French writer Patrick Modiano has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. According to the press release, “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”
Here’s more from The Atlantic: “Many of Modiano’s novels, like his debut La Place de L’Etoile, examine the moral struggles of those living under the Nazi occupation—and the dreamlike experience of navigating time and loss…For those unfamiliar with Modiano’s work, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund recommended Missing Person, a novel about a detective who has lost his memory and traces ‘his own steps through history to find out who he is.’”
Several of Modiano’s books have been translated into English including La Ronde de nuit (English title: Night Rounds), Rue des Boutiques obscures (English title: Missing Person), and Du plus loin de l’oubli (English title: Out of the Dark). Previous winners include Dear Life author Alice Munro, Red Sorghum author Mo Yan, and The Art of Procrastination author John Perry. (Photo Credit: Catherine Hélie)
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Canadian author Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The press release described her career in a single phrase: “master of the contemporary short story.”
Munro has published extensively at The New Yorker. You can read a number of her short stories at this link. Here’s more from the Nobel site:
Munro is acclaimed for her finely tuned storytelling, which is characterized by clarity and psychological realism. Some critics consider her a Canadian Chekhov. Her stories are often set in small town environments, where the struggle for a socially acceptable existence often results in strained relationships and moral conflicts – problems that stem from generational differences and colliding life ambitions. Her texts often feature depictions of everyday but decisive events, epiphanies of a kind, that illuminate the surrounding story and let existential questions appear in a flash of lightning.
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By Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Growing up with no special interest in China, one of the few things I associated with the country was mix and match meal creation. On airplanes and school cafeterias, you just have “chicken or beef” choices, but Chinese restaurants were “1 from Column A, 1 from Column B” domains. If only in recent China debates, a similar readiness to think beyond either/or options prevailed!
I thought of this when Reuters ran an assessment of Xi Jinping’s first weeks in power last months that in some venues carried this “chicken or beef” sort of headline: “China’s New Leader: Reformist or Conservative?” Previous Chinese leaders have often turned out to have both reformist and conservative sides. Even Deng Xiaoping, considered the quintessential reformer due to his economic policies, held the line on political liberalization and backed the brutal 1989 crackdown. Mightn’t Xi, too, end up ordering from the reformist and conservative sides of the menu?
A Valentine’s Day for the books: President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with Vice President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China and members of a Chinese delegation in the Oval Office, Feb. 14, 2012, several months before Xi became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize win last fall, which continues to generate controversy, led some foreign commentators into a similar “chicken or beef” trap—or, rather, an “Ai Weiwei or Zhang Yimou” one. The former is an artist locked into an antagonistic relationship with the government, the latter a filmmaker who has been choreographing spectacles celebrating Communist Party rule, including both the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Games and a 2009 gala staged to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Since they are two of the only internationally prominent Chinese creative figures, some Westerners assumed Mo must be like one or the other.
In fact, the novelist shares traits with each but isn’t all that similar to either. Like China’s best-known artist, Mo has a penchant for mocking the powerful. And like the renowned filmmaker turned state choreographer, Mo works within the system, serving as a Vice-Chairman of the official writer’s association and recently agreeing to be a delegate to the Chinese People’s Consultative Political Conference. Unlike Ai Weiwei, though, Mo skewers only relatively safe targets, like the kinds of corrupt local officials that the central authorities don’t mind seeing satirized, and instead of railing against censorship, he has likened it to an inconvenience akin to airport security protocols. And unlike Zhang Yimou, one of whose best films was based on the novelist’s story “Red Sorghum,” Mo has consistently produced iconoclastic works.
If Column A choices signal compliance and Column B ones criticism, the artist and filmmaker now stick to opposite sides of the menu, while Mo Yan keeps choosing from both—and he’s not alone in this. Yu Hua, an author whose political choices I find more admirable, does this as well. He belongs to the official writer’s association and his novels, like Mo’s, generally satirize relatively safe targets. But Yu also pens trenchant essays on taboo topics, including the 1989 massacre. He’s frustrated that these can only be published abroad, but glad that they end up circulating on the mainland in underground digital versions.
A third debate, centering on the competing predictions made by “When China Rules the World” author Martin Jacques and “The Coming Collapse of China” author Gordon G. Chang, makes me think not of the value of combining Column A and Column B choices but of a different feature of Chinese restaurants that I only learned about as an adult. If you don’t like the options on the English language menu in some Chinatown eateries, you can ask to see a Chinese language one that lists additional dishes the proprietor doubts will interest most customers.
My problem with the Jacques vs. Chang debate is that I find neither pundit convincing. Jacques’ vision of China moving smoothly toward global domination glosses over the fissures within the country’s elite and the many domestic challenges its government faces. Chang continually underestimates the Communist Party’s resiliency and adaptability. His 2001 book said it would implode by 2011. Late in 2011, he told Foreign Policy readers that he’d miscalculated and they could “bet on” his prophecy coming true in 2012. In 2013, the Communist Party is still in control and somehow Chang’s still being invited onto news shows to make forecasts.
When asked whether Xi Jinping is a reformer or a conservative and whether Mo Yan is a collaborator or a critic, I can craft an answer that draws a bit from both Column A and Column B Being asked whether I side with Jacques or Chang is different. I’m left feeling like a hungry vegetarian who has been given a list made up exclusively of chicken and beef dishes—and hopes desperately that there’s another menu hidden in the back with some acceptable choices.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at University of California at Irvine, is the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2010), an updated edition of which will be published in June.
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Press play above to watch Mo Yan‘s Nobel Lecture in Literature. His speech will begin at 11:30 AM ET this morning.
Earlier this week Yan made some controversial remarks about censorship, so the literary community will follow his words closely.
Here’s more about the lecture: “The Nobel Lecture in Literature will be held on Friday 7 December 2012, at 5:30 p.m. (CET), at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm (tickets required). The lecture will be webcast live at Nobelprize.org, and the text will be published here at the same time. The Nobel Lecture will be published in six different languages: English, Swedish, French, German, Spanish and Chinese. A video of the lecture will be available here a few days later.”
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Chinese Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan generated controversy for describing censorship as “unpleasant but necessary.”
Chinese author Han Han published This Generation earlier this year, collecting essays and blogs he wrote about living in the Communist country. In that book, he spoke frankly about censorship in his country.
Below, we’ve collected five quotes from the book illustrating how censorship really works in the Chinese publishing industry. As you can see below, Han writes without capitalization in his prose.
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Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature!
He's my favorite author and he's had Nobel hype for years. It's so exciting that he finally won!
The first book of his that I read was Red Sorghum. It was assigned for a Chinese Literature in Translation course. I was only auditing the class and could only read part of it before I had to turn my attention elsewhere. But, I liked it so much that I went back and finished it after the semester was over.
The movie Red Sorghum dramatises the first part of the novel. The opening scenes of Happy Times are based on one of the short stories in Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh.
The Garlic Ballads is my favorite book by him.
I prefer is earlier stuff to his later stuff. The shorter works are tighter and more accessible. His later works seem like a Nobel bid, but are still very good. Overall his writing is marked by a visceral lushness that I'm not used to seeing from Chinese prose, which is usually sparse in its descriptions. Many of his works are touched by a magic realism that brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
AND! When writing up this blog post I see that many of his works are available for FREE for Amazon Prime members through the lending library and many are priced at bargain prices to own the Kindle version. Take advantage while you can, especially of the three titles I mentioned in this post.
Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.
Chinese novelist Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.
If you want to explore his work, we have linked to free samples of his work that are available in English–simply follow the links below. Here’s more about his career:
Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition. In addition to his novels, Mo Yan has published many short stories and essays on various topics, and despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors.
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The Nobel Prize for Literature winner for 2012 will be revealed on Thursday. Currently, the UK gamblers at Ladbrokes have given Haruki Murakami 2/1 odds to take the $1.2 million prize.
At the same time, Chinese author Mo Yan has 8/1 odds, Canadian short story master Alice Munro has 8/1 odds and Hungarian writer Peter Nadas has 8/1 odds. Who do you want to win?
Here’s more about the award: “Those entitled to nominate candidates for the Prize are the members of the Academy, members of academies and societies similar to it in membership and aims, professors of literature and language, former Nobel laureates in literature, and the presidents of writers’ organisations which are representative of their country’s literary production. Proposals in writing for the year’s laureate must reach the Nobel Committee by January 31st. A proposal should, but need not, be accompanied by supporting reasons. It is not possible to propose oneself as a candidate, i.e. the Nobel Prize cannot be applied for. There are usually about 350 proposals each year.” (Via Michael Orthofer)
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As literary types speculate about this year’s nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature before the official announcement, UK gamblers are still adjusting the odds and trying to predict a winner of the prestigious prize.
According to the betting site Ladbrokes, Japan’s Haruki Murakami still leads with 7/1 odds. However, Bob Dylan the next favorite with 10/1 odds. Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom and Chinese author Mo Yan have also risen to the top with 12/1 odds. Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth both have 16/1 odds and Alice Munro has 20/1 odds. Who will you place your bet on?
Nevertheless, literary blogger Michael Orthofer reminds us that Dylan is a bad bet: “it’s easy money for them — anyone who bets on Dylan is basically just handing the money over to them, zero risk to Ladbrokes.”
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