Nobel Prize in Literature in Controversy for 2nd Straight Year
For the last two years there has been some extra drama regarding the Nobel Prizes in Literature. The Prize was not awarded in 2018 (actually as we will see it was “postponed”) due to a slew of scandals and resignations from the committee that decides the winners and other key members of the Nobel organization. The main head-lining scandal involved Jean-Claude Arnault, a French photographer and the husband of Katarina Frostenson, a committee member. He was hit with charges of sexual assault of 11 women (he was found guilty of just one of these charges). The internal investigation by the Nobel Prize organization found that Arnault committed assaults on property owned by the organization and asked Frostenson to withdraw from the work of the committee.
The Academy was also facing conflict of interest accusations and was seeking to locate the source of leaks revealing the names of prizewinners in advance. The turmoil eventually led to a slew of withdrawals, including that of Ms. Frostenson and the organization’s head, Professor Sara Danius. Members cannot resign from their posts but can refrain from taking a further part in proceedings. All this turmoil led to the Academy announcing the postponement of the award on May 5, 2018. When all that dust settled in time for the 2019 award announcements, the committee announced two winners, one the postponed 2018 Prize and the other for the 2019 Prize. The 2018 winner was Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 prize went to Austrian author Peter Handke.
Tokarczuk was awarded “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Before starting her literary career she trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw. She became a practicing psychologist and a therapist until she took up writing full-time. Her first book was published in 1989, a book of poetry; her first novel was published in 1993, Podróż ludzi księgi ("The Journey of the Book-People"). Tokarczuk’s writing career includes poetry, essays and non-fiction, fiction and novels, as well as screenplays. She has won many literary awards aside from the 2018 Nobel Prize; including the 2018 Man Booker International Literary Prize for her novel Flights. Tokarczuk considers herself a disciple of Carl Jung and cites his psychology as an inspiration for her literary work. Since 1998, Tokarczuk has lived in a small village Krajanów near Nowa Ruda, from where she also manages her private publishing company Ruta. Tokarczuk is a leftist, a vegetarian, and a feminist.
In Poland Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize was a matter of not just celebration, but also of conflict as her politics are decidedly progressive and there is a strong right-wing nationalist segment that does not appreciate her political stance as they find her writings and statements about Poland’s mistakes of the past as “traitorous”.
The 2019 Prize winner gives the Nobel Academy even more controversy for a second year in a row. Peter Handke, an Austrian-born author now living in France, was awarded the Prize according to the Academy “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”
Handke was born in 1942 in the Austrian city of Griffen. His father was a German soldier whom he did not know or meet until adulthood. His mother was a Slovene living in Austria and married a German tram conductor, Bruno Handke. Handke’s stepfather was an abusive alcoholic and made his youth a great hardship. Handke starting writing while going to college and was successful from the start. An interesting local connection is that Handke gained international attention after an appearance at a meeting of avant-garde artists belonging to the Gruppe 47 in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1966. He is a dramatist, a novelist, a screenwriter and film director. His writing has garnered a slew of fiction and drama awards. Besides his novels, Handke has gained notice for his writing for (and with) Wim Wenders including the great film, Wings of Desire (1987).
Handke’s selection has come with great controversy though, as his association and support for the late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević has been a cause of condemnation from many writers’ association world-wide. He is considered by many to be Milošević’s apologist and gave the eulogy at his funeral. Handke repeatedly spoke out in favor of Milošević’s regime, claiming that the dictator was being misrepresented by Western media and that the massacres of Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Serbian troops were staged by Muslims themselves. These kind of actions are why the free speech organization PEN America condemned the choice of Handke and issued the following statement; “PEN America does not generally comment on other institutions’ literary awards. We recognize that these decisions are subjective and that the criteria are not uniform. However, today’s announcement of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke must be an exception,” said PEN America president and Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan. “We reject the decision that a writer who has persistently called into question thoroughly documented war crimes deserves to be celebrated for his ‘linguistic ingenuity.’ At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this. We deeply regret the Nobel Committee on Literature’s choice.”
The Mercer County Library stocked up on the available works of these two authors in honor of their awards and allow our patrons to read and judge these two authors by their works.
Primeval and Other Times (2010) – Set in the mythical Polish village of Primeval, a microcosm of the world populated by eccentric, archetypal characters and guarded by four archangels, and chronicles the lives of the villagers over the course of the feral 20th century in prose that is forceful, direct, and the stylistic cousin of the magic realism in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Told in short bursts of "Time," the narrative takes the form of a stylized fable, an epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time and the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine) in which Poland's tortured political history from 1914 to the contemporary era and the episodic brutality visited on ordinary village life is played out. A novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial, Primeval and Other Times was awarded the Koscielski Foundation Prize in 1997, which established Tokarczuk as one of the leading voices in Polish letters and has been translated into many languages throughout the world and hailed as a contemporary European classic. As Tokarczuk has said of the novel: "I always wanted to write a book such as this. One that creates and describes a world. It is the story of a world that, like all things living, is born, develops, and then dies." Kitchens, bedrooms, childhood memories, dreams and insomnia, reminiscences, and amnesia — these are part of the existential and acoustic spaces from which the voices of Tokarczuk's tale come, her "boxes in boxes." (Publisher’s Description)
Flights (2017) – A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer. This novel won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize in Literature.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018) – Finalist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, and autonomy and fate. In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind...
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970) – The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier. Maybe his most noted work.
Kaspar and Other Plays (1970) – The story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and illogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes creative--"doing his own thing" with words; for this he is destroyed.
Short Letter, Long Farewell (1974) – One the most inventive and exhilarating of Handke’s novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America—from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything’s spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, Short Letter, Long Farewell is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life—or the corpse of an old one—lying just around the corner.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams : a Life Story (1974) – Peter Handke's mother was an invisible woman. Throughout her life, which spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economy, she struggled to maintain appearances, only to arrive at a terrible recognition: "I'm not human anymore." Not long after, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams her son sits down to record what he knows, or thinks he knows, about his mother's life and death before, in his words, "the dull speechlessness, the extreme speechlessness" of grief takes hold forever. And yet the experience of speechlessness, as it marks both suffering and love, lies at the heart of Handke's brief but unforgettable elegy. This austere, scrupulous, and deeply moving book is one of the finest achievements of a great contemporary writer.
The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays (1976) – A collection of six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, spanning the early years of the Austrian playwright's career.
The Weight of the World (1984) – A combination of professional notebook and personal diary that records -- both in short, informal jottings and through more formal, extended meditations -- the details of Handke's daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977. Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert DeNiro and Goethe, the journal recounts Handke's passing impressions of strangers; the deep and delicate nature of his relationship with his daughter; and a brief hospital stay which stirs his ever-present fear of death.
Absence (1990) – The time is an unspecified modernity, the place possibly Europe. Absence follows four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler -- as they journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.
Voyage to the Sonorous Land, or The Art of Asking and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other (English Edition – 1996) – In these two plays, here translated into English for the first time, the renowned Austrian writer Peter Handke inquires into the boundaries and life-affirming qualities of language. At a time when language no longer seems to serve the purposes of a genuine human community, Handke asks, is such a community possible?
Once Again for Thucydides (1998) – A collection of seventeen micro-epics written on trips around the world. In each brief journal entry, Handke concentrates on small things he observes, trying to capture their essence, their simple, unadorned validity. What results is a work or remarkable precision, in which he uncovers the general appearance of random objects and discovers their inner working and mystery.
Across (2000) – Tells the story of a quiet, organized classics teacher named Andreas Loser. One night, on the way to his regularly scheduled card game, he passes a tree that has been defaced by a swastika. Impulsively yet deliberately, he tracks down the defacer and kills him. With this act, Loser has crossed an invisble threshold, and will be stuck in this secular purgatory until he can confess his crime.
Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (2007) – On the outskirts of a northwestern European river port city lives a powerful woman banker, a public figure admired and hated in equal measure, who has decided to turn from the worlds of high finance and modern life to embark on a quest. Having commissioned a famous writer to undertake her "authentic" biography, she journeys through the Spanish Sierra de Gredos and the region of La Mancha to meet him. As she travels by all-terrain vehicle, bus, and finally on foot, the nameless protagonist encounters five way stations that become the stuff of her biography and the biography of the modern world, a world in which genuine images and unmediated experiences have been exploited and falsified by commercialization and by the voracious mass media.
Don Juan: His Own Version (2010) – Don Juan's story—"his own version"—is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke's Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. Don Juan: His Own Version is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space.
Storm Still (2018) – In Storm Still, Handke returns to the land of his birth, the Austrian province of Carinthia. There on the Jaunfeld, the plain at the center of Austria’s Slovenian settlement, the dead and the living of a family meet and talk. Composed as a series of monologues, Storm Still chronicles both the battle of the Slovene minority against Nazism and their love of the land. Presenting a panorama that extends back to the author’s bitter roots in the region, Storm Still blends penetrating prose and poetic drama to explore Handke’s personal history, taking up themes from his earlier books and revisiting some of their characters. In this book, the times of conflict and peace, war and prewar, and even the seasons themselves shift and overlap. And the fate of an orchard comes to stand for the fate of a people.
The Moravian Night : a Story (2016) – Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of the narrator's and the continent's past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain, Germany, and Austria, from a congress of experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of jew's-harp virtuosos. His story and its telling are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer and appears sometimes as a demon, sometimes as the longed-for destination of his travels. Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer, tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke traces and interrogates his own thoughts and perceptions while endowing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "Handke's sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world."
The Academy was also facing conflict of interest accusations and was seeking to locate the source of leaks revealing the names of prizewinners in advance. The turmoil eventually led to a slew of withdrawals, including that of Ms. Frostenson and the organization’s head, Professor Sara Danius. Members cannot resign from their posts but can refrain from taking a further part in proceedings. All this turmoil led to the Academy announcing the postponement of the award on May 5, 2018. When all that dust settled in time for the 2019 award announcements, the committee announced two winners, one the postponed 2018 Prize and the other for the 2019 Prize. The 2018 winner was Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 prize went to Austrian author Peter Handke.
Tokarczuk was awarded “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Before starting her literary career she trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw. She became a practicing psychologist and a therapist until she took up writing full-time. Her first book was published in 1989, a book of poetry; her first novel was published in 1993, Podróż ludzi księgi ("The Journey of the Book-People"). Tokarczuk’s writing career includes poetry, essays and non-fiction, fiction and novels, as well as screenplays. She has won many literary awards aside from the 2018 Nobel Prize; including the 2018 Man Booker International Literary Prize for her novel Flights. Tokarczuk considers herself a disciple of Carl Jung and cites his psychology as an inspiration for her literary work. Since 1998, Tokarczuk has lived in a small village Krajanów near Nowa Ruda, from where she also manages her private publishing company Ruta. Tokarczuk is a leftist, a vegetarian, and a feminist.
In Poland Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize was a matter of not just celebration, but also of conflict as her politics are decidedly progressive and there is a strong right-wing nationalist segment that does not appreciate her political stance as they find her writings and statements about Poland’s mistakes of the past as “traitorous”.
The 2019 Prize winner gives the Nobel Academy even more controversy for a second year in a row. Peter Handke, an Austrian-born author now living in France, was awarded the Prize according to the Academy “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”
Handke was born in 1942 in the Austrian city of Griffen. His father was a German soldier whom he did not know or meet until adulthood. His mother was a Slovene living in Austria and married a German tram conductor, Bruno Handke. Handke’s stepfather was an abusive alcoholic and made his youth a great hardship. Handke starting writing while going to college and was successful from the start. An interesting local connection is that Handke gained international attention after an appearance at a meeting of avant-garde artists belonging to the Gruppe 47 in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1966. He is a dramatist, a novelist, a screenwriter and film director. His writing has garnered a slew of fiction and drama awards. Besides his novels, Handke has gained notice for his writing for (and with) Wim Wenders including the great film, Wings of Desire (1987).
Handke’s selection has come with great controversy though, as his association and support for the late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević has been a cause of condemnation from many writers’ association world-wide. He is considered by many to be Milošević’s apologist and gave the eulogy at his funeral. Handke repeatedly spoke out in favor of Milošević’s regime, claiming that the dictator was being misrepresented by Western media and that the massacres of Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Serbian troops were staged by Muslims themselves. These kind of actions are why the free speech organization PEN America condemned the choice of Handke and issued the following statement; “PEN America does not generally comment on other institutions’ literary awards. We recognize that these decisions are subjective and that the criteria are not uniform. However, today’s announcement of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke must be an exception,” said PEN America president and Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan. “We reject the decision that a writer who has persistently called into question thoroughly documented war crimes deserves to be celebrated for his ‘linguistic ingenuity.’ At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this. We deeply regret the Nobel Committee on Literature’s choice.”
The Mercer County Library stocked up on the available works of these two authors in honor of their awards and allow our patrons to read and judge these two authors by their works.
Olga Tokarczuk
Peter Handke
In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams her son sits down to record what he knows, or thinks he knows, about his mother's life and death before, in his words, "the dull speechlessness, the extreme speechlessness" of grief takes hold forever. And yet the experience of speechlessness, as it marks both suffering and love, lies at the heart of Handke's brief but unforgettable elegy. This austere, scrupulous, and deeply moving book is one of the finest achievements of a great contemporary writer.
The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays (1976) – A collection of six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, spanning the early years of the Austrian playwright's career.
The Moravian Night : a Story (2016) – Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of the narrator's and the continent's past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain, Germany, and Austria, from a congress of experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of jew's-harp virtuosos. His story and its telling are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer and appears sometimes as a demon, sometimes as the longed-for destination of his travels. Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer, tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke traces and interrogates his own thoughts and perceptions while endowing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "Handke's sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world."
- Larry M., Lawrence Headquarters Branch
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