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New works from Asia and Africa dominated world literature in 1999, with only modest competition from Europe. Leading the charge was Indian-born Salman Rushdie with The Ground Beneath Her Feet, an exuberant and elegiac novel that spanned several continents and decades to tell its sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic tale of two star-crossed musical celebrities.
Waiting, the second novel by Chinese writer Ha Jin, who in 1985 settled in the U.S., won the National Book award for fiction. The novel tracked the poignant course of an ordinary man so bound by a strong sense of duty—to tradition, family, and the party—that he misses out on most of the opportunities life offers him, whether for professional advancement, material success, or genuine love. With South of the Border, West of the Sun, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami produced one of his most humane and pleasurable works yet, a compact, lyrical, and thought-provoking tale of long-separated lovers overwhelmed by longing for the innocent yet consuming passion they once knew.
Perhaps the single most powerful book released in Africa was Country of My Skull (1998), the South African poet and fiction writer Antjie Krog's collected reports on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, charged with bringing to light all the horrors and injustices of the apartheid years. The brutal politics of contemporary South Africa were also evident in J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize–winning novel Disgrace, as generational and ideological fault lines separate the fallen academic Lurie irreconcilably from his daughter Lucy both before and after a vicious attack on their remote farm. The young Cameroonian novelist Calixthe Beyala continued her meteoric rise on the literary horizon with Amours sauvages, the ribald and often politically incorrect tale of yet another young refugee from the slums of the African metropolis who marries a Westerner and attempts to refashion her life in an extremely colour- and race-conscious modern-day France.
In Four Mothers the talented young Hebrew novelist Shifra Horn celebrates the strength, fortitude, determination, and mutual support of several generations of widowed or abandoned Jewish women, weaving their interlocking stories seamlessly in a nonlinear, achronological narrative that gives all four "mothers" a timeless, mythic, larger-than-life quality.
The Russian-born French writer Andrei Makine followed up his award-winning Dreams of My Russian Summer (1997) with The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, another sumptuously lyrical novel involving the displaced and disintegrating Russian aristocracy in pre- and post-World War II France. In The Clay Machine-Gun (1998), Viktor Pelevin ponders which way Russia should look for its cultural direction; no clear answers were forthcoming, however, in this wonderfully witty and sometimes almost too glib tale told by a delusional patient in a present-day psychiatric hospital.
From Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco came Ocean Sea, a sweeping and enchanting book of extraordinary power. In My Century the 1999 Nobel laureate in literature, Germany's Günter Grass (see Nobel Prizes), interwove 100 monologues spoken by characters representing a broad spectrum of German society.
An unexpected work dominated the literary landscape in Great Britain in 1999—a children's novel. In July the publication of J.K. Rowling's (see Biographies) third book in her Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, made news headlines and broke all sales records, selling 68,000 copies in the first three days after its release. Rowling, who wrote the first of the series while an unemployed single parent in Edinburgh, composed chapters in cafes because she could not afford to heat her apartment. The Guardian newspaper applauded the book's intricate narrative, with its weft of "plots, sub-plots, red herrings, diversions … and an un-pin-downable magic" and found its writing style her most confident ever, giving the impression of "an author who loves her job." Although the publishers issued adult versions of the series, with more subdued covers so that older readers would not be embarrassed to read them in public, the book did not appear on the adult best-seller list of The Sunday Times. This created a furor, with the Potter publishers accusing the newspaper of responding to pressure from Random House, the publishers of Thomas Harris's latest Hannibal Lecter thriller, which Rowling's book outsold five to one. The Sunday Times refuted the charge, insisting that the Harry Potter books should be featured only on the children's list.
The Guardian asserted that the Harry Potter craze was symptomatic of a general revival of children's literature. "Something is happening, a quiet revolution," it claimed. "In the playground, children are swapping books." Other children's authors, such as Jacqueline Wilson, Anne Fine, and Philip Pullman, also experienced robust sales. Pullman suggested that the popularity among both children and adults of plot-driven books such as his own indicated a fin de siècle retreat from postmodernism, with its "weakening effect of knowing that you're doing something clever, which vitiates the story." The Whitaker BookTrack sales figures for the first 12 weeks of the year confirmed his theory; in a children's market that was never so buoyant, 5.5 million children's books were sold, compared with 7.5 million adult books.
In addition, in a move designed to encourage the culture of reading, a children's laureate was named, and the Scottish Arts Council established a new set of awards for children's books. Meanwhile, David Almond's Skellig, a story about an unhappy boy who finds unexpected hope from a mysterious, earthy tramp, beat the second Harry Potter book for the Whitbread Children's Book Award. Almond's book was also short-listed for The Guardian Children's Fiction Award, but it was overtaken by Susan Price's The Sterkarm Handshake, a time-travel story set on the English-Scottish border and straddling the 16th and 21st centuries. Salman Rushdie, known chiefly for his adult books, reissued his children's story Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written while he was in hiding under an Iranian death threat. The volume appeared in a new edition with illustrations by Paul Birkbeck.
Meanwhile, Rushdie's new adult novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, was published to warm reviews. The Literary Review hailed it as the most "un-put-downable" Rushdie offering to date, and many commentators favoured it for the 1999 Booker Prize. Set in a world slightly out of kilter, the book was an effervescent romp full of famous pop stars, their eccentric coterie, lone assassins, love affairs, and pirate radio stations.
Another title vying for the Booker was Vikram Seth's An Equal Music.The book, a claustrophobic story about an English string quartet, traversed a smaller canvas than his previous panoramic, A Suitable Boy, but it was praised for a fascinating and intricate portrait of four closely bound people and the music they made. Jim Crace, whose novel Quarantine was short-listed for the 1997 Booker, published Being Dead. As with Rushdie's book, the world was slightly out of true. The plot involves the murder of two middle-aged zoologists in a British seaside town called Baritone Bay, the police inquiry, the decomposition of the zoologists' bodies, and the return of their daughter to the family home. An eerie but poetic book, it was hailed by one critic as a book of "near genius." Rose Tremain's Music and Silence was a luminous and deftly woven historical novel set in 1629 Copenhagen, but, according to Booker Prize judge John Sutherland, it was published "too late" in the year "for its intricacy to be fully appreciated" by the Booker panel.
The six titles that were short-listed were represented by authors from Egypt, England, Ireland, India, Scotland, and South Africa. Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love, a romance of the desert, was admired by the judges for its readability, and two judges reportedly favoured Michael Frayn's Headlong. Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting was criticized as slight and precious by Sutherland, although he acknowledged that it "grew on you." Although the committee admired the sensitivity of Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship, it apparently "lit no fires." Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers was also praiseworthy but was put aside because it was a first novel and the author presumably would have other opportunities to win.
The £21,000 ($34,890) prize was awarded to J.M. Coetzee for Disgrace. It was his second win and made him the first author to have captured the prize twice; his first win was in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K. The judges hailed Disgrace as a "masterpiece," although the chair of the judges, Gerald Kaufman, acknowledged some agonizing moments in the four hours of judging and difficulties in reaching a consensus. The novel presented a bleak tale of the new South Africa and chronicled the life of a professor at the University of Cape Town (where Coetzee taught) who is forced to resign after an affair with one of his students. The protagonist retreats to his daughter's sequestered farm, where they are violently attacked by three marauders. Coetzee did not go to London to accept the prize, stating that he wished to avoid the celebrity status surrounding the award.
The world's richest prize for fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth £Ir 100,000 (about $135,000), went to British novelist Andrew Miller for his first novel, Ingenious Pain. Set in the milieu of 18th-century medicine, the book was described by the panel as a masterful exposure of "every human being's essential need to feel personally a share of the world's suffering." The winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction—awarded to a woman writer—went to Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood, a compelling portrait of American suburbia in the 1970s as seen through the eyes of a troubled child.
The Whitbread Book of the Year honour went to the late poet Ted Hughes for his collection of poems Birthday Letters. The poems, addressed to his wife Sylvia Plath, had broken a 35-year silence in which Hughes never publicly discussed his life with Plath, a fellow poet who had committed suicide in 1963. Hughes had won the same award in 1998 for his Tales from Ovid.
Hughes's 1998 death had left vacant the post of poet laureate, and there was much debate about the appointment of a successor. Among those most favoured by bookmakers were Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, James Fenton, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Wendy Cope. Some speculated that Prime Minister Tony Blair, who selected the laureate from a shortlist for the queen's approval, might favour a "people's poet" and select a pop star such as Sir Paul McCartney. In the event, tradition won the day, and the poet, critic, and biographer Andrew Motion was selected to serve a 10-year term, as opposed to the life appointments that had been previously made. He would continue, as part of his role, to write verse for royal and national occasions. Motion had already composed a poem about the death of Diana, princess of Wales, and had expressed a willingness to accept the post, unlike many poets who said that if offered it, they would turn it down. Motion said he hoped to "diversify the job" and help promote poetry in schools.
The year was rich in biographies. A.N. Wilson hailed D.J. Taylor's Thackeray, a 494-page study of William Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, as the "most enjoyable and the most skilful" he had read that year, singling out for praise its masterful evocation of the 19th-century journalistic scene. The war poet Siegfried Sassoon continued to attract attention; the second volume of Jean Moorcroft Wilson's work on Sassoon's life was under way, and John Stuart Roberts's Siegfried Sassoon: (1886–1967) threw fresh light on his personal life and placed a long overdue emphasis on his later poetry. Meanwhile, Garrick by Ian McIntyre spotlighted the larger-than-life personality of one of Great Britain's most famous actors in a rich and scholarly study that drew on its protagonist's letters and on the vivid 18th-century backdrop in which David Garrick lived and worked. Anthony Sampson's Mandela: The Authorized Biography was a celebration of a modern fairy tale and chronicled the story of the man who emerged from 27 years of imprisonment to become president of South Africa. Sampson, one of the few whites who on his many visits to South Africa during the apartheid era had made friends across the race divide, delivered a thoughtful and sympathetic portrait of Nelson Mandela. A daring and intriguing book came from Ann Wroe. Her Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man was an assured and inventive investigation into the Gospels, the York Mystery Plays, and classical texts that resulted in a plausible account of the man Pontius Pilate might have been, as well as a rendering of the many images of Pilate that abound across two millennia of representations. The literary biographer Michael Holroyd turned his attention closer to home. His Basil Street Blues was a touching and delicate portrait of his own family facing social decline and dwindling fortunes; Holroyd confessed that he had shed some tears while writing the story.
Other noteworthy nonfiction titles included David Vincent's The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998, in which he traced successive British governments' obsessions with secrecy and their botched cover-ups; the cumulative effect was a plea for a culture of openness. Simon Jenkins's England's Thousand Best Churches was a celebration of and guide to what the author described as "the glory of Britain." Another ambitious offering came from Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, whose The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium attempted to capture life, in all its mundanities, for ordinary Anglo-Saxons of that era. A.N. Wilson produced a highly praised account of the rise of secularism, God's Funeral, which charted the "death" of God from the Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and to 20th-century scientific thinkers such as Richard Dawkins. Timothy Garton Ash's History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s was a valediction not to a millennium or a century but to a decade; it painted, however, a large canvas of great events in a troubled region at a time of convulsive change.
Iris Murdoch (see Obituaries), who had suffered for years from Alzheimer's disease, died in February. Her passing was poignantly marked by Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, a frank portrait by her husband, John Bayley, of their unusual but close marriage, as well as an unflinching account of her illness.
The distinction between fiction and nonfiction made news in 1999, at least when Dutch, Edmund Morris's long-awaited book about former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, arrived in the bookstores in early autumn. The prizewinning historian did not deliver the biography everyone—apparently even his own editor, Robert Loomis—had expected. Instead, after years of unprecedented access to his subject during Reagan's White House years and after much research, he published what he called a memoir rather than a biography—and a fanciful one at that. Morris included in the narrative a fictitious version of himself and created several other imaginary characters, including a son of his, to play roles in Reagan's unfolding life.
The response of reviewers to this bizarre innovation was overwhelmingly negative. Though historians were unhappy and most Reagan loyalists were displeased, the public seemed unaffected, assuming, perhaps, that historians sometimes created history by making it up; the book landed on the best-seller list.
No other work of history or biography published in 1999 caused anywhere near that stir. Jay Parini's Robert Frost did emend somewhat the dark legend of Frost, and Paul Mariani with his The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane and Edward Mendelson with Later Auden produced works of serious interest. Judith Thurman's biography of Colette, Secrets of the Flesh, won numerous favourable reviews. Lorca: A Dream of Life by Leslie Stainton was a biography of poet Federico García Lorca and worthy of some attention. Fred Kaplan lavished nearly 900 pages on a living literary figure in Gore Vidal. Anne Charters edited the Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac, 1957–1969. (A collection of Kerouac's early prose under the title Atop an Underwood was also published during the year.) Geoffrey Perret with his massive biographical study Eisenhower, Jean Strouse with her book on J.P. Morgan—Morgan: American Financier, and Roger Kahn with A Flame of Pure Fire, his book about boxer Jack Dempsey and his times, waded into the mainstream of American history.
Stirring the waters of this stream was Peter Novick's fascinating The Holocaust in American Life, a revisionist study of American attitudes toward the destruction of European Jewry and the politics of manipulating public opinion on this issue. Also adding depth to the study of cultural history was Steven Watson's Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism. Delving into personal history in extremely candid fashion was Betty Fussell in My Kitchen Wars, her memoir of her marriage to literary critic Paul Fussell. East Indian–American writer Padma Hejmadi's transcultural memoir Room to Fly was a much more highly intellectualized account of a life. Novelist Larry McMurtry offered the most serious, thoughtful, and entertaining memoir of the year, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, an excursion into his own family's past with a great deal of commentary about his own reading and writing life. Among essay collections, one of the most delightful was William W. Warner's Into the Porcupine Cave and Other Odysseys.
In the realm of fiction itself, there were some interesting debuts, some problematic posthumous works, and some powerful new mainstream novels and story collections. Both Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison were represented by renderings of their unfinished works. Hemingway's son Patrick, with some assistance from editors at Scribner's, put out a version of True at First Light, a manuscript set in Africa in which Hemingway wrote about himself and wife Mary in a fictional mode, sometimes playful and sometimes dark. ("In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.") Despite such occasional passages that sing in the old Hemingway voice, the book was more a torso of a manuscript than a fully developed narrative, and it did not honour Hemingway to publish it as a seemingly finished work of art.
Ralph Ellison's mythical second novel, the book he had been working on for nearly 40 years and never seemed able to complete, was also published in a version determined by someone other than the author. In this case it was Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan, who edited the thousands of pages of the unfinished novel into a book titled Juneteenth. Oddly enough, some of the most interesting sections that Ellison had published in literary magazines over the years or that he read in public were excluded from this volume, whose determining factor was, apparently, a coherence that Callahan had to try to figure out on his own.
There was not much joy in either of these books but instead much sadness that neither Hemingway nor Ellison had figured out how to finish these books, both of which were decidedly inferior when set alongside their own best work.
Providing some joy, but not much, was Bone by Bone, the concluding volume of Peter Matthiessen's Everglades trilogy about the life of E.J. Watson, the late 19th-century Florida renegade, farmer, and assassin. Thick with history, frontier lore, and detailed descriptions of the Everglades and south Florida terrain and waterways and jammed with a multitude of characters, the series that began with Killing Mister Watson turned out to be an enterprise more to respect than to be entertained by. The same could be said for Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos's new novel, Empress of the Splendid Season, an attempt to tell the story of an ordinary Hispanic woman living in New York City. Similarly joyless was the second novel by James Thackara, an American expatriate and longtime London resident. The Book of Kings, his nearly 800-page epic, was supposedly an underground masterpiece on which he had slaved for decades and when published would turn the marketplace on its ear. An article in The New Yorker about Thackara's labour of love put the buzz in American ears. The book itself turned out to be a flawed epic about four young men in quest of love and knowledge beginning in pre-World War II Europe and continuing on into the postwar period. Only its masterly set pieces, dramatizing wartime strategy and scenes of combat, rose to the high level of competency suggested in the prepublication hype.
After the enormous success of his debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, Washington-state novelist David Guterson raised public expectations when he came out with a second novel, East of the Mountains. The story of the last days of an elderly heart surgeon dying of cancer was a sweetly told and entirely respectable piece of fiction whose main character was rather memorable and whose settings—the apple farms and mountain towns east of Seattle, Wash.—were quite sharply observed. Broke Heart Blues, a novel set in her own private terrain of upstate New York, showed Joyce Carol Oates working once again at the top of her powers.
The American Indian writer Leslie Marmon Silko succeeded in her newest novel, Gardens in the Dunes, in presenting the engaging story of a turn-of-the-century Indian waif, one of the last survivors of an obscure Southwestern desert tribe, who ventures into the modern world. The book did not receive anywhere near the attention it deserved. Neither did Ian MacMillan's stunning representation of life, death, and rebellion at the Treblinka concentration camp, Village of a Million Spirits. Other works that failed to achieve the attention that they merited included Audrey Schulman's charming but serious novel about a woman struggling to complete medical school, Swimming with Jonah; Connie Porter's Imani All Mine, a touching portrait of a young mother on the streets of Buffalo, N.Y.; and Kathleen Tyau's Makai, an entertaining portrayal of Hawaiian family life from Pearl Harbor to the present.
Plainsong, the third novel by unheralded Midwestern writer Kent Haruf, did succeed in calling some attention to its author. A kind of Our Town of the plains east of Denver, the novel presents a small group of small-town characters—among them a high-school teacher, a pregnant student, and a pair of elderly farmers—caught up in the quiet thrall of everyday problems. It was nominated for a National Book Award in fiction. Also nominated were the novel Hummingbird House, Patricia Henley's triumphant little workout on themes of expatriatism, estrangement, and love, set in Central America; Waiting by Ha Jin, the Chinese expatriate turned U.S. citizen whose book showcases the difficulties of love and marriage in contemporary China; House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III; and a story collection titled Who Do You Love by another Midwestern writer, Jean Thompson. The award was presented to Waiting.
The story collection that drew the most review attention—and deservedly so—was Annie Proulx's Close Range, a noisy gallery filled with acrobatic language and larger-than-life cowboys and farmers. ("You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You'll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at the sky punched with bullet holes.") American Richard Bausch, one of the country's most esteemed short- story writers, turned in a new collection, Someone to Watch over Me, that reasserted his claim as one of the new masters of realistic short fiction. In September, the Light Changes was novelist Andrew Holleran's successful bid to be recognized as a writer of fine stories. An extremely entertaining and thought-provoking collection—seven long stories—was published by Robert Girardi under the title A Vaudeville of Devils.
Among debut works of short fiction, Nathan Englander's first collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, won much praise for his work as a self-proclaimed successor to the short-story writing of Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The most impressive first novel of the year came from Brooklyn journalist Colson Whitehead—his novel about a female elevator inspector titled The Intuitionist reminded some reviewers of the quirkiness and intelligence of Walker Percy's debut novel, The Moviegoer.
Midnight Salvage, Adrienne Rich's latest book of poems, dramatized the masterly poet's continuing quest to find new meaning in her adopted California landscape: ("Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I/ sought the light of a so-called heavenly body:/ a planet or our moon in some event and caught/ nothing but a late wind/ pushing around some Monterey pines/ themselves in trouble.") In his National Book Award–nominated volume Repair, C.K. Williams showed interior scenes and the violence of modern life: ("In a tray of dried fixative in a photographer friend's/ darkroom/ I found a curled-up photo of his son the instant after/ his death,/ his glasses still on, a drop of blood caught at his/ mouth.")
Other poets with new works were Louise Glück with Vita Nova, John Ashbery with Girls on the Run. and Ai with Vice, which went on to win the National Book Award in poetry. Quincy Troupe came out with Choruses, his sixth book of verse, an appealing mix of classical poetry forms (sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas) and the fluid jazz poems for which he was better known. Jorie Graham contributed with Swarm, Stephen Sandy with Black Box, and Eric Pankey with Cenotaph, in which he continued his evocative studies of the spirit in the everyday of American life.
Literary criticism did not have a great year, owing to the void created with the 1998 death of influential critic Alfred Kazin and the lack of a successor. Elizabeth Hardwick put together a number of review essays on contemporary American fiction under the title American Fictions. John Updike published More Matter, a wonderful miscellany of reviews and essays on subjects ranging from literature to popular culture. Magazine editor Wendy Lesser tackled various subjects in The Amateur. Among academics, Richard Poirier stood alone in bringing out a book of broad interest, Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances. Among poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver collected essays and some verse in Winter Hours. Alice Fulton bunched together essays in Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. Poet Brad Leithauser gathered the essays of Randall Jarrell under the title No Other Book.
In what may well have been the last round of Lannan Foundation awards for literary achievement, Adrienne Rich won a $75,000 prize. The PEN/Malamud Prize for an outstanding body of work in short fiction went to T.C. Boyle. Michael Cunningham garnered the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction with his novel The Hours. Mark Strand (see Biographies) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Joseph Heller, author of the classic antiwar satire Catch-22, died in December. (See Obituaries.) Other deaths during the year included short-story writer Andre Dubus (see Obituaries) and novelist and translator Stephen Becker.
Women as authors and as protagonists abounded in 1999, from Audrey Thomas's Isobel Gunn, who disguises herself as a man to work for the North West Company in Rupert's Land, to Keith Maillard's Gloria, in which a self-centred, late-maturing antiheroine struggles to become her better self in West Virginia during the 1950s, and to the dead but relentlessly remembered Elizabeth, titular presence in Matt Cohen's Elizabeth and After, in which regrets and expectations blur past and future in the ever-evaporating now. The novel was honoured with the Governor General's award just weeks before Cohen's death (see Obituaries). Time makes no difference to the powerful ghost of Marie Ursule, rampaging through Dionne Brand's second novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, while generations of women, related by blood even when only related by marriage, inhabit, and pass through, the rooms of Bonnie Burnard's Giller Prize–winning A Good House, the kind of house that Rachel Wyatt's midlife protagonist seeks to escape in Mona Lisa Smiled a Little. In a work translated from the original French, Anne Hébert wonders ironically Am I Disturbing You? as she details the significant effects one young woman can have on the lives of two men, and Nancy Huston, in The Mark of the Angel, draws the reader through scenes of emotional destruction, tracing the scars that warriors inflict on lovers, and vice versa.
Divisions that brought people together lace through Thomas King's Truth & Bright Water, a tale of two little border towns that have a lot in common; David Macfarlane's Summer Gone strips nostalgia to the bone as the wind strips leaves from autumn trees; and David Helwig deliberately stays Close to the Fire in his brief study of self-deceit and redemption. Timothy Findley, that writer of deathless prose, creates a deathless character in Pilgrim, a journey of verbal delights through various heavens and hells of immortality.
Women overran short stories too, although the sad, self-punishing mothers and daughters, endlessly, repetitively searching for, and abandoning, and finding each other in Elyse Gasco's wryly humorous Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? were in sharp contrast not only to All the Anxious Girls on Earth, Zsuzsi Gartner's impious romp through contemporary mores of love and honour, and to Girls Around the House, M.A.C. Farrant's series of linked stories about survival amid one's kin, but also to the Young Men in Russell Smith's poignant collection, as vulnerable and tough in their own ways as any girl.
At the heart of the Canadian identity myth is the idea of land, of wilderness, and of the half-known other, nurturer and nemesis, and during the year several books of poems bloomed on these long-established roots. Terrence Young's The Island in Winter captures the interplay of fog and rock, water and tree, heart and soul; Nelson Ball's Almost Spring releases language that alters one's perception of almost everything; and Richard Harrison's Big Breath of a Wish whistles through metaphors as fresh as all outdoors. In Speaking Through Jagged Rock, Connie Fife delineates the changing horizons of a Cree woman approaching the 21st century, while Marilyn Bowering explores the mysterious hinterlands of Human Bodies: New and Collected Poems 1987–1999, distilling a wry wisdom from often inhumane conditions.
Lillian Allen twists reality like a pretzel in Psychic Unrest; Linda Rogers discovers different forms through which cruelty may sublime into understanding in The Saning; and Susan Musgrave in Things That Keep and Do Not Change shows the reader the nature of transformation itself. Carrying the Shadow was Patrick Friesen's remembrances of lives lost, and for Lorna Crozier it was What the Living Won't Let Go, which bares the meaning of bereavement.
Some poets challenged the reality of language itself. In Scars on the Seehors, bill bissett convolutes tongue and eye in exuberant new concrete and performance poems; going even farther, Erin Mouré deconstructs text and meaning in A Frame of the Book, creating her own wilderness of syntax in which to enthrall the reader.
Outstanding literary works from Africa and Australia were predictably among the highlights for 1999. Dominating the African scene were writers from South Africa, most notably the novelist, critic, and academic J.M. Coetzee, who won an unprecedented second Booker Prize for his seventh novel, Disgrace, lauded for its spare prose, readability, and evocation of the problems of postapartheid South Africa. Coetzee also brought out The Lives of Animals and The Novel in Africa, both of which presented moral, philosophical, and literary arguments within a fictional framework based on texts the author had delivered as lectures. Similar preoccupations informed Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century,a collection of essays, correspondence, and reminiscences by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. The pervasive subject of apartheid and coming to terms with the atrocities of South Africa's past were explored elsewhere in two seminal works—poet and journalist Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa and Bishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu's personal memoir No Future Without Forgiveness. The life of Nelson Mandela, perhaps the most iconic figure of the struggle to end apartheid, was thoroughly examined by British journalist Anthony Sampson in Mandela: The Authorized Biography.
In Australia poet Les Murray published perhaps his greatest achievement to date, Fredy Neptune, an epic novel in verse using eight-line stanzas to bring its globe-trotting hero to life. Poet and critic Chris Wallace-Crabbe published his reflections on the writing life, Author! Author!, and Colleen McCullough broke from her Masters of Rome novel series to release The Courage and the Will, her biography of the decorated military figure Roden Cutler. Novelist Murray Bail was named winner of both the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. The year ended on a sad note with the death of best-selling author Morris West (The Shoes of the Fisherman). (See Obituaries.)
The most controversial issue among German-language writers in 1999 was the fighting in the Serbian province of Kosovo, which elicited heated debate throughout the first half of the year in the PEN club and elsewhere. The unrest represented the first major offensive use of the German military since 1945, and writers debated about the lessons of history: Did the horrors of World War II teach "Never again war" or, rather, "Never again Auschwitz"? Peter Handke's play Die Fahrt im Einbaum, oder, Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg was a bitter pro-Serbian attack on both the NATO bombing action and the Western European press; other respected writers, however, including Günter Grass (see Nobel Prizes) and Wolf Biermann, supported German involvement in the NATO effort in Kosovo on humanitarian grounds.
Grass's Mein Jahrhundert, one of the most discussed books of the year, was a collection of 100 stories, each representing one year of the century. The first story, set in 1900, dealt with a German who participated in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China; in the last story, set in 1999, Grass's mother comes back to life to comment on family affairs and politics, as well as her dreams and fears for the future. In the course of the book, readers encounter, in rapid succession, World Wars I and II, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, postwar reconstruction, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and its collapse, and the tensions ensuing in the wake of national reunification.
Gert Neumann's novel Anschlag was a linguistically ambitious and complex exploration of contemporary German identity and the East German past. Thomas Brussig's novel Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee dealt with some of the same issues but in a less-demanding and more nostalgic way. Its young hero, who lives close to the Berlin Wall, remembers a delightful childhood and adolescence, even though he acknowledges the many negative aspects of the GDR regime. Like Brussig's 1995 novel, Helden wie wir, this was an attempt to treat contemporary German history with humour and popular appeal. Other novels dealing with German reunification included Marcia Zuckermann's Das vereinigte Paradies, Joachim Lottmann's Deutsche Einheit, and Jürgen Becker's Aus der Geschichte der Trennungen. Christian von Ditfurth's novel Die Mauer steht am Rhein was a fictional experiment exploring what might have happened if East Germany rather than West Germany had been the stronger player in German reunification. In Ditfurth's treatment West Germans under the thumb of a communist regime showed many of the same East German weaknesses, the very ones criticized by West Germans. Irene Böhme's well-received first novel, Die Buchhändlerin, explored both the Nazi and the GDR past and featured two female figures from different generations who must come to terms with life in those periods of German history. Monika Maron's memoir, Pawels Briefe, also probed German history, addressing the fate of Maron's grandfather, a Polish Jew converted to Christianity and ultimately murdered by the Nazis; at the same time, the memoir examined the relationship between Maron and her mother, whose response to Nazi tyranny had been to support socialism in the GDR.
Peter Schneider's novel Eduards Heimkehr—a loose sequel to the 1992 Paarungen—dealt with the return to Berlin of a German expatriate who had spent almost a decade living in California; through his experiences as a contemporary Rip van Winkle in the once and future capital, readers encounter a sense of the changes in Germany since 1989. Sten Nadolny's novel Er oder ich—a sequel to Nadolny's first novel, Netzkarte—also explored the psychological situation of contemporary Germany; its hero, the middle-aged, disillusioned consultant Ole Reuter, travels randomly through the country by train.
Friedrich Christian Delius's novel Die Flatterzunge—a fictional work based on a true 1997 incident—recounted the misfortunes of a talented Berlin musician who, during a concert trip to Israel, signs a restaurant check with the name Adolf Hitler. The novel, which took the form of a personal notebook, explored the musician's attempt to understand his own seemingly inexplicable actions and painted a literary landscape of contemporary Berlin.
Peter Bichsel's long narrative Cherubin Hammer und Cherubin Hammer was a complex story of two Swiss men who represent reverse mirror images of each other. The loud, gregarious man is an imaginative wish projection of the quiet, lonely man. Thomas Brasch's sophisticated novella Mädchenmörder Brunke also deals with the thoughts of a man who imagines himself in the life of another man—a notorious murderer.
Durs Grünbein's poetry collection Nach den Satiren, widely hailed as the poet's best to date, referred back to the satires of Juvenal and thus made a connection between ancient Rome and contemporary Berlin. In his poetry collection Leichter als Luft: moralische Gedichte, Hans Magnus Enzensberger also reflected on the situation of the contemporary German living in a state of confusion and unrest.
In 1999 Dutch literature in translation continued to enjoy success in the international arena, and it also made new inroads. The 1999 Vondel Translation Prize was awarded to Ina Rilke for her English translations of the novels The Virtuoso by Margriet de Moor (1996) and Roads to Santiago by Cees Nooteboom (1997). Harry Mulisch won the French literary award Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne for The Discovery of Heaven, published by Gallimard as La Découverte du ciel in a translation by Isabelle Rosselin.
The prominence of Amsterdam in Dutch belles lettres was challenged by writers and poets in the city of Utrecht. Since Herman Franke received (1998) the Generale Bank Literatuurprijs—the successor of the AKO Literatuurprijs—for his novel De verbeelding, the translation rights were acquired by the prestigious German publisher S. Fischer Verlag. The Generale Bank award for 1999 went to Karel Glastra van Loon for De passievrucht.
Competition for major Dutch literary prizes was tough. Esther Jansma won the VSB prize for poetry, awarded annually for the best poetry collection of the year, for Hier is de tijd (1998), which established her reputation as a major new talent. The C. Buddingh' Prize, for the best poetry debut of the year, was awarded to Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer for Van de vierkante man (1998). Mulisch's De procedure claimed the 1999 Libris Literatuur Prijs for the best novel of the year, one of the most important awards for works written in Dutch. The jury lauded De procedure as a "daring, virtuoso, dazzling" novel. Marga Minco, author of a varied body of novels and short stories, many of which highlighted the post-World War II experiences of Holocaust survivors, received the Annie Romeinprijs, the biennial award of the feminist journal Opzij, for her entire oeuvre. The report praised her for "finding a unique form in which to describe the indescribable, and to communicate it to others."
In other literary news, biographer Henk van Gelder published his work on Dutch columnist and writer Simon Carmiggelt, and the prominent literary journal Maatstaf, founded by Bert Bakker in 1953, ceased publication.
The Danish literary scene in 1999 offered a rich variety of styles, character portrayals, familiar and foreign settings, and historical and contemporary stories. In Leif Davidsen's thriller Lime's billede (1998), for example, a vivid, nearly sensual Madrid is ground zero for a Danish paparazzo. One of his photos leads to the death of his wife and daughter, to intrigue, and eventually to new love. Ebbe Kløvedal Reich's expansive novel Zenobias liv (1998) takes the reader far, interweaving stories of the divine queen Zenobia with contemporary searches for her lost autobiography. Two works, Katrine Marie Guldager's Det grønne øje (1998) and Birgithe Kosovic's Om natten i Jerusalem (1999), recall Karen Blixen's use of frame stories and her voyages into the heart. In Det grønne øje, Hanna Darting, a British woman in dire straits, shares tale after tale before finally coming to grips with the inherent chaos in life. In Om natten i Jerusalem, an old woman spins intricate tales of a pasha and his wives, especially the favoured Mihrimah, for the Franciscan monk Theodore, whose pilgrimage has taken him to Jerusalem. In Christina Hesselholdt's Hovedstolen (1998), a child's random anecdotes reveal unique impressions of the world.
Jens Christian Grøndahl's Hjertelyd (1999) explores the relationship of an unnamed narrator and his friend. The reader of Hjertelyd is essential in interpreting and assessing the narrator's memoirs. Christian Jungersen's debut novel,Krat, (1999) involves a search for significance; the elderly protagonist discovers that his old friend Eduard is a malevolent stranger in a different, but entirely parallel, reality. In Dværgenes dans (1998), Anne Marie Løn creates a sensitive portrait of the dwarf Tyge Willhof-Holm, an organist in Copenhagen who, during a few weeks in 1922, is captivated by a woman he only glimpses above his console. An oddity in the picture-perfect but loveless Willhof-Holm family, Tyge finds personal renewal through love.
Pia Tafdrup, winner of the 1999 Nordic Council Literary Prize for Dronningeporten, published new poems about poetry, Tusindfødt (1999). Niels Lyngsø also offered a new cycle of poems on the self and significant events in Force majeure (1999). Hanne Kvist's tale of sibling devotion, Drengen med sølvhjelmen (1999), captured the Danish Award in the Nordic Children's Book Competition, and Klaus Rifbjerg won the 1999 Swedish Academy Nordic Prize. Peter Seeberg, a master of the novella, died in January.
The Norwegian literature of 1999 was often characterized by long novels about God, family, and outsiders. Ingvar Ambjørnsen continued his serious yet humorous story of outsider Elling in Elsk meg i morgen, fourth in the popular and critically acclaimed series. Ann Helene Arntzen, in her debut novel, Ildtuene, was compared to Herbjørg Wassmo, another author from Nord-Norge (far northern Norway).
The nominees for the Brage Prize were young authors Frode Grytten (Bikubens song), Kyrre Andreassen (Barringer), and Hanne Ørstavik (Like sant som jeg er virkelig). The prizewinning Bikubens song, Grytten's first novel, was composed of 24 texts corresponding to the 24 apartments in the title beehive. It was also nominated for the Nordic Council Literary Prize.
Several established authors produced impressive works, including Finn Carling's short novel Kan hende ved en bredd, Toril Brekke's Aske, Roy Jacobsen's Grenser, and Jan Kjærstad's Oppdageren, the third volume of his well-received trilogy. Øystein Lønn, 1996 Nordic Council Literary Prize winner, did not disappoint with Maren Gripes nødvendige ritualer.
The short-story genre was well represented with Lars Saabye Christensen's Noen som elsker hverandre, Laila Stien's Gjennom glass, and newcomer Ari Behn's Trist som faen.
The critically acclaimed Ars Vivendi, eller de syv levemåter was Georg Johannesen's first collection of poetry in 32 years and was nominated for the Nordic Council Literary Prize.
The late Agnar Mykle, made famous by the 1950s pornography trial that banned his Song of the Red Ruby, was the subject of Anders Heger's critically praised biography, which won the Brage Prize for biography. Mykle: et diktet liv chronicled Mykle's balancing act between genius and madness. Readers could judge Mykle for themselves in Mannen fra Atlantis—brev og annen prosa.
Finn Olstad's biography Einar Gerhardsen—en politisk biografi revealed little-known aspects of the long-time prime minister and Labour Party leader, including Gerhardsen's proposal for cooperating with the Germans early during the World War II occupation.
Asbjørn Aarseth's Ibsens samtidsskuespill attempted a rhetorical reading of Henrik Ibsen's 12 nonhistorical dramas, and Kjartan Fløgstad's Eld og vatn explored the little-known history of Norwegian emigration to South America.
In 1999 numerous excellent fictional works by older, established authors were published. Although few among the year's debutantes received positive critical reviews, there were some notable novels by younger writers, among them Johanna Nilsson's Flickan som uppfann livet, about a young girl's difficult years of adolescence, and Mare Kandre's gothic novel Bestiarium.
The approaching millennium no doubt influenced themes in a number of works. Kerstin Ekman's magnificent Vargskinnet-Guds barmhärtighet, about a young midwife in the 1920s, and Per Odensten's En lampa som gör mörker, a chronicle of hate, hypocrisy, and inhumanity, could be read as the balance sheet for a troubled century. The same dark world view defined Per Olov Enquist's Livläkarens besök, a tale about the reactionary moralism in the Danish court society of the 1700s. Bengt Anderberg's novel Amorina ends in an apocalyptic conflagration in which memories and love are destroyed. Niklas Rådström's Dickensian novel Drivved från Arkadien, set in 1899, made the reader reflect on the 20th century's unfulfilled promises and shattered hopes. Inger Alfvén's Det blå skåpet och andra berättelser aptly dissected the strebertum ("me-first" attitude) of the 1990s.
Sweden's northern provinces provided the setting for the final volume of Sara Lidman's epic story of the people of Missenträsk, Oskuldens minut, Kerstin Ekman's Vargskinnet, and Torgny Lindgren's collection of short stories I Brokiga Blads vatten. Sweden had become part of a larger world, and that world intruded in many works of 1999. In Marianne Fredriksson's Flyttfåglar, the voices of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte's henchmen echo in a dialogue between two women in Sweden; in Inger Edelfeldt's Det hemliga namnet, the protagonist faces her repressed childhood in a foreign country; and in Ellen Mattson's Poetens liv, a multilayered story about art and the artist unfolds in Europe. Björn Collarp's Palatsbarnen, about two Russian sisters caught in the Russian Revolution, was compared to works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Sweden, no longer a homogenous society, found that new immigrant writers had become a literary force.
A sense of loss echoed in a number of works and was the overarching theme of Ernst Brunner's childhood reminiscences Vallmobadet, about a Sweden of the 1950s. Lost youth, aging, and death were explored, particularly by male authors, notably Ulf Eriksson's short-story collection Is, Ulf Lundell's Friheten, Stig Claesson's Varsel om kommande tilldragelser, and Lennart Sjögren's minimalist novel Fårmannen.
On the poetic front the best works were again written by established authors: Ingrid Arvidsson's critically acclaimed return, Rummet innanför, with its stunning images of nature and landscape; the Skåne poet Jesper Svenbro's elegant poems about a happy childhood, Installation med miniatyrflagga; and Ernst Brunner's cycle of memories of an older man, Stoft av ett stoftkorn.
Important essay collections included Horace Engdahl's elegant aphorisms in Meteorer and Ulf Linde's dialogues on art, Svar.
The 1999 literary output in France was marked by the continuing trend, termed "déprimisme" or "depressivism" by its detractors, to paint a hopelessly gloomy picture of French society. One of the most tender products of this melancholic tendency was Jean-Claude Izzo's Le Soleil des mourants, in which the homeless drifter Rico, intent on ending his life after watching his friend die in the subway, wanders through France until he takes a runaway boy under his wing. Although thereby presented with a chance for a meaningful life, Rico nonetheless abandons the boy in his sleep just after the boy calls him "papa" for the first time.
François Taillandier's Anielka traced a young woman's struggle to find her own identity amid the strident chaos of competing philosophies: her parents' Roman Catholicism, her boyfriend's Marxism, society's consumerism, and other women's feminism.
On a lighter note, Lydie Salvayre's La Conférence de Cintegabelle recounted an imaginary conference meant to bolster the dying art of leisurely conversation in ever-accelerating French society, a conference that tumbles into delirium as the speaker hints that he murdered his wife because she was unable to converse.
This déprimisme was even projected into the fantasy of the postapocalyptic future in Antoine Volodine's Des anges mineurs, in which 200-year-old babushkas create a communist saviour for themselves out of rags following the collapse of technology and capitalism, only to watch him treacherously reinvent the injustices of capitalism. The novel was formed by the stories the condemned saviour tells himself as he awaits his endlessly postponed execution.
The ills of society were telescoped into small, stifling relationships in three successful novels. In Régis Jauffret's Clémence Picot,a woman, driven to psychosis by the death of her family, devises a plan to abduct the son of her next-door neighbour, a single mother; when that fails, she destroys their love, which is an affront to her lonely misery. In Marie Ndiaye's Hilda, it was society's institutionalized hierarchy and the hypocrisy of those who profess to combat it that was put on trial. Madame Lemarchand, a wealthy leftist, hires Hilda as a governess because she must have a woman with such a unique name and then, though sincerely believing she is improving her servant's lot, slowly obliterates Hilda's identity in her need to possess another person completely.
In Hugues Pradier's Pendant la chaleur du jour, the defeat of aristocracy by capitalism is represented by a dwindling family of provincial nobility, slowly being swallowed by a nouveau riche family that has bought its land, hired away its servants, and is about to force a marriage between their son and the nobles' daughter. In the final spasm of inexorable destiny, the noble family implodes but takes the nouveau riche son with them.
Despite pervasive déprimisme, the characters in three noteworthy novels manage to carve a place for themselves through their revolt against society. In Sébastien Lapaque's Les Idées heureuses, a dandy fancying himself an ancient Greek meets a Marxist girl, and despite the mismatch, their common revolt against consumerist society proves fertile ground for love. In Clélie Aster's O.D.C. (a wordplay on odyssey), the main characters, including the author herself, revolt against society with a 10-day plunge into sex and drugs; the revolt permeates the style of the novel, which use the French of the streets. In Eric Chevillard's L'Oeuvre postume de Thomas Pilaster, the revolt, this time against sellout literature, is conducted with acidic humour; when the successful novelist Pilaster dies, his "friend," the unsuccessful poet Marson, is asked to compile a volume of the late author's unpublished works. The envious Marson collects only Pilaster's worst writings into a volume intended to destroy his name.
Three other authors made narrative innovations worthy of note. In her collection of short stories, Guidée par le songe, Béatrix Beck chronicles the lives of the poor in a style that makes use of proverbs and word games and magically imbues with voice such unexpected characters as cats, gargoyles, lawn gnomes, and the ox and ass of the Christmas manger. In Jean Echenoz's Je m'en vais, the story of an Inuit treasure shipwrecked, recovered, then stolen, the omniscient narrator destroys the conventions of both detective and adventure stories, interrupting the plot to toy with the reader, destroy suspense, and fixate on details described at length with the most bizarre of similes. Jean-Pierre Milovanoff's L'Offrande sauvage, the fictionalized account of a Norwegian resistance fighter's life, also has an omniscient narrator, but one who transforms the true story into a legend that sings one man's pains and glories as universal mysteries and marvels of life.
The Prix Femina was awarded to Maryline Desbiolles's Anchise, the story of an old man at the end of a life filled with endless mourning for the wife he lost to fever while he was away at war. Christian Oster won the Prix Médicis for Mon grand appartement, in which a man who has lost everything falls in love with a woman already pregnant, in the hope of filling his life with a ready-made family. The Prix Renaudot was given to Daniel Picouly's L'Enfant léopard, in which policemen during the French Revolution search for a black-and-white-spotted boy, the illegitimate son of a noblewoman and an African, conceived at a black mass. The Prix Goncourt went to Echenoz's Je m'en vais.
The emergence in 1999 of new publishing houses, including the evocatively named Planete Rebelle and L'Effet Pourpre, made news in literary circles because these small enterprises would be devoted to publishing the works of young writers who considered themselves "cutting edge," such as Maxime-Olivier Moutier, whose work veered toward the confessional.
The youth were not the only ones recognized during the year, however. Canada's richest literary prize, the Gilles-Corbeil, went to Paul-Marie Lapointe, also a well-known broadcaster. Senior poet Roland Giguère won the Prix David, given by the province of Quebec. Both winners represented Quebec's movement into modernity. Pauline Julien: la vie à mort, Louise M. Desjardins's popular biography of singer-songwriter Pauline Julien, also an important figure in Quebec's post-World War II self-image, continued the search for the past.
As interest in the Quebec separatist movement waned, so did books about it; fewer polemical essays were published during the year. The exception was the simultaneous French and English publication of Reed Scowen's Time to Say Goodbye (Le Temps des adieux). Scowen, a longtime English-speaking Quebec politician, was roundly condemned by everyone on the political spectrum after he suggested that Canada should tell Quebec to get lost.
In fiction some old favourites put in an appearance, including Réjean Ducharme with his book Gros mots. The reclusive Ducharme was Quebec's answer to American writer J.D. Salinger, and despite his complete lack of public persona, his books continued to find a solid audience. The very public Sergio Kokis checked in with Le maître du jeu, a novel in which theology and sensuality met. Francine Noël (La Conjuration des bâtards) and Yves Beauchemin (Les Émois d'un marchand de café), mainstays on the literary scene, were rewarded for their efforts by strong showings on the best-seller lists.
Quebec's litany of cultural complaints remained constant. The market was dominated by books from France, including American translations that traveled through Paris publishing companies, and the Quebec populace of some seven million shared the problems of many other small cultural communities; Quebec writers would be watching the latest round of World Trade Organization talks to see how the resulting agreements would affect their enterprise.
The most remarkable development of 1999 was the conquest of the literary market by what was traditionally considered a marginal and inferior work lacking in quality—the detective story, a genre known in Italy as the giallo. A significant sign of the new status afforded the genre was the success of Delitti di carta, a scholarly journal founded in 1998 at the University of Bologna and devoted to research in the field. Italians had always been avid readers of detective and mystery novels, mainly by American authors, but in 1999 several homegrown gialli were regularly included in the weekly best-seller lists. Most popular were La mossa del cavallo and Gli arancini di Montalbano, two of the many novels by the Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri, a 74-year-old television producer and filmmaker whose literary talent had achieved recognition only recently. His stories, typically set in Sicily and written in a sort of Siculo-Italian language, showed some of the ambitions of Leonardo Sciascia's classical investigations of "excellent murders" while stylistically echoing Carlo Emilio Gadda's linguistic experimentation. What made Camilleri's hero, Inspector Montalbano, a captivating character was his passionate yet coolly collected determination to pursue the truth, coupled with his awareness that defeat might always be possible.
Dacia Maraini, too, borrowed some formal features of the giallo for her latest book, Buio, which presented 12 separate cases investigated by Adele Sòfia, a woman detective already known for her role in Maraini's earlier novel, Voci. What distinguished this detective was her compassion and strong moral conscience. The "darkness" she explored in these true stories was that of the human mind that degrades, violates, and corrupts the souls and bodies of children, particularly through sexual violence within the family. The book, which expressed the author's profound participation in the silent suffering of the innocent, effectively denounced the growing tide of adult brutality in a society that traditionally considered itself to be eminently child-loving.
Though shocking enough, Maraini's picture of Italian society was not quite as bleak as the one that emerged from Vincenzo Consolo's latest book, Lo spasimo di Palermo, the most intense, harrowing, and difficult novel of the year and, not surprisingly, one of the least popular. More than a narrative, it was the lyrical expression of a heartrending pain, a wound that a father and son shared without ever finding a remedy for it in their separate lives. For the father, a dissatisfied writer, it was the gap that grew between the hopes and illusions he entertained at the end of the war and his actual achievements; for the son, a former revolutionary and terrorist living in exile, it was the bitter disappointment that followed his own violent involvement in recent events. The drama was both existential and political; it suggested the failure of the father and the son, of Sicily, and of Italy to change. Consolo, a Sicilian by birth and one of Italy's most gifted contemporary writers, worked in the tradition of Sciascia and Gadda yet forged a difficult language all his own that was uniquely suited to exploring and expressing the deep malaise that he sensed around him.
Moving from the extreme south of Italy to the northeast, the picture was different but the despair similar. Well-known novelist Ferdinando Camon's slim and accessible book of verse, Dal silenzio delle campagne, synthesized the new barbarity of affluence and consumerism, or the 50-year progress of the Veneto peasant from "subhuman" to "supermonster" status. The collection's ostensibly comic subtitle was a summary of what the region had lately become: "Bulls, cows, devils, peasants, drug addicts, merchants of women, and serial killers." Equally gloomy in substance, though more amusing in tone, thanks to an irresistible irony, was Paolo Barbaro's novel L'impresa senza fine, about two young brothers from the Veneto who make a fortune by leaving the university and starting a garbage-collection-and-disposal enterprise. Their business grows so much that it eventually covers the whole world—an apologue of the unspeakable devastation brought on by recent economic "progress."
Among young narrators, Alessandro Baricco took on contemporary American culture with City. The story centres on a physics genius—a lonely and sad 13-year-old American boy whose mother is permanently locked away in a psychiatric ward and whose father is an army general who communicates only by telephone. The boy is inundated with offers from universities wanting to hire him as a professor.
There were some fine love stories: Piero Meldini's Lune was a compelling and superbly written tale of love and death set in Greece; Roberto Cotroneo's L'età perfetta chronicled an affair between a professor and his bewitching pupil and was modeled on the biblical Song of Solomon; Guido Conti's I cieli di vetro detailed a tragic obsession within a harsh, torrid environment; and Ippolita Avalli's Amami was a delicate, lyrical fable. Maria Corti, the retired but still very active scholar, philologist, and narrator, received a well-deserved award for her career work; her last narrative work, Catasto magico, was published in 1999 and chronicled the fascination throughout the ages that many have with Mt. Etna.
The grim realities of shipwreck and sudden death, well known to villagers living near the treacherous waters along the rocky coast of Galicia, provided the backdrop and principal recurring imagery of Madera de boj (1999) by Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela, a native of the region. Cela's plotless and nearly dialogue-free novel—breathlessly narrated by a local chronicler in run-on sentences that roll like heavy surf across its pages in relentless surges of up to 6,000 words in length—offered a foamy concatenation of maritime anecdotes and sketches involving hundreds of characters. Readers left adrift by the narrator's constant use of terms and expressions in the Galician language could rescue themselves by clinging to an extensive glossary attached to the novel's stern.
With El sol de Breda (1998), a brisk and provocative retelling of the costly Spanish victory over the Flemish at Breda in 1625, Arturo Pérez-Reverte published the third installment of his enormously popular "Capitán Alatriste" series of gritty historical novels. Critics lavished high praise on Álvaro Pombo's first attempt at historical fiction, La cuadratura del círculo, a rambling saga set in 12th-century Aquitaine about a disillusioned crusader. In the chatty confessions of Atlas de geografía humana (1998), Almudena Grandes perceptively surveyed the affective landscapes of contemporary urban life as precariously experienced by four women, all approaching their 40s, who have been hired by a Madrid publisher to prepare installments of an atlas.
Gustavo Martín Garzo won the Nadal Prize for Las historias de Marta y Fernando, a lyrical meditation on the accidents of love, evil, and grace in married life; and in the magic realism of Son de mar, Alfaguara Award winner Manuel Vicent ingeniously fused classical mythology with a contemporary, passion-driven love story set in the Spanish Levant. Espido Freire, at 25 one of the youngest recipients of the coveted Planeta Prize, published her winning novel, Melocotones helados, a quasi-allegorical exploration of the taboo-ridden silences that haunt a Spanish family across three generations. From among 379 collections of verse in international competition for the Hiperión Prize, jurors unanimously favoured Las moras agraces by Carmen Jodra Davó, an 18-year-old philology student at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Against all probability, two titles endorsed by the Royal Spanish Academy of Language—a reference work on grammar and a treatise on spelling: Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (3 vols.) and Ortografía de la lengua española—rocketed to the top of nonfiction best-seller lists the moment they were released.
The year was marked by the passing of two distinguished poets—Claudio Rodríguez and José Agustín Goytisolo—and of two literary titans: Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (see Obituaries), author of more than 30 novels, and the prolific lyric poet Rafael Alberti (see Obituaries), who was the sole remaining voice of the so-called Generation of '27. Both had received the highest distinction in Hispanic letters worldwide, the Cervantes Prize, which in December 1999 was awarded to the Chilean writer Jorge Edwards, a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist.
The year 1999 was a productive one for Latin America's established writers and was notable for the number of women who brought out novels.
Carlos Fuentes of Mexico was honoured by the publication in 1999 of a special 40th-anniversary edition of his first novel, La región más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear), and of a new novel, Los años con Laura Díaz. Mario Benedetti of Uruguay published a new collection of fiction, Buzón de tiempo, and Alfredo Bryce Echenique of Peru published both a collection of short stories, Guía triste de París, and a novel, La amigdalitis de Tarzán. Both Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Guillermo Cabrera Infante of Cuba premiered new collections of their best short stories, Obra reunida and Todo está hecho con espejos, respectively.
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende's Hija de la fortuna chronicled the adventures of a young Chilean woman who followed her lover to California during the gold rush of 1849. Other notable fictional works by established Chilean writers included Poli Délano's La cola, Diamela Eltit's Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998), Marcela Serrano's Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Antonio Skármeta's La boda del poeta, and celebrated poet Raúl Zurita's first novel, El día más blanco.
In Argentina Abelardo Castillo produced El Evangelio según Van Hutten, and Vlady Kociancich reissued La octava maravilla, first published in 1982. Mempo Giardinelli came out with a new novel, El décimo infierno, as well as a new complete edition of his short stories, Cuentos completos.
Mexican writers had a banner year. Angeles Mastretta published Ninguna eternidad como la mía, a novella about a young woman seeking a dancing career in Mexico City in the 1920s, and a collection of short stories and essays, El mundo iluminado, both of which had been published in 1998 and were reissued in 1999. Dramatist Carmen Boullosa produced her eighth novel, Treinta años. Sergio Pitol won the 1999 Juan Rulfo Literary Prize for Latin American and Caribbean literature and published a new trilogy, Tríptico del carnaval. Luis Zapata published Siete noches junto al mar, and José Antonio Pacheco released his latest poetry collection, La arena errante.
Bolivian works included Gary R. Daher Canedo's El olor de las llaves and Emilio Martínez's Noticias de Burgundia. In Uruguay Cristina Peri Rossi published El amor es una droga dura. From Colombia came Fernando Vallejo's El rio del tiempo. Puerto Rico was represented by Rosario Ferré's Vecindarios excéntricos, Olga Nolla's El manuscrito de Miramar (1998), and Alfredo Matilla Rivas's El españolito y el espía. Cuban Daína Chaviano's Casa de juegoswas a story of love and mystery set in Havana.
Several works defied traditional categorization, including Mexican documentalist Elena Poniatowska's Las soldaderas, about the women who fought in the 1910 Mexican Revolution, complete with actual photographs of their participation. Other works from Mexico included Marisol Martin del Campo's Amor y conquista, a novel that reexamined the role of Malinche, the indigenous lover of Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés; Rosa Helia Villa's first novel, Itinerario de una pasión, the story of the many loves of Pancho Villa; Carlos Montemayor's Los informes secretos, a novel about political corruption based on documents from official archives; Enrique Serna's El seductor de la patria, a psychological novel about Antonio López de Santa Anna, the Mexican president whose political bravado led to the loss of half of his nation's territory to the United States; and Guadalupe Loaeza's Las obsesiones de Sofía,a novel of social satire compiled from actual 1990s news articles. Argentine journalist Martin Caparrós published La historia, a novel based on the internal political conflicts of his nation, complete with illustrations. Nicaraguan novelist Sergio Ramírez released Adiós muchachos, his memories of the 1979 Sandinista National Liberation Front revolution.
Two new novelists enjoying phenomenal success were Laura Esquivel of Mexico, who produced her fourth novel, Estrellita marinera, and Zoé Valdés of Cuba, whose latest novel was Querido primer novio.
Other novels from new writers included Júrame que te casaste virgen, a feminist satire on machismo by Beatriz Escalante of Mexico; Yo amo a mi mami, the story of a child raised by servants in a wealthy suburb of Lima, Peru, by Jaime Bayly of Peru; Aurora, a historical novel and English translation by Giancarla de Quiroga of Bolivia about Bolivian women and indigenous groups; Fuga del silencio, a novel set in Nürnberg, Ger., during the Cold War by Norma López Suárez of Mexico, winner of the 1999 Joaquín Mortiz Prize for a first novel; En busca de Klingsor, a fictionalized portrayal of Western history and science by Jorge Volpi of Mexico, winner of the 1999 Biblioteca Breve Prize; Pista falsa by Carmen Ollé of Peru; and El renacer de un amor oculto by Marian Castillo-Bocanegra of Puerto Rico.
Significant contributions from new writers in Chile were El bandido de los ojos transparentes, by Chilean film director Miguel Littín, whose clandestine adventures documenting the atrocities of the Augusto Pinochet Ugarte regime, were earlier published by Gábriel García Marquez; Ernesto de Blasis's El mejor jugador del mundo; and Hernán Rivera Letelier's Fatamorgana de amor con banda de música. New works by Argentine writers included La canción de las ciudades, short stories by Matilde Sánchez; Señorita by Hebe Uhart; La sombra del jardín by Cristina Siscar; Calle de las escuelas, no. 13, a first novel by Argentine poet and screenwriter Martin Prieto; and A veinte años, Luz, a feminist political novel by Elsa Osorio about a child stolen at birth during the Argentine dictatorship.
The Great Prize for Fiction was awarded by the Association of Portuguese Authors in 1999 to Fernanda Botelho for the publication of her latest novel, As contadoras de histórias. A writer with a brilliant career, Botelho showed a consummate skill in mastering the techniques of the narrative. The setting of her story is an old house in the country where a group of women tell stories to each other. They examine each narrative, discuss the literary merits of each, and try to understand the motivation of the characters. Every new story unfolded from the previous one, and as the whole process was completed, the reader became an accomplice to the mysteries of the oral and written word and was able to question the illusion created by fiction.
Although literary experimentation became the hallmark of Portuguese literature in the past decade, Júlio Moreira alone showed a deeper commitment to innovation. His novel Férias de verão adopted the form of the dialogue, reducing description to a bare minimum of contextual information. The reader was constantly challenged to capture the anxieties and problems of the characters in their conversation. The events of May 1968 in Paris and the idea of the revolution with its illusions and delusions formed the centre of a narrative that was admirably told, showing skepticism over the promised changes.
Another successful literary experiment was achieved by Almeida Faria, author of the novel A paixão (1997), considered a modern classic. Faria adapted the work to a play written in free verse, Vozes da paixão, and the effect was stunning. The beauty of poetic diction and the compression of the action enhanced the quality of the drama, which takes place on a Good Friday, with all its symbolism.
The Camões Prize was awarded to Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen for her magnificent body of poems.
The October 1999 death of João Cabral de Melo Neto (see Obituaries) overshadowed all other cultural events in Brazil. The most revered of Brazil's post-1945 poets, Cabral created works, notably the Pernambucan folk drama Morte e vida Severina (1955), that received international plaudits. Félix de Athayde published Idéias fixas de João Cabral de Melo Neto,a collection of interviews given by Cabral over the course of his professional life, both as diplomat and as poet. Other notable deaths included distinguished dramatist, folklorist, and antidictatorship cultural hero Alfredo Dias Gomes, author of the drama O pagador de promessas (1961) among many other works that included prose, drama, and soap opera scripts; novelist J.J. Veiga; literary critic Soares Amora; lexicographer and cultural philosopher Antônio Houaiss; and poet Ary Quintella.
In 1998 Rubem Fonseca published a new collection of stories, A confraria dos espadas, in which death and humour meshed quite harmoniously. Ana Miranda's first collection of stories, Noturnos: contos, featured a female narrator viewing her past and future. Women writers and protagonists also figured in two other novels. Adélia Prado's Manuscritos de Felipa presented, in her unique poetical prose, a woman's view of aging in a society that prizes youth and physical beauty. Sônia Coutinho's latest novel, Os seios de Pandora, was a work of detective fiction following the reporter Dora Diamante's investigation into the death of a "liberated" woman.
A collection of poetry by the late Eurico Alves, A poesia de Eurico Alves: imagens da cidade e do sertão, included essays on the poet and his works and was edited by Rita Olivieri-Godet. A new study about the influence of Pedro Nava's grandmother and mother on his poetry was published by Ilma Salgado.
Several new collections of literary and cultural essays placed Brazilian letters within an international context: Literatura e identidade, organized by José Luis Jobim, Psicanálise e colonização, compiled by Luiz André de Sousa, and Literatura e feminismo, organized by Christina Ramalho.
In an O Globo poll of Brazilian writers and intellectuals, the 100 most important works of 20th-century literature in Portuguese were selected. In first place was João Guimarães Rosa's Grande sertão: veredas (1956; The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1963), followed by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro (1899; Eng. trans. 1953).
The year 1999 marked a number of major anniversaries in Russian literature, most notably the 200th anniversary of the birth of Aleksandr Pushkin. A large government-sponsored celebration took place in Moscow, and St. Petersburg served as host to a World Poetry Conference meeting dedicated to him. Among the more praiseworthy publications dedicated to Pushkin were the articles of Maria Virolainen in the literary journal Znamya. The 100th anniversary of the births of Vladimir Nabokov and Andrey Platonov, two of Russia's greatest 20th-century prose writers, was the topic of many conferences, articles, and books.
Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, leading 1990s Postmodernists, weighed in with new novels that ridiculed the inauthentic, simulative nature of Russian "reality" and the falseness of logocentrism. Sorokin's Goluboye salo ("Blue Lard") takes place in a mid-21st-century Russia that has been conquered by China. In the book, experimenters—who create genetic clones of Russian writers Leo Tolstoy, Anna Akhmatova, Nabokov, and Platonov, who then produce literary works that are reminiscent of the authors' actual writings—discover that these impostors also produce a most valuable by-product, blue lard. Pelevin's English-titled novel, Generation P, depicts Russian political life as the product of the fantasy and artistry of a group of first-rate "copywriters" of television commercials. The novel, which denounces greed, cynicism, and the manipulation of public opinion, used elements of popular culture and enjoyed enormous commercial success.
Another group of texts, more artistically significant than the predictable Postmodern and psychological prose, were published in several of the leading literary journals, including Znamya, Oktyabr, Novy mir, and Zvezda. They included new short stories by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Nina Sadur, and Boris Khazanov and featured fantastic themes that were treated with realistic verisimilitude as well as a metaphysical depth combined with subtle artistic form.
Nonfiction prose, much of it controversial, also continued to be an important area of development. The well-known prose writer and 1960s human rights activist Vladimir Maramzin broke a long silence with Vozvrashchenets ("The Returnee"), and Anatoly Nayman produced two works: Nepriyatny chelovek ("An Unpleasant Man"), an "update" on the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1864 Notes from the Underground, and Lyubovny interes ("A Love Interest"), an attempt to understand the spiritual experience of the final Soviet generation.
Several books published in 1999 were written years earlier, including such works as Aleksandr Morozov's Obshchaya tetrad ("A Collective Notebook"), the second installment of a tetralogy that began with the 1998 Chuzhoye pismo ("A Foreign Letter," winner of the 1998 Russian Booker Prize), Yevgeny Popov's stories, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's memoir of his years in exile. Also published were works by Fazil Iskander, Grigory Kazanovich, and writers of the younger generation, including Yury Buyda, Oleg Pavlov, and Oleg Yermakov, signing in with the last novel in his trilogy, Reka ("The River").
The most important work of poetry published was Yelena Shvarts's long-awaited Izbrannoye ("Selected Poems"), which was nominated for the Russian State Poetry Prize. Other notable poetic publications included Almanakh ("Almanac"), a collective work by the Moscow conceptualists led by D.A. Prigov and Lev Rubinshteyn, and individual tomes by poets Sergey Volf, Sergey Stratanovsky, Svetlana Ivanova, Timur Kibirov, Denis Novikov, Gleb Gorbovsky, and Semyon Lipkin.
Several broad critical discussions dominated the year, including ones about the meaning of the Russian intelligentsia—as in 1909, a 1999 anthology devoted to the subject was published in Paris and entitled Novye Vekhi ("New Landmarks"); the direction of contemporary Russian culture, the topic of concern to critics Irina Rodnyanskaya, Pavel Basinsky, Nikita Yeliseyev, and Aleksandr Skidan; and the possibility of continuing to consider Russian literature as a single, unified phenomenon. One of the most interesting contributions to the latter debate was made by Mikhail Epshteyn in Russkaya kultura na rasputi ("Russian Culture at the Crossroads"), his essay about the effects of the total secularization of Russian culture.
The "Anti-Booker" prizes went to 95-year-old Emma Gershteyn, for her Silver Age memoir, and to the little-known young Moscow poet Maksim Amelin, for a selection of poems published in Znamya. The St. Petersburg Northern Palmyra was awarded to Shvarts. The shortlist of books nominated for the 1999 Russian Booker Prize—now called the Smirnoff Booker Prize—included Vladimir Makanin's Geroy nashego vremeni ("A Hero of Our Time"), Leonid Girshovich's Prays ("Price"), Buyda's Prusskaya nevesta ("The Prussian Bride"), Aleksandra Vasilyeva's Moya Marsucheka ("My Marsucheka"), Viktoriya Platova's Bereg ("The Shore"), and Mikhail Butov's Svoboda ("Freedom"). The winner was Butov, who received the $12,500 award in Moscow on November 25.
A prize in memory of Joseph Brodsky was established, and the first recipients were Stratanovsky, Kibirov, and Vladimir Strochkov. The winners of the Andrey Bely prizes for avant-garde achievements were Mikhail Yeryomin, Ry Nikovna, Sergey Sigey, and Vasily Kondratyev, who died in September after falling from a rooftop.
Three major figures in Russian culture died: renowned scholar Dmitry S. Likhachev, known as "the conscience of Russia," (see Obituaries), and Igor Kholin and Genrikh Sapgir, two of the leading 1950s and '60s poetic figures of the Moscow underground.
Poland suffered a great loss in 1999 with the deaths of three major talents: theatrical innovator Jerzy Grotowski, critic and editor Jerzy Turowicz, and poet Jerzy Harasymowicz. Zbigniew Kruszyński published his eagerly awaited work of documentary fiction, Na lądach i morzach ("On Lands and Seas"). Mariusz Wilk solidified his reputation with Wilczy notes: słowo/obrazy terytoria ("Wolf's Notebook: Word/Pictures of the Territories"). Edward Redliński continued his assault on the conventions of literature with Krfotok ("Hemorrhage"). Antoni Libera's debut novel and winner of the Znak Award, Madame, was an ironic portrait of the artist during his formative early years. Olga Tokarczuk's Dom dzienny, dom nocny ("Day Home, Night Home"), considered her finest work, was nominated for the Nike Literary Award. Marcin Świetlicki's two personal and sardonic poetry collections, Pieśni profana ("Songs of the Profane") and Schizma ("Schism"), established his reputation as a leading talent.
The central theme of a number of works in the Czech Republic continued to be the confrontation of present-day problems and the communist past. After 26 years of forced silence, Jiří Kratochvil published Noční tango: roman jednoho léta z konce století ("Night Tango: A Novel of One Summer of the End of the Century") and was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize. Jaroslav Putík's diary Odchod ze zámku ("Departure from the Castle") concentrated on his experiences during a time of political and social changes. Petr Šabach's Babičky ("Grandmothers") recalled the author's childhood and youth in communist Czechoslovakia with his two grandmothers. Jáchym Topol's novella Anděl ("Angel") depicted the destiny of a rebellious drug addict who fights his addiction. Jan Jandourek's Škvár ("Trash"), a satire on the public's taste for literary trash, was also an attack on the Czech literary elite. J.H. Krchovský's Básně ("Poems") included verse from three earlier collections and oscillated between death and the anguish of erotic relationships.
Literature from Slovenia included Drago Jančar's latest novel, Zvenenje v glavi ("A Ringing in the Head"), a fictionalized account of his seven-month incarceration in 1976 for political espionage. Tomaž Šalamun's reputation as an outstanding poet was solidified with his latest collection, Morje ("The Sea").
The literary event of the year in Bulgaria was the publication of Vreme i sŭvremennitsi: dnevnitsi na Kiril Khristov ("Time and Contemporaries: The Diaries of Kiril Christov") after a 50-year-long ban. Blaga Dimitrova's two poetry collections, Noshtna lampa sred byal den ("A Night-Lamp in Broad Daylight)" and Balkaniada-ada ("Balkanalia"), were well received, especially her poems about Kosovo. Yordan Radichkov's Avtostradata ("The Highway"), a compilation of short stories and novels, marked the writer's 70th birthday. ("A Natural Novel") was awarded the Razvitie Award, and Konstantin Terziev's Chukala moma leshnitsi ("A Lassie Was Cracking Hazelnuts") won the Razvitie Award. Donka Petrunova's trilogy Gangsterskata voyna ("The Gangster War") captured the Grand Prix of the Academy of the Ministry of the Interior. Several works appeared that investigated political injustices, including Khristo Khristov's Sekretnoto delo za lagerite ("The Secret File Concerning Concentration Camps") and Dimitŭr Shishmanov's four-volume collection of short stories published under the title Stranni khora ("Strange People").
A record number of outstanding collections of poetry appeared in Romania: Mihai Ignat's Eu ("I"), Șerban Foarță's Un castel in Spania pentru Annia ("A Castle in Spain for Annia"), Mariana Marin's Multilarea artistului la tinerețe ("The Artist's Maiming Early in His Youth"), Marta Petreu's Apocalipsa după Marta ("Apocalypse After Marta"), Constantin Abăluță's Cârtița lui Pessoa ("Pessoa's Mole"), Denisa Comănescu's Urma de foc ("The Fire Track"), and T.O. Bobe's poem in prose, Bucla ("The Curl"). The novel was also well represented with new entries by Daniel Vighi, Anamaria Beligan, Constantin Eretescu, Dan Stanca, Dumitru Țepeneag, Dumitru Radu Popa, and Mirela Roznoveanu.
In Macedonia several outstanding collections of poetry were published: Mateja Matevski's Isklucuvanje na Ida ("Disconnection of Ida"), Radovan Pavlovski's Sinot na sonceto ("The Son of the Sun"), Jovan Kotevski's Razor, Jovan Strezovski's Blik, and Alajdin Tahir's Fotografii ("Photographs"). New novels were welcomed from Vladimir Kostov, Krste Čačanski, and Danilo Kocevski. Two highly praised works were translated into Albanian: Slavko Janevski's Secema prikazna ("The Sugar Story") and Resul Shabani's Sedum drami ("Seven Dramas").
In Croatia, Dubravka Ugrešić's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth, proved to be the literary event of the year. The book, a hybrid of diary, memoir, notebook, and novel, contained moving vignettes from the writer's past.
Ðoko Stojičić's Kopno, kopno na vidiku! ("Land, Land in Sight!") proved to be one of his best collections and established his reputation as one of Serbia's leading poets. Referred to as the Serbian Rambo, Dragan Jovanović Danilov completed his poetic trilogy with Kuća Bahove muzike ("The House of Bach's Music").
The main events in Hebrew literature in 1999 were the publication of Yuval Shimoni's Heder ("A Room") and S. Yizhar's Giluy Eliyahu ("Discovering Elijah"). Shimoni's triptych was a richly condensed depiction of the many faces of contemporary Israel and an insightful examination of the ability of art to cope with the complicated nature of human existence. Yizhar, who renewed his literary career in the early 1990s, published a telling memoir on the background of the October 1973 war that broke out in Israel on Yom Kippur. Other notable novels included Orly Castel-Blum's Hasefer hahadash shel Orly Castel-Blum (1998; "Taking the Trend"), Hai'm Be'er's Havalim (1998; "The Pure Element of Time"), Eyal Megged's Hesed ne'ura'yich ("Early Grace"), and Dorit Rabinyan's Hahatunot shelanu ("Our Weddings"). Among the works of several veteran writers that failed to match previous achievements were Aharon Appelfeld's Kol asher ahavti ("All That I Have Loved"), Natan Shaham's Mikhtav baderekh ("A Letter in the Mail"), and Judith Katzir's Migdalorim shel yabasha ("Inland Lighthouses"). Highlights among the many collections of short stories were Alex Eptstein's Ahuvato shel metapes heharim ("The Mountaineer's Beloved") and Nurit Zarhi's Mishakei bedidut ("Games of Loneliness"). First novels were published by Yael Ichilov, Nasikh levavot adom ("Knave of Hearts"), and Ayelet Smair Tulipman (Gnessin 3).
Notable books of poetry included Aryeh Sivan's Dayar lo mugan ("Unprotected Tenant"), Rachel Chalfi's Nosa'at smuya ("Stowaway"), Lea Ayalon's Kan Beitzim ("A Nest of Eggs"), Israel Eliraz's Tavor("Tabor"), Dan Armon's Alim ("Leaves"), Joseph Sharon's Hayorshim ("The Inheritors"), and Aharon Shabtai's controversial Politika ("Politics"). A first book of poems, Rmoz eich ata ohev lehithazer ("Tell Me How You Want to Be Wooed"), was penned by Tamir Lahav-Radlmesser.
The premier event in literary scholarship was the publication of the last volume of Gershon Shaked's study of 100 years of Hebrew fiction, Hasiporet ha'ivrit ("Hebrew Narrative Fiction"; 1880–1980; vol. v, 1998). Other works of literary scholarship included Dan Miron's studies of modern Hebrew poetry, Ha'adam eino ella ("Man in Nothing But"), and Ziva Shamir's examination of Natan Alterman's poetics and politics in Al et ve'al atar ("Sites and Situations"). Avner Holzman discussed Hebrew literature against the backdrop of the visual arts in Melekhet mahshevet: tehiyat ha'uma("Aesthetics and National Revival"), and Shlomo Yaniv studied tradition and innovation in Haballada Ha'ivrit bat zmaneinu ("The Contemporary Hebrew Ballad").
The highlight of 1999 was the 600-page anthology, Di Yidishe literatur in amerike 1870–2000 ("Yiddish Literature in America 1870–2000), selected and edited by Emanuel S. Goldsmith.
Among the worthy additions to Yiddish verse were Rivke Basman's Di erd gedenkt ("Earth Has Memory"), Kadya Molodovsky's Papirine brikn ("Paper Bridges"), and Pinye Plotkin's Vegn der tsayt un vegn zikh: lider ("About Time and Myself: Poems").
In his Ondenk-likht ("Light of Memory"), Moyshe Bernshteyn succeeded in memorializing in a richly illustrated collection the experiences and acquaintances of a lifetime through poems and portraits of writers. Leo Levinson's Mayn farnikhtete velt ("My Extinguished World") was a vivid and thought-provoking contribution to the memoir literature of the Holocaust period. In a moving personal narrative, Fun der royter armey biz Sibir ("From the Red Army to Siberia"), Avrom Meyerkevitsh portrays the adventures and aspirations of a Jewish boy who, having grown up in the alleys of Jewish Warsaw, faces the cascading impact of induction into the Soviet army and exile to Siberia; the book offered an unmediated view of the disillusionment of an idealist.
Master storyteller Itsik Kipnis produced two charming volumes of children's stories that were enriched with appealing illustrations: Dos shtibele ("The Little House") and Fir babelekh ("Four Butterflies"). Poet and composer Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman published Fli mayn flishlang ("Fly My Kite"), an illustrated anthology of new lyrics.
A pair of contributions to literary history were Artur Lermer's Un dokh—dem morgnroyt antkegn ("And Yet, Against the Red of Morning"), essays and opinion pieces that ranged widely over the history of Yiddish literature and culture and were crafted with an awareness of the implications and challenges of technology, and Shimen Heylik's Di muser-literatur: fun a kultur-historisher perspektiv ("Musar [Ethics] Literature from a Cultural and Historical Perspective").
Yoysef Guri published Klug vi Shloyme Hamelekh ("Clever as King Solomon"), a handbook of folk similes and metaphors that was a benchmark work of prodigious research.
Shloyme Vorzoger finished Frida ("Frieda"), the second volume of his roman-fleuve about a woman's marriage and divorce.
In Turkey's literary world, the drama in 1999 centred on the communiqué issued by some prominent Turkish writers—Yașar Kemal among them, and endorsed by 46 cultural figures from abroad, notably Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Ingmar Bergman, Arthur Miller, and Harold Pinter—calling for broader rights for Kurds.
Orhan Pamuk published no fiction in 1999, but he did produce a large volume of selected essays. Enis Batur, a towering figure in Turkish letters, continued to produce scores of essays as well as many volumes of prose and poetry, in addition to his indefatigable work as head of the country's largest literary publisher, Yapı Kredi Yayınları.
Impressive successes included Bir dinozorun gezileri ("Excursions of a Dinosaur"), Mîna Urgan's sequel to her 1998 best-selling memoir, Bir dinozorun anıları ("Reminiscences of a Dinosaur"); Rekin Teksoy's translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy; the gripping novels İntihar ("Suicide") by Kaan Arslanoğlu, Cennetin arka bahƈesi ("Rear Garden of Paradise") by Habib Bektaş, Bir aşk bilmecesini nasıl ƈözersiniz ("How Can You Solve a Puzzle of Love") by Atilla Birkiye, Elyazması rüyalar ("Handwritten Dreams") by Nazlı Eray, and Genƈliğin o yakıcı mevsimi ("That Scorching Season of Youth") by Erendiz Atasü.
Some of Turkey's leading poets had a fertile year. Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca, often referred to as "Turkey's preeminent living poet," turned 85 and continued to publish the complete body of his work. İlhan Berk, an innovator since the 1950s, exerted new influences with new works and the republication of his previous books. Ataol Behramoğlu, Güven Turan, Sina Akyol, and Haydar Ergülen published remarkable new collections of poems.
Two books were banned by the authorities for "excessive and offensive eroticism": Mehmet Ergüven's collection of essays and the Turkish translation of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint.
Literary circles mourned the deaths of Can Yücel, an outstanding poet, satirist, and translator; Fakir Baykurt, celebrated novelist who had exposed the plight of villagers; Abbas Sayar, famous for his 1971 novella Yılkı atı ("Wild Horse"); Mehmet C̦ınarlı, a poet; and Selƈuk Baran, an award-winning short-story writer.
Literary activity in Iran evolved in 1999 along two separate tracks, one retrospective, the other current. Whereas the former activity added appreciably to the store of publications that took stock of the work of a generation of writers approaching old age, the latter continued to develop in a tangle with the factional political disputes of the past few years.
The publication of Safar-nameh-ye baran ("The Rain's Travelogue") marked the culmination of efforts by students and admirers to collect the work of reclusive poet Mohammad-Reza Shafi'i-Kadkani, a professor at the University of Tehran, who had refused to publish many of his recent compositions.
In September Mowj ("Wave"), a student newsletter, published a two-page play on the theme of a student's encounter with the Twelfth Imam, who was believed to appear from occultation at the end of time to right the wrongs of the world. The event caused an uproar among the fundamentalist factions. The playwright, the editor, and a professor who had recommended it to his class received prison sentences from a special press court. Around the same time, a book with the same theme, titled Divaneh-ye dovvom ("The Second Lunatic"), was ordered to be withdrawn nationwide from bookstores.
These events resulted in greater self-restraint, if not self-censorship, among Iranian writers. At meetings held in New York City and Washington, D.C., to foster dialogue between Iranian and American literary figures, Iranian guest speakers, among them writers, critics, and poets, demonstrated the pressures under which they lived and worked.
Three novels, published in Iran, France, and Sweden, respectively, the last two by Iranian writers living in exile, constituted noteworthy additions to an impressive output at the close of the century: Moniru Ravanipur's Kowli-e kenar-e atash ("The Gypsy by the Fire"), Reza Qasemi's Chah-e Babel ("The Well at Babylon"), and Shahrnush Parsipur's Majaraha-ye sadeh va kuchak-e ruh-e derakht ("The Simple Little Adventures of the Tree's Spirit"). Literary output in Afghanistan and Tajikistan remained unremarkable in an atmosphere utterly incompatible with literary productivity.
The attention of literary circles in the Arab world was monopolized in 1999 by both the sad news of the loss of a major Iraqi poet and three prominent Egyptian writers as well as a controversy at the American University in Cairo (AUC) over Muhammad Shukri's novel Al-Khūbz al-ḥāfī (1982; For Bread Alone, 1973). The death on Dec. 1, 1998, of renowned Islamic scholar and writer ʿĀisha ʿAbd ar-Rahmān, known also by her pen name, Bint ash-Shāti, was also mourned.
Iraqi poet ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati, author of some 20 volumes of poetry, including his 1998 title, Al-Bahr baʿid ("The Sea Is Far Away"), died on August 3. The Egyptian writers who died were ʿAlī ar-Rāʿī, a critic and historian of the Arabic theatre; novelist and journalist Fatḥī Ghānem, author of Ar-Rajul alladhī faqada dhillahu (1966; The Man Who Lost His Shadow, 1980); and short-story writer and playwright Lutfi al-Khūlī, who was perhaps better known as a journalist and political activist.
The heart of the controversy over Al-Khubz al-ḥāfī was the question of freedom of expression—parents of students at AUC requested that the book be removed from a course list—and the issue was publicized in the United States via e-mail.
There was also a rich crop of books by women authors. Fay ʿAfāf Kanafānī published her autobiography, Nadia—Captive of Hope: Memoir of an Arab Woman. Three Moroccan novels written in French, Fettouma Djerrari Benabdenbi's Souffle de femme, Siham Benchekroun's Oser vivre, and Yasmine Chami-Kettani's Cérémonie, dealt with strikingly similar themes and were heavily autobiographical. The protagonists in the novels were modern women who aspired to change society, but their dreams were crushed once they married.
A young Lebanese writer, Dominique Eddé, published her first novel, Pourquoi il fait si sombre? Breaking with his tradition of writing historical novels, Amin Maalouf in his latest book, Les Identités meurtrières (1998), dealt with the new wave of ethnic cleansing.
The Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, which dedicated 1999 to Morocco, marked the occasion by publishing and distributing Onze histoires marocaines, a small collection of translated excerpts from Moroccan Arabic literature. Moroccan journalist and fiction writer ʿAbd al-Karīm Ghallāb published Ash-Shaykhūkha az-zālima ("Unfair Old Age"), an autobiography about aging.
Books dealing with the aftermath of the civil war in Lebanon and the resulting psychological effects also began appearing. Najwa Barakat published Yā salām ("O Dear!"); Layla ʿUsayrān producedḤiwār bila kalimāt fiʾl Ghaybūbah (1998; "Wordless Dialogue in a Coma"); and Etel Adnan explained in a "letter to Elie" the state of denial existing among Lebanese who referred to the civil war as the "events."
The continuing Algerian crisis was grist for fictional works that mirrored reality. The latest in the series was journalist Y.B.'s L'Explication; his lone other book, Comme il a dit lui (1998), won the Mimouni Award. Algerian novelist Ahlam Mustaghanmi dedicated Fawḍā al-ḥawās (1998; "The Chaos of Senses"), a sequel to Dhākiratu'l-jasad (1996), to Muhammad Boudiaf.
Prolific writer Ghāda as-Sammān published Al-Abadiyya laḥdhatu ḥubbin ("Eternity Is an Instant of Love"), a collection of romantic poetic prose vignettes on love and death; unlike her earlier works, it contained no reference to the Lebanese civil war. Nostalgia and a feeling of loss animated the protagonist of Iraqi writer Shākir al-Anbāri's novel Mawṭen al-asrār ("The Home of Secrets").
Mahmoud Darwish pursued his symbolic expression of country and identity in a new collection of poetry, Sarīr al-gharībah ("The Bed of the Stranger"). Ahdāf Soueif continued to write in English and published the novel The Map of Love (1999).
During 1999 the list assembled by Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly) of the 100 best Chinese fictional works of the 20th century was released in Hong Kong. The first-place winner was Lu Xun for his Nahan ("Call to Arms"); it was followed in order by Shen Congwen for Bian cheng ("Remote Town"), Lao She for Luotuo xiangzi ("The Camel"), Zhang Ailing for Chuanqi ("Legend"), Qian Zhongshu for Wei cheng ("Enclosed City"), Mao Dun for Ziye ("Midnight"), Pai Hsien-yung for T'ai-pei jen ("Taipeiers"), and Ba Jin for Jia ("Family"). As always, some found the judges' selections biased, but the chosen works reflected the opinions of a panel of 14 experts from several countries.
Authors in China were prolific during the year, but much of their subject matter, as in the past, was intended principally to glorify the big national holidays. Ten novels were offered as gifts to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, but their artistic quality was generally mediocre.
During the year the process began of selecting the finalists for the fifth Mao Dun Literature Award, given once every three years. Works published from 1995 to 1998 were eligible, and, although the award was originally scheduled to be given in 1999, the presentation was postponed until 2000. The first cut was made by a group of critics who voted for the 25 best from hundreds of novels nominated; then a second group voted for the best 3–5 of those. Considered most likely to win were Zhou Daxin's epic novel Di ershi mu ("The 20th Act"), which, with deep historical insight and feeling, depicted the rise and fall over a century of a family's silk business; young Tibetan writer A Lai's Chen'ai luo ding ("When the Dust Settles"), a novel thick with cultural implications and dynamic language as well as unique scenes and symbols representing life changes as seen through the eyes of the son of a Tibetan chieftain; and female author Wang Anyi's Chang hen ge ("Song of Everlasting Sorrow"), which used delicate, exact, and somewhat gloomy language to portray the trivial daily life of urban Shanghai residents and the changes in their behaviour over the decades. Two other novels given a chance to win were Jia Ping'ao's Gao lao zhuang ("The Old Gao Village"), a straightforward story of an ancient scholar who travels back to visit relatives in his old village, a trip with resonance for life in contemporary China, and Cao Wenxuan's Hongwa ("Red Tile"), a story about children written in a classic style.
On another front, Han Shaogong, the author of Maqiao cidian ("Ma Qiao Dictionary"), filed and won a libel suit in a local court against the critics of his work. His action caused a furor in literary circles, where it was felt that a literary dispute should not be the subject of legal action, and it was feared that the incident would set a bad precedent.
The major news in Japanese literature was delivered in January 1999. The Akutagawa Prize, Japan's top literary award for young writers, went to Keiichirō Hirano's novel Nisshoku (1998; "Solar Eclipse"). Hirano was 23 years old and an undergraduate at Kyoto University when his work claimed the prize. He just missed being the youngest winner ever by a few months, but his work invited comparison with that of other writers who had won the Akutagawa Prize as undergraduates— Shintarō Ishihara (see Biographies), Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburō Ōe, and Ryū Murakami. When Hirano's work was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, a controversy arose over its suitability. The story—about a seminary student who meets an old alchemist and is totally affected by him while traveling through the countryside in medieval France—had nothing to do with Japan. Recent prizewinners had all chosen subjects from contemporary Japan. Hirano himself was uncertain whether his literary offering would meet the selection criteria, but he won, almost unanimously, on the strength of his writing power. Some judges, however, complained about his use of kanji, the Chinese character-based writing system considered outmoded in contemporary Japan. One of the most popular Japanese authors, Haruki Murakami, published a new work of fiction: Supūtoniku no koibito ("The Sputnik Sweetheart"). It appeared two years after his nonfiction Āndāguraundo ("Underground"), which told of the indiscriminate homicide by the religious group AUM Shinrikyo. The new work was a story about a young high-school teacher and his missing girlfriend, Sumire, who had got lost while visiting Greece with her employer, Mew, a middle-aged businesswoman. Although the story unfolded along the lines of Murakami's classic seek-and-find storytelling style, this time he mainly emphasized things that were not apparent or events that happened seemingly without basis. Mew's hair, for example, suddenly turns gray because of an incident 14 years earlier. Although she remembers the incident clearly, she never understands what made her hair change colour overnight. The reason for Sumire's disappearance is also left unexplained. The best-selling fiction of the year was Toyoko Yamazaki's five-volume Shizumanu taiyō ("The Never-Setting Sun"), which chronicled the life of a struggling businessman at a national airline company and partly mirrored the facts of Japan Airlines' Boeing 747 crash in 1985. It sold two million copies. Other fictional best-sellers included Miri Yū's Gōrudo rasshu(1998; "The Gold Rush"), Ōe's Chūgaeri ("Somersault"), and Hisashi Inoue's Tōkyō sebunrōzu ("Tokyo Seven Roses"). Although few critical works appeared, Hiroki Azuma's study on Jacques Derrida, Sonzaironteki yūbinteki ("Ontological, Postal"), was highly acclaimed. The Yomiuri Prize for Literature went to Kunio Ogawa's Hasissi gang ("Hashish Gang") and Noboru Tujihara's Tobe Kirin ("Fly, Kylin"), and the Tanizaki Jun'icherō Prize was given to Nobuko Takagi's novel Tōkō no ki ("Lights Thinning Tree"). Major contemporary authors Akio Gotō, Kunio Tsuji, and Ayako Miura died during the year, and Japan's leading literary critic Jun Etoh commited suicide; his essay Tsuma to watashi ("My Wife and I") was on the best-seller list.
The major news in Japanese literature was delivered in January 1999. The Akutagawa Prize, Japan's top literary award for young writers, went to Keiichirō Hirano's novel Nisshoku (1998; "Solar Eclipse"). Hirano was 23 years old and an undergraduate at Kyoto University when his work claimed the prize. He just missed being the youngest winner ever by a few months, but his work invited comparison with that of other writers who had won the Akutagawa Prize as undergraduates— Shintarō Ishihara (see Biographies), Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburō Ōe, and Ryū Murakami.
When Hirano's work was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, a controversy arose over its suitability. The story—about a seminary student who meets an old alchemist and is totally affected by him while traveling through the countryside in medieval France—had nothing to do with Japan. Recent prizewinners had all chosen subjects from contemporary Japan. Hirano himself was uncertain whether his literary offering would meet the selection criteria, but he won, almost unanimously, on the strength of his writing power. Some judges, however, complained about his use of kanji, the Chinese character-based writing system considered outmoded in contemporary Japan.
One of the most popular Japanese authors, Haruki Murakami, published a new work of fiction: Supūtoniku no koibito ("The Sputnik Sweetheart"). It appeared two years after his nonfiction Āndāguraundo ("Underground"), which told of the indiscriminate homicide by the religious group AUM Shinrikyo. The new work was a story about a young high-school teacher and his missing girlfriend, Sumire, who had got lost while visiting Greece with her employer, Mew, a middle-aged businesswoman. Although the story unfolded along the lines of Murakami's classic seek-and-find storytelling style, this time he mainly emphasized things that were not apparent or events that happened seemingly without basis. Mew's hair, for example, suddenly turns gray because of an incident 14 years earlier. Although she remembers the incident clearly, she never understands what made her hair change colour overnight. The reason for Sumire's disappearance is also left unexplained.
The best-selling fiction of the year was Toyoko Yamazaki's five-volume Shizumanu taiyō ("The Never-Setting Sun"), which chronicled the life of a struggling businessman at a national airline company and partly mirrored the facts of Japan Airlines' Boeing 747 crash in 1985. It sold two million copies. Other fictional best-sellers included Miri Yū's Gōrudo rasshu(1998; "The Gold Rush"), Ōe's Chūgaeri ("Somersault"), and Hisashi Inoue's Tōkyō sebunrōzu ("Tokyo Seven Roses"). Although few critical works appeared, Hiroki Azuma's study on Jacques Derrida, Sonzaironteki yūbinteki ("Ontological, Postal"), was highly acclaimed. The Yomiuri Prize for Literature went to Kunio Ogawa's Hasissi gang ("Hashish Gang") and Noboru Tujihara's Tobe Kirin ("Fly, Kylin"), and the Tanizaki Jun'icherō Prize was given to Nobuko Takagi's novel Tōkō no ki ("Lights Thinning Tree").
Major contemporary authors Akio Gotō, Kunio Tsuji, and Ayako Miura died during the year, and Japan's leading literary critic Jun Etoh commited suicide; his essay Tsuma to watashi ("My Wife and I") was on the best-seller list.