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.
