Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review has posted some links over the last couple of days about odds and guesses leading up to the announcement, in a week or so, of the Nobel Prize in literature. Last year, I correctly predicted that the prize would go to Orhan Pamuk, and this year I am not getting a strong feeling, but I’m still going to give it a try. I think it will go to Cormac McCarthy. You heard it here first.
First Lines is a Cornell University site that collects opening lines from many classic novels, and lets you guess which books they came from. Warning: It’s pretty addictive.
What a delightful surprise: The amazing Pico Iyer reviews Orhan Pamuk’s new collection of essays for the New York Times. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“Other Colors” is too eagerly inclusive to make up the single-pointed, honed narrative that its author promises. Like the maximalist “Black Book” or “My Name Is Red,” it is more a fireworks display than a rounded sculpture (it’s no surprise that a favorite Pamuk character is the “encyclopedist ”). Yet what emerges powerfully, and often movingly, from it is Pamuk’s faith in writing as a “consolation” and refuge, “our only defense against life’s cruelties.” When he titles one major section in the book “My Books Are My Life,” he seems to be speaking both for the way that he has put almost all his adult life into his work (sitting in his room 10 hours every day and barely leaving Istanbul until he was 31 ), and for the fact that his shrine is his library of 12,000 books (in a culture that “views the nonreader as the norm”).
You can read the entire article here.
On the plane to Orlando, I re-read, for the first time since I was fourteen years old, Albert Camus’ L’étranger. I remembered some passages from the novel so well I could have recited them (C’est alors que tout a vacillé etc.) My unease with the book as a teenager did not change, though, and in fact it grew worse. Meursault’s killing of the character referred to simply as “the Arab,” the complete absence of any dialogue from the three Arab men who confront Raymond and Meursault on the beach, the fact that the only Arab character who says anything is Raymond’s abused and oppressed girlfriend, the absence of the Arab man’s family or any Arab witnesses at the trial: these are not coincidences, naturally, but clear narrative choices Camus made. One might argue that Meursault’s fight with the chaplain and his realization at the end are an assertion of the Self in the face of an indifferent universe and a moralizing society, but I think that assertion about the absurdity of life comes by way of victimizing the Other. Camus gives us a vision of the world that leaves nothing to compassion, emotion, or humanity.
I am in Winter Park, Florida, for a couple of days. I will be giving a lecture, followed by a reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, here at Rollins College.
The event will take place in Tiedtke Music Hall on Tuesday (tomorrow).