The link below is to an article reporting on the winners of the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2016. Did you read any of them? Do you intend to read any of them? Are they worthy of their place in your opinion? Let us know what you think in the comments.
For more visit:
http://ebookfriendly.com/goodreads-choice-awards-2016-winners/
Rebecca Braun, Lancaster University
Paul Beatty has won the Man Booker prize, becoming the first American to win the award since it was opened up to authors outside the Commonwealth in 2013. Most won’t yet have heard of the 54-year-old author of The Sellout, a satire of US racial politics. Because if one thing united this year’s shortlist, it was the lack of literary celebrity.
As the Man Booker website itself commented, of the six authors shortlisted, only Levy had even been heard of before in Booker circles. All were on the list on the literary merit of their books. But celebrity such as the Booker changes all this.
Literature is generally held to be the opposite of popular culture, something that requires solitude and sustained engagement with words and ideas beyond the everyday. So its relationship with celebrity, that most visual and ephemeral of phenomena, is in some ways unique.
It is certainly true that even a very famous writer is unlikely to pack out a football stadium, although the award of the Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan, coupled with his signature failure to acknowledge it, must make the literary establishment check their assumptions about both literature and celebrity. But what is peculiar about literary celebrity is that it is not about “the literary” at all. It is about our obsessions with the biographical person.
Enter the author. Following the announcement of any major literary prize in the UK and Europe, the immediate focus falls on the author’s biography. In the case of Elena Ferrante, as we have recently seen, this public hunger for the personal can suppress pretty much everything else, including the actual writing. Although Ferrante’s efforts to keep her private person out of the public eye are as extreme as the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti’s distasteful obsession with tracking her down, her dislike of the celebrity machine is shared by the many other authors who also try to shift attention back to their books.
Beatty clung to his after the first awkward minutes during which he foundered on the podium after winning the prize, clearly uncomfortable with having to share his immediate thoughts and emotions with the international media. “Maybe I should talk about the book a bit,” he suggested. But his book will not hide him now. Herta Müller’s claim that it was her books that won the Nobel Prize in 2009 could not do anything to stop speculation about her hairstyle and choice of dress doing the rounds in the international broadsheets.
Beatty will also have to get used to the invariable discussion of the cash, and whether it is really desirable for one author to hit the jackpot at the exclusion of everybody else. Mention of money sullies the literary for some.
All of this could be uncomfortable for Beatty, who told the Booker dinner guests of how he cried with joy in front of readers in Detroit some years back when he read aloud from his work for the first time. He had realised just how perfectly it replicated the language in his head. This touching tale from an author who loves his craft made up for his being, in his own words, “woefully underprepared” for speaking as a celebrity at the gala dinner.
Not so the publishers, who have been working up to this for months and will now take every opportunity they can to push their product with shiny stickers and prime displays, just as the laws of celebrity require. Beatty should expect to have numerous meetings with numerous publicists lined up to expedite sales at home and abroad. He may start to feel a little bit like Beyoncé. Unlike Beyoncé, however, literary celebrity doesn’t travel. This could be his writerly salvation.
Although the English-speaking book market is huge and highly influential, it is still just one geographically-bounded market, and not a very cohesive one at that.
Julian Barnes has a strong following in the UK. But he is not such a big deal in the US, where he is (justifiably) described as particularly British. Jonathan Franzen is an A-list literary celebrity in New York, and he’s pretty famous in the UK, but the further east he travels, the more he is in need of mediators. While still a well-known face in Germany, he mainly goes there to bird watch.
Travelling back the other way, Joël Dicker’s French blockbuster The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair sold 2m copies in Europe, but bombed in the US. Just 13,000 of Penguin’s 125,000 copies sold on its much trumpeted launch, and reviews quickly turned negative. Routinely accosted in his home town of Geneva, he is safe in New York.
Can Beatty take some comfort from these regional quirks that accompany even bestsellers? “I love being lost,” he quipped on the stage as he searched for words. “It’s the only way I get anywhere.” He has been found for English readers, but once his book starts to travel to other places, there are no guarantees that the same piece of writing will arrive as set off. There could be an escape route here.
Readerships are diverse, knowledge and expectations are different, and the more mediators are needed (translators, foreign-language editors, international rights departments), the more the book becomes detached from its biographical author. Some famous authors make it on a global stage, for sure. But there is often remarkably little left of the original author by then.
So here’s a plan for Beatty. He can take the money and settle down to write somewhere where English is not the primary language. He doesn’t have to deny the literary establishment entirely like Bob Dylan, but he could look to put more of the rest of the world on the literary map. Not by selling books there, but by writing them. That would be another kind of sellout – one that might just make people stop and think.
Rebecca Braun, Senior Lecturer in Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Peter Kimani, The Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications (GSMC)
Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o was the bookies’ favourite for the second year to win the Nobel prize in literature. But singer songwriter Bob Dylan won it for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. But, as Kenyan academic Peter Kimani tells The Conversation Africa’s Julius Maina, this doesn’t take the sheen off one of Africa’s greatest living writers.
Who is Ngugi wa Thiong’o?
Ngugi wa Thiong’o is regarded as one of Africa’s greatest living writers. He grew up in what became known as Kenya’s White Highlands at the height of British colonialism. Unsurprisingly, his writing examines the legacy of colonialism and the intricate relationships between locals seeking economic and cultural emancipation and the local elites serving as agents of neo-colonisers.
The great expectations for the new country, as captured in Ngugi’s seminal play, The Black Hermit, anticipated the disillusionment that followed. His fiction, from the foundational trilogy of Weep Not, Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat, amplify those expectations, before the optimism gives way in Petals of Blood, and is replaced by disillusionment.
What sets Ngugi above and apart from the hundreds of other African writers?
African fiction is fairly young. Ngugi stands in the continent’s pantheon of writers who started writing when Africa’s decolonisation gained momentum. In a certain sense, the writers were involved in constructing new narratives that would define their people. But Ngugi’s recognition goes beyond his pioneering role: his writing resonates with many across Kenya and Africa.
One could also recognise Ngugi’s consistency at churning out high-quality stories about Africa’s contemporary society. This he has done in a manner that illustrates his commitment to equality and social justice.
He has done much more in scholarship. His treatise, Decolonising the Mind, now a foundational text in post-colonial studies, illustrates his versatility. His ability to spin the yarns while commenting on the politics that goes into literary production of marginal literature is a very rare combination.
Finally, one could talk about Ngugi’s cultural and political activism. This precipitated his yearlong detention without trial in 1977. He attributes his detention to his rejection of English and embracing his Gikuyu language as his vehicle of expression.
Which work or works best illustrate his thinking?
It’s hard to pick a favourite from Ngugi’s over two dozen texts. But there is concurrence among critics that A Grain of Wheat, which was voted among Africa’s best 100 novels at the turn of the last century, stands out for its stylistic experimentation and complexity of characters.
Others consider the novel as the last signpost before Ngugi’s work became overly political. For other critics, it’s Wizard of the Crow – which came out in 2004, after nearly two decades of waiting – that encapsulates Ngugi’s creative finesse. It utilises many literary tropes, including magical realism, and addresses the politics of African development and the shenanigans by the political elite to maintain the status quo.
What are Ngugi’s lasting contributions to African literature?
Without a doubt, Africa would be poorer without the efforts of Ngugi and other pioneering writers to tell the African story. He is also an important figure in post-colonial studies. His constant questioning of the privileging of the English language and culture in Kenya’s national discourse saw him lead a movement that led to the scrapping of the Department of English at the University of Nairobi and replaced by the Department of Literature that placed African literature and its diasporas at the centre of scholarship.
Ngugi is still active in writing and his latest offering is the third instalment of his memoir, Birth of a Dreamweaver that looks back on his years at Makerere University in Uganda. This is the period when he published his novels, Weep Not, Child and The River Between, while still an undergraduate. Also at this time he wrote the play, The Black Hermit, which was performed as part of Uganda’s independence celebrations in 1962.
His work has been translated into more than 30 world languages.
Ngugi has appeared on the list of favourites to win the Literature Nobel for a number of years. This was yet another year.
Yes indeed, Ngugi has been among the bookies’ favourite for the past couple of years. But since the workings of the Nobel award committee remain secret —- the list of the committee’s deliberations are kept secret for 50 years —- its choice for this year, the American singer Bob Dylan raises interesting questions about the Nobel committee’s interpretation of artistic production as writing.
As one unimpressed pundit commented on Twitter,
“the idea that Dylan is a greater writer (rather than song versifier) than Philip Roth is, frankly, absurd.”
But author Salman Rushdie, who bookies listed among this year’s possible winners, commented:
“From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice.”
Peter Kimani, Lecturer, The Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications (GSMC)
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Jen Webb, University of Canberra
In 1920, Rudyard Kipling (Nobel Prize in Literature 1907), published The Conundrum of the Workshops. This poem about review culture features the Devil as “first, most dread” critic who responds to human creative outputs with: “it’s pretty, but is it art?”, a review that hurls the makers into confusion, rivalry and anguish. What could be worse, for an artist, than to discover that what you were making is not art after all?
Social media has taken over the Devil’s role as “most dread” reviewer, and all night the twitterverse has been alive with commentators expressing their outrage at, or rejoicing over, the decision of the Nobel Prize Committee to award the Literature prize to musician and songwriter Bob Dylan. As journalist and writer Jason Diamond tweeted: “My timeline is like watching a ‘Dylan deserved the Nobel’ vs ‘Dylan didn’t deserve the Nobel’ ping pong match.”
Much of this ping-pong commentary operates less according to the rules of evidence and argument than according to the rules of quarrel; of personal taste; of anger directed at established privilege; and of teasing Boomer nostalgia.
On the Affirmative team we have not-a-poet Salman Rushdie tweeting that “From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition”.
And there’s actual poet Billy Collins, who affirms the prize because Dylan’s lyrics are “in the 2 percent club of songwriters whose lyrics are interesting on the page”.
From the team for the Negative, there’s editor Chloe Angyal: “Literally zero women were awarded Nobels this year. Maybe someone can write a poignant, gravelly, somewhat atonal folk song about that”.
Or the writer Shay Stewart Bouley who tweeted about “peak white man music.” Or music journalist Everett True, who pokes fun at the committee: “Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature is like your third-rate English teacher at school, trying to look ‘cool’.”
Not all commentators have relied on personal taste or social politics: several observe something that struck me too: there seems to have been a category error in the awarding of this prize.
Novelist Jodi Picoult tweets: “I’m happy for Bob Dylan. #ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?” From novelist Joanne Harris: “Is this the first time that a back catalogue of song lyrics has been judged eligible for a literary prize?” More bluntly, from novelist Jeff VanderMeer:
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Is it possible that this award was determined according to the sort of logic set out by The Logician in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros: The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded only to those who have created literature. Bob Dylan was awarded the Prize. Therefore Dylan is a creator of literature?
Perhaps. I am very interested in the relationship between song lyrics and poetry, and it is a close relationship – the first poems were almost certainly sung – but centuries ago, the two creative modes parted company. They operate now according to a different logic, depend on different traditions, and are located within very different ecosystems. This is not a question of relative quality; it is a question of categories.
So, whether I admire Dylan’s body of work or not, whether I am a fan or not, I think the Nobel Prize Committee has made a category mistake. They awarded the prize to Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
And I don’t argue with this at all. But does that mean his output is “work in the field of literature”? Not for my money. Dylan is a musician; he has been well recognised for his contributions to music, and more broadly to cultural life.
When Swedish Academy member Per Wastberg gushes that “He is probably the greatest living poet”, I can only say that Mr Wastberg should not be let anywhere near a literature prize.
And – taking my own place on the team for the Negative – if it must go to a songwriter, why Dylan? Did he need the money more than, say, Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell or Aretha Franklin? Has he not had enough public attention? And were there really no writers – no poets, novelists, essayists, no people who have spent their lives in the field of literature – considered Nobel-worthy?
It’s very good to see that literature can still spark passion and outpourings of personal commentary; but I can’t help but read this decision as one that was discourteous to members of the field of literature, dismissive of women’s achievements, and fundamentally kinda nostalgic. Let me leave the last (tongue-in-cheek) word to writer Leah Kaminsky: “No woman wins any Nobel prize this year. Oh the times they ain’t a changin’.”
Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Richard Brown, University of Leeds
To the surprise of many, Bob Dylan has become the first singer-songwriter to win the Nobel prize in literature.
As the news broke, I was in the middle of teaching James Joyce to some undergraduates – an author who did not win the Nobel, but is often considered a pinnacle of high literature. Many wouldn’t look to compare these two artists, not least those already protesting that Dylan’s win cheapens the award. But in many ways, they’re alike. I’m thrilled. Dylan’s win has been a slow train coming.
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Meanwhile, Dylan will have been gearing up for another gig – much as he has been doing for more than half a century. On his Nobel-winning night he’s set to play Las Vegas, so it’s good to hear that he’s won a prize based on the reasonable judgement of a committee of high-minded enlightened experts and not just on the throw of the dice.
In terms of stamina alone, he’s a worthy winner but – more than that – it is the quality and the generosity of the achievement that is a pleasure to recognise. It’s great for his millions of fans around the world, old and young, great for the prize and great for the idea that popular music and serious literature aren’t necessarily so different after all.
The world of Dylan’s most distinctive lyrics is probably more Las Vegas than it is Stockholm – his songs are more often populated with gamblers than writers and academics. But his stature as the poet of rock and roll has never really been much in doubt. The significant presence of literary culture in what Variety magazine once mocked as the “deliberately iggerunt” vernacular language of his songs has increasingly been revealed.
The seriousness of the literary as well as musical achievement has gradually gained more and more respect and leading academic critics, such as Christopher Ricks, have been keen to recognise and to try to account for it. His autobiographical Chronicles are packed with references to and anecdotes about writers.
References and anecdotes are also something that filled Joyce’s pages. Curiously, Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records at the time Dylan was beginning his recording career, gave him a first-edition copy of Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses. Dylan professed that “he couldn’t make hide nor hair of it”. He wanted the poet Archibald MacLeish to explain it to him but didn’t get around to asking in the end.
Readers of Joyce as well as Dylan might recognise that as just the kind of thing that happens to Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom. Ulysses is full of snatches of songs and music – and if it had been written a few years later Bob Dylan would have been in there for sure.
What a lucky man to own a first edition of such a famous text – now one of the most prized and valuable of all collectable rare and vintage books (one sold in 2009 for £275,000) as well as one that is most valued by serious literary critics and readers all over the world. Not a bad insurance policy just in case the recording career didn’t take off.
But of course it did take off – and how. It’s hard to imagine a more prominent living figure in American culture – perhaps even world culture – than Bob Dylan, or one whose work combines a more richly poetic and surreal artistry in its vision of the contemporary world, a more iconoclastic sense of social justice, more notes of personal intimacy or such a dry and acute sense of humour. There is nobody better capable of provoking his huge and amazingly loyal audience with new challenges, at the same time as endearing himself to them all the more.
I hope the buskers and street singers in the subways and on the street corners around the world dust off their favourite Dylan standards and sing them out loud. It’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone with or without a guitar or harmonica who hasn’t tried to strum some Dylan chords or mimic that unmistakeable voice at some point in their lives – just to try to answer that great Dylan anthem question: “How does it feel?”
How does it feel for Dylan to win the Nobel? Let’s hope he tells us in the acceptance speech – or in song.
Richard Brown, Reader in Modern Literature, University of Leeds
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
David McCooey, Deakin University
Bob Dylan has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The media has reported on this surprising choice by asking musicians, poets, and writers if Dylan’s songs are indeed “literature”. Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting (1993), made it clear on Twitter that he didn’t think they were:
If you’re a ‘music’ fan, look it up in the dictionary. Then ‘literature’. Then compare and contrast.
So are song lyrics a type of literature or, more specifically, poetry? The English poet Glyn Maxwell thinks not. In On Poetry (2011), he writes that “Songs are strung upon sounds, poems upon silence”. Inhabiting silence makes poetry the harder and more important art form. Music, Maxwell writes, makes lyrics seem better than when they appear on the whiteness of the page.
But many don’t share Maxwell’s position. The critic Christopher Ricks has long championed Dylan’s song lyrics as poetry. In Dylan’s Vision of Sin (2004), he places Dylan’s songs in a poetic tradition that includes Tennyson and Donne.
Both Maxwell and Ricks, however, ignore an ancient link between poetry and music. Ancient Greek poetry, such as the epics of Homer or the lyric poems of Sappho, were accompanied by a stringed musical instrument called the lyre. It is from the lyre that we get the words “lyric” and “lyrics”.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Swedish Academy drew attention to this ancient link between poetry and music when announcing its decision. The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, pointed out that Homer and Sappho were “meant to be performed, often together with [musical] instruments”.
There are more recent examples, of course. English lute songs of the 16th century set poetry to music. In the 19th century, Schubert and other composers wrote lieder (German “art songs”), which also set poetry to music.
But how accurate is it to compare Dylan with Sappho and composers of art song? Dylan belongs to the tradition of blues, country, and Tin Pan Alley (the commercial American songwriters of the first half of the 20th century). He was central in the rise of “Americana”, a mix of folk and popular American musical forms that have little to do with “elite” musical forms such as opera and lieder.
Dylan has avoided taking on the mantle of “poet”. He once described himself as a “song ’n’ dance man”. Nevertheless, he famously took the name of a Welsh poet (Dylan Thomas) for his pseudonym. (Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman.) In addition, his songs, as Ricks and others have pointed out, take in numerous literary references, as seen in his many often-playful allusions to the Bible. And while his breakthrough in the early 1960s was as a “folk” singer, Dylan quickly became famous for the complexity and “poetic” quality of his lyrics.
So, do Dylan’s lyrics survive as poetry in the “silence” of the page? You can find out for yourself by reading the 960 pages of Dylan’s The Lyrics: 1961-2012 (2014). And you can compare his work with those of other song writers – such as Lou Reed, PJ Harvey, and Paul McCartney – whose lyrics have been published in book form.
Certainly, many people would argue that the lyrics of Dylan’s classic songs from the 1960s do survive as poetry. The strange, surreal, and often funny lyrics from Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) arguably represent his peak as a lyricist.
Visions of Johanna, from Blonde on Blonde, is a good example of the “literary” Dylan.
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
Visions of Johanna contains some of Dylan’s most celebrated lyrics, and you can see why. It clearly works on the page.
But should we make the printed page the standard of what counts as “literature”? Bob Dylan’s songs are multimedia things. Lyrics are to songs what scripts are to plays or films. We can read scripts for enjoyment, and to better understand the productions they come from. But to pretend that the play or film is somehow secondary is clearly a mistake. Equally, we can’t ignore the music and performances that accompany Dylan’s song lyrics.
Dylan’s Nobel Prize shows up what the Swedish Academy has so far ignored in their award system: film, popular music, and the emerging forms of digital storytelling.
Perhaps what this Nobel tells us more than anything is that “literature” or “poetry” are categories of our own making. To move beyond the page seems long overdue.
David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Alex Lubet, University of Minnesota
There’s been a great deal of excitement over Bob Dylan winning the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s rare for artists who have achieved widespread, mainstream popularity to win. And although Nobels often go to Americans, the last literature prize to go to one was Toni Morrison in 1993. Furthermore, according to The New York Times, “It is the first time the honor has gone to a musician.”
But as Bob Dylan might croon, “the Times they are mistaken.”
A Bengali literary giant who probably wrote even more songs preceded Dylan’s win by over a century. Rabindranath Tagore, a wildly talented Indian poet, painter and musician, took the prize in 1913.
The first musician (and first non-European) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tagore possessed an artistry – and lasting influence – that mirrored Dylan’s.
Tagore was born in 1861 into a wealthy family and was a lifelong resident of Bengal, the East Indian state whose capital is Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Born before the invention of film, Tagore was a keen observer of India’s emergence into the modern age; much of his work was influenced by new media and other cultures.
Like Dylan, Tagore was largely self-taught. And both were associated with nonviolent social change. Tagore was a supporter of Indian independence and a friend of Mahatma Gandhi, while Dylan penned much of the soundtrack for the 1960s protest movement. Each was a multitalented artist: writer, musician, visual artist and film composer. (Dylan is also a filmmaker.)
The Nobel website states that Tagore, though he wrote in many genres, was principally a poet who published more than 50 volumes of verse, as well as plays, short stories and novels. Tagore’s music isn’t mentioned until the last sentence, which says that the artist “also left … songs for which he wrote the music himself,” as if this much-loved body of work was no more than an afterthought.
But with over 2,000 songs to his name, Tagore’s output of music alone is extremely impressive. Many continue to be used in films, while three of his songs were chosen as national anthems by India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, an unparalleled achievement.
Today, Tagore’s significance as a songwriter is undisputed. A YouTube search for Tagore’s songs, using the search term “Rabindra Sangeet” (Bengali for “Tagore songs”), yields about 234,000 hits.
Although Tagore was – and remains – a musical icon in India, this aspect of his work hasn’t been recognized in the West. Perhaps for this reason, music seems not to have had much or any influence on the 1913 Nobel committee, as judged by the presentation speech by committee chair Harald Hjärne. In fact, the word “music” is never used in the prize announcement. It is notable, however, that Hjärne says the work of Tagore’s that “especially arrested the attention of the selecting critics is the 1912 poetry collection ‘Gitanjali: Song Offerings.’”
It may be that the Nobel organization’s downplaying of Tagore’s significance as a musician is part and parcel of the same thinking that has long delayed Dylan’s receiving the prize: uneasiness over subsuming song into the category of literature.
It’s rumored that Dylan was first nominated in 1996. If true, it means that Nobel committees have been wrestling with the idea of honoring this extraordinary lyricist for two decades. Rolling Stone called Dylan’s win “easily the most controversial award since they gave it to the guy who wrote ‘Lord of the Flies,’ which was controversial only because it came next after the immensely popular 1982 prize for Gabriel García Márquez.”
Unlike Tagore’s Nobel announcement, in which his songs were an afterthought, the presentation announcing Dylan’s award made it clear that aside from a handful of other literary contributions this prize is all about his music. And therein lies the controversy, with some saying he shouldn’t have won – that being a pop culture icon who wrote songs disqualifies him.
But like many great literary figures, Dylan is a man of letters; his songs abound with the names of those who came before him, whether it’s Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in “Desolation Row” or James Joyce in “I Feel a Change Comin’ On.”
Why not celebrate Bob by being like Bob and reading something unfamiliar, great and historically important? Tagore’s “Gitanjali,” his most famous collection of poems, is available in the poet’s own English translation, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats (who won his own Nobel in literature in 1923). And YouTube is a great repository for some of Tagore’s most celebrated songs (search for “Rabindra Sangeet”).
Many music lovers have long hoped that the parameters of literature might be writ a bit larger to include song. While Dylan’s win is certainly an affirmation, remembering that he’s not the first can only pave the way for more musicians to win in years to come.
Alex Lubet, Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music, University of Minnesota
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Jen Webb, University of Canberra
And we have a winner. Black Rock White City, AS Patric’s dark, sorrowful story has impressed the judges sufficiently for them to award it first prize. I too was captured by the world of the novel, and by the central characters: Jovan, who “had been a poet in Yugoslavia when that was still a country”, and who is now a cleaner at a Melbourne hospital; and Suzana, his wife, who works as a cleaner in Melbourne’s Black Rock, and who comes from White City (“the literal translation of Belgrade”).
Suzana and Jovan are survivors of the Bosnian conflict, and have made their way to Melbourne where they are eking out a small spare life. Their story is told through a series of analepses and prolepses — fleeting glimpses of their life before Australia, more fully sketched accounts of their lives in the here and now. Both were academics before the war, living with their two small children a comfortable European life. This came to an end, when hate turned
into fire, free-floating and exploding throughout a city, and then materialising again into a blistered red monster more real than any creature children imagine in night-time terrors.
Though Suzana and Jovan escaped the fire and the hate by escaping Sarajevo, it has not let them go. They lost everything: their home, careers, and identity; their children, who died after eating poisoned meat; their dream of a future; even their sexual lives. Suzana has been unable to make love with Jovan since their children’s death, so he is having an impersonal affair with Tammie, a dentist: for her, he is “a tool for her sexual fantasies”; for him, she is mere physical release.
The story is animated by the graffiti artist who is haunting the hospital where Jovan works. Known to the hospital community as Dr Graffito, this shadowy person daubs obscene, obscure, and often darkly funny texts on the hospital walls and windows, the plates in its cafeteria, even cutting it into the flesh of cadavers. Jovan, whose job it is to clean up the mess, finds in the messages strange resonances with his own history: a strange connection with this bête noire.
Suicides and other deaths follow the pattern of Dr Graffito’s project, and this is a mystery that remains unresolved, a topic of conversation among the workers, a sharp point of anxiety. This mystery weaves through the gradually shifting lives of Jovan and Suzana as they begin to move out of mere survival into a kind of living, a kind of loving.
I couldn’t help but read this novel, in some ways, as an analogy for the contemporary tragedy that is the forced, mass movement of people across the globe. Australian government policy performs a double act: erecting powerful barriers to anyone seeking asylum, and locking away, out of sight and out of story, those who have managed to reach Australian territory.
This novel is a reminder that every refugee, every asylum seeker, is a person, an individual, someone struggling to return to the world of light after the disaster. And it is a reminder too that it can happen to anyone. “When you think refugee, you think black, brown or Asian,” says Bill, Jovan’s co-worker, but Europeans, academics, poets, lawyers: anyone can fall into that pit, and become a Jovan or a Suzana, a human being desperately trying to accommodate the trauma that has upended their lives, that has clamped itself to them.
Yes, this is grim stuff. It is harrowing, densely tragic, almost devoid of hope. Almost, but not entirely. Jovan and Suzana, after all, have retained dignity, if nothing else; she is beginning to creep back toward life by learning to become a novelist; he is beginning to recover memories of the poetry he wrote in his former life as a result of the absurd, obscure, obscene writing with which Dr Graffito desecrates the walls and windows and cadavers of the hospital.
It’s not all darkness: there are moments of great tenderness scattered throughout the narrative and, like any good chiaroscuro, there is always a bit of light in the shadow.
Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Jen Webb, University of Canberra
The literary calendar is marked by big public events: writers festivals, book fairs, and the announcements first of shortlists and then of winners of major literary awards. For Australian writers and readers, the Miles Franklin is a lodestone, our Big Award – the one that celebrates not just writing, not just fiction, but particularly and peculiarly Australian writing.
Since 2013 that award has been accompanied by the second literary award to be named for Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin: the Stella Prize, established to recognise women’s contribution to Australian literature.
This year, it seems to me, the Miles Franklin shortlist entirely honours the founder of the award, not only because four of the five novelists are women, but also because each of the novels, in their own idiosyncratic and nuanced ways, reflects and represents Australian life, presenting as that “indigenous literature” (Franklin’s term) that prevents people from being “alien in their own soil”.
The novels do not, though, offer a comfortable or consoling rendition of Australian life: if anything, they turn their lenses on alienation, and on the weight of the ordinary occasions of everyday life, as well as the larger scale complexities of, say, the socio-political landscape, that bear down on individuals.
This makes them sound a bit “worthy” and “serious”: novels that take as their task the imperative to instruct readers about The Human Condition. But in fact each is remarkably readable; each writer has a wonderful sense of story and its elements: character, pacing, setting and yes, even plot. Any would be a worthy recipient of this prestigious award, to be announced Friday night.
Let me tiptoe through them in alphabetical order.
Peggy Frew’s Hope Farm is set in 1985 Gippsland. It is narrated by Silver, daughter of Ishtar who – pregnant as a teenager – fled the petit bourgeois morality of 1970s Queensland that would have forcibly removed her baby from her, for the uncertain support of a local ashram. The story unfolds on the ironically misnamed Hope Farm, a communal property occupied mainly by feckless incompetents. Ishtar and Silver may be misfits, but they are neither feckless nor incompetent; and their arrival, along with that of Ishtar’s new man Miller, initiates an unravelling of that decaying place, that compromised community.
There are the expected conflicts – children vs adults; bullies vs bullied; male vs female; parent vs child – but they are delivered with a clarity and tenderness that takes readers beyond the surface impression of, say, snotty child, or slovenly adult, to the fullness, the complexity, of any individual, or group of individuals. I wouldn’t dream of saying “redemption” in relation to this novel – and indeed this is not a redemptive story in the classical sense – but it does offer a stage on which Silver, and her equally misplaced friend Ian, and her shining, glorious, damaged mother Ishtar, can begin to feel their way beyond mere survival, and toward a more endurable life
With Leap Myfanwy Jones has crafted a lyrical account of mourning, and the long, lonely, difficult work of building sufficient scar tissue over the wounds of bereavement to allow mourners the possibility of moving on. Much of this work is couched in terms of physical being: the parkour through which Joe, muted by the death of his girlfriend Jen, is feeling his way back into the world; or the stillness and compulsive observation, that Jen’s mother, Elsie uses as her connection to memories of her daughter, to the idea of being alive.
Cats are important metaphors in this novel: the cat leap that Joe is learning to perform; the tigers that have captured Elsie’s imagination; the “catlike containment” of the mysterious nurse who moves into the spare room in Joe’s share house; Jen’s intention to have tiger stripes tattooed on her leg. Cats as a way of thinking about being: it worked for me. The novel is moving; the language poetic; the morphology of grief very believable.
With Black Rock White City we are again in the company of grief: loss, bereavement, trauma. Of the central characters, AS Patric’s narrator says, “Neither of them is sure about the present but this is some sort of afterlife”. Jovan and Suzana, refugees from the war in Sarajevo, have left their lives behind, along with the bodies of their little children: “Their names were Dejan and Ana. And there’s nothing more that can be said about the dead that doesn’t make them small, lost and forgotten”.
They are living now in the sort of afterlife you find in mythology: grey, and sad, and haunted by the shades of all they have lost. Even Jovan’s name has been lost in this new country (“Jo … Ja … Joh-von. Ja-Va. Ah fuck it, we’ll call you Joe”). But of course we never entirely lose, or escape, our past. The idea of war has come with them; Dr Graffito, who defaces the walls of the hospital with violent phrases, is a metaphor as well as an actuality of violence and death. But Patric does not leave Suzana and Jovan there; slowly, tenderly, they begin to emerge into this new country and all its possibilities.
Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek treads the sort of ground broken a few years ago by Kate Grenville and her Secret River. Set in the Coorong in South Australia, peopled by the Finches – a large and ever-expanding family whose father cannot find the balance between ideal and action – it’s narrated by Hester, the eldest daughter and the one who is required to provide the through line for the family: including cooking and cleaning and supporting her depressed mother and caring for the little children.
What I found compelling was not the story of Hester’s endurance, but rather the way Treloar depicts the relationship between the local people and the Finches: the stupidity and carelessness, the casual brutality, with which the settlers treat the Indigenous owners of land to which they have laid claim; and the way some of the Finch children begin to connect, however inadequately, with some of the local people. One of the rare sunny spots in the novel is provided by Tully, a local youth, who is adored both by Addie, Hester’s lighthearted sister, and Fred, her artist brother. And yes, it ends in tears. Indeed, this particular colonial adventure generally ends in betrayal, brokenness and disappointment; but to say this so bluntly is to ignore the beauty of the language, the lightness with which the historical context is carried by the story, and the vivid presence of the physical environment, which is as fully realised as are the central characters.
Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, in equal parts captivated and appalled me. Built out of the actuality of the Hay Institution for Girls, an institution established for the punitive constraint of adolescent “offenders”, this novel operates as a dystopic fable of the control of women and women’s sexuality. The ten young women who suffer “the natural way of things” have all been the subjects of very public sexual scandals. They have been kidnapped and enslaved and brutalised by the agents of a vaguely identified corporation, Harding International.
Their heads shaved, their clothes exchanged for heavy boots and rough dresses, and their eyes and arms under constraints, the women find themselves “abducted right into the middle of the nineteen fucking fifties”. The necessarily “bald and frightened girls” and their dull abusive captors gradually adapt to this bizarre life, in a Waiting for Godot situation where day after day Harding International fails to arrive. But how does anyone adapt to the impossible: to authorised misogyny, to absent rights? They don’t, of course; they simply find ways to accommodate themselves to it.
In those accommodations we see the crippling of selves; the ambiguous comfort of friendship; the giving over of personal values for tiny physical ease. While there are fleeting gestures toward a sense of sisterhood, only two characters really come out of it with any honour: Yolanda, betrayed by her beloved brother, named “lunatic”, but able to hunt and kill, and thus to keep everyone alive, for a time; and Verla, who is able to use her brain, and thus to some extent keep them comparatively functional. It is gruelling to read, shattering. It is important.
Novels build in their readers a capacity for empathy, we are told. These five novels do precisely that, and besides are lovely to read – each writer has a feeling for sentences and phrases, and has built in such narrative traction that I read them at a gulp, emerging only at the end, blinking, before returning to the everyday. These novels are scored through by sensitivity, clarity, and a ruthless generosity of voice, and feel their way into character, into ethical complexities, and into the small and large ways our society creaks on.
Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Arts and culture are part of the broad subset of economic activities that are afforded special treatment – usually within the ambit of a government ministry – by some claim to special circumstances or importance. Defence, transport infrastructure, sports and education are other examples. What these sectors have in common is the claim that they produce public goods, or experience substantial market failure, justifying public support.
In this view, the problem with the arts and cultural economy is on the supply side. If left to the market, too few resources will be devoted to arts and cultural production. Hence government support is necessary to arrive at a socially optimal level of arts and cultural production.
But a different way of understanding the problems in the economics of arts and culture is from the perspective of the consumer (not the producer). Here the problem is simply that choice is hard because quality is uncertain. Markets can fail when producers lack the incentives to produce enough exciting new work, but markets can also fail because consumers don’t know how to choose over the set of new things, and find it easier to choose nothing. That is, they stay away.
By definition, art produces something novel and unique. This is something that economists call an experience good. You only know what you think of it after you’ve consumed it. This means that demand and purchase occurs before you know whether you will like something. Markets fail here because they don’t carry enough information.
Market-making in these industries invariably involves creating mechanisms to deal with the quality uncertainty problem. Often the economic success of a sub-sector depends upon the extent to which it can solve this problem.
There are several such mechanisms. One is a minimum quality standard, of the sort imposed through industrial regulations, licenses or certifications. These are used extensively in restaurant and tourism to signal minimum cleanliness, safety or service. Another is the use of a brand, which functions as a reputational hostage. Publishing Imprints and Galleries use this mechanism. Another mechanism is social network markets, where the pooling of the choices of other consumers fill in the information gaps. Box office sales and consumer reviews are examples of such.
But another important mechanism is awards. Awards are characterised by disinterested expert assessment of quality. Indeed, industries with substantial quality uncertainty problems (e.g. wine, movies, architecture, advertising, science, complex engineering) also tend to have high profile, high prestige awards (e.g. the Academy Awards for film, the Emmy’s for television).
So awards matter. But how do they actually work? And do they work differently in different industries?
A new study by Erwin Dekker and Marielle De Jong, both cultural economists from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, has examined a long and deep new data set on book awards in three countries: the US, France and the Netherlands. Their new paper called What Do Book Awards Signal? alights on a surprising finding, namely that book awards don’t work the same way that, as a prime comparison, movie awards work.
The basic difference is that with movie awards there is a relatively strong correlation between the assessments of different award juries (say Cannes, Sundance and the Oscars), and between these awards and popular consumer perceptions of quality, as measured with audience ratings. Relatively strong here means on the order of 50% correlation, which still leaves a lot of room for disagreement.
But with books, the overlap between different expert assessments of quality, i.e. consensus of expert opinion, is much lower: Dekker and De Jong find that it is 10% in the US, 7% in the Netherlands and just 3% in France.
So it seems that award winning books do not represent expert consensus about quality. So what are book awards doing? Dekker and De Jong suggest, following the work of Lucien Karpik, that book awards are signalling not a shared consensus on quality, but a judgement of distinctiveness.
Indeed, such awards work to precisely signal that a particular award winning book will not correspond to a common opinion assessment of quality.
An award winning book carries the signal that the reader will be consuming more than just a good book, but something more precious in a social context, namely a book of distinction, a quality that then carries over to the reader.
Why do book awards work this way? One reason is that books require more investment (i.e. time) than do movies. A second reason is that many more people need to agree that a movie is good through the production process in order for it to be made at all, so higher expert consensus is more likely.
Suppose now you’re a public benefactor of the arts and culture, or specifically that you were Mitch Fifield, Australia’s Arts Minister. One thing you can do is direct subsidy. That’s the producer-side market failure model. But while that makes the recipients happy, it doesn’t actually solve the quality uncertainty problem. The risk with that strategy is that all you’ll do is make some producers happy and leave the consumers of arts and culture no better off at all.
To solve that problem, consider setting up an award. Or rather, another new type of award. Can there be too many awards? Probably. But we are nowhere near that margin yet, and certainly not with high distinctiveness arts such as books, theatre, and dance. And the fun thing is you even get the legacy effect when you name the award after yourself.
Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
At the BookShelf 
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