Ignoble Nobels? Is That Why They Ignore Margaret Atwood?

 It's been over for awhile but it still bothers me.  2023 was the latest year in which Margaret Atwood did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

At least the Pulitzer Prize committee finally recognized Barbara Kingsolver.  There's been no better US novelist, none more consistent and capacious in the breadth, depth and style of her work.  But also this year the Nobel committee has once again ignored not only my now-perennial favorite--and  the world's-- in once again passing over Margaret Atwood.

Atwood was widely believed to be the favorite back in 2017--so much so that the actual winner, Kazuo Ishiguro, publicly apologized for winning it instead of her.  But there was always next year.  And next year. And next year... And now Margaret Atwood is 84.

I don't claim to have read all the fine writers of the world, and I must defer judgment on a lot of prizes, like the Booker.  But the Nobel has a specific, specified mission.  In the words of founder Alfred Nobel, it is for the writer "who, in the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

That person, year after year for the past decade (I've been touting her since at least 2011), has been Margaret Atwood.  She is unique in the world for sustaining quality literary work over many years, while her work consistently engages the contemporary world.  She is now a global presence, for the shared present and future dilemmas she writes about (and the increasingly relevance of The Handmaid's Tale), but also as a literary figure and an active voice.  Her contributions are immeasurable. 

Of course the Nobel committee in Sweden has ignored their founder's goals for years.  They tend to award for a body of work rather than something from the previous year, which is defensible.  But they also tend to choose writers who are perhaps known mostly within a single nation (usually a small one), if, frankly, at all.  Their influence on the world is minimal, at least until they win and their work gets new editions.

Body of work?  Margaret Atwood has published 18 novels, nine story collections, 18 volumes of poetry,  11 books of nonfiction, eight children's books and two graphic novels--and these are only works brought out by major publishers and presumably translated widely.  She writes and speaks on ecology and economics as well as literature.

But there's no point in making the case.  Everyone knows it.  Everyone knows she is the perfect Nobel Laureate, and has been for years.  

So why hasn't she been one?  It can't be only because she sometimes writes speculative or science fiction--they gave the award to Doris Lessing many years ago.  Atwood herself hasn't commented on it in interviews I've read or watched on Youtube, usually praising whoever just won.  But I got the feeling that she doesn't expect to ever win it, because of some problem with the Nobel committee.  Maybe there's animosity, personal or otherwise, from a member or members of the committee..  Maybe they feel she's gotten too many other awards.  Who knows? (Actually, I think she does.)

The Nobel committee in any case has a well known track record of not getting around to honoring major literary figures in their lifetimes, and therefore never honoring them at all.  So why should I care?  I probably shouldn't.  But to me it calls into question not only the Nobel committee's judgment but their integrity.  I know all these prizes are political to some extent, and this is not the worst injustice in the world.  But seeing some justice done is a rare but good feeling.  She deserves this.

So I don't care who wins the Nobel anymore.  Not until the name that's announced is Margaret Atwood.  

P.S. Margaret Atwood's latest fiction is a story collection, Old Babes in the Woods.  Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer-winning novel is Demon Copperhead.  Both are fine gifts for discerning and appreciative readers.

Heat Tip

Don't miss Laura Miller's terrific piece in Salon on Margaret Atwood at West Point.

For Pleasure: Fall into Winter

The DVDs of the BBC Sherlock series and my continuing interest in the Granada Sherlock Holmes series (with Jeremy Brett) inspired me to read (and re-read) Sherlock Holmes stories in my The Illustrated Sherlock Holmes Treasury (Crown 1984) which has many of the original illustrations as well.  Especially when re-watching various Granada episodes (based most closely on the actual stories), I would go to the stories themselves to see how they differ.  Fun and enlightening.  I came to prefer Holmes stories for bedtime.

I happened to see a recent video interview with J.K. Rowling.  She was asked the question: what writer would you most like to be compared to?  I think it was specific to the Harry Potter books.  As the question was asked the name E. Nesbit leapt into my mind.  And so it was with a shiver that I heard her say that same name, E. Nesbit.

English author Edith Nesbit is best known for her children's novels and stories, though she wrote other works and had an otherwise fascinating and dramatic life.  At some point at the old family home, I happened on a couple of her books that had belonged to my younger sisters.  I read them and was enchanted.  When I read the first Harry Potter book much later, the first author I thought of was E. Nesbit.

So I revisited one of those books, The New Treasure Seekers, and for the first time read the original, The Story of the Treasure Seekers.  It was a different reading experience but I wasn't disappointed.

I've also been reading (or re-reading) juveniles from the time of my youth or before.  I've mentioned some before, mostly the science fiction stories but also some sports fictions.  In a box of somebody's giveaways I came across one that I either read or could have read back then: Grand-Slam Homer, a Bronc Burnett story by Wilfred McCormick (1951.)  It did remind me that, next to listening to radio play-by-play of Pittsburgh Pirates games, I learned the most about the finer points of baseball from books like this one.  I learned very little from my own coaches--much more from coaches like Cap'n Al in this book.

Also inspired by viewing a DVD collection of Chekhov plays, I read A New Life of Anton Chekhov by Ronald Hingley.  But with no televisual prompting at all, I also read Michael Billington's 1987 Stoppard, on the plays of Tom Stoppard to that point. Billington is always interesting.  I found myself yearning for the music of James Joyce's sentences, so I began reading the stories in Dubliners, but specifically in the Illustrated (and annotated) Edition by John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley (St. Martins) which I'd been given as a gift many years ago.  For similar reasons, I've reread portions of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Nesbit and H.G. Wells were contemporaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They all appeared in The Strand Magazine, sometimes in the same issues.  Wells has been a particular interest in recent years, so it was for an ongoing project involving his work as well as my Sherlock phase that I also read Arthur Conan Doyle by Don Richard Cox (1985) and The Doctor and the Detective by Martin Booth (1997.)  I'm evolving my own theory about Conan Doyle's influence on Wells.

Finally, as part of that ongoing writing project, I dipped into several books on and by Wells, and I've been reading with great pleasure as well as interest: Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds, Robert A. Heinlein by H. Bruce Franklin, and particularly Alien Encounters by Mark Rose.

I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet
Edited by Mark Martin
Verso

As noted in Bill McKibben’s introduction, this collection of 10 stories arrives in the growing shadow of the Climate Crisis. But these are not stories primarily about the Climate Crisis, and only a few mention specific manifestations. Instead they are meant to illuminate (as McKibben says), “not to push us in some particular direction.” Still, sales of this book benefit 350.org, McKibben’s advocacy organization dedicated to reducing the still-climbing output of greenhouse gases.

The book starts with T.C. Boyle’s account of an environmental action in Oregon, and the complex emotional lives of participants. Lydia Millet’s story, “Zoogoing” concerns a man’s response to animals and the animal in himself. It’s not as potent as Michael Ventura’s novel, The Zoo Where You’re Fed to God, but it does illuminate. Kim Stanley Robinson contributes a chapter from one of his Climate Crisis trilogy novels (though it’s about a hike in the Sierras.) In Robinson and Millet, characters contemplate the already visible implications of the destruction of the natural world as we know it, which the Climate Crisis may well complete.

Nathaniel Rich contributes a fantasy that illuminates the inadequate smallness of our scientific approach to nature. Then there are several post-apocalyptic stories—a disturbingly popular genre. Helen Simpson and Toby Litt provide their variations on the breakdown of society. David Mitchell’s “The Siphoners” that combines futuristic horror with a teaching folk tale is more like traditional apocalyptic stories, which tended to be cautionary tales, saying basically that if we let this or that aspect of our society or technology play out to its logical conclusion, this catastrophe will result. There’s conspicuously little of that here.

Wu Ming’s story depicts persistent human and cultural qualities in post-apocalyptic circumstances, while Paolo Bacigalupi suggests a culture of survival in an ongoing ecological catastrophe that the previous stories imply.

When I saw Margaret Atwood’s name as a contributor, I immediately anticipated her contribution might be “The Bad News” from her most recent story collection. It’s the best story that subtly illuminates our current condition that I’ve read since Charles Baxter’s “Through the Safety Net” in the 1980s, only then it was nuclear war while today it is the slower specter of the Climate Crisis. But Atwood is instead represented by a shorter 2009 piece, “Time Capsule Found on a Dead Planet,” a trenchant elegy for Earth, and fatal human hubris.

These stories speculate on a variety of fates for the Earth. We could use more stories that explore how to best navigate the major and painful changes that probably are ahead. This provocative collection is a start, and it’s for a very good cause.

For Pleasure: Galileo's Dream

Of the summer reading I outlined, I did complete that lovely volume of Margaret Atwood's stories (Moral Disorder,) and a number of James Hillman essays in Puer Papers as well as in Picked Up Pieces--more on those in a later post.  I also read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Mother Night, but I'll probably take a break in my journey through his novels to read a forthcoming biography of him I've received.  But the major read was Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream. 

As a fan of his science fiction and near-future fiction (the Mars trilogy, Three Californias, Science in the Capital) I’ve been reluctant to tackle Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate histories. But I started his latest novel, Galileo's Dream (Spectra), and more than 500 pages later I finished it, wondering what my problem was.

Part of my reluctance was the historical dialogue choice between two equally awkward alternatives: does everybody sound hopelessly antique and false, or do these characters from remote times talk like they’ve got smartphones in their togas?

Robinson opts for a contemporary vocabulary, though with a minimum of anachronisms plus appropriate historical touches and maybe some subtle Italian rhythms. He makes it work mostly because he creates a complex, believable and likeable Galileo, clearly the result of impressive research, but also a literary character—a kind of Italian Falstaff (Galileo and Shakespeare were contemporaries) with a quick and penetrating intelligence.

Galileo’s intellect and insights are formidable, but his ego, impatience and appetites cause him as much humiliation as his battles with the Church over how the solar system works. He’s got marital, family and money problems, devoted friends and dedicated enemies. Plus he keeps getting sent to the moons of Jupiter in the year 3020.

That’s the science fiction part of the story, and some readers have found those scenes and characters less satisfying because less complete. I like the way the problems of the future feed back into the historical story, and manage to even create suspense about Galileo’s ultimate fate. (There are hints that the past of this future is different—even the solar system has a few more planets. And that this future may depend on Galileo being executed. ) That the future characters have mythological names adds another layer of mystery. In terms of how humans react to new knowledge that humbles them, past and future stories correspond.

The future segments allows Robinson to describe a fascinating new cosmology based partly on contemporary theory. (This also makes Galileo’s means of transport credible, and there are other impressive technologies in this future.) Galileo’s scientific attitude and curiosity lends credibility to how easily he accepts what he sees and learns.  The idea of a greater consciousness is not new--Lem's Solaris has a living sea, and the great Olaf Stapledon built up to conscious star systems--but here the importance would seem to be how future humans respond to something that seems to reduce their centrality in the universe, much as people in Galileo's day did to the implications of what he saw through his telescope.

In other ways the interaction not only provides perspective from the future viewing the earth's past, but the other way around. About the inhabitants of these moons, Galileo observes: “Surely living out here must make you all a little bit mad? Never to sit in a garden, never to feel the sun on your neck? We were never born for this.”

Though Robinson (who teaches down the coast at Davis) is just shy of 60, this novel expresses a notably mature perspective, both in content and forthright expression. This gives Galileo’s aging observations even more resonance.

Ultimately this is the story of the first scientist (though the word “scientist” didn’t arrive until the 19th century), and the meaning of his insights as well as the fullness of his life. There’s humor and incident within the framework, and towards the end of his life, when Galileo sees something different in one of his daughters, there’s a feeling of possibility as well as elegy. That’s even stronger when you figure out the identity of his last visitor.

For Pleasure: Summer Reading
So I noticed on several newspaper and magazine sites this weekend a feature about books that people (usually famous people) are reading this summer, usually accompanied by a photo like the one above (the pipe stem is a nice if unintended touch--I used to smoke it many years ago, and now I keep it around for the occasional phantom pipe tobacco taste, but mostly as decor.)

So in addition to my never-dwindling pile of books to review (many still to go from this past spring), my summer reading so far is this pile of books.  I wish I could say it was a considered literary program, but all of them were recent finds in used bookstores and a big bookstore sale (except the Vonnegut and the James Hillman, which I've had for years and am re-reading; I generally do a Hillman around my birthday, especially big ones.)

I've just completed reading (for the first time, I'm ashamed to say) Memories of My Melancholy Whores, so far the last published novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  It's better than the reviews I remember.  I kept waiting to find a proper hardback used or remaindered, but at this late date I settled for this new paperback.  It was also an interesting book to read around my birthday (though still a quarter century from my 90th, which is the narrator's age.)

I've been re-reading Vonnegut's novels more or less in order.  I read Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan last month and started Cat's Cradle, only to realize I re-read this one last year.  But it has been years since I've read the rest.  I'm also intrigued by the idea of re-reading J.D. Salinger.  I haven't re-read any of those books in decades.

I've started Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder collection of stories. The voice is very similar to that in the occasional pieces in Writing With Intent--same sort of humor, of little leaps and connections, but with more literary qualities.  The first story in the collection, "The Bad News," is an absolute masterpiece, the best apocalyptic in everyday life story I can recall since one by Charles Baxter many years ago.  I'm enjoying this a lot--come on, Nobel Prize committee!

I've started Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, Galileo's Dream. I've been a little wary of his historical/alternate history novels, though I can't exactly explain why.  I guess I couldn't see how they could be as good as his s/f and future vision novels.  And Galileo has always seemed more of a symbol to me--he seems to be treated that way in several plays about him--and not my choice for someone I'd like to see Doctor Who visit.  But he's a real character here, and not at all stiff or stuffy.  I am enjoying this, and I sense there's more to it in regard to the contemporary world than noted in reviews or descriptions.

Earlier this year I had a chance to buy a remainder copy of Jack Kornfield's The Wise Heart, and passed on it.  Though I went back to get it, I'd lost my chance.  Faced with it again as a sale paperback, I couldn't pass it up again. I tend to start but not finish his books, though I don't know why.  I started reading it as a spiritual balance to the soul concerns of Hillman (Hillman makes a big distinction between soul and spirit, and it makes a lot of sense.)  Its subtitle is "A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology" which is of great pith and moment.

That's the summer so far, though I'm likely to roam through my library (and probably a few more bookstores) in search of another kind of moment, another reading experience, as the spirit (and the soul) moves.

For Pleasure: Early Winter 2010-11

There wasn't much time for undemanded reading these past few months, but I managed some. I've continued a few nightly pages of Richardson's Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and am close to finishing it. Emerson's admiration for Bronson Alcott, the educator, reformer and daddy to Louisa May, suggested I might enjoy Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis, new this past fall from Yale. But Francis' unsympathetic portrait of Alcott, whether that was intentional or not, soured me on reading very far into it. Alcott comes across as a thoroughly, aggressively, self-righteously and cluelessly self-deluded character, who made me so impatient that I couldn't bear reading about him, especially in this undistinguished prose. I sure didn't see any reason reflected in this book for Emerson to admire him.

I also followed up Thomas Peacock's comic early 19th century novel Headlong Hall with his Nightmare Abbey. It too was great fun to read, and as satire of both certain forms of romantic fiction and of various pretentious representatives of various pretentious ideologies and systems of thought, it is often remarkably contemporary. And still funny after all these years.

Reading Mark Rotella's Amore: The Story of Italian American Song (Farrar, Straus) reminded me of a book I bagged at a used bookstore some time ago that has been shelf decoration ever since: Schnozzola: Gene Fowler's Story of Jimmy Durante. So I finally read it, and what a book! It covers Durante's life and career in great detail for his early years (it was published in 1951, just as he was becoming the TV star I recall from my childhood.) Durante started out as a ragtime and New Orleans jazz piano player, became a nightclub star in the 20s, Broadway, radio and the movies in the 30s and 40s, and after his decade or so as a TV star, he became a recording star with several albums of standards and ballads in the 60s and 70s. Some of these renditions were revived in the movie soundtracks of Sleepless in Seattle and City Slickers, and his version of "September Song" is definitive, and heartbreaking.

The Gene Fowler book reads like a Damon Runyon story, with the real Damon Runyon as an occasional walk-on. Fowler suggests this is so because it is about the same people Runyon wrote about and fictionalized--especially the people who talked the way Runyon later wrote. So full circle in a way. Show biz characters like Eddie Cantor, George M. Cohan and Ethel Merman play bit parts, with starring roles going to Durante and Lou Clayton, his biggest booster and manager as well as the third member with Eddie Jackson of the act that ruled the Broadway club scene in the 1920s. Durante's complex relationship with his first wife Jeanne is also a central thread (Fowler speculates that she was the "Mrs. Calabash" Durante famously and forlornly said goodnight to at the end of his shows, something which Durante reportedly confirmed many years later.) But the featured players are the gangsters who ran and supported the clubs and the club scene, especially during Prohibition--guys with actual names like Zimp, Johnny Blue Eyes, Long-Shot Abraham and Benevolent Charlie. They don't make 'em--or write 'em--like that anymore.

Recently I've started reading Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (just as I ran across an Emerson quote in the Richardson book: "...the impracticability and tough unalterableness of sentences which must not stand as they are, demonstrates past a doubt the inherent vice of my writing.") So far this seems a slighter book than Against the Day in more ways that the number of pages. I've also begun Margaret Atwood's novel The Year of the Flood. I've always admired Margaret Atwood, in her nonfiction and interviews and so on as well as her fiction. I especially cherish her book on writing and writers, Negotiations with the Dead. She's still making waves with her 2008 book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. I believe Margaret Atwood will be the next writer in the English language to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I support the idea.