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.

Cinema and Literature: The Brönte Sisters

The interplay between literature and cinema is as old as the medium of celluloid. Transferring novels, short stories, plays, and even poetry, to the screen has always played a crucial role in popularizing literature. Books usually provide films with the raw material, with a narrative line and characters which are already described. Anyway, books leave more to our imagination and films may not be completely faithful to their plots. 

Having just watched Emily Brönte´s Wuthering Heights  may make me reread this masterpiece of elemental and universal passions. Sweeping love, hate, revenge... Set against the Yorkshire moors, a landscape as wild as the relationship of the main characters, the novel is considered the heart and soul of the romantic spirit. The film is full of really powerful scenes, one of them when Heathcliff tears Catherine´s grave open, removing one side of her coffin. Gothic elements also appear in Charlotte Brönte´s Jane Eyre and the new adaptation released a few months ago. There are persecutions, a threatening atmosphere, a gloomy manor house, madness and cruelty. But this 19th century novel also heralds a new kind of heroine, one whose independence, persistence and virtuous integrity let her triumph over class barriers to win equal status with the man she loves.

Obviously, watching a film is not the same as reading a novel. They are different aesthetic genres with different conventions. Each of them has its own language and art of seduction, but both can explain the meaning of the world, who we are and what we are like. Both have the ability of entertaining, appealing to our emotions and moving us. They are simply good allies and, however good or bad an adaptation may be, it is always good news if it sends viewers back to the literary source.

Dickens, 200th birthday

If Dickens was immortal, he would be 200 years old today. If he was alive nowadays, he would probably have lots of friends on Facebook and he would be trending topic on Twitter quite often. He enjoyed such a fame and popularity during his lifetime that no other British writer has equalled him since then. Even Queen Victoria is said to have read his novels fervently. These were published serially in newspapers and delivered in monthly instalments, which were awaited eagerly.

The portrait he made of Victorian London is unforgettable, part of our cultural subconscious: an age of Puritan morality and strict discipline, with fathers depicted as god-like figures allowed to beat children and submissive wives; that awful fog that even made pedestrians die from walking into the Thames; the horror of prisons where whole families had to live due to debts; the chimney sweeps and the cruel conditions for orphans at boarding schools... He was the first great novelist in English to make childhood central to his fiction. Deeply wounded by the experiences of his early life, he was not only an entertainer but also an influential spokesman who attacked that new capitalist society and soulless and sordid industrialism.

Although he wrote for adults, not for children, I first encountered Dickens when I was only eight. I remember it perfectly because it was thanks to a classics illustrated comic book I got as a present for my First Holy Communion. Among other versions by authors such as Jules Verne or Stevenson, it included A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield. Those well-rounded and enduring characters struck me. So trapped and fascinated did I feel that, when I started to read those lively plots, I could not give them up until the end. I was just a child, but now I believe it is incredible that at that early age I already got acquainted with Paris and the French Revolution or 19th London. Sometimes I wonder what kind of literary and historical references children have nowadays. We used to follow the adventures of D´Artagnan and The Three Musketeers, The Quixote, Tom Sawyer or Willy Fog in his 80 Days Around The World. Now they follow Sponge Bob and Dragon Ball... Maybe it is also just a question of belonging to another age...