South African writer JM Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, the Swedish Academy said. Coetzee, ”who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider”, will take home the prize sum of 10-million kronor (1,11-million euros, $1,3-million), the jury said.
The Swedish Academy said Coetzee’s novels are characterised by their well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance.
”But at the same time he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilisation. His intellectual honesty erodes all basis of consolation and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession. Even when his own convictions emerge to view, as in his defence of the rights of animals, he elucidates the premises on which they are based rather than he argues for them,” said the academy in a statement.
”There is a great wealth of variety in Coetzee’s works. No two books ever follow the same recipe. Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward spiraling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters. His protagonists are overwhelmed by the urge to sink but paradoxically derive strength from being stripped of all external dignity.
”Coetzee’s interest is directed mainly at situations where the distinction between right and wrong, while crystal clear, can be seen to serve no end. Like the man in the famous Magritte painting who is studying his neck in a mirror, at the decisive moment Coetzee’s characters stand behind themselves, motionless, incapable of taking part in their own actions. But passivity is not merely the dark haze that devours personality, it is also the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions. It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man.
”In Disgrace, Coetzee involves us in the struggle of a discredited university teacher to defend his own and his daughters honour in the new circumstances that have arisen in South Africa after the collapse of white supremacy. The novel deals with a question that is central to his works: Is it possible to evade history?”
The Nobel Prize for Literature is considered the highest accolade to which a writer can aspire, but there is a long list of justly-deserving authors who have died without winning the award.
Everyone has their own favourite who never made it on to the laureates list, but there are a good many about whom no one with an interest in fiction would disagree. It has even been argued that, in not recognising literary talent of such stature, the Swedish Academy have devalued the prize rather than the reputation of the writers in question.
Among those considered in the running but who have died in the past few years was RK Narayan, a foremost Indian writer in English of whom his friend Graham Greene once remarked that thanks to his writing he had known what it was like to be Indian.
Canada’s Robertson Davies was held in the highest esteem by those who read his Gargantuan but beautifully-crafted intellectual novels, and often cited as near-certainty for the prize, providing he did not, as he unfortunately did, die first.
The same could be said for Italian Giorgio Bassani, another recently-departed writer, whose Ferrara novels, in particular his masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, have a sense of place and period almost unmatched in contemporary fiction.
Two other Canadians, Mordechai Richler and Irish-born Brian Moore, would also have been worthy laureates had they lived long enough.
But, arguably the two greatest writers of the 20th century not to be honoured have to be Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, whose singular work, epitomised by his masterpiece Labyrinths, defies comparison, and Graham Greene, whose novels range over political and religious themes in settings as disparate as Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti (The Comedians), West Africa (The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case), Vietnam (The Quiet American) and wartime London (The End of the Affair and The Ministry of Fear).
It was often claimed that it was a personal vendetta by a member of the Nobel committee which prevented Greene receiving the award which was his due, and the choice of William Golding in 1983 was seen as a direct snub to the man who at the time was perhaps the greatest living writer in English.
Greene’s contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, suffered from being considered too much of a comic writer to gain such serious recognition, while another Enlgishman, Anthony Powell, whose 12-volume roman-fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time has been called by some the finest English novel of the 20th century, was never a fashionable enough figure.
The man whose work is considered an influence of Powell’s form and structure, Marcel Proust, was also passed over in his lifetime despite his A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) being one of the most important works of the last century.
Similarly, Austria’s Robert Musil, author of the three-volume Man Without Qualities was never rewarded, nor was James Joyce, whose Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake revolutionised literature, and neither was Simone de Beauvoir, the prototype feminist.
But, like Bertolt Brecht, Joyce and de Beauvoir were probably too controversial for the conservative Swedish Academy, and the world was probably not ready for a black American laureate while James Baldwin was still alive, even though the year before he died, Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka was honoured.
Popularity and a sense of humour have in the past almost seemed to bar a writer from the prize, as French poets Jean Cocteau and Jacques Prevert, Italian novelists Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, Cesare Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg could testify, and for sheer popularity, Georges Simenon in his non-crime novels was a master of concision and unjustifiably under-rated.
Of writers still alive and therefore still eligibile for the prize, a sense of fun and humour will probably in time rule out whole swathes of worthy winners, among them Czech exile Milan Kundera, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and Scottish mischief-maker Muriel Spark. – Sapa-AFP
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