Nadine Gordimer

Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, Nadine Gordimer was one of the noteworthiest chroniclers of oppressive life in South African apartheid, a system that crippled humanity. But in her novels and short stories there was much more than writing about the injustices of racial segregation; her concern was also on relationships and this worldwide confusion of human values. 

Rereading The Late Bourgeois World this week, I´ve rediscovered Liz´s story in a novella overtly political - but also of moral dilemmas and search of the self - which makes use of imprisonment as a metaphor of the human condition.

The act of reading according to Doris Lessing

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”     (The Golden Notebook, 1962) 

 Doris Lessing, another Nobel Prize for Literature who has just passed away...  The image of her, sitting on her doorstep in London, surrounded by the journalists who had just communicated her the news when coming back from grocery shopping is now a legend. The Swedish Academy had phoned her home a few hours earlier, but she wasn´t in ("Oh! Christ! ... I couldn´t care less", she said to them).  Something which also said a lot of her character was the fact of having turned down the offer of becoming Dame of the British Empire because "a British Empire no longer exists". However, there was no problem in accepting the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature.

In her novels and short stories, she explored a great variety of topics ranging from the mystery of being female in a male-dominated world or the degradation of the educative systems nowadays to racism in British colonial Africa or her disillusionment with communism.

Doris Lessing was one of the most vividly representative literary figures of our times, and she will be best remembered for her semiautobiographical Children of Violence and the experimental The Golden Notebook. Many readers will sorrow the loss of her courageous outspokenness, her intellectual restlessness and fierce curiosity about the changing world around us.

Seamus Heaney, Dante and Asturias

Seamus Heaney, who was born Catholic in a predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland, never forgot the world where he came from. He was intensely aware of the often violent political and religious struggles that plagued his country and the unrest and oppression it entailed. At the same time, his roots and poetry lay deep and were grounded in that Irish rural countryside. 

The Little Canticles of Asturias is a beautiful tribute to a region he loved and used to visit because one of his sisters-in-law lived here. Besides, Asturian landscape lovingly evoked his homeland. This work is also a version of The Divine Comedy, the well-known 14th c. epic poem where Dante describes his journeys through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, an allegory of the soul´s pilgrimage towards God. Like the Italian genius, Heaney looks into human experience trying to explain the mystery of our own identity. 

All along three stanzas, he renders a splendid account of a drive in Asturias. In the first one, it is midnight, they are driving through an industrial area among furnaces and hot refineries and they curse the hellish roads. (And then at midnight as we started to descend / into the burning valley of Gijón, / .../ for we almost panicked there in the epic blaze / of those furnaces and hot refineries / ... / and gathered speed and cursed the hellish roads.). 

In the second canticle, during the purgatorial next morning, the farmers who are working in the fields on both sides of the road wave at him. Their rural labour brings him memories of his childhood in Ireland. (Next morning on the way to Piedras Blancas / I felt like a soul being prayed for, / ...). In the third and last stanza, he arrives at a paradise of rivers under sunlight. (At San Juan de la Arena / it was a bright day of the body. / Two rivers flowed together under sunlight. / ...). The final words (of distant Compostela, stela, stela) emulate the Italian stelle which also finish the three canticles of Dante´s masterpiece.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize in 1995, and one of the most productive, lauded and beloved of the living poets, has passed away. Ireland, Asturias and the whole world mourn his death. Life is ephemeral, we know,  but let's remember poetry is not. Cherished and celebrated, his verses will remain forever.

Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

"Life is a chaos between two silences", said Samuel Beckett. The Irish playwright was only sure of two things: he had been born and he had to die. He left Dublin and travelled to Paris with the obsession of meeting James Joyce. He joined the novelist´s literary circle there and became his assistant. But Lucia, Joyce´s schizophrenic daughter, fell in love with him and his refusal of her caused Ulysses´s author to ban him from his home.

Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, Beckett is one of the great names of the Theatre of the Absurd. First written in French, Waiting for Godot is a metaphor of the absurdity of human existence, of man´s loneliness and boredom and of the deseperate search for meaning in life. Throughout the play, and while they are waiting for Godot, the main characters, two tramps, try to fill in the empty time on an eternal Saturday which follows Good Friday but which never becomes Easter Sunday. Very little 

happens, life is meaningless. Like them, we also spend much of our time waiting constantly for something new to happen so that our life has sense. Their incoherent dialogue dramatically shows our failure to communicate. Literary critics have wondered who this Godot is, someone who seems to be on the point of arriving but who never does so. Beckett used to say that if he had had the answer, he would have written it.

One day, Beckett was flying to Paris when the chief flight attendant said: "I´m speaking in Captain Godot´s name..." Immediately, he wanted to jump out of the plane up in the air.