Literature: Year In Review 1999 | Britannica.com
Literature: Year In Review 1999
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Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content.
Overview
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New works from Asia and Africa dominated world literature in 1999, with only modest competition from Europe. Leading the charge was Indian-born Salman Rushdie with The Ground Beneath Her Feet, an exuberant and elegiac novel that spanned several continents and decades to tell its sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic tale of two star-crossed musical celebrities.
Waiting, the second novel by Chinese writer Ha Jin, who in 1985 settled in the U.S., won the National Book award for fiction. The novel tracked the poignant course of an ordinary man so bound by a strong sense of duty—to tradition, family, and the party—that he misses out on most of the opportunities life offers him, whether for professional advancement, material success, or genuine love. With South of the Border, West of the Sun, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami produced one of his most humane and pleasurable works yet, a compact, lyrical, and thought-provoking tale of long-separated lovers overwhelmed by longing for the innocent yet consuming passion they once knew.
Perhaps the single most powerful book released in Africa was Country of My Skull (1998), the South African poet and fiction writer Antjie Krog’s collected reports on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, charged with bringing to light all the horrors and injustices of the apartheid years. The brutal politics of contemporary South Africa were also evident in J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize–winning novel Disgrace, as generational and ideological fault lines separate the fallen academic Lurie irreconcilably from his daughter Lucy both before and after a vicious attack on their remote farm. The young Cameroonian novelist Calixthe Beyala continued her meteoric rise on the literary horizon with Amours sauvages, the ribald and often politically incorrect tale of yet another young refugee from the slums of the African metropolis who marries a Westerner and attempts to refashion her life in an extremely colour- and race-conscious modern-day France.
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In Four Mothers the talented young Hebrew novelist Shifra Horn celebrates the strength, fortitude, determination, and mutual support of several generations of widowed or abandoned Jewish women, weaving their interlocking stories seamlessly in a nonlinear, achronological narrative that gives all four “mothers” a timeless, mythic, larger-than-life quality.
The Russian-born French writer Andrei Makine followed up his award-winning Dreams of My Russian Summer (1997) with The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, another sumptuously lyrical novel involving the displaced and disintegrating Russian aristocracy in pre- and post-World War II France. In The Clay Machine-Gun (1998), Viktor Pelevin ponders which way Russia should look for its cultural direction; no clear answers were forthcoming, however, in this wonderfully witty and sometimes almost too glib tale told by a delusional patient in a present-day psychiatric hospital.
From Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco came Ocean Sea, a sweeping and enchanting book of extraordinary power. In My Century the 1999 Nobel laureate in literature, Germany’s Günter Grass (see Nobel Prizes ), interwove 100 monologues spoken by characters representing a broad spectrum of German society.
English
United Kingdom
An unexpected work dominated the literary landscape in Great Britain in 1999—a children’s novel. In July the publication of J.K. Rowling’s (see Biographies) third book in her Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, made news headlines and broke all sales records, selling 68,000 copies in the first three days after its release. Rowling, who wrote the first of the series while an unemployed single parent in Edinburgh, composed chapters in cafes because she could not afford to heat her apartment. The Guardian newspaper applauded the book’s intricate narrative, with its weft of “plots, sub-plots, red herrings, diversions … and an un-pin-downable magic” and found its writing style her most confident ever, giving the impression of “an author who loves her job.” Although the publishers issued adult versions of the series, with more subdued covers so that older readers would not be embarrassed to read them in public, the book did not appear on the adult best-seller list of The Sunday Times. This created a furor, with the Potter publishers accusing the newspaper of responding to pressure from Random House, the publishers of Thomas Harris’s latest Hannibal Lecter thriller, which Rowling’s book outsold five to one. The Sunday Times refuted the charge, insisting that the Harry Potter books should be featured only on the children’s list.
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The Guardian asserted that the Harry Potter craze was symptomatic of a general revival of children’s literature. “Something is happening, a quiet revolution,” it claimed. “In the playground, children are swapping books.” Other children’s authors, such as Jacqueline Wilson, Anne Fine, and Philip Pullman, also experienced robust sales. Pullman suggested that the popularity among both children and adults of plot-driven books such as his own indicated a fin de siècle retreat from postmodernism, with its “weakening effect of knowing that you’re doing something clever, which vitiates the story.” The Whitaker BookTrack sales figures for the first 12 weeks of the year confirmed his theory; in a children’s market that was never so buoyant, 5.5 million children’s books were sold, compared with 7.5 million adult books.
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In addition, in a move designed to encourage the culture of reading, a children’s laureate was named, and the Scottish Arts Council established a new set of awards for children’s books. Meanwhile, David Almond’s Skellig, a story about an unhappy boy who finds unexpected hope from a mysterious, earthy tramp, beat the second Harry Potter book for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. Almond’s book was also short-listed for The Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, but it was overtaken by Susan Price’s The Sterkarm Handshake, a time-travel story set on the English-Scottish border and straddling the 16th and 21st centuries. Salman Rushdie, known chiefly for his adult books, reissued his children’s story Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written while he was in hiding under an Iranian death threat. The volume appeared in a new edition with illustrations by Paul Birkbeck.
Meanwhile, Rushdie’s new adult novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, was published to warm reviews. The Literary Review hailed it as the most “un-put-downable” Rushdie offering to date, and many commentators favoured it for the 1999 Booker Prize. Set in a world slightly out of kilter, the book was an effervescent romp full of famous pop stars, their eccentric coterie, lone assassins, love affairs, and pirate radio stations.
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Another title vying for the Booker was Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music.The book, a claustrophobic story about an English string quartet, traversed a smaller canvas than his previous panoramic, A Suitable Boy, but it was praised for a fascinating and intricate portrait of four closely bound people and the music they made. Jim Crace, whose novel Quarantine was short-listed for the 1997 Booker, published Being Dead. As with Rushdie’s book, the world was slightly out of true. The plot involves the murder of two middle-aged zoologists in a British seaside town called Baritone Bay, the police inquiry, the decomposition of the zoologists’ bodies, and the return of their daughter to the family home. An eerie but poetic book, it was hailed by one critic as a book of “near genius.” Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence was a luminous and deftly woven historical novel set in 1629 Copenhagen, but, according to Booker Prize judge John Sutherland, it was published “too late” in the year “for its intricacy to be fully appreciated” by the Booker panel.
The six titles that were short-listed were represented by authors from Egypt, England, Ireland, India, Scotland, and South Africa. Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, a romance of the desert, was admired by the judges for its readability, and two judges reportedly favoured Michael Frayn’s Headlong. Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting was criticized as slight and precious by Sutherland, although he acknowledged that it “grew on you.” Although the committee admired the sensitivity of Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship, it apparently “lit no fires.” Andrew O’Hagan’s Our Fathers was also praiseworthy but was put aside because it was a first novel and the author presumably would have other opportunities to win.
The £21,000 ($34,890) prize was awarded to J.M. Coetzee for Disgrace. It was his second win and made him the first author to have captured the prize twice; his first win was in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K. The judges hailed Disgrace as a “masterpiece,” although the chair of the judges, Gerald Kaufman, acknowledged some agonizing moments in the four hours of judging and difficulties in reaching a consensus. The novel presented a bleak tale of the new South Africa and chronicled the life of a professor at the University of Cape Town (where Coetzee taught) who is forced to resign after an affair with one of his students. The protagonist retreats to his daughter’s sequestered farm, where they are violently attacked by three marauders. Coetzee did not go to London to accept the prize, stating that he wished to avoid the celebrity status surrounding the award.
The world’s richest prize for fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth £Ir 100,000 (about $135,000), went to British novelist Andrew Miller for his first novel, Ingenious Pain. Set in the milieu of 18th-century medicine, the book was described by the panel as a masterful exposure of “every human being’s essential need to feel personally a share of the world’s suffering.” The winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction—awarded to a woman writer—went to Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood, a compelling portrait of American suburbia in the 1970s as seen through the eyes of a troubled child.
The Whitbread Book of the Year honour went to the late poet Ted Hughes for his collection of poems Birthday Letters. The poems, addressed to his wife Sylvia Plath, had broken a 35-year silence in which Hughes never publicly discussed his life with Plath, a fellow poet who had committed suicide in 1963. Hughes had won the same award in 1998 for his Tales from Ovid.
Hughes’s 1998 death had left vacant the post of poet laureate, and there was much debate about the appointment of a successor. Among those most favoured by bookmakers were Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, James Fenton, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Wendy Cope. Some speculated that Prime Minister Tony Blair, who selected the laureate from a shortlist for the queen’s approval, might favour a “people’s poet” and select a pop star such as Sir Paul McCartney. In the event, tradition won the day, and the poet, critic, and biographer Andrew Motion was selected to serve a 10-year term, as opposed to the life appointments that had been previously made. He would continue, as part of his role, to write verse for royal and national occasions. Motion had already composed a poem about the death of Diana, princess of Wales, and had expressed a willingness to accept the post, unlike many poets who said that if offered it, they would turn it down. Motion said he hoped to “diversify the job” and help promote poetry in schools.
The year was rich in biographies. A.N. Wilson hailed D.J. Taylor’s Thackeray, a 494-page study of William Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, as the “most enjoyable and the most skilful” he had read that year, singling out for praise its masterful evocation of the 19th-century journalistic scene. The war poet Siegfried Sassoon continued to attract attention; the second volume of Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s work on Sassoon’s life was under way, and John Stuart Roberts’s Siegfried Sassoon: (1886–1967) threw fresh light on his personal life and placed a long overdue emphasis on his later poetry. Meanwhile, Garrick by Ian McIntyre spotlighted the larger-than-life personality of one of Great Britain’s most famous actors in a rich and scholarly study that drew on its protagonist’s letters and on the vivid 18th-century backdrop in which David Garrick lived and worked. Anthony Sampson’s Mandela: The Authorized Biography was a celebration of a modern fairy tale and chronicled the story of the man who emerged from 27 years of imprisonment to become president of South Africa. Sampson, one of the few whites who on his many visits to South Africa during the apartheid era had made friends across the race divide, delivered a thoughtful and sympathetic portrait of Nelson Mandela. A daring and intriguing book came from Ann Wroe. Her Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man was an assured and inventive investigation into the Gospels, the York Mystery Plays, and classical texts that resulted in a plausible account of the man Pontius Pilate might have been, as well as a rendering of the many images of Pilate that abound across two millennia of representations. The literary biographer Michael Holroyd turned his attention closer to home. His Basil Street Blues was a touching and delicate portrait of his own family facing social decline and dwindling fortunes; Holroyd confessed that he had shed some tears while writing the story.
Other noteworthy nonfiction titles included David Vincent’s The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998, in which he traced successive British governments’ obsessions with secrecy and their botched cover-ups; the cumulative effect was a plea for a culture of openness. Simon Jenkins’s England’s Thousand Best Churches was a celebration of and guide to what the author described as “the glory of Britain.” Another ambitious offering came from Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, whose The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium attempted to capture life, in all its mundanities, for ordinary Anglo-Saxons of that era. A.N. Wilson produced a highly praised account of the rise of secularism, God’s Funeral, which charted the “death” of God from the Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and to 20th-century scientific thinkers such as Richard Dawkins. Timothy Garton Ash’s History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s was a valediction not to a millennium or a century but to a decade; it painted, however, a large canvas of great events in a troubled region at a time of convulsive change.
Iris Murdoch (see Obituaries), who had suffered for years from Alzheimer’s disease, died in February. Her passing was poignantly marked by Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, a frank portrait by her husband, John Bayley, of their unusual but close marriage, as well as an unflinching account of her illness.
Siobhan Dowd
United States.
The distinction between fiction and nonfiction made news in 1999, at least when Dutch, Edmund Morris’s long-awaited book about former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, arrived in the bookstores in early autumn. The prizewinning historian did not deliver the biography everyone—apparently even his own editor, Robert Loomis—had expected. Instead, after years of unprecedented access to his subject during Reagan’s White House years and after much research, he published what he called a memoir rather than a biography—and a fanciful one at that. Morris included in the narrative a fictitious version of himself and created several other imaginary characters, including a son of his, to play roles in Reagan’s unfolding life.
The response of reviewers to this bizarre innovation was overwhelmingly negative. Though historians were unhappy and most Reagan loyalists were displeased, the public seemed unaffected, assuming, perhaps, that historians sometimes created history by making it up; the book landed on the best-seller list.
No other work of history or biography published in 1999 caused anywhere near that stir. Jay Parini’s Robert Frost did emend somewhat the dark legend of Frost, and Paul Mariani with his The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane and Edward Mendelson with Later Auden produced works of serious interest. Judith Thurman’s biography of Colette, Secrets of the Flesh, won numerous favourable reviews. Lorca: A Dream of Life by Leslie Stainton was a biography of poet Federico García Lorca and worthy of some attention. Fred Kaplan lavished nearly 900 pages on a living literary figure in Gore Vidal. Anne Charters edited the Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac, 1957–1969. (A collection of Kerouac’s early prose under the title Atop an Underwood was also published during the year.) Geoffrey Perret with his massive biographical study Eisenhower, Jean Strouse with her book on J.P. Morgan—Morgan: American Financier, and Roger Kahn with A Flame of Pure Fire, his book about boxer Jack Dempsey and his times, waded into the mainstream of American history.
Stirring the waters of this stream was Peter Novick’s fascinating The Holocaust in American Life, a revisionist study of American attitudes toward the destruction of European Jewry and the politics of manipulating public opinion on this issue. Also adding depth to the study of cultural history was Steven Watson’s Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism. Delving into personal history in extremely candid fashion was Betty Fussell in My Kitchen Wars, her memoir of her marriage to literary critic Paul Fussell. East Indian–American writer Padma Hejmadi’s transcultural memoir Room to Fly was a much more highly intellectualized account of a life. Novelist Larry McMurtry offered the most serious, thoughtful, and entertaining memoir of the year, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, an excursion into his own family’s past with a great deal of commentary about his own reading and writing life. Among essay collections, one of the most delightful was William W. Warner’s Into the Porcupine Cave and Other Odysseys.
In the realm of fiction itself, there were some interesting debuts, some problematic posthumous works, and some powerful new mainstream novels and story collections. Both Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison were represented by renderings of their unfinished works. Hemingway’s son Patrick, with some assistance from editors at Scribner’s, put out a version of True at First Light, a manuscript set in Africa in which Hemingway wrote about himself and wife Mary in a fictional mode, sometimes playful and sometimes dark. (“In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.”) Despite such occasional passages that sing in the old Hemingway voice, the book was more a torso of a manuscript than a fully developed narrative, and it did not honour Hemingway to publish it as a seemingly finished work of art.
Ralph Ellison’s mythical second novel, the book he had been working on for nearly 40 years and never seemed able to complete, was also published in a version determined by someone other than the author. In this case it was Ellison’s literary executor, John Callahan, who edited the thousands of pages of the unfinished novel into a book titled Juneteenth. Oddly enough, some of the most interesting sections that Ellison had published in literary magazines over the years or that he read in public were excluded from this volume, whose determining factor was, apparently, a coherence that Callahan had to try to figure out on his own.
There was not much joy in either of these books but instead much sadness that neither Hemingway nor Ellison had figured out how to finish these books, both of which were decidedly inferior when set alongside their own best work.
Providing some joy, but not much, was Bone by Bone, the concluding volume of Peter Matthiessen’s Everglades trilogy about the life of E.J. Watson, the late 19th-century Florida renegade, farmer, and assassin. Thick with history, frontier lore, and detailed descriptions of the Everglades and south Florida terrain and waterways and jammed with a multitude of characters, the series that began with Killing Mister Watson turned out to be an enterprise more to respect than to be entertained by. The same could be said for Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos’s new novel, Empress of the Splendid Season, an attempt to tell the story of an ordinary Hispanic woman living in New York City. Similarly joyless was the second novel by James Thackara, an American expatriate and longtime London resident. The Book of Kings, his nearly 800-page epic, was supposedly an underground masterpiece on which he had slaved for decades and when published would turn the marketplace on its ear. An article in The New Yorker about Thackara’s labour of love put the buzz in American ears. The book itself turned out to be a flawed epic about four young men in quest of love and knowledge beginning in pre-World War II Europe and continuing on into the postwar period. Only its masterly set pieces, dramatizing wartime strategy and scenes of combat, rose to the high level of competency suggested in the prepublication hype.
After the enormous success of his debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, Washington-state novelist David Guterson raised public expectations when he came out with a second novel, East of the Mountains. The story of the last days of an elderly heart surgeon dying of cancer was a sweetly told and entirely respectable piece of fiction whose main character was rather memorable and whose settings—the apple farms and mountain towns east of Seattle, Wash.—were quite sharply observed. Broke Heart Blues, a novel set in her own private terrain of upstate New York, showed Joyce Carol Oates working once again at the top of her powers.
The American Indian writer Leslie Marmon Silko succeeded in her newest novel, Gardens in the Dunes, in presenting the engaging story of a turn-of-the-century Indian waif, one of the last survivors of an obscure Southwestern desert tribe, who ventures into the modern world. The book did not receive anywhere near the attention it deserved. Neither did Ian MacMillan’s stunning representation of life, death, and rebellion at the Treblinka concentration camp, Village of a Million Spirits. Other works that failed to achieve the attention that they merited included Audrey Schulman’s charming but serious novel about a woman struggling to complete medical school, Swimming with Jonah; Connie Porter’s Imani All Mine, a touching portrait of a young mother on the streets of Buffalo, N.Y.; and Kathleen Tyau’s Makai, an entertaining portrayal of Hawaiian family life from Pearl Harbor to the present.
Plainsong, the third novel by unheralded Midwestern writer Kent Haruf, did succeed in calling some attention to its author. A kind of Our Town of the plains east of Denver, the novel presents a small group of small-town characters—among them a high-school teacher, a pregnant student, and a pair of elderly farmers—caught up in the quiet thrall of everyday problems. It was nominated for a National Book Award in fiction. Also nominated were the novel Hummingbird House, Patricia Henley’s triumphant little workout on themes of expatriatism, estrangement, and love, set in Central America; Waiting by Ha Jin, the Chinese expatriate turned U.S. citizen whose book showcases the difficulties of love and marriage in contemporary China; House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III; and a story collection titled Who Do You Love by another Midwestern writer, Jean Thompson. The award was presented to Waiting.
The story collection that drew the most review attention—and deservedly so—was Annie Proulx’s Close Range, a noisy gallery filled with acrobatic language and larger-than-life cowboys and farmers. (“You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You’ll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at the sky punched with bullet holes.”) American Richard Bausch, one of the country’s most esteemed short- story writers, turned in a new collection, Someone to Watch over Me, that reasserted his claim as one of the new masters of realistic short fiction. In September, the Light Changes was novelist Andrew Holleran’s successful bid to be recognized as a writer of fine stories. An extremely entertaining and thought-provoking collection—seven long stories—was published by Robert Girardi under the title A Vaudeville of Devils.
Among debut works of short fiction, Nathan Englander’s first collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, won much praise for his work as a self-proclaimed successor to the short-story writing of Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The most impressive first novel of the year came from Brooklyn journalist Colson Whitehead—his novel about a female elevator inspector titled The Intuitionist reminded some reviewers of the quirkiness and intelligence of Walker Percy’s debut novel, The Moviegoer.
Midnight Salvage, Adrienne Rich’s latest book of poems, dramatized the masterly poet’s continuing quest to find new meaning in her adopted California landscape: (“Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I/ sought the light of a so-called heavenly body:/ a planet or our moon in some event and caught/ nothing but a late wind/ pushing around some Monterey pines/ themselves in trouble.”) In his National Book Award–nominated volume Repair, C.K. Williams showed interior scenes and the violence of modern life: (“In a tray of dried fixative in a photographer friend’s/ darkroom/ I found a curled-up photo of his son the instant after/ his death,/ his glasses still on, a drop of blood caught at his/ mouth.”)
Other poets with new works were Louise Glück with Vita Nova, John Ashbery with Girls on the Run. and Ai with Vice, which went on to win the National Book Award in poetry. Quincy Troupe came out with Choruses, his sixth book of verse, an appealing mix of classical poetry forms (sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas) and the fluid jazz poems for which he was better known. Jorie Graham contributed with Swarm, Stephen Sandy with Black Box, and Eric Pankey with Cenotaph, in which he continued his evocative studies of the spirit in the everyday of American life.
Literary criticism did not have a great year, owing to the void created with the 1998 death of influential critic Alfred Kazin and the lack of a successor. Elizabeth Hardwick put together a number of review essays on contemporary American fiction under the title American Fictions. John Updike published More Matter, a wonderful miscellany of reviews and essays on subjects ranging from literature to popular culture. Magazine editor Wendy Lesser tackled various subjects in The Amateur. Among academics, Richard Poirier stood alone in bringing out a book of broad interest, Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances. Among poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver collected essays and some verse in Winter Hours. Alice Fulton bunched together essays in Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. Poet Brad Leithauser gathered the essays of Randall Jarrell under the title No Other Book.
In what may well have been the last round of Lannan Foundation awards for literary achievement, Adrienne Rich won a $75,000 prize. The PEN/Malamud Prize for an outstanding body of work in short fiction went to T.C. Boyle. Michael Cunningham garnered the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction with his novel The Hours. Mark Strand (see Biographies) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Joseph Heller, author of the classic antiwar satire Catch-22, died in December. (See Obituaries.) Other deaths during the year included short-story writer Andre Dubus (see Obituaries) and novelist and translator Stephen Becker.
Alan Cheuse
Canada
Women as authors and as protagonists abounded in 1999, from Audrey Thomas’s Isobel Gunn, who disguises herself as a man to work for the North West Company in Rupert’s Land, to Keith Maillard’s Gloria, in which a self-centred, late-maturing antiheroine struggles to become her better self in West Virginia during the 1950s, and to the dead but relentlessly remembered Elizabeth, titular presence in Matt Cohen’s Elizabeth and After, in which regrets and expectations blur past and future in the ever-evaporating now. The novel was honoured with the Governor General’s award just weeks before Cohen’s death (see Obituaries ). Time makes no difference to the powerful ghost of Marie Ursule, rampaging through Dionne Brand’s second novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, while generations of women, related by blood even when only related by marriage, inhabit, and pass through, the rooms of Bonnie Burnard’s Giller Prize–winning A Good House, the kind of house that Rachel Wyatt’s midlife protagonist seeks to escape in Mona Lisa Smiled a Little. In a work translated from the original French, Anne Hébert wonders ironically Am I Disturbing You? as she details the significant effects one young woman can have on the lives of two men, and Nancy Huston, in The Mark of the Angel, draws the reader through scenes of emotional destruction, tracing the scars that warriors inflict on lovers, and vice versa.
Divisions that brought people together lace through Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water, a tale of two little border towns that have a lot in common; David Macfarlane’s Summer Gone strips nostalgia to the bone as the wind strips leaves from autumn trees; and David Helwig deliberately stays Close to the Fire in his brief study of self-deceit and redemption. Timothy Findley, that writer of deathless prose, creates a deathless character in Pilgrim, a journey of verbal delights through various heavens and hells of immortality.
Women overran short stories too, although the sad, self-punishing mothers and daughters, endlessly, repetitively searching for, and abandoning, and finding each other in Elyse Gasco’s wryly humorous Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? were in sharp contrast not only to All the Anxious Girls on Earth, Zsuzsi Gartner’s impious romp through contemporary mores of love and honour, and to Girls Around the House, M.A.C. Farrant’s series of linked stories about survival amid one’s kin, but also to the Young Men in Russell Smith’s poignant collection, as vulnerable and tough in their own ways as any girl.
At the heart of the Canadian identity myth is the idea of land, of wilderness, and of the half-known other, nurturer and nemesis, and during the year several books of poems bloomed on these long-established roots. Terrence Young’s The Island in Winter captures the interplay of fog and rock, water and tree, heart and soul; Nelson Ball’s Almost Spring releases language that alters one’s perception of almost everything; and Richard Harrison’s Big Breath of a Wish whistles through metaphors as fresh as all outdoors. In Speaking Through Jagged Rock, Connie Fife delineates the changing horizons of a Cree woman approaching the 21st century, while Marilyn Bowering explores the mysterious hinterlands of Human Bodies: New and Collected Poems 1987–1999, distilling a wry wisdom from often inhumane conditions.
Lillian Allen twists reality like a pretzel in Psychic Unrest; Linda Rogers discovers different forms through which cruelty may sublime into understanding in The Saning; and Susan Musgrave in Things That Keep and Do Not Change shows the reader the nature of transformation itself. Carrying the Shadow was Patrick Friesen’s remembrances of lives lost, and for Lorna Crozier it was What the Living Won’t Let Go, which bares the meaning of bereavement.
Some poets challenged the reality of language itself. In Scars on the Seehors, bill bissett convolutes tongue and eye in exuberant new concrete and performance poems; going even farther, Erin Mouré deconstructs text and meaning in A Frame of the Book, creating her own wilderness of syntax in which to enthrall the reader.
Elizabeth Rhett Woods
Other Literature in English
Outstanding literary works from Africa and Australia were predictably among the highlights for 1999. Dominating the African scene were writers from South Africa, most notably the novelist, critic, and academic J.M. Coetzee, who won an unprecedented second Booker Prize for his seventh novel, Disgrace, lauded for its spare prose, readability, and evocation of the problems of postapartheid South Africa. Coetzee also brought out The Lives of Animals and The Novel in Africa, both of which presented moral, philosophical, and literary arguments within a fictional framework based on texts the author had delivered as lectures. Similar preoccupations informed Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century,a collection of essays, correspondence, and reminiscences by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. The pervasive subject of apartheid and coming to terms with the atrocities of South Africa’s past were explored elsewhere in two seminal works—poet and journalist Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa and Bishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu’s personal memoir No Future Without Forgiveness. The life of Nelson Mandela, perhaps the most iconic figure of the struggle to end apartheid, was thoroughly examined by British journalist Anthony Sampson in Mandela: The Authorized Biography.
In Australia poet Les Murray published perhaps his greatest achievement to date, Fredy Neptune, an epic novel in verse using eight-line stanzas to bring its globe-trotting hero to life. Poet and critic Chris Wallace-Crabbe published his reflections on the writing life, Author! Author!, and Colleen McCullough broke from her Masters of Rome novel series to release The Courage and the Will, her biography of the decorated military figure Roden Cutler. Novelist Murray Bail was named winner of both the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. The year ended on a sad note with the death of best-selling author Morris West (The Shoes of the Fisherman). (See Obituaries.)