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The 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Toni Morrison (see NOBEL PRIZES), an American novelist who had been instrumental, proclaimed London's Daily Telegraph, in "breaking the male domination of Black American literature." She was only the eighth woman to win the prize, and her victory was unexpected. When Morrison's name was announced, Christopher Bigsby, professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, declared, "She is certainly one of the most interesting novelists writing in the United States today." But, he added, "After the award to Derek Walcott last year, it strikes me that there is an element of the 'politically correct' about it." Walcott, a West Indian poet, had also been recognized as black. It was agreed that Morrison's finest novel was Beloved, a tragic story of black slaves in 19th-century America. She had been described in the New York Times as "the nearest thing America has to a national novelist." The Swedish Academy announced that the honour was given to her for her depiction of black America in novels "characterized by visionary force and poetic import" that give life to "an essential aspect of American reality."
In France the barbarities of the 19th century were commemorated by the publication of Germinal, Émile Zola's grim novel about striking coal miners. The work was sold at newsstands and published in the form of a broadsheet newspaper with headlines. It was one of several editions available to accompany an ambitious new film version of Germinal, which was studded with an all-star cast and directed by Claude Berri.
France's Prix Goncourt was awarded to a Lebanese-born novelist, Amin Maalouf, for his novel Le Rocher de Tanios. It was the second time in six years that this important French prize had gone to an Arab. The novelist David Malouf, who was favoured to win, was runner-up for the Booker Prize for Fiction in the U.K. with his novel Remembering Babylon. An Arab born in Australia, Malouf was also admired for his libretto to Michael Berkeley's new opera, Baa Baa Black Sheep--a study of Rudyard Kipling's childhood and his fascination with imperial India. It was noted that among the principal candidates for the Booker Prize, only Tibor Fischer had been born in Britain.
General dismay was expressed at the death of E.P. Thompson (see OBITUARIES), a left-wing historian and peace campaigner. Thompson was "one of the most important writers, historians, and polemicists of the Modern Age and a central figure in English left-wing culture and politics for almost half a century." Two new books by the versatile author appeared during the year. One was Alien Homage, an account of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and his relationship with Thompson's father. The other was Witness Against the Beast, a study of William Blake as a political thinker and ally of Thomas Paine.
The novelist Salman Rushdie was honoured by the organizers of the annual Booker Prize for Fiction in English. His novel Midnight's Children, which won the prize in 1981, was adjudged the "Booker of Bookers"--the best of the 25 "literary novels" awarded the prize since 1969. The news of Rushdie's honour was not received with general approbation. Cambridge scholar John Casey held that Rushdie was an inadequate storyteller; Rushdie's admirers had been challenged to remember the "plot" of Midnight's Children--to report "how the book ends"--and none had been able to answer. Casey concluded that the Booker Prize (and other literary prizes) claimed and received too much respect--since English novelists had lost "confidence in what the novel can do, of its being part of politics and history."
Casey's arguments were widely supported in a year fertile with sneers at English novelists and suspicion of Asian contenders. Allan Massie, a former candidate for the prize, declared that "the whole game of the serious novel"--or the "literary" novel--might be over. His long article in the Daily Telegraph was headed "Death on the Shelf: Have English novelists lost the plot?"--again referring to the literary novelists' failure to tell stories. Massie observed that the latest list of the Best Young Novelists (promoted by Granta) had made "no impression on anyone beyond the literary world." Other societies, other cultures, might still produce great novels because the writers were "confident that people want to learn" and that there was "a society on the march: properly guided, it could reach a satisfactory destination." That confidence was lacking in contemporary Britain, and "one feels the game is up: the novel, that beautiful and flexible art form, is on the way out."
Despite this despair, two critical studies were published and well received, both discussing contemporary fiction. One was The Modern British Novel by Malcolm Bradbury; the other was After the War: The Novel and English Society Since 1945 by D.J. Taylor. Both were clearly engaged with their subject--and indeed polemical. In the London Review of Books, Patrick Parrinder described Bradbury as a "self-conscious progressive," while Taylor, a younger man, was a "self-conscious reactionary."
Vikram Seth (see BIOGRAPHIES), the most charming of the Indian writers currently popular in Britain, was much applauded for his 1,000-page novel A Suitable Boy. As the title might suggest, the novel concerned a girl seeking a husband--a middle-class girl of 19, living in northern India in 1950. This was just three years after Partition, when India was preparing for its first general election. The scene was set, as Pico Iyer pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement, "not during the tumult of Independence, but in the uncertain interregnum that came after." The love story was entwined with "a wide variety of interlinked characters and stories," said John Lanchester in the London Review of Books, and displayed a knowledge of Indian politics, law, economics, and religion, all expressed in a lucid prose. "The resulting structural clarity is remarkable," said Lanchester. But the book might be thought too "mild-mannered," suspected Iyer: "Can an epic be built on charm alone?"
Another ambitious and admired novelist, surprisingly passed over by the Booker Prize judges, was the cosmopolitan Irishman Brian Moore. His novel No Other Life, although set in a Caribbean island resembling Haiti, was taken by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books to be a kind of strategy for rationalizing Moore's reluctance to live in Ireland--Moore was an atheistic member of a Belfast Catholic family. His new novel concerned a poor orphan from the hills who had been trained by the local priests for a brilliant career in the church but stood for election as president of the island after the death of a (Papa Doc Duvalier-like) dictator and finally became part of the island's mythology. The most nightmarish part of the story, according to John Banville in the Times Literary Supplement, concerned the priest-politician's visit to his dying mother, who had lost her faith. "There is no other life," she said. Eagleton took this phrase, the book's title, to mean also that there was no hope for "change on earth"--reform or revolution; he deplored Moore's apparent pessimism.
Other novels by respected authors disappointed critics and prize committees. William Boyd's The Blue Afternoon was a complicated narrative that began in Los Angeles in 1936 and moved back in time to the Philippines in 1902. The central figure was an elderly man who had been imprisoned for 20 years, after being convicted for committing gruesome serial murders. The man recounts his life story to a woman he claims as his daughter. Though the mutilated corpses were realistically described, no clue was offered as to whether the man was guilty of the crimes. In the London Review of Books, Ronan Bennett complained, "To set up a mystery and then wilfully refuse to explain it is to frustrate and irritate the reader." He was unsure whether the novel was an attempt at "a knowing, Post-Modernist send-up" of thrillers or had tried to tell a story but failed. Anita Brookner published A Family Romance, the story of a grave, cultivated London spinster and her extrovert aunt--"a Parisienne, with a voracious appetite for life, messy, solipsistic, guiltlessly dependent," as described by Times Literary Supplement reviewer Aisling Foster, who added, "The effect is as diverting as attendance at a family gathering where an aged maiden aunt whispers the biographies and peccadilloes of every passing guest." Allan Massie's "comedy of morals," These Enchanted Woods, presented another melancholy account of contemporary British life. After a woman, married into the sombre world of the Scottish landed gentry, chances to meet her former lover, an aggressive businessman, she resumes their relationship amid a cast of melancholy Scots and Londoners. A.N. Wilson, a keen churchman turned militant unbeliever, expressed his divided feelings in The Vicar of Sorrows. The story was of a contented clergyman without faith who falls in love with a free-living, nomadic girl and comes to accept a strange, new religious faith, leading him to madness and death. The seriousness of Wilson's intention was indicated by his unusual lack of self-assurance and the solemnity of his literary references.
None of these novels was short-listed for the Booker Prize, an institution that was severely criticized during the year. The chairman of the judges, Lord Gowrie, asserted that his team had been looking for "passion" in the contestants' novels; it was widely felt that they had not found it. They selected as their prizewinner a book about an engaging Irish child, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle, a Dublin schoolmaster whose previous Irish comedies had proved quite popular and had been adapted as films. Another contender was Tibor Fischer, a Hungarian born in England in 1959. His black comedy Under the Frog chronicled the Russian suppression of the Hungarian rebellion of 1956. Canadian-born Michael Ignatieff, a London television commentator, was also a candidate. His novel Scar Tissue was a stern description and discussion of the death of the narrator's mother (both are nameless) from a neurological disease. Chicago-born Carol Shields also represented Canada. Her novel, The Stone Diaries, was described in the Daily Telegraph as the story of "a woman who looks back over a life rich in episode, but devoid of emotional involvement, in an attempt to find substance in her character." More characteristic of Commonwealth literature was Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips, who was born in the West Indies, was raised in Britain, and became a teacher at a U.S. college. The work was a complex narrative about the descendants of an 18th-century man who sold his three children into slavery. Australian David Malouf was similarly preoccupied with imperial history. His novel Remembering Babylon was the story of a boy living in the last century who had been lost in the Australian bush and brought up by Aborigines.
The most discussed biography, and perhaps the greatest commercial success, was The Downing Street Years by Baroness Thatcher, the former prime minister, who was deposed by her own Conservative Party. It was flanked by the memoirs of two of her ministerial colleagues: The Turbulent Years: My Life in Politics by Kenneth Baker and Diaries by Alan Clark. They were all reviewed together, rather sardonically, by another ministerial colleague, Tristan Garel-Jones, who had been highly involved in the maneuvers within the party to remove Thatcher from office. It was his assessment that Clark had played a walk-on part and that Baker was a leading man, while Thatcher was "the stage, the script and even the play itself." He cautioned against trusting the two men and remarked that "Margaret Thatcher had found a method of making money--and mischief too." Conservative reviewers of the three books seemed more condemnatory than writers from the opposition benches. One keen Conservative, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, wrote of the "tastelessness" of Baker's account: "On more than one occasion Mr. Baker falls beneath Mr. Clark's low standards." Worsthorne was so excited by the Conservative Party's intrigues, however, that he concluded, "No lack of literary skill can prevent Mr. Baker's truthful account of the political assassination of Mrs. Thatcher from being unputdownable." Less partisan readers conceded that Thatcher's book, at least, was rather well written.
Among other studies of recent politicians was Philip Ziegler's biography of the former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. It was the third on Wilson to appear within 18 months. As a result, more attention was paid to John Campbell's biography of Wilson's opponent, Edward Heath, the Conservative prime minister whose enthusiasm for European cooperation had helped to make him a formidable critic of fellow Conservative Thatcher. Campbell's careful biography drew attention to the redeeming virtues of this stubborn, rather awkward politician. Peter Paterson published a biography of one of Wilson's most embarrassing ministers, the late George Brown. The very title of Tired and Emotional: The Life of Lord George Brown was a joke, for the first three words had been a catchphrase, originally a euphemism for Brown's habitual drunkenness. Jeremy Paxman wrote in The Independent that "of all the recent political biographies this is the most entertaining read." A more serious labour politician, Harold Laski, was rediscovered and commemorated in two long biographies, one by Michael Newman and another by Isaac Kramick and Barry Sheerman. Laski was a brilliant teacher and lecturer, most influential between 1931 and 1945--inspiring not only British students but "especially those from America and what was not yet called the Third World," as E.J. Hobsbawm put it, reviewing the biographies in the London Review of Books. "Except by his former students, he was soon forgotten. . . . And yet, would the greatest and most humane reforming administration of the century have come about without him?"
Among the nonpolitical biographies, the most compelling was the life of the poet Philip Larkin, written by Andrew Motion. Larkin's letters had been published in 1992 and evoked considerable disquiet among readers, especially those who had most enjoyed and admired Larkin's poems. The letters seemed to present a very small-minded man, the epitome of "political incorrectness"; the biography in no way allayed readers' distaste. "I read it with growing admiration for the author," wrote the playwright Alan Bennett in the London Review of Books, "and, until his pitiful death, mounting impatience with the subject." Bennett found that Larkin's poems remained unscathed by the biographical revelations, such as they were, and held that it had been a sound "marketing strategy" to publish the letters first; the letters might help sell the life, but the life would not sell the letters. Another biography of particular interest to the literary world was Rebecca's Vest by Karl Miller, the founder and former editor of the London Review of Books, and previously an editor with the Spectator, the New Statesman, and the Listener. The memoir (its title derived from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe) did not dwell on his literary life in London but told of his childhood and youth in Scotland, where his parents split up and left him to the care of his aunts, and then his experience of dandified Cambridge of the 1950s, furnishing some explanation of his career as a writer, editor, and teacher.
Not the best of times but not the worst either, the year 1993 in American fiction turned out be as much a time of testing for new and younger writers as it was a period dominated by established masters. The latter, however, were represented mainly by reprints and old material. Such was the case at least with William Styron's A Tidewater Morning, a slender volume comprising three short stories published in magazines in the previous decade. Critical reception was respectful, with few reviewers pointing out that Styron, still considered in the conventional wisdom to be one of the giants of contemporary American letters, had not published a full-length work of fiction since the novel Sophie's Choice nearly 15 years before.
Too Far from Home, an omnibus collection of the prose of Paul Bowles (edited by poet Daniel Halpern), contained only one new story, from which the volume took its title. But with the inclusion of the complete text of Bowles's 1949 masterwork, The Sheltering Sky, and a dozen of his marvelous stories as well as travel essays, sections from a memoir, and journals and letters, the book offered the kind of retrospective pleasure that seemed markedly absent in the Styron collection.
The new novel by the African-American Louisiana realist Ernest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying, told the story of a killing and its aftermath in a rural Louisiana parish in the 1950s. It won the underrated Gaines new appreciation and turned readers' attention toward some of his impressive earlier accomplishments. Philip Roth's mock-confessional novel Operation Shylock, by contrast, did not do as well either with reviewers or in the bookstores. For all of its frenetic energy and wild comedy based on the motifs of the doppelgänger and Jewish nationalism, the book fell short of complete success as a narrative.
T.C. Boyle, a younger writer with a rising reputation, came out with a new novel, The Road to Wellville, which, however, also did not win much favour with the reading public. Among Boyle's peers it fell to Virginia writer Richard Bausch, with his new novel, Rebel Powers, and Michigan-based Charles Baxter, with his second novel, Shadow Play, to win good critical attention. Both writers explored with fine effect the fragmentation of the American family. Susan Richards Shreve's The Train Home was a romantic variation on the desires of a middle-class woman.
Among other writers in mid career who published fiction in 1993 with varying degrees of success were Madison Smartt Bell, whose Save Me, Joe Louis again displayed the author's obsession with the world of the criminal; Ishmael Reed, who brought out a sharp satire on academia, racism, and American mores in Japanese by Spring; and Bob Shacochis and Richard Powers, who published long convoluted novels--Swimming in the Volcano and Operation Wandering Soul, respectively--both of which were nominated for best fiction in the National Book Awards.
Octogenarian Harriet Doerr, who won the American Book Award for first fiction for her novel Stones for Ibarra, came out with a second work, Consider This, Señora, which was also set in Mexico and done in pastels. Reviewers loved it. Reception was more equivocal for David Leavitt's historical tour de force While England Sleeps. The author came under heavy attack for his unacknowledged borrowing from the Spanish Civil War memoirs of British poet Stephen Spender and for his candid portrayal of homoerotic love.
After the great success of his memoir Stop-Time in the late '70s, writer-jazz pianist-teacher Frank Conroy produced only one slim collection of stories. After a long hiatus he came out in 1993 with Body & Soul, a charmingly composed novel of education in the mode of Dickens (and the spirit of Hollywood of the '40s) about the rise of a poor young pianist and composer from New York City. E. Annie Proulx published The Shipping News, the sweetly told saga of a gentle newsman from New York state who makes a new life in the cold clime of Newfoundland. Proulx was the recipient of several prizes (see below). Wilton Barnhardt made a walloping success with his second novel, Gospel, about two American religious scholars, one an old, retired, but still randy professor and the other a young female graduate student, and their quest across Europe and Africa for a fabled lost biblical text.
An African-American photographer from Pittsburgh, Pa., named Albert French made an impressive debut with Billy, the powerful re-creation of a crime committed in rural Mississippi in 1937. Charlotte Watson Sherman, a young African-American woman from Seattle, Wash., published a lyrical exploration of black identity in the northwestern woods, called One Dark Body. A novel in stories called Scissors, Paper, Rock was journalist Fenton Johnson's touching first book. Theatrical producer Eric Blau told the story of a Hollywood producer of horror films who wants to make an epic about Zionist Theodore Herzl in The Beggar's Cup. Among story collections of new writers Thom Jones's The Pugilist at Rest made the biggest splash for its nine evocative stories, many of them focusing on the Vietnam War and its aftermath.
In To Feel These Things, Leonard Michaels composed startling sentences and evocative essays on everything from smoking to going to the movies. Equally intriguing were the thoughts and revelations in The Sixties, the final volume of the late Edmund Wilson's notebooks. The young Delmore Schwartz could be heard in Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, the correspondence between the enfant terrible of post-World War II American poetry and his publisher. The young John Cheever was heard from again in Glad Tidings: a Friendship in Letters, the correspondence of Cheever and writer friend John D. Weaver between 1945 and 1982 (Weaver was the editor of the volume).
Several senior American men of letters published volumes of their essays. Gore Vidal brought out United States: Essays 1952-1992 and master critic John W. Aldridge Classics and Contemporaries. Novelist E.L. Doctorow offered his selected essays under the title Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution. Chicago writer Richard Stern added One Person and Another, assorted reviews and essays on literary subjects. John Leonard put in with The Last Innocent White Man in America, and Ishmael Reed presented a polemical collection of essays called Airing Dirty Laundry. In these lively volumes everything from politics to race to sex to baseball came under sharp scrutiny. Among poets writing criticism, Adrienne Rich's What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics soared above the rest.
In the realm of memoir, Donald Hall's Life Work recounted his experience with the life of writing and the advent of a serious illness. In Extra Innings septuagenarian novelist and critic Doris Grumbach continued the exploration of aging that she had begun several years earlier with Coming into the End Zone. The volume concludes with a spare but moving meditation on the nature of home. Home and family stood out as motifs in James Conaway's affecting memoir Memphis Afternoons and in the sturdy and intelligent essays by Scott Russell Sanders in Staying Put. Clark Blaise focused on the paternal in I Had a Father and Diana Trilling on her marriage to the late literary critic Lionel Trilling in The Beginning of the Journey.
The major biographies of the year brought to life both literary and political figures. In W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, historian David Levering Lewis embraced the worlds of literature and society in an important study. Stanley Weintraub, in Disraeli, produced a portrait of a political figure who was also a writer of fiction. Novelist Erica Jong portrayed the work and mind of Henry Miller in The Devil at Large. The life and work of the French novelist and dramatist Jean Genet was accorded full treatment in novelist Edmund White's Genet: A Biography. Thomas Powers chose as his subject physicist Werner Heisenberg and his connection to the events of World War II in Heisenberg's War. James E.B. Breslin, a literary critic with an interest in modern poetry, took on as his subject a major American painter in Mark Rothko: A Biography. Deborah Baker kept poetry in the forefront in In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding.
Journalist Frank Browning explored the paradoxes of homosexual life in The Culture of Desire. In his book-length essay A Place at the Table, Bruce Bawer argued forcibly for recognizing homosexuals as a valuable segment of American society. Allan Bloom wrote a meditation on eros, tracing its origins and impact in the West in Love & Friendship. Social historian Richard Slotkin published Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.
Theology professor and critic Cornel West explored in Race Matters issues in the life of the black intellectual and the American citizen at large. John McPhee put together his latest magazine pieces in Assembling California. Novelist James Howard Kunstler traced the evolution of the modern American concept of urban planning in The Geography of Nowhere. In Talk National Public Radio's special correspondent Susan Stamberg brought together incisive and entertaining interviews over several decades with people from all walks of life. NPR commentator and poet Andrei Codrescu recorded the events of an idiosyncratic cross-country journey in Road Scholar.
Poet and MacArthur fellow Jim Powell brought out Sappho: A Garland, new translations of the poems and fragments of the 6th-century BC poet from the Mediterranean island of Lesbos. The power of Sappho's poetry resonates throughout the brief 25 pages of this new rendering of her work. Twenty-one living American poets offered their versions of the cantos in Dante's Inferno (edited by Daniel Halpern). In The Lost Book of Paradise, translator David Rosenberg presented his imaginative translation of Genesis. John Hollander edited the impressive new two-volume Library of America edition of American Poetry, the Nineteenth Century.
Numerous volumes of new contemporary poetry made their appearance. The voice of Mark Strand in his linked poems in Dark Harbor made another attempt at transcendence. Bringing together 35 years of work in The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, longtime Alaska hand John Haines broke through the mask with a certain urgency, as in the title poem, which treats the history of sculpture. James Schuyler in his Collected Poems spoke in a more natural voice. Four female speakers make up the linked choruses in Margaret Gibson's The Vigil.
A.R. Ammons offered Garbage, a book-length poem on the subject of American trash and its implications. In The Museum of Clear Ideas, Donald Hall included some long poems that employ images from his beloved baseball. Among more conventional lyric collections worth noticing were Lawrence Raab's What We Don't Know About Each Other, Rosanna Warren's Stained Glass, and Mark Doty's passionate vision of America besieged by AIDS, My Alexandria.
Adrienne Rich was represented by her Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970. Sherod Santos published a sequence of poems and prose called The City of Women; Susan Ludvigson came out with Everything Winged Must Be Dreaming, Frederick Seidel with My Tokyo, the African-American poet Ai with Greed, and Jack Marshall with Sesame.
Prizes and Awards. Toni Morrison (see Introduction, above; NOBEL PRIZES) won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Pulitzer for fiction went to novelist and story writer Robert Olen Butler for his collection of stories about Vietnamese Americans in Louisiana called A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. The PEN/Faulkner Prize was awarded to novelist Proulx for her novel Postcards. Proulx's novel The Shipping News won the National Book Award for fiction and the Heartland Prize, as well as the prestigious Aer Lingus Prize of Ireland. A.R. Ammons won the National Book Award for poetry, and Gore Vidal took the nonfiction prize for his collected essays. Barbara Kingsolver won the Los Angeles Times prize for fiction for her novel Pigs in Heaven, and Mark Doty won for poetry.
Two big literary guns came out blazing in 1993, Margaret Atwood with The Robber Bride, a highwaywoman in many guises--smuggler, émigré, child prostitute--and mistress of psychological terror, and Timothy Findley with Headhunter, which echoed Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in its journey through darkest Toronto. Short-listed for the Booker Prize, however, was a less well-known author, Carol Shields, for The Stone Diaries: The Life of Daisy Goodwill, a novel built from the gritty details of everyday living. Grit, and plenty of it, was required by the women in Gail Scott's Main Brides, Against Ochre Pediment and Aztec Sky, which took place in the span of a summer afternoon and evening.
In The Bookseller, Matt Cohen portrayed a writer manqué, now dealing in used books, who strove to approach his brother, a successful doctor, although always indirectly, through other people. Nino Ricci's In a Glass House, the second novel in an intended trilogy, moved from Italy to Canada to Africa as it chronicled a young immigrant's search for himself. A woman's search for a mate, after the bloody winnowing of World War I, was at the heart of Hugh Hood's ninth volume of his planned 12-volume New Age series, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes.
Many kinds of distances--temporal, spatial, and, above all, psychological--were explored in Jane Urquhart's Away through the portrayal of several generations of Irish immigrants in Canada, while Audrey Thomas, in Graven Images, delved into the past to find many a familiar artifact of human life. In Scar Tissue, Michael Ignatieff, also short-listed for the Booker Prize, traced the effects on her family of a mother's disintegration from Alzheimer's disease. The novel probed depths of resentment until it found the source of healing.
Notable first novels included Linda Leith's Birds of Passage, in which the collapse of communism in Hungary mirrored the breakup of a marriage in Canada. In Catherine Bush's Minus Time, a daughter's adolescent struggle for freedom and maturity was set against her mother's career as an astronaut. Greg Hollingshead's Spin Dry took its readers for a funny wild ride through suburban mysteries. Metaphors of movement also played a role in his short stories in White Buick, a vehicle for presenting a colourful mix of characters.
Mavis Gallant, in her latest collection of stories, Across the Bridge, shuttled her readers back and forth across the fine line between ordinary goodness and ordinary evil, revealing the horror that can unexpectedly erupt from lives of limited expectations, while Evelyn Lau's Fresh Girls and Other Stories uncovered the same dreary wickedness in more grotesque forms. Barry Callaghan offered little comfort in When Things Get Worst. Mark Frutkin's In the Time of the Angry Queen was an exuberant mélange of eccentrics engaged in playing games from chess to blindman's buff.
Among noteworthy poetry publications were Leonard Cohen's Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, chosen from works written between 1956 and 1992, and Irving Layton's Fornalutx, a collection of some of his less well-known poems of frustration and bitter desire. Marilyn Bowering's Love as It Is illuminated true passion in the light of love as it is not, and, from a more detached position, Raymond Souster, in Old Bank Notes, pondered values as observed in the vaults of the old Imperial Bank in Toronto.
Collections for adults by two well-known children's authors were Dennis Lee's Riffs, variations on a theme of illicit love, and Sheree Fitch's In This House Are Many Women.
George Bowering was represented with two collections of poetry, elegiacally in The Moustache: Remembering Greg Curnoe and quirkily in George Bowering Selected: Poems 1961-1992. Judith Fitzgerald also came forth with Walkin' Wounded, which included a cycle of baseball poems and "Habit of Blues," a prose poem meditating on the fate of a novelist, the late Juan Butler. Two posthumous works by bp Nichol were published, Truth: A Book of Fictions and First Screening.
Many important French intellectuals from the postwar period were honoured in 1993, among them Roland Barthes, Raymond Aron, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Levi-Strauss. The first volume in the Oeuvres complètes of Roland Barthes, who died in 1980, appeared, bringing together all of his works published between 1942 and 1965 as well as a few previously unpublished ones. This volume permitted a better understanding of the originality of the author of Mythologies. Completely enclosed within his own system, Barthes used different languages in an attempt to approach both the text and, beyond that, an understanding of himself. Raymond Aron, whose intellectual development was traced by Nicolas Baverez, was shown as having been more preoccupied with politics than literature--in contrast to Sartre, for example (with whom Aron kept up a lifelong and passionate debate), who thought it possible to reconcile the two. In her essay Jacques Lacan, esquisse d'une vie, histoire d'un système de pensée, Elisabeth Roudinesco described with competence the path of the man who was to become for so many a master. Most notably, she showed that Lacan had yielded to Freud in two ways--through his studies of medicine, neurology, and psychiatry and his espousal, for a time, of surrealism. Finally, mention must be made of L'Apport Freudien, a collective work under the direction of Pierre Kaufmann, offering a new approach to the principal concepts of psychoanalysis.
In his Regarder, écouter, lire, Claude Lévi-Strauss invited the reader to roam with him through the arts. As he evoked Nicolas Poussin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Maurice Ravel, Arthur Rimbaud, and Denis Diderot, he also sketched a self-portrait and unfolded his thought. Michael Panoff's Les Frères ennemis explored similarities and differences between Lévi-Strauss and Roger Caillois. Both men had problematic literary careers, but Lévi-Strauss came to be considered a profound thinker and the founder of a particular school of thought, while Caillois now passed for an inspired if unclassifiable dabbler. Denis Hollier's Les Dépossédés discussed Caillois as well as Henry Bataille, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Leiris, all of whom were fascinated by a world that had no place for them but that demanded from them the sacrifice of their art.
Still in the realm of nonfiction, Geneviève Bollème's work, Parler d'écrire, examined the manner in which writers since the advent of literary journalism have talked about themselves and their activity. The book dealt at length with Marguerite Duras, who--as her last two works, Écrire and Le Monde extérieur, bear witness--analyzed herself in depth. Also published were a collection of critical articles by Duras' husband, Dionys Mascolo, À la recherche d'un communisme de pensée, and a polemical text, Haine de la philosophie.
The 21st and final volume of Marcel Proust's Correspondance was published, leading up to 1922; it had been edited by the recently deceased Philip Kolb. The volume showed Proust concerned with the books that he still had to deliver to his publisher, Gallimard. He admitted to Jacques Rivière a doubt that he would be able to finish his work. The Correspondance between Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant (the centenary of whose death was also celebrated in 1993) revealed the great affection uniting these two writers (at times one could imagine Flaubert to be Maupassant's father).
Among notable novels in 1993, L'Invention du monde by Olivier Rolin distinguished itself by its audacity and originality. Rolin describes one day on Earth: March 21, 1989. The raw material for the book was provided by some 500 periodicals in 31 languages. One of Rolin's intentions in writing this "book of all possible books" was to create a song of praise for literature in general. In Les Jours ne s'en vont pas longtemps, Angelo Rinaldi assembled a gallery of characters who displayed certain personality traits that are borrowed from members of the Parisian literary world. One was reminded, perhaps too quickly, of Marcel Proust. In Des hommes illustres, Jean Rouaud continued the family saga begun in Les Champs d'honneur (1990 winner of the Prix Goncourt); all of the grace of the first novel, however, had disappeared, ceding place to a style that was heavy and annoying. In La Boucle, Jacques Roubaud practically invented a language, assisted by the possibilities offered by the computer, in order to relate his childhood memories. He plunged into the labyrinth of his memory to write a book of rare density. The same theme was evoked, soberly, by Jean-Loup Trassard in L'Espace antérieur. Two young women, Christine Lapostolle and Lydie Salvayre, authored two particularly successful books on difficult subjects: Le Grand large, on suicide, and La Médaille, on the world of the factory.
The Prix Goncourt was awarded to Amin Maalouf, a French writer of Lebanese origin, for Le Rocher de Tanios, a sort of oriental fairy tale blending history and legend. Set in the 1830s, the novel showed a vengeful spirit passed on from generation to generation. The Prix Médicis was awarded to Emmanuèle Bernheim for Sa femme, a short text discussing jealousy and phantasms in a dry, sterile manner. Nicolas Bréhal received the Prix Renaudot for Les Corps célestes, the story of a friendship, and Marc Lambron received the Prix Fémina for L'Oeil du silence, a novel based on the life of Lee Miller, a fashion photographer for Vogue and the companion of Man Ray.
Established French-Canadian novelists continued to do excellent work. Michel Tremblay published a sequel to his 1986 novel, Le Coeur découvert, the story of a homosexual liaison between Jean-Marc and Mathieu. The new novel, Le Coeur éclaté, described the breakup of their relationship, with Jean-Marc going off to Key West in order to dull the pains of separation (insiders were aware of the novel's autobiographical dimension). Jacques Godbout's Le Temps des Galarneau was the sequel--after 26 years--to the author's most popular novel, Salut Galarneau!
A host of new novelists were vying for the reading public's attention. Stéphane Bourguignon's L'Avaleur de sable, written in a pungent and jerky style, showed the slow disintegration of a man who lost the woman he loved and tried to find reasons to go on living. Monique Proulx received the most critical plaudits in 1993. The film version of her 1987 novel, Le Sexe des étoiles, was released concurrently with her new novel, Homme invisible à la fenêtre. Its narrator, a paraplegic, commented on the human condition in a stingingly alive language.
There also was a copious outpouring of French-Canadian poetry in 1993. Two volumes in particular were worth noting: Madeleine Gagnon's La Terre est remplie de langage and Serge-Patrice Thibodeau's Le Cycle de Prague. Gagnon was adept at exploiting the tension between things as such and the symbolic meaning with which language invests them. A poet of growing reputation was Louise Dupré, whose Noir déjà treated themes like time and death.
Works belonging to genres often thought to be minor became publishing success stories. Readers of theatrical literature enthusiastically received Gilbert Dupuis's Kushapatshikan, a play criticizing present-day society. Dominique Demers, prominent author of children's literature, published Les Grands Sapins ne meurent pas. The year's most provocative contribution to the essay was François Ricard's La Génération lyrique, which examined the baby-boom generation of the '40s.
At the beginning of the year, Germans were startled to learn that two of the former East Germany's most respected writers, Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller, had collaborated--however briefly--with the Communist secret service. At the same time, the writer Botho Strauss provoked a lively debate with his declaration of faith in right-wing values to the extent of endorsing violence and xenophobia. The political left, which had its origins in the radical upheaval of the late 1960s, appeared to be well on the defensive.
A number of literary works reflected the changing political climate, including a turning away from politics. The narrator of Ulrich Woelk's novel Rückspiel embodied the indifference of the contemporary generation to political questions. The title, "Return Game," referred to the unification of Germany, implying a possible revival of Nazism, as well as to the backlash against the 1960s. Helmut Krausser's cult novel Melodien unfolded its vast historical panorama from the time of the Renaissance to the present day in a replay of the myth of Orphic melodies invested with the power to transform humankind and the world. Swiss author Adolf Muschg's Der rote Ritter was a more sober assessment of myth. Employing the Parsifal story, he showed that myth must be abandoned when it is taken over by ideology. Hanna Johansen's charming collection of "tales and laments," Über den Himmel, joined fantasy and science. Wolfgang Hilbig's kafkaesque "Ich," remarkable for being told from the point of view not of the victim but of the spy (both writers), recognized a relationship between writing and surveillance. In his diary of 1992, Am Sonnenhang, Reiner Kunze launched a number of accusations against fellow writers; the public theme, however, was juxtaposed with private ones, in particular the death of his father.
Aging and mortality were leitmotivs of the year. Hermann Peter Piwitt's moving Die Passionsfrucht told of the amour fou of an aging German artist for a young Italian woman painter. In her customary ironic manner Gabriele Wohmann described three sisters growing old with dignity and humour (Bitte nicht sterben). Martin Walser's Ohne einander developed the author's long-standing preoccupation with sexual rivalry and the struggle of each against all, combining these themes with a wicked attack on a prominent literary critic. A complementary theme was the evocation of childhood, idyllic in the case of Johannes Schenk's Dorf unterm Wind, set in the north German village of Worpswede at the end of World War II, and darker in Gert Hofmann's ironically titled Das Glück, a child's-eye view of the breakup of a marriage, in which both parents appear helpless. More radically, Ludwig Harig's Die Hortensien der Frau von Roselius called into question the reliability of memory, suggesting that fantasy plays an equally important part in reconstructing the past. In Gerhard Köpf's Papas Koffer the narrator's search for Ernest Hemingway's lost papers became simultaneously the quest for his own youth.
Christoph Hein disappointed his readers with his first postunification novel, Das Napoleon-Spiel, the story of a millionaire lawyer who decides to kill a complete stranger. The equation of moneymaking with murder and of murder with the campaigns of a Napoleon may have produced interesting results, but the narration was tedious. Two writers whose literary origins were in the proletarian, documentary tradition turned to stories of crisis and flight--in Austrian Franz Innerhofer's Um die Wette Leben to Italy, in Ludwig Fels's Bleeding Heart to Tangiers.
There were a number of novels addressing political and social issues. Friedrich Christian Delius' Himmelfahrt eines Staatsfeindes, a roman à clef on the events of the year of terror, 1977, remained dedicated to political consciousness-raising, implying the symbiosis of terrorism and state security. Otto F. Walter's Die verlorene Geschichte, the stream-of-consciousness story of an illiterate neo-Nazi Swiss construction worker who accidentally befriends an illegal immigrant from Thailand, had its obvious topicality, as did Uwe Saeger's Landschaft mit Dornen, which depicted teenage violence in a small town in eastern Germany. Michael Kleeberg's picaresque Proteus der Pilger and Wolfgang Hegewald's Die Zeit der Tagediebe were bizarre satires on the development of post-World War II German society. A new topic for writers from the former German Democratic Republic was the gay scene in Berlin, evoked both in Friedrich Kröhnke's P 14 and in Mario Wirz's AIDS novel, Es ist spät, ich kann nicht atmen.
Two novels of special interest were Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, a Turkish author writing in German, and Edgar Hilsenrath's Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr. The former introduced the wider German public to the customs, history, and culture of the many Turks living in their midst, while the latter evoked the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe; the individual stories were set against the impending Holocaust.
In his elegant and thought-provoking travel diary, Fliegende Pfeile, Peter Rosei brought to life places such as Paris, London, Istanbul, Crete, and Canada. Of the many volumes of poetry published during the year, Heinz Czechowski's Nachtspur, Wulf Kirsten's Stimmenschotter, and Richard Wagner's Heisse Maroni were especially noteworthy.
The year 1992 witnessed the appearance of some first-class writing. Peer Hultberg continued in his established manner in the highly acclaimed Byen og verden, a work of sometimes humorous, often biting, sketches of provincial life. Knud Holten's Der var engang was a fantastic picaresque novel of development. Juliane Preisler's Dyr was a psychological thriller about loneliness, obsession, and manipulation. Ib Michael's Den tolvte rytter recalled his earlier success, Vanillepigen, and incorporated perspectives spanning the 16th to the 20th century.
Historical novels came from Hans Lyngby Jepsen, with his Men fuglene flyver about the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), and Helle Stangerup, with her Sankt Markus nat, a carefully researched novel set during the Danish Reformation.
Some trilogies were completed: Suzanne Brøgger rounded off her Crème fraîche and Ja with Transparence, while Leif Davidsen completed his "Russian" novels with Den troskyldige russer, a thriller set in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Villy Sørensen concluded his memoirs with a third and final volume, Perioder, 1961-74.
Significant posthumous publications were Christian Kampmann's Skilles og mødes, a novel concerned with a mother fixation, bisexuality, and AIDS, and Thorkild Hansen's Artikler fra Paris 1947-52, a collection of lively observations and reflections that also shed light on Hansen's subsequent writings.
The late Henrik Bjelke's Skandalens sted was a volume of essays in which the author argued for stylistic excellence, presenting excerpts from the works of writers of particular importance to himself.
There was distinguished poetry as well. Death was a motif in Pia Tafdrup's Krystalskoven, while travel and departure were the subject of Henrik Nordbrandt's masterly Støvets tyngde. Thorkild Bjørnvig celebrated his 75th birthday with a new volume entitled Siv vand og måne. A newcomer was Kirsten Hammann, whose first collection of poems, Mellem tænderne, showed a linguistic brilliance, dark humour, and bite rarely found in Danish literature. Her latest publication, Vera Vinkelvir, a cross between a prose poem and a novel, had the same mixture of humour and pessimism.
Weighty in every sense was Ketil Bjørnstad's documentary novel Historien om Edvard Munch. This literary biography of Norway's leading painter marshaled extensive primary documentation with impressive sensitivity. Contemporary Norway was dissected by Jan Kjærstad's brilliant and humorous novel Forføreren, centred upon a leading television personality, and by Ingvar Ambjørnsen's witty Utsikt til paradiset, in which a desperately lonely good-for-nothing spends his time observing the goings-on in a block of flats opposite his own. Provincial towns provided the backdrop to Knut Faldbakken's thriller-style novel Ormens ar and Edvard Hoem's Engelen din, Robinson. Rural Norway in the period around 1918 was convincingly brought to life in Julie by Anne Karin Elstad. In Finn Carling's Dagbok til en død a widow in a diary to her deceased husband lays bare the complex relationships within her family. Unique in its kaleidoscopic succession of hypnotic visual fragments was Tor Ulven's plotless novel Avløsning. Among short stories, Øystein Lønn's collection Thranes metode was distinguished for its Pinteresque style.
The thriller continued to flourish. Fredrik Skagen's Nemesis focused on an international conference on atomic waste held in Trondheim, with countries hungry for nuclear weapons attempting to secure expertise from the former Soviet Union. Gunnar Staalesen's Begravde hunder biter ikke unfolded a bloodcurdling plot against the backdrop of a keenly observed Oslo.
The keynote of Jan Erik Vold's collection of poems Ikke was social satire and of Lars Saabye Christensen's Den akustiske skyggen serious humour. With its 526 posthumous poems, Ernst Orvil's Siste dikt marked a worthy farewell from a productive poet.
In an annus mirabilis for biographies, pride of place could but go to Tordis Ørjasæter for her well-researched Menneskenes hjerter: Sigrid Undset--en livshistorie. Haagen Ringnes drew an intimate, revealing portrait of a many-faceted central character in 20th-century Norwegian cultural life in his Johan Borgen, Har vi ham na? Tom Lotherington's Wildenvey--et dikterliv, besides being a frank account of the colourful life of the Don Juan of Norwegian poets, took the reader lightheartedly into the world of the artistic and intellectual elite of the first half of the 20th century. Published posthumously, Per Amdam's Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1832-1880 was a reminder of a sad loss to Norwegian scholarship.
In the fiction of 1993 the past frequently illuminated the present. For example, a male response to contemporary feminism may, perhaps, be perceived in Stewe Claeson's Pigan i Arras, in which the husband of Saint Birgitta (1303-73) was shown taking second place, even when sick, to her religious preoccupations. Carina Burman's epistolary novel Min salig bror Jean Hendrich was a cheerful spin-off from research about the poet Johan Henrik Kellgren (1751-95), while Agneta Pleijel's Fungi ingeniously contrasted Schopenhauer's pessimism with his student the naturalist F.W. Junghahn's belief in the underlying harmony of creation. Lars Gustafsson's Historien med hunden, set in Austin, Texas, was a metaphysical thriller about the existence--or nonexistence--of God (and the indubitable existence of evil). Lars Andersson's Vattenorgel featured several well-known members of late 19th-century artistic circles faced with historical change, and Björn Ranelid's Mitt namn skall vara Stig Dagerman was a fictitious autobiography of the brilliant author Dagerman, who committed suicide at a young age in 1954. Authentic memoirs were published by major writers grappling with sickness and the shadow of death: Sven Delblanc's Agnar; Tomas Tranströmer's Minnena ser mig; Göran Tunström's Under tiden; and Jan Myrdal's Inför nedräkningen.
Kjell Espmark continued his searing investigation of modern Sweden in Lojaliteten, narrated by a nonagenarian worker lamenting the compromises of social democracy and the decline of the welfare state. Ola Larsmo's Himmel och jord ma brinna presented workers' struggle for rights by juxtaposing 1909, 1917, 1976, and 1990. Kerstin Ekman's impressive Händelser vid vatten was both a crime story and a psychological study of an isolated community faced with social change. Ingrid Sjöstrand's Isranunkel was an episodic domestic variant of social change spanning 50 years. Two young women writers, Maria Fröjdh in Blåeld and Åsa Lundegård in Nöd och lust, wrote accomplished novels exclusively focused on family and sexual relationships with a positive outcome, while Mare Kandre accorded the devil sympathetic treatment in a playful alternative creation story, Djävulen och Gud. This stood in contrast to their male contemporaries, who produced works in a darker vein. Robert Kangas' Fjärde budet showed the brutalization of an unwanted child, and Magnus Dahlström's Nedkomst appeared as callously provocative in its cruelty.
Jesper Svenbro's learned and humorous verse in Samisk Apollon och andra dikter won plaudits, as did newcomer Henrik Nilsson's collection, Utan skor.
Literature stood no chance against the competition of reality in 1993. No fiction could beat the appeal of daily newspapers and TV news bulletins with their relentless stories of financial empires tumbling down, well-known magnates biting the dust, powerful political parties crumbling, and mighty politicians of all stripes standing accused of corruption and complicity with organized crime. There was, predictably, a flurry of instant books by journalists, sociologists, and magistrates dissecting the scandals of the day and assessing the threat they posed to national unity, but these books were more talked about than bought or read. To stimulate a flagging market, some publishers introduced the "supereconomical" paperback offering integral classics, from Epicurus to Freud, for less than the price of a cup of coffee.
Meanwhile, new literature continued to be published in quantity and quality not significantly different from in the past. Some works of fiction turned out to be strangely attuned to the apocalyptic mood sweeping across the country. By far the most compelling was Il cardillo addolorato by Anna Maria Ortese, a well-established though still somewhat underrated writer. Set at the end of the 18th century and written in a rich, transparent style, this remarkable novel told the story of three young men from Northern Europe who go to Naples and remain trapped there by the bewitching coldness of a mysterious young woman; the real protagonist, however, was the goldfinch of the title, whose haunting, magical singing time and again announces the defeat of reason and love and the triumph of a dark inhuman power over all human calculations and projects. It was a measure of the author's artistic achievement that her pervasive use of irony in respect to characters and events only served to increase the tension and suspense of the fiction. The same device achieved the opposite effect in Aldo Busi's Vendita galline Km 2, a rambling and occasionally witty monologue, ostensibly by a dead lesbian, in which the art of social gossiping was elevated to breathtaking new heights. Also dead was the narrator, as well as most of the other voices, in Roberto Pazzi's Le città del dottor Malaguti, an elegant, captivating story in which fantasy and reality cooperated to explore and expose, with a mixture of compassion and contempt, the sick rituals of a beautiful provincial city that, rather cleverly, was identified as Ferrara only in the novel's last word. More decidedly gloomy and enigmatic was Franco Ferrucci's Fuochi, a series of episodes in the sentimental journey of a young man, ending with his choosing at once love and death. What was intriguing and unsettling about this unusual book were its apparent contradictions: the sensuality of its language and the insubstantiality of its temporal and spatial settings, its rhapsodic structure and style, and the coherence and unity of the theme of death that inspired it. Equally dark in mood, but more clearly contemporary in setting, were the six short stories in Elisabetta Rasy's Mezzi di trasporto, six solitary journeys by six different means of transport into the same unpredictable, but generally inhospitable and degraded, contemporary world.
The year saw the return to fiction writing, after a silence of over 30 years, of Domenico Rea, one of the most forceful and expressive Neapolitan writers of the 1940s and '50s. In setting, subject, and style his Ninfa plebea--the story of a young woman's progression from the gutter to the altar--appeared still to belong to that literary period, despite its having acquired a new lexical explicitness that might not have been acceptable then.
Much more successful was Bagheria, Dacia Maraini's autobiographical account of her childhood in Sicily in the late '40s, an evocation of the island's natural beauty and, at the same time, an impassioned denunciation of its more recent moral and environmental devastation. Set at the opposite end of the country and covering the period from World War II to the present, were the stories of Il silenzio by Gina Lagorio, a book of classic beauty and maturity, in which a woman comes to terms with her solitude, still finding in the world of nature and society plenty of reasons for loving life.
Finally, most notable among new writers who made their mark during the year was Paolo Maurensig. His novel, La variante di Lüneburg, was the compelling story of two chess masters, one a Jew and the other a former Nazi officer, who, beyond the war and the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, continue to seek one another in order to play out one last deadly game. This book seemed to encapsulate all the main features of the most recent and distinguished Italian narrative: on the one hand, the search for a rich, lucid, and effective language, far from both extremes of banality and literary pompousness; on the other, the sense that literature can only reveal, but not resolve, the mystery that lies at the heart of history and reality.
The coveted Planeta Prize, traditionally awarded each year to a Spaniard for the best pseudonymously submitted manuscript of fiction, went to the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa (whose application for Spanish citizenship was approved in July); his Lituma en los Andes is a story of political violence and social regression--laced with Dionysian overtones--in a contemporary Andean setting. Runner-up in the Planeta competition was essayist Fernando Savater's first attempt at extended fiction, El jardín de las dudas, a lively epistolary exchange between Voltaire and an enlightened French noblewoman exiled to the benighted latitudes of 18th-century Madrid.
José Luis Sampedro and Antonio Gala both appeared regularly on best-seller lists all year long. El águila bicéfala, Gala's collection of meditations on the eternal riddle of love, prepared readers for his denser work, La pasión turca, which probed the complex passions of a middle-class Spanish woman driven to extremes by self-destructive love for a duplicitous Turk. Sampedro published two collections of short stories--Mar al fondo (1992) and Mientras la tierra gira--as well as the concluding volume of an ambitious trilogy (Los círculos del tiempo); focused on the antimonarchist uprising of 1808 and the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931, Real sitio offered an intimate, two-tiered drama set against a historical background of political intrigue and national upheaval.
Critics lavishly praised Juan Marsé's ninth novel, El embrujo de Shanghai, in which the contrasts between a dreary neighbourhood in postwar Barcelona and the exotic atmosphere of Shanghai in 1948 underscore the gulf between the innocence of Marsé's adolescent narrator and the grim reality of a treacherous adult world. Francisco Umbral exposed the twisted values and perverse milieu of an idealistic young fascist in Madrid 1940; in Arturo Pérez-Reverte's riveting thriller for bibliophiles, El club Dumas, a rare-book dealer unravels the mystery of a diabolical 12th-century manuscript; and Días contados, by Juan Madrid, graphically depicted the seamy side of life in the capital's rough Malasaña district. Fans of Antonio Muñoz Molina welcomed his first collection of short stories, Nada del otro mundo.
Two milestones bracketed the literary year: the sudden death of Juan Benet in January (see OBITUARIES) and the award in December of the Cervantes Prize, the highest honour in Hispanic letters, to the prolific novelist Miguel Delibes.
The major writers in Latin America in 1993 were the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. Fuentes published both a novel and a book of essays. In his well-constructed novel, El naranjo, o los círculos del tiempo, the author returned to some of his lifelong themes, such as the implications for the present of the conquest of the Americas and the circularity of time. The five stories in this volume not only expressed Fuentes' most immediate sensual pleasures but also contained his oldest memories. In his essays, Geografía de la novela, he covered a broad range of literary and cultural topics. In typical Fuentes fashion, he discussed Juan Goytisolo in the context of Cervantes, and Cervantes in the context of Goytisolo.
In Vargas Llosa's novel Lituma en los Andes, a minor character from previous novels, Lituma, becomes the protagonist. In this well-narrated work, Vargas Llosa considered how the forces of rationality and irrationality function in an impoverished society. The novel had its origins in the author's firsthand experience with Peruvian politics. Vargas Llosa also published an autobiographical account of his recent unsuccessful candidacy for the presidency of Peru, El pez en el agua. During the year Vargas Llosa publicly renounced any future participation in Peruvian politics and accepted Spanish citizenship.
The Argentine writer Mempo Giardinelli joined Fuentes and Vargas Llosa among the recipients of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. (Vargas Llosa was awarded this prestigious prize in 1967 and Fuentes 1977). Giardinelli's outstanding recent novel, Santo Oficio de la memoria, was generally considered the primary reason for his receiving this prize.
In Mexico the major novelists to publish, besides Fuentes, were Igancio Solares, Luis Arturo Ramos, and René Aviles Fabila. El gran lector by Solares continued in the author's vein of historical novels. It was the critical portrayal of a Mexican president who evinces qualities of several former Mexican heads of state. Ramos' fourth novel, La casa del ahorcado, is a satirical work about the protagonist's impotence. Avilés Fabila continued his long writing career with an essaylike novel about a writer who considers suicide, Réquiem por un suicida.
Colombian writers who published outstanding books were Ricardo Cano Gaviria, Germán Espinosa, Juan Manuel Silva, and Felipe Agudelo Tenorio. Cano Gaviria, who had already written essays and fiction, published a well-crafted epistolary novel set in the 1920s, Una lección de abismo. The author of several historical novels, Espinosa wrote yet another historical work, Los ojos del basilisco. The poet Silva published his first novel, La tramposa de la patasola, a work dealing with violence and the construction of myths in Colombia. Agudelo Tenorio, also a poet, published his first novel, under the title of Las raíces de los cielos.
Two of the most noteworthy books in Venezuela were Pieles de leopardo by Humberto Mata and Yo soy la rumba by Angel Gustavo Infante. Pieles de leopardo was a volume of short fiction that found its unity in the stories' common themes. In Yo soy la rumba, Infante used the theme of music to reconstruct life in Venezuela in the 1960s.
Both established and new writers published important books in the Southern Cone. In Chile, novelist Jorge Edwards published his first set of stories since the 1960s, Fantasmas de carne y hueso. Jaime Collyer's third novel appeared, Gente al acecho, and Sergio Gómez wrote his first volume of short stories, Adiós, Carlos Marx, nos vemos en el cielo. The most notable books to appear in Argentina were El Dock by Matilde Sánchez, Prontuario by David Viñas, Cuando digo Magdalena by Alicia Steimberg, Acerca de Roderer by Guillermo Martínez, El ojo de la patria by Osvaldo Soriano, and Paredón Paredón by Gabriel Báñez.
Vargas Llosa was not the only writer in Peru to publish memoirs. Fiction writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro came forth with La tentación del fracaso, and novelist Alfredo Bryce Echenique wrote Permiso para vivir: (antimemorias). The Peruvian Miguel Gutiérrez published a lengthy and complex novel in three volumes, La violencia del tiempo. A further Peruvian novel of note was País de Jauja by Edgardo Rivera Martínez.
The annual Foreign Fiction Award for the best foreign novel in English translation was awarded by The Independent to José aramago for The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. It was the first time that this coveted literary prize had distinguished a Portuguese author.
The most original novel of the year was A Barragem by Júlio Moreira, a writer who had attracted growing attention for his uncommon choice of themes and unusual ways of handling them. The situations described in this narrative were real enough, but they took place in an imaginary realm that conferred on them the quality of a universal allegory. The idea of clandestine human relationships and their frailty in an insecure environment was explored in the changing voices of the narrator, a method that communicated a sense of fear and of an imminent apocalypse. The aura of doom was enhanced by the characters' visit to the city condemned to be flooded by the finished dam.
Three literary prizes were awarded to Helena Marques--one of them the prestigious Great Prize for Fiction by the Association of Portuguese Authors--for her first novel, O último cais. Turning her back on the current fashion of experimentalism, Marques produced a narrative of deceptive simplicity, a love story that exposed human weaknesses and ill-assorted passions in a close-knit community of her native Madeira. The strong characters of this novel were women who slowly but firmly broke through the geographic and social insularity of their lives. Their silent liberation mirrored the restlessness of their menfolk, who discover through them their own identity and the complex security of love. A perceptive study of changing moods, the novel gives a moving picture of life that is tempered in its romantic shades by a quiet and aesthetic acceptance of death.
In 1993 many works of regional fiction appeared. Antônio Olinto's Sangue na floresta was set in the contemporary Amazon region. Myriam Campello's semiautobiographical Carioca novel São Sebastião Blues viewed the infighting for prizes and recognition among the city's literary cliques. Edla van Steen's Madrugada, set in São Paulo, was a novel about the death of the city as viewed through the death of four people; it was awarded the Coelho Neto Prize by the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The distinguished poet Décio Pignatari turned to fiction in his bildungsroman of life in São Paulo, Panteros. The dramatist Maria Adelaide Amaral's first novel, Aos meus amigos, was a roman à clef about the suicide of Décio Bar, a poet of her late-1960s university generation. Luiz Antônio de Assis Brasil began a new trilogy of life in Rio Grande do Sul--from the end of the second empire through the era of Getúlio Vargas--with the novel Perversas famílias. Also of note was new fiction by Ana Miranda, João Gilberto Noll, and Esdras do Nascimento. Antônio Callado's collection of five stories, O homem cordial e outros contos, reflected his personal concerns about Brazil and may be viewed as sketches for his major novels.
Waly Salamão returned to his unique form of poetry with Armarinho da miudezas, which reflects native Bahian traditions. Sebastião Uchoa Leite and Felipe Fortuna published new volumes of poetry. Adão Ventura, the noted black poet from Minas Gerais, published Texturaafro, which once again treated the theme of the black race both in Brazil and in Africa. Also of interest was the National Library's creation of a magazine, Poesia sempre, to promote Brazilian and foreign poetry as well as to provide a forum for debate about the poetic art.
The most interesting theatrical event of the year was the International Festival of the Theatre of the Oppressed, which staged works by dramatists from all over the world, including Brazil's founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal.
Other cultural milestones included the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the tropicália movement, which was accompanied by the publication of Hebert Fonseca's Esse cara, a collection of documents about and interviews with Caetano Veloso, one of the movement's founders. Also celebrating its 25th year was the Brazilian Children's Book Foundation. Of special interest to literary scholars was the publication of the undoctored Memórias do cárcere by Graciliano Ramos as Cadeia.
In his acceptance speech after receiving the medal of honour for literature from the National Arts Club in New York City, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn commented on the relationship between the current situation in Russia and the state of the country's literature: "The new age has clearly begun, both for Russia and for the whole world. Russia lies utterly ravaged and poisoned; its people are in a state of unprecedented humiliation, and are on the brink of perishing physically, perhaps even biologically. Given the current conditions of national life, and the sudden exposure and ulceration of wounds amassed over the years, it is only natural that literature should experience a pause. The voices that bring forth the nation's literature need time before they can begin to sound once again."
The debate about the path and direction of Russian literature had not only a cultural but also a political and economic dimension as, once again, literature and politics became intertwined. As Solzhenitsyn was about to return to Russia (he was scheduled to arrive in May 1994), the role of the writer and the place literature was to hold in his homeland remained unclear. Criticized by some as being out of touch with the new Russia, Solzhenitsyn maintained the view that "a writer must not disunite his people, not adapt to some party, faction, or political movement, but a writer must as far as possible unite his people."
While Russian literature stopped at the crossroads, literary discussions gave way to literary quarrels. In 1992 the first Russian Booker Novel Prize, awarded to Mark Kharitonov for his novel Linii sud'by ("Lines of Fate") precipitated controversy. The judges, promoting the postmodernist trend in Russian literature, passed over Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, who had been widely favoured to win the prize for Vremya: noch' ("The Time: Night"). Meanwhile, young writers continued their attacks on the older, established writers, accusing them of holding back the younger generation. Bulat Okudzhava, a frequent target of these attacks, characterized them as "ordinary confrontations between fathers and sons," complicated by political and cultural uncertainties. "How, may I ask, can I give up my place in favour of some young person? What place? The one behind my writing desk?"
Yet Russian writers were also growing weary of intrigues and constant questions about the chaos and disarray in which they had to work. When asked to define the situation of a writer in a market economy, Joseph Brodsky responded: "A writer writes." For Petrushevskaya politics influenced Russian literature not in terms of the quality of the writing but in the opportunity and experience of being published. When asked about the lack of demand for serious literature, Okudzhava responded that serious writers should not try to compete with the authors of the detective stories, pornography, and occult literature that filled bookstores. "It's time writers got used to the new situation," he commented, believing that gradually some publishing houses would begin working on Western principles, publishing works of literary value along with books for which there was a greater demand.
Literary agencies in the West had begun to promote Russian writers. Edvard Radzinsky's Zhizn' i smert' Nikolaya II (The Last Tsar), for example, became an American best-seller. At the same time, literary awards, previously limited to Western writers, were bestowed on Russian writers as well. Germany introduced the Pushkin Prize, an international award given to Russian writers for of a body of work. In 1991 the Pushkin Prize was awarded to Andrey Bitov, in 1992 to Petrushevskaya, and in 1993 to Fazil Iskander. In England the Booker committee awarded the first Russian Booker Novel Prize in 1992 in the hope of stimulating greater interest in Russian literature and of helping it through the transition to the commercial realities of Western-style publishing.
The efforts to draw Russia into the international literary community were also reflected in 1993 in the Eighth International Moscow Book Fair, held after a two-year hiatus. It was significant that on July 9, 1993, Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin signed a law on copyright and related rights aimed at preventing book piracy, which had grown rapidly with the advent of private publishing enterprises. The instability of Russia's book market and the piracy on the part of some book publishers also led to the founding of "Authors and Publishers Against Piracy," with Iskander as its chairman.
Western colleges and universities, traditionally a haven for U.S. writers and intellectuals, opened their doors to Russian writers, offering them temporary affiliations. Not only Brodsky but also Tatyana Tolstaya, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Petrushevskaya, to mention only a few, were guest lecturers or artists-in-residence at U.S. universities.
In 1993, Russian literature experienced a great loss with the death of Yury M. Lotman, founder of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics and a pioneer in the field of cultural semiotics. Widely translated abroad, Lotman's works created an entire field of study that became known as the structural-semiotic approach to culture.
Although faces in the political arena of Central and Eastern Europe seemed to be changing faster than the weather, the profile of the literary establishment remained virtually unchanged. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Poland. The 88-year-old Julian Stryjkowski received the prestigious Jan Parandowski Prize for lifetime achievement. His most recent work, Milczenie ("Silence"), dealt with the search for moral orientation. Zbigniew Herbert, forsaking poetry for the moment, issued a volume of prose that included six sketches and 10 "apocrypha." Martwa natura z wedzidłem (Still Life with a Bridle, 1991) contained reminiscences and ruminations of his tour of Holland. The novelist Tadeusz Konwicki offered his readers six film screenplays, including Ostatni dzien lata ("The Last Day of Summer"), which gave the volume its title. Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium ("Empire") was a sociological and political exploration of the Soviet Union on the eve of its dismemberment. Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski's latest diaries and political observations, Wyjshcie z milczenia ("An Exit from Silence") and Dziennik pisany noca, 1989-1992 ("Diary Written by Night, 1989-1992"), further illustrated the writer's lifelong concern for truth in the face of repression and presented a forthright appraisal of Poland's place in world politics.
The southern Slavs continued to produce excellent literary works despite the restrictions imposed by a continuing war. Milorad Pavic, best known for his Dictionary of the Khazars (1988), delighted readers with The Inner Side of the Wind (translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric). Charles Simic continued his translations of Serbian poetry, this time with The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry and Novica Tadic's Night Mail: Selected Poems. The anthology was the culmination of 30 years of translating some of Serbia's finest poets, including Ivan V. Lalic, Vasko Popa, Momcilo Nastasijevic, and Nina Zivancevic.
The Macedonian Sande Stojcevski's A Gate in the Cloud, ably translated by David Bowen et al., contained over 50 of the poet's best lyrics. The ubiquitous Simic (in collaboration with Milne Holton and Jeffrey Folks) translated Meto Jovanovski's Faceless Men and Other Macedonian Stories.
Don D. Wilson translated the brilliant poetry of Bulgaria's Petya Dubarova, Here I Am, in Perfect Leaf Today. Barely 17 when she died in 1979, Dubarova nonetheless deserved a place among Bulgaria's finest poets. Blaga Dimitrova, Bulgaria's popular vice president, was represented with two works, Noshten dnevnik ("Night Diary"), a collection of 70 poems written during the period 1989-92, published in Sofia; and The Last Rock Eagle, a translation of several of her poems, published in London.
Hungary's Istvan Orkeny, best known as a playwright, was also a superb prose stylist. His latest volume, Levelek egypercben ("One-Minute Letters"), contained letters, short stories, and fairy tales, written with delicate humour and an eye for the grotesque in everyday reality. Ivan Mandy's Huzatban ("In the Draft"), a collection of shorter and longer pieces, displayed the 75-year-old writer's refinement and exquisite style. Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Az urgai fogoly ("The Prisoner of Urga") won praise for its verisimilitude and delicately balanced style.
Perhaps the finest anthology of Eastern European poetry published after the fall of communism was the appropriately titled Shifting Borders, which contained some of the region's best poetry of the 1980s. Compiled and edited by Walter Cummins, the anthology, translated by both poets and translators, also included the poetry of the Baltic republics and Romania. Norman Manea's October, Eight O'Clock, translated by Cornelia Golna and others, returned to the theme of the Holocaust.
The past remained the subject of painful probing in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Good-bye, Samizdat: Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground Writing, edited by Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, was a collection of dazzling texts on cultural, sociopolitical, and philosophical themes by some of the finest Czech and Slovak thinkers. Michal Viewegh was fast becoming the most acclaimed writer of the young generation. Bájecná léta pod psa ("Glorious Lousy Years") was the story of characters too decent to become communists but too cowardly to become dissidents. His third novel, Nápady laskavého ctenáre ("Ideas of a Kind Reader"), poked gentle fun at several literary contemporaries. Oldrich Danek's play Jak snadné je vládnout aneb Karel IV ("How Easy Is It to Reign, or Charles IV") pursued the eternally vital theme of the individual's moral responsibility to society. The hero of Pavel Reznicek's surrealistic novel Vedro ("Oppressive Heat") turned out to be "oppressive heat" itself, an element endowed with comic human traits. Jaroslav Putik's novel Promeny mladého muze ("Transformations of a Young Man") focused on the generation that experienced the German occupation, World War II, and a totalitarian system.
The main event in Hebrew literature in 1993 was the publication of S. Yizhar's novel Tzalhavim ("Shining Lights"), a remarkable account of the author's youth as well as of Israel's early days. Other noteworthy works of fiction were Aharon Appelfeld's Timyon ("Abyss"), Amnon Navot's Lokhdei Arikim ("Gladiator [Studebaker], or a Note on the Military Police"), and Nathan Shaham's collection of stories, Naknikiyot Hamot ("Hot Hot Dogs"). The most popular novels in 1993 were Sammy Michael's Victoria ("Victoria") and Eli Amir's Mafri'ach haYonim ("Farewell, Baghdad"), both of which examined Jewish life in Iraq against the background of the Zionist struggle to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. A first novel was published by Tsruya Shalev, Rakadti Amadti ("Dancing Standing Still"), and Gadi Taub was acclaimed for his first collection of short stories, Ma Haya Kore Lu Ha'yeenu Shokhehim et Dov ("What Would Have Happened Had We Forgotten Dov"). As poetry had been losing ground to fiction in Israeli literature in recent years, several poets turned to prose. Among works of fiction published by established poets were Maya Bejerano's collection of short stories, Hasimla haKh'hula veSokhen haBitu'ach ("The Blue Dress and the Insurance Agent"), Nurit Zarchi's postmodernist-oriented stories, Oman haMaseikhot ("The Mask Maker"), and Asher Reich's autobiographical novel, Zikhronot shel Hole Shikheha ("Memories of an Amnesiac"). Novelist Yitzhak Averbuch Orpaz was the only writer going against the trend, publishing his first book of poems, Litzlo'ach et haMe'a ("To Cross the Century").
Notable books by veteran poets included Mordechai Geldman's A'vin ("Eye") and Israel Eliraz' Pe Karu'a ("A Torn Mouth"). First books of poetry were penned by Tamir Greenberg (Dyokan Atzmi Im Qvant veHatul Met; "Self Portrait with Quantum and Dead Cat"), Zvika Shternfeld (Hamarkiza miGovari; "The Marquise of Govari"), and Shimon Shloush (Tola Havui shel Asham; "A Hidden Worm of Guilt").
One of the most intriguing critical studies was Amos Oz's reading of Agnon's fiction, Shtikat haShama'vim: Agnon Mishtomen Al Elohim ("The Silence of Heaven: Agnon's Fear of God"). Other important scholarly works were Hillel Barzel's book on the poetry of S. Tchernichovsky, Ziva Shamir's examination of the poetry of Yonatan Ratosh, Yigal Schwartz's monograph on Aaron Reuveni, and Hannan Hever's controversial discussion of Avraham Ben Yitzhak's poetry.
The prestigious Israel Prize was awarded to the literary scholars and critics Dan Miron and Gershon Shaked.
The first issue of a new post-Soviet Yiddish monthly journal, the first since the demise of Sovetish heymland ("Soviet Homeland"), appeared in Moscow under the title of Di yidishe gas ("The Jewish Street"), edited by Aron Vergelis.
Mordkhe Schaechter's Yidish tsvey ("Yiddish Two") provided a groundbreaking and authoritative perspective on current Yiddish language usage, idiom, and style.
Yisroel Khaym Biletski's magisterial Uri Tsvi Grinberg der yidish-dikhter ("Uri Tsvi Grinberg: The Yiddish Poet") was a robust celebration of a major expressionist poet. A finely textured and capacious issue of Di goldene keyt ("The Golden Chain") explored the remarkable literary achievement of Avraham Sutskever. Khave Turniansky's stimulating volume, Di yidishe literatur in nayntsetn yorhundert ("Yiddish Literature in the 19th Century"), was a colourful sampling of the disparate strands from which contemporary writing was woven. Lili Berger's nuanced miscellany, Ekhos fun a vaytn nekhtn ("Echoes of a Distant Yesterday"), included Bible stories, essays, and sketches.
Three notable memoirs made their appearance. Avraham Karpinovitsh's portrait of his natal city, Vilne mayn Vilne ("Vilna, My Vilna"), was lovingly captured in 10 short stories. Sutskever's urbane and entertaining Baym leyenen penimer ("Reading Faces") ranged over many aspects of his long career. Ida Taub's intimate and moving Ikh klem fun benkshaft ("I Grieve from Homesickness") captured the voice of many whom the century had displaced.
In her autobiographical novel, Khanes Shef un rinder ("Khane's Sheep and Cattle"), Shire Gorshteyn approached her task of describing leading figures within the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia with fervour and candour. Yoysef Kerler's Abi gezunt ("As Long as You're Healthy") took the reader inside his remarkable life of persecution, exile, and safe haven in Israel.
Three noteworthy works of historical research appeared. Heshl Klepfish documented the impact of the century's cataclysms on communities and values in Oyf historishe vegn ("On Historic Paths"). Shmuel Rozhansky's 1492 . . . 500 yor nokhdem ("1492 . . . 500 Years Later") recorded conscience, courage, and suffering in a haunting collection of materials charting the expulsion of the Jewish community from Spain and its multifaceted aftermath. Boris Sandler's Der inyen numer 5390 ("Case Number 5390") was an arresting piece of analysis based on the author's research in the KGB archives of Chisinau, Moldova.
The year 1993 began with great promise and ended with the self-inflicted death of Gu Cheng (Ku Ch'eng), one of China's most accomplished poets. Much of the year's literary output had a provocative quality; as a result, a number of novels were banned for offensive contents, and many works written in China were published first abroad.
Established novelists were particularly prominent in 1993, some of them lending their prestige and talent to television dramas. Mo Yan (Mo Yen), whose historical novel Honggaoliang (Red Sorghum) appeared in English and other Western languages, published a collection of stories that broke new ground in form and rhetorical effects. Wang Meng, who was dismissed from his post as minister of culture in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen (T'ien-an-men) Square massacre, saw his novel Lianaide jijie ("A Season for Falling in Love"), the first volume of a planned trilogy on intellectuals in post-Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) China, published in China.
Also appearing during the year were English translations of Su Tong's (Su T'ung's) Dahongdenglong gaogaogua (Raise the Red Lantern), the film version of which had already won international acclaim, and Liu Heng's Heidexue (Black Snow), a novel of urban squalor and life on the edges of society. Liu continued to broaden the scope of his oeuvre with the delayed publication of his novel about the Cultural Revolution, Shaoyaosong ("In Praise of Leisure"), and the appearance of his most recent work, Tangde bairimeng ("Old River Daydreams"), a historical novel in a daringly innovative form.
In recent years the mainland literary scene had been dominated by young writers, most of them with ties to film and television. In 1993, however, a number of established middle-aged novelists published major works that showed that they, too, could win the attention of an increasingly young and sophisticated readership. Li Rui (Li Jui), one of the country's most respected fiction writers, published Jiuzih ("Old Sites"), a bloody, convoluted, and riveting historical novel that spans the entire 20th century. Jia Pingwa (Chia P'ing-wa), whose earlier novel Fuzao (Turbulence) had won prizes as well as readers in China and the West because of its upbeat approach to economic and political reform, turned to the more sensational theme of illicit sex, graphically described, in Feidu (The Ruined Capital), a novel of half a million words. In Shanghai, Zhu Lin (Chu Lin), who had already incurred the wrath of the literary establishment, showed that she remained unrepentant with the publication of Wu ("Witch"), a huge, rambling, and racy novel of rural superstitions and the dark side of life in the Chinese countryside.
Literary activity on the island of Taiwan was most notable for its relatively undistinguished output. However, Taiwanese booksellers continued to be the first to publish new work by popular young mainland writers such as Ge Fei (Ke Fei), who published not only a collection of stories entitled Xiangyu ("Encounters") but also his first novel, Diren ("Enemy"). In typical avant-garde fashion, the novel weaves a rhetorical landscape in a tale that frequently seems to offer little more than implied questions. Other mainland writers whose work first appeared in Taiwan were Yu Hua (Yü Hua) (Xiaji taifeng; "Summer Typhoon") and Ye Zhaoyan (Yeh Chao-yen) (Zuihouyichede nanmin; "The Last Carload of Refugees").
Shūsaku Endō, internationally renowned for his historical novels Chimmoku ("Silence," 1966) and Samurai ("Samurai," 1980), set his new novel, Fukai kawa ("Deep River") in contemporary Japan and India. The central figure ōtsu, unsuccessful in becoming a Catholic priest, decides to go to India after concluding that he cannot adjust to life in a French seminary. There he lives alone by the shore of the sacred Ganges and is engaged in the Hindu crematory service as a voluntary helper; Hindu belief in metamorphosis becomes a theme. Although ōtsu remains a Catholic, the reader suspects that Endō, the author, was drawn to Asiatic paganism. Saiichi Maruya's Onnazakari ("Woman in Her Prime") was a high-spirited novel about an attractive career woman who also has amorous relationships. Natsuki Ikezawa's ambitious novel Mashiasu Giri no shikkyaku ("The Downfall of Macias Giri") won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize. Its setting is a small island in the southern Pacific, supposedly a mandatory territory of prewar Japan. The protagonist, Macias Giri, is a clever and energetic political activist who secures a political dictatorship over the island. When his efforts to modernize his territory fail, he kills himself. The fantastic atmosphere of the tropical South and the spectacular career of Macias reflect the author's interest in Latin-American fiction, especially in the "magical realism" of the works of Gabriel García Márquez. There were two fine collections of short stories by women authors--Atsuko Anzai's Kokucho ("Blackbird") and Keiko Iwasaka's Yodogawa ni chikai machi kara ("Town by the Yodo River"). The former is concerned with various cases of adultery, the latter with the author's childhood memories of downtown Osaka. Two remarkable biographies also appeared--Jun Etō's Soseki to sono jidai ("The Life and Times of Sōseki Natsume"), on Japan's most important modern novelist, and Kunie Iwahashi's Shigure Hasegawa ("Shigure Hasegawa"), on a pioneer for feminine art in pre-World War II Japan. Shoichi Saeki's Daisezokuka no jidai to bungaku ("Great Secularization and Literature") provided a new perspective on the complicated relationship between religion and literature in Japan and suggested the deep-rootedness of Shintoism in Japanese mentality. Shuntaro Tanigawa's Sekenshirazu ("Unworldly"), a collection of poetry in a coloquial and detached style, was awarded the newly inaugurated prize commemorating the poet Sakutarō Hagiwara (1886-1942). See also Libraries; Publishing. This updates the article Western literature and articles on the literatures of the various languages.
Shūsaku Endō, internationally renowned for his historical novels Chimmoku ("Silence," 1966) and Samurai ("Samurai," 1980), set his new novel, Fukai kawa ("Deep River") in contemporary Japan and India. The central figure ōtsu, unsuccessful in becoming a Catholic priest, decides to go to India after concluding that he cannot adjust to life in a French seminary. There he lives alone by the shore of the sacred Ganges and is engaged in the Hindu crematory service as a voluntary helper; Hindu belief in metamorphosis becomes a theme. Although ōtsu remains a Catholic, the reader suspects that Endō, the author, was drawn to Asiatic paganism.
Saiichi Maruya's Onnazakari ("Woman in Her Prime") was a high-spirited novel about an attractive career woman who also has amorous relationships.
Natsuki Ikezawa's ambitious novel Mashiasu Giri no shikkyaku ("The Downfall of Macias Giri") won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize. Its setting is a small island in the southern Pacific, supposedly a mandatory territory of prewar Japan. The protagonist, Macias Giri, is a clever and energetic political activist who secures a political dictatorship over the island. When his efforts to modernize his territory fail, he kills himself. The fantastic atmosphere of the tropical South and the spectacular career of Macias reflect the author's interest in Latin-American fiction, especially in the "magical realism" of the works of Gabriel García Márquez.
There were two fine collections of short stories by women authors--Atsuko Anzai's Kokucho ("Blackbird") and Keiko Iwasaka's Yodogawa ni chikai machi kara ("Town by the Yodo River"). The former is concerned with various cases of adultery, the latter with the author's childhood memories of downtown Osaka.
Two remarkable biographies also appeared--Jun Etō's Soseki to sono jidai ("The Life and Times of Sōseki Natsume"), on Japan's most important modern novelist, and Kunie Iwahashi's Shigure Hasegawa ("Shigure Hasegawa"), on a pioneer for feminine art in pre-World War II Japan. Shoichi Saeki's Daisezokuka no jidai to bungaku ("Great Secularization and Literature") provided a new perspective on the complicated relationship between religion and literature in Japan and suggested the deep-rootedness of Shintoism in Japanese mentality.
Shuntaro Tanigawa's Sekenshirazu ("Unworldly"), a collection of poetry in a coloquial and detached style, was awarded the newly inaugurated prize commemorating the poet Sakutarō Hagiwara (1886-1942).
See also Libraries; Publishing.
This updates the article Western literature and articles on the literatures of the various languages.


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On a recent business trip to Walla Walla, my husband and I visited the Fort Walla Walla Museum. It is a special jewel; so full of interesting history and information about the region.
We were amazed at the mule team farming technique. The historic village and the buildings' furnishings are great reminders of the strength of the people who endured so many hardships to help our nation grow to what it is today.
We thought we would be visiting the site of a former military fort and that would be the central theme of the museum. What a pleasant surprise to find so much more. This museum is an asset to the entire region. You are fortunate to have such an interesting place to visit and learn.
Ann Hanke
Wentzville, Mo.
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Real Madrid defender Sergio Ramos admits he had a bitter battle with Atletico Madrid striker Radamel Falcao for Saturday's derby win.
Ramos was able to silence the Colombian ace on the night.
"There are plenty of cameras to see what happened, but these things stay on the pitch.
"There are match like these, with struggles and battles and Atlético have players who keep possession well and they like to battle and that is a part of football as well. With regard to things outside of the game's rules and that can damage the game's image, but that's what the cameras are there for. I didn't elbow Falcao. He's a footballer I respect a lot," said Ramos.