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In 1997 the world of publishing was as fickle as ever. The sudden death of Diana, princess of Wales, occasioned an outpouring of books that were devoured by the public, even as critics decried the impulse behind them. Although major publishing houses owned by multinational corporations continued their hegemony, an increasing number of highly regarded small presses came to represent a kind of literary samizdat. The virtual bookstore became a reality so overwhelming that many physical bookstores began to feel the effects. In the United States in particular, the best-seller lists were unexpected homes to a good number of dense and imposing literary titles by writers such as Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon) and Don DeLillo (Underworld), and the winners of major literary fiction prizes (the National Book Award for Fiction in the U.S. and the Booker Prize in Great Britain) were big commercial successes in advance of the awarding of the prizes themselves, which disputed the initial common wisdom that the memoir was supplanting the novel as the literary form du jour. Both prizes, however, were increasingly vexed; the shortlists ignored any number of important titles in both the U.S. and the U.K., and both were won by first-time novelists, which caused many in publishing to shake their heads in disbelief and dismay.
Throughout the world the approaching millennium sent writers fleeing to the past for subject matter. In the U.S. major novels explored the 18th century, the Civil War, the Cold War, and the 1960s. In Britain Jim Crace's Quarantine took place in 1st-century Judea, and France's Prix Goncourt was won by La Bataille, an account of an 1809 Napoleonic battle told from the combatants' point of view. Germany's cult hit Starfish Rules was set in the U.S. during the 1930s, and a major Danish novel explored the religious and political struggles of 14th-century Denmark. Throughout Latin America fiction meditated on recent historical outrages.
The persecution of writers by the state continued in many parts of the world, notably in the Middle East and Africa. The International Parliament of Writers, headed by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, mailed out an appeal for funds, citing censorship, harassment, imprisonment, and even murder in places like Algeria, Iran, China, Nigeria, and Uzbekistan.
Highly regarded new English translations of Horace's Odes and Ovid's Metamorphoses appeared. The 75th anniversary of James Joyce's Ulysses was marked by the publication in the U.K. of a "reader's edition," which most critics regarded as a travesty. Other highlights of the year included the sudden high visibility of expatriate Indian writers, as well as new works by such internationally known authors as Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Peter Handke, Peter Carey, Robert Stone, Cynthia Ozick, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Colleen McCullough, Beryl Bainbridge, Peter Findley, Ben Okri, J.M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Hélène Cixous, Aharon Appelfeld, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, A.B. Yehoshua, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kurt Vonnegut, Mario Benedetti, and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.
In 1997 literary critics widely agreed that there were no new standout novels. Other literary forms, however, such as the memoir, seemed to many to give better expression to the fin de siècle mood of the country. Stephen Moss, The Guardian's literary editor, complained about what he regarded as a lacklustre 1997 Booker Prize shortlist, writing, "The death of the novel is an endlessly replayed . . . subject, but any objective observer of the events surrounding this year's Booker would have to conclude that fiction was in a parlous state. Breathing, but only just."
The Booker shortlist drew criticism both for its obscurity on the one hand and for pandering to popularity on the other. Three lesser-known titles shortlisted were Mick Jackson's The Underground Man, Madeleine St. John's The Essence of the Thing, and Tim Parks's Europa. The three more prominent titles, however, were considered more likely to win. Although Grace Notes by the well-established short-story writer Bernard MacLaverty from Northern Ireland was expected to gain the award, Booker Prize administrator Martyn Goff said that the panel felt that the book was really three short stories strung together, and its status as a novel was thus weakened. Jim Crace's Quarantine was many literary critics' favourite. An ambitious historical novel set in Judea in the 1st century ad, the action took place in the desert during the time when Jesus undertook his 40-day fast. Other characters took up residence there as well, including a dying and wily merchant whom Jesus saves, a woman trying to cure her infertility, and a group of pilgrims intent on settling in the caves. Although Quarantine earned praise for its humane intelligence and superb writing, the book nevertheless failed to win. In the voting the judges were divided but eventually arrived at a unanimous decision, announced October 14. The prize of £20,000 was awarded to Arundhati Roy, a first-time author from New Delhi, for The God of Small Things. The story, a saga of love, death, and intercaste relations, focused on twins growing up in the southern Indian state of Kerala. In the author's native India, critics charged that the book corrupted public morals. It nevertheless enjoyed strong sales in Britain and North America, and by the day before the winner was announced, the book had emerged as the favourite. Although Gillian Beer, the chairwoman of the judges, praised the book's "extraordinary linguistic inventiveness," Carmen Callil, 1996 chairwoman, in an interview just after the announcement, derided the decision of the judges as "execrable." Moss dismissed comparisons of Roy to V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie as the "fantasies of publicists" and concluded that the year's choice had been "disastrous" for the award and "profoundly depressing."
The Whitbread Award was less controversial but notable in that the overall winner was not a novel. The respective winners in each of four categories--first novel, novel, poetry, and biography or autobiography--were John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure (1996), Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself (1996), Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level (1996), and Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996). Although Bainbridge's novel, a tale about the sinking of the Titanic, was favoured to take top honours as the Book of the Year, nine judges, chaired by Malcolm Bradbury, settled on Heaney's poetry collection. "It was a tightly fought battle and the decision . . . was not unanimous," said Bradbury, "but [Heaney] represents some of the most powerful, original, and energetic work in the language." Heaney, the Northern Ireland-born poet and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, had been hailed as Ireland's greatest poet since William Butler Yeats.
The second Orange Prize for Fiction, awarded for the best novel written by a woman, went to Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. The book was the Canadian poet's first novel and probed the memories of a Holocaust survivor through his journal. It was a late submission and was considered only after one of the judges of the award called on the publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, to enter it for the prize. The novel also won The Guardian Fiction Award.
Whereas many critics were less than enthusiastic about the year's literary fiction, genre fiction, particularly the crime novel, rose to ever more popular heights. P.D. James published her 12th traditional English crime novel, A Certain Justice. A story of a murder in London's Inns of Court, it went straight onto the best-seller lists, along with Ruth Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford novel, Road Rage. These established queens of crime were joined by such newcomers as noir stylists Nicholas Blincoe, with Jello Salad; Glaswegian writer Christopher Brookmyre, with Country of the Blind; and Neil Tidmarsh, whose Fear of the Dog was a smooth-paced thriller about amoral dealings in London's 1990s art world. Counterbalancing crime novels set in the gritty modern day was a rush of historical detective fiction. Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost was set in Oxford in the 1660s, and authors Peter Tremayne and Kate Ross, respectively, produced a 7th-century nun and a Regency dandy as sleuths. The Guardian praised the best of these offerings for prose styles "at least equivalent to that of, for example, Madeleine St. John, Booker-shortlisted this year." As if envious of the genre's popularity, literary fiction writers Ian McEwan and Martin Amis both produced books obeying elements of the crime novel. McEwan's Enduring Love featured a stalker, and Amis's Night Train presented a case that might have been murder or suicide.
Other novels that won critical acclaim were Rose Tremain's The Way I Found Her, a story of summer love in Paris narrated by a 13-year-old boy, and Edna O'Brien's Down by the River, a disturbing story of a 14-year-old girl seeking an abortion after becoming pregnant as a result of an incestuous relationship with her father. A short novel, The Reader, a love story set in post-World War II Germany by Bernhard Schlink, was acclaimed by several reviewers for its terse and haunting prose, and Do White Whales Sing at the Edge of the World? by Paul Wilson was hailed by The Independent as "not a nice novel, but . . . grim and fantastic."
One of the most controversial books of the year was a new edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. Coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the book's publication and appearing on Bloomsday, June 16 (the day on which the action in Ulysses takes place), Ulysses was edited by Danis Rose, a Joyce scholar in Dublin. Rose claimed to have purged some of Joyce's errors and won praise from, among others, Irish poet and novelist Seamus Deane, who hailed it as "one of the most important editions . . . in a long time." Many critics were stridently disparaging, however. The London Review of Books remarked that Rose's approach "violates every principle and procedure of critical editing," and John Kidd, director of the James Joyce Research Center at Boston University, commented, "No responsible editor has ever undertaken the scale of mutilation that Danis Rose has perpetrated on this text." The Joyce estate, led by Joyce's grandson Stephen James Joyce, threatened to stop the book's publication on copyright grounds.
The memoir threatened to oust the novel as the literature of choice, with Angela's Ashes (1996), Frank McCourt's poignant tale of growing up in the slums of Limerick, Ire., winning praise in both the U.K. and the U.S., though sales in the U.S. were greater. Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski was a memoir of a traumatic childhood, overshadowed by a father who was a con man and a mentally disturbed mother who had aspirations of making her daughter into an ice-skating champion. Along with impoverished and abusive childhoods, illness was another favoured subject for autobiographical comment. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby's account of his suffering as a result of a paralyzing stroke--dictated by blinks of his eye--won high praise when it appeared in the U.K. in a translation by Jeremy Leggatt. The Independent declared it a "hugely absorbing narrative" reminiscent of the "icy clarity" of Simone de Beauvoir's description of Jean-Paul Sartre's descent into blindness and confusion. Bauby died in March. Fiona Shaw's Out of Me, an account of a postnatal breakdown, was a passionately written piece about life at the edge of an emotional abyss. More self-reflection came from Elizabeth Kaye, whose book Mid-Life: Notes from the Halfway Mark (1995; published in London in 1997) was a wistful but colourful account of coping with aging.
Literary biography continued to thrive as a robust form. The first volume of R.F. Foster's biography of Yeats appeared under the title The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914 and was hailed by The Literary Review as being as rewarding as it was long awaited; it was especially celebrated for its "brilliantly" handled examination of Yeats's relation to political events in Ireland. Fintan O'Toole's biography of another Anglo-Irish writer, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was also well received, as was Phyllis Grosskurth's Byron: The Flawed Angel, the first substantial account of the life of the poet for more than 30 years and much applauded for its balance and restraint. A stirring account of the life of Daniel Defoe, author of Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, was produced by Richard West, with a title reminiscent of his subject's writing style: The Life & Strange Surprising Adventures of Daniel Defoe. Although little was known about Defoe's life, West coped with this exigency by supplying a lively historical backdrop to his narrative, encompassing such events as the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire of London, and the Popish Plot.
Other warmly received biographies included Jennifer S. Uglow's Hogarth: A Life and a World, a rich evocation of the artist and his London hometown. A.N. Wilson's Paul: The Mind of the Apostle conveyed the subject's enormous intelligence and literary skill amid a backdrop of vexed Mediterranean politics in the 1st century. Wellington: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert provided new insights into the duke's personal life. The author had used newly found archives that had come to light since Elizabeth Longford's major study appeared 25 years earlier.
Other nonfiction works included Hugh Thomas's The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. Three decades in the writing, it was hailed as one of the most rounded and complete studies of the slave trade to date. David Crystal's English as a Global Language examined the rise of the English language, from its murky origins in the Dark Ages to its present-day status as a language to which, Crystal claimed, approximately one-third of the people on the planet were routinely exposed.(See Spotlight: English Language Imperialism). Equally ambitious in scope were Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Millennium, a history of the world over the past 1,000 years, and Roy Porter's authoritative The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity.
Two remarkable compilations were also published. The Penguin Book of Columnists, edited by Christopher Silvester, brought together in 640 pages the most vibrant of the U.K.'s newspaper columnists. The Papacy, edited by Michael Walsh, was a compact history of the papacy as it approached the 3rd millennium. The book ended with the conclusion that there would be a pope in Rome for as long as there was a human race. One of the most highly sought-after edited collections, however, was a new and comprehensive edition of the letters of the Brontë family. The Brontës: A Life in Letters, edited by Juliet Barker, was celebrated for its intimate portrayal of Yorkshire life in the vicarage at Haworth; the book's popularity spoke to the enduring fascination among British readers with this family of geniuses.
This article updates English literature.
Fiction is dying--the memoir is the thing. This seemed to be the conventional wisdom in 1997 among the big American publishing houses, where the previous year's mood of desperation born of declining sales of serious fiction and growing returns of unsold books fed a frenzy of hype and aesthetic blindness. Kathryn Harrison's confessional memoir The Kiss, her deliberately opaque account of her incestuous affair with her father, became the focus of the hysteria. For a while the controversy over this book--obscene or not? a subtle masterpiece or an empty bit of titillation?--dominated the talk about new books. Ultimately, the year was marked by the publication of some of the biggest books of the decade, which allowed serious readers and critics alike to focus their attention on questions of quality rather than on gossip.
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon's long-awaited novel set in the pre-Civil War U.S., took centre stage for a time, though the massive 700-page volume, which included cameo appearances by Ben Franklin and George Washington and was peppered with Pynchon's signature wit and song lyrics, received a mixed response from critics. The initial reception of another huge novel, Underworld, Don DeLillo's 800-page-plus exploration of American life at the advent of the Atomic Age, was much more positive. Its resonant opening line--"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful. . . ."--and its masterly opening set-piece (the final game of the 1951 National League play-offs, with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover, among others, in the crowd) immediately swept most readers into the action.
Pynchon and DeLillo were not the only established novelists to produce major new works. Philip Roth's American Pastoral, a look back at the 1960s, elicited a favourable critical response. Novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen focused once again on pre-World War I Florida in Lost Man's River, the second volume in a trilogy with the enigmatic quasi-historical E.J. Watson at the centre of things. John Updike anticipated the next century in his science-fiction knockoff Toward the End of Time. Kurt Vonnegut proclaimed Timequake his "last" novel even as it began to appear on best-seller lists around the country. The only one of this well-recognized group to strike out was Norman Mailer, with his oddly experimental revision of the Jesus story, The Gospel According to the Son.
Among other seasoned novelists, San Francisco-based Herbert Gold published his urbane comedy about an older man in the throes of romance, She Took My Arm as if She Loved Me, and Cynthia Ozick revived an old character in new dress in The Puttermesser Papers. Joyce Carol Oates produced Man Crazy, a novel episodic in design and, like her 1996 work We Were the Mulvaneys, set in upstate New York. Frederick Busch used an upstate New York winter as the backdrop for Girls, his best novel in years. Ward Just returned to Washington, D.C., for the scene of Echo House, one of his most successful works of fiction.
Nicholas Delbanco employed a variation on the legend of the doomed 12th-century lovers Héloïse and Abelard for the motif of his wonderfully engaging contemporary love story Old Scores. Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony and Allan Gurganus's Plays Well with Others were two novels that dealt with the impact of the AIDS epidemic, but neither to very good effect. Terminal Velocity, Blanche McCrary Boyd's novel set in the 1970s in a California lesbian commune, was much more successful in its treatment of somewhat similar material. The highly regarded Denis Johnson produced what he called "a California Gothic" titled--aptly, according to most reviewers--Already Dead. It had the distinction of being the worst book of the year by a good writer, which, given Mailer's flop, was saying a great deal.
Heading straight to the top of the best-seller lists and staying there was Cold Mountain, a debut novel by North Carolina writer Charles Frazier. The story of a wounded Confederate veteran's valiant attempts to put war behind him and return to his mountain home, the book was a wonderful blend of forceful narrative, striking imagery, and engaging characters. The debut of playwright Joseph Skibell as a novelist in A Blessing on the Moon, a story of the Holocaust, also won deserved attention. Kathleen Alcalá signed in with Spirits of the Ordinary, a charming historical fiction set on the northern border of Mexico in the late 1800s. Jay Parini turned to history again in Benjamin's Crossing, a novel based on the last days of the German-Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin.
Sticking with a contemporary setting with good effect was novelist Kem Nunn in The Dogs of Winter, a beautifully composed thriller with a cast of surfers and other California renegades. Craig Nova used a Southern California setting with fine results in The Universal Donor. Cristina García, author of the acclaimed Dreaming in Cuban (1992), transported readers to Cuba and Miami, Fla., in The Agüero Sisters, a novel blessed with wonderful prose rhythms and poignant scenes from Caribbean family life. Darcey Steinke's third novel, Jesus Saves, the story of a Virginia minister's daughter and the perils of suburban life, showed off the author's powerful dark lyric style.
It was also a good year for novellas and short fiction. Saul Bellow produced a gem of a work in his 100-page story The Actual. Two notable novella collections appeared: David Leavitt's Arkansas and Francine Prose's Guided Tours of Hell. Whether they were considered novellas or simply three long stories, the work in former Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner winner Richard Ford's Women with Men brought him more well-deserved national attention. Bear and His Daughter collected all of the gifted novelist Robert Stone's brilliant short fiction from the past several decades. Some important fiction reprints also appeared during the year, namely, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud and Larry Woiwode's impressive 1975 novel Beyond the Bedroom Wall.
American poets produced less controversy than their prose counterparts but nonetheless issued some excellent volumes of verse. Pulitizer Prize winner Mary Oliver came out with West Wind--"If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me?/ Even then? Since we're bound to be something, why not/ together? Imagine Two little stones, two fleas under the/wing of a gull, flying along through the fog. . . ." In Eating Bread and Honey Pattiann Rogers also turned, with great effect, to the natural world.
Award-winning poet Frank Bidart--recipient of the 1997 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize--published Desire. Jane Hirshfield signed in with The Lives of the Heart ("There is more and more I tell no one/ Strangers nor loves. . . ."), Stanley Plumly with The Bride in the Trees, Charles Wright with Black Zodiac, and Hilda Raz with Divine Honors. Cynthia MacDonald (I Can't Remember), A.R. Ammons (Glare), and Jorie Graham (Errancy) also brought out new volumes during the year. In Ceremonies of the Damned, Adrian C. Louis produced lyrics on Indian reservation life, and Elizabeth Alexander played on black family motifs in Body of Life. With the publication of the collection When People Could Fly, the prose poem found a marvelous godfather in Morton Marcus ("There was a time when stones flowered. I need to believe that. In forests and fields, layers of black rock cracked open after rain, and slick pink petals swarmed into wet sunlight. . . .").
As to the year's nonfiction prose, certainly some of the memoirs offered the most interesting passages, though Harrison's The Kiss was not among the books memorable for their achievement rather than their content. Burning the Days, by novelist and screenwriter James Salter, was in this select group, however. "There are certain houses near the river in secluded towns, their wooden fences weathered brown. Near the door in sunlight, stiff-legged, a white cat pulls itself up in an arc. Clothes on a half-hidden line drift in the light. It is here I imagine the wives, their children long grown, at peace with life and now drawn close to the essence of it, the soft rain flattening the water, trees thick with foliage bending to the wind, flowers beneath the kitchen window, quiet days. Men are important no longer, nor can they know such tranquillity, here in perfect exile, if it can be had that way, amid nature, in the world that was bequeathed to us. . . ."--this was Salter in what was perhaps the single most impressive book of prose published all year in any genre.
Memoirs, good and bad, abounded in 1997. In North Country, Howard Frank Mosher plumbed the difficulties of approaching middle-age as a "mid-list" novelist. Albert French turned to the Vietnam War for his subject matter in Patches of Fire. The difficulties of kinship and siblings were featured in Jay Neugeboren's Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival. Another work focusing on family relationships was My Brother, Jamaica Kincaid's loosely constructed story of her brother's death from AIDS and her own response to his passing. Phyllis Rose conducted a gracious tour of a recent year in her life, with some excursions into her past, in the felicitously composed The Year of Reading Proust. Novelist Paul Auster's autobiography Hand to Mouth was a decided failure in the eyes of just about every reviewer of merit. American Indian writer N. Scott Momaday collected his essays in The Man Made of Words. Journalist and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff cobbled together a memoir out of essays and newspaper columns under the title Speaking Freely.
Literary figures were the subjects of a large portion of the year's best biographies--a category that included Michael Reynolds's Hemingway: The 1930s, Walker Percy by Patrick Samway, S.J., Robert Penn Warren by Joseph Blotner, John Ciardi by Edward M. Cifelli, and Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley by Pulitizer Prize-winning critic Jonathan Yardley--though other creative individuals, painters, photographers, and composers came under scrutiny, notably in Duchamp by Calvin Tomkins, Steichen by Penelope Niven, and Johannes Brahms by Jan Swafford. Sylvia Jukes Morris chose a notable 20th-century woman as her subject in Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce. The selected letters of the poet Hart Crane were edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber under the title O My Land, My Friends. Literature professor Bonnie Costello edited The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore.
Important literary criticism came from elder statesman Alfred Kazin in God and the American Writer. Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco received well-deserved attention for Required Reading, his essays on classic American writing. Poet John Hollander put together 23 essays on The Work of Poetry. Poet Jane Hirshfield demonstrated an interesting approach in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and Henry Louis Gates's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man demonstrated a critical mind working well in the realm of journalism. Arguably the best work of the year by a younger critic was James Bloom's The Literary Bent: In Search of High Art in Contemporary American Writing.
Mark Edmundson's Nightmare on Main Street stood as one of the year's best books of cultural criticism. Former Harper's Magazine executive editor Michael Pollan, a self-proclaimed "unhandy" man, narrated the story of the construction--by his own hands--of a small building in A Place of My Own. Janna Malamud Smith won some notice for her work on privacy in American culture, Private Matters. California novelist James Houston focused on American-Asian affinities and differences in his resonant travel memoir In the Ring of Fire.
In the realm of historical narrative and public affairs, John Lukacs assessed the extant Hitler biographies in The Hitler of History. Maury Klein wrote of the coming of the Civil War in Days of Defiance. David K. Shipler took up the subject of race relations in A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. Novelist Susan Richards Shreve and her writer son, Porter, edited an interesting collection of essays by various hands under the title Outside the Law: Narratives on Justice in America, and veteran New York Times reporter Serge Schmemann painted an affecting portrait of his ancestral home in Russia in Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village.
Among the year's awards the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to Stephen Millhauser for his novel about a visionary entrepreneur, Martin Dressler. Short-story writer Gina Berriault received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Women in Their Beds. Frazier's Cold Mountain won the National Book Award for fiction; William Meredith's Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems took the award for poetry; and Joseph Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson won for nonfiction. New Jersey-born Robert Pinsky was named the new poet laureate.
This article updates American literature.
In 1997 the millennium was too close for comfort yet too distant for reality--an ideal condition for poetry, which feeds on time and death, the beat, and the silence between beats, as evidenced in Time Capsule: New and Selected Poems, which eloquently demonstrated why Pat Lowther's 1975 death was a great loss to Canadian literature. Anne Szumigalski soared forth On Glassy Wings: Poems New & Selected, a 25-year flight of verbal aerobatics, and Selected Poems: 1978-1997 was Patrick Lane's latest offering of poems as enigmatic as the volume's title. P.K. Page's collected works required two volumes to reveal the many dimensions of The Hidden Room: Collected Poems.
Poets were the original blue-sky pilots, like the voyagers to the Long Lost Planet: Lesley Choyce and the Surf Poets, a talking book in which images blazed like meteors across the dark night of the mind; Francis Sparshott in Home from the Air, viewing a landscape charged with balloons and sinners, graves and academics; or Dionne Brand's dazzling displays of controlled metaphorics in Land to Light On. In contrast was Don McKay's austere, astutely crafted Apparatus, instrumental in stopping the eye on the nearly invisible present as it flashes past, swift as childhood. Those moving horizons were circumscribed by Linda Rogers in Heaven Cake, a delicious concoction of celestial visions and earthly delights.
Robert Priest, seeking Resurrection in the Cartoon, sketched multiple perspectives with the tip of his mordant wit, whereas Al Purdy used a broader brush of humour, loaded with mixed messages, in The Gods of Nimrud Dag. Rosemary Aubert's audacious Picking Wild Raspberries: The Imaginary Love Poems of Gertrude Stein served as counterpoint to bill bissett's Loving Without Being Vulnrabul. Laura Lush, a poetic seismograph, mapped Fault Lines in meticulous detail, and George Bowering raced down the tracks of Blonds on Bikes, telling tales all the way.
The tellers of real tall tales were found in short-story collections, as in Timothy Findley's Dust to Dust, elegiac reconstructions of lives too early lost, or too long extended; Holley Rubinsky's At First I Hope for Rescue, lives lived in the narrow valleys of the interior of British Columbia linked into a chain, each binding each; the inspired forgery of John Weier's Friends Coming Back as Animals, transformations under the hammer of events; and Maggie Helwig's Gravity Lets You Down, a descent into society's underbelly and back again.
In one sense Larry's Party, Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields' latest novel, lasted for 20 years; in another it was over where it began, at the centre of Larry's labyrinthine heart, where everyone eventually arrives--amazed, bemused, and wonderfully confused. Funnily enough, Mordecai Richler snarled his characters in contradictions and myth in Barney's Version, for which he won Canada's $25,000 Giller Prize. For The Time Being Mary Meigs arranged the meeting of two women in the wilds of Australia and turned them loose with startling results. In Evening Light Harold Horwood saw clear to the core of the outport soul in his rendering of a Newfoundlander's life; Jane Urquhart used the medium of a minimalist artist to limn her meaning in The Underpainter, winner of the 1997 Governor-General's Award for English-language fiction; and Marilyn Bowering charted mysterious customs in Visible Worlds.
In Austin Clarke's The Origin of Waves, immigrants meeting in Toronto after a hiatus of 50 years while away time in a bar during a blizzard; Margaret Gibson, in a storm of memories and pain, re-created the past in Opium Dreams. In Sleeping Weather Cary Fagan described a waking nightmare of invasion by the irrational and the irresistible. Even scarier was Bharati Mukherjee's protagonist in Leave It to Me, a goddess of revenge stalking the parents who abandoned her in infancy. Erika De Vasconcelos celebrated generations of women in My Darling Dead Ones, and Nino Ricci completed his trilogy with Where She Has Gone.
This article updates Canadian literature.
Literary works by writers from Australia, New Zealand, and sub-Saharan Africa highlighted 1997. From Australia Madeleine St. John's novel The Essence of the Thing was a finalist for Great Britain's increasingly controversial Booker Prize. Peter Carey, winner of the Booker in 1988, released his latest novel, Jack Maggs; and poet Les Murray, nominated for the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, offered a selection of his prose writings in A Working Forest. Also in Australia, the best-selling author Colleen McCullough brought out Caesar: Let the Dice Fly, her ninth novel and the fifth in an ambitious series on ancient Rome. Other important works included Gail Jones's wide-ranging short-story collection Fetish Lives and Robert Dessaix's Night Letters: A Journey Through Switzerland and Italy (1996), a marvelously imaginative personal, epistolary, and literary journey set against a changing backdrop of time and place.
New Zealand writers offered a comparable range of literary talent. Heading the list in poetry were Allen Curnow with Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems, 1941-1997 and C.K. Stead with Straw into Gold: Poems New and Selected. In fiction established authors continuing to draw attention and acclaim were Maurice Shadbolt with Dove on the Waters (1996) and Lauris Edmond with In Position. In Maurice Gee's latest work, The Fat Man, the protagonist threatens to control the lives of an 11-year-old boy and his family as part of his plan for revenge for the mistreatment he suffered as a schoolboy.
Outstanding new literature, both innovative and engaging, emerged from writers in Africa. The Nigerian-born award-winning novelist Ben Okri released Dangerous Love (1996), a lyrical novel about a doomed affair between star-crossed lovers; it was hailed as his "most accessible and disarming novel yet." Other standouts included memoirs from two of South Africa's finest writers not noted for such personal revelations--novelist J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life and playwright Athol Fugard's Cousins: A Memoir. The new works of other South Africans met with both critical and popular success as well, including Lynn Freed's The Mirror, Christopher Hope's Me, the Moon, and Elvis Presley, Rayda Jacobs's Eyes of the Sky (1996), and W.P.B. Botha's A Duty of Memory.
The essay collection of Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, explored the relationship between art and political power. Censorship was the topic in Margreet de Lange's The Muzzled Muse: Literature and Censorship in South Africa. Nobelist Wole Soyinka, a victim of censorship and continued threats from Nigeria's government, drew support from such literary luminaries as Kenzaburō Ōe, Nadine Gordimer, and Toni Morrison, who issued a formal statement of protest in his defense.
The year in African letters was also marked by the news of the death of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, whose grisly tales were inspired by Yoruba folklore.
The controversy that had surrounded German-language literature since German reunification in 1990 finally began to abate in 1997. The year saw the 50th anniversary of the first meeting of the legendary Group 47, which had profoundly influenced the creation and reception of postwar German-language literature. The most visible sign of improvement was an agreement at the spring meeting of the two German PEN clubs to work toward the organizational unification of German writers. In previous years the push toward unification of the PEN clubs had been blocked by members of the West German club critical of some of their East German colleagues.
The most disputatious ongoing controversy of 1997 was the German spelling reform decided on by the educational and cultural authorities of the German-speaking nations of Central Europe and scheduled to go into effect in 1998. Many of the most prominent German-speaking authors, including Ilse Aichinger, Ulla Hahn, Sarah Kirsch, Martin Walser, Günter Grass, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Siegfried Lenz, protested against the reform during the year, arguing that because of it their literary works would be changed without permission, sometimes to the detriment of intended meaning. Owing to the many legal challenges mounted against the spelling reform in the Federal Republic, it was unclear at the end of the year whether the reform would actually be carried through as planned.
Botho Strauß continued his critical reflections on modern life in his book Die Fehler des Kopisten, a blending of aphorism and observation typical for the author. The work centred on the narrator's relationship to his young son, for whom the narrator would like to provide beautiful childhood memories and whom he must soon partially relinquish to the school system. This dilemma furnished the opportunity for critical reflections on contemporary education and child rearing. At the same time, the joyous presence of the son gave the book a more positive tone than Strauß's other recent work.
Peter Handke's novel In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus was a return to fictional narration after the massive, plotless meandering of Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht (1994) and the political controversy of Handke's intervention in favour of Serbia in 1996. The hero of the novel is a lonely Salzburg pharmacist who is hit over the head one night and becomes mute. He then sets out on an adventurous trip to Spain, where, after a long pilgrimage, he ultimately regains the power of speech. The novel was full of references both to Handke's earlier works and to Cervantes's Don Quixote; Handke sought to re-create the miraculous and the wonderful in an alienated postmodern world.
In his novel Von allem Anfang an, Christoph Hein made a valuable contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to reexamine life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) with an honesty difficult to achieve prior to 1989. Set in November 1956, the story revolved around Daniel, the son of a Silesian pastor whose family was forced to move to Saxony at the end of World War II. Combining family memories of war and devastation with Daniel's own coming of age and reflections on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, this story realistically depicted both the problematic early decades of the GDR and the lack of warmth and friendliness in the West. In his much-less-successful work, Amerikahaus und der Tanz um die Frauen, Friedrich Christian Delius also combined a coming-of-age story with a political awakening, this time set in the Berlin of the mid-1960s and focusing on a loser figure with no compelling power.
Perhaps the most important novel by a young author in 1997 was Tobias O. Meißner's cult hit Starfish Rules, an unwieldy, apocalyptic fantasy set in a mythical U.S. in the years 1937-39 but including anachronistic characters like Jimi Hendrix and the rap group Public Enemy. The "starfish" of the title was a symbol for the U.S. and its supposed five driving forces: hatred, violence, chaos, sex, and revolution. Heavily influenced by the paranoid brilliance of Thomas Pynchon, Meißner here attempted a postmodern pastiche of pop culture and grand narrative; his novel demonstrated how important American postmodern literature had become for many of the young German authors.
Günter Kunert, who had experienced both the Nazi dictatorship and the socialism of the GDR, published his memoirs, Erwachsenenspiele, containing fascinating and humorous reflections on figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Johannes R. Becher, Herbert Marcuse, and Uwe Johnson. Herbert Achternbusch's undisciplined but gripping Der letzte Schliff was the semiautobiographical story of a failed love affair. Wilhelm Genazino's Das Licht brennt ein Loch in den Tag (1996) contained a lyrical series of observations and memories. The year also saw the publication of Robert Gernhardt's clever and thoughtful poems Lichte Gedichte, based partially on Gernhardt's painful experience of a heart bypass operation during the previous year.
Jurek Becker, whose life work bridged the East-West and German-Jewish divides, died on March 14.
This article updates German literature.
Literary critic and poet Kester Freriks, commenting on the nominees for the VSB prize for poetry for 1997, lamented, "Dutch poetry doesn't sing anymore." In the place of melody we find a degree of cerebral grind that makes many poems inaccessible to many readers. Freriks evaluated the work of the nominees Elisabeth Eybers with her bilingual Tydverdryf/Pastime, Gerrit Kouwenaar, the eventual winner, with De tijd staat open, Robert Anker with In het vertrek, Judith Herzberg with Wat zij wilde schilderen, Flemish poet Leonard Nolens with En verdwijn met mate, and Toon Tellegen with Als wij vlammen waren. Nolens at 50 was the youngest of the nominees, which led Freriks to say, "I miss the dashing, equivocal capricious debutantes and not only among the debutantes but in the field of poetry in general as well."
Of prose it could well have been said that the place of the storyteller's art had been taken by writers' preoccupation with structure and contemplation of social problems, often of a personal nature. Prominent examples were Arnon Grunberg with Figuranten and Joost Zwagerman with Chaos en rumoer. Now the end of the 20th century appeared to be witnessing a revival of traditional storytelling. Indications of this could be found in the work of the nominees for the Libris Prize, such as Flemish author Hugo Claus with De geruchten (1996), A.F.Th. van der Heijden with Het hof van barmhartigheid, Margriet de Moor with Hertog van Egypte (1996), and J.J. Voskuil with Het bureau. In the works of these authors, one recognized an element that, though still mainly autobiographical, portrayed a situation that reached beyond the exclusively personal.
Internationally well-known writer Harry Mulisch's 70th birthday in July was celebrated with an exhibition dedicated to him in the City Museum of Amsterdam. An equally well-known author of that generation, Marga Minco, cast light on Nagelaten dagen.
This article updates Dutch literature.
A number of 1996 and 1997 Danish publications captured international attention in 1997. In Anne Marie Ejrnæs's Thomas Ripenseren (1996), a young Dane is caught up in 14th-century religious and political struggles in Denmark; Brugge, Belg.; and Paris. Mette Winge's Når fisken fanger solen (1996) told the sad fate of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe's sister Sophia, who followed an alchemist into exile and ended up living in dire poverty. Merete Pryds Helle's Men Jorden står til evig tid (1996) mixed scientific meticulousness with musicality and myth, and Kirsten Hammann produced a second fantastic novel, Bannister. Ib Michael's Prins combined fantasy with realism, starting with the discovery by a 12-year-old boy of a well-preserved body floating off the Danish coast.
In Anders Bodelsen's Den åbne dør, a 40-year-old mystery is solved, and Tage Skou-Hansen's På sidelinjen (1996) was the latest installment in his series of novels about Holger Mikkelsen. Jens Smærup Sørensen's Kulturlandsbyen (1996) was a modern-day judgment on a Danish village that saw its native culture disappear after it was proclaimed a European Union village of culture. Suzanne Brøgger's Jadekatten traced the rise, fall, and disintegration of a Jewish immigrant family. Social and ethical disintegration were seen in Jens-Martin Eriksen's Vinter ved daggry, which was inspired by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina; that theme was also the setting for Jan Stage's De andres krig.
Three established writers produced volumes of short stories: Klaus Rifbjerg's Andre Tider recounted the moments that change lives; Henrik Stangerup's Lille Håbs rejse contained three youthful fables that seemed to echo many of the themes in his mature work; and Peter Seeberg's Halvdelen af natten was a collection of short stories and essaylike reflections.Naja Marie Aidt published Huset overfor: Digte (1996), more poems in her delicate yet incisive style, and Thomas Boberg reinforced his position as a leading poet of the 1990s with Under Hundestjernen, a mixture of verse and prose. Morti Vizki, another '90s poet, found inspiration in Egyptian King Akhenaton for Sol, and Jørgen Gustava Brandt's selected poems were published in three volumes. A very different writing style characterized Sila (1996), a collection of Greenlandic short stories translated into Danish and edited by Aqqaluk Lynge.
This article updates Scandinavian literature.
Two Norwegian works of 1997 stood out as examples of publishing at its best: Atle Næss's Ibsens Italia, which recaptured both pictorially and lyrically the atmosphere of Italy during two long periods that Henrik Ibsen spent there, and Stein Mehren's Kjærlighetsdikt, a book of sensual love poems featured along with 81 reproductions of the poet's abstract paintings.
Among novels, Ketil Bjørnstad's monumental Veien til Dhaka brilliantly depicted the moral mess of modern humans, and Finn Carling's Skumring i Praha told of a painter who travels to Prague to capture the city at twilight but instead is accused of having murdered his wife and becomes involved in a kafkaesque court case. Anne Holt analyzed in intimate detail a disastrous lesbian relationship between a young woman and a married mother of four in Mea culpa, and Sissel Lie's Svart due was a surrealistic portrait of a middle-aged woman's attempt to cope with aging. The breakdown of a marriage between a doctor and her husband was recounted in Liv Køltzow's Verden forsvinner, winner of the prestigious Brage Prize. Knut Faldbakken's Eksil was a psychological thriller set in the seedier districts of Oslo. Gerd Brantenberg's semidocumentary Augusta og Bjørnstjerne was largely a retelling of Norwegian cultural and social history in the first half of the 19th century, and Bengt Calmeyer's Hundreårsromanen. Mennesker surveyed Norwegian history in the 20th century. Tor Åge Bringsværd's GOBI. Baghdad was the fifth in a series of novels about the Mongolian empire.
Short-story collections included Lars Saabye Christensen's Den misunnelige frisøren, Kjersti Wold's Prinsessene lander, and Toril Brekke's Blindramme. Poems by Gunvor Hofmo were collected in Etterlatte dikt, which showcased works discovered since her death in 1995.
In the biographical genre, Tor Bomann-Larsen's Det usynlige blekk: Sigurd Christiansens liv fascinatingly portrayed the intimate relationship between Christiansen's enigmatic private life and his literary works. Liv Bliksrud's Sigrid Undset, and Harald S. Næss's Knut Hamsuns brev 1915-1924 illuminated interesting aspects of those two Norwegian Nobel Prize winners.
This article updates Scandinavian literature.
The number of Swedish novels and volumes of poetry and essayistic writings was larger than usual in 1997--1,898 new books were published, and many of the works of well-established authors vied for attention with those produced by a younger generation of writers.
Works of poetry and prose by women figured prominently, with Carina Rydberg's Den högsta kasten arousing great debate among the literary cognoscenti; the disappointing tell-all revealed personal information about well-known personalities. Esteemed writer Marianne Fredriksson produced Enligt Maria Magdalena, a pale follow-up to her 1996 novels.
Well-regarded works included Anna-Karin Palm's Målarens döttrar, a modern rendition of Shakespeare's The Tempest; first-time novelist Gabriella Håkansson's pseudoscientific novel Operation B; and Inger Edelfeldt's Betraktandet av hundar, a story about a lonely schizoid high-school teacher.
Two standout themes--death and dying--characterized many works. The title of Eva Runefelt's book of poetry, Soft Darkness, was the metaphor she used for death, and Inger Alfvén's Berget dit fjŠrilarna flyger för att dö told of a slowly dying 38-year-old man. Lennart Sjögren's FågeljŠgarna was a poetic magnum opus about hunters drowning, and Verner Aspenström's posthumously published Israpport overshadowed the literary scene with its haunting beauty.
Another recurring theme was societal outcasts, with the best examples being Björn Ranelid's fictionalized autobiography Till alla mŠnniskor pa jorden och i himlen, the sixth novel in a series; Poet Kjell Espmark's GlŠdjen, about those living in "the other Sweden"; and Anita Goldman's tales from a Jewish family, Rita Rubinstein åker tunnelbana i den bŠsta av vŠrldar. Also in this category was Man måste det man önskar, Stig Claesson's hilarious love story about two pensioners.
Two novels dealt with the past: Peeter Puide's Samuil Brachinskys forsvunna vrede, a contemporary J'accuse about the fate of the Estonian Jews during the Nazi era, and Per Holmer's Svindel, a story painted on the 1914-43 European canvas about Jewish everyman Herschel Meier; a frightening tale of disintegration of values and ideological battles, it was one of the most discussed and praised books of 1997.
This article updates Scandinavian literature.
Although the emphasis on authors' individuality continued to prevent the precedence of any one literary movement, during 1997 a group of diverse novels had themes whose cohesion compensated for the lack of a unified theory. One predominant theme was that of the drifting social outcast. Jean Echenoz's Un An told of a young woman, falsely implicated in her boyfriend's death, who flees across France for a year, slowly sinking into poverty and abasement. The meanderings of an abandoned boy in Emmanuel Darley's Un Gâchis were even more somber; he finds love with a lost little girl, only to lose it owing to their inability to communicate and hounding by the police. Finally, in Jean-Christophe Rufin's L'Abyssin, a 17th-century French ambassador exiles himself from his own culture when his travels cause him to fear of the imperalistic spread of Christianity and French power.
In contrast to the theme of exile, two successful novels dealt with the inescapable effects of home. The young academic of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's La Télévision decides to stop wasting time watching television in order to write, but slowly all of his energy is diverted from his work into the fight against television, and his life is absorbed by the very passivity he had tried to avoid. Home was a source of lasting trauma in Patrick Villemin's La Morsure, in which a young man attempts to make sense of his painful childhood, during which he was victimized by his parents, teachers, and classmates.
Three novels were coming-of-age stories. In Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio's Poisson d'or, an African girl, stolen in infancy and abandoned at age 13, learns to fend for herself in France and the United States as she discovers pride in her heritage. In Tahar Ben Jelloun's La Nuit de l'erreur, a Moroccan girl learns to fight for independence as she avenges the cowardly hypocrisy of men by destroying them with her sexuality. The lessons of Morgan Sportès's Lu were less laudable; a vacuous woman interested solely in her own beauty learns to use her wiles to marry into money and thus take advantage of a world that had always taken advantage of her.
Two best-selling novels maintained the French tradition of satire. Jean d'Ormesson's Casimir mène la grande vie recounted the misadventures of a fallen nobleman, his nostalgic grandfather, a young Trotskyite, and an Arab woman--who agree that the world must be changed but disagree on how to go about it--as they become modern-day Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. In former thriller writer Tonino Benacquista's Saga, four screenwriters, hired without a budget to fill the government's quota of French-produced television series, manage against all odds to come up with a hit. The novel engaged readers in the lives of the struggling writers while poking fun at television and its audience.
In the realm of autobiography, Annie Ernaux's La Honte recounted the author's claustrophobic small-town childhood and the shame she suffered over her vindictive neighbours' knowledge of her father's attempt to kill her mother. On a lighter note, in Hélène Cixous's Or: les lettres de mon père, the writer discovers the existence of her dead father's love letters to her mother. Before reading them, she imagines what they will say and how they will resurrect the past and bring back to life a man she had thought lost forever.
Two major essays aimed alarmist criticism at France. Pierre Bourdieu's Sur la télévision (1996) denounced television's growing control over books in general and of the press in particular, whereas in La Guerre des rêves, Marc Augé attacked the steady impoverishment of collective and individual imagination at the hands of what he considers totalitarian and imperialistic image makers, particularly the theme park and mass tourism trades.
Poetry was marked by two divergent foci. The first was the foreignness of everyday objects, as in Nathalie Quintane's Chaussure, a collection obsessively preoccupied with shoes, feet, and walking. A second poetic trend, inherited from Surrealism, was the exploration of dreams. In Anatolie Marie Etienne attempts to put her dreams on display in the hope that they will gain solidity and reveal the unconscious, a hope sadly unrealized at the end of the collection. Between these two trends, Lionel Ray's Syllabes de sable (1996) attempted to discover the inner self by examining a person's reaction to loss--be it the loss of a friend, the loss of youth, or separation from home.
The 1997 Prix Goncourt was awarded to Patrick Rambaud for La Bataille, the meticulously researched novelization of an 1809 Napoleonic battle told from the soldiers' point of view. Pascal Bruckner won the Prix Renaudot for Les Voleurs de beauté, the philosophical tale of a couple who kidnap and disfigure beautiful women in order to redress the injustice of their own ugliness. The Prix Femina went to Dominique Noguez's Amour noir, the story of an all-consuming passion that ends inevitably in death, and Philippe Le Guillou won the Prix Médicis for Les Sept Noms du peintre, the tale of a young painter's mystic initiation into sexuality and spirituality.
This article updates French literature.
In 1997 Quebec writers joined the wave of stage performance in the literary arts. The Quebec Writers Union's literature festival in May was a decidedly youthful affair, mixing disciplines and moving away from the tradition of writers declaiming their works before chair-bound audiences in a hall. More established writers such as Suzanne Jacob and Madeleine Gagnon participated too, in October, with a joint French-English cabaret event that featured writers who represented both language communities.
Leading thinkers such as essayist François Charron questioned the assumptions and uses of Quebec nationalism, long a mainstay of literary life in the province. Influential journalist, essayist, and editor Richard Martineau did the same, using his column in the entertainment weekly Voir to give the Quebec writing scene new room for political debate. On the language front, Georges Dor questioned the value of Quebec's celebrating its own patois in the work Anna braillé ène shot (1996). François Ricard extended his exploration of one of French Canada's greatest writers with his biography of Gabrielle Roy.
In a surprising move, the Can$10,000 City of Montreal Book Prize was awarded to the little-known Cristoforo, a lively and well-researched historical novel about the colonization of New France. The work was penned by a newcomer writing under the pseudonym Willie Thomas. The Governor General's Literary Award for fiction broke no new ground; the Can$10,000 award was given to Aude for her book Cet imperceptible mouvement, a short-story collection diaphanous in tone.
An exceptional, almost unclassifiable work by Robert Lalonde was the year's commercial and esthetic success. In Le Monde sur le flanc de la truite, which follows in the tradition of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Lalonde meditates on writing and nature and comments on and translates into French a variety of books heretofore unknown in French Quebec.
Hard on the heels of Michel Tremblay's early 1997 best-seller Quarante-quatre minutes, quarante-quatre secondes, the perennially popular author weighed in with a second novel in the fall, Un Objet de beauté. Tremblay's success proved that in Quebec, like everywhere else, romanticized accounts of a people's history were always eagerly read.
This article updates Canadian literature.
While academics were disputing in 1997 the authenticity of Eugenio Montale's 1996 Diario postumo, actor and playwright Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, much to Fo's amazement and the Italian literary establishment's discomfiture. (See NOBEL PRIZES.) Also sparking controversy were the "cannibals"--a vociferous band of young pulp-fiction writers, whose works were united in the anthology Gioventù cannibale. Susanna Tamaro, author of the exceptionally successful Va' dove ti porta il cuore (1994), incensed critics without enthralling many readers with her new novel, Anima mundi, which introduced as protagonist a worthless young man who moved from Trieste to Rome, there to be all too suddenly converted. Most intriguing among the other distinguished works by women writers was Marta Morazzoni's Il caso Courrier, which painted a picture of provincial life in 1917 in the Auvergne region of France and culminated in the unexpected suicide of its central character. In Dolce per sé Dacia Maraini recounted a love affair between a much-traveled middle-aged woman and a violinist 20 years her junior. The woman's resulting self-portrait was unusually structured as a series of letters that she (the narrator) sends to the musician's six-year-old niece. Memories of childhood and adolescence in Naples and Rome during the 1950s and '60s were the subject of Elisabetta Rasy's Posillipo, a sober and terse narrative in which beauty and pain are inextricably interwoven. At the other end of the spectrum was Francesca Sanvitale's collection of short stories, Separazioni, about loss, old age, and loneliness. A rare example of a present-day narrative was found in Francesca Duranti's Sogni mancini, in which an Italian woman, an academic, finds independence, perhaps significantly, not in Italy but in New York City.
Whereas the autobiographical novel was favoured by women writers, the thriller was particularly popular among male authors. Antonio Tabucchi's La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro, a story about a murder and the collusion between police and drug traffickers in Oporto, Port., had some of the stylistic qualities of his earlier Sostiene Pereira, but it lacked the latter's narrative rhythm and structural coherence. More compelling was Daniele Del Giudice's Mania, a collection of six short stories that were subtly united by the theme of death. The first, "L'orecchio assoluto," was a remarkable example of a classic plot that went back to Edgar Allan Poe. The consistently high quality of the collection gave further proof of Del Giudice's unusual ability to combine a rich and mobile imagination with a rigorous control of style. Very impressive for its inventiveness and stylistic novelty was Silenzio in Emilia, Daniele Benati's first book. In the 11th tale the characters of the previous 10 make up, as in a Federico Fellini movie, a fantastic soccer team. In fact, they are all dead souls of ordinary men haunting their homeland in the Emilia region and still talking, and thinking, in its inimitable language.
Claudio Magris's Microcosmi, winner of the Strega Prize, was a fascinating journey of exploration through ever-changing public and private microcosms, including the literary, artistic, historical, and scientific. The narrative--a combination novel, essay, journal, and autobiography--involves animals, woods, mountains, rivers, and seas, as well as dead and living people, and ancient and contemporary settings. At journey's end, however, the points of departure and arrival turn out to be on either side of Trieste's public gardens, which suggests perhaps that the journey of life never took place. Difficult to classify was Ombre dal Fondo by Maria Corti. Like Magris, she was a university professor, scholar, and part-time creative writer. Her book chronicles how a collection of manuscripts by contemporary writers was developed at the university of Pavia; each manuscript evokes the shadow of its author, at times in a very moving manner. University life and education were again central to Luigi Meneghello's latest prose collection, La materia di Reading, which contained autobiographical essays and reflections on his previous writings and offered further insights into contemporary culture in Italy and Britain.
History from the Middle Ages to the 20th century inspired several novels. The first crusade served as the background for Franco Cardini's L'avventura de un povero crociato; Sebastiano Vassalli's Cuore di pietra explored national disappointments following major historical events since Italy's unification, such as World War I and the Resistance against Fascism; and Enrico Palandri's Le colpevoli ambiguità di Herbert Markus focused on the ideological crisis that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most popular in this category was La parola ebreo, a narrative by Rosetta Loy that compellingly told of both the heroism and the indifference of Italian Catholics concerning the persecution of Italian Jews before and during World War II.
Two major projects were completed for the prestigious "Meridiani" collection of Italian classics: Dante's Commedia and Petrarch's vernacular works, painstakingly annotated by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi and Marco Santagata, respectively.
This article updates Italian literature.
Late in 1996 Ana María Matute broke a literary silence of 25 years and astounded critics with Olvidado Rey Gudú, a massive allegorical folk-epic that spanned four generations of rulers, gnomes, witches, and other creatures in the make-believe medieval kingdom of Olar. Also published late in 1996 was Las máscaras del héroe by Juan Manuel de Prada, a gifted newcomer on the literary scene. His work had been attracting new readers for nearly a year when the author won the coveted Planeta Prize for his second novel, La tempestad, set in contemporary Venice; there Giorgione's famously cryptic landscape painting, "The Tempest," supplied the key to a mysterious web that ensnared a Spanish art historian.
Adding another volume to his prodigious output, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester published Los años indecisos, a curious amalgam of semiautobiography, metaliterary narrative technique, and confessional reminiscences in the voice of a failed, self-doubting journalist. La forja de un ladrón, by Francisco Umbral, evoked the postwar squalor of Valladolid, whereas in El pequeño heredero, Gustavo Martín Garzo offered a compelling story about growing up in rural Castile. The two best-sellers of the year explored deep psychological transformations and engaged weighty moral themes. In Rosa Montero's La hija del caníbal, the protagonist's search for her kidnapped husband draws her into uncharted territories of her identity--as a daughter, woman, wife, and citizen of an imperfect world. Antonio Muñoz Molina's tenacious inspector in Plenilunio, a taut, grimly realistic analysis of random psychopathic violence, learns that evil wears a disconcertingly ordinary face.
In an introspective novella, La mirada del alma, and in the collected vignettes of Días del desván, Luis Mateo Díez captured the subtle interplay of remembered images, sensations, and impressions that clarify life's most intimate meanings. Other exceptional fictions included Placer licuante, Luis Goytisolo's disturbing novel of triangulated desire and revenge; No existe tal lugar, a meditation on utopia by Miguel Sánchez-Ostiz; and Carlos Cañeque's bizarre metanarrative, Quién, the Nadal Prize winner. Steeped in the atmosphere of 17th-century Madrid, El capitán Alatriste (1996) and Limpieza de sangre, by master yarn spinner Arturo Pérez-Reverte, were the first two of six promised volumes devoted to the adventures of the central character, Don Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, in the treacherous court of Philip IV.
In December the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante received the Cervantes Prize, the highest award in Hispanic letters.
This article updates Spanish literature.
Life under military rule, particularly the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, continued to dominate the writing of Latin-American authors. A major issue relating to the history of military tyranny was the treatment of women prisoners, and a guilty secret of this history was the collaboration between women and their male torturers that provided information about other suspects. Liliana Heker's novel, El fin de la historia, dealt with this issue through the parallel stories of two women who were childhood friends; an added dimension was provided by the fact that one was a Jew.
Ana María Shua was known for the dry wit with which she wrote about the tensions of daily life in Argentina, often with specific reference to the Jewish community. Her wit was a vehicle for incisive representations of the very real sense of horror over the injustices and conflicts those tensions may create. La muerte como efecto secundario was set somewhat in the future and described the despair of attempting to survive in a society undergoing late capitalist collapse. In El escriba (1996), a fictitious account of the great Argentine writer Roberto Arlt, Pedro G. Orgambide captured the tumultuous texture of life in Buenos Aires on the eve of the country's first military dictatorship.
Argentine writers also explored a wide range of social issues. Marco Denevi delved into sexual ambiguity in Nuestra señora de la noche. Using minimalist prose and other postmodern conventions, Martín Rejtman's series of short stories in Velcro y yo (1996) captured the tone of present-day consumer society in Buenos Aires. In El llamado de la especie, Sergio Chejfec added to his numerous treatments of Jewish collective memory with a story about lifetime friendship among a group of women. César Aira, perhaps the most accomplished Argentine representative of postmodernist antiliterature, returned to the theme of neoliberalism in modern-day Argentina in La abeja (1996).
Elsewhere in Latin America, writers pursued political and social themes with comparable depth and acuity. In Nicaragua Milagros Palma redressed the neglect of women's issues in Nicaraguan literature with her allegorical novel El pacto (1996). The book chronicled the diabolical aspects of tyrannical governments in Latin America and the social and historical contradictions that beleaguered political revolutions. Honduran writer Leonel Alvarado presented a series of ingenious rewritings of major works of Latin-American fiction in Diario del odio.
A study of a contemporary Latin-American city under the influence of neoliberalist economic policies, Alberto Fuguet's Tinta roja (1996) covered the life of a crime reporter who discovered a series of sordid stories in modern Santiago, Chile.
Zoé Valdés's Te di la vida entera, considered by many to be one of the most important works to be published by a contemporary Cuban woman writer, presented an ironic allegory of 20th-century Cuban social life as seen through the eyes of a humble provincial woman. In a complex narrative of personal and sociocultural identity, Jesús Díaz, one of Cuba's best-known novelists, portrayed the search for lost Cubans of the post-1959 diaspora in La piel y la máscara (1996).
Mexican popular culture continued to earn accolades as one of the most creative in the world. Jordi Soler's La cantante descalza y otros casos oscursos del rock, a collection of stories based on popular metropolitan motifs, explored the world of rock music. In Mal de amores (1996), best-selling Mexican novelist Angeles Mastretta drew parallels between the relationship of a married couple and Mexican sociocultural history. In a much more experimental novel entitled Apariciones (1996), feminist critic Margo Glantz delivered a complex meditation on love and romance that explored female subordination to both divine and secular definitions of love. Using the figure of Iphigenia as the springboard for a meditation on violence and death, Aline Pettersson also explored gender issues in La noche de las hormigas.
Puerto Rican writer Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá continued to probe American influences on the island's Hispanic culture. In Peloteros he examined the growing charisma of American baseball after World War II, when Puerto Rico increased its social and political involvement with the United States.
A new Spanish-language edition of Rosario Ferré's The House on the Lagoon answered critics who charged that the feminist writer deserted her native language by first publishing the 1995 book in English. La casa de la laguna presented the story of a woman struggling against enormous violent odds to write her own version of the history of a family whose vicissitudes and treacheries epitomized the sociopolitical history of Puerto Rico.
Although Mario Vargas Llosa's strident repudiations of the Latin-American left had cost him much of his former prestige, he continued to exert considerable influence over Peruvian culture. Rendered with a fine degree of demystifying and ironic humour, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto told the story of a man devoted to sexual hedonism. Mario Benedetti, the dean of Uruguayan letters, chose the format of an autobiographical novel in Andamios (1996) to explore the themes of exile and return that typified the work of many fellow authors writing in Latin America's young democracies.
This article updates Latin-American literature.
The year 1997 was a good one for Portuguese authors and publishers. At the Frankfurt (Ger.) Book Fair, where Portugal was the theme, more titles for translation were sold than ever before, which indicated a steadily growing interest in the country and its literature. Another major coup was the awarding of Mobil's Pegasus Prize for Literature--given annually to the best foreign work of fiction--to Mário de Carvalho, the first Portuguese recipient of the prize, for his novel A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening (1997). The book was first published in Portuguese, as Um deus passeando pela brisa da tarde, in 1994. The winner of the 1997 Prize of the International Association of Literary Critics (Portuguese Section) was Augusto Abelaira for his novel Outrora Agora. Abelaira probed, with great subtlety, the past and present conflicts arising from the generation gap. The novel, based on a triangular relationship, explored the identities of two female characters belonging to two different generations and exposed some male myths with wit and understanding.
Totally different was a book by José Cardoso Pires. De Profundis, Valsa Lenta was a brilliant and pungent account of the stroke from which he recovered admirably. In this narrative Pires became the character of his own fiction. The first symptoms of alienation from the environment, the loss of his own personality, and a sense of the inner movement into the other side of Alice's looking glass were seized with implacable lucidity and courage, which made this work a unique testimony to the resilience of human nature.
An outstanding book of poetry, O Monhé das Cobras, was published by Rui Knopfli. His book of memory and memoirs presents fragmentary images of an African childhood, of a lost birthplace that is never to be recovered in his nostalgic peregrination throughout Europe. Loose images--a name, a place, a statue--are deftly woven around the magic of the snake charmer of his youth, gaining the poetic cohesion and the unity of a great work of art.
This article updates Portuguese literature.
The year 1997 was dominated by the deaths of major literary and cultural figures whose works had commented upon and profoundly influenced the direction of Brazilian culture over the past 40 years. Among them was novelist and playwright Antônio Callado, author of Quarup (1967), Reflexos do baile (1976), Sempreviva (1981), and other distinguished works--all of which confronted the social and political injustices in Brazil. Callado had been an outspoken defender of human rights and was imprisoned by the military regime that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Anthropologist, politician, and novelist Darcy Ribeiro, who had fled into exile when the military took control, used Brazilian Indians' myths to eloquently question their destiny in modern Brazil, notably in the fictional work Maira (1976). Political novelist and dramatist Paulo Francis was Brazil's premier international newsman, and Carybé was known for his drawings, which depicted Brazilian street life within an Afro-Brazilian context; he also illustrated novels by Jorge Amado and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. Sociologist Herberto (Betinho) de Souza and illustrious educator Paulo Freire also died.
Márcio Souza's new novel, Lealdade, dealt with his native state of Amazonas during the 19th century. Antônio Olinto's Alcácer Quibir, a historical novel about Portugal's fall to Spanish domination in 1580, returned to his favourite themes--the relationship of Portugal, Africa, and Brazil. Sérgio Sant'Anna, Autran Dourado, and Antônio Torres all published new fictional works. Moacyr Scliar's latest collection of short stories was O amante de Madonna & outras histórias. A young writer, Antônio Fernando Borges, was awarded the Nestlé Short Fiction Prize for his collection Que fim levou Brodie?, which echoed themes characteristic of the works of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Suzana Vargas published a new volume of poetry, Caderno de outono e outros poemas. Para sempre, a new play by Maria Adelaide Amaral, dealt with the intricacies of personal relationships.
In late 1996 Valéria Lamego's A farpa na lira offered a new perspective of the poet Cecília Meireles, and Cecília e Mário, with an introduction by Alfredo Bosi, was a collection of the correspondence between Meireles and Mário de Andrade. Josué Montello published a new study of Machado de Assis, and, finally, novelist Nélida Piñon was elected president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the first woman to hold the position in the academy's 100-year history.
This article updates Latin-American literature.
As had been the case for many years, in 1997 the classics of the "Thaw" generation of the 1950s and 1960s continued to play a significant role in Russian literature. Collected works from Andrey Bitov and Bella Akhmadulina were published to coincide with their 60th birthdays; the death of the popular poet, novelist, and singer of the 1960s Bulat Okudzhava was treated as a national loss. The stream of books and articles on the late Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky continued, and new works appeared from such well-known figures as Vasily Aksyonov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.
At the same time, the reputation of authors of the succeeding generation, those associated with Russian postmodernism, seemed largely secure. High-quality editions appeared of selected works from two of the leading Moscow Conceptualists, Lev Rubinshteyn and Dmitry Prigov. Also, Viktor Yerofeyev's 50th birthday was marked with the release of his selected works in three volumes, including his new and controversial novel, Strashnyi sud ("The Last Judgment").
The attention of both readers and critics was largely centred on other authors, however. In this regard the list of nominees for the 1997 Russian Booker Prize was revealing: Anatoly Azolsky's Kletka ("The Cage")--the eventual winner of the prize, worth $12,500; Dmitry Lipskerov's Sorok let Chanchzhoye ("Forty Years of Chanchzhoye"); Lyudmila Ulitskaya's Medya i y dety ("Medea and her Children") and Anton Utkin's Khorovod ("Round Dance"). Surprising perhaps, but the list was nevertheless consistent; there was an absence of playful, postmodernist works and emphasis on intensely emotional and psychological fiction.
Among the prose works receiving substantial critical attention in 1997 were "mythological" novels (Yury Buyda's Boris i Gleb ["Boris and Gleb"]), confessional and nonfiction works (Sergey Faybisovich's Dydya Adik ["Uncle Adik"] and Aleksandr Melikhov's Roman s prostatitom ["Novel with Prostatitis"]), thoroughly traditional realistic novels (O. Pavlov's Delo Matyushina ["The Matyushin Affair"]), and even a parody on the fantasy genre (M. Uspensky's Tam, gde nas net ["There, Where We Are Not"]).
While some contemporary Russian authors tried to revive the "grand style," others sought artistic discoveries on the level of the page, paragraph, even sentence. For example, Vladimir Gubin published an extremely hermetic but charming and finely wrought novella, entitled Illarion i karlik ("Hilarion and the Dwarf"), on which he had worked for several decades. In many ways similar to Gubin, Oleg Yuryev, in his volume of short stories Frankfurtsky byk ("The Ox of Frankfurt"), successfully combined a densely metaphysical style with an anti-utopian and grotesque depiction of contemporary Europe. This theme of the "Russian in Europe" was also quite important to Nina Sadur, who published a brief but lively novel, Nemets ("The German"). On the other hand, Zinovy Zinik, in Ostorozhno. Dveri zakryvayutsya ("Attention. The Subway Doors Are Closing"), explored the experience of an émigré returning to a "different country" after many years' absence.
Several Russian authors, sensing an irrevocable break with the not-so-distant past, tried to sum up this recent chapter in Russian history. Boris Khazanov, a former dissident, depicted the end stages of Soviet society in his novel Posle nas potop ("After Us, the Deluge"), and Grigory Kanovich concluded his multivolume treatment of Lithuanian Jewry with his bitter novel Park zabytikh yevreyev ("The Park of Forgotten Jews"). Even the literary and philological life of the 1970s and '80s became the subject of belated treatment (Anatoly Nayman's B.B. i drugiye ["B.B. and Others"]).
In poetry Yelena Shvarts remained the central figure; her style, combining high lyricism, mysticism, and the grotesque, exerted a noticeable influence on her younger contemporaries. Her latest book of poetry, Zapadno-vostochny veter ("The West-East Wind"), was permeated with a spirit of divine madness, the quest for the "fifth cardinal point of the Earth." Poets whose works appeared either in literary journals or in separate books included several impressive debuts (Dmitry Vodennikov from Moscow, Dmitry Kachurov from Murmansk, and Viktor Yefimov from St. Petersburg). Generally speaking, the work of the young generation of poets was characterized by a visionary, fantastic, and mythological bent (in sharp contrast with the total irony and linguistic play dominant only a few years earlier).
In the shakedown among the "thick" journals from the Soviet period, the survivors became clear: Znamya ("The Banner") and Oktyabr ("October") in Moscow, Zvezda ("The Star") in St. Petersburg, and Volga in Saratov. Most of the magazines and publishing houses that appeared after perestroika had either ceased to exist or found a particular niche in the nation's literary life, as, for example, Mitin' zhurnal ("Mitya's Magazine") and Postkriptum ("Postscript") in St. Petersburg and Lepta ("The Mite"), Kommentarii ("Commentaries"), and Novy Vavilon ("New Babylon") in Moscow. Among the new periodicals to appear in 1997, the most significant was the Moscow magazine Pushkin.
This article updates Russian literature.
During 1997 Polish literary circles showed a renewed interest in the poetry of Wisława Szymborska, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Once again, of all the genres, poetry proved to be the most vital one in Poland. In her volume Adresat nieznany: Notatnik poetycki 1993-1996 ("Unknown Addressee: A Poetic Notebook 1993-1996"), Agata Tuszyńska exhibited a precision and lyricism that was devoid of sentimentality. Artur Szlosarek, whose earlier poetry was marked by influences of poets Rainer Rilke and Paul Celan, developed a voice of his own in Popió ł i miód ("Ash and Honey"), which was free of the exaltation and egotism that characterized his earlier work. Paweł Marcinkiewicz received the 1997 Award of the Foundation for Culture for his volume of verse Świat dla opornych ("The World for Insubordinates"); Marcinkiewicz, one of the most interesting poets of the younger generation, experimented with poetic conventions in his latest effort. With the publication of Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz's collections of essays Piesek przydrożny ("A Little Side-Road Dog") and Zycie na wyspach ("Life on Islands"), he remained visible mainly as a critic of mass culture and the superficial values so prevalent in the late 20th century. Finally, a long-overdue biographical work appeared that was dedicated to the late poet Miron Białoszewski. Carefully edited by Hanna Kirchner, Miron: Wspomnienia o poecie ("Miron: Memories of the Poet") offered a wide assortment of personal recollections by friends and critics and thereby gave readers a new dimension to his life. Although residing in Italy, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński marked his presence with the appearance of Gorảcy oddech pustyni ("Heated Breath of a Desert"), a collection of short stories written in 1993-95 and representative of the writer's metaphysical meditations.
Serbian literature, which had been dominated for 50 years by traditional historical fiction, found new expression with postmodern "self-reflective" metafiction; most illustrative of this trend was David Albahari's 1996 novel Mamac ("Lure"), which won the prestigious 1997 NIN Award. In the book, Albahari, who had lived in Canada since 1994, sought shelter in the Serbo-Croatian language while exploring the process of dying; in the end, language became the only palpable reality. Another postmodern novel, published in 1997 by Svetislav Basara with the English title Looney Tunes, became a best-seller; it offered an absurdist picture of a political establishment. A shorter work not written in the realistic mode was Basara's "Uncle Vanja," considered by NIN the best short story of 1997. Historical fiction, the traditional centre of Serbian literature, was best represented by Milica Mićić-Dimovska's Poslednji zanosi MSS ("The Final Raptures of MSS"); the novel evokes the life and dynamic personality of Milica Stojadinović Srpkinja, the 19th-century nationalist and woman activist. In the field of poetry, much praise was given to Miroslav Maksimović, an award-winning representative of middle-aged poets. His recent collection of verse, Nebo ("The Sky"), deals with the political reality of urban life in a cool, ironic voice. Matija Bećković, a prominent figure in Serbian literary circles and known for his anticommunist and royalist proclivities, published a collection of poems, Ćeraćemo se jo ("We Will See Each Other in Court Again"); his poems were recited in the streets of Belgrade during the November 1996-February 1997 pro-democracy demonstrations.
Like most other Eastern European literature, the Czech literary market was dominated by translations, mostly from English. Besides the death of internationally known writer Bohumil Hrabal (see OBITUARIES), the Czech literary year was distinguished by new editions and reeditions of other Czech masters, such as Milan Kundera's novel Valčík na rozloučenou ("The Farewell Party"), which included a forward by the author. The works of Jaroslav Seifert, the first Czech to win a Nobel Prize (1984), were also reedited, notably one of his most memorable collections of verse, Maminka ("Dear Mom"). The appearance of Ivan Slavík's juvenile poetry, Snímání s křiže ("Descent from the Cross"), was hailed by critics and showed the author's fascination with the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. Eda Kriseová's long historical novel Kočiči životy ("Cats' Lives") was cited for its lyricism and transported readers from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day in multiethnic Volhynia. Václav Havel, best known for his plays, published '96, a volume of his recent speeches and articles.
In Romania the Writers' Union awarded the National Prize to Ştefan Bánulescu, renowned for his prose, and poet Marta Petreu was awarded a prize for her latest volume, Cartea mâniei ("The Book of Anger"), and Andrei Pleşu was recognized for his collection of essays Chipuri şi măsti ale tranziţiei ("Faces and Masks of the Transition"). Newly elected members to the Romanian Academy were literary critic Nicolae Manolescu, critic and historian Mircea Zaciu, and novelists Nicolae Breban and Dumitru Radu Popescu.
The premier event in Hebrew fiction in 1997 was the publication of A.B. Yehoshua's novel Masa el tom haelef ("Voyage to the End of the Millennium"), which examined societal and cultural issues in contemporary Israel by means of a plot that takes place near the end of the first millennium. Other works by veteran writers included Aharon Appelfeld's Mihkre hakerah ("The Ice Mine"), his first attempt to describe the horrors of a German labour camp, and collections of short stories--Yitzhak Orpaz's Laila beSanta Paulina ("A Night in Santa Paulina") and Dalia Rabikovitz's Kvutzat hakaduregel shel Winnie Mandela ("Winnie Mandela's Football Team"). The most interesting novels published by the younger generation were Gidi Nevo's Ad kan ("So Far"; 1996), an intriguing dialogue with Ya'akov Shabtai's Past Continuous, and Tsruya Shalev's Hayei ahava ("Love Life"). Other important books were Nurit Zarchi's Mekhonit kemo orchidea ("A Car like an Orchid"), Leah Aini's Hardufim ("Oleanders"), Rachel Gil's Isha yoshevet ("A Woman Sitting"), and Eyal Megged's Sodot Mongolia ("Secrets of Mongolia"). Hanna Bat Shahar (the pseudonym of a female writer who used a pen name because of her Orthodox family) published her fourth book, Sham sirot hadayig ("Look, the Fishing Boats"). Other books that showed traces of the authors' religious background were Rina Brandle's K. lo shel Kafka ("K. Not Kafka's") and Judith Rotem's Kri'a ("Mourning"; 1996).
The most significant books of poetry were the second volume of the collected poems of Avot Yeshurun and the first volume (the long poems) of the collected poems of Abba Kovner (1996). Other notable books of poetry were Aharon Shabtai's Behodesh May hanifla ("During the Wonderful Month of May"), Mordechai Geldman's Sefer Sh'al ("Book of Ask"), Yigal Ben Arieh's Kav parashat hazman ("Time Dividing Line"), and Zvia Ben-Yosseph Ginor's Isha bor ("Womanswell"; 1996). Such works as Asher Reich's Musikat horef ("Winter Music"; 1996) and Itamar Yaoz-Kest's Dlatot tsrifim od niftahot bi ("Doors of Bunks Are Still Opened in Me") examined the Holocaust. First books of poetry were offered by Daliah Fallah, Dodi hashofet hamehozi Dorban ("My Uncle the Circuit Judge Dorban") and Shimon Adaf, Hamonologue shel Icarus ("Icarus's Monologue").
Works of literary scholarship included Dan Laor's Hayei Agnon ("The Life of S.Y. Agnon") and Dan Miron's Hahim bea'po shel hanetzah ("Posterity Hooked: The Travail and Achievement of U.N. Gnessin"). Hamutal Bar Yosef studied the decadent trends in the writings of Hayyim Bialik, Micah Berdychevski, and Joseph Brenner, and Nitza Ben-Dov wrote about erotic frustrations in Agnon's fiction. Yigal Schwartz examined Appelfeld's world view (1996), and Uzi Shavit discussed enlightenment (Haskala), poetry, and modernism (1996).
This article updates Hebrew literature.
Most of the Yiddish writings in 1997 appeared in the accessible form of short stories and sketches. Some, like Avraham Karpinovitsh's exciting tapestry Geven, geven amol Vilne ("There Was Once Upon a Time Vilna"), brought a wealth of memory to a retrospective--a reconstruction of the Jerusalem of the North. Yoysef Burg's companion volumes Tsvey veltn ("Two Worlds") and Tseviklte stezshkes ("Unfolded Paths") propelled characters dramatically through the desperate and unreal circumstances of the Holocaust era. Shire Gorshman's narratives in On a gal ("Without Bitterness") traversed a time frame that extended from the medieval era of Rashi to the traumatic experiences of Jews in the Soviet Union. Boris Sandler's intriguing stories in Toyern ("Towers") were a mixture--some were allegorical and others realistic--and Moyshe Shkliar's Moln di amoln ("Portraying the Past") provided prosaic and poetic reminiscences of school days in Warsaw. Eli Shekhtman produced an ambitious autobiographical volume, Tristia (1996), or "Gloom" in Latin, an evocative chronicle of a physical and emotional journey from a childhood in the Soviet Union to the Auschwitz gas chambers and crematoriums in Poland.
Other notable works included Mikhal Feldzenbaum's Der nakht-malekh ("The Night Angel"), a modernist drama in an absurdist key, and Heshl Klepfish's Der kval far doyres ("The Source for Generations"), essays that covered the panorama of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Shloyme Vorzoger completed a series of superbly researched and interrelated essays, Mit zikh un mit andere ("With Myself and with Others"), capturing in painstaking detail the achievement of Israeli Yiddish writers.
Collections of poetry included Moyshe Bernshteyn's A toyb in fentster ("A Dove in the Window"), in which he returned to the theme of a world destroyed. An illustrated album of 80 poems by Mordkhe Gebirtig, Mayn fayfele ("My Whistle"), brought to light the renowned Galician folksinger's work, which had spent 40 years in obscurity in Israeli and American archives. Vu' mit an alef (" 'Where' Spelled with an Aleph") by Boris Karlov (the pen name of Dov Ber Kerler) was his first book of lyrical sonnets and ballads, ranging from the earnest and polemical to the whimsical and satirical. Simkhe Simkhovitsh gathered 50 years of poetic creativity in the anthology Funken in zshar ("Sparks in Embers").
Three scholarly volumes also appeared: Chaim M. Weiser's Frumspeak: The First Dictionary of Yeshivish, Yitskhak Niborski and Shimen Noyberg's Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh-shtamike verter ("Dictionary of Words Stemming from Hebrew-Aramaic"), and Kazuo Ueda's Shmuesn Yapanish-English-Yiddish ("Chats in Japanese-English-and-Yiddish").
In July Yiddish literary authority Chone Shmeruk died in Warsaw.
This article updates Yiddish literature.
No masterpieces, many fascinating works, and much debate (about human rights and freedom of speech) marked the Turkish literary scene in 1997. Its major event was Frankfurt Book Fair's decision to honour Yashar Kemal, who also won the German Publishers Association's Peace Prize. Turkey's Nobel hopeful published a book of dirges he had collected in southern Anatolia and in late November began to serialize Fırat suyu kan akıyor baksana ("Look, the Euphrates Is Flowing Bloody"), the first part of a planned trilogy, in the daily Milliyet.
Prominent woman novelist Adalet Ağaoğlu won the $40,000 Aydın Doğan Prize, and Yıldırım Keskin received the 25th annual Orhan Kemal Award. Habib Bektaş, a novelist living in Germany, was awarded the 70th Anniversary Prize of İnkılâp Kitabevi, a major publishing house.
Ahmet Altan's Tehlikeli masallar ("Dangerous Tales"), the Turkish translation of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, and Ayse Kulin's semifictionalized biography of Aylin Radomişli, a Turkish-American woman psychiatrist in New York and a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, who died mysteriously, dominated the best-seller lists.
The 51st annual Yunus Nadi Prizes were awarded to Erendiz Atasü for her short stories and Burhan Günel for his latest novel. Ayla Kutlu and Hasan Öztürk shared the screenplay prize; Enver Ercan and Derya Çolpan, the award for poetry. Ercan was also the recipient of the Cemal Süreya poetry prize. The Necatigil Poetry Prize went to Haydar Ergülen. Cahit Külebi, one of Turkey's major poets, passed away at age 80, a few months after he received the Presidential Arts Award.
In the U.S., Kemal Silay edited An Anthology of Turkish Literature, featuring selections from the past 1,000 years. The New Life, Güneli Gün's translation of Orhan Pamuk's 1994 best-seller, was published in the U.S. to favourable reviews. Pamuk was also featured in a cover story in The New York Times Magazine.
In Iran the literary community experienced an escalation in harassment by the government during the first six months of the year. Although the election of a former culture minister to the presidency raised hopes for some relaxation in censorship, official measures to ease it were sporadic. Meanwhile, essayist Faraj Sarkuhi, Iran's most famous jailed dissident, was sentenced to one year in prison. War and civil strife in Afghanistan and Tajikistan left little room for literary activity there.
Although the number of novels, plays, and collections of poetry and short stories published in Iran increased substantially, no noteworthy work appeared in print. Dar dam-e shah ("In the Trap of the Shah"), ostensibly the memoirs of a former actress and onetime courtesan of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was the most widely read new title. In Sweden veteran novelist Reza Baraheni published his latest novel, Azadeh khanom va nevisandeh-ash ("Ms. Azadeh and Her Writer"), an ambitious work in the Postmodern vein. In the United States Shokuh Mirzadegi's Guldin ark ("Golden Ark") and Reza Ghasemi's Hamnava'i-ye shabaneh-ye orkestr-e chubha ("The Nocturnal Chorus of the Wooden Orchestra") led the list of important additions to expatriate Persian literature.
Perhaps the most significant literary trip of the year was Modernist poet Feraydun Moshiri's visit to the U.S. He read his poems, once considered mediocre at best, to enthusiastic crowds of expatriates in a score of American cities. His selected poems, Yek aseman parandeh ("A Skyful of Birds"), thus became the best-selling title of the year in Persian poetry.
The year marked the passing of several notable writers, including Iranian novelist and short-story writer Bozorg Alavi; novelist Taqi Modarressi; Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh, who was considered the founder of modern Persian fiction (see OBITUARIES); and Tajik writer Satem Ologhzadeh, perhaps the most important fiction writer of Soviet Tajikistan.
Chinese literary works received two major awards in 1997. The first, the Third National Book Award, was shared by Tang Haoming and Zhu Shucheng's biographical novel Kuangdai yicai--Yang Du ("Outstanding Talent--Yang Du") and Zhou Meisen's Renjian zhengdao ("The Way of Living in the World"), published at the end of 1996. Kuangdai yicai portrayed Yang Du, a controversial reformer of early republican China, as a complex historical figure, illustrating his experimentation with a broad range of philosophies and his eventual conversion to Buddhism near the end of his life.
The second major award was the Mao Dun Literature Award, given once every three years. Sharing the award were Wang Huo's Zhanzheng yu ren ("War and People"), a multivolume portrait of the war against Japan (1937-45) featuring many grand scenes; Cheng Zhongshi's Bailu yuan ("White Deer Plain"), which aroused considerable controversy with its weighty implications; and Liu Sifen's Baimen liu ("Willow at Baimen"), which depicted famous intellectuals in Chinese history.
The number of fictional works published in 1997 was about the same as in 1996--more than 800. While most lacked depth in spirit or imagination and taste, some were better. Wo shi taiyang ("I Am the Sun") by Deng Yiguang portrayed a soldier's inspiring but somehow tragic life with none of the old stereotypical expressions. Qianjuan yu juejue ("Close Affection and Breaking Up") by Zhao Changfa was a complicated and fascinating tale of love and hate in a landlord's family and of the relationship between farmers and the land. Bai lazhu ("White Candle") by Wang Zhaojun concerned the difficult times of the early 1960s but was unlike other such works in its meek and touching nature. Ge Fei's Qingshui huanxiang ("Clear Water Illusions") was a story with a classical flair; it told of a landlord's concubine who, while bathing in a pond, recalls the decline of members of the landlord's family. Xianggang de zaochen ("Hong Kong Morning") by Hong Kong writer Liu Wenyong was an autobiographical novel written in strong and colourful language and depicted all types of people in Hong Kong as well as the author's own struggle with himself.
Also attracting interest was the work of Mosuo writer Lamu Gatusa, a three-time winner of China's Minority People Literature Award. Gatusa, who spent two months recording a shaman's recitation of the entire oral history of the Mosuo people in Yunnan province, finished translating the recitation into Chinese in 1997. The work was to be published by the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences.
Chinese poetry remained at a critical juncture as poets pursued such innovative and bizarre techniques that even critics wondered how the poems should be read. In contrast, Taiwanese poet Yu Guangzhong's touching poems on his travels to the mainland were rich in imagination and flavour.
This article updates Chinese literature.
Two best-sellers--a novel and a nonfiction work--were the standouts in Japanese literature during 1997. The curious pair comprised Jun'ichi Watanabe's Shitsuraku-en ("Paradise Lost") and Haruki Murakami's Āndāguraundo ("Underground"). Although there was little similarity between Watanabe's highly erotic story of extramarital love, which ends in double suicides, and John Milton's biblical epic of the same title, the allusive title seemed to add a mysterious flavour to the novel, especially for nonreligious Japanese. A newspaper serialization of the work proved remarkably popular, and the two-volume hardcover edition sold more than one million copies. The novel was then adapted for a motion picture and serialized on television. Murakami's nonfictional Underground was a collection of more than 60 interviews of the victims of the underground disaster on March 20, 1995, in which members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released the deadly nerve gas sarin in a crowded Tokyo subway. Although there had been numerous sensational reports of the event in the mass media, Murakami was the first to use a subdued tone in order to meticulously detail the touching yet vivid account of the victims' panic, confusion, and suffering, which for some lasted long after their initial hospitalization. Nobuo Kojima's Uruwashiki hibi ("Beautiful Days") was another example of a literary triumph marked by quiet appeal. This novel detailed the domestic predicament of an elderly couple whose divorced, middle-aged son turns into an incorrigible alcoholic and becomes hospitalized. Although obviously autobiographical and at times rather monotonous, the story, however, was not gloomy. The title befitted the work, and the pervasive tone was consoling and even humorous--an amazing tour de force on the part of Kojima. Two remarkable collections of short stories appeared, and, although their settings and subjects were quite different, both were refreshingly vivid and moving. Taku Miki's Roji ("Alley"), winner of the Tanizaki Jun'ichirō Prize, evoked the monotony of life in Kamakura, a historic city not far from Tokyo. Each story recounts, vividly and effectively, the petty drama of various types of eccentrics. Aiko Kitahara's Edo fūkyōden ("Biographies of Edo Eccentrics"), winner of the Women Writers' Prize, showcased the author's narrative skill and her remarkable ability to portray an assortment of amusing, artistic, and scholarly eccentrics during the feudalistic Edo period. Takanori Irie's Taiheiyō bunmei no kōbō ("The Rise and Fall of the Pacific Civilization") was a brilliant book about cultural history and criticism, both readable and broad in historical perspective. The 1997 Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize in Poetry was awarded to Kōsuke Shibusawa for Yukueshirezu shō ("Missing Forever"), a personal and philosophical reflection. Yu Miri (see BIOGRAPHIES) won Japan's top award for young writers, the Akutagawa Prize, for her novel Kazoku shinema ("Family Cinema"). A second-generation Korean living in Japan, Yu attracted wide praise for her story about a broken family that reunites to film a semifictional documentary about themselves, but her book also stirred controversy. Japan's conservative press accused Yu of portraying the Japanese as fools, and right-wing terrorists threatened to bomb her Tokyo book signing. This article updates Japanese literature.
Two best-sellers--a novel and a nonfiction work--were the standouts in Japanese literature during 1997. The curious pair comprised Jun'ichi Watanabe's Shitsuraku-en ("Paradise Lost") and Haruki Murakami's Āndāguraundo ("Underground").
Although there was little similarity between Watanabe's highly erotic story of extramarital love, which ends in double suicides, and John Milton's biblical epic of the same title, the allusive title seemed to add a mysterious flavour to the novel, especially for nonreligious Japanese. A newspaper serialization of the work proved remarkably popular, and the two-volume hardcover edition sold more than one million copies. The novel was then adapted for a motion picture and serialized on television.
Murakami's nonfictional Underground was a collection of more than 60 interviews of the victims of the underground disaster on March 20, 1995, in which members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released the deadly nerve gas sarin in a crowded Tokyo subway. Although there had been numerous sensational reports of the event in the mass media, Murakami was the first to use a subdued tone in order to meticulously detail the touching yet vivid account of the victims' panic, confusion, and suffering, which for some lasted long after their initial hospitalization.
Nobuo Kojima's Uruwashiki hibi ("Beautiful Days") was another example of a literary triumph marked by quiet appeal. This novel detailed the domestic predicament of an elderly couple whose divorced, middle-aged son turns into an incorrigible alcoholic and becomes hospitalized. Although obviously autobiographical and at times rather monotonous, the story, however, was not gloomy. The title befitted the work, and the pervasive tone was consoling and even humorous--an amazing tour de force on the part of Kojima.
Two remarkable collections of short stories appeared, and, although their settings and subjects were quite different, both were refreshingly vivid and moving. Taku Miki's Roji ("Alley"), winner of the Tanizaki Jun'ichirō Prize, evoked the monotony of life in Kamakura, a historic city not far from Tokyo. Each story recounts, vividly and effectively, the petty drama of various types of eccentrics. Aiko Kitahara's Edo fūkyōden ("Biographies of Edo Eccentrics"), winner of the Women Writers' Prize, showcased the author's narrative skill and her remarkable ability to portray an assortment of amusing, artistic, and scholarly eccentrics during the feudalistic Edo period.
Takanori Irie's Taiheiyō bunmei no kōbō ("The Rise and Fall of the Pacific Civilization") was a brilliant book about cultural history and criticism, both readable and broad in historical perspective. The 1997 Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize in Poetry was awarded to Kōsuke Shibusawa for Yukueshirezu shō ("Missing Forever"), a personal and philosophical reflection.
Yu Miri (see BIOGRAPHIES) won Japan's top award for young writers, the Akutagawa Prize, for her novel Kazoku shinema ("Family Cinema"). A second-generation Korean living in Japan, Yu attracted wide praise for her story about a broken family that reunites to film a semifictional documentary about themselves, but her book also stirred controversy. Japan's conservative press accused Yu of portraying the Japanese as fools, and right-wing terrorists threatened to bomb her Tokyo book signing.
This article updates Japanese literature.