Princess of Serendip

Photo: Jason Chow Photography (http://jasonchowphotography.com/)

One always feels happy when a writer one has read gets some official recognition.

Later this month it’ll be time again for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Every year when the prize is announced, I realise – all over again – how little I know of world literature.

There are 105 winners since 1901. I can’t claim to have heard of more than 35 writers from that list, and only eight before they won. (I started reading seriously only in the late 1970s).

An aside: Wouldn’t it be great if Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood won the prize this year? After all, no Canadian has ever won the Nobel for Literature.

I read Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door if No Return recently, and wrote here about her incisive insight on Naipaul.

She is now the third poet-laureate of Toronto. That makes me happy. It’s also fitting tribute to the genius of a poet and writer who paints images with words and brings to life abstract feelings of emptiness.

Sample this:

“There is a sense in the mind of not being here or there, of no way out or in. As if the door has set up its own reflection. Caught between the two we live in the Diaspora, in the sea in between. Imagining our ancestors stepping through these portals one senses people stepping out into nothing; one senses a surreal space, an inexplicable space. One imagines people so stunned by their circumstances, so heartbroken as to refuse reality. Our inheritance in the Diaspora is to live in this inexplicable space. That space is the measure of our ancestors’ step through the door toward the ship. One is caught in the few feet in between. The frame of the doorway is the only space of true existence.”

Discovering Dionne Brand was serendipitous.

Images:

Original photo: http://www.toronto.ca/culture/poet_laureate.htm.

Warhol effect: http://bighugelabs.com/popart.php

Experiment in reading

Geoff Pevere, the book columnist for Toronto Star, has written about an amazing experiment that I'd like to share with everyone I know. 

Writing in Saturday Star's entertainment section Short stories reveal that less really can be more, he says, "In the best short fiction, style and vision commingle in a way that is unique to the form. This is also one of its most acute pleasures. A couple of years ago, I went on a trip accompanied by three volumes: The Complete Short Stories on Ernest Hemingway, Selected Stories by Alice Munro and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. I kept them in rotation, reading one story by each author before picking up the next book. The effect, as a reader, was remarkable. Not only was I able to appreciate the quality of the stories on their own -- and you couldn't ask for three more variously amazing writers -- I was stunned by the consistency of tone I encountered when the rotation would bring me back to the world of a particular writer. And that's the point: it was a world. Or three, really: Munro's a place of quiet, localized desperation; Hemingway's a stark frontier for the testing of existential mettle; Nabokov's a glided hall of distorted delusion and stained grandeur.

"This is the very thing: While each tale lived and breathed and haunted as a distinct entity on its own, it also took on an altogether richer life when considered in the context of other stories by the same author. This was the vitality provided by the overriding authority of the author's voice."