Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

Kazuo Ishiguro said he was very surprised when he learnt that he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature. They all are. I have not come across any winner in recent times who, upon being informed that s/he won the Nobel, responded, “I knew this. I knew I was going to win the Nobel. My creative output has been of such a high calibre and I have been so consistently superlative that I couldn’t see how the Nobel committee could think of anyone else than me when it sat round the table to decide this year’s Nobel. Indeed the only surprise is that I did not get it earlier.” That would be viewed as conceited. So, while the true sentiment of the recipients might be “what took them so long to realise my greatness”, they are hardly going to say that in public. For example, novels of VS Naipaul, pre-2001, made it a point to mention that he had won every possible literary award other than the Nobel. This suggests that at the very least the Nobel was important for Sir Vidiya.

When the winners declare that they are very surprised at receiving the award, what they probably mean is that they genuinely had no inkling till they received the phone call to be informed that that they have won the £ 800, 442 jackpot. So, (like Naipaul, probably) they might not be surprised that they won the award and their inner reaction upon receiving the news might be “about time”; the news itself probably is a surprise.

When Dorris Lessing won the Nobel in 2007 (I think), the Nobel committee could not inform her straightaway; because Lessing was out, shopping for weekly grocery in a local supermarket. The Nobel committee then released the news of the award to the media, and reporters were waiting for Lessing at her doorsteps when she returned from her shopping. I don’t know if the video of Lessing’s reaction when she saw the gaggle of journalists in front of her house is available on the YouTube, but her reaction suggests that she was genuinely not expecting it (and also that she took the news of her triumph in her stride).

VS Naipaul, who, in 2001, ended the long wait for the British writers, by winning the Nobel twenty years after William Golding, was in his house when the phone call came, but he apparently refused to take the call, believing it was a prank or hoax.

In the English speaking world, at least, the media and newspaper knew who the Nobel Laureate for this year was, when Ishiguro’s name was announced. I have read that when JML Le Clezio, a novelist probably little known outside of the building he lived in, in his native France, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008, the sub-editors of the literary sections of newspapers in the English speaking countries were scampering about to find any information they could get on Le Cleizo. Ditto for Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet who was awarded the Nobel in 2011.

The Nobel committee over the years has been accused of having regional, political and language biases while awarding the Nobel. Many more European and Scandinavian authors and poets have won the award in recent decades than those in the rest of the world. When the Europeans do not win the award, usually it is someone who writes in English who is awarded the prize. The former permanent secretary of the Nobel committee, Horace Engdahl, was unapologetic about it. In 2008 he declared that Europe was still “the centre of the literary world”. America, according to Engdahl, by contrast, was “too insular and too isolative.” Engdahl was responding, if I remember correctly, to the criticism, after the win of the little known JML Le Clezio in 2008, that a distinct European bias was creeping into the awarding of Nobel and that American authors were being deliberately ignored. Having read the literary outputs of the recent Nobel winners, I am struck how the writing of at least some of the European winners is so totally Eurocentric; indeed, if you were a reader in, say, an African or Asian country, you would not get the nuances unless you knew the historical as well as geopolitical context. Imre Kertesz, who won the award in 2003, and Herta Muller who won it in 2009 are two examples. Svetlana Alexievich, the Ukrainian born non-writer who was awarded the Nobel in 2015, has written exclusively on the Soviet era issues. (It is also true for non-European authors such as Mo Yan, the Chinese author who won the Nobel in 2012.) So I am not sure what Engdahl meant when he said that the Americans were insular. Did he mean the American writers were insular and isolative, because they wrote about American culture? I saw it as a very unconvincing attempt to justify what at that time was a very obvious anti-American bias. (Of the Nobel winners I have read, VS Naipaul, Dorris Lessing  and Mario Vargas Llosa were the only ones (and, in case of Naipaul and Llosa, only in their later outputs) who, I felt, wrote in their fiction about themes that transcended times and geography. And now Ishiguro.)

At that time of Engdahl’s comment in 2008, no American author was awarded the Nobel, after Toni Morrison won it in 1993. There would be a further wait of eight years before an American was awarded the Nobel, in 2016. And that was Bob Dylon, who for months did not acknowledge any communication from the Nobel committee. Not because Dylon was protesting, insofar I could make out (unless this was Dylon’s way of letting the Nobel Committee know that he was not overawed by the award). Dylon did not reject the award (like Jean Paul Sartre did on the 1960s, or Pasternak did, under duress, in the 1950s) because that would have given the message that the award was important for Dylon. Dylon just did not take the calls (because he was touring) and did not respond to letters (because he was touring). One must assume that he knew that he had won the Nobel (unless he does not watch television or read newspapers) but he did not think it was necessary to contact the Nobel committee for months. The Nobel committee thought it was rude. It certainly was priceless. I was practically weeping with hilarity when I read a piece in the Guardian in which the spokesman for the Nobel carped about Dylon’s rudeness.

The Nobel committee, mercifully, did not have such trouble in 2017, although Ishiguro’s land-line was consistently engaged when they attempted to contact him. The committee released his name to the media, but, unlike Dylon, they did manage to contact Ishiguro the same day. Ishiguro later remarked, half-facetiously one assumes, that they were a bit cross at the difficulty in getting in touch with him. The committee, however, would have to admit that wait was not anywhere as long as it was in 2016.

Ishiguro is a safe choice. Notwithstanding the rather strange reaction of Will Self (“He’s a good writer, and from what I’ve witnessed a lovely man, but the singularity of his vision is ill-served by such crushing laurels, while I doubt the award will do little to reestablish the former centrality of the novel to our culture”—I think what Self is saying here is that Ishiguro did not deserve the Nobel) most have described him as a deserving winner.

Ishiguro is the only novelist apart from VS Naipaul whom I had read extensively prior to his Nobel win. Ishiguro is a good writer and I like him. Apart from The Unconsoled (which I thought was a car crash of a novel; or, more likely, I found it in accessible) I have loved all of his novels, in particular Never Let Me Go, which I think is outstanding. I also thought When We were Orphans was excellent (I was surprised to hear Ishiguro describing it as his least convincing novel in a literary programme; apaprently his wife did not like the novel either). Then there is The Remains of the Day, which probably is Ishiguro’s most famous novel, for which he won the Booker Prize decades ago. His early novels are also well worth a read.

Ishiguro is more than just a good writer. He is an excellent writer. Many of his novels deal with memory, either individual or national or cultural; and how individual memories can differ from the national memories to the point of delusion (which I thought was explored very movingly in When We were Orphans). Although Ishiguro is not the only writer to have done this (Salman Rushdie tackled this issue slightly differently, and in his inimitable style in Midnight’s Children, in my view), he has done it consistently in most of his novels (is that what Will Self had in his mind when he talked about “the singularity” of Ishiguro’s vision?).

Three cheers for Ishiguro.

Who Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature These Days?

The hiatus is over. After two years of awarding the Nobel  Prize for Literature to non-Europeans, the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature is awarded to an European; a Frenchman. Quelle surprise!

The Nobel Prize went to a cuddly Chinese, Mo Yan, in 2012, who was derided by some as an apologist or a puppet of the dictatorial Chinese regime; therefore, presumably, not worthy of the award, which, in the years bygone, was awarded to such luminaries as the Nazi apologist Knut Hamsun. Herta Muller, the 2009 Nobel Laureate, was moved to publically declare that she felt like crying when she heard that Mo Yan had won the award (not because she had anything to say—at least not in the interview she gave—about the literary merits or lack thereof of Mo Yan’s novels, but because of his political leanings; that Mo Yan was not outraged enough (or not at all)  to publically express his outrage of the outrage of the Tiananmen Square in 1989, which outraged many Western intellectuals—and avoided certain incarceration, was unacceptable). One hoped that the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Mo Yan helped Muller to sympathize with many in Rumania, the country of Muller’s birth, who no doubt felt like crying when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for what many in that country regarded as her unreadable paranoid rants against the Communist regime which she passed off as fiction (her rants, that is; not the Communist regime, which was very real). In 2013 the Nobel Prize was awarded to Alice Munro, a short story writer of meagre talents who elevated monotony to the level of art. The menu of your local Tandoori will have more variety than Munro’s short stories.

The 2014 Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded to one Patrick Modiano. Why was Modiano awarded the Swedish award?  According to the press-release by the Swedish academy, Modanio got the Nobel

“for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”.

What in the name of Allah does this mean? Art of memory   . . . most ungraspable human destinies . . . life-world of occupation . . . Who writes such lines? Does the Swedish academy employ someone on the verge of thought disorder (or has taken long distance course in writing like a patronizing tw*t) to do the press releases? If you search through the entire awful vocabulary of clichés, you’d struggle to come up with something as nonsensical as this.

When I first read this I interpreted “occupation” as activities people do to earn their daily living, to keep themselves occupied etcetera. I was wrong. “Occupation” , here, refers to the occupation of France by Germany during the Second World War. An understandable mistake, you will agree, I hope, if you have not read anything by Modnio, or, for that matter, never heard of him until the Nobel committee decided to confer upon him the award, using barely decipherable language.

An article in The Guardian (after Modanio won the award) informed that Modanio delights in mystifying his readers. Is it a short-hand for wooly writing? I wouldn’t know. As I said, I have not read any of Modanio’s novels.

What might increase your chances, these days, of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Firstly it will help you enormously if you were European or Scandinavian. A glance at the Nobel Laureates in the past twenty years will show that 13 were European (including British & Irish). Of the remaining seven, one is Turkish (Orhan Pamuk), another is Naturalized British of Indian descent who was born in the Caribbean (V.S. Naipaul), while a third one is naturalized French of Chinese descent (Gao Xingjian). Kenzaburo Oe (1994) who is Japanese; J.M. Coetzee (2003), who is South African; Mo Yan (2012), a Chinese; and Alice Munro (2013), who is Canadian, are the only authors in the last twenty years to have won the Nobel, who can be said to have no European connection.

Have you heard of J.M.G. Le Clezio? I thought not. He won the Nobel in 2008. He is the author of “new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy”. He is the “explorer of the humanity beyond and below [but not above or sideways] the reigning civilization”. I bought, on an impulse, three books of the “author of new departures”, hoping to find the promised sensual ecstasy. I am sorry to say that I couldn’t find it despite using the most powerful microscope, in the only novel of Le Clezio (his debut novel) I have read till date. Would I find it in the other two novels which I bought? Possibly, but I am not going to risk it. I am thinking of flogging the novels on the Amazon. 

Herta Muller, who won the Nobel the year after Le Clezio, is a writer “who with the concentration of poetry and frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”  (What is “concentration of poetry”?) The two novels of Muller which I have read (one of which I have reviewed on this blog) were almost as unreadable as those of Le Cleizo, but less abstruse in their themes. Muller is a writer (both the novels dealt with the plight of ethnic German in Communist Rumania after the Second World War, so Muller does write about the dispossessed) who takes boredom to unheard of levels. This is a writer who will give you an eye-witness account of the Crucifixion and can still put you to sleep. 

Imre Kertezsz, who won the award in 2003 has had a 3-4 of his novels translated into English, of which I have read a couple. Fateless, Kertesz’s autobiographical work of fiction (? A fictional memoir) was outstanding, but the next one I read, Kaddish for an Unborn Child where an unnamed narrator explains why he chose never to have children was a masterclass in abject misery and self-pity. When you finally reach the end of this 80-odd pages novella, the only reason you don’t strangle the moaning whingeing, self-obsessed narrator is because you are too  exhausted by the ponderous style (either of the translator or Kertesz) to do anything other than totter into a dark room and wash down some paracetamol with Jack Daniel's and lie down for the next five hours.

This brings me to the second criterion. In addition to having some connection to Europe, you must make efforts to write on subjects no one is interested in, and in a style that is a cure for treatment resistant insomnia. Your novels cannot, under any circumstances, be accused of having a story or a narrative structure.

The third, and most important, criterion is that you are not allowed to be American. If you are an American novelist hoping to be considered for the Nobel, just forget it. It’s not gonna happen, at least not any time soon. The last American to win the Nobel was Toni Morrison, who won the award in 1993. There were those who thought Updike ought to have been awarded the Nobel. Well he wasn't. The trouble with Updike was that for the best part of his career he wrote novels that were accessible, enjoyable, and which people took the trouble to read. He tried to make up for this shortcoming by writing a series of novels, in the later part of his writing career, which were about nothing in particular and not particularly easy to read. But that was not good enough (too little, too late); he was never going to be on par with the likes of Le Cleizo and Muller. Not surprising, really; you can’t expect a toaster, after a life-time of making crunchy toasts, to become a washing machine; it might try, and you might applaud the effort; but it is not going to be good at it.  Updike died unawarded.

These days I read, from time to time, how Philip Roth is thought by many (mostly Americans) to be a worthy Nobel winner, and how it is a shame that he continues to be ignored. Well Roth is not European; so tough luck. He also suffers from the fatal flaw of having written countless novels which were funny, extremely readable, thought provoking, and, mostly, of high quality. He might consider (like Updike) changing his writing style and attempt writing something that would inspire the hacks at the Nobel committee to describe his writing as something that depicts the universality of myth (richly and inventively, I hasten to add), imbued with poetic intensity, and showing deep awareness of the human condition. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. (Indeed Roth has declared that he is through with writing novels. Nemesis, his 2009 novel is going to be his last novel, Roth has announced.) And, as a Philip Roth fan, I would not have wanted him to do it anyway. Would you ask your favourite chef who specializes in making mouth-watering, succulent, rich (and fattening)) roast beef to make a tofu dish, which, nutritional it might be, will have the taste and texture of office furniture?

Mo Yan's Nobel Prize in Literature: is it a Disaster?

I had frequently spotted a novel of the Chinese author Mo Yan in the local library. It was titled Big Breasts, Wide Hips. The front cover showed the close up of a Chinese woman in her twenties (so impossible to tell if she had big breasts and wide hips). The back cover described Mo Yan as arguably China’s most important contemporary literary voice.

I thought about borrowing the novel, but couldn’t make up my mind. On the one hand I am always game for reading fiction coming out of other cultures; and if it is written by arguably the most important contemporary literary voice of that culture, I say to myself, ‘Couldn’t be better.’ On the other hand, Big Breasts, Wide Hips was described as an epic novel, and it is in the nature of epic novels to be very long. The back-cover also informed that the novel was about the survival of a rural Chinese family, of a woman born in 1900 to be precise, spanning several decades—from the end of Qing dynasty to post-Mao years. That concerned me. Earlier this year I read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, which is also an epic novel. The novel (reviewed on this blog) written in original English failed to enthuse me. I was not sure that I was in a fit enough condition to get through another epic Chinese novel about rural Chinese (albeit written by a bona fide Chinese rather than an honorary Chinese like Buck).

In the end I did not borrow the book. ‘I’ll read the novel some other time,’ I said to myself. ‘Who is Mo Yan, anyway? Never heard of him,’ I said to myself at some other time. ‘Life is too short to read books of authors you don’t know about,’ I reasoned. ‘Better stick to what you know and like. I will read William Boyd and Jonathan Coe.’

What helped me to make up my mind was the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to Mo Yan in October this year. I realised that Mo Yan was definitely worth reading. If he was good enough to win the Nobel, he was good enough for me. One must expand one’s horizons; you can’t spend your whole life reading J.K. Rowling and Louis de Bernieres. And rural Chinese culture at the turn of the twentieth century is as good a culture as any to start getting to know.

I still haven’t managed to read Big Breasts Wide Hips, though, because, suddenly, the book has disappeared from the library; its popularity has soared. I asked the librarian (a woman in her thirties with a mean, pinched face and an advanced bosom) whether any novels of Mo Yan were available for borrowing. She banged keys on her computer, stared at the screen for a few seconds and then informed me (with ill-concealed glee) that all the novels of Mo Yan were ‘out’. Moreover there were in excess of 50 claims already on them. I could put a ‘claim’ too; it would cost me 50 pence, and I would get to read the book sometime in the spring of 2013.

‘How many copies have you got?’ I asked.

‘Of what?’

‘Of Mo Yan’s novels.’

‘Which one?’

‘“Big Breasts and Wide Hips”.’

‘I am not at a liberty to tell you that.’

‘What about his other novels?’

‘Which one?’

‘Does it matter? Are you at a liberty to give me the required information?’

‘I am afraid not.’

‘You obviously haven’t ordered enough copies. It’s ridiculous that I have to wait for three months even after giving you money to put my claim.’

In response the woman crossed her arms under her breasts. ‘It’s 50 p,’ she spat out. I looked back at her, marvelling at the contrast between her face—unpleasant, rebarbative, unwelcoming, unaccommodating, arid as the Sahara, and the breasts—generous, inviting, and hospitable. I turned away. I know when I am defeated.

‘Perhaps I shall read Mo Yan after a few months,’ I said to myself. ‘I can always read Wole Soyinka in the meanwhile,’ I told myself.

Then I came across a short article in the Guardian (where else?) in which the 2009 Nobel Laureate Herta Muller declared herself to be heartily sick that Yo Man . . . I mean Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel.

Awarding the Nobel to Mo Yan was a ‘catastrophe’, according to Muller. The choice of Mo Yan was deeply upsetting, Muller said. (What next? Nobel Peace Prize for Dr Bashar al-Assad?)

I was puzzled when I read the (admittedly sketchy) Guardian story. ‘Giving the Nobel for Mo Yan is nothing short of a catastrophe,’ says Herta Muller. Really?  The 2005 Tsunami was a catastrophe. The attack on the World Trade Centre was a catastrophe. The Iraq invasion was an even bigger catastrophe. But can the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to a Chinese author known for his depiction of Chinese rural life characterized by (according to the Nobel committee) ‘hallucinatory realism’, and described in Time magazine as ‘one of the most famous, oft banned and widely pirated of Chinese writers’ be termed as a catastrophe?  Does this act of the Nobel committee qualify as a great calamity?

Why did Herta Muller think it is a catastrophe anyway? According to the article in the Guardian, she felt like crying when she learnt that Mo Yan had won the Nobel. That’s serious. When a grown woman, a Nobel Laureate, too, gets on the verge of crying, it cannot be ignored. Notice has to be taken.

Herta Muller, it would appear, has no observation or critique of Mo Yan’s prose, his writing style, or the subjects on which he writes. Is he a mediocre writer, undeserving of the Nobel? He might be, or he might not be; Muller is silent on the matter. She is exercised about Mo Yan’s Nobel because he is too close to the establishment. He is in good books of the Chinese Communist party. That is not acceptable. Why is it not acceptable? What have Mo Yan’s political leanings got to do with his writing? It’s like saying Tiger Woods should not receive all those millions of pound worth prizes because he is a man of loose moral character, and wants sex repeatedly and vigorously, and not just with his wife.

But apparently, when it comes to the Nobel Prize in Literature, it matters; at least it matters to Herta Muller. She is cheesed off because Mo Yan hand-copied Mao Tse Tung’s Green Book on the 70^th anniversary of the speech. She is browned off because he (Mo Yan) did not come out openly in support of Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and who is currently in Jail in China for activities that the Chinese government thinks are anything but peaceful. After winning his Nobel Prize in Literature Mo Yan said that he hoped that Liu Xiaobo would achieve his freedom soon. But that was not good enough for Muller; it was too little too late. (What should Mo Yan have done? Come out openly in support of Xiaobo and hope to be his cell-mate? That was hardly going to happen, not from the man who hand-copied Mao’s Green book.)

It seems to me that the Nobel committee is in a very difficult position vis a vis Chinese authors. If they award the prize to a dissident, the Chinese authorities foam at the mouth; if they award it to someone who is acceptable to the establishment, Herta Muller goes nuts.

In 2000, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Gao Xingjian, an exiled Chinese writer (by choice, I  should add) in France since 1988, in recognition of his ‘oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity’; not because of his opposition to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The Chinese government which had banned all of Xingjian’s works reacted with anger to the award, and refused to acknowledge him as Chinese. (Technically they were probably right. At the time of his Nobel Prize Xingjian was a French citizen; and I guess his Chinese citizenship was revoked).

We do not know the reaction of Muller, herself nine years away from her own Nobel Prize in 2000, when Xingjian, known (if at all) in his native country for his absurdist dramas (rather than novels of which he has written two or three), was presented the award; but one can safely assume that she heartily approved, perhaps because she agreed with the Nobel committee that Xingjian’s oeuvre had ‘universal validity’ and offered ‘bitter insights’, but more likely because of her admiration of his opposition to (what she no doubt views as) a totalitarian regime. For the same reason she is dismayed that Mo Yan, an establishment man, has been awarded the Nobel.

The Nobel Committee finds itself in this position because it has a history of awarding the Nobel for reasons other than purely literary. Why should it be? I read somewhere that according to instructions left by Alfred Nobel, the person adjudged to have been worthy of the literary award should have ‘produced the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. You have got to admit that that is pretty ambiguous (provided the English translation of the Swedish is correct). What could be the ‘ideal’ direction? Who knows? Judging by some of the winners of the Nobel Prize in the past the committee probably takes into account the ideology espoused by the author, the social or political message conveyed through his literary work or some such things. It is not enough to have produced literary work of artistic merit and technical ability (sorry Jeffrey Archer), the literary work needs to propagate an acceptable message; or, to be precise, a message that is acceptable to the Nobel committee, or, to be even more precise (or generalized depending on how you see these things), to the liberal European (or Scandinavian) sensibilities.

Take Muller’s Nobel Prize in 2009. She was awarded the Nobel because she ‘depicted the landscape of the dispossessed with the concentration of poetry and frankness of prose’. Her (German) prose was compared to that of Kafka.

Muller, belonging to the German speaking minority in the Banat region of Romania, has repeatedly depicted the plight of the Germans post Second World War in the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. When she lived in Romania, Muller was a member of a group consisting of German-speaking writers which supported freedom of speech. Some of Muller’s novels were censored when they were first published in Romania. Muller has repeatedly claimed that she was persecuted by Securitate, Ceausescu’s secret service. According to her, agents of Securitate bugged her house, hounded her from her job, interrogated her, turned her friends against her, threatened to kill her, and generally terrorized her over the years. They visited her house when she was not at home and left obvious evidence that they had been there in her absence. How did she know? When she returned she often found chairs’ positions changed, pictures taken off walls, and butts of cigarettes (which she did not smoke) in the ashtray. Her requests to be allowed to immigrate to Germany were denied more than once before she was finally allowed to leave the country in 1987. The persecution, according to Muller, continued even after she left Romania and began living in Berlin. (Don’t you think that a tad strange? If the Communists were so keen to want to know what Muller got up to, why did they allow her to leave the country in the first place?) Did the persecution end, finally, after the Communist rule in Romania came to an end and Ceausescu met his own bloody end in front of a firing squad on the Christmas day in 1989 (as he sang The Intertionale)? No sir, it didn’t. The dreaded Securiate, Muller claims, remains intact, though, of course, it has changed its name. The post-Communist Romanian secret service, largely consisting of former Securiate agents, continues to persecute the 2009 Nobel Laureate, says the Nobel Laureate.

Is Muller paranoid? Sounds like she is. But, as the Will Smith character in The Enemy of the State (directed by the late Tony Scott who met his own violent end earlier this year), said, you are not paranoid when they are really after you. Or, putting it another way, even paranoids can have enemies. The question is: is Muller’s story representative of systematic persecution or suggestive of a systematized delusion?

There are at least two people who think Muller is mad. A secret agent from Securiate called Radu Tinu (who admitted to having spied on Muller and bugged her house), and Muller herself. (Can you really be psychotic if you know you are psychotic?)

Radu Tinu gave an interview, given after Muller was awarded the Nobel prize and used the opportunity to inform the world (in case it had missed anything) how she was persecuted in Romania. In the interview Radu claimed that Muller was a sufferer of psychosis and had lost contact with external reality. According to Radu, Muller’s house was bugged as a ‘one off incident’, not repeatedly as she has been claiming (so it’s alright, then); she was not interrogated as often as she says; and (this sounds most damning) she was sacked from her job not for refusing to cooperate with Securiate, but for smoking in the classroom and repeatedly ignoring the warning!. Tinu concluded by saying that in his considered opinion Muller was treated with ‘kid-gloves’, really, because [note this] ‘she was always surrounded by the German secret service[!]’

In an interview given in 2010 (more than 20 years after Ceausescu’s death) Muller, the daughter of an alcoholic German labourer who volunteered for Waffen-SS (and was in the same tank division as Gunter Grass, Muller’s compatriot and fellow Nobel Laureate), Muller said, ‘Ceausescu was mad; he made half of Romania mad; I am mad because of him.’

If one has read Anna Funder’s (immensely readable) Stasiland and Timothy Garton-Ash’s (not as readable, but still interesting) The File, one would have little trouble is concluding that there must be at least some truth in what Muller is saying.

Tinu, the ex-Seuriate agent, calls Muller as suffering from a mental delusion; but the examples he gives of her ‘psychosis’ seem like exaggerations by Muller (as per Tinu) of the extent of her persecution. If that is the case, if Muller has been overegging the pudding all these years, then has she been doing it deliberately to raise her profile as a crusader against repression (which resulted in the ultimate acknowledgement in the form of Nobel, in 2009)? Or, is it the case that Muller, of paranoid disposition, perhaps, and prone to see tigers behind chairs (when none exist) has been scarred irredeemably by the minor persecution (according to Tinu), which someone with more robust personality would have been able to take in her stride? (In a 2010 interview Muller said that when she applied to immigrate, the regime took 18 months to process the application. The immigration date given her was 29 February 1987, which, of course, did not exist. Muller saw this as yet another example of Communist persecution of her; it might suggest that the regime had a sense of humour, albeit macabre. She was allowed to immigrate the same year).

There is always the possibility that everything Muller is saying is true; that she was repeatedly persecuted and the persecution continued even after she left Romania and well beyond the end of the Ceausescu regime. Who might you consider, between Tinu and Muller, a person of (what I imagine will be described in the British courts of law) ‘good character’, of ‘integrity’? One is a Nobel Laureate, the other a service agent who could no sooner be converted into an honest man than a bullock cart into a Rolls Royce. I know whom I’d believe.

It should be noted that Muller’s Nobel elicited a hostile reaction in Romania, the country of Muller’s birth, and not just from crafty secret service agents with inherent talent for duplicity. A prominent journalist remarked that Muller’s reputation was based solely on her opposition to the Ceausescu regime rather than any real literary talent. ‘The Nobel Peace Prize would have suited her better than the Nobel Prize in Literature,’ the journalist remarked (I imagine, wryly).

It seems as though Muller’s anger against the Ceausescu regime is personal. She was born into the German speaking minority, which, one imagines, after the Second World War, was not the most popular of communities in Romania; and has personal experience of persecution (she says). When she finally immigrated to Germany, it must have seemed like homecoming.

Once you have an understanding of Muller’s background you can begin to appreciate (even if not agree with) what appears to be, on the surface, an intemperate, petulant outburst. Muller clearly sees herself as a victim of a repressive totalitarian regime, and sees it as a duty of every writer of integrity to oppose such regimes in the world. In her eyes Mo Yan has failed the ultimate test: he has not stood up against what Muller believes to be a tyrannical, antidemocratic regime (and democracy is the best way of governance, right?) Had Mo Yan spent some time in jail agitating about—I don’t know—political freedom, or, like Gao Xingjian, escaped to a European country, Muller would have approved. Instead he hand-copied Mao’s Green Book (although I read somewhere that early in his career some of his books were banned in China as they were deemed to be too vulgar).

When it comes to her literary oeuvre it seems as though Muller, like the 2002 Nobel Laureate, Imre Kerstz (another resident of Berlin), is a one-track pony (although the two ponies canter along different tracks). The only novel of Muller I have read (reviewed on this blog) left me feeling severely underwhelmed. (Indeed, I have become hesitant about reading Kafka, if his prose—as I read in the article on Muller—is like Muller’s.)

I shall read Mo Yan next year. I won’t be surprised if I like his work far more than Muller’s (even though Muller believes that he has clearly made the wrong choice of not aligning as an outspoken critic of and dissident against the Chinese government).