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The 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Japanese novelist Kenzaburō Ōe. (See NOBEL PRIZES.) The British professor Mark Morris congratulated the prize committee on "one of the bravest decisions in years," the only previous Japanese winner (in 1968) having been an easy choice, according to his view--much translated and presented as "exotic and quintessentially Japanese"--whereas there was "nothing comfortably Japanesey about Ōe's brand of grotesque realism." Ōe was a writer painfully conscious of his country's defeat and humiliation in World War II. His revulsion against nuclear weapons was first expressed in Hiroshima noto (1965; Hiroshima Notes, 1981), begun after a visit to the bombed city. The birth of a son with severe brain damage became the basis for his most famous novel, Kojinteki na taiken (1964; A Personal Matter, 1968). Ōe's more recent works had not been widely translated. Japanese critics complained that his style was too "Westernized"--too precise, perhaps--and he seemed alien to the conservative spirit in Japan, where he was regarded as a spokesman for left-wing intellectuals.
The literature of Eastern Europe seemed to have lost its attraction for the rest of the world, which was generally reckoned to be a result of the collapse of the communist regimes there. Jasper Rees, in the Daily Telegraph (London), wrote wistfully of "the golden age of Czech fiction" and that nation's "grand old men of letters," Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, and Ivan Klíma. Škvorecký, living in Canada, quoted a remark of Graham Greene--"The situation of a writer is incomparably better under communism than under capitalism"--and explained that "it's a ready-made drama if you live under the Nazis or the Stalinists." However, Škvorecký affirmed, "The real writers do not depend on that. . . . They survived the change of the regime." One such writer, Klíma, was applauded in Britain for his new novel, Cekání na tmu, cekání na svetlo (1993; Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, 1995), which dealt with a disaffected television cameraman under the communist regime. The man dreams of freedom and works on an unpublishable screen drama, but when the "velvet revolution" comes, he remains disaffected, unmoved, and unpublished.
A disagreeable feature of the literary year in Britain was the attention paid to books that denigrated members of the royal family. Extracts, serializations, and ill-tempered review articles abounded in the generally conservative press. One long review in the Daily Telegraph was devoted to five books about Charles, Prince of Wales, his wife, Diana, their supposed adulteries, and his brother's father-in-law. The reviewer, Lynn Barber, said, "The most 'important' (I flatter him) book in this galère is Andrew Morton's Diana: Her New Life," although she found it "not so jaw-droppingly sensational" as his previous book about the princess. Barber also sneered at the other bio books, which included Princess in Love, a romantic fantasy about Diana's alleged adultery written by Anna Pasternak, a kinswoman of the celebrated Soviet dissident Boris Pasternak.
A dismissive attitude toward the royal house was apparent in Andrew Roberts' admired book Eminent Churchillians--seeming to invite comparison with Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, as John Charmley pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement, and treating the political career of Winston Churchill as if it were a reign. The book comprised eight essays about some of Churchill's contemporaries. Included were essays on the royal family and their attitude toward the political policy of appeasing the Nazis and also a "wickedly funny and devastatingly cruel" essay on Lord Mountbatten, according to Charmley. He agreed with Roberts' verdict on the royal family that "they represented the most unprepossessing aspects of conventional wisdom, at precisely the time when it was proving dangerously mistaken." A milder form of iconoclasm was expressed in The Oxbridge Conspiracy by Walter Ellis, a denunciation of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the power held by the graduates in the life of the nation; the book was reviewed widely but sneeringly by those very graduates.
Surprisingly well received was Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm--surprisingly because Hobsbawm had long been a member of the Communist Party and still remained a Marxist. This was the fourth volume of his history of the modern world, the other three dealing with "the long 19th century"--from 1789 to 1914. The central argument, according to Niall Ferguson, was that the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the dictatorship of Stalin had served positively to preserve capitalism. Writing in a right-wing newspaper, Ferguson, an Oxford historian, urged his readers to ask, "Where is our Hobsbawm?" He went on: "No other living historian of whatever political affiliation has the intellectual firepower--the range and depth of knowledge, the analytical skill--to bring off a book like this."
As a relief from all the dismal commentaries on modern royal liaisons, Claire Tomalin offered Mrs. Jordan's Profession, a biography of the celebrated actress Dorothea Jordan, who had been mistress to the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV. "A biography worthy of its subject," declared John Gross, appreciating the "remarkable woman" whose life had been recorded with such "penetrating analysis and narrative verve." Equally impressive was David Gilmour's biography Curzon, the story of the Marquess George Nathaniel Curzon, the ambitious politician and viceroy of India whose achievements had been long neglected, buried under humorous anecdotes.
The most noteworthy biographies, however, seemed to be accounts of two dead novelists who were sorely missed: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. The latest biography of Waugh, by Selina Hastings, was described as "admirable and riveting" by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator. According to the reviewer, she stressed Waugh's social unease (mixing with grandees, "he realised how inelegant and unsophisticated his own family were," said Wheatcroft), and she provided "more detail than ever before about Waugh's passionate homosexual affairs at Oxford." Hastings was equally sharp about Waugh's military career, his rudeness, and the failings of his friends. Her book seemed to be admired partly because it made Waugh pitiable.
Although Waugh's failings had already been much discussed, his friend Greene had remained rather mysterious. Four biographies of him appeared in 1994, however, attempting to shed light. Norman Sherry continued his own lengthy account with The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two: 1939-1955, in a manner that was found to be "forbearing and deferential" by Karl Miller, the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement. Miller, the former editor of the London Review of Books, also reviewed the other three biographies, and he noted the "adversarial case" made by Michael Shelden in Graham Greene: The Man Within. "Shelden's book is bold and unhesitating," said Miller. "If his criticisms are sometimes overdone, they are seldom misplaced. The anti-Semitism of the early fictions . . . is firmly documented." Other reviewers were more interested in other of Shelden's denigrations. David Lister, in the Independent, for example, concentrated on Greene's habit of taking a toy bear on his travels, finding this a plausible support for Shelden's suspicion that Greene suffered from a homosexual tendency.
A third biography, Graham Greene: Three Lives by Anthony Mockler, was dismissed by Miller as "a fairly peculiar production." Mockler had displeased Greene, who then impeded the biographer's work. The fourth memoir, Leopoldo Durán's Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, was the work of the Spanish priest who had inspired Greene's novel Monsignor Quixote (1982). Durán was persuasive and compassionate about Greene's personality and his failed marriage, though he seemed to misunderstand the old dictum (said by George Orwell) that Greene was "our first Catholic fellow-traveller." He had welcomed Greene as a traveling companion and had not concerned himself with Greene's supposed sympathy for Soviet communism.
Kingsley Amis was perhaps the most successful of the established novelists publishing during 1994. His latest book, You Can't Do Both, was reckoned to be more autobiographical than the 20 other works that had preceded it--almost like a young man's "first novel." It told of a London boy's suburban adolescence in the 1930s, his oppressively supervisory father, his wartime military service, his marriage and adultery, and his job as a provincial university lecturer. Described by the publisher as "a precursor to Lucky Jim," it was found, in general, to be far less funny than that success of 40 years ago. Martyn Harris in the Sunday Telegraph (London), however, was sympathetic to the novel, "with its bashful, shamefaced tenderness," and to the hero, with his sense of "having missed something important." He found the novel "excellent" and some of the scenes "hideously funny."
An element of autobiography was also apparent in V.S. Naipaul's unusual novel A Way in the World, which seemed to be trying to bridge the conventional gap between fact and fiction. The book began with the narrator, a Trinidadian youth (like Naipaul himself), waiting to take up a scholarship at Oxford; there followed an apparently true history of Uriah ("Buzz") Butler, who led an oil workers strike in 1937 and was jailed by the British authorities. Two intellectuals, one of them British, supported Butler and, many years later, met the narrator in London; though seemingly historical, the intellectuals were fictitious. There followed brief histories of Sir Walter Raleigh's discovery of Eldorado (1595) and, over two centuries later, of Francisco de Miranda's rebellion against Spanish rule in Venezuela. The histories were presented as "unwritten stories" from the narrator's bottom drawer, and the stories melded into a work that, in Abdulrazak Gurnah's view as expressed in the Times Literary Supplement, reflects Naipaul's tendency to "privilege Europe and European ways, and portray non-Europe (especially Africa and South America) with absurd malice." Interviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Aamer Hussein, Naipaul explained his purpose in constructing "fiction" in such a manner and expressed his feeling that the "novel form has done its work."
John Bayley, the chairman of the Booker Prize jury, announced that reading the 130 novels submitted for the prize had been an "ordeal" and that the "new fiction is at best ambitious and at worst pretentious." Nevertheless, the Booker jury managed to select a shortlist of six novels that was generally respected, though without much enthusiasm.
In Reef, Romesh Gunesekera, a Sri Lankan settled in London, produced a story about a Sri Lankan boy working in the city. In Paradise, Gurnah, a university teacher of literature in England who was born in Zanzibar, told the story of an African boy's coming-of-age. Another candidate for the prize was Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh, a writer best known for her children's books. In this, her third adult novel, she had imagined a medieval island where a child, reared by wolves, is discovered in the mountains; the girl is carefully secluded, without education or instruction, as a theological experiment to see if she will discover or invent a god. Knowledge of Angels was notable for having been rejected by 14 major London publishing houses, and the author, the only woman on the shortlist, had published the work herself. A novel about a gay man was contributed by Alan Hollinghurst, author of the successful The Swimming-Pool Library; his new novel, The Folding Star, concerned an English tutor in a Belgian city (resembling Bruges) who becomes obsessed with one of his adolescent pupils.
The two other novels on the shortlist came from Scotland. George Mackay Brown, a septuagenarian from the Orkney Islands, was an unexpected entrant--"much the bravest and most intriguing selection," according to David Robson, since "the veteran Orcadian novelist writes in a bardic, over-the-top style." His novel, Beside the Ocean of Time, consisted of eight stories of life on the fictitious island of Norday over a period of 1,000 years, the narrator being a crofter's son on the eve of World War II. However, the eventual winner of the prize was a different sort of Scottish writer, James Kelman, with How Late It Was, How Late, a painful story of poverty and the loss of eyesight, narrated by a hard-drinking, hard-swearing, victim of modern life in the Glasgow underclass. The book was bitterly rebuked for its modern vernacular of foul language, but some critics noticed its literary roots in John Milton's Samson Agonistes.
Although the Booker Prize was intended for prose fiction, the jury was also asked to consider a poetry book, History: The Home Movie by Craig Raine, the most noticed new verse of the year. It had as its subject the family histories of the poet and his Russian wife--another kinswoman of Boris Pasternak. The scholarly novelist David Lodge said, "It is as absorbing, moving and amusing as a good novel, while achieving a lyric intensity that would look like straining for effect in prose fiction."
The novel Theory of War (1993) by Joan Brady, who was born in the U.S. but who had lived in England for about 30 years, won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1994. It was the first time the prize had been given to a woman.
For all of the moaning and groaning about the state of the literary arts in the United States--and from writers to editors to critics to booksellers to readers, all had done some of it--it had to be admitted that when people argued about books, and the quarrels made newspaper headlines, something valuable was taking place. In 1994 critic Harold Bloom stirred up the biggest hornet's nest in a long time by publishing The Western Canon, his book-length advertisement for the great books of the culture. Both a polemic against what he called "the recent politics of multiculturalism" and a persuasively argued answer to the question "What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read, this late in history?" Bloom's book took the high ground in the nearly decade-long debate on what books the university should teach.
Some of the country's best novelists meanwhile came out with new works, unmindful of the literary debate raging around the idea of the importance of the sociological component of their art. Jayne Anne Phillips' lyrical second novel, Shelter, was a story about innocence struggling with experience--and good wrestling with evil--against the backdrop of a summer camp for girls in the early 1960s in Appalachia. No less lyrical was Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, the second novel in his "Border Trilogy," the first of which, All the Pretty Horses, had been a best-seller the year before. Also veering toward the lyric was Peter Taylor's masterly meditative novel about the early 20th-century South called In the Tennessee Country. Taylor died soon after its publication.
With What I Lived For, Joyce Carol Oates published her best novel in years. Set in a fictional upstate New York metropolis resembling Buffalo, the book recounted one weekend--Memorial Day 1992--in the life of a 43-year-old American Everyman, Jerome ("Corky") Corcoran. He is a short fellow who demands the respect of men and the love of just about every woman he meets, and Oates brought him to life in all of his confused, bawdy reality and with a vigour and intelligence that few novelists, female or male, could muster on the subject. Another veteran novelist, Joseph Heller, brought out a new book with much less successful results. Closing Time, a supposed sequel to Heller's 1960s cult classic Catch-22, delivered none of that first book's humour and none of its narrative drive. In Mercy of a Rude Stream, octogenarian novelist Henry Roth delivered the first of a new six-novel cycle about the education of a young Jewish New Yorker in the 1920s and '30s. Although not as memorable as his classic Call It Sleep, the new novel demonstrated some of that earlier book's lyrical strength and descriptive powers in its account of city life. With The Waterworks, E.L. Doctorow added another segment to his own continuing depiction of New York City, the novel taking the reader back to the mid-19th century and focusing on the mysterious disappearance of a post-Civil War mogul and his son's quest to find him.
Among younger writers who published novel-length fiction during 1994 were Joanne Meschery, with an engaging domestic narrative called Home and Away that was set in a community in California's High Sierra; Paul Russell, whose Sea of Tranquility told the story of an American astronaut and his struggle to come to terms with his son's homosexuality; and Beverly Lowry, with The Track of Real Desires, a ferocious portrait of a middle-class dinner party in a small Mississippi town. Howard Norman's The Bird Artist was nominated for a National Book Award and appeared to be a leap forward in his own evolution as an ethnographer turned fiction writer.
There were several striking debuts in 1994, particularly Maxine Clair's Rattlebone, a portrait in stories of a black Kansas City family; Susan Power's connected stories of Sioux history and life in The Grass Dancer; and David Guterson's memorable Snow Falling on Cedars, which told of the murder trial of a Japanese-American salmon fisherman in an island community on Puget Sound. Also worth noting was the first novel Losing Absalom, in which Alexs D. Pate focused on the death of a black Philadelphia patriarch and the effect of his demise on his estranged son.
Several veteran short-story writers came out with new collections: John Updike with The Afterlife and Other Stories, T.C. Boyle with Without a Hero, and Richard Bausch with Rare & Endangered Species. Barry Lopez turned his narrative talent to stories in a new collection entitled Field Notes, and Louis Auchincloss brought out The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss. The PEN/Malamud Prize for Short Fiction went to Grace Paley for The Collected Stories.
American poets were enormously productive in 1994. The masterly Philip Levine, for example, published The Simple Truth, his 16th book, and Richard Howard's Like Most Revelations met with approving reviews. John Ashbery brought out And the Stars Were Shining, and John Wood produced a new volume entitled In Primary Light.
Several highly regarded poets offered new and selected poems, among them C.K. Williams, Kenneth Koch, Stephen Dunn, Heather McHugh, and Jack Gilbert. Carolyn Forché published her long-awaited The Angel of History and an impressively edited anthology entitled Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Rosellen Brown added to her verse saga of New Englander Cora Fry with Cora Fry's Pillow Book.
In a stunning new translation, Robert Pinsky produced a fresh and refreshingly readable English version of Dante's Inferno. Pinsky had spent years on the project, and the volume appeared with striking illustrations by Michael Mazur, a foreword by John Freccero, and notes by the poet's daughter Nicole Pinsky. In its breadth and depth of dramatic as well as linguistic insight, it would stand as a landmark work of the poet-translator's art.
A number of gifted younger poets came out with new collections, including Edward Hirsch with Earthly Measures (which had the distinct honour of being one of the few recent volumes of poetry listed by Bloom in his portrait of the modern canon), Andrew Hudgins with The Glass Hammer, and Jane Hirshfield with The October Palace. Hirshfield also published a wonderful historical anthology, Women in Praise of the Sacred. Nearly 150 African-American poets were represented in the most beautifully produced anthology of the year, E. Ethelbert Miller's In Search of Color Everywhere.
Blackfoot novelist James Welch turned to nonfiction in Killing Custer, a meditative retelling from a Native American perspective of the U.S. cavalry incursions against indigenous tribes during the takeover of the West. Mixing autobiography with social commentary, novelist John Edgar Wideman produced in Fatheralong what he dubbed "a meditation on fathers and sons, race and society." Tobias Wolff worked more in the direct vein of memoir in his chapterlike essays on his Vietnam service in In Pharaoh's Army. Another fine fiction writer, novelist Robb Forman Dew, published The Family Heart, a memoir of her family's response to the revelation of her older son's homosexuality. In the elegantly turned essays in Last Watch of the Night, Paul Monette portrayed his own illness and the life of the United States during the AIDS decades. Physician and fiction writer Abraham Verghese wrote a memorable account of his encounter with AIDS patients in small-town Tennessee in My Own Country.
Equally personal, and also with broader social resonance, was Lucy Grealy's finely composed Autobiography of a Face, the story of her childhood cancer and subsequent reconstructive surgery. In Parallel Time Brent Staples turned his journalistic style to autobiography and the pathology of racism. Novelist Reynolds Price put his storytelling gifts at the service of autobiography and an account of his difficult but rewarding battle with cancer in A Whole New Life. On the lighter side, novelist and story writer Bob Shacochis compiled a number of his magazine columns on home cooking under the title Domesticity.
Within the forms of history and biography, interesting and slightly unconventional work appeared. London's Burning by Peter Stansky and William Abraham treated the nexus of what they identified as "love, death, and art" during the period of World War II. Janet Malcolm, fresh from a libel trial in which she was exonerated of charges of character assassination made against her by the historian of psychoanalysis Jeffrey Masson, brought out a study of Sylvia Plath entitled The Silent Woman, in which the questions of the reliability of biographical sources and the biographer's own intentions come under as much scrutiny as the subject herself. John Demos focused in The Unredeemed Captive on a conventional early American captivity narrative and broadened his research to include questions of larger importance in colonial American family life.
Galileo, a biography of the great European thinker by James Reston, Jr., showed a freshness of style, if not approach. Shari Benstock's No Gifts from Chance, a biography of Edith Wharton, opened to public view previously veiled aspects of the New York novelist's private life. In the history of ideas, Page Smith's Rediscovering Christianity traced the relationship between modern democracy and the Christian ethic. David J. Garrow performed a similar labour in his massive Liberty and Sexuality. In the autobiography Naturalist, which treated both his life and the ideas in science that led him to fulfill it, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson depicted the growth of an inquiring mind and the growth of a science. Scholarship was turned into fascinating narrative in Louise Levathes' study of the Chinese royal navy in the 15th century, When China Ruled the Seas.
For all of its intensity, Bloom's The Western Canon celebrated the works it touched on as much as it investigated them. In terms of analytic depth, moral reach, and practical use for the serious reader, the best book of literary criticism in 1994 was the posthumously published A Critic's Notebook by Irving Howe (edited by his son Nicholas). A study of the various aspects of the novel, Notebook offered full-blown essays on the function of character in modern fiction and the role of history in the novel and made a running argument with the new formalists who insisted, as Howe put it, that "if you are caught discussing a fictional character in the way that you might talk about a human being, you will probably be convicted of being a 'naive reader.' " Less analytic but just as entertaining were the numerous short essays--reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, and Pound, among others--in Auchincloss' The Style's the Man.
In poetry criticism Louise Glück, in her Proofs & Theories, put forward the notion that "within the discipline of criticism, nothing is more difficult than praise" and then elegantly disputed it with her pieces on George Oppen, John Berryman, Robinson Jeffers, and Stanley Kunitz. In a more conventional but valuable study of the work of Malcolm Lowry--Forests of Symbols--scholar Patrick A. McCarthy delved deep into the work of the often overlooked mid-20th-century modernist. Prizewinning essayist Arthur Danto published Embodied Meaning: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations. Gerald Early covered issues from sports to race to literature in his collection The Culture of Bruising, and Saul Bellow collected a number of disparate essays in the sprightly volume It All Adds Up. As "cultural studies" programs advanced across the American academy, historian Daniel Boorstin came out with essays on various subjects from politics to literature under the title Cleopatra's Nose, in which he combined erudition and a rare clarity of style in order to illuminate the broader culture.
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to E. Annie Proulx (see BIOGRAPHIES) for her novel The Shipping News, and Yusef Komunyakaa won the poetry award for Neon Vernacular. In general nonfiction the winner was Washington Post reporter David Remnick for Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Edward Albee won his third Pulitzer, for the play Three Tall Women.
The Los Angeles Times prize for poetry went to Forché for The Angel of History. The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction was won by Philip Roth for his novel Operation Shylock. Ernest J. Gaines took the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction for A Lesson Before Dying. The award in poetry went to Mark Doty's My Alexandria. Genet, by Edmund White, won in the category of biography, and in general nonfiction the prize was awarded to Alan Lomax for The Land Where the Blues Began.
The winners of the National Book Award were A Frolic of His Own, by William Gaddis, for fiction; Worshipful Company of Fletchers, by James Tate, for poetry; and How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, by Sherwin B. Nuland, for nonfiction. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks received the National Book Foundation's medal for distinguished contributions to American letters.
The output of fiction and poetry in 1994 perfectly mirrored the elusive Canadian identity--a mosaic, to be sure, but composed of amoebas, refusing to cohere in any one pattern for longer than a "nanolife," or the span of a longish novel. In The Cunning Man, Robertson Davies used the exceptional diagnostic talents of a doctor as a lens through which to examine the symptoms of contemporary life. Joan Clark's Eiriksdottir: A Tale of Dreams and Luck assembled the shards of legend and archaeology into an epic of survival on the coast of prehistoric Newfoundland. Charles Foran moved every which way through time in Kitchen Music as a Canadian man and his Vietnamese wife search for their parents and the redemption of a past they never knew. Contrariwise, in Alice Boissonneau's A Sudden Brightness, set in a mental hospital in British Columbia, both patients and staff try to find a tolerable future.
Poet Mary Di Michele turned to fiction to chart the multiple dimensions of fear in Under My Skin, a psychological thriller-within-a-thriller. Detective work of a historical kind was the focus of M.G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets, based upon a diary that exposes the sins of earlier generations and confounds present ones. Among first novels were Frog Moon by Lola Lemire Tostevin, another poet venturing into prose, metaphors flashing; The Cage by Audrey Schulman, in which a small but feisty woman photographer faces down polar bears and human boars alike; and Paul William Roberts' The Palace of Fears, in which the better the good life gets, the worse the protagonist's dissatisfaction.
Alice Munro's latest collection, Open Secrets, ranged from the semicivilized hills of southern Ontario to the wilderness of Albanian mountains. In Guerrilla Beach former journalist Oakland Ross crafted stories from his years as a foreign correspondent in South America, while Hugh Hood bore witness to very strange country in Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montreal Life. Motherhood generated the action in Katherine Govier's The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery and Other Stories, while absence informed the senses in Carole Giangrande's Missing Persons and artfulness played through Sky Lee's Bellydancer: Stories. The inhabitants of Bonnie Burnard's Casino and Other Stories are faced with more choices than they can deal with, while the characters in Gayla Reid's To Be There with You find that solitude and claustrophobia are much the same.
Notable among the outpourings of poetry in 1994 were Stephen Scobie's Gospel, in which the poet took on God's voice directly; Hologram: A Book of Glosas, in which P.K. Page paid homage to poets who had influenced her; Al Purdy's homage to life at large, Naked with Summer in Your Mouth; and Linda Rogers' Hard Candy, which included "Wrinkled Coloratura," winner of the new Stephen Leacock Award. Other distinguished works included Gary Geddes' Girl by the Water, mystery refracted through myriad voices; Susan Musgrave's first new collection since 1985, Forcing the Narcissus; Francis Sparshott's satirical tour called The Hanging Gardens of Etobicoke; Cherie Geauvreau's first collection, Even the Fawn Has Wings, celebrating a logic of feeling rather than the mind; Beds and Consenting Dreamers, Joe Rosenblatt's playful revisionist parable of Marxist theory; Evelyn Lau's search for atonement through perversity in In the House of Slaves; and Ralph Gustafson's stately and startling Tracks in the Snow.
Rudy Wiebe won the 1994 Governor-General's Award for fiction for A Discovery of Strangers, a historical novel set in the Canadian north. The awards of the Canadian Authors Association went to Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride, for fiction, and to Boyce Richardson, The People of Terra Nullius: Betrayal and Rebirth in Aboriginal Canada, for nonfiction. Winner of the new Giller Prize, established to honour the late popular Canadian journalist, Doris Giller, was Vassanji for The Book of Secrets.
Authors from the rich and variegated cultures of Australasia and central and southern Africa provided some of the finest literary works written anywhere in English in 1994. From Australia, for example, Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List (originally Schindler's Ark), continued his productive career with perhaps his most complex and engaging novel to date, Jacko: The Great Intruder. Fiction writer Thea Astley brought out her 13th novel, Coda, a delightfully funny yet moving account of a woman's journey into old age. Peter Carey, winner of the 1988 Booker Prize, published The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, a picaresque, tragicomic drama in which the world was boldly reimagined. Making its debut as well was Albion's Story (published as Dark Places in Australia and the United Kingdom), Kate Grenville's compelling tale of rape and incest told from the perpetrator's point of view. In a superb tribute befitting its subject, Hazel Rowley combined rich detail and thoughtful analysis in her literary biography Christina Stead.
In poetry Les Murray's Translations from the Natural World presented puns, verbal sound effects, and syntactic ambiguities among daring and frequently beautiful metaphors to evoke nature. David Rowthbaum, following a 13-year hiatus, offered New and Selected Poems (1945-93), which included selections from his Toowoomba childhood to more recent pieces on modern life and politics.
New Zealand writers demonstrated great diversity and high quality in a number of important new titles. Deep River Talk, for example, gathered 140 poems from 10 collections by Hone Tuwhare, the most internationally known contemporary Maori poet. Novelist Alan Duff depicted the sordid, violent despair of his characters and their milieu in Once Were Warriors. Bill Manhire's vision of New Zealand life was somewhat less bleak and often humorous in his short-story collection South Pacific.
Noteworthy among the year's literary contributions from sub-Saharan Africa were Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise (Tanzania) and Steve Chimombo's Napolo and the Python (Malawi). Author Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel laureate in literature (1986), fled his homeland in November fearing that he would be arrested for criticizing Nigeria's military regime.
From South Africa came several outstanding offerings as well, including None to Accompany Me, the latest novel by the 1991 Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, which portrayed the lives of two couples--one black and the other white--during the confused and traumatic period just before the establishment of South African majority rule. Eighteenth-century South Africa was the setting of André Brink's 11th novel, On the Contrary, and veteran novelist J.M. Coetzee chose 19th-century Russia as his backdrop and Fyodor Dostoyevsky as his protagonist in The Master of Petersburg. The émigré writer Sheila Roberts examined exile and migration as recurring themes in her new collection, Coming In and Other Stories. Renowned poet Laurens van der Post unveiled his autobiographical anthology Feather Fall, a compilation of his verse from over 60 years.
In nonfiction two works of international interest appeared in 1994: Nelson Mandela Speaks, released in South Africa for the first time although previously published in the United States, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu's The Rainbow People of God: The Making of a Peaceful Revolution.
As in every year, there were a number of celebrations in 1994, including the 500th anniversary of the birth of François Rabelais and the 300th of Voltaire. There were not many major new works on Rabelais published during the year. Nevertheless, a short study by Jean-Yves Pouilloux (1993) appeared, and a number of important earlier works, including Lucien Febvre's L'Incroyance au 16e siècle, la religion de Rabelais and Rabelais (1988) by Gilles Henry, were reissued. Young writers such as François Bon, author of La Folie Rabelais (1990), reminded readers in newspaper articles of the radical originality of the work of Rabelais.
Voltaire--who wanted to be known as the "universal man" but who, with cruel irony, became the archetype of the engaged intellectual--was celebrated in 1994 as he should have been--with an avalanche of works. Noteworthy were Dictionnaire Voltaire, edited by Jacques Lemaire, Raymond Trousson, and Jeroom Vercruysse; Voltaire et l'Europe by Françoise Bléchet and Marie-Odile Germain; Le Rire de Voltaire by Pascal Debailly, Jean-Jacques Robrieux, and Jacques van den Heuvel; Voltaire, l'affaire Calas et nous by Gilbert Collard; and Voltaire, le conquérant by Pierre Lepape.
A number of works by and about Michel Foucault, who had died 10 years earlier, appeared in 1994. Dits et écrits, in four volumes, brought together various writings on philosophy. Didier Eribon, author of a biography of Foucault, published Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, which included treatment of Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Dumézil, Roland Barthes, Jürgen Habermas, and Louis Althusser. Michel Foucault, les jeux de la vérité et du pouvoir, a collection of works edited by Alain Brossat, also appeared, along with Michel Foucault, la clarté de la mort by Jeannette Colombel, a friend of Foucault and Sartre.
During the year Jacques Derrida published two essays, Politiques de l'amitié and Force de loi, different in tone but both examining the notions of politics, justice, and the state. Marie-Anne Lescourret published the biography Emmanuel Lévinas, and Michel Serres Atlas. Edgar Morin published an important autobiographical work, Mes Démons, and Claude Lévi-Strauss published an album combining photographs and text, Saudades do Brasil. Alain Robbe-Grillet came out with Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe, which concluded his three-volume autobiography. In it he recalled, sometimes with humour, such colleagues as Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, Barthes, Sartre, and his editor, Jérôme Lindon, the prestigious director of Éditions de Minuit.
The last, unfinished, autobiographical novel of Albert Camus was published in 1994, 34 years after the author's death. Although Le Premier Homme was an imperfect and incomplete work, it contained themes dear to the author of L'Étranger (Algeria, the maternal figure, injustice, absurdity, pleasure), and in it Camus revealed, for the first and only time, the inconsolable wounds of his childhood. A short work by Louis Aragon was also published posthumously; Projet d'histoire littéraire contemporaine on the one hand clarified his Dadaist period and the beginnings of Surrealism and on the other his relationship with his principal editor, Jean Paulhan. Volumes of the Oeuvres of Raymond Roussel appeared, accompanied by an essay by Annie Le Brun, "Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mots, Raymond Roussel." Finally, the newly discovered text of Jules Verne's Paris au XXe siècle was published for the first time in 1994. In this astonishing work of anticipation, the reader discovers the fervent advocate of progress making his first predictions.
Among the most notable novels of the year were Du coeur et de l'affection by Jacques Teboul, a book of reminiscences; Comme des anges by Frédéric Boyer, a lyrical portrayal of a family during the 1950s; Le Fil by Christophe Bourdin, a literary work on AIDS; Un Mal imaginaire by Maxime Montel, also with AIDS as a subject; and a humorous first novel on the world of work, Extension du domaine de la lutte by Michel Houellebecq. In poetry the collection of works by Philippe Jaccottet, Après beaucoup d'années, was notable.
Olivier Rolin received the Prix Fémina for his novel Port-Soudan, in which he succeeded in evoking a sad love story as well as the malaise of those who would have been 20 in May 1968. Didier Van Cauwelaert received the Prix Goncourt for Un Aller simple, which retraced the tragicomic voyage of a street Arab of Marseille deported by mistake to Morocco. Also recommended for the Goncourt was a novel by Paule Constant, La Fille du Gobernator, a dark and despairing book despite comical anecdotes in which the author recalled his childhood in Cayenne, French Guiana, where his father was governor of the prison. Guillaume Le Touze, a young writer of 26, received the Prix Renaudot for Comme ton père, and Yves Berger the Prix Médicis for Immobile dans le courant du fleuve.
In terms of popular appeal, the novel topped all other major literary genres in Quebec in 1994. Attention was focused mainly on Va savoir by Réjean Ducharme, an author whose aversion to the limelight was notorious but whose reclusive ways had not affected his productiveness (close to 10 novels published since 1966). Ducharme was esteemed for his creative handling of language and his poetic imagination, both of which appeared in nearly perfect balance in Va savoir. Michel Tremblay, the well-known author of Les Belles-Soeurs and of the chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal, also achieved success as a novelist in 1994. In Un Ange cornu avec des ailes de tôle, Tremblay transmuted his reminiscences into literature by exploring his youth from the standpoint of the books that had shaped it. Each of the chapters gave pride of place to a work of literature esteemed by Tremblay to have had a marked influence on his development as a writer.
Daniel Poliquin's novel, L'Écureuil noir, a tale of modern life that dexterously united elements of comedy and disillusionment, was hailed as the literary event of 1994 (of the decade by some). The seductive power of the novel was due to the simple way in which the hero, Calvin Winter, describes the events of his life. Finally, in Ostende the popular storyteller François Gravel provided a vividly written and richly textured account of the 1960s and '70s.
Poetry lovers were equally well served in 1994. Readers evinced a particular fondness for a book of poetry by Robert Mélançon called L'Avant-printemps à Montréal. One critic pointed out that the poet's special achievement was to make banal things seem luminous. Intent on precisely describing things such as the end of the day or the look of snow as it falls during the night, the poet created the kind of atmosphere wherein the reader experiences such things afresh. Another book of poetry that did well in 1994 was L'Usage du temps (1993) by Claude Beausoleil. This was poetry for readers not put off by obscurity, for Beausoleil gave them some 50 pages of quatrains unencumbered by punctuation.
The provocative question Is German literature boring? was posed in 1994 by the editor of the prestigious S. Fischer publishing house, Uwe Wittstock, who volunteered his own answer: Yes, German writers should learn to write more entertainingly and take Anglo-American authors as their model. His assessment was rejected by such highly regarded literary critics as Rolf Michaelis and Heinz Ludwig Arnold. In an effort to prove the existence of a lively and exciting contemporary German literature, Suhrkamp, the most important publisher of contemporary literature, issued the "Red Series," showcasing young writers of the past 10 years, Durs Grünbein and Ralf Rothmann, among others, being represented.
The year also saw the debut of promising new talent. One discovery was Guido Schmidt, whose magnificent story "Die Soldaten der Jungfrau" recounted the uprising of the Indians of the Chiapas region in southern Mexico at the end of the 16th century. In cool and detached prose, Schmidt depicted the merciless cruelty of the Inquisition and dissected in a sober and seemingly pitiless fashion the annihilation of the native peoples by the Spanish invaders. The German-Romanian author Herta Müller also wrote about persecution and terror in her poetic novel Herztier. Employing a prose at once forceful yet sensitive, she portrayed six German-Romanians who were destroyed by the Romanian dictatorship.
In Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg, Adolf Endler recalled life under the East German dictatorship, specifically in the bohemian quarter of East Berlin. Laconic and rife with irony, his diary-styled text related the conflicting allegiances of writers and poets who on the one hand lived as if on a government-protected reservation and on the other hand were spied on by colleagues who betrayed them. Reiner Kunze likewise turned to the past in his journal Am Sonnenhang, citing from files in which the East German secret police had recorded his private life in detail. Kunze still felt as inwardly divided as he perceived the country to be outwardly riven. Similarly skeptical was Sarah Kirsch's Das simple Leben, which gathered together prose and verse from the years 1991 to 1993. On the other hand, Christoph Hein's tales in Exekution eines Kalbes made it clear that there was no reason one should yearn for the old regime.
A more varied picture of the East German past emerged from the addresses, letters, prose texts, and journal entries that Christa Wolf published in October under the title Auf dem Weg nach Tabou. She raised a bristling defense against accusations of West German critics that she had not been critical enough of the communist regime yet admitted to errors and wrote openly of the wounds she had suffered before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite its political themes, Auf dem Weg nach Tabou remained first and foremost a work of poetry, full of strange images and a sensitive, suggestive language.
Contemporary German literature continued to reflect the differences that existed between Germans from the east and those from the west. While numerous eastern writers still struggled with the experience of life under the communist dictatorship, many young western writers were mapping new literary terrain. They were no longer beholden to the past--which for them meant the Nazi past of their forefathers--and they no longer saw themselves as writers forced to pay obeisance to their age.
Arnold Stadler traced his youth in his novel Mein Hund, meine Sau, mein Leben, and in so doing he revealed its essential loneliness. Stadler told his story oddly distanced, often even engaging in parody. In his novel Wäldernacht, Rothmann likewise had his protagonist returning to the period of his boyhood. Even more so than Stadler, Rothmann told of suffering and failure while using a pliant and realistic language. In two books the third writer of this young generation, Andreas Mand, spun tales of the "superfluous generation." The story Peng was written as the draft of a screenplay for a film that had young people failing miserably in order that they might grow closer to each other. By contrast, Mand's novel Das rote Schiff was a wonderfully light story about growing up in Germany and simultaneously a swan song to the culture of the 1970s and '80s. A member of an older generation, Reinhard Lettau, who for many years had taught in the United States, wrote one of the shortest (93 pages) and sharpest novels around, entitled Flucht vor Gästen. Hard-hitting, comic, and clever, this book about Lettau's homecoming was written in a prose style that read like poetry.
German lyric poetry continued to excite relatively little interest even among cognoscenti. A significant exception was the work of Grünbein, who responded to the situation in Germany after 1990 in Falten und Fallen, combining the words of an East German with the irony of his West German counterpart. Other important volumes of poetry were published by Jürgen Kolbe and Robert Gernhardt. An impressive biographical sketch of the late poet Ludwig Greve also appeared.
Several major diaries were published in 1994. Ninety-six years after the death of Theodor Fontane, his Tagebücher--1852, 1855-1858, 1866-1882, 1884-1898 appeared, giving insight into the cultural life of Berlin in the second half of the 19th century. At the same time, the complete four-volume historical-critical edition of Franz Kafka's diaries (1909-23) was published. They included passages originally excised by Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, especially Kafka's uninhibited observations on sexuality. Also of historical import were the Tagebücher, 1913-1917 of Gershom Scholem, relating his odyssey from Berlin to Palestine, and the Tagebücher, 1910-1924 of the poet and revolutionary Erich Mühsam, who in 1934 was murdered by the Nazis.
Several established authors ventured outside their usual fields of expertise in 1994. A prominent existentialist writer of mostly World War II novels, W.F. Hermans published a book on photography, Een foto uit eigen doos, a valuable collectors' piece. Martin Hart received a literary prize for the most suspenseful novel of the year, Het woeden der gehele wereld, but he also wrote Du holde kunst, a series of essays on his favourite composers from Bach to the present day. Leo Vroman, the well-known poet, wrote Warm, rood, nat en lief, relating the impact on his poetry of his involvement in scientific research. J. Bernlef, a leading author since the 1950s and, like Hart, an amateur musician, published a collection of essays on music entitled Schiet niet op de pianist.
The established novelist Theun de Vries published Terug uit Irkoetsk, a historical work set in Russia. The promising young novelist Thomas Rosenboom published Gewassen vlees, about life in 18th-century Holland. Nelleke Noordervliet wrote the sociopsychological novel De naam van de vader and Hermine de Graaf the feminist novel Vijf broden en drie vissen. Important works came from the Flemish poet Hugo Claus, who issued Gedichten 1948-1993; Bernlef, Vreemde wil; Toon Tellegen, Tijger onder de slakken; and Leonard Nolens, Honing en As.
The veteran writer Martha Christensen's Her i nærheden consisted of three novellas, the main one portraying a mother whose possessive love finally drives her son to murder. Gentler was Sten Kaalø's Pilgrim i Paz, about a midlife crisis in the chaos of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe figured too in Janina Katz's Heltens tykke kone, both humorous and sad portrayals of exiled Jews after World War II. Peter Høeg produced De måske egnede (1993; Borderliners, 1994), about private schooling in Denmark and its traumatic effects on the pupils. He was chosen author of the year by Time and received the Danish Critics' Prize and the Golden Laurels of the Danish Booksellers' Association.
Already established as a young poet of character, Naja Marie Aidt published several idiosyncratic short stories, Vandmærket, on the surface banal, but in fact sophisticated, portraits of those on the edge of society. Also on the edge was one of the two main characters in Kirsten Thorup's 615-page Elskede ukendte, showing the meeting between a 22-year-old dropout and a religious fanatic. Even more depressing was Vagn Lundbye's Udflugt med Billie, about a half-Lapp Oslo girl who is left to fend for herself and who becomes alienated in the process. Lighter, but not without a serious perspective, was Svend Åge Madsen's Edens gave, centred on a discovery that allows unlimited enjoyment of food without weight gain and leads among other things to famine because of overconsumption by the rich.
Solvej Balle was a young writer making a name for herself. Her Ifølge loven was an experimental novel in the form of four interlinked short stories. Klaus Rifbjerg's Vi blir jo ældre was a volume of 18 short stories ranging from the playful to the profoundly moving but all reflecting the fact that Rifbjerg was aging. His Synderegistret was a series of reflections on the present day, overshadowed throughout by the spectre of Bosnia.
Ole Wivel published a new collection of poems, Iris, a mixture of erudition and tenderness showing his skill to be undiminished. With Denne kommen og gåen, Benny Andersen confirmed himself as a supreme master of play on language in poems that were both humorous and serious. Also linguistically brilliant were Lundbye's highly acclaimed poetical animal sketches, Lundbyes dyrefabler. Pia Tafdrup's intense Territorialsang centred on Jerusalem, reflecting both the city and the poet's search for community with it.
A collection of 25 short stories by as many contemporary writers, De beste norske novellene, selected by Terje Holtet Larsen, underlined the strength of this genre in 1994. Among several new collections, pride of place went to Tor Ulven's Vente og ikke se for its original use of language and minimalistic brilliance. Øystein Lønn won the Norwegian Critics' Prize for his collection Thranes metode. In the novel, psychological complexities were unraveled with dramatic intensity in Ketil Bjørnstad's Barnevakt. In Finn Carling's Gjenskinn a man receives a book as a gift, which awakens in him painful memories of traumatic happenings in his own life. The cruel, sadistic world of a small group of 12-year-old boys was portrayed with humour, psychological insight, and linguistic mastery in Rolf Enger's Solformøkelsen. The atmosphere of Oslo in the 1950s was magnificently caught in Bjørg Vik's Elsi Lund, with painful sexual awakening in teenage girls as one of its central themes. Johannes Heggland displayed his usual mastery as a narrator in the historical novel Jordparadiset. Kunnskapstreet, with action laid in the 18th century.
In Espen Haavardsholm's documentary novel Ikke søkt av sol, a portrayal of Norwegian intelligence during and after the German occupation was interwoven with an account of a retired agent's attempts to uncover the facts behind his cousin's mysterious death in Stockholm in 1945. The dramatic life of the Jewish-Russian psychiatrist Sabina Spielrein was re-created with great sensitivity in Karsten Alnæs's Sabina, from her sexual awakening as Carl Jung's young mistress to her tragic death during the German invasion of Russia in 1941.
Agnar Mykle died during the year, and in his highly personal biography, Agnar Mykle--en dikterskjebne, his son-in-law, Eystein Eggen, traced the tragic life of one of the most controversial figures in postwar Norwegian literature. Mykle's complete works were also published in seven volumes. As well as being a biographical reevaluation, Yngvar Ustvedt's monumental Henrik Wergeland. En biografi provided fascinating insights into the cultural history of Norway in the first half of the 19th century. The profound influence exerted by Henrik Ibsen's dramas on Edvard Munch's art was thoroughly analyzed in Lars Roar Langslet's copiously illustrated Henrik Ibsen--Edvard Munch, with the text in English and Norwegian. The first of six planned volumes of Knut Hamsun letters, Knut Hamsuns brev, edited by Harald S. Næss, documented the trials and tribulations of Hamsun's life prior to his literary debut in 1890 marked by Sult (Hunger, 1899).
The Brague Prize went to Sigmund Mjelve for his poetry collection Omrade aldri fastlagt and an honorary Brague award to Halldis Moren Vesaas for her contributions to Danish literature. Deaths during the year included Rolf Jacobsen, a leading modernist poet.
Kerstin Ekman received the Nordic Council's literary prize in 1994 for her novel Hemligheter kring vatten. In Klas Östergren's novel Under i september, extramarital love is unexpectedly sidelined by the imperative to help illegal immigrants. Björn Ranelid's sprawling, chaotic Synden featured the struggle for love and survival of two young victims of adult moral turpitude. In the short story collection Oskuld, Robert Kangas presented a chilling world in which his protagonists shows no moral sensibilities or pity. Johan Lagerman's first novel, Slumpen Lydia, good-naturedly presented unglamorous, middle-aged friendship and incipient love between a prostitute and client. Helena Helsing's Omständigheter was a humorous first-person account of the traumas of pregnancy, while Mare Kandre's Quinnan och Dr Dreuf was a sparkling satire on Freud's view of women patients. In Anna, Hanna och Johanna, Marianne Fredriksson traced the lives of three women--grandmother, mother, and daughter--against the background of a century of social change, while Gerda Antti's Bara lite roligt . . . conveyed, through a female narrator, the aspirations and discontents of a group of country folk. Margareta Ekström wrote elegantly about the relationship between a cat and her female owner in Olga om Olga. Thus, the sociopolitical severity of the Vietnam years and their aftermath in Sweden had demonstrably been replaced by literature dealing with personal relationships.
Katarina Frostenson's Tankarna, Ann Jäderlund's Mörker mörka mörkt kristaller, and Arne Johnsson's Faglarnas eldhuvuden were notable poetry collections. Per Olov Enquist published three plays in Tre pjäser, and astronomer Peter Nilson turned from the cosmos to describing humankind's home on Earth in Hem till jorden. Poet and scholar Lars Huldén published a monograph, Carl Michael Bellman, on the 18th-century poet. In Jag bor i en annan värld men du bor ju i samma, octogenarian Olof Lagercrantz recalled his friendship with the poet Gunnar Ekelöf.
Novelist Ulla Isaksson wrote a passionate account, much debated by readers, of how her aging husband, the distinguished literary scholar E.Hj. Linder, had "abandoned" her because of Alzheimer's disease. Poet and novelist Lars Gustafsson wrote informal memoirs in Ett minnespalats. Vertikala memoarer. Poet Ylva Eggehorn gave a suggestive account of her 1950s childhood in Kvarteret Radiomottagaren, while in Svartenbrandt Sweden's most notorious jailbreaker, Lars Ferm, described his violent criminal career and the peace he finally attained as a believer.
Audiences of all ages were captivated in 1994 by the weekly reading on television of Dante's Inferno. The cantos detailing punishments inflicted upon grafters, hypocrites, thieves, and fraudulent politicians proved to be especially popular. But, for once, television could not be blamed, either by publishers or by critics, for the fall in book sales--1994 being a World Cup year in which the president of the Milan association football (soccer) club, and owner of major national television channels, became prime minister. On the other hand, so many books were published and so many literary prizes were awarded that ordinary readers were right to feel totally overwhelmed by sheer quantity. Quality, however, was far from missing.
In the field of narrative the general trend was back toward formally traditional novels with a social and political conscience. An excellent example of the genre was the remarkable Sostiene Pereira by Antonio Tabucchi. Told in the slightly impersonal, but faintly unsettling, style of a witness's deposition and set in 1938 Lisbon with the Spanish Civil War, Italian Fascism, and German Nazism lurking in the background, it was the masterly psychological portrait of a journalist--a mature man, unhealthily fat, lonely, initially quite apolitical, but obsessed by the memory of his dead wife and by the thought of his own death--who is gradually forced by circumstances to take the path of decency and honour and to commit himself, weaknesses and all, to the cause of reason and humanity. A war was also the focus in Attesa sul mare by Francesco Biamonti, in which a sea captain is hired to take a shipload of arms to Bosnian partisans in former Yugoslavia and thus comes into contact with the cruelty of armed conflict and the sufferings of a disputed land, an experience that pushes him back to sea, searching for an all-too-elusive goodness.
A more direct concern for the country's moral and political crisis surfaced in such disparate novels as Andrea De Carlo's Arcodamore and Francesca Duranti's Progetto Burlamacchi. The former centred on a morbid and doomed love story that could be read as an allegory of contemporary Italy were it not for the fact that the country's predicament was itself raised in the book by the narrator's indignant voice. Duranti's novel was more ambitious in conception and execution, attempting to graft onto the present two historical examples of failed religious and moral reformation. Sebastiano Vassalli, the successful northern writer, caused a stir by attempting to complete his trilogy on the Italian character with a story about the Sicilian Mafia. His novel Il Cigno, set emblematically in 1893 Sicily, was highly praised for its structural qualities but ran into criticism for failing to understand and convincingly depict its Sicilian context.
A number of new young writers proved that the novel was alive and well. The most successful commercially was Susanna Tamaro's Va' dove ti porta il cuore, a diary in which an 80-year-old woman recounts to her granddaughter the story, largely painful, of three generations of Italian women. By coincidence, the compelling portrait of a grandmother was also the subject of Margaret Mazzantini's Il catino di zinco, which unconventionally and unsentimentally aimed to recover traditional female values that modern feminist thinking fought to discredit; the portrait was especially effective thanks to a firm and confident style that skillfully combined an almost precious linguistic sophistication with flashes of vernacular crudeness. Even more remarkable in stylistic range and structural conception was Alessandro Baricco's enigmatic Oceano mare, a series of disturbing encounters with a limitless sea that could be read, among other things, as historical thriller, prose poem, dramatic dialogue, "conte philosophique," and picaresque tale.
At the opposite end of the spectrum was Giuseppe Culicchia's minimalist Tutti giú per terra, a painfully realistic portrait of a contemporary antihero that rightly claimed to be a generational autobiography, with a young man who fails to live up to any of the television-induced expectations and myths of his family and social milieu as both narrator and protagonist.
Giuseppe Pontiggia published Vite di uomini non illustri, 18 fictional biographies of as many ordinary men and women of the 20th century. The secret of Pontiggia's writing was in his skillful application of the classical Plutarch-like biographical patterning of the lives of insignificant characters, a device that not only achieved ironic effects but also served to reveal how truly extraordinary every ordinary life was. In a category of its own was Il dispatrio, a kind of diary and essay in which, after several books devoted to his Italian upbringing, Luigi Meneghello attempted to recapture in characteristic plurilingual style what it was like for a young Italian intellectual--a recent graduate from both a civil war and a faculty of philosophy--to be living and working in an English academic environment from the late 1940s onward.
Among various literary polemics, there was much debate over Notizie dalla crisi, a collection of theoretical and applied literary essays in which Cesare Segre showed how effective a semiotic-philological approach to literary texts could continue to be after deconstruction and neohermeneutics had outlived their usefulness.
In El hermano pequeño, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán gave Pepe Carvalho, the most famous detective in contemporary Spanish fiction, some easy warm-up assignments and then put him to the ultimate test in Roldán, ni vivo ni muerto: to step into reality and find Luis Roldán--who had riveted public attention, and deeply embarrassed the government, when he fled the country in April 1994 just before his impending arrest on charges of having embezzled a sizable fortune during his tenure (1986-93) as chief of the national Guardia Civil. At year's end the whereabouts of Spain's most infamous fugitive remained known only to Carvalho.
Life's peculiar symbiosis with literature also attracted two senior novelists. In Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's La novela de Pepe Ansúrez, a pathetic bank clerk attempts to write a roman à clef and gets a helping--or hindering--hand from everyone at work, and Camilo José Cela, silent since receiving the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, derived El asesinato del perdedor from the true story of a young man recently driven to suicide by a grotesque legal injustice. At a different, more hazardous intersection of fiction and reality, Cela himself got blindsided when his second novel of the year, La cruz de San Andrés, received the lucrative Planeta Prize, an award originally established to encourage young writers; prominent observers openly denounced the decision as a venal negotiation between the sponsoring publisher and the "prearranged" winner of the putatively blind annual competition.
In a year dominated by important new fiction, Carmen Martín Gaite--winner of the National Letters Prize--offered La Reina de las Nieves, full of literary cross-references and competing narrators; and Julio Llamazares published Escenas de cine mudo, an evocative reconstruction, from old photos, of childhood impressions and experiences in rural León. Strongly autobiographical elements also coloured Malena es un nombre de tango, Almudena Grandes' third novel; and the treacherous political climate of the final years of the Franco regime shaped El dueño del secreto by Antonio Muñoz Molina. Bernardo Atxaga won the Critic's Prize for his thriller El hombre solo, translated by the author from the Basque original. Widely praised were best-sellers by three exceptionally gifted writers: Luis Landero (Caballeros de fortuna), Rosa Regás (Azul, the Nadal Prize winner), and Javier Marías (Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí). The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who became a citizen of Spain in 1993, won the highest award in Hispanic letters, the Cervantes Prize.
The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes was the most prominent novelist of Latin America to publish a book in 1994. It was a year of particular significance for Latin-American writers of Fuentes' generation as well as for earlier writers. Fuentes published the novel Diana, o la cazadora solitaria, part of his lifelong project "The Era of Time." The novel, set in the world of Mexican intellectuals during the 1960s, was a fictional account of Fuentes' experiences and dealt with an American actress who has an affair with a Mexican writer. In the work Fuentes asked the question What passions or ideals make human beings act in ways that carry them to their death?
Two writers belonging to the generation before Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Juan Carlos Onetti, had works published posthumously in 1994. The Cuentos completos of Cortázar appeared in print 10 years after his death. In Mexico the University of Guadalajara established a permanent Julio Cortázar chair in October in honour of the Argentine writer. The chair was endowed by Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez. The Cuentos completos of Onetti were also published during the year.
The Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro received the Juan Rulfo Literary Prize, worth $100,000 and the major literary award in Latin America. Author of three novels, several volumes of short stories, and other assorted writings, Ribeyro had become one of the most respected of Latin-American writers and intellectuals, even though he was relatively unknown in the Anglo-American literary world. Ribeyro was a particularly accomplished craftsman of short fiction.
Major works of literature in Mexico were published by the novelists Carmen Boullosa, Homero Aridjis, Juan García Ponce, Francisco Rebolledo, and Federico Patán, as well as by the poets José Emilio Pacheco, Francisco Hernández, and Octavio Paz. Boullosa, who had become one of Mexico's leading female writers, considered gender issues in the colonial Hispanic world in her latest novel, Duerme. Aridjis published a historical novel set in the millennium, El señor de los mil días. García Ponce, who belonged to the generation of Fuentes, published a roman à clef about intellectuals in Mexico, Pasado presente. Rebolledo published an excellent first novel, Rasero, and Patán issued another fine anthology of short fiction, El paseo. Pacheco, who had become Mexico's major poet of the generation after Nobel laureate Paz, published the collection El silencio de la luna. Hernández also published a notable book of poems, El infierno es un decir. The first volumes of Paz's complete works, entitled Obras completas, also began to appear in print. Poet Vicente Quirarte published an excellent literary essay, Peces del aire altísimo, which was awarded the essay prize at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
In South America some of the most notable new fiction among young writers appeared in Colombia and Uruguay. The Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince's first novel, Asuntos de un hidalgo disoluto, was a postmodern and digressive account of the narrator-protagonist, an elderly Colombian in Italy. The playful and irreverent work marked a new direction for Colombian fiction. Colombian Andrés Hoyos, author of two novels, published Los viudos, a volume of outstanding short fiction thematically similar to his previous nostalgic fiction. One of Uruguay's most innovative female writers, Teresa Porzecanski, published Perfumes de Cartago; she employed descriptions of perfume and other sensory stimuli to transport the reader to the Montevideo of the 1930s but also evoked the Orient. The Uruguayan Guillermo Degiovangelo, who had already written short fiction, published a well-received novel with a symphonic structure, Descubrimiento de la melancolía.
The winner of the Great Prize for Fiction in 1994 was Vergílio Ferreira for his novel Na tua face (1993). It was the second time he had been awarded the distinction in his long career as a novelist and an author of nonfiction. Deeply concerned with the ravages of physical decay and the anguish of death, Ferreira told a moving story in a confessional tone that had the dreamlike qualities of stream of consciousness, with flashes of a surrealistic imagination. Divided between the woman he married and the elusive figure of the woman that he loved, the narrator is trapped in an existential predicament seen in the light of a dialogue with the tenets of the philosophical traditions of Western culture. In a subtle way the author reveals the futility of consolation and the fallacies of domesticity, to discover a redemption in beauty and in the memory of the dead that transcends the deceits of human existence.
The young people from the former Portuguese colonies in Africa and India who went to Lisbon after World War II for university studies were the subject of Os netos de Norton, an engaging and subtle novel by Orlando da Costa. Born and bred in the liberal and republican atmosphere, these young people were committed to a change of the regime and to the liberation of the colonies. Norton de Matos served as both a symbol for them and a presidential candidate to stand up to the dictatorship. Political vicissitudes, however, were only the framework for the beautifully written novel, in which a web of human relationships is tied up with self-discovery and the ills of a generation that seeks its emancipation through the labyrinths of eroticism, love, and art. The problem of art and the intensity of its expression occupies a large part of the novel, showing the changing values of a composition that gains its maturity in the warmth of human feeling and in the melancholy that taints the hopes and fears of a fulfilled present.
A time of devastation and moral emptiness was how the distinguished poet Joaquim Manuel Magalhães saw the years preceding the end of the 20th century in his collection A poeira levada pelo vento (1993). His poems were admirable for their ideas, the pithiness of his metaphors, and the haunting desolation of the cities he described.
Perhaps owing to increasing national despondency over the political and economic future, Brazilian literature withdrew from its preoccupation with such matters in 1994. Notable works of fiction included Rubem Fonseca's O selvagem da ópera, about the life of the Brazilian opera composer Carlos Gomes, and Jorge Amado's A descoberta da América pelos turcos, which highlighted the Arab contribution to Brazilian civilization. There were other new works of fiction by Rachel de Queiroz and Luiz Antônio de Assis Brasil. In Ah, é? Dalton Trevisan wrote stories about the sexual preoccupations of banal people living in Curitiba, while Deonísio da Silva's O assassinato do presidente presented short tales of urban life.
The collected works of poets Murilo Mendes and Hélio Pellegrino were published posthumously. The essayist and short-fiction writer Marina Colasanti turned to poetry with Rota da colisão (1993), a collection of feminist views of womanhood in a macho Brazilian society. Several young poets, including Cláudia Roquette-Pinto, Alexei Bueno, and Rosane Serro, published new collections. João Cabral de Melo Neto, Brazil's preeminent poet, was awarded the Ibero-American Prize for Poetry by Queen Sophia of Spain.
It was a year for revivals in the theatre. Three of Nélson Rodrigues' most lauded works--A falecida, Vestido de noiva, and Anjo negro--were restaged. Works by Oduvaldo Viana Filho (Vianinha) and Plínio Marcos--major social dramatists of the 1960s and '70s--were also revived, as was Adélia Pradoˋs Dona Doida. Among new theatrical productions were Geraldo Carneiro's O eleito, a parody on Brazilian politicians' cynicism, and Denise Stoklos' Amanhã será tarde . . . , about women and love. Miguel Fallabela, Maria Adelaide Santos de Amaral, and Beth Thomas also had new plays produced.
The tropicalista Paulo Coelho published yet another volume in his worldwide best-seller collection of pseudomystical self-help fiction, Na margem do Rio Piedra eu sentei e chorei. A study of the songs of Caetano Veloso, one of tropicália's leading musical figures, was published in 1993 by Ivo Lucchesi and Gilda Korff Dieguez. Biographies of the Brazilian cultural entrepreneur Assis Chateaubriand and the poet Vinícius de Moraes appeared during the year. The illustrious novelists Antônio Callado and João Ubaldo Ribeiro were inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The distinguished American Brazilianist Raymond S. Sayers died in September.
Throughout the year Russian literature continued in a period of transition, in which many saw the myth of the Great Russian Writer slowly moving toward extinction. Even the return of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to his homeland on May 27 did not revive the truly Russian institution of the writer as moral authority. Symbolically entering Russia from the east, Solzhenitsyn seemed like a prophet of the old times to some and an anachronism to others.
Most of the intellectuals who had played a part in the final years of the communist period stepped back from public view. The writers who had once occupied seats in the Soviet parliament and taken a lead in the press no longer dominated. "I think we are expecting too much from politics and politicians," commented Fazil Iskander, adding, "The spiritual life of a nation should be led by philosophers and poets." Other writers, such as Vasily Aksyonov, were openly worried about the place of the writer in the new Russia, especially at a time when publishers were intent on producing "commercial pulp from the West."
While there was no shortage of predictions that literature was dying and would soon expire in the flood of low-grade Western culture, there was a sense of exhilaration and power among the young. Self-proclaimed modernists and avant-gardists began to dominate the literary magazines and fill the vacuum created by the sense of stagnation in traditional literature. Dmitry Prigov remained the star of the avant-garde and the mentor to scores of younger writers. A recipient of literary awards and proclaimed a "living classic" by Nezavisimaya gazeta, Prigov combined words and performance, abolished the borders between genres, and cultivated the art of the happening. He claimed that a writer today had to be an actor as well as an artist and emphasized context over content, along with gesture and action. The works of the post-modernists--for example, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn and Vladimir Sorokin--were beginning to introduce questions of discourse and textual criticism that had not been fully explored in Russian literature before. A gay culture was also gaining in strength and found a classic in Yevgeny Kharitonov's Pod domashnim arestom ("Under House Arrest"). The fame of Kharitonov, who died in 1981, was only now beginning to peak.
The literary scene was dominated by discussions and controversy centring on the Russian Booker Prize. The 1994 award, valued at $15,000, was awarded in December to Bulat Okudzhava for his autobiographical novel Uprazdnenny teatr ("The Closed-Down Theatre"). Okudzhava, a poet and balladeer in addition to a prose writer, was reportedly ill and unable to attend the awards ceremony. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize were Pyotr Aleshkovsky's Zhizneopisanie Khorka ("Polecat's Biography"), Yury Buida's Don domino ("The Domino-Player"), Igor Dolinyak's Mir trety ("Another World"), Mikhail Levitin's Sploshnoye neprilichiye ("Total Indecency"), and Aleksey Slapovsky's Pervoye i vtoroye prishestviye ("The First and Second Coming"). Scholar Marina Ledkovsky, a member of the Booker jury, noted that the works submitted to the committee reflected the tendency of Russian literature to turn to the past. In addition, Slapovsky's novel marked the revival of a popularized religion that was at times vulgarized. Many of the works on the shortlist were united by the theme of childhood reminiscences. With the exception of Okudzhava's work, they depicted the darker side of life, focusing on the underground, criminal world. Many of them conveyed this world in coarse language, which some critics defined as a new aesthetics and others condemned as a sign of literary decline.
Other noteworthy works of fiction in 1994 included Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's cycle of fairy tales Nu, mama nu ("Tell Me, Mom"); Dina Rubina's short story "V vorotakh tvoikh" ("In Thy Gates"), a humourous story of an émigré in Jerusalem; and Irina Muraveva's Kudryavy leytenant ("The Curly-Haired Lieutenant"), a collection of short stories set in a modern-day Russia bewildered by changes and searching for a new path. Vladimir Sorokin's Norma ("A Norm") and Valeriya Narbikova's Shopot shuma ("The Whispers of Noise") received favourable reviews from several critics. Fridrikh Gorenshteyn published a novel entitled Drezdenskiye strasti ("Dresden's Passions"), and Anatoly Rybakov completed Prakh i pepel ("The Dust and Ashes"), the final part of his trilogy that began with Deti Arbata (1987; Children of the Arbat, 1988).
Joseph Brodsky published a cycle of poems entitled "Vozdukh s morya" ("Air from the Sea") and an essay on poetry in his introduction to Yevgeny Reyn's Bella Akhmadulina. Other noteworthy works in 1994 included a book of essays by artist Sergey Gollerbakh, Moy dom ("My Home"), and Dmitry Volkogonov's Lenin, a new biography that included documents previously unknown in Russia but partly published abroad--for example, in the émigré journal Novy zhurnal.
The older generation of writers continued to dominate the literary scene in Poland in 1994. Tadeusz Różewicz's latest collection of poems, Słowo po słowie ("Word After Word"), contained newly published and revised poems and was, in many ways, a summing up for Poland's foremost poet. The same could be said for Urszula Koziół's latest volume of poetry, Postoje słowa ("Stages of the Word"). Former exiles also returned to Poland. Edward Redliński's two novelettes, written during his stay in the United States, presented a more urbane aspect of the writer. Dolorado included both the novelette of the same name, published in 1984, and Tancowały dwa Michały ("Two Michaels Were Dancing," 1985). Folk humour, always a part of Redliński's works, was replaced by a worldly cynicism. Dictionary of Polish Literature, the first of its kind in English, edited by E.J. Czerwinski, was published in October.
In the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, both established and newly published writers dominated the literary market. Václav Havel was awarded the 1994 Philadelphia Liberty Medal for his writings about freedom and the individual. Martin M. Šimečka won the 1993 Pegasus Prize for Literature for his novel Žabí rok (1985; The Year of the Frog, 1993). According to Havel, who wrote the foreword to the novel, Šimečka had not distanced himself from his Czech roots, even though he had made "a conscious decision to become a Slovak writer." In Lubomír Martínek's Mys dobré beznadeje ("Cape of Good Hopelessness"), the hero embarked on a search for self-identity and the meaning of life. His travels took him to England and the Far East. The novel, however, was not simply a travelogue but also an exploration of the conscience of his generation. Martínek also published a collection of 20 essays, Nomad's Land (original title in English).
Alexandr v tramvaji ("Alexander in the Streetcar") was a collection of surrealistic and grotesque short stories by Pavel Řezníček, an original writer heretofore known for his poetry and translations. Ivan Diviš' Jedná lod'--Laura Blair ("One Ship--Laura Blair") was a poetic parable of a ship's captain recollecting a tragic story; composed of 2,000 verses, the work was a meditation on the human desire for knowledge. Diviš' diary, Teorie spolehlivosti (1972; "Theory of Reliability"), covered 30 years of the writer's life and was considered one of the most remarkable texts in modern Czech literature. Karel Šiktanc's Srdce sveho nejez ("Don't Eat Your Heart Out") was a provocative collection of poetry that evoked the search for the secrets of human existence. Eda Kriseová's Klíční kůstka netopýra ("The Bat's Collarbone") consisted of three novellas, original tales filled with strong emotions and an intellectual approach to solving the country's moral problems. The Czech prime minister, Václav Klaus, also made a contribution to literature; his Česká cesta ("The Czech Road") was a compilation of speeches and articles that dissected his country's problems and value system.
In Romania Sorin Pârvu's The Romanian Novel was a notable critical attempt to introduce such novelists as Liviu Rebreanu, Cezar Petrescu, Mihail Sadoveanu, and Anton Holban to the English-speaking audience.
Since the death of Bulgaria's most important 20th-century poet, Elisaveta Bagryana, in 1991, her heir Blaga Dimitrova had gained a solid niche within the pantheon of Slavic poets. As a tribute to her mentor, Dimitrova (together with Iordan Vasilev) edited a collection of Bagryana's poetry, Zhivota, koito iskakh da bude poema: izbrana poeziya (1993; "Life, That Strives to Be a Poem: Selected Poems").
One of the most prolific and successful Serbian writers, Slobodan Selenić, had another best-seller with Ubistvo s predumišljajem (1993; "A Premeditated Murder"). The novel compared the present situation in Serbia with that of a half century ago in Yugoslavia. Two important Serbian poets in the diaspora published significant works in 1994: Sava Janković, Putevima i prostorima ("On Roads and Through Space"), his second collection of poetry; and Vasa Mihailović, Na brisanom prostoru ("In the Line of Fire"), his fifth volume of poetry. In both there was an unabashed lyricism and a love of homeland that permeated the poetry and underscored the ongoing tragic events. Written in the Bosnia and Herzegovinian capital but first published in its entirety in France, Zlata Filipović's Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo reminded the world that the conflict continued unabated in former Yugoslavia.
In Hungary, Géza Ottlik's Buda (1993) (the old section of Budapest on the right bank of the Danube) was published posthumously, under the guidance of the novelist's friend Péter Lengyel. A continuation of Ottlik's first novel, Iskola a határon (1959; "School at the Frontier"), the book was a nostalgic retrospective of a time when loved ones were more important than material advantages. A conference dedicated to the life and works of Miklós Radnóti was organized by George Gömöri at the University of Cambridge. Literary life awakened in Hungary with recent works by highly regarded writers such as György Kardos G. (Jutalomjáték; "Benefit Performance"), György Spiró, Ákos Kertész, Zsuzsa Kapecz, and Judit Fenákel. The popular writer Péter Esterházy also had a new collection of political-literary essays, Egy kékharisnya feljegyzesey ("Notes from an Intelligent Whore").
Some of Israel's most prominent writers published new novels in 1994. Among them were A.B. Yehoshua's Hashiva Mehodu ("Return from India"), Amos Oz's Al Tagidi Laila ("Don't Pronounce It Night"), Aharon Appelfeld's Laish, and Meir Shalev's Keyamim Aa'hadim ("As a Few Days"). The novels created a vehement dispute among critics, some of them arguing that the creativity and originality of the New Wave writers (notably Yehoshua and Oz) had dwindled severely. Indeed, the most powerful and intriguing novel of the year, Am, Ma'akhal Melakhim ("The People, Food Fit for a King"), by Yitzhak Laor, mocked the style and worldview of Oz and Yehoshua. Adopting postmodernist techniques and following Jacques Lacan's theories, Laor had become one of the main representatives of the younger Israeli generation.
Other noteworthy books in 1994 were David Grossman's Yesh Yeladim Zigzag ("The Zigzag Child"), Dan Tsalka's Ananim ("Clouds"), and Avraham Heffner's Alelim ("Alleles"). Among the most popular collections of short stories were the postmodern works of Etgar Errett (Ga'agu'ai leKissinger; "Missing Kissinger") and Orly Castel-Blum (Sipurim Lo Retsoniim; "Unvoluntary Stories"). First collections of short stories were published by the poet Shin Shifra (Rehov haHol; "The Sand Street"), Avner Shats (Ma'agalim Mudpasim; "Printed Circuits"), and Eyal Adar (Hiyukho shel Na'ar haMa'alit; "The Smile of the Bellboy").
Notable books by veteran poets included Aryeh Sivan's Gevulot haHol ("Borders of Sand"), Anadad Eldan's Loheshet Hulshatah ("Whispering Her Weakness"), Haim Gouri's Haba Aa'harai ("The One Who Comes After Me"), Maxim Ghilan's Mipui ("Mapping"), Roni Somek's Bloody Mary, Amir Or's Pidyon haMet ("Ransoming the Dead"), and the late Hezy Leskly's Sotim Yekarim ("Dear Perverts"). Efrat Mishori collected her poems in Shirim, 1990-1994 ("Poems, 1990-1994").
Among the works of literary scholarship and criticism published during the year were Dan Miron's essays on modern Hebrew poetry (Hadashot Me'ezor haKotev; "News from the Polar Zone"), Hannan Hever's study of the rise of political Hebrew poetry (Paitanim uViryonim; "Poets and Zealots"), and Ruth Karton-Blum's discussion of Natan Alterman's Hagigat Ka'yitz (Haletz vehaTzel; "The Darkling Jester"). The novelist and poet Pinchas Sadeh died in 1994.
Aleksander Beyderman published the small Kaboles-Ponim ("Welcoming Reception") in 1994. Rukhl Fishman's sophisticated and sensitive Azoy vil ikh faln (I Want to Fall Like This, 1994) celebrated nature with fresh images. A retrospective collection of modernist verse issued from the pen of H. Binyumin (pseudonym of Yale professor Binyumin Hrushovski), Take oyf tshikaves ("This Is Really Curious"). Boris Mogilner offered a unique perspective in his meditative Like-Khame ("Solar Eclipse"). A master of light verse, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman produced Lider ("Poems") in a bilingual edition. Yankev Vorzoger made his debut with the reflective Lider in shayer ("Poems in a Barn").
Three novelists demonstrated remarkable range and depth. From Moscow, Hersh Polyanker's Geven a mol a shtetl ("There Was Once a Shtetl") chronicled Jewish life in Ukraine and in Birobidzhan, Russia. Boris Sandler re-created a sober and haunting world in Der alter brunem ("The Old Well"). Master wordsmith Eli Shekhtman concluded his epic lamentation for the courage of Belarussian Jews in Polesye (the Pripet Marshes area) in Baym shkiye-aker ("At the Twilight-Plowshare").
In collections of short stories, Gennady Estraykh penned the informative Moskver Purim-shpiln ("Moscow Purim Plays"). Dovid-Hirsh Katz created a unique voice in his Der flakhershpits ("The Flat Peak"). Yente Mash drew persuasive portraits of emigrant life in contemporary Israel in Meshane mokim ("Change of Place"). Meyer Yelin's Di gliendike koyln ("By the Glowing Coals") captured the fragile line that separated life from death for the inhabitants of Lithuania's Kaunas ghetto. Tsvi Kanar's belletristic Ikh un Lemekh ("Me and Lemech") was a masterly achievement.
Yisroel-Ber Alterman suggested philosophical analyses of writers, explored the craft of composition, and reflected on the work of specific authors in Gerangl ("Struggle"). Yankev-Tsvi Shargel scrutinized the Yiddish imagination in Garbn in Elel ("Sheaves in the Month of Elul"). Mordkhe Tsanin compiled a judiciously balanced and synthetic overview of a controversial theme in Oyf di vegn fun yidishn goyrl: Der mytos goles ("On the Paths of Jewish Fate: The Exile Myth").
Bilge Karasu, winner of the 1991 Pegasus Prize, had a U.S. reading tour in 1994 featuring his novel Gece (1984; Night, 1994). Aziz Nesin, the immensely popular satirist who at age 79 continued to be involved in one controversy after another, received a special prize in New York City from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In a year when major authors--including the prolific Yaşar Kemal--published no novels, Orhan Pamuk's Yeni hayat, a scintillating literary mystery, broke all records, with 40 printings in four months, and his Kara Kitap was published in English as The Black Book in December. Adalet Ağaoğlu, the most prominent among Turkey's esteemed women novelists, was honoured as Writer of the Year at Istanbul's 13th annual Book Fair.
There was heated discussion in 1994 over the possibility of moving the remains of Nazım Hikmet, who had died in Moscow in 1963, from there to Istanbul. Two theatres staged dramatic renditions of his poetry. The first International Nazım Hikmet Poetry Prize went to the prominent Arab poet Adonis. Other major poetry prizes went to Ahmet Necdet, Abdülkadir Budak, and the popular poet-essayist Salah Birsel. Sulhi Dölek won the Yunus Nadi Prize for his short stories.
Strict ideological censorship by the government continued in 1994 to be the background against which all discussions of the literary scene in Iran had to be conducted. In this regard the most sensational event of the year was the death, probably in November, of the noted essayist and satirist 'Ali Akbar Saˋidi Sirjani, who died in custody, under unexplained circumstances, after having been imprisoned and forced to "confess" his ideological errors. Women writers in Iran were flourishing as never before. Simin Daneshvar published a new novel, Jazira-e Sargardani ("The Island of Perplexity"), and many writers, including women, could now make their living solely from writing.
Communities of Persians living abroad supported the publication of Persian literature on a notable scale. The prominent woman novelist Shahrnush Parsipur published two works of fiction in Los Angeles: Adab-e Sarf-e Chai dar Hozur-e Gorg ("Tea Ceremony in the Presence of the Wolf"), a collection of linked short stories in the mode of magical realism, and 'Aql-e Abi ("Blue Logos"). In Stånga, Sweden, the publisher Nashr-e Baran issued the collected works of the poet Esma'il Kho'i.
The attempt in October 1994 on the life of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1988), demonstrated both the importance of literature and the predicament of writers in the Arab world. Mahfouz' assailant cited his 1959 novel Awlād ḥāratinā (Children of Gebelawi, 1981) and its treatment of religion as the reason for the attack.
Novels published in 1994 included Muḥammad al-Bisāṭī's Ṣakhab al-buḥayrah ("Clamoring of the Lake"), Badr ad-Dīb's Ajāzat tafarrugh ("Sabbatical Leave"), Muḥammad Nājī's Khāfiyat qamar ("Moon Song"), and Edwār al-Kharrāṭ's Raqraqat al-aḥlām al-milḥiyyah ("Glittering of Salty Dreams") in Egypt; Ḥannā Mīnah's al-qamar fi 'l-maḥāq ("Moon in Eclipse") and the last two parts of Nabīl Sulaymān's quartet Madārāt ash-Sharq ("Orbits of the Orient") in Syria; Ilyās Khūrī's Majmaʿ al-asrār ("Record of Secrets") in Lebanon; al-Ḥabīb as-Sālimi's Matāhat al-raml ("Sand Maze") in Tunisia; and Muḥammad Zafzāf's Al-Ḥayy al-khalfi ("City Dregs") and Aḥmad al-Middīnī's Ṭarīq as-saḥāb ("Clouds' Path") in Morocco. Two novels by women stood out in 1994: by the Egyptian Raḍwā ʿĀshūr (Ghirnāṭah; "Granada") and by the Palestinian Liyānah Badr (Nujūm arīḥā; "Gerico Stars"). Collections of short stories included Nidāʾ Nūḥ ("Noah's Summons") by the Syrian Zakariyyā Tāmir.
In poetry 1994 saw the publication of Limādhā taraki al-ḥiṣān waḥīdā ("Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?") by the Palestinian Maḥmūd Darwīsh, perhaps the most distinguished Arab poet. The Egyptian Muḥammad ʿAfīfī Maṭar published two important collections, Iqāʿāt al-naml ("Ants' Tempos/Rhythms") and Iḥtifālīyāt al-mūmyāʾ al-mutawaḥḥishah ("Festivities of the Wild Mummy"), in which he transformed his 1991 prison experience into a metaphor for the Egyptian, indeed Arab, condition.
Two Chinese novels enjoyed a great succèss de scandale in 1994. Ai Bei's crudely written Jiao fuqin tai chenzhong ("I Called Him Father"), which claims she was Zhou Enlai's illegitimate daughter, received both praise and blame for revealing the sordid private lives of China's highest leaders. The poet Gu Cheng's narcissistic novel Ying Er, the name of his mistress, gave rise to both sympathy and disgust. In the same vein was Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao. Better written and more authoritative than Ai Bei's novel, it painted a picture of Mao Zedong as a lecherous, cruel, egomaniacal tyrant, with Zhou his loyal sycophant.
Much of the best mainland fiction continued to be published in Taiwan. The year's top works included Yu Hua's highly acclaimed historical novel Huozhe ("Living"; the script of director Zhang Yimou's award-winning film was also published in Taiwan and Hong Kong); three books by Su Tong--the story collections Lihun zhinan ("A Guide to Divorce") and Shiyi ji ("Eleven Blows") and a historical novel about China's only ruling empress, Wu Zetian ("Empress Wu"); three novellas by Ye Zhaoyan entitled Hong fangzi jiudian ("The Red Room Tavern"); Wang Anyi's short novel Xianggang qing yu ai ("Love and Longing in Hong Kong"); and A Cheng's Weinisi riji ("Venice Diary"). Su Tong's novel Chengbei didai ("North of the City") was serialized in the Nanjing magazine Zhongshan.
A number of works were produced by established writers in their 30s. Ge Fei's Bianyuan ("On the Margins") came out in Taiwan in late 1993. In this historical novel of subtle pathos and often poetic narration, an unnamed first-person narrator in his 80s presented 60 years of Chinese history from the point of view of an anonymous, insignificant participant. Ge Fei also wrote several essays on literature, while Can Xue's novella Gui tu ("The Road Back") appeared in Shanghai wenxue and A Cheng contributed occasional short short stories to Jiushi niandai, published in Hong Kong. Taipei's Hungfan reissued six short stories by Mo Yan with the title Mengjing yu zazhong ("Dreams and Bastards"), a collection containing one of Mo's own favourites, "Ni de xingwei shi women kongju" ("Your Actions Terrify Us"), which was written on the eve of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
A newly emerging talent was the poet Hong Ying, author, under the pen name Lao Hong, of Luowu dai ("A Generation Dancing Naked"), a sexually explicit 1992 novel about the confused lives of youthful literary and artistic types after Tiananmen. In 1994 she published five short stories in Zhongshan, and her poems were the topic of a literary seminar.
Literature in Taiwan continued to be weak, but Ma Sen's experimental M de lucheng ("The Journey of M") linked a series of nine previously published short stories in a collage of symbolic metamorphoses that related an anonymous narrator's quest for meaning and transcendence.
Noteworthy among English translations in 1994 were Running Wild: New Chinese Writers (an eccentric selection of stories); Under-Sky, Underground (translations of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism); the poet Bei Dao's Forms of Distance; Wang Meng's The Stubborn Porridge and Other Stories; and Death in a Cornfield and Other Stories from Contemporary Taiwan.
For lovers of Japanese literature, 1994 was a year of rejoicing. Kenzaburō Ōe became the second Japanese to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (see NOBEL PRIZES). After the prize was announced, the Japanese government said that Ōe would be given the Order of Merit Culture. Ōe shocked Japan, however, by rejecting this latter award, saying that he did not want to have anything to do with the establishment. Ōe and Yukio Mishima had come to be regarded as a pair of literary prodigies, but their political and cultural stances were diametrically different. Whereas Mishima claimed to be a radical traditionalist, Ōe was a confirmed leftist. Although his themes were basically political, as when he wrote about Hiroshima and Okinawa, his novels and stories were also imaginative and modernist. His Kojinteki na taiken (1964; A Personal Matter, 1968) was largely autobiographical, and his Man'en gannen no futtoboru (1967; The Silent Cry, 1974), telling the story of radical expatriate brothers struggling to return to and be reconciled with their native village in the deep woods of Shikoku island, used a highly involved and symbolic, even mythical, mode of narration. Another major figure of the year was Rieko Matsuura, whose Oya-yubi P no shugyo jidai ("The Study Period of Big Toe P") was awarded the Women Writers' Prize. It was a highly controversial, even sensational, novel, in which the central character, a student, is shocked to find that the big toe of her foot has turned into a penis. Hiroyuki Agawa's Shiga Naoya was a remarkable literary biography, both detailed and readable. Shiga was considered to be one of the classic authors of modern Japan, and Agawa was successful in portraying his personality and the literary milieu that had enveloped him. Kazuko Ibuki's Ware yori hoka ni: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro saigo no juninen ("Reminiscences of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō") was a highly evocative memoir of the novelist whose works include Sasameyuki (1943-48; The Makioka Sisters, 1957). Takashi Tsujii's Niji no Misaki ("Rainbow Promontory"), the Tanizaki Prize-winning novel of the year, was also biographical. Tsujii was the pen name of Seiji Tsutsumi, the well-known financial magnate. In poetry there were two impressive collections, by Tetsuo Shimizu and Yasuo Irisawa. Shimizu's Sekiyo ni Akai Ho ("Red Sail in the Setting Sun") was successful in evoking the bittersweet taste of various memories through colloquial diction and was awarded the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize. Irisawa's Tadayou Fune ("Drifting Ship") was an ambitious search for a "mythical" halo for a lost modern soul.
For lovers of Japanese literature, 1994 was a year of rejoicing. Kenzaburō Ōe became the second Japanese to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (see NOBEL PRIZES). After the prize was announced, the Japanese government said that Ōe would be given the Order of Merit Culture. Ōe shocked Japan, however, by rejecting this latter award, saying that he did not want to have anything to do with the establishment.
Ōe and Yukio Mishima had come to be regarded as a pair of literary prodigies, but their political and cultural stances were diametrically different. Whereas Mishima claimed to be a radical traditionalist, Ōe was a confirmed leftist. Although his themes were basically political, as when he wrote about Hiroshima and Okinawa, his novels and stories were also imaginative and modernist. His Kojinteki na taiken (1964; A Personal Matter, 1968) was largely autobiographical, and his Man'en gannen no futtoboru (1967; The Silent Cry, 1974), telling the story of radical expatriate brothers struggling to return to and be reconciled with their native village in the deep woods of Shikoku island, used a highly involved and symbolic, even mythical, mode of narration.
Another major figure of the year was Rieko Matsuura, whose Oya-yubi P no shugyo jidai ("The Study Period of Big Toe P") was awarded the Women Writers' Prize. It was a highly controversial, even sensational, novel, in which the central character, a student, is shocked to find that the big toe of her foot has turned into a penis.
Hiroyuki Agawa's Shiga Naoya was a remarkable literary biography, both detailed and readable. Shiga was considered to be one of the classic authors of modern Japan, and Agawa was successful in portraying his personality and the literary milieu that had enveloped him. Kazuko Ibuki's Ware yori hoka ni: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro saigo no juninen ("Reminiscences of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō") was a highly evocative memoir of the novelist whose works include Sasameyuki (1943-48; The Makioka Sisters, 1957). Takashi Tsujii's Niji no Misaki ("Rainbow Promontory"), the Tanizaki Prize-winning novel of the year, was also biographical. Tsujii was the pen name of Seiji Tsutsumi, the well-known financial magnate.
In poetry there were two impressive collections, by Tetsuo Shimizu and Yasuo Irisawa. Shimizu's Sekiyo ni Akai Ho ("Red Sail in the Setting Sun") was successful in evoking the bittersweet taste of various memories through colloquial diction and was awarded the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize. Irisawa's Tadayou Fune ("Drifting Ship") was an ambitious search for a "mythical" halo for a lost modern soul.