Writers on writing made up much of my best reading of the year, writes Darryl Accone.
Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk (Faber and Faber, 2007) is a collection of rich observations and meditations on life, reading, writing, pictures, politics, cities and the author’s oeuvre. Comprising 73 of Pamuk’s essays, ingeniously ordered to tell a tale, it is at once a writer’s credo, and a portrait of the artist as a young man, a developing writer and a novelist and story-teller at the height of his powers.
Given Pamuk’s way of working – he maps out his books completely in advance – it is not surprising, but no less impressive, that Other Colours is a seamless narrative flowing logically and compellingly from the first essay, ”The Implied Author” to the last, ”Views from the Capital of the World”. In between, he is brilliant on Bosphorus ferries, seagulls, summer houses, Islamic art and Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Much credit must go to Pamuk’s trusted translator Maureen Freely (to see how expressively she renders him, compare her version of The Black Book and the earlier attempt).
Added to the essays are Pamuk’s Paris Review interview of 2005; a short story, ”To Look Out the Window”; and his Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, ”My Father’s Suitcase”. Into this last Pamuk packs poignancy, confession and continuing aspirations. (The lecture is available also as a Faber booklet that sells for about R50.)
Nobel Lectures: 20 Years of the Nobel Prize for Literature Lectures (Icon Books, 2007) covers 2006 to 1986, in that order, from Pamuk to Soyinka. Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee are here, as are Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison and Dario Fo and Jose Saramago.
Laureate in 2000, Gao Xingjian, pointedly notes: ”That the writing of literature has become a profession is an ugly outcome of the division of labour in modern society and a very bitter fruit for the writer.”
Seamus Heaney (1995) extends Archibald Macleish’s ”A poem should be equal to/not true” and argues that ”poetry can be equal to and true at the same time” while Harold Pinter, in his electrifying attack on United States foreign policy, asks ”What is true? What is false?” and concludes that citizens have ”a crucial obligation” to ”define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.
In that context, reading Gunter Grass (1999) now is discomfiting. His subsequently exposed amnesia, or economy with the truth about his own past, makes Grass’s lecture seem an exercise in evasion, or at least a slipshod peeling of his famous metaphorical onion.
Pamuk and Morrison feature also in The Paris Review Interviews, Volume II (Canongate, 2007), to which the former contributes an introduction that begins, irresistibly: ”When I first read Faulkner in The Paris Review, in Istanbul, in 1977, I felt as elated as if I had stumbled on a sacred text.”
That ”sacred text” is here, a 1956 interview with Faulkner filled with candour and continual debunking of hokum, such as ”I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is – I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.”
What’s most impressive about this second volume, put together again by The Paris Review‘s current editor Philip Gourevitch, is not so much greats like Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Larkin, as neglected or under- appreciated writers such as Eudora Welty and John Gardner, whose 1971 novel Grendel reimagines Beowulf from the monster’s point of view.
Prodded by that, and the reported absurdities of the movie version of Beowulf (wittily redubbed Norse by Norse Worst by Philip French of The Observer), I read again Seamus Heaney’s masterly translation of the poem (Faber and Faber, 1999). Here, Grendel and his mother, and the radiant, gold-guarding dragon, are primeval creatures from a distant time of dream and nightmare, archetypes and not Hollywood ciphers.
There were other meetings with old favourites.
It was in 1938 that the last great meijin (master) of the Honnimbo School, Shusai, sat down at the Go board to take on a challenge from Kitani Minoru, a player of the Seventh Rank. Their single encounter was to last from 26 June to 2.42 pm on 4 December 1938. Yasunari Kawabata was there, covering this epochal clash for two Japanese newspapers.
Thirty years later, in 1968, Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature for a lifetime’s work that formed an extended elegy on the passing away of things. Kawabata had lost all his relatives when a child. That irrevocable personal loss was mirrored in the pell-mell abandoning after World War II of centuries-old traditions, morals and principles that for Kawabata constituted the quintessence of Japan.
Kawabata’s The Master of Go (Yellow Jersey Press, 2006; translated by Edward G Seidensticker) chronicles the passing of that past. It is an acute picture of a society at the point of no return. The Master is aware that there is more than the honour of the Honnimbo at stake. His challenger – Otaké in the book – is the apotheosis of modernity. In his chafing at convention, his subtly impolite actions, he reveals himself an arriviste. Just as the arrival of firearms from the West spelt the end of Japan’s warrior code, so does the challenger’s behaviour break tradition, cast aside customs and brutally rupture cultural integrity.
Soseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat (Tuttle Publishing, 2002; translated by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson) is one of the strangest works in Japanese literature. Its opening lines announce title, protagonist and a problem: ”I am a cat. As yet I have no name.”
Natsume’s tale appeared originally in 10 instalments between 1905 and 1906. It is a mordant observation of the upper middle-class of the Meiji Restoration, which in one generation saw Japan move from feudalism to modernity. The 60 years beginning with the restoration in 1868 saw Japan industrialise at a pace surpassed only by China’s great state capitalist leap forward of the last 15 years.
Western readers will soon realise that the shade of Laurence Sterne is at work in I Am a Cat. Tristram Shandy is ”radical and total dethroning of ‘story’,” writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain (Faber and Faber, 2007), his cogent seven-part essay on the history, nature and meaning of the (Western) novel. It is ”stitched together by only a few eccentric characters and their microscopic, laughably pointless actions,” he continues (ibid). So it is with Natsume’s novel.
(Tristram Shandy is wonderfully captured by Pamuk too in Other Colours: ”Life has no meaning, only this shape.” That chimes with Kundera’s verdict on Sterne: ”In the art of the novel, existential discoveries are inseparable from the transformation of form.”)
Natsume spent 1900 to 1902 at the University of London on a scholarship, during which time he acquired a vast knowledge of 18th century Western literature and a love of Sterne, Jane Austen and Jonathan Swift. Those, alongside his essential Japanese sensibility and a startling originality, are all manifest in this gloriously tangential, wandering book, to the last pages of which I will now be returning.