Our favorite Nobel

Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature this year – one of the most awaited announcements every October – is South African novelist JM Coetzee, whose Dusklands is his most visible book in the bookstores.

Coetzee is also a previous winner of the Booker Prize, another prestigious award for British writers as well those of the monarchy’s former territories and protectorates. This probably makes him the first Booker Prize winner to also bag the Nobel, although by no means likely to be the last. The British and their former colonies have too many good writers, and in fact a novel once shortlisted for the Booker, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard by Timothy Mo, is set in the island of Cebu, if we’re not mistaken, where the former crown colony resident has since quietly set up shop.

But, back to Coetzee. The novelist was introduced to us by Greg Brillantes sometime in the 1980s, when he used to lend books and other stuff to the Midweek staff, in which magazine he was senior editor.

Upon handing Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K to us, Mr. Brillantes said without much fanfare: "You can keep it as long as you want."

This usually meant that he did not expect the book to be returned to him, for any one or a combination of the following reasons: 1) He already had a duplicate; 2) he wanted to get rid of the book as he sorted through his library; or 3) he had a mind to enlighten and educate the young staff.

Life and Times of Michael K is not the only Coetzee book handed to us by Señor Greg, the other being Foe, which he handed to us with the expected "keep it as long as you want" missive, because it was a duplicate.

Foe we haven’t read, buried somewhere in the ramshackle library that doubles as a cat’s playground in the apartment. Michael K we’ve read twice, probably more than 10 years apart between readings, and both times what is most obvious is Coetzee’s being a classic storyteller.

Except for a shift in persona in the second section which is like a bridge in the plot, the narrative proceeds at a conventional pace, with meticulous descriptions and a cool detachment to engage the reader. One might even venture to say that this is textbook naturalism at its best, the same kind that NVM Gonzalez did so well in his Mindoro stories.

Reading through Michael K again, one can conclude that Coetzee – at least in this novel written in the early 1980s – has little or no use for postmodern or deconstructionist pyrotechnics. It has a beginning, middle and end, and we can sleep well the same way we did with the storytellers of old.

One of the more popular Nobel winners, and in fact continues to remain so, is the 1982 laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Colombian writer’s novels and collections of short fiction are readily available in most bookstores, and his acknowledged masterwork that forever changed the face of Latin American literature, One Hundred Years of Solitude, can even be chanced upon in book sales and second hand bargain bins, complete with marginal notes and gaudily underlined passages.

It was in a restroom in a Bay Area restaurant while we were relieving our soused selves that we happened to read pasted on the wall, a news item announcing Marquez’s winning literature’s premier prize. Having finished our ablutions, we proceeded straightaway to tear out the vital news item to take back to our companions at the table, to which we could only exchange high fives and more toasts of beer.

And while Solitude is Marquez’s best known work, quite a number of Marquez fans prefer the later Love in the Time of Cholera, a love story unusual in that while it is not a run of the mill tearjerker, it has enough passion, lyricism and humor threatening to spill from the pages.

Other works by Marquez worth any reader’s while to check out are the fiction collection Strange Pilgrims, and the reconstructed reportage News of a Kidnapping. In the latter book we can assume that Marquez, who started out as a reporter in a Bogota newspaper, sticks to the facts, and so is less an experiment in metafiction as his other book based on a real life story but which reads like a novella, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.

Word has it that Marquez’s latest book is an autobiography, certainly a signal event from one who has been said to be dying of lymphatic cancer.

Marquez, whose surname is actually Garcia, has acknowledged the influence of another Nobel laureate in the creation of his mythical Macondo. Marquez pays tribute to the American William Faulkner, whose novel The Sound and the Fury helped pushed the boundaries of post-war literature.

Few of Faulkner’s novels can be found in bookstores, though his Nobel acceptance speech about man eventually prevailing has been widely anthologized in textbooks and other inspirational compilations.

The American writer at times dared to use the point of view of a mentally challenged person in his fiction, like that of a moron, which entailed necessary adjustments in spelling, punctuation and grammar. This gave a big headache to editors, but provided gist for filmmakers exploring unconventional modes of telling a story.

If there is such thing as sheets of sound in music, Faulkner’s prose would be sheets of words, whose volume and density can baffle the uninitiated.

He too has created a mythical place in literature, enough to inspire Marquez’s Macondo, for how else but in myth and memory are novels born and Nobel prizes won.