The Nobel shortlist: a speculator's guide

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The good academicians at the Swedish Academy are slated to announce the next Nobel literature laureate this Thursday, and somehow I don't think General and Mrs Miriam Abacha will win. Last year, the counterparts to the venerable Academy at the Ig Nobel awards bestowed the 2005 Ig Nobel prize for literature to the Nigerian spammers, for their "a bold series of short stories", featuring a cast of rich characters""General Sani Abacha, Mrs Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others.

Spammers aside, speculation this year has been intense. Many favour Amos Oz, Orhan Pamuk, Philip Roth or Haruki Murakami. A few renegades hope for a courageous choice""Mario Vargas Llosa, perhaps, or even Salman Rushdie.

While the Academy embargoes the Prize shortlists for fifty years, word about contenders tends to leak out. Many of the authors in serious consideration are little known in India, and they may not win the Nobel this year, but they are well worth reading. Try discovering them before they get the nod from the Academy.

There's Belgian polymath Hugo Claus""novelist, film-maker, poet, artist""who adopted Artaud as a father-figure and was once married to the star of the Emmanuelle films. There's Italian author Antonio Tabuchhi, whose long list of works includes Indian Nocturne, a short novella whose narrator travels to India in search of a friend who has vanished somewhere around Bombay and Goa.

There's the Dutch travel writer and poet Cees Nooteboom, who says of his book Nooteboom's Hotel: "I've built a hotel in my mind that is poor and rich, that is third world and first world, that has a view on one side of the Polar Ice Sea and on the other side of a Caribbean beach. It has an unending number of rooms, and in each of these rooms I have written something because much of my work has been done while travelling." There's Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, who once said of her opus, the Algerian Quartet, "In my first books, I went veiled. In the quartet, I expose myself." There's Harry Mulisch, whose mother was Jewish but who escaped the camps because his German father was a Nazi collaborator: "I didn't so much experience the war," he wrote, "I am the Second World War."

The strongest contenders, though, are poets""many also exiles. Some, like Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish, command loyal and large followings. Ali Ahmad Said was born in Syria, studied in Damascus and then became a political prisoner. He left for Lebanon, and eventually settled in France, adopting the pen-name of Adonis. He borrows from Arab tradition and history, but considers himself closer to "Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Goethe and Rilke".

Palestinian poet Darwish was six years old when his family were forced to leave Galilee after the Israelis razed their village to the ground. He has been jailed, and lived in exile until 1996. In "I Come From There", he writes: "I walked this land before the swords/ Turned its living body into a laden table; /... I learnt all the words and broke them up/ To make a single word: Homeland....."

There are echoes from their lives in the life of Korea's best-known""and stunningly prolific""poet Ko Un, who has been a gravedigger ("the world is piled with death/ our chore is burying them every day"), a monk, a drunkard (he counts this as a serious profession) and a teacher in his time. In prison for defying the regime, he came up with the idea for an epic poem where he would record the life of everyone he had ever known or heard about. Similarly, Chinese dissident poet Bei Dao has spent years in exile from Beijing. He tried to return in 1994 and was held and questioned at the airport for hours. "I came into this world/ with only blank pages, rope and my fingers;/ therefore, before final judgements are given,/ I need to speak in all the voices of the defendants."

I leave you with two poets who have also been seen as serious contenders, though exile and dissidence may not have been the pattern of their lives. Of Danish writer Inger Christensen's many works, my favourite is probably Alphabet, a slim abecedary that covers the alphabet from 'a' to 'n'. Here's section 4: "doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;/ killers exist, and doves, and doves;/ haze, dioxin, and days;/ days exist, days and death;/ and poems / exist; poems, days, death."

And this is from Swedish psychologist and poet Tomas Transtoemer's 'Morning Bird Song': "Fantastic to feel how my poem is growing/ while I myself am shrinking./ It's getting bigger, it's taking my place,/ it's pressing against me./ It has shoved me out of the nest./ The poem is finished."

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com