Politics of the Nobel Prize
Venturing into adult literature, which is somewhere I rarely go (there’s just too much good kid lit out there). But this is an issue that turns over and over in my mind.
Peter Handke, who won the Novel Prize for literature this year, is…a pretty awful person. An apologist for genocide. A defender of a murderous dictator. They say he’s a very good writer and I’m not arguing; I’m sure he is. But should someone like this win the very highest prize we can offer?
Two editorials in the New York Times offer two different views. I was entirely convinced by both of them, which is kind of impossible.
Bret Stephens laments that “we live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics” and affirms that Handke’s “art deserves to be judged, or condemned, on its artistic merits alone.” And I find myself nodding. Some people with vile beliefs have written excellent novels. I keep Roald Dahl’s work on my shelves, despite his anti-Semitism and his misogyny. I appreciate Laura Ingalls Wilder’s perfects turns of phrase and eye for landscape, even while I wince away from her views of Native Americans.
Aleksandar Hemon points out that a writer who denies genocide enables and upholds it and makes the next mass murderer that much easier. He asks us to consider whether “a page of Mr. Handke is worth a thousand Muslim lives.” How can I argue? Handke did not just vote for policies I dislike. He lied about slaughter. He lied about guilt and innocence. How can a man with no grasp of moral truth be even a decent writer, let along a great one?
If there’s a middle ground here, it’s a shaky one that I feel uneasy standing on. But let’s say there’s a line between censoring a writer’s work (nobody is advocating that, by the way, Bret Stephens, and you shouldn’t have implied it) and giving him the higher honor we can award. There also a line between being (say) a grumpy and unpleasant human being and enabling and applauding mass murder.
Those lines must cross somewhere. We won’t ever agree on exactly where. But it’s always my belief that there are multiple books and multiple authors, every year, who could win awards. The idea of the single best book of the year, of any year, is a fantasy. There are so many good books; there are so many great writers.
Do we have to give our highest award to one who can’t acknowledge that truth exists? That genocide happened? That Muslims died?
Really, there wasn’t anybody else?
Read MoreWhat I’ve Been Reading
I mean, now I have to go read everything else Meg Medina ever wrote. Because–well, it’s so hard to write about perfection without gushing. But she doesn’t put a foot wrong. Every emotion real and powerful without being overdone, and in a novel that touches on class, race, friendship, family, illness, loss, and growing up, that’s truly something.
When you’re a writer, there’s a fine line between work that is so good it’s inspirational and work that just makes you want to go bury your head in a sandbank and never try to write another word because why bother when it’s already been done so well? This book sits right on that line.
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I was less pulled into A Heart in a Body in the World than I wanted to be, partly because it was just difficult to read about a young woman (very nearly literally) flagellating herself with guilt and long-distance running for…something undefined. I was impressed by the delicate rendering of a young woman, under intense pressure (internal and external) to be nice, tolerating toxic masculinity, trying to preform the impossible dance of being endlessly kind to an intense young man who can’t hear her no, who doesn’t notice her boundaries, who doesn’t care about her needs. Yes, this is a book that has true and important things to say about the dreadful, debilitating power of “nice” and what it does to girls who grow up learning that they must take care of everyone but themselves.
In the end, though, the book felt as if it was about these ideas rather than about Annabelle. (And the rhetorical device of leaving readers dangling–what did The Taker do? Who’s Seth Montgomery? What’s actually waiting for Annabelle in Washington, D.C.?) can be effective but it can also be overused. This time it was overused.
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It’s just not fair for Angie Thomas to be this talented. That’s all I’m saying.
What I’ve Been Reading
Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed
Definitely as good as it is rumored to be! Quick-paced but still managing to pay loving attention to the details of everyday life in a Pakistani village–the sugarcane fields, the ironing of the salwar kameez, the hot homemade rotis, trips to the market, the close connections of the village families. There’s more than enough suspense to pull a reader through, and I particularly admired how the characters are multifaceted without being overly complicated–the thug of a landlord is human enough to mourn over a lost love, the mistress of the house is kind yet spoiled, helpful as long as her own convenience isn’t marred. Amal’s father, who lets her be taken as as servant to pay off his debts, isn’t a villain–he’s desperate, helpless, and trying to take care of a family of five daughters, sacrificing one to keep the others safe. Don’t miss this one!
Read MoreMore About Reading Logs
It occurs to me that I never did tell you why Natalie Babbit agrees with me about reading logs. (You do know who Natalie Babbit is, don’t you? She wrote Tuck Everlasting. Go read it. Now.)
She wrote, not specifically about reading logs, but about the panic all around her (in 1986) that literacy skills were devolving. This is from her speech “Easy Does It.”
We are blaming our children’s poor reading and writing skills on television, an easy and pleasant machine, and also on the seductive and mysterious computer, which, I understand, is easy and pleasant too….There can be no question about the fact that these two inventions are changing our world. They are only the latest things to change our world, which has been in a constant process of change since its creation…. Still, I think it’s highly debatable that they are single-handedly responsible for our difficulties….It seems to me that it’s not so much the difficulties that are new as it is our expectations.
When I was a child in the good old days, my friends weren’t all word lovers, not all book lovers, not all good readers and writers….And all were growing up without television and computers. It seems to me as if we simply can’t expect a universally high level of enthusiasm about reading. That expectation seems new to me. And, unfulfilled, it carries with it for our teachers [and, I’d add, our kids] a heavy and inevitable load of blame. But there always was and always will be a percentage of children that finds reading stale, flat, and unprofitable….
And if we–you and I–go on believing that we can, should, and must graduate all children from high school and college into a lifetime of appreciative reading of literature, and a capacity for clear and graceful writing, we will, quite simply, break our hearts….
The only thing we can do, I guess, is fight fire with fire….Somehow [teachers] are going to have to find a way to make reading as seductive as its rivals–to make it, in other words, easy and pleasant. Because that, it seems to me, is the only thing that was better about the good old days. Books–for me, anyway–were easy and pleasant.
One of the things that makes books easy and pleasant was the practice of reading aloud. Almost any writing is easy and pleasant when it’s read aloud. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, read aloud to us every day for the last half hour, and she read aloud for pleasure, hers as well as ours. We weren’t tested on the books she read to us. We didn’t do projects or write to authors. We just relaxed and enjoyed it….
Some of the things I hear about that are being done with books in classrooms now make my blood run cold….Books have collected countless barnacles of peripheral stuff these days, and how can that do anything but turn reading into hard work?…
Use a little low cunning. Ease up on the projects, schedule time for reading aloud. Read aloud things that you really like, yourself. Everyone responds to a good story, and that is what good literature really is: a good story, well told.
I think we can go a long way if we take that route. Honey, you know, is actually good for us nutritionally. So is peanut butter. But they taste so good that we forget about the nutrition. Reading is like that. Or at least it should be. And could be. Maybe. All we can do is try.
This marvelous essay and many more are found in Barking With the Big Dogs: On Writing and Reading Books for Children.
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New England Vampires
JB exhumed skeleton beings studied at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
Forensic science and folklore can piece together some truths about life (and the afterlife) in New England in the 1700s and 1800s. Like Mercy Brown in Mercy: The Last New England Vampire, JB was a real person, a Connecticut farmer who died of tuberculosis….and whose community dug up his grave after his death, convinced he was a vampire. The Washington Post details new discoveries about him here…one of the few so-called vampire burials to be exhumed and studied.
You don’t have to travel to Transylvania to encounter homegrown vampire folklore. The same legends that led to JB’s exhumation were the basis for my YA novel Mercy. Family, loss, terror, and love–the elements of a good horror story or a supernatural legend.
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Sarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Readers will treasure the blossoming friendship between opposites in this whimsically illustrated tale. Short chapters and plenty of action make for an accessible and appealing reading experience. . . . Touching and inspiring.”
—Kirkus Reviews