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.
