaningful.

This short-story collection is a good example of this. First of all it’s a mixed bag, ie, we have The Magnificent, The So-and-So, and The-Not-So-Good (there are not really bad short stories here). What is immediately noticeable is Mantel’s use of language (the system). What better way to evaluate a write’s skills than in the shorter form? I’ve always stated that there’s no better way to “see” the inner skills of a writer. In the shorter forms the writer cannot hide behind the usual literary contraptions: plot, complex character development, etc.

In this aspect Mantel succeeds entirely, ie, her use of language drew me in, revealing the horror that just lies beneath the surface of our everyday life, to reveal the inner structure of reality, much like Gonçalo M. Tavares (vide review) is able to do:

 “I knew not to mention her name and the pressure of not mentioning her made her, in my imagination, beaten thin and flat, attenuated, starved away, a shadow of herself, so I was no longer sure whether she existed when I was not with her.” (From “Comma”)

“And we saw – nothing; we saw something not yet become; we saw something, not a face but perhaps, I thought, when I thought about it later, perhaps a negotiating position for a face, perhaps a loosely imagined notion of a face, like God’s when he was trying to form us; we saw a blank, we saw a sphere, it was without feature, it was without meaning, and its flesh seemed to run from the bone.” (From “Comma”)

"What I had taken to be stucco was in fact some patent substance newly glued to the front wall: it was grayish-white and crinkled, like a split-open brain, or nougat chewed by a giant." (From “How Shall I Know You”, my favourite short story in this collection).

“I did my act on autopilot, except that when it came to my influences I went a bit wild and invited a Portuguese writer who I said knocked Pessoa into a socket hat. The golden young man kept invading my mind, and I thought I’d quite like to go bed with someone of that ilk, by way of change. Wasn’t everybody due a change?” (“How Shall I Know You”)

As I said, not all of the stories are successful. Sometimes we get the feeling that Mantel just ran out of steam by the end of some them, but the ones that work, oh my…Almost all of the short stories here are a wonderful example of the show-don’t-tell type; they show everything, almost, and tell nothing. What more can I ask for in a literary work? In this aspect Mantel belongs to the Gonçalo M. Tavares, António Lobo Antunes and Philip K. Dick lineage.

Without having read her other body-of-work, ie, having read only this collection, Hilary Mantel may be one of the best writers of her time, and there's no better evidence of her skills than this short-story collection. I’ll refrain from further praise. I’ll wait for the Cromwell trilogy to fully state my case.

Is it possible to name a writer as the best prose stylist of our time? Should the discussion be exclusively Anglo-centric? I think not. I can give two wonderful examples of writers writing in Portuguese, but with numerous translations in English, that in my mind could be real contenders for this elusive “prize”: Gonçalo M. Tavares (he pushes the boundaries of what fiction is or should be in a way I haven’t seen in a writer writing in English in recent years – vide review above), and António Lobo Antunes (I always thought that his writing is very god-like, ie, Lobo Antunes can write as if God himself were choosing the words for him; it all fits perfectly in his sentences).

I invite you to name a few writers having this “illuminating”, reality-behind-the-surface quality (in English or in any other language). Any thoughts on this? I’m curious to know.