The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001-2010

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2002

Imre Kertész “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003

John M. Coetzee “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2004

Elfriede Jelinek “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005

Harold Pinter“who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006

Orhan Pamuk “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”.

Half of my book Istanbul is about the city; the other half chronicles the first 22 years of my life. I remember my huge disillusionment when it was finished. Of all the things I had wanted to express about my life, of all the memories that I considered the most crucial, only a few had found their way into the book. I could have written another twenty volumes describing the first twentytwo years of my life, each one drawing from a different set of experiences. It was then that I discovered that autobiographies served not to preserve our pasts, but to help us forget them.

I was born in Istanbul in 1952. My grandfather was a successful civil engineer and businessman who made his fortune building railroads and factories. My father followed in his footsteps, but instead of making money, he kept losing it. I was educated in private schools in Istanbul, and after studying architecture for three years, I dropped out, enrolled in a journalism course, and set out to become a writer. Between the ages of 7 and 22, I dreamed of being a painter. During my childhood and early youth, I painted with a happy and passionate sense of purpose. But by the time I stopped painting at the age of 22, I knew that I had no choice but to devote my life to art. At the same time, I had no idea why I gave up painting at the age of 22 and began to write my first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons. It was to explore that mystery that, years later, I wrote Istanbul.

When I look back on my life up to the age of 54, I see a person who has worked long hours at a desk, in both happiness and in misery. I have written my books with care, patience, and good intentions, believing in each and every one. Success, fame, professional happiness… these did not come to me easily. Today my novels have been translated into 55 languages, but the hardest thing was finding a Turkish publisher for my first novel. It took me four years to find a publisher to take on Cevdet Bey and Sons. This despite the fact that it had won a national prize for unpublished novels …

In 1982 at about the same time that I published my first novel, I married Aylin Türegün, and because we had both grown up in the same affluent, westernised Istanbul neighbourhood, walking the same streets and before we ever knew each other attending the same schools, I used to tease her by saying I had ‘married a girl from my village’. Our daughter was born in 1991, and we named her after Rüya, the heroine of The Black Book.

I have made my living exclusively from writing. Between 1985 and 1988, I was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, while my wife was working on her doctorate at the same university. I was greatly impressed by the richness of America’s libraries, bookstores, and museums. My wife and I were divorced in 2002. She and our daughter remain my best friends. In 2006, a month before I won the Nobel Prize, I began to teach at Columbia University for one semester a year.

For me, a good day is a day like any other, when I have written one page well. Except for the hours I spend writing, life seems to me to be flawed, deficient, and senseless. Those who know me well understand how dependent I am on writing, tables, pens, and white paper, but they still urge me to ‘take a bit of time off, do some travelling, enjoy life!’ Those who know me even better understand that my greatest happiness is writing, so they tell me that nothing that keeps me far from writing, paper, and ink will ever do me any good. I am one of those rare happy creatures who have been able to do what they most desired, and who have been able to devote themselves to that task to the exclusion of all else.

I spent my childhood in a large family surrounded by uncles and aunts. My two first novels, Cevdet Bey and Sons, and Silent House, are family sagas. I enjoy describing crowded family gatherings the meals they eat together, the feuds, and the quarrels. But with the passage of time, as our fortunes dwindled and our family dispersed, it gradually ceased to be a source of protection or a centre to which I felt obliged to return. Every night, when I curl up in bed and pull my quilt over me, I am swept away by a sweet fear that walks between solitude and dreams, the beauties of life, and its cruelties, and it is then that I shiver in the same way I did when I listened to scary stories, or read fairy tales, as a child.

In Silent House, it was through my grandmother’s monologues that I tried to penetrate this world between sleep and wakefulness. There are traces of that same world in The White Castle, which also explores the shadows between dreams and reality, imagination and history. But it was in The Black Book, which I began in 1985, that I felt I found my own voice. I was 33 years old at the time, living in New York, and asking myself hard questions about who I was, and about my history. I spent all my time in my room in the Columbia Library, reading and writing. During my time in New York, my longing for Istanbul mixed in with my fascination for the wonders of Ottoman, Persian, Arab, and Islamic culture. The Black Book was a book that took me a very long time to plan, a book that I wrote without knowing exactly what I was doing, feeling my way forward like a blind man. I am still surprised that I was able to finish it.

The New Life is a lyrical exploration of the thing I first discovered in The Black Book, this time not in Istanbul, but in Anatolia. My Name is Red is the novel that perplexes my mother: she always tells me that she cannot understand how I wrote it …There is nothing in any of my other novels that surprises her; she knows that I drew upon the stuff of my own life. But in My Name is Red there is an aspect that she cannot connect with this son she knows so well, this son about whom she is certain that she knows everything… This must, in my view, be the greatest compliment to any writer can hear: to hear from his mother that his books are wiser than he is.

What has surprised me the most was the popularity of Snow. In the beginning I thought this was down to growing interest in political Islam, the clash of East-West stereotypes and their reflections in everyday life. But now I have come to think that what sets the book apart is what transpires in the Hotel Asia when the political activists are furiously preparing their statements. But in so thinking, I may have again misread my readers’ minds. In the early nineties, when I was known only in Turkey, and Turkish journalists would sometimes ask me in a hostile way why people liked my books, and why I was so widely read, I’d come up with all sorts of reasons that I liked a great deal, but now I don’t believe a single one of them. Later on, when I slowly came to be read all over the world, foreign journalists and literary critics began to ask the same question. I write the books I myself would like to read. And sometimes I take this to mean that everyone in the world shares my feelings. This attempt to explain the popularity of my books is probably as misguided as all the others. Even so, talking about one’s books is as pointless as talking about one’s life. In the end, a writer will see his life as more important than his books. But it is those books that give life its meaning and value. From the age of 22, when I began to write novels, I have never been able to separate my life from my novels. I think that the books I shall write in the future will be thought more entertaining, and more important, than my life. I take this to mean that a person must look ahead to the moment of his death, that he must resign himself to that moment. Despite this, it still seems that there is a lot of time left.

Because as I write these words at the age of 54 in April 2007, I know that my life has long since passed its midpoint, but, having written for thirty-two years now, I believe that I am at the midpoint of my career. I must have another thirty-two years in which to write more books, and to surprise my mother and other readers at least one more time.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007

Doris Lessing “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2008

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009

Herta Müller “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010

Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.

Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city. During his childhood in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Piura, a city in the north of Peru, he believed that his father had died. However, this was a lie told by his mother to conceal their tortuous separation. The truth emerged when, in 1946, his father appeared unexpectedly to take him away from his mother’s parents, moving with him and his mother to Lima. This revelation signified an abrupt change in Vargas Llosa’s life, from the pampered upbringing of a feminine environment to the hostile treatment of an authoritarian father. At his side, he was to discover fear, injustice and violence for the first time.

During these years in which he left his childhood behind, devouring the works of Dumas and Victor Hugo, the political climate in Peru was a reflection of Vargas Llosa’s home life. The dictator Manuel Odría rose to power in 1948 and over the next eight years, while Vargas Llosa studied law and literature at the University of San Marcos, he imposed rigid controls on social life which stifled individuality, engendering scepticism, defeatism and frustration among Peruvians. This period later inspired his novel Conversation in the Cathedral, published in 1969.

The dominant presence of authoritarianism in both public and private spheres led Vargas Llosa to strongly condemn systems which, in one way or another, sought to inhibit individual initiative and restrict personal freedom. His literary works, starting with The Time of the Hero (1963) – one of the key novels which pioneered the ‘Boom’ period in Latin American literature – reflect his loathing of arbitrary manifestations of power and the absence of law which enables the strongest to impose their will. The inspiration for this novel was the time he spent between 1950 and 1951 in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, where he was sent by his father to stifle his literary ambitions through military discipline. However, Vargas Llosa managed to rebel against his paternal yoke, not only pursuing a writing career, but also marrying his maternal uncle’s sister-in-law Julia Urquidi, who was eleven years older than him and divorced. He drew on these experiences to write his novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, published in 1977.

Another fundamental experience in his life was a journey he made in the Amazon jungle in 1958, which inspired novels such as The Green House (1966), Captain Pantoja and the Special Service(1973), The Storyteller (1987) and The Dream of the Celt (2010). As opposed to other city dwellers who first came into contact with the remote jungle landscapes of Peru, which are still inhabited by primitive indigenous tribes, Vargas Llosa found neither exoticism nor harmony between humanity and nature but rather despotism, violence and cruelty. The absence of law and institutions exposed the jungle natives to the worst humiliations and acts of injustice by colonists, missionaries and adventurers, who had come to impose their will through the use of terror and force. What he heard, saw and felt in the jungle convinced Vargas Llosa that the archaic Peru which survived in the depths of the Amazon and the peaks of the Andes should be integrated into a modern Peru, the only Peru which, due to its legal framework, could stop the pillaging and wrongful acts committed against minorities and the most vulnerable sectors of Peruvian society.

Until the early seventies, Vargas Llosa perceived in socialism and the Cuban revolution a series of ideas which embodied modernity and a solution to the moral vices and economic underdevelopment of Latin America. However, when the revolution showed signs of having become an oppressive dictatorship where writers felt their freedom to create was restricted, Vargas Llosa distanced himself from Fidel Castro and socialism and began to advocate reformism, liberal pluralism, democracy and the free market. His changing political inclination brought with it a new way of understanding Latin American problems. The revolution, the dictatorship, nationalism, racism and religious mysticism, all of which are present throughout the course of the republican history of Latin America, now proved to be symptoms of a deeper problem related to intolerance and dogmatism. A host of leaders, rebels and saviours had instigated fanatical attempts to impose a closed view of the world with no concern for the consequences. This human tendency, which is ever present in Latin America and the root cause behind innumerable tragedies, provided the plot for his novel The War of the End of the World in 1981.

In 1987 the attempt by the then president of Peru, Alan García, to nationalise the banking industry was vehemently rejected by Vargas Llosa, who saw this project as a strategy to accumulate power and place the media and businesses in government hands. With the support of large sectors of the population, Vargas Llosa organised protest marches which catapulted him into the political arena. His Movimiento Libertad, which opposed Alan García, evolved into the Frente Democrático, three years later. As the leader of this party he ran in the presidential elections in 1990. However, he lost in the second round to the engineer Alberto Fujimori, who then shut down congress and established a despotic and corrupt dictatorship for which he is currently serving a sentence. Memories of these years can be found in his book of memoirs A Fish in the Water (1993).

Since 1990 Vargas Llosa has published a fortnightly column in the Spanish daily newspaper El País, which is reprinted in different media sources all over the world. In these, he states his opinion regarding the most important current political, social and cultural events. He also teaches literature courses at American universities and writes literary essays. Although Vargas Llosa began writing plays in the 1980s, it was not until 2005 that he decided to take to the stage himself to portray his characters. Aitana Sánchez Gijón, the actress who accompanies him in this new adventure, has described him as a promising young actor.