Tag Archives: nobel

The Big Wave and The Pavilion of Women, by Pearl S. Buck

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This is the next in my series of explorations of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Pearl S. Buck, born in 1892, won the award in 1938, making her the third youngest winner after Rudyard Kipling and Sinclair Lewis (just edging out Sigrid Undset). I had already read and enjoyed her best known book, The Good Earth (1936); her short 1948 piece The Big Wave is her second most popular on LibraryThing, and her novel Pavilion of Women second-placed on Goodreads, so since the financial and time costs were not excessive, I read them both.

Both of those books postdate the Nobel award, which was explicitly for “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces”. The first half of that refers to The Good Earth (1931) and its sequels, Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935), and the second half to her less well-remembered biographies of her mother and father, respectively The Exile and Fighting Angel, both published in 1936.

One has to be alert to the potential difficulties of a Western author being presented as the world’s expert on Chinese life, and I must say that in her favour, Pearl S. Buck’s Nobel lecture contains almost nothing about her own work, but urges he audience to get acquainted with Chinese literature, particularly The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Dream of the Red Chamber (she mentions Journey to the West as well, but doesn’t put it on the same level, though today it is generally counted as one of the Four Great Novels).

A video of the ceremony survives, with Pearl S. Buck and Enrico Fermi (who is significantly the shorter of the two) receiving their awards from the very tall King Gustav V, who had turned 80 earlier that year.

As I said, The Big Wave is quite a short book for younger readers. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

But each day Jiya was still tired. He did not want to think or to remember—he only wanted to sleep. He woke to eat and then to sleep. And when Kino’s mother saw this she led him to the bedroom, and Jiya sank each time into the soft mattress spread on the floor in the quiet, clean room. He fell asleep almost at once and Kino’s mother covered him and went away.

It’s the story of two friends, Jiya and Kino, who live in a fishing village in Japan. Kino and his family live on the hill; Jiya’s family live by the shore, and along with the rest of their village are wiped out by a tsunami. Jiya, devastated beyond words, is adopted by Kino’s family, and as he grows up, he puts his life back together, declining to be adopted by the local aristocrat and falling in love with Kino’s sister. It’s well-expressed and compact. You can get The Big Wave here. I am pretty sure that I had read it as a child.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Pavilion of Women is:

“I must choose the woman at once,” she told herself. The household could not be at ease in this waiting. She would therefore today send for the old woman go-between and inquire what young women, country bred, might be suitable. She had already brought to her own memory all others that she knew, but there was not one whom she wanted. All were either too high or too low, the daughters of the rich, who would be proud and troublesome, or so foreign-taught that they might even want her put away. Or they were the daughters of the poor who would be equally proud and troublesome. No, she must find some young woman who had neither too much nor too little, so that she might be free from fear and envy. And it would be better, she reflected, if the young woman were wholly a stranger, and her family strangers, too, and if possible, distant, so that when she came into the house she would take up all her roots and bring them here and strike them down afresh.

Pavilion of Women is a longer book, but not too long. It is about Madame Wu, of a wealthy family, who on her fortieth birthday decides that she will no longer have sex with her husband, procures him a concubine and embarks on her personal voyage of self-discovery, with the help of the foreign priest Father Andrei. It is not just about China, but about the development of women’s rights across the world, and about how Westerners who blunder into an ancient society thinking they have all the answers are doomed to failure, while those who take the time to sit and listen may learn something. But the core of the book is Madame Wu and her relationships with her husband, his other lovers, and their sons and daughters-in-law, at a time of massive social change in China. She is not a completely sympathetic character, but she and her environment are vividly drawn. You can get Pavilion of Women here.

I won’t go out of my way to complete my Pearl S. Buck bibliography, but at the same time I’ll snap up any other books that I happen to spot in passing.

Next in this sequence is the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral; her work is not easily available in English translation, and I will have to be satisfied with a volume of Selected Prose and Prose-Poems.

The Big Wave was also my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Enchanted April, by Elizabeth vom Arnim.

Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Donna Ester fece fare il pane apposta, un pane bianco e sottile come ostia, quale si fa solo per le feste, e di nascosto dalle sorelle comprò anche un cestino di biscotti. Dopo tutto era un ospite, che arrivava, e l’ospitalità è sacra. Donna Ruth a sua volta sognava ogni notte l’arrivo del nipote, e ogni giorno verso le tre, ora dell’arrivo della diligenza, spiava dal portone. Ma l’ora passava e tutto restava immoto intorno.Ester made bread just for the occasion, white and thin as a holy wafer, the kind usually made only for festivities. She also secretly bought a basket of cookies. After all, a guest was coming and hospitality is sacred. Every night Ruth dreamed about their nephew’s arrival, and every day around three, the hour the coach came, she would spy from the doorway. But the hour went by and everything was quiet.

Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, the second woman to get it after Selma Lagerlöf, and the second Italian after Giosuè Carducci (who I must admit I have not otherwise heard of). The citation was “for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general”. She had been nominated almost every year since 1914 by the former Swedish ambassador to Italy, Carl Bildt, whose great-great-great-nephew of the same name served as prime minister and then foreign minister of Sweden.

Reeds in the Wind / Canne al vento, is her best known book, and it’s noticeable that her Nobel nominations started as soon as it was published in 1912. I have to say it’s not very cheerful. It’s about a declining noble family in Sardinia, and the tension between the two surviving sisters, the son of the sister who fled to the mainland years before, and the old retainer who is the guardian of the dark family secret that is eventually revealed.

It reminded me of The Leopard, but the Deledda’s Pintor family are more decayed and less up themselves than di Lampedusa’s Salina family. There are some nice landscape moments, but otherwise I was not overwhelmed by it. You can get Reeds in the Wind here.

I know it’s a small sample, but two out of two European winners of early Nobel Prizes for Literature that I have sampled so far have gone in for rural drama. Next up in this project is Kristin Lavransdottir, by Sigrid Undset, which I fear is going to be more of the same.

East of Eden, by John Steinbeck

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Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un):

Adam’s father Cyrus was something of a devil—had always been wild—drove a two-wheeled cart too fast, and managed to make his wooden leg seem jaunty and desirable. He had enjoyed his military career, what there was of it. Being wild by nature, he had liked his brief period of training and the drinking and gambling and whoring that went with it. Then he marched south with a group of replacements, and he enjoyed that too—seeing the country and stealing chickens and chasing rebel girls up into the haystacks. The gray, despairing weariness of protracted maneuvers and combat did not touch him. The first time he saw the enemy was at eight o’clock one spring morning, and at eight-thirty he was hit in the right leg by a heavy slug that mashed and splintered the bones beyond repair. Even then he was lucky, for the rebels retreated and the field surgeons moved up immediately. Cyrus Trask did have his five minutes of horror while they cut the shreds away and sawed the bone off square and burned the open flesh. The toothmarks in the bullet proved that. And there was considerable pain while the wound healed under the unusually septic conditions in the hospitals of that day. But Cyrus had vitality and swagger. While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents. When he had his new leg, and painfully knew his condition, he hobbled about for days, looking for the girl. He told his bunkmates what he was going to do when he found her. He planned to cut off her ears and her nose with his pocketknife and get his money back. Carving on his wooden leg, he showed his friends how he would cut her. “When I finish her she’ll be a funny-looking bitch,” he said. “I’ll make her so a drunk Indian won’t take out after her.” His light of love must have sensed his intentions, for he never found her. By the time Cyrus was released from the hospital and the army, his gonorrhea was dried up. When he got home to Connecticut there remained only enough of it for his wife.

First of the books that I acquired this summer from the old family home in Dublin, and what a start. It’s a grand generational story of Adam Trask, who moves from Connecticut to the Salinas Valley in California with his pregnant wife Cathy. After she gives birth to twins (it is implied that at least one of them is fathered by Adam’s brother), she shoots Adam in the shoulder and leaves, settling down discreetly to work at and then own the brothel in the next town over. The two boys, Aron and Caleb, grow up, and we move with deliberate and measured pace to a grand conclusion which I won’t spoil. The book was apparently Steinbeck’s favourite of his own writing and must have helped him get the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years after it was published.

There’s also a very interesting character from Northern Ireland in the first part of the book, Sam Hamilton, based on Steinbeck’s own grandfather from Ballykelly, which is about 25 km from the home of my own ancestors in Aghadowey (where my distant cousins still farm the land and live in the house built by my 4x great-grandfather). The Irish Times summarises Steinbeck’s description of his own visit to Ballykelly in 1952 and you can read the original here. That must have been after he wrote the Hamilton parts of East of Eden though, as he says he went to Ireland in the summer and the book was published in September. It’s rare enough to find Northern Ireland intruding in classic literature, and his depiction of Sam Hamilton, his wife Liz and their many children is intense and sympathetic, even though the main thrust of the novel is the story of the Trasks. (Steinbeck even puts himself as a child into the novel, as a casual onlooker.)

There’s also the intriguing character of Lee, who starts as a Chinese servant in the Trasks’ house, but ends up as a family member, shifting from pidgin to standard American English and supplying Biblical exegesis and philosophy when it is needed; there’s a particularly effective moment of Marcus Aurelius at the end. The women fare less well; Cathy / Kate is meant to be the villain, and I found her just a bit too evil at a couple of key moments, and Aron’s girlfriend Abra was just a bit too virtuous to be real. Still, Steinbeck was trying, I think.

It’s a great book, all in all. You can get East of Eden here.

This was my top unread top non-genre book, my top unread book acquired this year and the top unreviewed book in my LibraryThing catalogue. Next on all three piles is The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.

The Emperor of Portugallia, and Jerusalem, by Selma Lagerlöf

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This is the start of my new project, to read at least one book by each of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man, in order. I am bracing myself for Kristin Lavransdatter in a couple of rounds, but the process starts gently with Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) of Sweden, who in 1909 became the tenth winner but the first woman, and also the first Swede, to get the award, “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination, and spiritual perception that characterize her writings”

I thought it was worth looking up the presentation speech at the 1909 Nobel ceremony.

Purity and simplicity of diction, beauty of style, and power of imagination, however, are accompanied by ethical strength and deep religious feeling… what makes Selma Lagerlöf’s writings so lovable is that we always seem to hear in them an echo of the most peculiar, the strongest, and the best things that have ever moved the soul of the Swedish people. Few have comprehended the innermost nature of this people with a comparable love… Such an intimate and profound view is possible only for one whose soul is deeply rooted in the Swedish earth and who has sucked nourishment from its myths, history, folklore, and nature. It is easy to understand why the mystical, nostalgic, and miraculous dusk that is peculiar to the Nordic nature is reflected in all her works. The greatness of her art consists precisely in her ability to use her heart as well as her genius to give to the original peculiar character and attitudes of the people a shape in which we recognize ourselves.

Perhaps it comes across as a little defensive of the Swedish Academy for having chosen one of their own. By contrast, Lagerlöf’s own speech is attractively humble, regretting that her late father was not present.

Anyone who has ever sat in a train as it rushes through a dark night will know that sometimes there are long minutes when the coaches slide smoothly along without so much as a shudder. All rustle and bustle cease and the sound of the wheels becomes a soothing, peaceful melody. The coaches no longer seem to run on rails and sleepers but glide into space. Well, that is how it was as I sat there and thought how much I should like to see my old father again. 

I was first put onto Lagerlöf by my distant cousin Frederic Whyte (1876-1940), who wrote about her in his 1926 memoir A Wayfarer in Sweden. On his recommendation, as it were, I read and enjoyed Gösta Berling’s Saga and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. Of her other books, The Emperor of Portugallia had the most raters on Goodreads and Jerusalem the most owners on LibraryThing, and both are short, so I decided to read both (but was only partially successful, as I will explain).

The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Emperor of Portugallia is:

Det var Erik i Fallas hustru, som skulle bära barnet till dopet. Hon åkte till prästgården med den lilla flickan i sina armar, och Erik i Falla själv gick bredvid kärran och körde. Den första vägbiten ända fram till Duvnäs bruk var ju så dålig, att den knappt kunde kallas för väg, och Erik i Falla ville vara försiktig, då han hade det odöpta barnet att köra för.It was the wife of Eric of Falla who was to bear the child to the christening. She sat in the cart with the infant while Eric of Falla, himself, walked alongside the vehicle, and held the reins. The first part of the road, all the way to Doveness, was so wretched it could hardly be called a road, and of course Eric had to drive very carefully, since he had the unchristened child to convey.

Published in 1914, five years after Lagerlöf had got her Nobel Prize, it is about a tenant farmer who is devoted to his daughter; but when he falls on hard times, she goes to Stockholm to work. It becomes obvious to everyone in the village that she has become a sex worker in the city; her father at first is in denial, and then suffers a mental breakdown, believing himself to be the Emperor of Portugallia and his absent daughter his princess. There is a somewhat glurgy ending, but the rest is interesting enough. It is exactly the sort of thing that the Swedish Academy would have had in mind in celebrating the pious and honest people of the countryside, oppressed by the landowners but supported by the Church. I did not think it was especially deep, but there is nothing very wrong with it. You can get The Emperor of Portugallia here.

Having (as I thought) finished Jerusalem, and checking out the plot points on Swedish Wikipedia, I was alarmed to realise that I had only the first of the two parts of the novel, published respectively in 1901 and 1902. (I also had intended to read the earlier book first, but I got that wrong too.) None of the English translations available in ebook format seems to include the second part of Jerusalem – I suspect that they have all been scraped from Project Gutenberg, which has only the first half. So my review is of the first half of the book only.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Jerusalem, is:

– Vad ska det där bli till? sade mor Märta.“What’s all that for?” asked Mother Martha.

It’s another portrait of a changing society in rural Sweden, which I did not find as compelling as The Emperor of Portugallia – too many people with similar names, and the narrative skips through a couple of generations perhaps a little too easily. But the last few chapters, showing a fringe Christian cult gaining control of most of the population and then brainwashing them into moving from Sweden to Jerusalem, are well done. In the second volume, which I wasn’t able to get hold of, apparently they get to Jerusalem and have a really hard time. Claes Annerstedt’s Nobel ceremony speech, quoted above, raves about Jerusalem, but I think more about the second part than the first. You can get the first part of Jerusalem here.

The rural Swedes moving to Jerusalem are a genuine historical episode; they joined up with the American settlers whose legacy is the very pleasant American Colony Hotel to the north of the Old City.

Anyway, I think that in retrospect, there were much more interesting things going on in literature in 1909 than Selma Lagerlöf, but she is a logical enough laureate if you’re interested in the kind of literature that the Swedish Academy was – bearing in mind that the previous laureates were Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosuè Carducci, Rudyard Kipling and Rudolf Christoph Eucken.

Next in this sequence of mine is the winner of the Nobel Prize four years after Selma Lagerlöf – Rabindranath Tagore, who got the award in 1913. I shall be reading his poetry collection Gitanjali.