A Literary Melange on Offer!

1929 | A Potpourri of Sorts in Literature

The year 1929 has been such a remarkable year in literature for a variety of reasons, and some, which are pretty close to our hearts too!

1929 was the year when immortal comic hero Tintin appeared for the very first time in the comic book titled, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, in the pages of the youth supplement to a famed Belgian newspaper. 

There has been no stopping this quiffy-haired teenager ever since!

[Interestingly, Tintin shares his year of birth with exiled Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr, the German philosopher Habermas, the English playwright John Osborne, the German-born Dutch-Jewish diarist, Anne Frank, and former President of the US and writer, Jimmy Carter. Quite a variety, you may wonder!]

1929 was also a year that saw a lot of books and art work getting banned, proscribed or prohibited. Voltaire's Candide (1759) was the first book to become victim to the US law enforcements! The book was found ‘obscene’ by the United States Customs Service.

In England, yet another book was held obscene for its portrayal of the city’s wild, bohemian life! It was Norah C James’s maiden novel titled, Sleeveless Errand, published just that year, in 1929. Finally, it was published in Paris.

The year 1929 also saw the confiscation of 13 nude paintings done by D. H. Lawrence, from off a London gallery - on charges of obscenity and indecency - by Scotland Yard.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was also banned in the Soviet Union this very year, for the author Arthur’s ardent interest in the occult!

It was on this very same year that, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir became a couple!

On the ‘literary criticism’ front, I A Richards gave us all his Practical Criticism in which he gives illustrations from work by his students who had analysed unidentified poems on their own!

American author William Faulkner’s novel titled, The Sound and the Fury was also published this year!

An essay by Virginia Woolf titled, “A Room of One’s Own” considered to be a defining essay in the feminist literary credo, was published this year.

An intriguing short story by Dorothy Parker, titled, ‘‘Big Blonde’’ and

Rebecca West’s amazing novel titled, Harriet Hume were also published this year.

Ernest Hemingway’s famed war novel titled, A Farewell to Arms was also published this year.

Erich Maria Remarque’s war novel titled, All Quiet on the Western Front was also published this year.

The popular Expressionist play that attacked the atrocities of the imperial wars, written by Sean O’Casey titled, The Silver Tassie was published this year.

Philippe Soupault’s intriguing surrealist novel titled, Last Nights of Paris was also published this year in 1929.

Finally, on the awards front, yes! Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature, this year.

PS: This list is not exhaustive! The list goes on and on.! These are just views from this pavapetta blogger's perspective! athey! ;-)

'You do it for love. You do it for love and respect for your own life; you do it for love and respect for the world; and you do it for love and respect for the task itself.'

Talent | By Annie Dillard

A marvelous text that I loved reading and re-reading over and over again! It’s titled, ‘Talent’ and it’s written by Professor Annie Dillard. Thanks much to a vibrant research scholar and our alumna Ms. Pheba Paul for sharing this essay on 'Talent' with us. So here we go!

Talent

By Annie Dillard

There is no such thing as talent. If there are any inborn, God-give gifts, they are in the precocious fields of music, mathematics, and chess; if you have such a gift, you know it by now. All the rest of us, in all the other fields, are not talented. We all start out dull and weary and uninspired. Apart from a few like Mozart, there never have been any great and accomplished little children in the world. Genius is the product of education.

Perhaps it’s a cruel thing to insist that there is no such thing as talent. We all want to believe—at least I do—that being selfless was “easy” for Albert Schweitzer, that Faulkner’s novel just popped into his head, that Rembrandt painted because he “had to.” We want to believe all these nonsensical things in order to get ourselves off the hook. For if these people had no talent, then might the rest of us have painting or writing or great thinking as an option? We, who have no talent? I think the answer is yes, absolutely.

So I maintain that the people who have made something of their lives—the Pasteurs and Cezannes and Melvilles—were neither more talented no more disciplined nor more energetic nor more driven than the rest of us. They were simply better educated. Some of them did it the hard way, studying all the difficult works of their fields at home on their own. Others studied in school. But they all studied. You won’t find a writer who hasn’t studied the details of the works of other writers—although occasionally you find an American writer like Hemingway or Whitman who deliberately pretended to be spontaneous and unstudied, probably in order to mislead the competition. And occasionally you find a writer like Thoreau, a very well educated Harvard man whose reading was in the Greek classics and in whose work most readers overlook the evidences of scholarship and effort simply because they don’t want to see them.

It’s hard work, doing something with your life. The very thought of hard work makes me queasy. I’d rather die in peace. Here we are, all equal and alike and none of us much to write home about—and some people choose to make themselves into physicists or thinkers or major-league pitchers, knowing perfectly well that it will be nothing but had work. But I want to tell you that it’s not as bad as it sound. Doing something does not require discipline; it creates its own discipline.

People often ask me if I discipline myself to write, if I work a certain number of hours a day on a schedule. They ask this question with envy in their voices and awe on their faces and sense of alienation all over them, as if they were addressing an armored tank or a talking giraffe or Niagara Falls. We all want to believe that other people are natural wonders; it gets us off the hook.

Now, it happens that when I wrote my first book of prose, I worked an hour or two a day for a while, and then in the last two months, I got excited and worked very hard, for many hours a day. People can lift cars when they want to. People can recite the Koran, too, and run in marathons. These things aren’t ways of life; they are merely possibilities for everyone on certain occasions of life. You don’t life cars around the clock or write books every year. But when you do, it’s not so hard. It’s not superhuman. It’s very human. You do it for love. You do it for love and respect for your own life; you do it for love and respect for the world; and you do it for love and respect for the task itself.

If I had a little baby, it would be hard for me to rise up and feed that little baby in the middle of the night. It would be hard; but it certainly wouldn’t be a discipline. It wouldn’t be a regimen I imposed on myself out of masochism, nor would it be the flowering of some extraordinary internal impulse. I would do it, grumbling, for love and because it has to be done.

Of course it has to be done. And something has to be done with your life too: something specific, something human. But don’t wait around to be hit by love. Don’t wait for anything. Learn something first. Then while you are getting to know it, you will get to love it, and that love will direct you in what to do. So many times when I was in college I used to say of a course like Seventeenth Century Poetry or European History, “I didn’t like it at first, but now I like it.” All of life is like that—a sort of dreary course which gradually gets interesting if you work at it.

I used to live in perpetual dread that I would one day read all the books that I would ever be interested in and have nothing more to read. I always figured that when that time came I would force myself to learn wildflowers, just to keep awake. I dreaded it, because I was not very interested in wildflowers but thought that I should be. But things kept cropping up and one book has led to another and I haven’t had to learn wildflowers yet. I don’t think there’s much danger of coming to the end of the line. The line is endless, I urge you to get in it, to get in line. It’s a long time—but it’s the only show in town.

image: ohmyhandmadedotcom

“There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge..."

1975 | On the Literary Arena

The year 1975 has been yet another productive year in the realm of literature, spanning a wide array of genres!

1975 was the year when Anita Desai published her novel, Where Shall We Go This Summer?. As is wont with Desai, this novel is also woman-centred, where she beautifully delineates the psyche of the protagonist Sita, a character who is in search of her own self, an extremely sensitive, middle-aged, woman, trapped within the confines of a tangle of family relationships. How she discovers her real self during the course of the novel, forms the course of this novel.

Bharati Mukherjee’s novel titled Wife, was also published this year, in 1975. This is yet another novel that has for its lead character, a housewife who wants to assert her identity and frame her own rules and roles for herself, rather than submit to the norms and curbs imposed by a patriarchal society.

Buchi Emecheta’s novel titled, Second Class Citizen was also published this very year, in 1975.

‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa,” a high-renowned essay by Helene Cixous was also published this year, in 1975.

  

V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas was also published this selfsame year, in 1975.

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, was also published this year, in 1975. In this text, Foucault discusses elaborately on panopticism, and uses the term panopticon as a metaphor proper for the modern disciplinary society.

Some of the most endearing quotes from Discipline and Punish are given below - 

“There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” 

“Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was manifested...Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is this fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. And the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification. In this space of domination, disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially by arranging objects. The examination is, as it were, the ceremony of this objectification.” 

“Visibility is a trap.” 

“The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth."

to be continued...

image: amazondotcom

"Jonas has been selected to be our next Receiver of Memory."

Lois Lowry | The Giver

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul,” says Rosamond Smith or Lauren Kelly or Joyce Carol Oates, as we popularly know her!

Indeed, that’s the exact feel one gets when one reads through Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland ain’t it? Right from off the opening lines where Alice is shown so subtly graduating from real land into la la land aka wonderland!

This ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is indeed such a thrill and a joy to us, passionate readers of these ‘wonderland-type’ stories of all hues, ain’t it?

And on an added high was this special thrill we all had experienced, back then, during our childhood days, when we used to literally parse our way through every line, every paragraph and every page of this ‘Carroll classic,’ Alice in Wonderland with such wide-eyed curiosity writ large all over us!

Ooooh boyyy! This transition from the real to the magical was so deft, so subtle and so suave that there always was the highest of possibilities for us in failing to notice which was which!

Sample this from Alice in the very opening page – (and tell me sometime later, how you found the transition going for you!)

ALICE was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?'

So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" (when she thought it over afterwards it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.

And this is exactly the magical power and the mystical charm that Joyce Carol Oates [who’s – on sweet coincidence – counted on such high renown for her famed Wonderland quartet] tells us when she talks about the power of reading! She says, [I repeat] -

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.

And that’s yet another reason why John Milton famously speaks to the evocative power of a good book in such eulogizing terms, when he says that,

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life!

In fact, that is one of the supra-dynamic powers contained, by default, within any masterly literary piece, to gently make us slip, involuntarily, into another’s skin, another’s world, another’s voice or even another’s soul! And of such is the power of literature to endow us with alternative realities, hypothetical factualities, or still better, helps us imagine alternative possibilities to our realities, wherein our thoughts and our imaginations can go much beyond facts to encompass other possibilities.

Fiction that springs up on the utopian and dystopian mode, belongs to this breed of the ‘speculative’ that gives the reader the ‘what might have beens’ to another parallel reality altogether!

One such dystopian fiction is Lois Lowry’s The Giver that bespeaks to a futuristic society in which science and technology play a subtle yet vital role!

In this futuristic society, the people of the community practice ‘sameness’ in all aspects to life and living! Hence, as a fall out of this ‘conformity’, the community’s people have long lost their finer instincts that were so unique to each of them, like for example, the ability to listen to music, the ability to feel love, their ability to see colour, etc. In fact, there’s no choice, whatsoever, for them to choose from! Everything is dictated in their lives, according to a strict set of ‘rules,’ that condition their lives!

Jonas, the protagonist of the novel, is an adolescent boy who’s waiting his adult occupation to be assigned or proffered on him by the community’s Elders. 

Jonas is shocked beyond words when the Chief Elder of the community proffers on him a very special assignment! He would be the Receiver of Memory of the entire community from thence on!

The Receiver of Memory is considered a person of repute in this society, as he would be the one who takes upon himself the most difficult task of bearing the burden of the memories from all of his culture, his society and his history, and hence, he has the unique privilege of being allowed access to books, which none else could possibly do!

Snippets from the read, for y’all -

Reassuringly she placed her arm across his tense shoulders.

"Jonas has not been assigned," she informed the crowd, and his heart sank.

Then she went on. "Jonas has been selected."

He blinked. What did that mean? He felt a collective, questioning stir from the audience.

They, too, were puzzled.

In a firm, commanding voice she announced, "Jonas has been selected to be our next Receiver of Memory."

Then he heard the gasp - the sudden intake of breath, drawn sharply in astonishment, by each of the seated citizens. He saw their faces; the eyes widened in awe.

And still he did not understand.

"Such a selection is very, very rare," the Chief Elder told the audience. "Our community has only one Receiver. It is he who trains his successor.

"We have had our current Receiver for a very long time," she went on. Jonas followed her eyes and saw that she was looking at one of the Elders. The Committee of Elders was sitting together in a group; and the Chief Elder's eyes were now on one who sat in the midst but seemed oddly separate from them.

"We failed in our last selection," the Chief Elder said solemnly. "It was ten years ago, when Jonas was just a toddler. I will not dwell on the experience because it causes us all terrible discomfort."

He is to be alone, apart, while he is prepared by the current Receiver for the job which is the most honored in our community."

Alone? Apart? Jonas listened with increasing unease.

"Therefore the selection must be sound. It must be a unanimous choice of the Committee. They can have no doubts, however fleeting. If, during the process, an Elder reports a dream of uncertainty, that dream has the power to set a candidate aside instantly.

"Jonas was identified as a possible Receiver many years ago. We have observed him meticulously. There were no dreams of uncertainty.

"He has shown all of the qualities that a Receiver must have."

With her hand still firmly on his shoulder, the Chief Elder listed the qualities.

"Intelligence." she said. "We are all aware that Jonas has been a top student throughout his school days.

"Integrity" she said next. "Jonas has, like all of us, committed minor transgressions." She smiled at him. "We expect that. We hoped, also, that he would present himself promptly for chastisement, and he has always done so.

"Courage," she went on. "Only one of us here today has ever undergone the rigorous training required of a Receiver. He, of course, is the most important member of the Committee: the current Receiver. It was he who reminded us, again and again, of the courage required.

Now, for the first time in his twelve years of life, Jonas felt separate, different. He remembered what the Chief Elder had said: that his training would be alone and apart.

But his training had not yet begun and already, upon leaving the Auditorium, he felt the apartness. Holding the folder she had given him, he made his way through the throng, looking for his family unit and for Asher. People moved aside for him. They watched him. He thought he could hear whispers.

No spoilers though!

But yes! With the intense training that Jonas receives, as the newy Receiver, he is able to see beyond the ‘conformity’ or ‘sameness’! Sadly, the blessing of a good memory had been removed from all the members of the community, for reasons of security, conformity, and sameness!

So once Jonas gets to receive his training as the new Receiver, by the Giver of memories, (his trainer) from then on, he begins to look beyond this monotonous 'Sameness.' Now, he is able to see and appreciate the various colours (which his community cannot!) and he is also able to feel love, pain, hunger and starvation! (which his community members cannot!)

Hence, after this initiation into the world of memory, Jonas feels shocked that memories have been deprived from his community. So he resolves, in quiet collusion with the Giver, that it’s high time the memories of the community be restored and returned unto them, as the community seems to have completely lost its way down the ages, as he is of the convinced opinion that sameness and conformity could make a person's life utterly meaningless!

What happens next, is for y’all to read! ;-)

Well, then, a host of interesting parallels abound in the entire gamut of literature, that so sync with the story line of this absorbing dystopian read! I’d like to make a passing mention of just three of ‘em over here!

Something akin to this storyline, happens in Ayn Rand’s gripping dystopian novella titled Anthem!

The novella Anthem, is a dystopian story, taking place in some remote time in the future, in a place where freedom and individual rights have been stifled and completely dispensed with. Collectivism has replaced individualism!

Hence, the 21-year old protagonist who goes by the peculiar name, Equality 7-2521, uses only plural pronouns ("we", "our", "they") to refer to himself and to others.

Like all the other children in this collectivist society, Equality 7-2521 was also brought up, away from his parents, in collective homes.

Equality feels that he has a ‘curse’ on him, that makes him very receptive to any subject that’s being taught, and as a result so many questions pop up in his ‘scholarly’ bent of mind!

More on 'Equality' HERE, in our past post on Ayn Rand! ;-)

The next one, for passing reference would be on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Written way way back in 1953, the book is a brilliant yet shocking critique of a dystopian world in which ‘independent thinking’ and ‘enlightened questioning’ are considered taboo and anathema to society’s ‘interests’! Also, because books and the ideas contained within them enable a person to exercise independent, sane and rational judgments, they were conveniently considered ‘detrimental’ to the interests of the State and its agenda!

But to Bradbury, books are the most sacred of objects, as they are transmitters of stories! Hence, by burning books, the ruling dispensation in this dystopian American society, has curtailed the freedom of expression and thereby stifled the human spirit itself! More on Fahrenheit, on our past post HERE.

The third book for a passing mention would be, Milan Kundera’s Ignorance, in which he deals with themes pertaining to memory and forgetting. Milan beautifully brings out the bitter truth that, ‘selective memories’ here act as mere antecedents to ignorance. In other words, ‘ignorance’ here could either be a deliberate, willing action that people take part in, by avoiding or walking out of unpleasant topics in a conversation, or it could also be pretending or feigning ignorance of the past rather than facing reality or the truth! The book would sure provide such a profound platform for both discussion and dissection, particularly in the fields of Memory Studies and Exilic Literature!

To be continued…

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'When autumn strikes, we need to be prepared for the winter, the storms, the floods and the dark clouds – the season of mist. Our life goes through seasons too!'

'Surviving the Storm' | On Chaaru's Winter

Well, here goes my little take on Chaaru’s Winter: Survive the Storm and Withstand the Cold.

In fact, the subtitle in itself has oodles of incentives on offer for the reader, to launch oneself into the book full throttle.

I was equally intrigued when I chanced upon this lovely phrase on the subtitle, which reads, ‘Survive the Storm!’

Indeed, the word ‘storm’ brings to one's mind a battery of associations and significations that could connote anything from trauma, to violence, to agony, to physical violations, to terrorism, to war, to emotional upheavals, and to psychological troubles, etc.

Toni Cade Bambara’s experimental and maiden novel The Salt Eaters is a case in point. The story is about a bevy of seven sisters who are women of colour, drawn from diverse backgrounds, and are journeying towards the fictional town of Claybourne in Georgia, for an annual festival hosted by a community school there. 

The seven sisters have such vibrancy to their spirit and such dynamism to their souls that, they are so passionate and so alike in their dreams! A dream to change the world and to transform their society! And this they do, in their own little ways, by loving one another, helping one another, caring for one another, and supporting one another in their times of distress! As such, they also double up as both therapeutic healers and amazing artists touching lives and changing societies on the go!

The novel begins with Minnie Ransom, the famed, ‘fabled healer’ of the district, asking Velma, who has attempted suicide,

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?

Velma Henry turned stiffly on the stool, the gown ties tight across her back, the knots hard. So taut for so long, she could not swivel. Neck, back, hip joints dry, stiff. Face frozen. She could not glower, suck her teeth, roll her eyes, do any of the Velma-things by way of answering Minnie Ransom.

In fact, the ‘well’ here could connote to mean the wellness of Velma, and of her entire community as well, which is bound to happen only if they could survive and come safe and secure, from the ‘storms’ they face in their lives – both literal and figurative ones!

Deep into the novel, now, Campbell could sense a storm brewing – this time a literal storm!

He wondered what effect the storm would have on the Brotherhood’s pageant, on the Academy’s procession, on the police’s program, on the vigilantes’ plans, and on his future. Something more than storm was up, he figured, rejecting the idea that ordinary lightning, thunder and rain could elicit so profound a response from everyone!

[In fact, the book has around fifteen ruminations and descriptions on storm in general, and through each of the ‘storms’ Bambara is subtly conveying a beautiful message to the reader, that, the storms in the lives of the people are a result of some personal hurt or trauma that they’ve been through.]

And hence, if there should be wellness in their hearts and minds, they ought to survive the storms, by all means! No spoilers though! This 1980 book is up for grabs on e-stores as well! So that’s the byline: Surviving the storms!

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe would be our second case in point, in our discussion on ‘surviving the storm’!

The narrator, Crusoe himself, tell us, how, he had courageously withstood many storms, and mutinies on the violent sea decades back in time. However, the real test of his life had befallen him only in the year 1659 when a deadly storm had played havoc on sea and wrecked his ship. Crusoe finally finds himself marooned on the shore of a strange island! In this wretched, uninhabitable place, Crusoe had to think of various means of survival, and finally, after he had braved and survived both the literal storm at sea, and the metaphoric storm of survival in the desert land, he managed to return to England, fully well, after 28 long years.

Placing Chaaru’s Winter in this context of ‘surviving one’s storms,’ would sure make the reading more interesting, I bet!

And this claim is authenticated well enough with the epigraph to Chaaru’s book, that states, ‘The greater the tempest, the stronger you come out!’

In her authorial note that begins the book, Chaaru starts off on a conversational tone, saying,

We live in the ‘Age of Anxiety;! We have so many things to worry about and being mentally healthy is a blessing in today’s age amidst the ‘hazards of modern life’ – anxiety, depression, panic attacks and insomnia’

Later on, she has a note for the reader, when she asks,

Have you thought about getting out of the storm, stronger and smarter?

Then this book is for you!

When autumn strikes, we need to be prepared for the winter, the storms, the floods and the dark clouds – the season of mist. Our life goes through seasons too!

Chaaru ends her prefatory on a positive high, by quipping,

Let’s grow art out of all the holes left in our hearts.

On an added note, Chaaru has another interesting tagline to her profile – A caffeine addict! And well, this pure love for coffee seems to adorn quite a few of her 63 wonderful poems as well! Be it a passing reference to a coffee cup, a coffee shop, or just a cuppa coffee! It’s there, 'splashed' all across the pages! 

Chaaru’s lines have an amazing air of reality – a philosophical reality, that acts the trigger for finer ruminations and intense contemplations!

“… got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full.” 

― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

Congratulations Chaaru!

Winter | Chaaru

Heartiest congratulations to Ms Chaaru, II MA English, MCC, on publishing her second book titled, Winter, with the reputed Emerald Publishers, Chennai, India.

Chaaru’s first novel titled, Summer was published just over a year ago, in 2018!

Well, I’ve just started reading Winter, and here’s hoping to give y’all a wonderful review to Charu’s Winter, latest by tomorrow!

Congratulations Chaaru! We are so proud of you! Keep up the spirit, and here’s wishing you all good luck and best wishes, to give us all many many more such impactful books in the years to come!

Winter will soon be available on all popular e-stores!

Literary delights and delicacies of 1988 at a glance!

1988 | In Literature 

The year 1988 has proved to be a very productive year in terms of its literary output, be it in the realms of the novel, or prose, or poetry, or criticism, or on theory!

Indeed, just a cursory glance at the plethora of ‘literary delicacies’ that are available for avid bibliophiles of all hues during this year, one could only be wonder-amazed at their immense variety, their diversity and their heterogeneity.

This post intends to highlight a few of the important literary accomplishments of the year 1988! This said, however, the list for 1988 is by no means exhaustive at all! Readers could always look up an authentic encyclopedia, to watch out for more literary delicacies that happened this particular year!

To begin with, it was in the year 1988 that Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel was published.

Well, Milan Kundera’s name and fame rests on his amazing literary feats, some of which have been discussed in our past posts HERE and HERE.

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was also published this year, in 1988.

Australian novelist Peter Carey’s famed novel titled Oscar and Lucinda, was awarded the Booker Prize this year in 1988. In fact, he also has the added honour of being one of the four writers to have won the Booker Prize two times! (A prospective contender for the Nobel too!)

Pakistani novelist of Gujarati Parsi descent, who is now settled in the US, Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel titled, Ice-Candy Man, based on the partition of Indian Sub-continent, was also published this year, in 1988.

Eminent Italian novelist, semiotician and professor Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum was also published this year, in 1988.

Booker winner, Salman Rushdie’s highly controversial fourth novel titled, The Satanic Verses was also published this year, in 1988.

Eminent Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel titled, The Remains of the Day and popular British novelist Roald Dahl’s Matilda were also published this very year, in 1988.

Famed Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist was also published this year, in 1988.