Doris Lessing

Biography
From the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin,
HarperPerennial, 1995
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education.

But like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time." The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."

In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, "in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. "There is a whole generation of women," she has said, speaking of her mother's era, "and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them." Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century - their "climate of ethical judgement" - to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1951-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.

Attacked for being "unfeminine" in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf "tries to live with the freedom of a man" - a point Lessing seems to confirm: "These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.

Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 and If the Old Could..., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 appeared in 1995 and received the James Tait Black Prize for best biography.

Addenda (by Jan Hanford)

In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

She collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to create the unique and unusual graphic novel, Playing the Game. After being out of print in the U.S. for more than 30 years, Going Home and In Pursuit of the English were republished by HarperCollins in 1996. These two fascinating and important books give rare insight into Mrs. Lessing's personality, life and views.

In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal appearances to promote the book. In an interview she describes the frustration she felt during a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography: "I told my publishers it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another book. But they wouldn't listen. This time round I stamped my little foot and said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview." And the honors keep on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996.

Late in the year, HarperCollins published Play with A Tiger and Other Plays, a compilation of 3 of her plays: Play with a Tiger, The Singing Door and Each His Own Wilderness. In an unexplained move, HarperCollins only published this volume in the U.K. and it is not available in the U.S., to the disappointment of her North American readers.

In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time, providing the libretto for the opera "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five" which premiered in Heidelberg, Germany in May. Walking in the Shade, the anxiously awaited second volume of her autobiography, was published in October and was nominated for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography/autobiography category. This volume documents her arrival in England in 1949 and takes us up to the publication of The Golden Notebook. This is the final volume of her autobiography, she will not be writing a third volume.

Her new novel, titled "Mara and Dann", was been published in the U.S in January 1999 and in the U.K. in April 1999. In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, "I adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind." 1999 also saw her first experience on-line, with a chat at Barnes & Noble (transcript). In May 1999 she will be presented with the XI Annual International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya.

December 31 1999: In the U.K.'s last Honours List before the new Millennium, Doris Lessing was appointed a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done "conspicuous national service." She revealed she had turned down the offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire because there is no British Empire. Being a Companion of Honour, she explained, means "you're not called anything - and it's not demanding. I like that". Being a Dame was "a bit pantomimey". The list was selected by the Labor Party government to honor people in all walks of life for their contributions to their professions and to charity. It was officially bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II.

In January, 2000 the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled Leonard McComb's portrait of Doris Lessing.

Ben, in the World, the sequel to The Fifth Child was published in Spring 2000 (U.K.) and Summer 2000 (U.S.).

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Her most recent novel is The Cleft.

All Nobel Laureates in Literature

All Nobel Laureates in Literature

2007 - Doris Lessing
2006 - Orhan Pamuk
2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J. M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kertész
2001 - V. S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - Günter Grass
1998 - José Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
1993 - Toni Morrison
1992 - Derek Walcott
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1990 - Octavio Paz
1989 - Camilo José Cela
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1986 - Wole Soyinka
1985 - Claude Simon
1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
1983 - William Golding
1982 - Gabriel García Márquez
1981 - Elias Canetti
1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
1979 - Odysseus Elytis
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
1976 - Saul Bellow
1975 - Eugenio Montale
1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
1973 - Patrick White
1972 - Heinrich Böll
1971 - Pablo Neruda
1970 - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
1969 - Samuel Beckett
1968 - Yasunari Kawabata
1967 - Miguel Angel Asturias
1966 - Shmuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
1965 - Mikhail Sholokhov
1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre
1963 - Giorgos Seferis
1962 - John Steinbeck
1961 - Ivo Andric
1960 - Saint-John Perse
1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1957 - Albert Camus
1956 - Juan Ramón Jiménez
1955 - Halldór Laxness
1954 - Ernest Hemingway
1953 - Winston Churchill
1952 - François Mauriac
1951 - Pär Lagerkvist
1950 - Bertrand Russell
1949 - William Faulkner
1948 - T.S. Eliot
1947 - André Gide
1946 - Hermann Hesse
1945 - Gabriela Mistral
1944 - Johannes V. Jensen
1943 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1942 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1941 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1940 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanpää
1938 - Pearl Buck
1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
1936 - Eugene O'Neill
1935 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
1934 - Luigi Pirandello
1933 - Ivan Bunin
1932 - John Galsworthy
1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1930 - Sinclair Lewis
1929 - Thomas Mann
1928 - Sigrid Undset
1927 - Henri Bergson
1926 - Grazia Deledda
1925 - George Bernard Shaw
1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont
1923 - William Butler Yeats
1922 - Jacinto Benavente
1921 - Anatole France
1920 - Knut Hamsun
1919 - Carl Spitteler
1918 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1917 - Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
1916 - Verner von Heidenstam
1915 - Romain Rolland
1914 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
1913 - Rabindranath Tagore
1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann
1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck
1910 - Paul Heyse
1909 - Selma Lagerlöf
1908 - Rudolf Eucken
1907 - Rudyard Kipling
1906 - Giosuè Carducci
1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz
1904 - Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
1903 - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
1902 - Theodor Mommsen
1901 - Sully Prudhomme

Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata, son of a highly-cultivated physician, was born in 1899 in Osaka. After the early death of his parents he was raised in the country by his maternal grandfather and attended the Japanese public school. From 1920 to 1924, Kawabata studied at the Tokyo Imperial University, where he received his degree. He was one of the founders of the publication Bungei Jidai, the medium of a new movement in modern Japanese literature. Kawabata made his debut as a writer with the short story, Izu dancer, published in 1927. After several distinguished works, the novel Snow Country in 1937 secured Kawabata's position as one of the leading authors in Japan. In 1949, the publication of the serials Thousand Cranes and The Sound of the Mountain was commenced. He became a member of the Art Academy of Japan in 1953 and four years later he was appointed chairman of the P.E.N. Club of Japan. At several international congresses Kawabata was the Japanese delegate for this club. The Lake (1955), The Sleeping Beauty (1960) and The Old Capital (1962) belong to his later works, and of these novels, The Old Capital is the one that made the deepest impression in the author's native country and abroad. In 1959, Kawabata received the Goethe-medal in Frankfurt.

Yasunari Kawabata died in 1972 (suicide).

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1968/kawabata-bio.html

Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)



French novelist of the realist school, best-known for MADAME BOVARY (1857), a story of adultery and unhappy love affair of the provincial wife Emma Bovary. As a writer Flaubert was a perfectionist, who did not make a distinction between a beautiful or ugly subject: all was in the style. The idea, he argued, only exists by virtue of its form - its elements included the perfect word, cunningly contrived and verified rhythms, and a genuine architectural structure.

"Has it ever happened to you," Leon went on, "to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?"
"I have experienced it," she replied.
"That is why," he said, "I especially love the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears." (from Madame Bovary)
Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen into a family of doctors. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, a chief surgeon at the Rouen municipal hospital, made money investing in land. Flaubert's mother, Anne-Justine-Caroline (née Fleuriot), was the daughter of a physician; she became the most important person in the author's life. Anne-Justine-Caroline died in 1872.

Flaubert started to write during his school years. At the age of fifteen he won a prize for an essay on mushrooms. Actually his work was a copy. A disappointment in his teens - Flaubert fell in love with Elisa Schlésinger, who was married and some 10 years his senior - inspired much of his early writing. His bourgeois background Flaubert found early burdensome, and eventually his rebel against it led to his expulsion from school. Flaubert completed his education privately in Paris.

In the 1840s Flaubert studied law at Paris, a brief episode in his life, and in 1844 he had a nervous attack. "I was cowardly in my youth," Flaubert wrote once to George Sand. "I was afraid of life." He recognized from suffering a nervous disease, although it could have been epilepsy. However, the diagnosis changed Flaubert's life. He failed his law exams and decided to devote himself to literature. In this Flaubert was helped by his father who bought him a house at Croisset, on the River Seine between Paris and Rouen.

In 1846 Flaubert met the writer Louise Colet. They corresponded regularly and she became Flaubert's mistress although they met infrequently. Colet gave in Lui (1859) her account of their relationship. After the death of both his father and his married sister, Flaubert moved at Croisset, the family's country home near Rouen. Until he was 50 years old, Flaubert lived with his mother - he was called ''hermit of Croisset.'' The household also included his niece Caroline. His maxim was: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Although Flaubert once stated ''I am a bear and want to remain a bear in my den,'' he kept good contacts to Paris and witnessed the Revolution of 1848. Later he received honors from Napoleon III. From 1856 Flaubert spent winters in Paris.

Flaubert's relationship with Collet ended in 1855. From November 1849 to April 1851 he travelled with the writer Maxime du Camp in North Africa, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. It took several Egyptian guides to help Flaubert to the top of the Great Pyramid - the muscular, almost six feet tall author was at that time actually relatively fat. On his return Flaubert started Madame Bovary, which took five years to complete. It appeared first in the Revue (1856) and in book form next year. The realistic depiction of adultery was condemned as offensive to morality and religion. Flaubert was prosecuted, though he escaped conviction, which was not a common result during the official censorship of the Second Empire. When Baudelaire's provocative collection of verse, The Flowers of Evil, was brought before the same judge, Baudelaire was fined and 6 of the 100 poems were suppressed.

Madame Bovary was published in two volumes in 1857, but it appeared originally in the Revue de Paris, 1856-57. - Emma Bovary is married to Charles Bovary, a physician. As a girl Emma has read Walter Scott, she has romantic dreams and longs for adventure. "What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides." Emma seeks release from the boredom of her marriage from love affairs with two men - with the lawyer Léon Dupuis and then with Rodolphe Boulanger. Emma wants to leave her husband with him. He rejects the idea and Emma becomes ill. After she has recovered, she starts again her relationship with Léon, who works now in Rouen. They meet regularly at a hotel. Emma is in heavy debts because of her lifestyle and she poisons herself with arsenic. Charles Bovary dies soon after her and their daughter Berthe is taken care of poor relatives. Berthe starts to earn her living by working in a factory. - The novel created an outrage. Flaubert was even tried and acquitted on charges of immorality for it. The character of Emma was important to the author - society offered her no escape and once Flaubert said: "Emma, c'est moi." Delphine Delamare, who died in 1848, is alleged to have been the original of Emma Bovary.

In the 1860s Flaubert enjoyed success as a writer and intellectual at the court of Napoleon III. Among his friends were Zola, George Sand, Hippolyte Taine, and the Russian writer Turgenev, with whom he shared similar aesthetic ideals - dedication to realism, and to the nonjudgmental representation of life. Their complete correspondence was published in English in 1985. ''The thought that I shall see you this winter quite at leisure delights me like the promise of an oasis," he wrote to Turgenev. "The comparison is the right one, if only you knew how isolated I am! Who is there to talk to now? Who is there in our wretched country who still 'cares about literature'? Perhaps one single man? Me! The wreckage of a lost world, an old fossil of romanticism! You will revive me, you'll do me good.'' (from Flaubert & Turgenev. A Friendship in Letters, edited and translated by Barbara Beaumont, 1985)

Flaubert was by nature melancholic. His perfectionism, long hours at his work table with a frog inkwell, only made his life harder. In a letter to Ernest Feydeau he wrote: "Books are made not like children but like pyramids... and are just as useless!" Flaubert's other, non-literary life was marked by his prodigious appetite for prostitutes, which occasionally led to venereal infections. "It may be a perverted taste," Flaubert said, "but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects." His last years were shadowed by financial worries - he helped with his modest fortune his niece's family after their bankruptcy. Flaubert died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 8, in 1880.

In the 1870s Flaubert's work gained acclaim by the new school of naturalistic writers. His narrative approach, that the novelist should not judge, teach, or explain but remain neutral, was widely adopted. Flaubert himself detested the label Realist - and other labels. Among Flaubert's later major works is SALAMMBÔ (1862), a story of the siege of Carthage in 240-237 BC by mercenaries. The novel inspired in 1998 Philippe Fénélon's opera, the libretto was written by Jean-Yves Masson. Also the composers Berlioz and Mussorgsky had planned opera adaptations, but they were never realized. TROIS CONTES (1872) was a collection of three tales. The Italian writer Italo Calvino has praised it as "one of the most extraordinary spiritual journeys ever accomplished outside any religion."

L'ÉDUCATION SENTIMENTALE (1869) was a panorama of France set in the era of the Revolution of 1848. Its first version (LA PREMIÈRE ÉDUCATION SENTIMENTALE) Flaubert had finished in 1845. The story depicted the relationship between a young man and an older married woman. Fréderic Moreau, the hero, is a gifted young man, full of vague longings, but he constantly meets people who have nothing else to offer but pessimism and cynicism. The ironic title, A Sentimental Education, means the education of feeling, and refers to the failure of Flaubert's generation to achieve its ideals. LA TENTATION DE SAINT ANTOINE (1874) was a book that influenced the young Freud. Its story was based on the story of the 4th-century Christian anchorite, who lived in the Egyptian desert and experienced philosophical and physical temptations. Flaubert spent decades years with the work. Part of its fantastic mode and setting was inspired by a Brueghel painting. Flaubert's book on bourgeois stupidity, BOUVARD ET PÉCUCHET, was left unfinished at his death, and was first published in La Nouvelle Revue (1880-81), edited by Flaubert's niece Caroline Commanville. The two protagonists, two copy clerks who move to the country, have often been considered forefathers of Beckett's characters. Bouvard and Pécuchet was partly inspired by Bartlémy Maurice's story 'Les Deux greffiers' (1841), which had appeared in the magazine La Gazette fdes tribunnaux. Some of the banalities which Flaubert found unbearable, he had already collected in Dictionary of Received Ideas (1911).

For further reading: Gustave Flaubert: Sa vie, ses romans, son style by Albert Thibaudet (1922, rev. ed. 1935); Gustave Flaubert and the Art of Realism by Anthony Thorlby (1956); The Novels of Flaubert by Victor Brombert (1966); Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty by Jonathan Culler (1974, rev. ed. 1985); Flaubert and the Historical Novel by Anne Green (1982); Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies by Michal Peled Ginsburg ( 1986); Bibliographie des études sur G. Flaubert by D.J. Colwell (1988-90); Gustave Flaubert by William J. Berg, et al (1997); The King & the Adulteress: A Psychoanalytical and Literary Reinterpretation of Madame Bovary and King Lear by Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca, Colin Rice (1998); Flaubert: A Life by Geoffrey Wall (2001) - See also: Guy de Maupassant, Jean-Paul Sartre's biography of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille

Selected works:

MADAME BOVARY, 1857 - (trans. by Francis Steegmuller) - Rouva Bovary (suom. Eino Palola) - films: 1917 (Life Number Two), dir. by William Nigh ; 1932 (Unholy Love), dir. by Albert Ray ; 1934, dir. by Jean Renoir ; 1949, dir. by Vincente Minnelli ; 1991, dir. by Claude Chabrol, starring Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Francois Balmer, Christophe Malavoy, Jean Yanne ; BBC television series, 2000, dir. by Tim Fywell, screenplay by Heidi Thomas, starring Frances O'Connor, Hugh Bonneville. Also Dvid Lean's film Ryan's Daughter (1970), starring Sarah Miles, Robert Mitchum, Chris Jones, written by Robert Bolt, was inspired by Flaubert's book. The story was set in Ireland in the mid-1910s.
SALAMMBÔ, 1862 - Salambo (suom. Jalmari Finne, 1908; Annikki Suni) - films: 1924, dir. by Pierre Marodon; 1959, dir. by Sergio Grieco
L'ÉDUCATION SENTIMENTALE,1869 - A Sentimental Education - Sydämen oppivuodet (suom. J.A. Hollo) - film 1961, dir. by Alexandre Astruc
TROIS CONTES, 1872 - Three Tales - Kolme kertomusta (suom. Kauko Kare)
LE CANDIDAT, 1874 - The Candidate
LE TENTATION DE SAINT ANTOINE, 1874 - The Temptation of Saint Anthony (trans. by Lafcadio Hearn) - Pyhän Antoniuksen kiusaus (suom. Jorma Kapari)
BOUVARD ET PÉCUCHET, 1881 - Bouvard and Pécuchet (trans. by Alban J. Krailsheimer) - Bouvard ja Pécuchet (suom. Antti Nylén)
PAR LES CHAMPS ET PAR LES GRÉVES, 1886
LE SEXE FAIBLE, 1910 - The Feeble Sex
DICTIONNAIRE DES IDÉES RECUES, 1911 - Dictionary of Received Ideas - Valmiiden ajatusten sanakirja (suom. Mirja Halonen ja Ville Keynäs)
CORRESPONDANCE, 1926-33
LA PREMIÈRE ÉDUCATION SENTIMENTALE, 1963 - The First Sentimental Education
ŒUVRES COMPLÈTES I-II, 1964
Flaubert & Turgenev: A Friendship in Letters, 1985 (edited and translated by Barbara Beaumont)

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/flaubert.htm

Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal Saadawi

by Jennifer McBride
Nawal El Saadawi is a leading Egyptian feminist, sociologist, medical doctor and militant writer on Arab women's problems. She is one of the most widely translated contemporary Egyptian writers, with her work available in twelve languages.

Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931 in Kafr Tahla, a small village outside of Cairo. El Saadawi was raised in a large household with eight brothers and sisters. Her family was relatively traditional, El Saadawi was "circumcised" at the age of six, and yet somewhat progressive, El Saadawi's father insisted that all of his children be educated. El Saadawi describes her mother as "a potential revolutionary whose ambition was buried in her marriage." Her mother died when she was 25, and her father shortly thereafter, both unable to witness the incredible accomplishments their daughter went on to make.

Despite limitation imposed by both religious and colonial oppression on rural women, El Saadawi attended the University of Cairo and graduated in 1955 with a degree in psychiatry. After completing her education, El Saadawi practiced psychiatry and eventually rose to become Egypt's Director of Public Health. El Saadawi met her husband, Sherif Hetata, also a doctor, while working in the Ministry of Health, where the two shared an office together. Hetata shared El Saadawi's leftist views, himself having been imprisoned for 13 years for his participation in a left-wing opposition party.

Since she began to write over 25 years ago, El Saadawi's books (27 in all) have concentrated on women, particularly Arab women, their sexuality and legal status. From the start, her writings were considered controversial and dangerous for the society, and were banished in Egypt. As a result, El Saadawi was forced to publish her works in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1972, her first work of non-fiction, Women and Sex, which as the title suggests, dealt with the highly taboo subject of women and sexuality, and also the sensitive subjects of politics and religion. This publication evoked the anger of highly placed political and theological authorities, and the Ministry of Health was pressured into dismissing her. Under similar pressures she lost her post as Chief Editor of a health journal and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt.

From 1973 to 1976 she researched women and neurosis in the Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine. Her results were published in Women and Neurosis in Egypt in1976, which included 20 in-depth case studies of women in prisons and hospitals. This research also inspired her novel Woman at Point Zero, which was based on a female death row inmate convicted of murdering her husband that she met while conducting the research.

In 1977, she published her most famous work, The Hidden Face of Eve, which covered a host of topics relative to Arab women such as aggression against female children and female genital mutilation, prostitution, sexual relationships, marriage and divorce and Islamic fundamentalism.

From 1979-180 El Saadawi was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Program in Africa (ECA) and the Middle East (ECWA).

Later in 1980, as a culmination of the long war she had fought for Egyptian women's social and intellectual freedom, an activity that had closed all avenues of official jobs to her, she was imprisoned under the Sadat regime, for alleged "crimes against the state." El Saadawi stated "I was arrested because I believed Sadat. He said there is democracy and we have a multi-party system and you can criticize. So I started criticizing his policy and I landed in jail." In spite of her imprisonment, El Saadawi continued to fight against oppression. El Saadawi formed the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1981. The AWSA was the first legal, independent feminist organization in Egypt. The organization has 500 members locally and more than 2,000 internationally. The Association holds international conferences and seminars, publishes a magazine and has started income-generating projects for women in rural areas. The AWSA was banned in 1991 after criticizing US involvement in the Gulf War, which El Saadawi felt should have been solved among the Arabs.

Although she was denied pen and paper, El Saadawi continued to write in prison, using a "stubby black eyebrow pencil" and "a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper." She was released in 1982, and in 1983 she published Memoirs from the Women's Prison, in which she continued her bold attacks on the repressive Egyptian government. In the afterword to her memoirs, she notes the corrupt nature of her country's government, the dangers of publishing under such authoritarian conditions and her determination to continue to write the truth:


When I came out of prison there were two routes I could have taken. I could have become one of those slaves to the ruling institution, thereby acquiring security, prosperity, the state prize, and the title of "great writer"; I could have seen my picture in the newspapers and on television. Or I could continue on the difficult path, the one that had led me to prison... Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies. Nothing is more perilous than knowledge in a world that has considered knowledge a sin since Adam and Eve... There is no power in the world that can strip my writings from me.
Even after her release from prison, El Saadawi's life was threatened by those who opposed her work, mainly Islamic fundamentalists, and armed guards were stationed outside her house in Giza for several years until she left the country to be a visiting professor at North American universities. El Saadawi was the writer in residence at Duke University's Asian and African Languages Department from 1993-1996. She also taught at Washington State University in Seattle.

El Saadawi continues to devote her time to being a writer, journalist and worldwide speaker on women's issues. Her current project is writing her autobiography, laboring over it for 10 hours a day.

http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/saadawi.html

Naguib Mahfouz

Egyptian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, and was the first Arabic writer to be so honored. Many in the Arab world saw the prize as somewhat ironic, not least because the work for which Mahfouz received the prize had been published at least three decades earlier. In spite of millions readers in the Arab world, the author's books are still unavailable in many Middle Eastern countries on account of his support for President Sadat's Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978. Mahfouz wrote some 40 novels and short story collections, 30 screenplays, and many plays.
"Zaabalawi!" he said, frowning in concentration, "You need him? God be with you, for who knows, I Zaabalawi, where you are?"
"Doesn't he visit you?" I asked eagerly.
"He visited me some time ago. He might well come now; on the other hand I mightn't see him till death!"
I gave an audible sigh and asked:
"What made him like that?"
He took up his lute. "Such are saints or they would not be saints," he said laughing.
"Do those who need him suffer as I do?"
"Such suffering is part of the cure!"
(from 'Zaabalawi,' 1965)
Naguib Mahfouz was born in Gamaliya, Cairo. The family lived in two popular districts of the town, in al-Jamaliyyah, from where they moved in 1924 to al-Abbasiya, then a new Cairo suburb; both have provided the backdrop for many of the author's writings. His father, whom Mahfouz described as having been "old-fashioned", was a civil servant, and Mahfouz eventually followed in his footsteps. In his childhood Mahfouz read extensively. His mother often took him to museums and Egyptian history later became a major theme in many of his books.
The 1919 revolution in Egypt had a strong affect on Mahfouz, although he was at the time only seven years old. From the window he often saw English soldiers firing at the demostrators, men and women. "You could say," he later noted, "that the one thing which most shook the security of my childhood was the 1919 revolution." After competing his secondary education, Mahfouz entered the University of Cairo, where he studied philosophy, graduating in 1934. By 1936, having spent a year working on an M.A., he decided to become a professional writer. Mahfouz then worked as a journalist at Ar-Risala, and contributed to Al-Hilal and Al-Ahram. The major Egyptian influence on Mahfouz's thoughts of science and socialism in the 1930s was Salama Musa, the Fabian intellectual.
Before turning to the novel, Mahfouz wrote articles and short stories, 80 of which were published in magazines. His first published book was a translation of James Baikie's work on ancient Egypt. Mahfouz's first collection of stories appeared in 1938. In 1939 he entered government bureaucracy, where he was employed for the next 35 years. From 1939 until 1954, he was a civil servant at the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and then was appointed director of the Foundation for Support of the Cinema, the State Cinema Organization. In 1969-71 he was a consultant for cinema affairs to the Ministry of Culture. After marrying Atiyyatallah Ibrahim in 1954, he moved from the family house in al-Abbasiya to an apartment overlooking the Nile in Jiza.
Most of Mahfouz's early works were set in al-Jamaliyyah. ABATH AL-AQDAR (1939), RADUBIS (1943), and KIFAH TIBAH (1944), were historical novels, written as part of a larger unfulfilled project of 30 novels. Inspired by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) Mahfouz planned to cover the whole history of Egypt in a series of books. However, following the third volume, Mahfouz shifted his interest to the present, the psychological impact of the social change on ordinary people.
Mahfouz's central work in the 1950s was The Cairo Trilogy, a monumental work of 1,500 pages, which the author completed before the July Revolution. The novels were titled with the street names Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street. Mahfouz set the story in the parts of Cairo where he grew up. They depict the life of the patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family over three generations in Cairo from WW I to the 1950s, when King Farouk I was overthrown. With its rich variety of characters and psychological understanding, the work connected Mahfouz to such authors as Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Galsworthy. Mahfouz ceased to write for some years after finishing the trilogy. Disappointed in the Nasser régime, which had overthrown the monarchy in 1952, he started publishing again in 1959, now prolifically pouring out novels, short stories, journalism, memoirs, essays, and screenplays.
The Children of Gebelaawi (1959) portrayed the patriarch Gebelaawi and his children, average Egyptians living the lives of Cain and Abel, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Gebelaawi has built a mansion in an oasis in the middle of a barren desert; his estate becomes the scene of a family feud which continues for generations. "Whenever someone is depressed, suffering or humiliated, he points to the mansion at the top of the alley at the end opening out to the desert, and says sadly, 'That is our ancestor's house, we are all his children, and we have a right to his property. Why are we starving? What have we done?' " The book was banned throughout the Arab world, except in the Lebanon. In the 1960s, Mahfouz further developed its theme that humanity is moving further away from God in his existentialist novels. In The Thief and the Dogs (1961) he depicted the fate a Marxist thief, who has been released from prison and plans revenge. Ultimately he is murdered in a cemetery.
Mahfouz left his post as the Director of Censorship and was appointed Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema. He was a contributing editor for the leading newspaper Al-Ahram and in 1969 he became a consultant to the Ministry of Culture, retiring in 1972. He has been a board member of Dar al Ma'aref publishing house. Many of his novels were serialized in Al-Ahram, and his writings also appeared in his weekly column, 'Point of View'. Before the Nobel Prize only a few of his novels had appeared in the West.
In the 1960s and 1970s Mahfouz started to construct his novels more freely and use interior monologue. In Miramar (1967) he developed a form of multiple first-person narration. Four narrators, among them a Socialist and a Nasserite opportunist, represent different political views. In the center of the story is an attractive servant girl. In Arabian Nights and Days (1981) and in The Journey of Ibn Fatouma (1983) Mahfouz drew on traditional Arabic narratives as subtexts. Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth (1985) is about conflict between old and new religious truths, a theme with which Mika Waltari dealt in Finland in his historical novel Sinuhe (1945, trans. The Egyptian).
"As a geographical place and as history, Egypt for Mahfouz has no counterpart in any other part of the world. Old beyond history, geographically distinct because of the Nile and its fertile valley, Mahfouz's Egypt is an immense accumulation of history, stretching back in time for thousands of years, and despite the astounding variety of its rulers, regimes, religions, and races, nevertheless retaining its own coherent identity." (Edward W. Said in New York Review of Books, November 30, 2000)
Mahfouz, called the "Balzac of Egypt", described the development of his country in the 20th-century. He combined intellectual and cultural influences from East and West  his own exposure to the literarature of non-Arabic culture began in his youth with the enthusiastic consumption of Western detective stories, Russian classics, and such modernist writers as Proust, Kafka and Joyce. Mahfouz's stories, written in the florid classical Arabic, are almost always set in the heavily populated urban quarters of Cairo, where his characters, mostly ordinary people, try cope with the modernization of society and the temptations of Western values.
Among those people, who brought early translations of his work to the English-speaking readers was Jacqueline Onassis. In Egypt he was widely considered a spokesperson not only for Egypt but also for a number of non-Western cultures. However, Mahfouz himself almost never traveled outside of Egypt, and sent his daughters to accept the Nobel Prize on his behalf.
Like many Egyptian writers and intellectuals, Mahfouz was on a "death list" by Islamic fundamentalists. He defended Salman Rushdie after the Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned him to death, but later he criticized Rushdie's Satanic Verses as "insulting" to Islam. In 1994, near his home, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife, and two Egyptian Islamic militants were sentenced to death for attempting to kill him. Texts written after the assassination attempt for a weekly women's magazine were collected in Dreams (2000-2003). In his old age Mahfouz became nearly blind, and he though he continued to write, had difficulties in holding a pen or a pencil. He also had to abandon his daily habit of meeting his friends at coffeehouses. Mahfouz died in Cairo on August 30, 2006.
For further reading: The Changing Rhythm: A Study of Najib Mahfu's Novels by Sasson Somekh (1973); The Modern Egyptian Novel by Hilary Kilpatrick (1974); The Arabic Novel by Roger Allen (1982); Naguig Mahfouz, Nobel 1988: Egyptian Perspectives (1989) Nobel Laureates in Literature, ed. by Rado Pribic (1990); Naguib Mahfouz's Egypt by Hayim Gordon (1990); Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz, ed. by Trevor Le Gassick (1991); Naguib Mahfouz, ed. by Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar (1993); Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning by Rasheed el-Enany (1993); The Early Novels of Naguib Mahfouz: Images of Modern Egypt by Matti Moosa (1994); The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz by Gamal al-Ghitani (2000)
Selected works:
• ABATH AL-AGDAR, 1939 - Mockery of the Fates
• RADUBIS, 1943
• KIFAH TIBAH, 1944
• KHAN AL-KHALILI, 1944
• AL-QAHIRAH AL-JADIDAH, 1946 - New Cairo
• ZUQAQ AL-MIDAQQ, 1947 - Midaq Alley (trans. by Trevor le Gassick) - Midaqq-kuja (suom. Pekka Suni, Mustafa Shikeben) - film El Callejón de los milagros / Midaq Alley, dir. by Jorge Fons and starring Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Salma Hayek, and Maria Rojo, was based on Mahfouz's novel but set in Mexico City.
• IGNIS FATUUS, 1948
• AL-SARAB, 1949
• BIDAYAH WA-NIHAYAH, 1949 - The Beginning and the End (trans. by Ramses Hanna Awad)
• AL-THULATIYA, 1956-57 - The Cairo Trilogy; BAYN AL-QUASRAYN (1956) - Palace Walk (trans. by W. Hutchins and Olive Kenny) - QUAST AL-SHAWQ (1957) - Palace of Desire (trans. by W. Hutchins, Lorne Kenny and Olive Kenny) - AL-SUKKARIYAH (1957) - Sugar Street (trans. by W. Hutchins and Angele Botros Semaan) - Palatsikatu, Intohimon palatsi, Sokerikuja (suom. Pekka Suni)
• Children of Gebelaawi, 1959 - Children of the Alley (trans. by Peter Theroux)
• AL-LISS WA-AL-KILAB, 1961 - The Thief and the Dogs (trans. by Trevor Le Gassic and Mustafa Badawi)
• AL-SUMMAN WA-AL-KHARIF, 1962 - Autumn Quail (trans. by Roger Allen)
• AL-TARIQ, 1964 - The Search (trans. by Muhammed Islam)
• AL-SHAHHADH, 1965 - The Beggar (trans. by Kristin Walker Henry and Nariman Khales Naili al Warrah)
• THARTHARAH FAWQ AL NIL, 1966 - Adrift on the Nile (trans. by Frances Liardet)
• AWLAD HARITNA, 1967 - Children of Gebelawi (trans. by Philip Stewart) / Children of the Alley (trans. by Peter Theroux)
• MIRAMAR, 1967 - Miramar (trans. by Maged el-Komos and John Rodenbeck) - Miramar (suom. Pekka Suni, Mustafa Shikeben)
• AL MARAYA, 1971 - Mirrors (trans. by Roger Allen)
• AL-HUBB TAHT AL MATAR, 1973
• AL-KARNAK, 1974 - Three Contemporary Egyptian Novels
• QUAB AL-LAYL, 1975
• HIKAYAT HARITNA, 1975 - Fountain and Tomb (trans. by Soad Sobhy, Essam Fattouh, and James Kenneson)
• HADRAT AL-MUHTARAM, 1975 - Respected Sir (trans. by Rasheed el-Enany)
• MALHAMAT AL-HARAFISH, 1977 - The Harafish
• ARS AL-HUBB, 1980
• AFRAH AL-QUBBAH, 1981 - Wedding Song (trans. by Olive Kenny)
• LAYALI ALF LAYLAH, 1981 - Arabian Nights and Days (trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies)
• AL-BAQI MIN AL-ZAMAN SA'AH, 1982
• RIHLAT IBN FATTUMAH, 1983 - The Journey of Ibn Fatouma (trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies)
• AMAM AL-'ARSH, 1983
• AL-A'ISH FI AL-HAQIQAH, 1985 - Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth (translated from the Arabic by Tagreid Abu-Hassabo)
• YAWM MAQTAL AL ZA'IM, 1985 - The Day Leader Was Killed
• HADITH AL-SABAH WA-AL-MASA, 1987
• THARTHARAH ALA AL-BAHR, 1993
• ASDAA AL-SIRA AL-DHATIYYA, 1994 - Echoes from an Autobiography (trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies)
• AHLAM FATRAT AL-NAQAHA, 2000-2003 - The Dreams
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mahfouz.htm

American drama

AN OLD FASHIONED GUY

(A short play for one male and one female actors and one voice-off)

(A street with shopping stores. On the grown-floor a sign says "BOOKSTORE". In the centre of the set there's SHE. Stopped as if waiting for someone. Behind her is HE, walking back and forth... seems to be very nervous.)

HE (Addressing to SHE) - Excuse me miss... good afternoon.

SHE (Rude) - I'm not interested.

HE - If you could spare me a minute...

SHE (Without looking at HE) - don't push! I've enough of public collections!

HE (With a shy smile) - I see... there are so many people collecting for so many different things.

SHE (Rude) - Exactly! Goodbye! (Turns her back to him)

HE - Wait! Just a small favour... here, in the bookstore. (Pointing at the bookstore)

SHE (Looking at the bookstore) - Bookstore?! What's wrong with it?

HE (Awkward) - Nothing's wrong. I just need a little favour... and I'm here appealing to your kindness, sure I'm bothering you, but there is a problem... a natural obstacle, which could be overcome, surpassed, in if in case you'd be willing to help me.

SHE - Do you work at the bookstore?

HE - I'm a costumer.

SHE - don't tell me you've forgotten your credit card and you want to lend you some money!

HE - I have the money! I have the money!

SHE - So... what have I got to do with this bookstore? (Looks inside through the shop window) I've never entered here.

HE - A book.

SHE (Surprised, at HE) - A book?!

HE - Yes. A small book. Here's the title... (Shows a folded paper)

SHE - I don't understand.

HE - Here's the title of the book and... (takes out some coin from his pocket and rubs them in) and there is the right amount money for it! The title... (shows the paper) and the right money. (The coins hop in his hand) So... are you on?!

SHE - Wait a minute... you want me to go to the bookstore and buy you a book?

HE (Nodding) - Exactly! Would you be so kind as to do it?

SHE - Why don't you do it yourself?

HE (Lowering his head) - Details don't allow me to...

SHE - I got it! It's a porn book!

HE (Offended) - Nothing of the kind! I'd never ask a lady such a thing!

SHE - I think... maybe you have debts in there.

HE (Hopping the coins) - I have the money!

SHE - What a strange request.

HE (Anxious) - So?!... A small favour... you deliver the paper, deliver the money, and then take the book out there! Two minutes! Please!

SHE (Grabs the paper out of the hands of HE) - What's the book's title?

HE (extremely awkward) - It doesn't matter to you. You just have to deliver the paper and the money, and they'll wrap the book...

(SHE unfolds the paper)

No, don't read it! Please, I beg you! Be sorry on me!!

SHE (Reading the paper, now unfolded. Opening wide her eyes) - "HOW TO OVERCOME SHYNESS"?!!! (SHE laughs) "HOW TO OVERCOME SHYNESS"?!!! (SHE laughs again)

(The set becomes dark)

OFF-VOICE - With the help of the book - or maybe not - they married and were shyly happy.

© Teixeira Moita - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Note:Please don't use,reproduce or stage this work without the author's permission!