08 The American lawyer seeking human rights for chimpanzees

The American lawyer seeking human rights for chimpanzees

Steven M Wise is campaigning for chimps’ right to seek freedom from unlawful detention on the grounds that they are essentially people. Are apes’ rights just a matter of time?
Where will legal moves to give rights to chimpanzees end up?
Where will legal moves to give rights to chimpanzees end up? Photograph: Getty Images

Tommy, 26, lives on a trailer lot in Gloversville, New York, with only a television for company. Tommy is a chimpanzee, and if the organisation seeking to free him and move him to a sanctuary wins a lawsuit it filed today, the result could have implications for how we view – and treat – our closest animal relatives. Tommy is one of four chimps the Nonhuman Rights Project will be representing. Kiko, also thought to be 26, lives in Niagara Falls, and has been trained in martial arts, though his sparring partner Charlie, “the karate Chimp”, is now dead. The other two, Hercules and Leo, are “being held” at a university, where they are used for biomechanical research.

The Nonhuman Rights Project was set up by a legal scholar, Steven M Wise, in 2007, with the aim of conferring “personhood” on animal species. The organisation has filed a writ of habeus corpus, historically used to seek freedom from unlawful detention – if one is human. When I speak to him, Wise is on his way to court to file another case on behalf of his chimpanzee plaintiff. “In March we decided to file suit in New York on behalf of two chimpanzees,” he says. “The following month I went to check on them and one of them had died. We went back at the end of September and learned that the second chimpanzee had died. At that point we became concerned and decided that we would file lawsuits on behalf of all the surviving chimpanzees in the state of New York that we can identify. Since then, a third chimpanzee has died.”

He has two arguments – one of liberty, and one of equality. “As a matter of liberty, we have affidavits from nine of the top working primatologists in the world who make it clear that chimpanzees have extraordinarily complex cognitive abilities, and these include the ability to live their lives in an autonomous way. This is a cognitive ability that courts ferociously protect and our argument is that any place where these complex cognitive abilities are found in any being – species should be irrelevant – the courts should recognise that.” His equality argument is that, since chimpanzees have similar cognitive abilities to humans, “to simply pick out one quality they have that’s different, which is that they’re not human beings, and say you’re not a legal person and don’t have any legal rights – we argue that is a violation of common-law equality. It’s a distinction without a difference.”

Or, “We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes,” as Richard Dawkins put it in an essay for the Great Ape Project, another organisation, founded by ethicists Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, devoted to the rights of the hominidae family (humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans).

It isn’t the first time that people have sought to grant rights to apes, including releasing them from captivity or entertainment purposes, or banning their use in research. In 2010, the Great Ape Project sought to get a chimpanzee called Jimmy released from a zoo near Rio de Janeiro (unsuccessfully). Another similar case in Brazil went through the courts but the chimp, Suica, died during the process. In 2007, the Balearic Islands, an autonomous part of Spain, granted personhood to great apes, and the Spanish parliament later approved a resolution extending their rights though according to a spokesperson for the Great Apes Project this has not become law yet. In New Zealand and Britain, as well as several other European countries, experiments on apes are banned.

“I think that people in the future will look back,” says Wise, “and see this as the opening salvo in a sustained, strategic litigation campaign that led to a breach of the personhood barrier which currently divides humans from non-humans.”

 

08 The more inept you are the smarter you think you are

Neurohacks| 25 November 2013

The more inept you are the smarter you think you are

Tom Stafford
Why inept people think they are much smarter(Thinkstock)

Psychologists have shown humans are poor judges of their own abilities, from sense of humour to grammar. Those worst at it are the worst judges of all.

 

You’re pretty smart right? Clever, and funny too. Of course you are, just like me. But wouldn’t it be terrible if we were mistaken? Psychologists have shown that we are more likely to be blind to our own failings than perhaps we realise. This could explain why some incompetent people are so annoying, and also inject a healthy dose of humility into our own sense of self-regard.

In 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, from Cornell University, New York, tested whether people who lack the skills or abilities for something are also more likely to lack awareness of their lack of ability. At the start of their research paper they cite a Pittsburgh bank robber called McArthur Wheeler as an example, who was arrested in 1995 shortly after robbing two banks in broad daylight without wearing a mask or any other kind of disguise. When police showed him the security camera footage, he protested “But I wore the juice”. The hapless criminal believed that if you rubbed your face with lemon juice you would be invisible to security cameras.

Kruger and Dunning were interested in testing another kind of laughing matter. They asked professional comedians to rate 30 jokes for funniness. Then, 65 undergraduates were asked to rate the jokes too, and then ranked according to how well their judgements matched those of the professionals. They were also asked how well they thought they had done compared to the average person.

As you might expect, most people thought their ability to tell what was funny was above average. The results were, however, most interesting when split according to how well participants performed. Those slightly above average in their ability to rate jokes were highly accurate in their self-assessment, while those who actually did the best tended to think they were only slightly above average. Participants who were least able to judge what was funny (at least according to the professional comics) were also least able to accurately assess their own ability.

This finding was not a quirk of trying to measure subjective sense of humour. The researchers repeated the experiment, only this time with tests of logical reasoning and grammar. These disciplines have defined answers, and in each case they found the same pattern: those people who performed the worst were also the worst in estimating their own aptitude. In all three studies, those whose performance put them in the lowest quarter massively overestimated their own abilities by rating themselves as above average.

It didn’t even help the poor performers to be given a benchmark. In a later study, the most incompetent participants still failed to realise they were bottom of the pack even when given feedback on the performance of others.

Kruger and Dunning’s interpretation is that accurately assessing skill level relies on some of the same core abilities as actually performing that skill, so the least competent suffer a double deficit. Not only are they incompetent, but they lack the mental tools to judge their own incompetence.

In a key final test, Kruger and Dunning trained a group of poor performers in logical reasoning tasks. This improved participants’ self-assessments, suggesting that ability levels really did influence self-awareness.

Other research has shown that this “unskilled and unaware of it” effect holds in real-life situations, not just in abstract laboratory tests. For example, hunters who know the least about firearms also have the most inaccurate view of their firearm knowledge, and doctors with the worst patient-interviewing skills are the least likely to recognise their inadequacies.

What has become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of what psychologists call metacognition – thinking about thinking. It’s also something that should give us all pause for thought. The effect might just explain the apparently baffling self belief of some of your friends and colleagues. But before you start getting too smug, just remember one thing. As unlikely as you might think it is, you too could be walking around blissfully ignorant of your ignorance.

08 The joys and mysteries of Shakespeare.

The Theatre

The Mirror Has Two Faces

The joys and mysteries of Shakespeare.

by November 25, 2013

 

Paul Chahidi, Mark Rylance, and Liam Brennan in the cross-dressing, gender-bending comedy “Twelfth Night.”

Paul Chahidi, Mark Rylance, and Liam Brennan in the cross-dressing, gender-bending comedy “Twelfth Night.” Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio.

From Zadie Smith’s 2013 essay “Joy”: “If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.” I think I know what she means. Because after joy flares up and inevitably dies, what are you left looking at, through the smeared window of the everyday? The same old predictability, the grocer putting out his wares again, the children off to school, your usual self. As Shakespeare wrote, “Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament; / Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.” More than most artists, Shakespeare spoke of the mystery of joy by articulating its questions: Where does it come from? How is it generated? And why must it leave us, change, disappear?

The director Tim Carroll’s grand and unsurpassable version of “Twelfth Night” (in repertory with “Richard III,” at the Belasco) reminds us that there can be profound pleasure in such mysteries, that not fully understanding how Shakespeare organically created joy through so many characters and situations can actually add to the thrill of watching our shadow selves play at love and sorrow and reunion in his dramas. How marvellous it can be to let go of one’s self-conscious rationalizing, with its fear of the uncontrollable, like joy, and sink helplessly into the theatre of feelings—tender and coarse, confused and projected, authentic and invented—that drives “Twelfth Night.”

Orsino, the Duke of Illyria (the fantastic and sexy Liam Brennan), enters upstage right; his soul is heavy, his affect melodramatic. Poor Orsino, shipwrecked on the shoals of his unrequited love for Countess Olivia (Mark Rylance), commands the musicians who have been playing in the gallery above the stage to continue: their mournful music is apt accompaniment to his despair. Orsino is a straight drama queen, the kind of guy who wouldn’t know what to feel without an audience to play to. He postures against Jenny Tiramani’s brilliant stage design, which is faithful in almost every aspect to the sets and costumes of Shakespeare’s time. The spare set, with an oak screen at the back of the stage to facilitate the actors’ entrances and exits, is enhanced by Stan Pressner’s visually acute lighting, which mixes electric luminescence with candles. Altogether, this is one of the best-designed productions out there, both vivid and otherworldly, like an Elizabethan drawing.

Waving his hand, Orsino gives voice to his sorrow: “If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me the excess of it; that surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.” In fact, it’s actual death—Olivia’s brother and father are recently deceased—that has sealed the object of Orsino’s obsession off from him and from the world. Olivia, encased in black, with her tiny mouth slightly pursed and stained dark, as if by a bitter berry, is a living memento mori. But she’s also a practical girl, and she doesn’t mind expressing that practicality when she meets Cesario (the lovely Samuel Barnett), Orsino’s page, whom he has dispatched to plead his case. There is much that Orsino doesn’t know about his new hire, not least that Cesario is really a woman, Viola, shipwrecked on Illyria with her twin brother, Sebastian (Joseph Timms), who she assumes is dead. Viola is a precursor to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the flesh and blood behind all those gender-theory courses; she knows that life will be easier for her if she can at least play at being a man. (She may also be mourning her brother through impersonation, just as Olivia mourns hers through speech.) With Olivia, Viola is both herself and not, male and female and not, and she speaks the love she wants to hear—from Orsino, to whom she cannot reveal her true identity, even as she longs to show him her heart.

The metaphorical masks keep piling on. Before receiving Viola, Olivia asks Maria, her lady-in-waiting (Paul Chahidi), to fetch her veil; she doesn’t want Orsino’s emissary to know who she is. (Shakespeare doesn’t explain why, and it’s part of the fun not to question it.) Behind her black silk scarf, Olivia dodges the entreaties of her visitor, a youth whom her steward, Malvolio (Stephen Fry), drolly describes as “not yet old enough for a man, nor young / enough for a boy, as a squash is before ’tis a peas- / Cod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple.” Many of the word portraits in “Twelfth Night” act as a kind of doubling, or tripling, of the physical portrayal we see before us; each character is not only conjured up by the actor but reimagined through other characters’ eyes—especially if those eyes are lit by love. Eventually, Olivia is won over by the lyrical Viola (who may seem like a reincarnation of her late beloved sibling), and something happens that she never expected: she becomes alive to the possibility of happiness, to the possibility of belonging to someone, just as she belonged to her lost and no doubt idealized father and brother.

Rylance is an actor of remarkable gifts, alert to every moment, down to the wax dripping off the candles. When Olivia is away from Viola, his voice is all whispery disdain; when she’s in the same room as her beloved, his vocal cords relax and his throat opens, rounding his sounds. And you can barely believe what he’s able to express with his body. Small and trim, his skirts swinging beneath him like a bell, he circles the stage, his face flushed with wit or his chin drawn deep into his ruff in longing. Like many of Shakespeare’s women, Olivia isn’t the most scintillating character onstage—she’s not a villain—but Rylance’s work with Carroll adds layers of unspoken narrative to the text; he writes with his body. He’s a play within a play unto himself. (Rylance doesn’t hit quite the same heights as the star of “Richard III”: his inspiration isn’t off, but his intellectual work on the role is. Although he adds to Richard’s ghoulish sense of humor by cracking jokes to the audience as he displays his twisted arm—he has no pronounced hunchback—and licks his lips or the enamelled, prepossessing face of Lady Anne (Timms), his effects are all on the outside; he won’t let himself be foul inside. He delivers Shakespeare’s fantastic monologues about Richard’s rotten soul without giving off any stench.)

For days after I saw “Twelfth Night,” questions about the play and about Shakespeare reverberated in my mind. (Despite my love of mystery, I am, like most humans, a problem-solving animal.) How did he do it? How did he construct such a popular work out of “outsider” thoughts about gender and cross-dressing? By opening himself up to creative empathy, certainly. Where most of us succumb to the limiting power of self-preservation, Shakespeare rushed toward the enormous freedom that can come with “why”—the spirit of inquiry that jump-starts the imagination. Why does Iago lie, in “Othello”? Why does Richard III’s twisted body eroticize his entire world, and how does that eroticism translate into power? Why does “Twelfth Night” ’s Maria seek to usurp her mistress’s privilege and Malvolio’s? Chahidi, as Maria, gives one of the greatest performances I have ever seen. He ensorcells the audience with Maria’s stiff skirts and mincing walk, her silly smirks and creaky flirtations, her disingenuous modesty. In contrast to Rylance’s self-contained Olivia, Chahidi’s Maria wants to spill out of herself and into someone else’s arms—she’s attracted to Olivia’s uncle, that harmless rascal Sir Toby Belch (the charming and physically loose Colin Hurley)—but she wonders if her body is too much. To make up for her fleshiness, she plays the coquette, laughing behind hands that don’t quite hide her prominent nose and pillowy cheeks. She can’t quite hide her resentment, either, and we don’t want her to. Love is Olivia’s sweet spot; lust and vindictiveness are Maria’s. In a strong essay about “Twelfth Night,” the scholar Keir Elam suggests that the real life of the play lies not in Viola or in Olivia but in the secondary characters. Carroll seems to think so, too. Why else would he allow Chahidi to upstage Rylance, the show’s ostensible star? With near-Kabuki-like control over his face and body, Chahidi adds his own mysteries—about the art of performance—to Shakespeare’s.

None of that sense of mystery is present in the director Julie Taymor’s rendition of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (played in the round at the beautiful new Theatre for a New Audience, in Brooklyn). In her first production since her controversy-generating work on “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Taymor places the emphasis less on her hardworking performers than on her own formidable visual skills. She ably draws out the three plots occasioned by the impending wedding of Duke Theseus (Roger Clark) and Queen Hippolyta (Okwui Okpokwasili). Before the nuptials, we meet Hermia (Lilly Englert), who is in love with Lysander (Jake Horowitz), although her father, Lord Egeus (Robert Langdon Lloyd), doesn’t approve—he wants her to marry Demetrius (Zach Appelman). Meanwhile, Peter Quince (Joe Grifasi) and his fellow-players prepare to perform for the wedding party, while the rulers of Fairyland, aided by Puck (Kathryn Hunter), deal with their own romantic travails and, soon enough, with their human counterparts.

Employing a large cast that includes children in a fairy chorus, Taymor handles the staging like a master—not a hair is out of place—but she evinces no intellectual originality. Nor does she seem particularly interested in the fact that Englert speaks her lines as though she were translating from an Eastern European language, or that Tom Snout, who is played by the large black actor Jacob Ming-Trent, “does” stereotypical large-black-man things: eats too much and speaks as if he were singing the blues. These cruddy characterizations bring the entire show down and humiliate the actors, which humiliates us.

The unsurprising linearity of Taymor’s work only drives home how good acting can be when it’s handled by a director like Carroll, who possesses authority and vision as well as an inspired spatial sense. Actors flower under that kind of leadership; it allows them to reach deep into their craft, while also acknowledging the poetic reality that each performance—a rope trick powered by dexterity and stamina—is both immensely joyous and immensely sad, because, like first love, it can never be repeated.

08 On Doris Lessing and Not Saying Thank You

November 20, 2013

On Doris Lessing and Not Saying Thank You

doris-lessing.jpg

The woman has trouble stepping out of the taxi. She is old, and the taxi sits higher off the ground than she might like. As she stoops to protect her head, the long red scarf that hangs from her neck nearly brushes the pavement. The woman is not only old; she is also short and, it has to be said, somewhat squat—a small woman with gray hair tied back and stiff ankles cased in stockings, putting out a hand to steady herself against the open door of the taxi as the driver jogs over to assist her, his engine still running. She’s too far along to accept his help. She steps down slowly, asks the fare, and only after reaching for her pocketbook does she look straight into the camera, now close on her face, and ask what is being photographed. “We’re photographing you,” says a man’s voice, almost shyly, the long cone of a microphone pushed suddenly into view. “Have you heard the news?”

A number of obituaries of Doris Lessing, who died on Sunday, at the age of ninety-four, mentioned that when she learned she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature her response was, “Oh, Christ.” She said, “Oh, Christ,” and waved her hand at the reporters who had staked out her home in London, shooing them away. Then she turned and paid for her taxi as her son Peter, who lived with her and whom she cared for while he was ill, looked on. A running meter demands attention; after nearly nine decades, the last step to literary glory can be put off for five more minutes.

At eighty-nine, Lessing was the oldest writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the eleventh woman to do so. She was born in Persia, in 1919, to British parents, and she grew up on their failed farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia. As a young woman, she rejected the brutal, racist colonial system that she inherited, as well as the sexism that had crushed her mother’s life, and which nearly crushed hers after she married, at the age of nineteen. She was a committed Communist in the nineteen-forties, then spent the rest of her life refuting Communism, along with most other codified political movements. She moved to England, took younger artists into her home, and wrote book after book: novels, science fiction, memoirs, essays, poems, a libretto for an opera adapted from her book “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8,” with music by Philip Glass.

After her run-in with the press, Lessing went into her house. She came back with a glass of water, and, sitting on her front steps like she was getting ready to peel potatoes, she asked the reporters how she was supposed to react to their announcement. “The whole thing is so graceless and stupid and bad mannered,” Lessing said. They stammered. She was clearly having fun. Her name had been floated for years; the Nobel committee had made it clear to her that she was never going to win. Now it had apparently had a change of heart, tying her up with interviews and ceremonies and speeches just as she was getting ready to start another book.

We tend to expect certain things of people who win big prizes. First, there should be surprise, even shock, chased by a flicker of disbelief. That disbelief should soon give way to pleasure, but unchecked pleasure in the flush of success can be unseemly, embarrassing to witness; like Augustus Gloop lapping up the chocolate river in Willy Wonka’s factory, it makes for a gluttonous, and risky, display. The idea is to be collected, gracious, and sincere, to thank all of the people who helped you on your way to this, the most important moment of your life.

Winning the Nobel Prize was not the most important moment of Doris Lessing’s extraordinary and prolific life, and it seems as though some of her critics won’t forgive her for not pretending that it was, just as they won’t forgive her for leaving her two young children in the care of their father, in Rhodesia, so that she could pursue a different kind of life. Her obituary in the New York Times has a tone of peevish, gawking reproach. (Much better to read Margaret Atwood’s wonderful tribute in the Guardian.) These are many of the same people who pick at Lessing for refusing to call her best-known work, “The Golden Notebook,” a feminist book. But the uncompromising and unapologetic way in which she conducted both her private life and her writing life should speak for itself.

Lessing’s major political concern was the same as the one that is at the heart of feminism, and of all civil-rights movements: access. In her Nobel acceptance speech, called “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize,” Lessing described visiting two schools. The first was in what by then had become the independent Republic of Zimbabwe: “There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or Biros. In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, or novels with titles like ‘Weekend in Paris’ and ‘Felicity Finds Love.’ ” The second was an upper-crust London boys’ school. She told the students there about the students in Zimbabwe who begged visitors to bring them books. The London boys looked at her blankly, polite but bored. “I’m sure that some of them will one day win prizes,” she said. Look at Orhan Pamuk, she told her audience, look at V. S. Naipaul and J. M. Coetzee. All three, in their Nobel acceptance speeches, spoke of an early life spent with books. How can we better distribute knowledge?

“I have to conclude that fiction is better at ‘the truth’ than a factual record,” Lessing wrote in her 1993 preface to “The Golden Notebook.” When Lessing set out to tell the story of her parents in her final book, “Alfred and Emily,” published in 2008, she split it in two, pairing the real account of their miseries and privations with an imagined counter-history of what their lives might have been if the First World War had never happened. Sometimes, though, the factual record turns out to be just as good as fiction. The pugnacious bravado, the fascination and fury with politics, the death of the British Empire (Lessing refused to become a dame, because there was no longer any Empire to be Dame of), the apparent total lack of fear of failure—what Lessing needs now is a top-notch biographer. Hermione Lee, the best person for the job, has just published her book about Penelope Fitzgerald. Could we hold out hope that she might turn to Lessing next? Oh, Christ, what a prize that would be.

Alexandra Schwartz is on the editorial staff of the magazine. She is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.

Above: Doris Lessing in 1980. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty.

Keywords

08 Writers and critics on the best books of 2013

Writers and critics on the best books of 2013

Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this year

 

Illustration by Rachel Gannon

Illustration by Rachel Gannon at eyecandy.co.uk

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers’ The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with “sharing” our lives through technology. It’s convincing and a little creepy.

William Boyd

Breakfast with LucienBy strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word “Breakfast” in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby’s by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig’s fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was answered with great candour and judiciousness. Hook’s view of the art world is that of the professional auctioneer. In an A-Z format, it is an entire art education contained in under 350 pages. Wry, dry and completely beguiling.

Bill Bryson

The Compatibility Gene by Daniel M Davis (Allen Lane) is an elegantly written, unexpectedly gripping account of how scientists painstakingly unravelled the way in which a small group of genes (known as MHC genes) crucially influence, and unexpectedly interconnect, various aspects of our lives, from how well we fight off infection to how skilfully we find a mate. Lab work has rarely been made to seem more interesting or heroic. But my absolute book of the year is Philip Davies’s hefty, gorgeous London: Hidden Interiors (English Heritage/Atlantic Publishing), which explores 180 fabulous London interior spaces that most people know nothing about, from George Gilbert Scott’s wondrous chapel at King’s College to L Manze’s eel, pie and mash shop in Walthamstow. It is beautifully illustrated with photographs by Derek Randall and worth every penny of its £40 price.

Eleanor Catton

My discovery of the year was Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press): in style, very similar to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, but the broken ellipses never feel like a gimmick or a game. I was utterly devastated by Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth (Granta), and utterly delighted by Elizabeth Knox’s sly and ingenious Mortal Fire (Farrar Straus Giroux). My favourite novel for children published this year was the marvellously funny and inventive Heap House (Hot Key), written and illustrated by Edward Carey.

Shami Chakrabarti

Return of a KingHelping to judge this year’s Samuel Johnson prize meant getting stuck into some serious non-fiction. The six books that made the shortlist – Empires of the Dead (David Crane, William Collins), Return of a King (William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury), A Sting in the Tale (Dave Goulson, Jonathan Cape), Under Another Sky (Charlotte Higgins, Jonathan Cape), The Pike (Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Fourth Estate) and Margaret Thatcher (Charles Moore, Allen Lane) – are among my favourites from 2013. Dalrymple’s masterful retelling of the first Afghan war had an eerie modern-day relevance, while Hughes-Hallett’s portrayal of the fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio was a sombre reminder of the perils of political extremism. On a completely contrary note, Goulson’s case for the importance of bumblebees will live long in my memory for its sheer passion and scientific detail.

Sarah Churchwell

Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts (Granta) provides a masterclass on the art of the essay from one of its most formidable living practitioners – often, as with the title essay, by sharing object lessons in failure. These occasional pieces offer glimpses into the creative process, the writer’s constant search for structure, order and consonance. Even when individual essays did not live up to Malcolm’s rigorous standards, the collection as a whole shows how connections emerge from the workings of one memorably searching, restless, ruthless mind.

Jim Crace

Birds & PeopleThe four non-fiction books I most valued this year have an unusual strength and depth in common; the single themes they profess to focus on are also the Trojan horses through which their writers smuggle in a whole wide world of instruction, knowledge and contemporary significance. They are: Spillover, David Quammen‘s investigation of animal-to-human viruses (Vintage); Falling Upwards (Harper Collins), Richard Holmes‘s history of ballooning; The Searchers (Bloomsbury), Glenn Frankel‘s account of the 1836 abduction by Comanches of Cynthia Ann Parker and its unending aftermath; and Mark Cocker’s loving and magisterial Birds and People (Jonathan Cape).

Roddy Doyle

George Saunders’s collection of stories, Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), is spectacularly good. The stories are clever and moving, and the title story is the best piece of fiction I’ve read this year. The Searchers, by Glenn Frankel, is about the stories behind the story that became the classic John Ford film. It’s a history of America, an exploration of racial intolerance, an account of how, and why, real events can become legends. It’s also hugely entertaining – as well as huge. My favourite book this year is Paul Morley’s The North (And Almost Everything in It) (Bloomsbury). History told backwards, a memoir, a love letter to Liverpool, several to Manchester; the book pushed me to go to the Lowry exhibition at the Tate and made me listen again to George Formby and the Buzzcocks. The book filled my head. It was much too long and occasionally irritating, but when I got to the end I wished there’d been more of it.

Richard Ford

James Salter’s novel All That Is (Picador). Not in my (admittedly failing) memory have I read a novel that, at its crucialest moment, made me just stand straight up out of my chair and have to walk around the room for several minutes. Laid into the customary Salterish verbal exquisiteness and vivid intelligence is such remarkable audacity and dark-hued verve about us poor humans. It’s a great novel.

Jonathan Franzen

Command and ControlMy vote is for Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control (Allen Lane). Do you really want to read about the thermonuclear warheads that are still aimed at the city where you live? Do you really need to know about the appalling security issues that have dogged nuclear weapons in the 70 years since their invention? Yes, you do. Schlosser’s book reads like a thriller, but it’s masterfully even-handed, well researched, and well organised. Either he’s a natural genius at integrating massive amounts of complex information, or he worked like a dog to write this book. You wouldn’t think the prospect of nuclear apocalypse would make for a reading treat, but in Schlosser’s hands it does.

Antonia Fraser

The Poets’ Daughters by Katie Waldegrave (Hutchinson) is an engrossing study of Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge. A double biography is an intricate pattern to achieve, but Waldegrave brings it off triumphantly: she also brings compassion as well as scholarship to her aid, so that at times the story is almost unbearably moving. After reading this book, I went right back to the paternal poetry and read it with fresh eyes. Olivier by Philip Ziegler (MacLehose Press), published appropriately enough as the National Theatre celebrates its 50th anniversary, is another narrative that sweeps you along. While in no sense a hagiography – there is plenty of discreet criticism when necessary – it enriched my sense of this amazing multi-faceted, multi-talented man. When I watch Henry V, for the umpteenth time, I shall gaze into those brilliant enigmatic eyes with even more awe, and a certain amount of apprehension.

Stephen Frears

Best read of the year was Into the Silence (Vintage), Wade Davis‘s account of the three unsuccessful Everest expeditions, through the back door of Tibet, culminating in the death of George Mallory in 1924. Men from the first world war showing endurance and a capacity for suffering beyond my comprehension. Maybe the prime minister should read it before he makes an idiot of himself. Oh and Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe (Viking). But I would say that since it’s about my ex‑wife and our children. Letters from their Leicester nanny. Very funny and sharp.

Malcolm Gladwell

Charles BelfoureI read so many books this year that I loved – Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert O Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher (Princeton University Press), David Epstein’s The Sports Gene (Yellow Jersey), and Jonathan Dee’s magnificent A Thousand Pardons (Corsair) – but my favourite was a novel I picked up entirely randomly, in an airport bookstore: The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure (Sourcebooks Landmark). It is a beautiful and elegant account of an ordinary man’s unexpected and reluctant descent into heroism during the second world war. I have no idea who Belfoure is, but he needs to write another book, now!

John Gray

Adam Phillips’ One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays (Hamish Hamilton). Writing of Ford Madox Ford’s hero Tietjens in Parade’s End, who in the middle of a conversation suddenly wondered if he was in fact the father of his child but “proved his reputation for sanity” by going on talking without any sign of distress, Phillips comments: “As though sanity for this Englishman was about being apparently undisturbed by one’s most disturbing thoughts.” Witty and somehow liberating, it’s a comment that could only come from Phillips. Covering a wide variety of topics – “On Being Bored”, “First Hates”, “On Success” and “The Uses of Forgetting” are just a few – these short pieces from the psychotherapist and critic will confirm him as the best living essayist writing in English.

Mark Haddon

The Great War edited by Mark Holborn, text by Hilary Roberts (Jonathan Cape). A collection of photographs from the vast holdings of the Imperial War Museums. I have never seen or read anything that brings the first world war quite so vividly alive. Some of the events of 1914-1918 have been told and retold so many times that the whole conflict has, for many people, acquired an obscuring antique patina. This book strips it all away. It will make me seem a fool, perhaps, but I kept turning pages and thinking, my God, these are real people. These things actually happened.

Mohsin Hamid

BastiThose unfamiliar with the American short-form master George Saunders should go out immediately and pick up a copy of his latest story collection, Tenth of December. Wow. Sharp and fun. Also, we should all be grateful for the New York Review Books Classics series, which this year has brought us Frances Pritchett’s English translation of Intizar Husain’s famous Urdu novel, Basti. Husain was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker International prize, and this, his best‑known work, deserves a UK publisher.

Robert Harris

In 1983, the 50-year lease on a safe deposit box on the island of Mallorca expired. It was opened and found to contain tens of thousands of pages of the diary of a minor German aristocrat, Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), covering the years from 1880 to 1918. These have now been meticulously translated and edited by Laird M Easton, and the result is Journey to the Abyss (Vintage), a 900-page marvel. Kessler, an aesthete and amateur diplomat, travelled relentlessly between Paris, Berlin and London before the first world war and the list of his friends and acquaintances, each vividly described, is staggering: Bonnard, Cocteau, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ravel, Rodin, Renoir, Gide, Monet, Mahler, Matissee, William Morris, Richard Strauss, Strindberg, Rilke, Verlaine, George Bernard Shaw, Hofmannsthal, Gordon Craig, Munch, Sarah Bernhardt, Max Reinhardt, George Grosz, Nietzsche (whose death mask he helps make), Walter Rathenau, Gustav Stresemann, HG Wells, Augustus John … And then comes August 1914 and Kessler – hitherto the most cultured companion – joins the Kaiser’s army and briefly becomes a swaggering German nationalist. An important, underappreciated, unforgettable book.

Max Hastings

Hanns and RudolfThomas Harding’s Hanns and Rudolf (William Heinemann) tells the story of how a young German Jewish refugee serving in the British army – the author’s uncle – was responsible in 1945 for tracking down and arresting Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz and one of the most dreadful mass murderers of all time. Harding sketches the parallel lives of the SS officer with notable skill. The book is a moving reminder of what an extraordinary amount Britain gained by the Jewish flight from Europe in the 1930s – it could have been still more had we offered a warmer welcome to a host of German scientists who moved on to the US.

Philip Hensher

Volume one of Charles Moore’s Margaret Thatcher (Allen Lane) is an extraordinary reconstruction of a political way of life now completely vanished, written with a clear eye and full of incidental pleasures. (Not least about the surprising number of adoring gay men surrounding her at all stages.) The novel I enjoyed most was Richard House’s sensational pile-driver, The Kills (Picador). Catching-up reading brought me Tapan Raychaudhuri’s superb memoir, The World in Our Time (HarperCollins India), not yet published in the UK, but full of the tumultuous life of the Bengal delta – a masterpiece.

Simon Hoggart

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (Hutchinson). Hard to imagine a thriller where you know the ending before you pick up the book, but Harris’s retelling of the Dreyfus case is as taut and exciting as anything by Forsyth or Follett. The tale is told through the eyes of Col Picquart, the head of “the statistical section” within the French secret service, who witnessed Dreyfus’s degradation but gradually came to realise that another officer was the traitor. The story of how he went over the heads of his superiors, none of whom wanted to rock the ship of state, is gripping, the evocation of turn-of-the-century France appealing, and the ending is magnificently downbeat, a terrific anticlimax – if that’s possible.

AM Homes

Woody Guthrie’s Wardy Forty: Greystone Park State Hospital Revisited by Phillip Buehler (Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc) is a hauntingly beautiful book about the five years the American folk legend, songwriter and activist spent as a patient at the Greystone Park State Hospital in New Jersey. Guthrie, who had Huntington’s disease, lived among the mental patients on ward 40. It was here that he was introduced to the 19-year-old Bob Dylan. Photographer Phillip Buehler, who has made a career of exploring 20th-century ruins, first climbed into Greystone through a window. The beauty of the decaying building, thick curls of paint peeling off the walls, light seeping into long empty narrow patient rooms like cells, spurred his curiosity. He located Guthrie’s files and, working with archivists and the Guthrie family, was able to put together a portrait of a man, a place and a point in American history when large state hospitals were all too often warehouses for humanity. There are notes from doctors indicating they had no idea who Guthrie was; or they saw him as a wanderer a vagrant, and thought his claims about songwriting were delusions of grandeur. A particular quote from Woody’s son Arlo stayed with me – a patient tells Woody that he loved his book Bound for Glory. “You read my book?” Woody asks. “No, I ate your book,” the patient says.

Barbara Kingsolver

The Golem and the DjinniI love surprise finds, so I’ll recommend two debut novels that swept me away. The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker (Blue Door), has the detailed realism of historical fiction, the haunting feel of a folk tale, and is one of only two novels I’ve ever loved whose main characters are not human. (The other was The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy.) And Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings, Bad Kings (out in March 2014 from Oneworld Publications) is a ferociously honest, funny, completely unstoppable trip through an institutionally corrupt home for disabled teenagers. I had no intention of going where they took me. That’s the thrill of fiction.

David Kynaston

Kenneth Roy’s The Invisible Spirit: A Life of Postwar Scotland 1945-75 (ICS) is by someone who lived through the period but is admirably unsentimental. Well-informed, highly readable, slightly prickly, often opinionated – not least about the seriously flawed Scottish establishment – this feels like something that needed to be written. Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Five Leaves) by Gillian Darley and David McKie I am far from alone in having the awkward, melancholic architectural writer and broadcaster as one of my heroes: partly for his deep conviction that the built environment mattered, partly for his insistence – in defiance of modernist orthodoxy – that people mattered more. One day no doubt Nairn will get a heavy-duty biography, but for the time being this elegant, rather slighter treatment does the job with charm and just the right degree of critical affection.

John Lanchester

Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina, a collection of letters to her sister from the period in the mid-80s when she was working as a nanny, is funny and sharp and has a distinctive streak of wildness: no book this year made me laugh more. Also funny and sharp, though in a darker vein, is ASA Harrison’s he-said, she-said psychological thriller, The Silent Wife (Headline). Finally, the last entry in the funny-sharp stakes are the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, which I’ve been reading thanks to Hermione Lee’s biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Chatto & Windus). The odd thing is that Lee’s book has had more influence on my reading than anything else this year, even though I’m not going to read the biography itself until I’ve finished the novels. That’s because I don’t want prematurely to spoil the mystery of how Fitzgerald could have known so much about so many worlds, from pre-revolutionary Moscow to 60s theatre-school London to German Romanticism. (I think I can guess how she knew so much about houseboats and bookshops.) Last recommendation: Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (OUP USA), an extraordinary and very controversial intervention in the current ructions about science and religion, from one of the world’s most respected philosophers.

Mark Lawson

On either side of the Atlantic, two octogenarian grand masters of espionage fiction were on high form: John le Carré’s A Delicate Truth (Viking) and Charles McCarry’s The Shanghai Factor (Head of Zeus) dramatise the cumulative consequences of decades of spying and lying by the victors of the second world war. Drawing on a lifetime of learning, and defying several life-threatening conditions, Clive James translated Dante: The Divine Comedy (Picador) into punchy, theologically serious and frequently funny verse. Julian Barnes reformed the conventional autobiography in Levels of Life (Jonathan Cape), combining essay, fiction and memoir in reflecting on the death of love, while Hermione Lee rethought the conventions of biography in a compelling account of the life and work (and overlaps between) of the until now underrated writer Penelope Fitzgerald. And, as readers migrate to the ebook, two lavishly produced volumes made the case for the physical book: a new edition (including the Olympic Flame bowl) of Thomas Heatherwick’s thrilling design compendium Making (Thames & Hudson) and JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (Canongate): an astonishing interactive project that encloses secret books and secret readers within what seems to be a 1949 library book.

Penelope Lively

Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life is literary biography at its best – a masterly discussion of the work of that fine novelist and an illuminating account of the life of a complex and elusive person. I thought I knew both the work and the writer pretty well but have learned much – new insights into the novels, aspects of her life of which I knew nothing. Nobody does elderly men better than Jane Gardam. Last Friends (Little, Brown) is the concluding volume in her trilogy about the legal pack – Feathers, Veneering, Fiscal-Smith – that began with Old Filth. Throughout the series Jane Gardam has switched viewpoints with extraordinary dexterity. Elegant, funny, unexpected – Last Friends ties things up. I am a long-time fan of Adam Thorpe. His versatility is remarkable – historical novels, shrewd forays into contemporary life. And now a thriller, Flight (Vintage). It zips from the Middle East to the Outer Hebrides – brilliant plotting, a mesmerising read.

Robert Macfarlane

Never a man to take a straight line where a diversion was possible, Patrick Leigh Fermor spent almost 50 years not-quite-finishing the final book of his trilogy describing his walk across Europe in the 1930s. It appeared this autumn as The Broken Road (John Murray), two years after his death, brought to publication by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron. I opened it expecting disappointment – how could it be as good as its sibling volumes? – and ended it amazed. I read Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (Granta) three times in my capacity as Man Booker judge, and each time round it yielded new riches. It is a vastly complex novel about investment and return, gift and theft, value and worth, which – in performance of its own ethics – gives far more than it appears to possess. Finally, in minimalist contrast to Catton’s maximalist novel, I loved Wolfhou by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, another exquisitely produced pamphlet of place-poetry from Corbel Stone Press, who work out of a cottage in the western Lake District.

Hilary Mantel

Penelope FitzgeraldIndulge in a big and richly satisfying literary biography, from an artist in the form: Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. It will send you back to the subject’s own piquant and elusive novels. But perhaps a book of the year should be a mirror of the times? If so, feed righteous indignation on Damian McBride’s Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin (Backbite). Bankrupt of morals and bankrupt of style, it is a nonpareil of peevishness, and self-delusion shines from it like a Christmas star.

Pankaj Mishra

The most remarkable discovery for me this year was Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good (Ugly Duckling Presse), a collection of poems and essays, a brilliant artistic and political response to the depredations of the Yeltsin and Putin era. Italo Calvino’s Letters: 1941-1985 (Princeton Press) and Collection of Sand: Essays (Penguin Modern Classics) remind us of a type of writerly mind almost extinct in Anglo-America: worldly, invariably curious, quietly passionate and elegant. Julia Lovell’s translations of Zhu Wen’s stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice and the Football Fan (Columbia) yet again affirm him as one of the most interesting Chinese writers today. This was a particularly rich and exciting year in literary translations from Indian languages; the stories in Ajay Navaria’s Unclaimed Terrain (Navayana Publications), and the novels by Sachin Kundalkar (Cobalt Blue, Hamish Hamilton) and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (The Mirror of Beauty, Hamish Hamilton) hint at the yet unrevealed depth and diversity of Indian literatures.

Blake Morrison

The PikeAdelle Waldman’s first novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P (William Heinemann) is memorable for its Austen-like wit, humour, social astuteness and scarily accurate insights into men. Rather than condemn the protagonist (a young New Yorker) as misogynistic and self-obsessed, Waldman sends him up, to devastating effect. Lucy Hughes-Hallett adopts a similar strategy in her terrific biography of the poet, seducer and fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Pike. The pace is hectic, as befits D’Annunzio’s life, and I enjoyed the quote from the ex-lover who said his ideal would be an octopus with a hundred women’s legs – but no head. Helen Mort’s Division Street (Chatto & Windus) is an excellent first poetry collection – lucid, intelligent, politically aware, and loyal to the northern landscapes that inspired it. Dave Eggers’s The Circle, about the abolition of privacy in the age of social media, is a must-read dystopian novel – the future it envisages has all but arrived.

Andrew Motion

Tim Dee’s Four Fields (Jonathan Cape) belongs in the tradition of “nature writing”, but works with it too – putting its beautifully written sentences in the service of description and evocation, but using them to frame a serious conversation about environmental preservation and its opposites; it’s a deeply attractive book and also an important one. Inside the Rainbow (Redstone Press), edited by Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya, is a survey of Russian children’s literature from 1920-35, and the subtitle tells us what to expect: “Beautiful books, terrible times”. Indeed. But brilliantly clever, seditious, amusing, brave and delightful books as well; their illustrations and jackets are all reproduced here to wonderful effect. JO Morgan’s long poem At Maldon (CB Editions) is a riff on the Old English poem, and owes something to Christopher Logue’s War Music and Alice Oswald’s Memorial – but it is its own thing too: inventive, striking and memorable. And a reminder that Morgan is one of the most original poets around.

Edna O’Brien

La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Galasso (Allen Lane) is a brilliant kaleidoscopic rendering of the tormented poet, his times and the city of Paris that “breathes” in his prose and poetry. We meet Baudelaire the dandy, his indecorous mistress Jeanne, both muse and vampire, his mother Caroline and his hated stepfather General Aupick, who, in the bloodshed of 1848, Baudelaire asked one of the insurgents to shoot. It is one of the most satisfying biographies I have ever read. Sylvia Plath: Drawings (Faber), lovingly compiled by her daughter Frieda Hughes, shows Plath’s observation of everyday things – a thistle, a horse chestnut, the willows near Grantchester. It is also salutary to compare the austerity of her poetry with the rapture in her letters to her husband (included here), in which she envisages his presence “come day, come night, come hurricane and holocaust …” Dear Boy by Emily Berry (Faber): from the evidence here, this poet’s imagination is rich, playful and restless, with the occasional note of anguish, which Plath would surely approve of, like a glimpse of the first crocus. Last, but by no means least, Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (Doubleday Ireland) is funny, moving and beautifully written.

Susie Orbach

Alan Rusbridger’s Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible is a wonderful account of trying to learn a complex piano piece while running the Guardian at the time of WikiLeaks and phone hacking. I had to skip some of the accounts of the fingering he is learning but he eloquently expresses the struggle to take up the playing of this piece – the Chopin Ballade No 1 – and segues into fascinating accounts of different historic pianos and the idiosyncratic manner individual musicians use them, and his various “teachers”, who mostly sound very strict, alongside the emergencies from the office. A parallel story of how newspapers can move forward in the digital age runs along the narrative. I am always curious about people’s daily lives and their curiosities. This book gives both in abundance.

Ian Rankin

Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (Doubleday) is her most challenging, complex and compelling novel yet. A woman has the chance to live life over and over again in often surprising ways. No Booker listing: no justice. Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard (Faber) is ostensibly a courtroom drama that asks how its sensible, intelligent middle-class heroine ended up in the dock in a murder case – beguilingly written, steely and plausible and occasionally shocking. Niccolò Ammaniti was a new name to me. Let the Games Begin (Canongate) is a wild ride with the fevered quality of Pynchon and Vonnegut as a party to end all parties sees the various characters vying to survive a grotesque uprising. It’s a satire on contemporary culture, Italian politics and the writing profession itself. Funny, sharp, and really quite rude. In a similar vein, John Niven’s Straight White Male (William Heinemann) is the story of a hugely successful Irish screenwriter and his gloriously incorrect behaviour. There are laughs aplenty, but Niven adds growing poignancy as his hero becomes self-aware. It is Niven’s best book, and the protagonist is easily the match of John Self in Martin Amis’s Money.

Ruth Rendell

StonerMy choice isn’t a new book, but it was reissued this year. I’m ashamed that I had never heard of Stoner by John Williams (Vintage) until I found it in a bookshop three months ago. I was stunned by it, it’s so good. And yet very little happens in it except joy and pain and sorrow in the American midwest, love and passion and the mistakes everyone makes. It’s beautifully written in simple but brilliant prose, a novel of an ordinary life, an examination of a quiet tragedy, the work of a great but little-known writer.

Lionel Shriver

Three novels stand out for me in 2013: Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda (Sceptre), set in Red Hook, Brooklyn; two girls venture out on a pink inflatable raft into the filthy East River and only one comes back. Great writing, great setting, beautifully rendered characters. The Son by Phillipp Meyer (Simon & Schuster): an epic set in Texas that uses, among other things, that white-man-raised-by-Indians routine, and yet incredibly it doesn’t feel tired. Totally engrossing. Lastly, Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs (Virago), which teems with fury, and tells a tale of breathtaking betrayal. It’s a great study as well in the (possibly?) unreliable narrator. You keep puzzling over whether this woman is completely off her head.

Helen Simpson

Hermione Lee’s fascinating biography of Penelope Fitzgerald charts a life that travelled the full 360 degrees on the wheel of fortune – from early promise and privilege down to dramatic middle-aged doldrums then back up to a late-blooming two decades of literary productivity and success. I’m now reading Fitzgerald’s last four novels, which are every bit as breathtaking as Lee’s concluding chapters describe. I read Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer for the first time this year in a vigorous new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Admired by Chekhov, Gorky and Tolstoy, these stories seethe with picaresque unpredictability, outlandish but touching monologues and recklessly impulsive characters like the country girl turned femme fatale in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Tom Stoppard

This is the time of year when I try in vain to remember what I was reading up to 12 months ago, and end up choosing three books I’ve enjoyed in the last 12 weeks. In the present case, these are Nature’s Oracle by Ullica Segerstrale (OUP), a biography of WD (Bill) Hamilton, the evolutionary biologist whose insight into the operation of kin selection at gene level suggested how altruism might have emerged from natural selection; a hugely enjoyable novel, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape), who, when he’s in his hardboiled vein, writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year; and The New York Times Book of Mathematics, which is what it sounds like: a century of news from maths written up for a general readership, and nobody does it better.

Colm Tóibín

TitianTitian: His Life by Sheila Hale (HarperPress) manages an intimate and careful study of Titian’s body of work, plus an intricate knowledge of politics and art in 16th-century Venice and in the Europe from which Titian received his commissions. She captures Titian’s vast ambition and does justice to his achievement, but also creates a portrait of an age. Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton University Press) are the second and third volumes of a three-volume biography. Stach reads the work and the life with minute care and sympathy. He has a deep understanding of the world that Kafka came from and the personalities who touched his life, and this is matched by an intelligence and tact about the impulse behind the work itself.

08 The religious symbolism behind the Chronicles of Narnia

21 November 2013 Last updated at 10:01

The religious symbolism behind the Chronicles of Narnia

 

By Alister McGrath Profesor of Theology, King’s College London
Aslan
Aslan is a literary Christ figure who plays a pivotal role in the story of Narnia, Professor McGrath says

What’s the best children’s book of all time? A 2008 survey found most people believed it was C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This opening novel of the Chronicles of Narnia series is widely regarded as its highlight.

Lewis himself would have been surprised at his immense popularity today. Although he had been hugely popular in his lifetime, he was gloomy about his future prospects.

Towards the end of his life, he told friends he expected to be forgotten within a few years of his death. Yet Lewis’s books – including the Chronicles of Narnia – sell more strongly today than at any point during his lifetime.

So how did a bachelor Oxford don without any children of his own come to write this classic work? What do people find so intriguing about the Chronicles of Narnia? And why does it retain such an appeal, 50 years after its author’s death in November 1963?

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis
  • Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898
  • He was known to his family as ‘Jack’ as that was the name he chose for himself at the age of three – ignoring anyone who called him Clive
  • He gained three first-class degrees from Oxford
  • He was good friends with author J.R.R. Tolkien
  • In 2008 a survey found most people believed his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, from The Chronicles of Narnia, was the best children’s book of all time

As a child, Lewis loved stories, but had little interest in Christianity. He later came to wonder how stories might have helped him to embrace a faith that he neither understood nor appreciated. What if stories could have opened up the wonder and joy of a faith that he had to wait two decades to discover?

Greatest literary creationLewis may well have written the books that he would have liked to read as a boy—both as something that excited his imagination and that helped him to offer what he later called an “imaginative welcome” to the Christian faith.

“I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood,” he said.

Religious symbolism thus plays a major role in the Chronicles of Narnia.

One of the best examples of this symbolism is Aslan, the noble lion of Narnia. Just about everyone agrees that he’s the stand-out character of the Chronicles of Narnia and probably Lewis’s greatest literary creation.

Lewis seems to have begun to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe without any clear idea of how its plot and characters would develop. Then Aslan came “bounding in” to Lewis’s imagination, and the narrative took shape.

Aslan is a literary Christ figure who plays a pivotal role in the story of Narnia, just as Jesus Christ is central to the Christian faith.

Lewis explained in a letter to Arthur Greeves in October 1931, that he set out his story of Aslan as a retelling of the “actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.”

Michael Aldridge as Professor Digory Kirke
Professor Digory wakes the evil Queen Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew

Lewis does not tell us what Jesus Christ is like; he shows us what Aslan is like, and allows us to take things from there by ourselves.

“Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia, and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen,” he told a fifth grade class in Maryland in a letter in 1954.

For Lewis, one of Aslan’s chief roles is to enable people to discover the truth about themselves.

Unleash evilAslan is such a commanding figure that he helps people who might otherwise remain locked in self-deception break free from this prison. He makes it possible for people to confront the awkward truth about themselves.

In The Magician’s Nephew, things take a turn for the worse when someone wakes nasty Queen Jadis up from her enchanted sleep. But who would do such a stupid thing? Who would be mad enough to unleash her evil?

When questioned by Aslan, Digory admits that he was one who rang the bell. He offers some half-hearted defence of his action. But as Aslan stares at him, he breaks down and admits his failure.

Digory abandons his pathetic attempts at self-justification, and takes responsibility for his actions. The gaze of Aslan compels him to tell the truth, both to Aslan and to himself.

It is as if Aslan offers a mirror in which we see ourselves as we really are. Or a light which reveals what we are really like, no matter how uncomfortable this may be.

Lewis is trying to help us realize that the quest for virtue involves both breaking the power of sin and embracing the power of good. Both, for Lewis, require the grace of God.

Dawn Treader
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was the third book in the series and was first published in 1952

This is clearly seen in the “undragoning” of Eustace Scrubb in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, widely agreed to be one of the most dramatic examples of religious symbolism in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Layer of scalesEustace is portrayed as a thoroughly selfish child, who changes into a dragon as a result of his “greedy, dragonish thoughts.”

Eustace frantically tries to scratch off his dragon’s skin. Yet each layer he removes merely reveals yet another layer of scales underneath it. He realizes that he is trapped within a dragon’s skin because he has become a dragon.

Then Aslan appears, and tears away at Eustace’s dragon flesh with his claws. The lion’s claws cut so deeply that Eustace is in real pain – “worse than anything I’ve ever felt.”

When the scales are finally removed, Aslan plunges the raw and bleeding Eustace into a well from which he emerges purified and renewed.

The symbolism of Eustace’s immersion in the water of the well reflects the New Testament’s language about baptism as dying to self and rising to Christ.

Lewis’s religious symbolism explores how we can be trapped by forces over which we have no control.

The dragon is a symbol of the power of sin to entrap, captivate, and imprison people. It can only be broken and mastered by the redeemer, Aslan, who heals and renews Eustace, restoring him to what he was intended to be.

Dragon
Eustace Scrubb changes into a dragon as a result of his “greedy, dragonish thoughts”

 

As might be expected, the storyline and religious symbolism of the Chronicles of Narnia divide its readers.

Some see Narnia as childish nonsense. To others, it is utterly transformative.

For those, this evocative story, rich in symbolism, affirms that it is possible for the weak and foolish to have a noble calling in a dark world; that our deepest intuitions point us to the true meaning of things; that there is indeed something beautiful and wonderful at the heart of the universe, and that this may be found, embraced and adored.

Whether Lewis is right or wrong, he has bequeathed us a children’s story that opens up some of the deepest questions of life using powerful imagery. Its future seems assured.

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08 Muere la escritora Doris Lessing

La novelista Doris Lessing, en una entrevista. / RAÚL CANCIO

La escritora Doris Lessing ha fallecido a los 94 años. Recibió el Nobel de Literatura en 2007 por una obta que “supo capturar lo esencial y la épica de la experiencia femenina, que con escepticismo, fuego y poder visionario ha sometido a una civilización dividida al escrutinio”. Una narradora, poeta, ensayista e intelectual comprometida con la vida y la literatura en una búsqueda encadenada a través de una obra con una estética que bien podría ser clásica o de fragmentación posmoderna.

Autora de más de medio centenar de libros, Lessing, nacida en 1919 en Kermanshah, Persia (actual Irán), practicó casi todos los géneros literarios, desde los 15 años. Es conocida por El cuaderno dorado (1962), obra cumbre de la literatura feminista y de la narrativa fragmentaria postmoderna. Lessing fue galardonada con numerosos premios, entre ellos el Nobel de Literatura en 2007 y el Príncipe de Asturias (2001).

África, Inglaterra, la mujer, las dudas existenciales y las contradicciones del ser humano tienen un papel esencial en su escritura. Calificada como una escritora feminista y militante de izquierdas, Lessing trascendió las etiquetas al hacer visible temas y problemáticas que tocan a todos los individuos al margen de géneros, ideologías y lugares.

Nació en Irán en 1919, cuando todavía era Persia y bajo el nombre de Doris May Tayler. Pasó su infancia y juventud en Rhodesia (ahora Zimbabue). Allí empezó a leer libros que su madre le compraba por catálogo. Se independizó a los 15 años y empezó a publicar cuentos en revistas sudafricanas. A los 31 años se fue a Londres, con su tercer hijo y su primera novela. Dejó atrás dos ex maridos y dos hijos. Autora de libros como Instrucciones para un descenso al infierno, Memorias de una superviviente, Canta la hierba o La buena terrorista, es una apasionada luchadora por la libertad, comprometida con las causas del Tercer Mundo. Militó en el partido comunista británico, pero lo dejó decepcionada por el estalinismo.

Bibliografía

Canta la hierba, 1950

Éste era el país del Viejo Jefe, 1951

Martha Quest, 1952

Cinco novelas cortas, 1953

Un casamiento convencional, 1954

La costumbre de amar, 1957

Al final de la tormenta, 1958

Catorce poemas, 1959

En busca de un inglés, 1961

El cuaderno dorado, 1962

Un hombre y dos mujeres, 1963

Cuentos africanos, 1965

Cerco de tierra, 1965

Gatos muy distinguidos, 1967

La ciudad de las cuatro puertas, 1969

Instrucciones para un viaje al infierno, 1971

Historia de un hombre no casado, 1972

Memorias de una superviviente, 1974

A small personal voice, 1974

Shikasta, 1979

Los matrimonios entre las zonas tres, cuatro y cinco, 1980

Diario de una buena vecina, 1983

Si la vejez pudiera, 1984 (con el pseudónimo de Jane Somers)

Los diarios de Jane Somers, 1984 (con el pseudónimo de Jane Somers)

La buena terrorista, 1985

El viento se llevará nuestras palabras, 1987

El quinto hijo, 1988

Historias de Londres, 1992

Risa africana, 1992

Dentro de mí, 1994

De nuevo el amor, 1996

Un paseo por la sombra, 1997

Mara y Dann, 1999

Ben en el mundo, 2000

El día en que murió Stalin: la mujer, 2001

El sueño más dulce, 2002

Las abuelas, 2003

Historia del general Dann y de la hija de Mara, de Griot y del perro de las nieves, 2006

La grieta, 2007

Made in England, 2008

 

Doris Lessing dies aged 94

Tributes pour in for Nobel prize-winning author of over 50 novels including The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing dies aged 94

Doris Lessing with her prize insignia of the 2007 Nobel prize in literature. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images

Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning author of The Golden Notebook and The Grass is Singing, among more than 50 other novels ranging from political to science fiction, has died at her London home aged 94.

The biographer Michael Holroyd, her friend and executor, called her contribution to literature “outstandingly rich and innovative”.

He said: “Her themes have been universal and international. They ranged from the problems of post-colonial Africa to the politics of nuclear power, the emergence of a new woman’s voice and the spiritual dimensions of 20th-century civilisation. Few writers have as broad a range of subject and sympathy.

“She is one of those rare writers whose work crosses frontiers, and her impressively large output constitutes a chronicle of our time. She has enlarged the territory both of the novel and of our consciousness.”

Nick Pearson, her editor at HarperCollins/4th Estate, said : “I adored her.”

He added: “When I took over looking after her books she had a fairly formidable reputation, and the first time I went to meet her I was terrified, but she was always completely charming to me. She was always more interested in talking about the other writers on our list, what the young writers were working on – and reading – than in talking about her own books.”

Her last novel, although several earlier books have since been re-released as e-books, was Albert and Emily, in 2008.

Pearson said: “That was a very interesting book for her, revisiting the early life of her mother and her father and how they had been touched by the first world war. At the time she said to me ‘this is my last book’, and we accepted that. She was already at a great age, and I could see she was tired.”

The publisher’s UK chief executive, Charlie Redmayne, added: “Doris Lessing was one of the great writers of our age. She was a compelling storyteller with a fierce intellect and a warm heart who was not afraid to fight for what she believed in. It was an honour for HarperCollins to publish her.”

Twitter reacted quickly to the news, a shock to many despite her great age. The author and critic Lisa Jardine described it as “a huge loss”, and the agent Carole Blake called her an “amazing writer and woman”. The writer Bidisha tweeted: “Doris Lessing: prolific multi-genre genius dies in sleep after writing world-changing novels and winning Nobel. Not bad at all.”

Born in Iran, brought up in the African bush in Zimbabwe – where her 1950 first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was set – Lessing had been a London resident for more than half a century. In 2007 she travelled back to West Hampstead, north London, by taxi, carrying heavy bags of shopping, to find the doorstep besieged by reporters and camera crews. “Oh Christ,” she said, on learning that their excitement was because at 88 she had just become the oldest author to win the Nobel prize in literature. Only the 11th woman to win the honour, she had beaten that year’s favourite, the American author Philip Roth.

Pausing rather crossly on her front path, she said “one can get more excited”, and went on to observe that since she had already won all the other prizes in Europe, this was “a royal flush”.

Later she remarked: “I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.”

Pearson, her editor at the time of the award, recalled the doorstep moment vividly: “That was what she was like. That was vintage Doris.”

The citation from the Swedish Academy called her “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

Her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook was described as “a feminist bible”, and her fellow laureate J M Coetzee called her “one of the great visionary novelists of our time”.

Doris Lessing

17 November 2013 Last updated at 15:32 GMT

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Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize-winning author, dies aged 94

Nick Higham looks back at the life of novelist Doris Lessing

British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing has died aged 94.

A statement from her publisher, Harper Collins, said she “passed away peacefully at her London home in the early hours of this morning”.

Her best-known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark.

She became the oldest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature when in 2007 she won the award for her life’s work aged 88.

Jonathan Clowes, her long-time friend and agent, said she was “a wonderful writer with a fascinating and original mind”.

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A compelling storyteller with a fierce intellect and a warm heart”

Charlie Redmayne Harper Collins UK

“It was a privilege to work for her and we shall miss her immensely.”

“Doris Lessing was a one of the great writers of our age,” said Charlie Redmayne, CEO of Harper Collins UK.

“She was a compelling storyteller with a fierce intellect and a warm heart who was not afraid to fight for what she believed in.”

The author is survived by her daughter Jean and granddaughters Anna and Susannah

Born in what is now Iran, she moved to Southern Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – as a child before settling in England in 1949.

Her debut novel The Grass is Singing was published in 1950 and she made her breakthrough with The Golden Notebook in 1962.

On winning the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy described Lessing as an “epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

Doris Lessing with her Nobel Prize
She was only the 11th woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature

After learning she had won the award, she said she was “very glad” but recalled that in the 1960s she had been told the Nobel Prize committee did not like her and she would never win one.

“So now they’ve decided they’re going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?” she said.

The Swedish Academy said the Golden Notebook was seen as “a pioneering work” that “belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th Century view of the male-female relationship”.

As an author, though, Lessing distanced herself from the feminist movement.

The content of her other novels ranged from semi-autobiographical African experiences to social and political struggle, psychological thrillers and science fiction.

She had two children with her first husband, Frank Wisdom, whom she married in 1939. But she left the family home and the couple divorced in 1943.

She then married and had a son with the German communist Gottfried Lessing in 1945.

They divorced in 1949 and she moved to England with her son Peter.

Tributes have been paid to Lessing by her fellow authors, with Professor Lisa Jardine remembering her as “one of our very greatest writers”.

What are your memories of Doris Lessing? You can send your comments using the form below.

 

Doris Lessing: a model for every writer coming from the back of beyond

Inventive, brave, down-to-earth – she never hedged her bets or pulled her punches, doing everything with all her heart
British novelist Doris Lessing
‘If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century authors, Lessing would be carved on it.’ Photograph: Kieran Doherty/Reuters

Wonderful Doris Lessing has died. You never expect such rock-solid features of the literary landscape to simply vanish. It’s a shock.

I first encountered Lessing on a park bench in Paris in 1963. I was a student, living on baguettes, oranges and cheese, as one did, and suffering from a stomach ailment, as one did. My pal Alison Cunningham and I had been barred from our hostel during the day, so Alison was soothing my prostrate self by reading from The Golden Notebook, which was all the rage among such as us. Who knew we were reading a book that was soon to become iconic?

Just as we were getting to a crucial moment in the life of Anna Wulf, along came a policeman to tell us that lying down on park benches was against the law, so we decamped for a bistro and another interesting washroom experience. (Footnote: this was before second-wave feminism. It was before widespread birth control. It was before mini-skirts. So Anna Wulf was a considerable eye-opener: she was doing things and thinking things that had not been much discussed at the Toronto dinner tables of our adolescence, and therefore seemed pretty daring.)

The other woman we were sneakily reading in 1963 was Simone de Beauvoir, but the childhoods of little-girl colonials such as ourselves lacked starched petticoats and were not very French. We had more in common with a remote-places-of-the-Empire parvenue such as Doris Lessing: born in Iran in 1919, growing up on a bush farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); then, after two failed marriages, running away to England with scant prospects, which was where we colonials with scant prospects ran away to then.

Some of Lessing’s energy may have come from her outland origins: when the wheel spins, it’s on the edges that the sparks fly. Her upbringing also gave her an insight into the viewpoints and plights of people unlike herself. And if you know you will never really fit in – that you will always be “not really English” – you have less to lose. Doris did everything with all her heart, all her soul, and all her might. She was sometimes temporarily wrong, as in the matter of Stalinist communism, but she never hedged her bets or pulled her punches. She went for broke.

If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century authors, Doris Lessing would most certainly be carved upon it. Like Adrienne Rich, she was pivotal, situated at the moment when the gates of the gender disparity castle were giving way, and women were faced with increased freedoms and choices, as well as increased challenges.

She was political in the most basic sense, recognising the manifestations of power in its many forms. She was spiritual as well, exploring the limits and pitfalls that came with being human, especially after she became an adherent of Sufism. As a writer she was inventive and brave, branching out into science fiction in her Canopus In Argos series at a time when it was a dodgy thing for a “mainline” novelist to do. She was also very down-to-earth, having famously remarked “Oh Christ!” when informed in 2007 that she had won the Nobel prize. She was only the eleventh woman to do so, and never expected it; a lack of expectation that was in itself a kind of artistic freedom, for if you don’t think of yourself as an august personage, you don’t have to behave yourself. You can still kick up your heels and push the limits, and that was what interested Doris Lessing, always. Her celebrated experiment with a pseudonym as a demonstration of the hurdles facing unknown writers being just one example. (Her “Jane Somers” novels were reviewed as pale imitations of Doris Lessing, which must have been a little daunting for her.)

I never met Simone de Beauvoir – that would have been, in my youth, a terrifying prospect – but I did meet Doris Lessing, several times. These meetings took place in literary contexts, and she was everything a younger female writer might hope for: kind, helpful, interested, and with a special understanding of the position of writers from elsewhere within England.

As we age, we face a choice of caricatures; for women writers vis à vis younger ones, it’s Cruella De Vil versus Glinda the Good. I encountered my share of Cruellas along the way, but Doris Lessing was one of the Glindas. In that respect, she was an estimable model. And she was a model also for every writer coming from the back of beyond, demonstrating – as she so signally did – that you can be a nobody from nowhere, but, with talent, courage, perseverance through hard times, and a dollop of luck, you can scale the topmost storyheights.

• This article was corrected on Sunday 17 November 2013 because it gave the name of the main character in The Golden Notebook as Martha Quest instead of Anna Wulf.

 

Series: My hero

My hero: Doris Lessing by Margaret Drabble

Doris would invite herself to lunch with me in Hampstead, when the mood took her. I never dared to say no
Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

I remember very clearly how I met Doris. I took the initiative, which was very uncharacteristic for me. I wrote to her in the late 1960s, out of some kind of desperation, and she very kindly asked me to lunch. I had just read The Golden Notebook, which prompted my attempt at contact, and I was overawed by her. I didn’t pursue the friendship very vigorously until some years later, when somehow, slowly, a different pattern established itself between us. She gave large parties, to which I was invited, and for which she did her own cooking – great casseroles and pots and bowls of food, what she called the farmer’s food of a farmer’s daughter, which we ate sitting on the floor or perched on the arms of chairs. She was a good cook, and enjoyed seeing other people eat and drink. Her company was miscellaneous – African writers and politicians, feminist publishers from the antipodes, people she’d met at a Russian evening class, scientists, novelists, playwrights, poets, journalists, campaigners, translators, an old lady who lived down the (rather shabby) street. We all mixed in comfortably together. A cat or two would perch itself amid the throng, soliciting attention. Doris loved cats, and wrote a book about them. Some of them were strays that had wandered in, found a good welcome, and stayed. I once saw Doris’s grand American publisher Bob Gottlieb giving one of these intrusive cats a very hostile and suspicious look. I think he thought they’d got the upper hand and he feared for Health and Safety.

Doris would invite herself to lunch with me in Hampstead, when the mood took her. I never dared to say no. Hers was a royal command. Even if I was frantic with children’s activities or deadlines, Doris had to be accommodated. So I would drop everything and cook for her – soup, chicken casserole, fish stew. I know I wasn’t the only person to whom she issued these decrees.

I remember one occasion when Doris invited herself on the day when my cleaning lady was due to come. Mrs Van always came on Wednesdays, and I could not possibly have rearranged her. My cleaning lady was not only my cleaning lady, she was my surrogate mother. I loved and admired her, and I always cooked lunch for her. So there we were, at table together, Doris Lessing and Mrs Van and me.

We got on well. Mrs Van Blerk was South African Cape Coloured, and had come to England just after the war with her white Afrikaner husband and her three children, in flight from apartheid. (Her husband died shortly after their arrival, and she supported herself and her family for decades.) Doris had come to England from South Africa at much the same period, without her husband and with only one of her three children, in flight from her mother. These two wise, hard-working women exchanged notes and I listened. It was a historic conversation. I have forgotten what was said, but I remember the mood. After lunch, Doris and I went upstairs to hide in my bedroom with our coffee, to allow Mrs Van to carry on with her cleaning. I was in awe of both of them.

 

08 Los ‘erasmus’ se movilizan en solidaridad con su remplazo

Los ‘erasmus’ se movilizan en solidaridad con su remplazo

Una veintena de ciudades europeas acogen las protestas de los becarios ante el posible recorte de ayudas el próximo curso

Protesta de ‘erasmus’ españoles en Bruselas. / A. L. Calbacho (EFE)

Los erasmus españoles han conseguido con sus protestas que la opinión pública se solidarizara con su grito por la retirada de la parte ministerial de las becas y de paso que el ministro José Ignacio Wert, presionado por el Gobierno y el partido, rectificase su intención y se comprometiese a abonar a todos las ayudas con las que contaban cuando hicieron las maletas (entre 100 y 180 euros el pasado año). Pero la lucha, dicen, no puede pararse pues el futuro de estas ayudas no se presenta halagüeño para los próximos erasmus.

Wert no se pronuncia sobre la dotación de becas para el próximo curso y se enzarzó el martes en una polémica con Bruselas respecto a la supuesta pérdida de becas y dotación para España con el nuevo reparto presupuestario de Erasmus +. Con estas mimbres de inquietud —aún no saben cuánto van a cobrar, ni cuando— y de solidaridad con el remplazo, centenares de erasmus de este curso se han manifestado hoy en una veintena de ciudades de toda Europa a la que pretenden se sumen los “exiliados laborales” y estudiantes de otras nacionalidades.

En su manifiesto, leído en todas las concentraciones, resaltan la “clandestinidad con la que se ha realizado la eliminación de becas, pese a que afectaba a estudiantes que ya se encontraban en su lugar de destino”; sostienen que retirarlas el año que viene (a quienes no tienen una beca general) es “un ataque a la educación pública, que priva a miles de estudiantes” de la posibilidad de disfrutar de la ayuda; desmienten la “excusa de la retribución, ya que las becas generales, cada vez más debilitadas, no llegan a quienes las necesitan”, y denuncian la que consideran “privatización paulatina del derecho constitucional a la educación”.

Las protestas comenzaron a gestarse el 4 de noviembre a través de las redes sociales para denunciar la retirada de sus becas, pero una vez conseguido su propósito consensuaron proseguir en lucha una vez ya organizados por países e incluso por ciudades. Las concentraciones han arrancado a mediodía en Berlín —entre la plaza de Brandeburgo a la embajada de España— y otros destinos del norte de Europa donde pronto se hace de noche y han continuado por la tarde en Cracovia, Turín, Edimburgo o Lisboa, con “un minuto de silencio en honor a la difunta beca” en París, tortilla de patatas en Budapest —”hecha quizá por los últimos erasmus“, la promocionan los convocantes— o un vídeo en Helsinki con el que unirse a las protestas estudiantiles del 21 de noviembre en España.

En Roma, donde este fin de semana la capital italiana acoge un encuentro de estudiantes de intercambio de toda Europa organizado por la red de estudiantes erasmus, los españoles han aprovechado la coincidencia para que su denuncia tome fuerza con la ayuda de universitarios de otros países.

En La Haya, la protesta ha reunido frente a la embajada de España a una treintena de estudiantes llegados también de otras universidades del país, como Utrecht, Groningen y Maastricht, informa Isabel Ferrer. Todos han hecho hincapié en que el recorte de las becas “es la punta del iceberg de un ahorro injusto impuesto a golpe de decreto”, en palabras de Nacho Vera, que cursa tercero de Políticas. “Nos manifestamos de forma pacífica para que nuestros hermanos, primos o amigos, también puedan disfrutar en el futuro de Erasmus”, ha añadido.

08 Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot’s prison letters to Slavoj Žižek

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot’s prison letters to Slavoj Žižek

Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is currently in a prison hospital in Siberia; here she and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek meet in an extraordinary exchange of letters

Pussy Riot: composer Cecilie Ore’s choral tribute to the punk band

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot writing to Slavoj Žižek

‘We are the children of Dionysus, sailing in a barrel and not ­recognising any authority’ … Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot writing to Slavoj Žižek. Photograph: David Levene/AFP/Getty/Guardian

2 January 2013

Dear Nadezhda,

I hope you have been able to organise your life in prison around small rituals that make it tolerable, and that you have time to read. Here are my thoughts on your predicament.

John Jay Chapman, an American political essayist, wrote this about radicals in 1900: “They are really always saying the same thing. They don’t change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their cause, fanaticism, triviality, lack of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of persistent radicals. To all appearance, nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat.” Isn’t this a good description of the effect of Pussy Riot performances? In spite of all accusations, you sound a certain note. It may appear that people do not follow you, but secretly, they believe you, they know you are telling the truth, or, even more, you are standing for truth.

But what is this truth? Why are the reactions to Pussy Riot performances so violent, not only in Russia? All hearts were beating for you as long as you were perceived as just another version of the liberal-democratic protest against the authoritarian state. The moment it became clear that you rejected global capitalism, reporting on Pussy Riot became much more ambiguous. What is so disturbing about Pussy Riot to the liberal gaze is that you make visible the hidden continuity between Stalinism and contemporary global capitalism.

[Žižek then explores what he sees as a global trend towards limiting democracy.] Since the 2008 crisis, this distrust of democracy, once limited to third-world or post-Communist developing economies, is gaining ground in western countries. But what if this distrust is justified? What if only experts can save us?

But the crisis provided proof that it is these experts who don’t know what they are doing, rather than the people. In western Europe, we are seeing that the ruling elite know less and less how to rule. Look at how Europe is dealing with Greece.

No wonder, then, that Pussy Riot make us all uneasy – you know very well what you don’t know, and you don’t pretend to have any quick or easy answers, but you are telling us that those in power don’t know either. Your message is that in Europe today the blind are leading the blind. This is why it is so important that you persist. In the same way that Hegel, after seeing Napoleon riding through Jena, wrote that it was as if he saw the World Spirit riding on a horse, you are nothing less than the critical awareness of us all, sitting in prison.

Comradely greetings, Slavoj

23 February 2013

Dear Slavoj,

Once, in the autumn of 2012, when I was still in the pre-trial prison in Moscow with other Pussy Riot activists, I visited you. In a dream, of course.

I see your argument about horses, the World Spirit, and about tomfoolery and disrespect, as well as why and how all these elements are so connected to each other.

Pussy Riot did turn out be a part of this force, the purpose of which is criticism, creativity and co-creation, experimentation and constantly provocative events. Borrowing Nietzsche’s definition, we are the children of Dionysus, sailing in a barrel and not recognising any authority.

We are a part of this force that has no final answers or absolute truths, for our mission is to question. There are architects of apollonian statics and there are (punk) singers of dynamics and transformation. One is not better than the other. But it is only together that we can ensure the world functions in the way Heraclitus defined it: “This world has been and will eternally be living on the rhythm of fire, inflaming according to the measure, and dying away according to the measure. This is the functioning of the eternal world breath.”

We are the rebels asking for the storm, and believing that truth is only to be found in an endless search. If the “World Spirit” touches you, do not expect that it will be painless.

Laurie Anderson sang: “Only an expert can deal with the problem.” It would have been nice if Laurie and I could cut these experts down to size and take care of our own problems. Because expert status by no means grants access to the kingdom of absolute truth.

Two years of prison for Pussy Riot is our tribute to a destiny that gave us sharp ears, allowing us to sound the note A when everyone else is used to hearing G flat.

At the right moment, there will always come a miracle in the lives of those who childishly believe in the triumph of truth over lies, of mutual assistance, of those who live according to the economics of the gift.

Nadia

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in a single confinement cell at a penal colony in Partza on 25 SeptemberNadezhda Tolokonnikova in a single confinement cell at a penal colony in Partza on 25 September 2013. Photograph: Ilya Shablinsky/AFP/Getty Images

4 April 2013

Dear Nadezhda,

I was so pleasantly surprised when your letter arrived – the delay made me fear that the authorities would prevent our communication. I was deeply honoured, flattered even, by my appearance in your dream.

You are right to question the idea that the “experts” close to power are competent to make decisions. Experts are, by definition, servants of those in power: they don’t really think, they just apply their knowledge to the problems defined by those in power (how to bring back stability? how to squash protests?). So are today’s capitalists, the so-called financial wizards, really experts? Are they not just stupid babies playing with our money and our fate? I remember a cruel joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be. When asked about the German concentration camps in occupied Poland, the Nazi officer snaps back: “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.” Does the same not hold for the Enron bankruptcy in 2002? The thousands of employees who lost their jobs were certainly exposed to risk, but with no true choice – for them the risk was like blind fate. But those who did have insight into the risks, and the ability to intervene (the top managers), minimised their risks by cashing in their stocks before the bankruptcy. So it is true that we live in a society of risky choices, but some people (the managers) do the choosing, while others (the common people) do the risking.

For me, the true task of radical emancipatory movements is not just to shake things out of their complacent inertia, but to change the very co-ordinates of social reality so that, when things return to normal, there will be a new, more satisfying, “apollonian statics”. And, even more crucially, how does today’s global capitalism enter this scheme?

The Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi tells how capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalising normality and adopted the logic of erratic excess: “The more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normality starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening is part of capitalism’s dynamic.”

But I feel guilty writing this: who am I to explode in such narcissistic theoretical outbursts when you are exposed to very real deprivations? So please, if you can and want, do let me know about your situation in prison: about your daily rhythm, about the little private rituals that make it easier to survive, about how much time you have to read and write, about how other prisoners and guards treat you, about your contact with your child … true heroism resides in these seemingly small ways of organising one’s life in order to survive in crazy times without losing dignity.

With love, respect and admiration, my thoughts are with you!

Slavoj

A Pussy Riot protest in Red Square in Moscow January 2012. A Pussy Riot protest in Red Square in Moscow in January 2012. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

16 April 2013

Dear Slavoj,

Has modern capitalism really overtaken the logic of totalising norms? Or is it willing to make us believe that it has overpassed the logic of hierarchical structures and normalisation?

As a child I wanted to go into advertising. I had a love affair with the advertising industry. And this is why I am in a position to judge its merits. The anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are its successful ad campaign. Modern capitalism has to manifest itself as flexible and even eccentric. Everything is geared towards gripping the emotion of the consumer. Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.

You should not worry that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the “real hardship”. I value the strict limits, and the challenge. I am genuinely curious: how will I cope with this? And how can I turn this into a productive experience for me and my comrades? I find sources of inspiration; it contributes to my own development. Not because of, but in spite of the system. And in my struggle, your thoughts, ideas and stories are helpful to me.

I am happy to correspond with you. I await your reply and I wish you good luck in our common cause.

Nadia

Link to video: Pussy Riot on Putin, ‘punk prayers’ and superheroes

10 June 2013

Dear Nadezhda,

I felt deeply ashamed after reading your reply. You wrote: “You should not worry about the fact that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the ‘real hardship’.” This simple sentence made me aware that the final sentiment in my last letter was false: my expression of sympathy with your plight basically meant, “I have the privilege of doing real theory and teaching you about it while you are good for reporting on your experience of hardship …” Your last letter demonstrates that you are much more than that, that you are an equal partner in a theoretical dialogue. So my sincere apologies for this proof of how deeply entrenched is male chauvinism, especially when it is masked as sympathy for the other’s suffering, and let me go on with our dialogue.

It is the crazy dynamics of global capitalism that make effective resistance to it so difficult and frustrating. Recall the great wave of protests that spilled all over Europe in 2011, from Greece and Spain to London and Paris. Even if there was no consistent political platform mobilising the protesters, the protests functioned as part of a large-scale educational process: the protesters’ misery and discontent were transformed into a great collective act of mobilisation – hundreds of thousands gathered in public squares, proclaiming that they had enough, that things could not go on like that. However, what these protests add up to is a purely negative gesture of angry rejection and an equally abstract demand for justice, lacking the ability to translate this demand into a concrete political programme.

What can be done in such a situation, where demonstrations and protests are of no use, where democratic elections are of no use? Can we convince the tired and manipulated crowds that we are not only ready to undermine the existing order, to engage in provocative acts of resistance, but also to offer the prospect of a new order?

The Pussy Riot performances cannot be reduced just to subversive provocations. Beneath the dynamics of their acts, there is the inner stability of a firm ethico-political attitude. In some deeper sense, it is today’s society that is caught in a crazy capitalist dynamic with no inner sense and measure, and it is Pussy Riot that de facto provides a stable ethico-political point. The very existence of Pussy Riot tells thousands that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for.

So I also wish you good luck in our common cause. To be faithful to our common cause means to be brave, especially now, and, as the old saying goes, luck is on the side of the brave!

Yours, Slavoj

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in court in April this yearNadezhda Tolokonnikova in court in April this year. Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA

13 July 2013

Dear Slavoj,

In my last letter, written in haste as I worked in the sewing shop, I was not as clear as I should have been about the distinction between how “global capitalism” functions in Europe and the US on the one hand, and in Russia on the other. However, recent events in Russia – the trial of Alexei Navalny, the passing of unconstitutional, anti-freedom laws – have infuriated me. I feel compelled to speak about the specific political and economic practices of my country. The last time I felt this angry was in 2011 when Putin declared he was running for the presidency for a third time. My anger and resolve led to the birth of Pussy Riot. What will happen now? Time will tell.

Here in Russia I have a strong sense of the cynicism of so-called first-world countries towards poorer nations. In my humble opinion, “developed” countries display an exaggerated loyalty towards governments that oppress their citizens and violate their rights. The European and US governments freely collaborate with Russia as it imposes laws from the middle ages and throws opposition politicians in jail. They collaborate with China, where oppression is so bad that my hair stands on end just to think about it. What are the limits of tolerance? And when does tolerance become collaboration, conformism and complicity?

To think, cynically, “let them do what they want in their own country”, doesn’t work any longer, because Russia and China and countries like them are now part of the global capitalist system.

Russia under Putin, with its dependence on raw materials, would have been massively weakened if those nations that import Russian oil and gas had shown the courage of their convictions and stopped buying. Even if Europe were to take as modest a step as passing a “Magnitsky law” [the Magnitsky Act in the US allows it to place sanctions on Russian officials believed to have taken part in human-rights violations], morally it would speak volumes. A boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 would be another ethical gesture. But the continued trade in raw materials constitutes a tacit approval of the Russian regime – not through words, but through money. It betrays the desire to protect the political and economic status quo and the division of labour that lies at the heart of the world economic system.

You quote Marx: “A social system that seizes up and rusts … cannot survive.” But here I am, working out my prison sentence in a country where the 10 people who control the biggest sectors of the economy are Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends. He studied or played sports with some, and served in the KGB with others. Isn’t this a social system that has seized up? Isn’t this a feudal system?

I thank you sincerely, Slavoj, for our correspondence and can hardly wait for your reply.

Yours, Nadia

• The correspondence was organised by Philosophie magazine in cooperation with New Times. Longer versions can be found in German at philomag.de or in French at philomag.com. Tolokonnikova’s letters were translated from Russian by Galia Ackerman

08 LOS RECORTES EN CIENCIA

LOS RECORTES EN CIENCIA

La I+D sufre el mayor desplome de la década en gasto e investigadores

El Instituto Nacional de Estadística recoge una caída total de la inversión del 5,6% en 2012

Fuente: Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE). / EL PAÍS

Los indicadores de I+D se han desplomado, según los últimos datos del Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), correspondientes a 2012. El gasto en investigación y desarrollo descendió, en total, un 5,6% respecto a 2011, pero en el sector público cayó un 7,4% y en el universitario un 7,2%. El declive fue menor en el sector empresarial, con un 4,1%. En cifras absolutas, el gasto total ascendió a 13.391 millones de euros, frente a 14.184 el año anterior. También disminuyó el número de investigadores: un 4,6% en la Administración pública y un 3,9% en la universidad, mientras que permaneció estable en las empresas. El dato genérico resultante fue igualmente a la baja: el esfuerzo de España en I+D se sitúa ese año en el 1,30% del PIB (había llegado al 1,4%). Aún no hay datos comparables de 2012 del total de los 27 países miembros de la UE, pero en 2011 la media era del 2,03% y superaban ya el 2,5% cinco países (Finlandia, Suecia, Dinamarca, Alemania y Austria), expuso Belén González, subdirectora general adjunta de Estadísticas de Turismo, Ciencia y Tecnología del INE, en la presentación del informe de I+D para 2012, en la Fundación para la Innovación Tecnológica Cotec.

“El dato del gasto público ha sido desastroso, aunque hay que destacar que las empresas que hacen I+D, alrededor de 11.000, han mantenido el tipo e incluso algunas han incorporado esta actividad a su estrategia”, valoró Juan Mulet, director general de Cotec. Las empresas, en 2012, “aguantaron el tipo manteniendo la actividad, pero sin invertir en nuevas ideas o nuevo material”, añadió.

Por comunidades autónomas, en su gasto en investigación y desarrollo referido al PIB, cuatro están por encima de la media nacional: País Vasco, Navarra, Madrid y Cataluña. A la cola se sitúan, de menor a mayor gasto, Ceuta, Melilla, Baleares, Canarias y Castilla La Mancha.

La caída de la inversión de la I+D en 2012, respecto a 2011, en los presupuestos generales del Estado fue del 22,22% (en los capítulos de subvenciones, tanto al sector público como al privado), quedándose en 2.636 millones el año pasado, frente a 3.390 millones el anterior, según el análisis de la Confederación de Sociedades Científicas de España (COSCE). Hay que tener en cuenta que la estadística del INE se refiere a gasto interno en I+D, por lo que incluye, además de las inversiones de la Administración central, las de las comunidades autónomas, los fondos internacionales, el dinero de las empresas, etcétera. Con 13.391 millones de euros, el gasto total en I+D en España supone un retroceso de seis años, ya que es algo inferior al total de 2007 (13.342 millones).

Fuente: Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE). / EL PAÍS

Mientras tanto, aumenta la distancia de España con los países más desarrollados y las naciones en vías de desarrollo vienen presionando muy fuerte por detrás, pero ya no tan detrás. Así, por ejemplo, India, por número de publicaciones científicas ha sobrepasado a España, que queda en décimo lugar, abandonando el noveno puesto mundial tan aireado como gran logro tanto por el Gobierno anterior como por el actual. China llegó al 1,84% de su PIB de gasto en I+D, en 2011, y Brasil, con un 1%, está creciendo a un ritmo del 9% anual. Estados Unidos y Japón dedicaron a I+D el 2,77 y el 3,39%, respectivamente, en 2011 según datos de la OCDE, y Corea del Sur, el 4,03%.

En la Estadística sobre Actividades de I+D 2012 del INE la evolución en España del gasto interno en actividades de I+D muestra la senda del desplome en los últimos años, cuando se pasó de un crecimiento de hasta el 14% y el 16%, en 2005 y 2006, con aumentos todavía notables hasta 2008, y la caída continuada desde hace cinco años. Al principio la caída fue tibia, con 0,8% de disminución del gasto en 2009 y equilibrio en 2010, para pasar a pronunciada en 2011 (-2,8%) y 2012 (-5,6%), según los datos del INE.

El origen de los fondos dedicados a investigación y desarrollo también refleja la disminución del esfuerzo público y, en 2012, el gasto de las empresas supera al de la Administración (45,6% y 43,2%, respectivamente, con un 3,9% correspondiente a las universidades).

Dentro del mundo empresarial, los datos del INE indican que la caída del gasto en I+D no ha sido tan notable entre las empresas de 250 trabajadores o más, mientras que en las de uno a diez empleados la disminución ha sido del 8,2%; en las de 11 a 49 trabajadores, del 4%; y en las de 50 a 249 empleados también es notable el descenso del 8,8%. “No es sorprendente que el interés de la empresa por la investigación esté al nivel del interés del Gobierno, a pesar de que unos y otro nos juguemos nuestro futuro en esto”, señala José de Nó, investigador del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) y miembro de la comisión de presupuestos de la COSCE.

Por ramas de actividad, solo aumentan ligeramente (1,7%) los servicios de I+D, mientras que caen un 5,5% las actividades directamente científicas y técnicas.

Un total de 208.831 personas se dedicaron a actividades de I+D, en equivalencia a jornada completa en 2012, lo que significa un 12,1 por mil del total de la población ocupada y un descenso del 2,9% respecto al año anterior. De ellos, 126.775 (7,3 por mil) eran investigadores. El 40,1% del total eran mujeres, porcentaje que cae al 38,5% entre el personal directamente dedicado a la investigación. En la Administración pública la proporción femenina es superior a la media, con un 46,8% del total y un 41,6% en las universidades, mientras que se queda en un 30,2% en las empresas.

08 The trouble with democracy

The trouble with democracy

Government shutdowns, petty policy squabbles, voter disaffection – democracy doesn’t seem to work very well. But what’s the alternative? And can we rely on muddling through?
Cover illo for Review - Democracy

Illustration: Simon Pemberton

It has been a bad few months for western democracy. Over the summer we discovered that while democratic citizens and their elected politicians were going about their everyday business, the secret services were routinely eavesdropping on everything they did. It was bad enough to suppose that the politicians were conniving in this. More disturbing was the thought that even the politicians were being kept in the dark about what was going on.

  1. The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present
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Then, in September, we had the spectacle of western leaders trying to take a lead on Syria, only to be stymied by their legislatures, which wouldn’t let them do anything (the British parliament didn’t express a decisive view, not even against the use of force; it simply rejected all the options put to it, like a sulky child). Principled positions on both sides of the argument got lost in the fog of partisan politicking. As Obama, Cameron and Hollande floundered around looking for a workable policy on Assad’s chemical arsenal, Putin stepped in at the last moment to save the day. It was a humiliation he compounded with a crowing article in the New York Times that highlighted the advantages of mature statesmanship over democratic skittishness.

Then things got worse. For 17 days in October the US government ceased to function altogether, while bitter infighting in Washington took the country to the brink of a disastrous default. The sight of American politicians playing their absurd game of chicken with the global economy left the rest of the world with conflicted emotions, ranging from despair to barely concealed glee. Putin smirked. The Chinese tut-tutted. Bureaucrats in Brussels gave a world-weary sigh. Politicians who do not have to worry about getting re-elected or who face only docile and compliant parliaments found themselves looking on with a mixture of pity and contempt. Imagine trying to do serious politics under the relentless pressure of eternal democratic squabbling, with barely enough time to breathe, let alone to think straight. Is it any way to run a government?

PutinPutin on holiday. Photograph: Alexsey Druginyn/AFP/Getty ImagesThose of us who live in the western democracies might sometimes be tempted to agree. Dictator envy is a habitual feature of democratic politics. We don’t actually want to live under a dictatorship – we still have a horror of what that would entail – but we do envy dictators their ability to act decisively in a crisis. For all his many faults, it is hard to imagine that Putin is often in the dark about what his spooks are up to. We may laugh at all those photographs of him stripped to the waist and hunting wildlife. Still, this is evidently a politician who knows how to go for the kill. Do ours even know what they are hunting for? While Obama was trapped in Washington grinding out a provisional solution to the shutdown, China‘s leaders were exploiting his absence from the world stage to promote the pragmatic benefits of their political system.

Chinese politicians have the advantage of being able to take the long view, freed from the remorseless demands of the electoral cycle. At the same time, China’s technocrats can cut through all the checks and balances of democratic politics to take speedy decisions. They don’t have to worry about squaring parliament or public opinion before they act. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told by western academics how refreshing it is to deal with Chinese politicians who can get things done. If you have an exciting plan to green an urban environment, or recalibrate a transport system, or reboot an entire industry, take it to China, where they might actually give it a go before it becomes stale. None (or at least vanishingly few) of these western academics actually want to adopt Chinese state capitalism, which they consider an oppressive and illiberal system. They are invariably still wedded to democracy. They just wish it could be similarly decisive.

The irony of dictator envy is that it goes against the historical evidence. Over the last 100 years, democracies have shown that they are better than dictatorships at dealing with the most serious crises that any political system has to face. Democracies win wars. They survive economic disasters. They adapt to meet environmental challenges. Precisely because they are able to act decisively without having to square public opinion first, dictators are the ones who end up making the catastrophic mistakes. When dictators get things wrong, they can take the whole state over the cliff with them. When democratic leaders get things wrong, we kick them out before they can do terminal damage.

Yet that is little consolation in the middle of a crisis. The reason we keep succumbing to dictator envy is that it requires steady nerves to take the long view when things are going wrong. The qualities that give democracies the advantage in the long run – their restlessness and impatience with failure – are the same qualities that make it hard for them to take the long view. They look with envy on political systems that can seize the moment. Democracies are very bad at seizing the moment. Their survival technique is muddling through. The curse of democracy is that we are condemned to want the thing we can’t have.

The person who first noticed this deeply conflicted character of democratic life was a French aristocrat. When he travelled to the US to study its prisons in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville shared the common 19th-century prejudice against democracy. He thought it was a chaotic and stupid system of government. By the time he finished his journey a year later, he had changed his mind. He decided that American democracy was a lot better than it looks. On the surface, everything appeared a mess: bickering politicians, vituperative and ill-informed newspapers (“The job of the journalist in America”, Tocqueville wrote, “is to attack coarsely, without preparation and without art, to set aside principles in order to grab men”), distracted citizens. No one was able to exert a grip. There was far too much noise, not enough signal. But over time this surfeit of noise produced an adaptable politics that never sat still for long enough to get stuck. The raucousness of American politics was a sign of its essential health. Americans kept stumbling into holes and then back out of them. More mistakes are made in a democracy, Tocqueville wrote, but more mistakes are corrected as well. More fires get started by Americans. More fires get put out by them too.

Tocqueville’s genius was to spot the likely psychological effects of living with such a system. It could go one of two ways. Many people would be made highly irritable by the constant inability of democratic politics to get its act together. Tocqueville called democracy an “untimely” form of government because it never seemed to rise to the occasion. When things look really bad, democratic politicians are often to be found bickering over inessentials. Yet when the crisis has passed, these same politicians turn out to have found a way to pull through. It is all very undignified. As a result, Tocqueville suspected that democratic citizens would always have a soft spot for kings and tyrants, who at least knew how to put on a show. Democracies dream of rescue by the politician who can bang a few heads together. When that politician fails to show up, their frustrations will bubble over. Anger and disgust are never far from the surface of democratic life.

US Government ShutdownLast month’s protest by US federal government workers calling for an end to the shutdown. Photograph: Bill Clark/CQ Roll CallHowever, the other likely psychological consequence of democratic untimeliness is complacency. If it is true that democracy is not as bad as it seems, then it is tempting to imagine that no crisis is ever as serious as it looks. Things will be all right in the end, so long as we don’t overreact. Tocqueville spotted that American democracy was founded on faith: people had to believe such a messy system would see them right in the end. The danger was that their faith in democracy would blind them to the stupid mistakes their politicians were making. Some crises, even for Americans, really are as bad as they seem.

Tocqueville’s analysis is the best guide to the workings of modern democracy throughout its history, right up to the last few weeks. The democratic mindset is to be despairing and blithely confident all at the same time. Just look at the behaviour of America’s current crop of political desperadoes. Surely you would only shut down the government if you thought that the system was working so badly that it is almost beyond repair. Desperate times require desperate measures. On the other hand, it is also true that you would only shut down the government if you thought the system worked well enough to survive whatever you could throw at it. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems. Scorched-earth Republicans have effectively given up on American democracy at the same time as having unlimited faith in it. They don’t want to ditch it, certainly not for Chinese state capitalism (anything but that). But nor can they bear to put up any longer with its messy compromises. Furious impatience and shoulder-shrugging fatalism are the twin vices of democratic life. The same politicians display them simultaneously.

It has always been like this. The history of democracy throughout the 20th century is a story of repeated crises during which politicians and publics have been torn between the twin impulses to overreact and to underreact to the dangers, without ever finding the balance between them. Dictator envy is never far from the surface. When the defining crisis of the century erupted in 1914, it became a permanent feature. Once it was clear that the first world war would not be over by Christmas, anxiety started to bubble up about whether the democracies had what it took to defeat the German military machine. Would they ever get their act together? In October 1915, the Times hosted an anxious debate on its letters pages about the relative merits of democracy and autocracy under conditions of total war. The consensus view was that democracy prioritised the wrong things. As one letter writer put it, the German emperor could promote politicians on the basis of their achievements, whereas “a democracy has no such knowledge: it chooses its leaders because they are well born, because they are skilful speakers, because they are good fellows.” In October 1915, the focus of the war was in the east, where the Germans were achieving military success against the Russians, whereas the British had just suffered humiliation in the Dardanelles at the hands of the Turks. It was clear who the letter writer had in mind. The politician responsible for Britain’s failure was Winston Churchill. The German general setting the pace was Erich Ludendorff. The trouble with democracy was that it gave power to lightweights such as Churchill. The strength of autocracy was that it promoted heavyweights such as Ludendorff.

The cult of Ludendorff, who in 1916 became with Hindenburg the effective dictator of Germany, grew in the western democracies throughout the war. People in Britain, France and the US didn’t want to be ruled by Ludendorff. They just wished their own elected politicians could be more like him. In 1917, with America having joined the fight, the Atlantic Monthly sent its young star journalist HL Mencken to Germany to profile the great man. Mencken was convinced that Ludendorff represented the reason Germany would come out on top: he was ruthless, pragmatic and decisive. The contrast with America’s president Woodrow Wilson couldn’t have been more stark. Wilson was all words and no action; a ditherer who had promised to keep America out of the war, before changing his mind and taking the country in. Ludendorff, who rarely spoke in public, was the silent destroyer. Democracy appeared much too confused and chaotic to compete.

Mencken was wrong. Ludendorff suffered from the failing of all dictators: he wasn’t adaptable enough. When his great plan to win the war in 1918 failed to deliver the decisive breakthrough, he had no fallback. He just ploughed on to the bitter end, until he and his army fell apart. Wilson the ditherer turned out to the adaptable one. The western democracies won the war because, although they made more mistakes, they corrected more mistakes as well. They changed policy, strategy, generals and politicians; chopping and changing until they found something that worked. France got through three prime ministers in a matter of months during the dark days of 1917, before stumbling on Clemenceau, the man who would save the country. At the time, French politics looked like the worst of democracy: fractious, petty-minded and prone to panic. Only in retrospect is it clear that this restless dissatisfaction is what made the difference. Western democracy survived the first world war because it was chaotic enough not to get bogged down by its own failings.

Victory wasn’t enough to put an end to dictator envy, however. Wilson, having defeated the autocrats, wanted to match them for decisiveness. Now he was competing with Lenin: to see off the Bolshevik menace, he hoped to create a world safe for democracy. But democracy wouldn’t let him. The restless impatience that got the democracies through the war scuppered Wilson’s attempts to build a lasting peace. He wanted people to take the long view. The voters were fixated on more immediate concerns: wages, jobs, prices, revenge. The US Senate blocked America’s entry into the League of Nations. The British and French electorates reverted to the national interest and their politicians to petty infighting. Democracies achieve victory in epic struggles such as the first world war because they keep moving on from their mistakes. But they keep moving on from their victories too, which is why they squander them.

RooseveltRoosevelt, 1904. Photograph: APThis pattern has repeated itself throughout the following century. In the early 1930s, at the height of the great depression, dictator envy was rife. It was widely assumed that western democracy would only survive if it took a leaf out of the dictators’ book. Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler looked like the men of action who could take the tough decisions needed to stave off disaster (Mussolini was particularly admired in this period for his hackneyed ability to get the trains to run on time). Elected politicians looked like miserable pygmies by comparison; too frightened of their electorates to take charge and too hamstrung by their parliaments to change course. But Franklin Roosevelt showed that this analysis was wrong. He was a notoriously changeable politician, never quite sure what he was doing or what he believed in but willing to try most things on the off chance they might work. Throughout his long presidency there were regular predictions of impending disaster: either the country would be ruined or Roosevelt would turn out to be a dictator after all. Neither came to pass: under Roosevelt’s chaotic but resourceful leadership the country muddled through. It was the dictatorships that fell apart in the end. Barack Obama is no FDR, but the criticism he faces takes the same form. Some accuse him of being a dictator; others of being an inveterate ditherer. The truth is that he is neither. He is just a democratic politician doing his best to improvise a way out.

During the cold war there was barely a moment when commentators in the west didn’t worry that the fight was being lost because the Russians were so much more ruthless than we were. Elected politicians were too busy fretting about getting re-elected to devise a coherent strategy for ultimate victory. They kept missing their chance. This fear persisted through the 1980s, even as the cold war was finally being won. In the Reagan White House, full of gung-ho cold warriors, the book everyone read (according to speechwriter Peggy Noonan) was How Democracies Perish, by a gloomy, pretentious French intellectual called Jean-François Revel. Like everyone else, Revel had spotted that the Soviet system was in deep trouble: communism didn’t work. Still he argued that it would drag western democracy down into the grave with it because the democracies were too indecisive for the brutal politics of the endgame. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the west would not know how to take advantage. The endless distractions of democratic politics would get in the way. So the hard-headed tyrants in the Kremlin, with nothing to lose, would run rings round us. Once it came to the crunch, democracy would fail to rise to the occasion.

FILE PHOTO: 50 Years Since East German Troops Sealed The Border Between East And West BerlinThe fall of the Berlin war. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Hulton ArchiveBut when it came to the crunch, democracy didn’t need to rise to the occasion. The end of the cold war was a lot like the end of the first world war: victory took the victors by surprise. Democracy won not just in spite of its distractions but because of them. While the Soviets were digging themselves a hole that they couldn’t get out of in Afghanistan, western citizens watched television and went shopping. Then one night they turned on their TVs and discovered that the Berlin Wall had come down. As in 1918, the temptation existed to turn this triumph into a vast morality tale. It must mean something momentous that democracy had won such a crushing victory. More, it must be an opportunity for democracy to cement its grip on the world as the rightful system of government for everyone. But it didn’t mean anything momentous. After the wall came down, western citizens just carried on shopping.

Victory in the cold war was squandered as surely as victory in the first world war had been. In part this was a consequence of democratic impatience. Some politicians (George W Bush, Tony Blair) grew tired of waiting for the long-term advantages of democracy to reveal themselves and tried to speed up the process, with disastrous consequences. The wars fought after 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq were designed to combat terrorism and to spread the merits of democracy. They succeeded in spreading terrorism and discrediting democracy. But the present plight of democracy is also a consequence of typical democratic complacency. By the 21st century, the pattern has become familiar enough to be taken for granted: nothing is ever as bad as it seems; democracy muddles through in the end. The financial crisis that began in 2007-08 was a result of that growing complacency. As the storm clouds gathered, politicians, central bankers and the general public all assumed that the situation would right itself. We carried on shopping and staring at our laptops. Stumbling around in the gloom, we nearly fell off a cliff.

How to steer a course between unwarranted complacency and unhelpful impatience is the democratic predicament. It is so difficult because countering complacency sounds impatient and countering impatience sounds complacent. This is the confidence trap, and there is no easy way out. Telling the Tea Party that the US can afford Obamacare is as futile as telling the architects of Obamacare that the Tea Party has a point. Telling Ukip that British democracy will eventually adapt to an influx of immigrants is as unhelpful as telling Guardian-reading liberals that Ukip are on to something. In a democracy you can always set short-term confusion against long-term strength, just as you can set long-term strength against short-term confusion.

Chinese Army Practice Marching DrillsMilitiawomen training in Beijing. Photograph: Barcroft Media/Feature ChinaBouts of dictator envy are not going to go away. The site of the fundamental battles between autocracy and democracy may move to the east, as China and India eventually fight it out for the spoils of the 21st century. But the pattern is likely to repeat itself. Indian democracy is chaotic and cries out for decisiveness. Chinese autocracy is efficient but cries out for greater adaptability. In the long run, the more adaptable system is likely to prevail. But only if its short-term weaknesses don’t get in the way. Meanwhile, western democracy faces its own version of the confidence trap. In Europe and America, the economic crisis has provoked a frantic outburst of muddling through as elected politicians try to keep the ship afloat long enough for the better days to return. Our politics is narrow and pragmatic, with our leaders attempting nothing more than to make sure nothing is broken beyond some future repair. But as they fight these familiar democratic battles, there is a danger that they are ignoring the bigger threat. Democracies have adapted to meet environmental challenges in the past. However, the risk of runaway climate change is different in scale and possible effects. It is something that no democracy can face with confidence. Yet, for now we do nothing about it. In the long-term contest between democratic impatience and democratic complacency, complacency may yet prove the winner. If it does, we will all lose.

Meanwhile, the muddle of democratic life creates the ongoing conditions for the spooks and the national security establishment to exploit our distraction to spy on us. As we continue shopping and staring at our laptops, they have the perfect opportunity to keep an eye on everything we do. The response to the recent exposure of their activities provides ample evidence of both democratic impatience and democratic complacency. Because we weren’t paying attention to them, they were able to pay attention to us without our knowing it. Now that we know what they were up to, many democratic citizens feel anger and disgust. There is a lot of mud flying around: something must be done. But just as many express shoulder-shrugging indifference: why should we care about people listening in if we’ve got nothing to hide? Once Tesco and Google can collate information on the mundane details of our lives, it is hardly surprising that the secret services should choose to do the same. A similar mix of responses is on display from the politicians. Some are furious. Some are embarrassed by their ignorance. But plenty are relatively indifferent, on the grounds that it is what spies are paid to do. Secrecy, they claim, is the price of democratic security.

The pattern of democratic life is to drift into impending disaster and then to stumble out of it. Undemocratic practices creep up on us unawares, until the routine practices of democracy – a free press, a few unbiddable politicians – expose them. When that happens, democracies do not get a grip; they simply make the minimum of necessary adjustments until they drift into the next disaster. What is hard for any democracy is to exert the constant, vigilant pressure needed to rein in the forces that produce the crises. It is so much easier to wait for the crisis to reveal itself before trying to do something about it. The new information technology, far from solving this problem, has made it worse. We are more distracted than ever. The surfeit of information flowing around the world makes it practically impossible for anyone to keep secrets for long. But it also makes it practically impossible to secure broad democratic agreement for wide-ranging reform of public life. There is far too much noise, not enough signal. So we keep our fingers crossed in the hope we will muddle through.

 

Total 1 review

  • vfores

    11 November 2013 9:37AM

    Confidence Trap Review

    I am surprised to be the first to review “The Confidence Trap”.
    Brilliant hypothesis, magnificent summery of the mistakes and crisis throughout history, society, politics and ideologies.
    If history is dead, today…

    Read more

El país
Foro Abierto
Hola Vicente
Vicente
Cumples los requisitos
Cumples todos los requisitos para ser miembro del Foro abierto EL PAÍS.
A partir de este momento puedes comentar en todas las noticias que quieras de EL PAÍS.

¡Empieza!

Tú opinión es muy importante para nosotros.
Gracias

08 RawJoy “Plasma” Hardy MariAnico Honorable?, ni Molt ni Poc, ni puc, ni Buick. salut vicente

Rajoy y Fabra en el diván: silencio y sumisión http://cort.as/6h50

 

RawJoy “Plasma” Hardy MariAnico. No es de Cuenca, ni Teruel, ni Galego, ni Catalán, ni ninguna de las demás autonomías. Que Europa es lo que no quiere ser Rajoy.
Fabra, faber, fable …inefable Honorable, ni Molt ni Poc, ni puc, ni Buick.
salut
vicente

 

Para el segundo intento:

RawJoy “Plasma” Hardy MariAnico Honorable?, ni Molt ni Poc, ni puc, ni Buick. ni Ford.
CrudaAlegría “Plasma” MerryAno.No es de Cuenca, ni Teruel, ni Galego, ni Catalán, ni de ninguna de las demás autonomías.

Que Europa es lo que no quiere ser Rajoy.
Fabra, faber, fable …i.n.e.f.a.b.l.e Honor.able, ni Molt ni Poc, ni puc, ni Buick.
salut
vicente

 

RawJoy “Plasma” Hardy MariAnico. No es de Cuenca, ni Teruel, ni Galego, ni Catalán, ni ninguna de las demás autonomías. Que Europa es lo que no quiere ser Rajoy. Fabra, faber, fable …inefable Honorable, ni Molt ni Poc, ni puc, ni Buick. salut vicente Para el segundo intento: RawJoy “Plasma” Hardy MariAnico Honorable?, ni Molt ni Poc, ni puc, ni Buick. ni Ford. RawJoy “Plasma” Hardy MariAnico. No es de Cuenca, ni Teruel, ni Galego, ni Catalán, ni ninguna de las demás autonomías. Que Europa es lo que no quiere ser Rajoy. Fabra, faber, fable …in.efa.ble Honor.able, ni Molt ni Poc, ni puc, ni Buick. salut vicente Rajoy y Fabra en el diván: silencio y sumisión http://cort.as/6h50 Ahora sí que NO he podido publicar mi comentario. Cosas raras, raras, raras, hurrah. A ELPAÏS no le gusta que use la palabra inefable y me censura, pero si escribes in.efa.ble la informática se psicoPATOlogiza y da error. Toda censura es un error, y ay de quien no aprenda de sus errores. salut vicente

Ahora sí que NO he podido publicar mi comentario. Cosas raras, raras, raras, hurrah.

A ELPAÏS no le gusta que use la palabra inefable y me censura, pero si escribes in.efa.ble la informática se psicoPATOlogiza y da error.

Toda censura es un error, y ay de quien no aprenda de sus errores.

 

salut

vicente

 

 

08 Wert rectifica: Los estudiantes mantendrán la beca Erasmus este año

Wert rectifica: Los estudiantes mantendrán la beca Erasmus este año

EL HUFFINGTON POST / AGENCIAS  |  Publicado: 05/11/2013 15:47 CET  |  Actualizado: 05/11/2013 17:36 CET

wert rectifica becas erasmus

Wert rectifica y el Ministerio de Educación dará la misma ayuda a las becas Erasmus de este año que se concedieron el año pasado.

El ministro de Educación ha reconocido que se había generado confusión entre los estudiantes, por lo que ha acordado con el presidente del Gobierno, la vicepresidenta y el ministro de Hacienda, revocar la decisión tomada en el BOE.

“La próxima orden permitirá que todos los beneficiados de la beca Erasmus obtengan la ayuda general”, ha explicado Wert desde el Senado. “Hemos entendido que el resto de los becarios no conocían el criterio de concentrar la ayuda en los alumnos con menos recursos. La incertidumbre generada por los beneficiarios que contaban mentalmente con esa ayuda del Estado queda disipada”.

El titular de Educación ha señalado que el Gobierno ha entendido las demandas de los alumnos con beca Erasmus que ya habían iniciado el curso y, por ello, una nueva orden ministerial permitirá que todos ellos recibirán por parte del Estado una ayuda idéntica a la percibida el año anterior.

En la sesión plenaria del Senado, preguntado por las becas Erasmus por el senador socialista, Marcelino Iglesias, el presidente del Gobierno, Mariano Rajoy, ha recordado que el Ejecutivo hará con estas ayudas “exactamente lo mismo” que hicieron el año pasado. “Espero contar con su pleno y total apoyo al anuncio que acabo de hacer ahora”, ha asegurado Rajoy, que ha reprochado al senador no haberse enterado del anuncio de Wert.

Iglesias ha recriminado a Rajoy que no pone “orden” en el Gobierno. “No sé si el ministro ha subido para decir, como he metido la pata, rectifico y me voy. Es lo que un ministro razonable tenía que haber hecho”, ha asegurado el senador, quien ha criticado el “sobresalto” generado con las becas.

“Si el ministro ha rectificado, le pido también que rectifique también con la ley de Educación”, ha proseguido Iglesias.

 

‘TOQUE’ DESDE EL PP

 

 

08 Party pressure forces Wert to go back on Erasmus decision – © a.r.e.a.

Asociación  Regional  y  Europea De Análisis – (A.R.E.A.) – Association for Regional and European Analysis

 

EDUCATION CUTS

Party pressure forces Wert to go back on Erasmus decision

Education minister says all exchange students will keep grants for this year as controversial cutback plan is ditched

“No queríamos defraudar a los estudiantes”. La presión del PP y el resto de partidos, las universidades y los jóvenes afectados fuerza a Wert a dar marcha atrás. / FOTO: Luis SEVILLANO | VÍDEO: ATLAS

Education Minister José Ignacio Wert has gone back on his decision to only award Erasmus grants to those students with the lowest economic means.

The minister has announced that all students taking part in the European foreign exchange program would keep their grants – at least for this academic year.

Wert said he had taken the “initiative” to reverse the decision following conversations about the controversial measure with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and the Finance Ministry.

Wert had found himself under pressure from regional governments, universities, opposition parties, as well as leaders from his own governing Popular Party (PP) to repeal the controversial measure, which would have seen students lose funds vital to continuing their studies abroad halfway through the academic year. The minister has become an extremely controversial figure during the PP government’s almost two years in office.

 

La presión del PP obliga a Wert a rectificar sobre las becas Erasmus

El ministro dice que la decisión ha sido “iniciativa” de su departamento en conversación con Rajoy, Sáenz de Santamaría y el Ministerio de Hacienda

Wert pide sacrificio para que los que menos tienen puedan acceder a Erasmus

El ministro dice que entiende “perfectamente” el disgusto de los alumnos afectados por una medida “dolorosa”

El ministro de Educación, José Ignacio Wert, ha pedido esta mañana un “sacrificio algo mayor” a las familias con más recursos para que los estudiantes con una situación económica más desfavorable puedan acceder a las becas Erasmus.

En una entrevista en la Cope, Wert ha dicho entender “perfectamente, no solo el disgusto sino algo más que el disgusto” de los estudiantes que se ven afectados por las nuevas condiciones para acceder a esas becas, una medida que ha reconocido que es “dolorosa”.

Según una orden publicada en el BOE del 29 de octubre, el nuevo requisito para poder beneficiarse de la aportación complementaria del Gobierno en el curso 2013-2014 es contar con una beca general el curso pasado, lo que ha causado reacciones tanto de los estudiantes como de distintos partidos políticos.

Tras pedir disculpas “por los inconvenientes causados”, el ministro ha explicado que España es el país de la Unión Europea que más estudiantes envía al extranjero dentro del programa de movilidad Erasmus, en proporción a la población total universitaria, que es el baremo que utiliza la UE para distribuir las ayudas entre los distintos Estados miembros.

“España es país de la UE que en términos relativos envía más Erasmus y los estudiantes españoles salen en proporción el doble de la media que el conjunto de países europeos”, ha asegurado Wert, quien ha subrayado que por ello nuestro país está en “una condición muy desfavorecida”.

Así, según ha explicado, mientras el año pasado la ayuda europea para los alumnos españoles era de 115 euros al mes, para los becarios de Liechtenstein se acercaba a los 800 euros, debido a que en este país son muy pocos los Erasmus en proporción a la población universitaria.

Wert ha precisado que lo que ha hecho ahora su Departamento es distribuir de otra forma la ayuda complementaria que presta el Gobierno para esos estudiantes, que depende de un presupuesto “que se ha recortado sensiblemente porque hemos priorizado las becas generales, las que van a los estudiantes con menos recursos”.

De esta forma, según ha asegurado el ministro, los estudiantes con rentas familiares más bajas, que son los que el año pasado accedieron a una beca general, obtendrán este año una ayuda para el programa Erasmus de entre 200 y 300 euros al mes, frente a los 38 que recibirían todos los becarios con el anterior sistema.

 

Bruselas insta a España a solucionar el daño causado a los ‘erasmus’

La Comisión tira de las orejas al Gobierno por dañar las “expectativas legítimas” de los Erasmus

La decisión del Ministerio de Educación de reservar la beca Erasmus a los estudiantes con rentas más bajas no solo ha indignado a los damnificados y a la comunidad educativa. La Comisión Europea ha mostrado hoy su malestar por un anuncio que se ha hecho de la noche a la mañana, perjudicando a los estudiantes que ya habían comenzado el curso y contaban con la ayuda estatal.

En Bruselas recuerdan que el dinero que se ha recortado es solo el que concede el Gobierno español. Y que es perfectamente legítimo que este haya decidido —como ya hicieron antes Francia y Bélgica— reservar sus fondos solo para aquellos que más necesidades económicas tengan. El problema viene por el perjuicio causado a unos jóvenes que tomaron la decisión de ir a una Universidad europea contando con un dinero que ahora se les retira.

“La decisión de las autoridades españolas debería haberse anunciado a los estudiantes antes del inicio del año universitario. Lo que están ahora en el programa Erasmus 2013-2014 se ven penalizados. Deberían haber sido informados de la suspensión o del cambio de la aportación que hace el Gobierno”, ha señalado un portavoz comunitario. Bruselas no solo critica la decisión del ministro José Ignacio Wert, sino que insta a España a reparar el daño causado. “Esperamos que las expectativas legítimas de los estudiantes puedan ser atendidas por las autoridades españolas”, ha añadido el portavoz.

Reacciones en España

Esta mañana, dos gobiernos populares han anunciado que asumirán la parte ministerial de la beca. Extremadura abonará el dinero a 490 estudiantes extremeños y La Rioja, que ya becada con 160 euros mensuales. La Xunta gallega ha asegurado que “mantendrán el esfuerzo”. El consejero de Educación, Jesús Vázquez, ha señalado que “el compromiso es claro; incrementamos un 30% las bolsas Erasmus”, lo que significa un aumento de la dotación “de un millón a 1,3 millones de euros”.

La Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid también ha anunciado que aportará 100 euros mensuales a los 355 becarios que han perdido la parte que abonaba Educación. Otros 79 alumnos la mantienen por tener becas generales. El fondo es de 214.775 euros.

El presidente de la Confederación Española de Asociaciones de Padres y Madres de Alumnos (Ceapa), Jesús Sánchez, ha calificado la decisión del Gobierno de “duro ataque” a las personas más vulnerables y a la enseñanza pública. Sánchez ha recordado que su organización acudió al Tribunal Supremo para solicitar la paralización del proyecto de becas del Ministerio de Educación y explicó que, por el momento, la denuncia ha sido admitida a trámite. “Esperemos que la justicia se pronuncie a nuestro favor”.

Juventudes Socialistas de España (JSE) también va a recurrir a la justicia. La organización está preparando un recurso ante la Audiencia Nacional para pedir la paralización de la orden ministerial sobre las becas Erasmus y reclamar que se sigan abonando a sus beneficiarios.

El secretario general de JSE, Nino Torre, opina que “es indecente que el Gobierno actúe con esta nocturnidad y alevosía, dejando tirados por sorpresa a miles de estudiantes [más de 30.000] que ya han iniciado el curso en su país europeo de destino”.

La portavoz del PSOE en el Congreso, Soraya Rodríguez, ha reclamado al Gobierno que anule “de forma inmediata” el nuevo recorte emprendido en las becas Erasmus, que “deja tirados” a los miles de estudiantes que estudian en el extranjero. Los socialistas han registrado una proposición no de ley en la que reclaman que se mantengan las ayudas, para que se debata tanto en el Pleno del Congreso como en la Comisión de Educación de la Cámara Baja.

El PSOE ya había pedido ayer la comparecencia urgente en el Congreso del ministro de Educación, José Ignacio Wert, para que explicara por qué se exige haber sido beneficiario de una beca general universitaria el curso pasado para poder optar en el 2013-2014 al complemento ministerial de las becas Erasmus. En el curso 2011-2012 se acogieron al programa de movilidad universitaria Erasmus 33.660 españoles, según el organismo autónomo de programas educativos europeos.

 

“Me queda dinero hasta marzo”

Los estudiantes en el extranjero se movilizan ante el recorte a su “sueño”

Vídeo de protesta subido a YouTube por los erasmus españoles en Foggia (Italia).

Once españoles, la mayoría andaluces, se concentran en torno a un portátil en Riga (Letonia) para denunciar el recorte de las becas Erasmus. Están angustiados porque siete tienen una situación familiar complicada con alguno de los padres en paro o con invalidez. Y solo una cuenta con beca general del ministerio. Unos no se benefician porque superan por poco el umbral de renta, alguno se quedó corto de créditos aprobados o en otros casos, la situación económica se acaba de deteriorar. Por eso se decantaron por Riga. Según la información de la que dispusieron, Letonia se encuadra en el nivel E de gastos —junto con Portugal o Rumanía— y con 450 euros mensuales se vive. Pero se acerca más a los 700. “No sabemos si es porque Riga es la capital, pero es muy caro. ¡Un litro de leche cuesta mínimo 0,98 euros! Una habitación individual 300 euros…”. Se les ha pasado por la cabeza volverse, pero “¿dónde vas con el curso empezado? ¿Renuncias a todo?”. Es el “sueño de muchos años” y la mayoría trabajó en verano para irse con ahorrillos. Les gustaría emplearse en Riga, pero no saben ni letón ni ruso —las clases son en inglés— y el paro allí es del 16%.

Sin beca se ha quedado también Raquel Pérez, con sus padres en paro y un expediente en periodismo brillante. Este año recibirá la beca general, pero ni un euro de la complementaria de Erasmus porque se concede sobre la base de la renta de hace dos años, cuando la situación en su casa era otra. Ha elegido vivir en Nimega (Holanda) cinco meses y no en Newcastle (Reino Unido), diez, pensando en el bolsillo. “Leí que en un sitio eran 700 euros al mes y en Inglaterra 1.000 y me planteé: ‘Más tiempo y más dinero, imposible”. Irá aún más justa, pero no se plantea volver.

A miles de kilómetros de Riga, en Foggia (Italia) se cuece mucho del movimiento de los erasmus. Germán Fernández, estudiante de Medicina en Sevilla, miraba todos los días el BOE escamado con el posible recorte de beca. Lo que no imaginaba es que se reduciría a 0 euros. Dio la voz de alarma a sus amigos y el domingo montaron una página en una red social para movilizar a sus compañeros. Ya superan los 7.000 inscritos. Iñaki Talens (Educación Física, Valencia), Alex Peñuela (Derecho, Jaén) y Fernando Orozco (Marketing, Almería) aseguran que no hubiesen solicitado la beca de haberlo sabido. Tienen dinero hasta marzo. En esta ciudad de la Puglia son unos 60 erasmus españoles. “Dicen que nunca había habido tanto. Claro, como para no haberlo si no dan un duro”, ironizan. Sus compañeros turcos reciben unos 800 euros mensuales.

De diez erasmus que hay reunidos en esta casa de Foggia tan solo Eider Serrano, navarra que estudia Fisioterapia en Madrid, disfruta de una beca general (3.000 euros el pasado curso): “No es justo que la tengamos solo unos pocos. Aquí a nadie le sobra el dinero”. Les gustaría hacer una sentada conjunta de los residentes en Italia en Roma el 16, pero el viaje supone un dinero extra y las navidades están cerca. Han cobrado el 80% de la ayuda de la UE y en el caso de Álex 2.000 euros de la Junta de Andalucía. El dinero andaluz no siempre llega a tiempo, así que prefieren no contar con él. “Tengo una amiga a la que aún le deben sus 1.000 euros de un erasmus en Portugal el año pasado”, cuenta la almeriense María Fernández, desde Módena, en el norte de Italia. Sus gastos allí son mayores: 310 euros de casa más gastos como la calefacción imprescindible en esas latitudes. Desde Almería le mandan cajas de comida y le piden que aproveche la oportunidad. María, que estudia Administración de Empresas, nunca había cogido un avión.

Como en el caso de los de Riga, Enrique Berges, que estudia Telecomunicaciones en Granada, tuvo en cuenta el nivel de vida de Polonia para inclinarse por Varsovia. Cuesta vivir lo que les dijeron: de 450 a 500 euros. “Dice el ministro que con esta medida se quiere fomentar la igualdad entre estudiantes, pero no es así, porque lo que se va a favorecer es la desigualdad entre los que puedan pagar y los que no”.

 

EN EL PAÍS

Ver todas »

 

LOS TESTIMONIOS DE LOS ERASMUS

“Me quedo en Dinamarca hasta que acabe la carrera aunque sea fregando urinarios”

Son más de una treintena de jóvenes que no han cumplido los 30. Casi todos están ya en algún país europeo, como becarios Erasmus

En sus cartas enviadas a EL PAÍS cuentan que no dan crédito al anuncio del Gobierno. Y hablan de “engaño” e “injusticia”

Estudiantes de Erasmus a las puertas de la facultad de la Universidad de Roma. / Rubén Caramazana (EFE)

Casi están ya en algún país europeo, como becarios Erasmus. Sus testimonios reflejan que no dan crédito al anuncio del Gobierno de la eliminación de su beca. Cada cual tiene una historia que contar, desde la de un enorme esfuerzo personal con sus padres en paro hasta la de llevar dos años trabajando para poder marcharse; la de vivir con lo justo, desmitificando la creencia de que es un año de fiesta para los estudiantes, o la del que se ha marchado para tener la oportunidad de estudiar la especialidad que realmente le gusta.

Éstos son sus testimonios enviados a EL PAÍS


Estudiante en Bruselas (Bélgica)

Víctor. “Contaba con ese dinero para los gastos mínimos”

Yo estoy en Bruselas y esta noticia ha sido como un jarro de agua fría. Contaba con ese dinero para los gastos mínimos. Pero de la nada se ha esfumado. Sí, es injusto, pero lo es aún más cuando otras “Erasmus” que recibieron la beca del MEC el curso anterior si van a tener esta ayuda. Yo, ni el año pasado ni este año. Y como yo hay muchos más. Menos mal que he encontrado trabajo en un Hotel como “pinche” de cocina.

PD: el total de lo que voy a recibir por parte de Europa es 375€, dividido entre cinco meses sale a 75€/mes. Ya me diréis qué hago con “eso” si tan solo la residencia cuesta 352€/mes.


Southampton (Reino Unido)

Javier. “Tendré que buscar un trabajo y compaginarlo con mis estudios”

Mi nombre es Javier, estudiante de último curso de Ingeniería de Telecomunicaciones en la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; curso que estoy haciendo de Erasmus en Southampton (Reino Unido)

La noticia que conocemos hoy supone un nuevo y vergonzoso recorte en educación. La Comunidad de Madrid ya suprimió hace años la aportación Erasmus (frente a Cataluña, Galicia o Andalucía, que dan del orden de 200 euros/mes), a la vez que ha ido incrementando las tasas universitarias DE PRIMERA MATRICULA un 67% en cuatro años (18,66 euros/ECTS en Sept de 2009 a 33,1 euros/ECTS en Sept de 2013 en mi universidad).

La sinvergonzonería de estos señores llega a su extremo cuando te enteras de que eliminan la aportación del Ministerio a las becas Erasmus, incluso a los que ya estamos fuera de España, sin esperar tan si quiera a aplicarla en el curso 2014/2015 y sin ofrecer alternativas.

Llevo desde el 18 de septiembre de Erasmus, pago 320 libras al mes (unos 380 euros) por el alojamiento, a lo que hay que sumarle comidas y el coste diario de vivir aquí, sustancialmente mayor que en España. Cuando solicité la plaza Erasmus se nos dijo que recibiríamos una aportación de la Comisión Europea (115 euros) y una aportación del Ministerio, aún por precisar, pero de unos 180 euros (muy recortada en los últimos años), en ningún caso 0 euros. Contaba con ese importe para sufragar gran parte del gasto por alojamiento.

Tras esto, mis padres tendrán que correr con todos los gastos, o tendré que buscar un trabajo y compaginarlo con mis estudios, aspecto con el que no contaba en absoluto.

Esta beca que han eliminado supone en muchos casos la diferencia entre poder continuar de Erasmus o tener que regresar a España, un país sin futuro a corto plazo.

En definitiva, me siento engañado y traicionado por el gobierno de mi país, ese gobierno que no duda en autoproclamarse patriota y salvador de España, país que están convirtiendo en un territorio sin salidas y sin salida. Un territorio con dinero para salvar bancos, autopistas de peaje, aeropuertos fantasma, toros, educación segregadora, juegos olímpicos, pero no tiene dinero para salvar a las comarcas mineras, para profesores, para dependencia, para sanidad…o eso nos quieren hacer creer, porque si esto no son recortes ideológicos, que baje ese Dios que tanto mencionan y lo vea.


Roma (Italia)

Carlos. “Tengo que replantearme el viaje, con todo ya preparado, y perderé el curso académico”

Buenas noches, me llamo Carlos Albaladejo Molina, estudiante de 4º de Arquitectura en la Universidad de Alcalá y tengo concedida la beca Erasmus para este curso, en el segundo cuatrimestre (de febrero a junio de 2014) en la universidad de Roma “La Sapienza”; por lo que actualmente todavía estoy en España

De casi 300 euros al mes prometidos en el pasado mayo pasaré a recibir 145 euros al mes con el nuevo recortazo, ya que no cumplí una condición (administrativa) para obtener la beca de carácter general. El alquiler de la habitación me costará 350 euros al mes más facturas, y créanme, es de las más baratas que encontré en Roma. Mis compañeros que ya están allí no van a poder afrontar tal gasto, probablemente tengan que vivir debajo del puente del río Tíber. Yo tengo que replantearme el viaje, con todo ya preparado, y perderé el curso académico ya que tampoco tengo derecho a asistir a las clases en España.


Copenhague (Dinamarca)

José Manuel. “Me voy a quedar y a acabar mi proyecto fin de carrera, aunque tenga que trabajar los fines de semana fregando urinarios”

¿Que cómo me afecta el recorte? Estoy de Erasmus en Copenhague. Un sitio en el que es imposible encontrar vivienda, aunque sea un zulo por menos de 400 euros al mes. Un país donde media docena de huevos cuesta 4 euros, donde no existe descuento alguno para el transporte urbano para los estudiantes y donde ciertas residencias como la mía se encuentran a 21 km de la universidad, o lo que es igual, a 88 euros al mes de bono mensual.

Me afecta en que llevo desde finales de agosto aquí, y lo de la fiesta loca sólo es para estudiantes de otros países (compañeros turcos y checos que reciben 600 euros al mes y que ya han recibido el 80% global de la ayuda) o para españoles hijos de papá (que los hay y muchos). Pero yo, como muchos de mis compañeros españoles no me puedo permitir salir un día de fiesta porque entre el transporte (que al centro se paga aparte que lo del bono mensual) y el precio de una mísera cerveza se me escapa mucho de un presupuesto en el que comprar una tableta de chocolate y un filete de pollo a la semana es un capricho. Como puedes ver los 100 euros al mes que teníamos garantizados me sabían a gloria.

Sé que estaréis hartos de leer historias como la mía, y os creeréis de la misa la mitad pero me da igual, porque esto me está sirviendo por lo menos para desahogarme.

Y yo me voy a quedar y a terminar mi proyecto fin de carrera, aunque tenga que trabajar los fines de semana fregando urinarios porque la oportunidad académica, repito, académica, de estar investigando en la mejor universidad técnica de Europa es demasiado grande como para desperdiciarla.


Lisboa (Portugal)

Yaiza. “He trabajado más y ahorrado lo máximo que he podido para poder irme”

Soy Yaiza Barcelona, alumna de Erasmus destinada en Lisboa, Portugal.

Ante la noticia, de la cuál tuve conocimiento el sábado a través de una compañera aquí, quedé perpleja. No podía creer que todos los planes para este año se vieran trastocados de esta manera. Mi situación es la siguiente:

Durante los años de carrera he estado trabajando a la vez que estudiando. El último año, al ser consciente de solicitar la plaza, he trabajado más y ahorrado lo máximo que he podido. Sin embargo, con mis ahorros no alcanzaba. Aunque la parte correspondiente al Gobierno no es una cuantía fija todos los años y que en los últimos ha ido decayendo cada vez más, hablando con compañeros que disfrutaron de Beca el año pasado, comprobé que la cuantía que en teoría se me asignaría sería suficiente. Tras muchos cálculos y cálculos y estar a punto de rechazar la plaza por motivos económicos, mis padres me animaron a irme. Con lo que yo tenía ahorrado, lo que ellos pudieran dejarme y el dinero de las becas podría vivir la experiencia de estar un año fuera, aprendiendo y mejorando idiomas (en mi caso dos), insertarme en un país con cultura diferente, haciendo nuevas amistades, conociendo sitios únicos… Sin embargo, ahora este futuro se torna oscuro.

Como puede leerse en el decreto y en la comunicación que ha hecho pública el Ministerio, esta medida se realiza para que las personas con menos recursos puedan acceder a estas ayudas. No obstante, la realidad es bien distinta. Para poder ser becario MEC (de la que afortunadamente he sido beneficiaria varios años) existen más requisitos además de la renta, y son, números de créditos aprobados respecto al curso anterior y, ahora, además, una nota media específica. En la convocatoria de Becas MEC 2012/2013, el requisito de créditos aumentó pasando de 80% de los superados al 90% en mi caso. Yo cumplía, como el resto de convocatorias, los requisitos de renta, y los de créditos si no hubiesen cambiado la exigencia a fecha 2 de agosto de 2012. Así, no tiene sentido que se justifique la medida dirigida a los más necesitados ya que muchas personas vamos a tener que plantearnos si nuestro año de Erasmus concluirá en el país elegido o de vuelta a nuestra casa en España.

De momento, incertidumbre, aunque mucha unión y apoyo entre todos nosotros.


Lille (Francia)

CELIA. “Están tratando a los estudiantes como auténticos imbéciles”

Escribo desde Lille, Francia.Estudiamos en mi residencia 20 españoles que nos acabamos de enterar que no vamos a recibir la beca.

Resulta indignante que llevando aquí dos meses, y contando con la ayuda de la beca Erasmus, sepamos a estas alturas que no vamos a recibir nada.

Sobre todo porque el alojamiento son 420 euros y la beca la pensábamos destinar íntegramente a pagar una parte.

Personalmente nunca me había quejado de las medidas aplicadas por el ministro Wert pero esto ha sido ejecutado en el ostracismo, tratando a los estudiantes como auténticos imbéciles.

Indignante, y realmente sucio.


Stuttgart (Alemania)

Alberto. “Si no me hubieran dado la beca, no me habría venido, ni aprendido alemán, ni mejorado mi inglés.

Yo me vine hace tres años con el programa Erasmus a Stuttgart, Alemania. Tras el año Erasmus, me quedé haciendo unas prácticas en una empresa parte de Airbus Space & Defense y tras las prácticas me contrataron.

Si no me hubieran dado la beca, no me habría ido de Erasmus, no habría aprendido alemán ni mejorado mi inglés y ahora estaría o en el paro en España o en un trabajo precario en algún lugar de Europa.

Eso habría sido un verdadero problema para mí; pero tampoco le interesaría a España, que tendría que pagarme el subsidio por desempleo; o a Alemania, que no estaría ingresando los más de 1600€ mensuales que pago de impuestos y que estaría viendo frenado su crecimiento por falta de mano de obra cualificada. Aparte de las consecuencias directas, hay otras implicaciones dentro del programa Erasmus que se ven afectadas, como las de integración europea, movilidad académica,etcétera. Europa debería garantizar el programa y no permitir que estados independientes acaben con él o lo aboquen al fracaso.

También me gustaría señalar que yo estudiaba en la Universidad de Granada, por lo que me correspondió la beca otorgada por la Junta de Andalucía y que era mucho más alta que las del resto de comunidades. Me siento en deuda con mi comunidad y no me importaría devolverle la beca ahora que tengo un salario. Era becado del MEC y recibía 750€ al mes, con lo que pude además viajar por Europa y conocer otras realidades diferentes de la de Alemania, lo cual me parece también algo necesario porque hay muchas Europas. Una de las experiencias más positivas que tuvo para mí la Erasmus es que las clases se difuminaban, o por lo menos para los estudiantes andaluces, porque por primera vez en mi vida pude vivir y viajar sin tener que pedirle dinero a mis padres, y así éramos todos, por lo que ya no dependías de cuánto dinero tenían tus padres.

En conclusión, yo era becado del MEC, pero sólo con el suplemento del MEC no me habría ido de Erasmus. Al final seguirá habiendo Erasmus, pero serán los hijos de la clase alta, porque a ellos se lo pueden pagar sus padres. Alberto Moreno

 

 


08 Seamus Heaney’s last poem published

Seamus Heaney’s last poem published

Guardian publishes In a Field ahead of its appearance in anthology marking centenary of outbreak of first world war
• The War Poets Revisited – interactive anthology

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney’s last poem was described by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, as ‘heartbreakingly prescient’. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian

What may have been Seamus Heaney‘s final poem, a “heartbreakingly prescient” reflection on the first world war, has been published for the first time by the Guardian.

Heaney was invited by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to contribute to a memorial anthology marking the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war. She asked poets to respond to poetry, letters and diary entries from the time.

Heaney chose Edward Thomas’s great poem, As The Team’s Head Brass, which he wrote in 1916 shortly before he asked to be posted to the front – a decision that led to his death at Arras the following year.

In response Heaney wrote In a Field (see below), completed in June, two months before his own death and now published for the first time.

Duffy said: “Seamus’s poem is typically beautiful, placed and weighted at the centre of the poetic landscape which he made so familiar to us all, and above all, heartbreakingly prescient.”

Heaney, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1995, died in August. He was a towering figure. The poet Don Paterson said his death “seems to have left a breach in the language itself.”

Matthew Hollis, who wrote Now All Roads Lead to France, the award-winning account of Thomas’s final years, said that of all of his poems Heaney “said that this was perhaps his favourite.”

Hollis added: “He admired what he called its ‘Homeric plane’: the way a local conversation shadowed events on the world’s field.

“He savoured what he termed its apparent ‘dailiness’, its lower key that disguised, in his phrase, ‘a big wheel of danger’ turning behind it.”

Heaney’s poem is set in the rural landscape of his childhood. It tells of a returning family member, demobbed from the war, “In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots/Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field/To stumble from the windings magic ring.”

Hollis said of reading the poem in the light of Heaney’s death in August: “It is hard not to be caught off-guard by its resonance, hard not to be moved by its final, hand-held gathering, or by its sure but gentle raising of the spirit, as Seamus said of Thomas’s poem, ‘above and beyond the poignant and the ordinary.'”

The 1914 anthology includes poems by Ruth Padel, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage and Blake Morrison. Heaney’s work is the last known by the Irish poet, although the papers he left behind are yet to be fully examined.

Duffy herself has responded to Wilfred Owen’s The Send-Off. She says in the book: “For me, the loss of Owen as a poet during the first world war is a continuing poetic bereavement each time I read him. He is a presiding spirit of our poetry.”

Duffy’s predecessor as poet laureate, Andrew Motion, has written a poem called A Moment of Reflection, inspired by Siegfried Sassoon’s statement to his commanding officer explaining his grounds for refusing to serve further in the army.

“His letter or protest is a pivotal document … as well as a powerful and poignant one,” says Motion.

In a Field

And there I was in the middle of a field,

The furrows once called “scores’ still with their gloss,

The tractor with its hoisted plough just gone

Snarling at an unexpected speed

Out on the road. Last of the jobs,

The windings had been ploughed, furrows turned

Three ply or four round each of the four sides

Of the breathing land, to mark it off

And out. Within that boundary now

Step the fleshy earth and follow

The long healed footprints of one who arrived

From nowhere, unfamiliar and de-mobbed,

In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots,

Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field

To stumble from the windings’ magic ring

And take me by a hand to lead me back

Through the same old gate into the yard

Where everyone has suddenly appeared,

All standing waiting.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/25/seamus-heaney-last-poem-published

© traducción al castellano por Vicente Forés y Jenaro Talens.

En un Campo

 

Y ahí estaba yo, en mitad de un campo

Cuyos surcos, que alguien llamara “muescas” una vez, aún brillan,

El tractor tras cargar el arado se acaba de marchar

Rugiendo carretera adelante

a una velocidad inesperada. Terminó la faena,

ya se han labrado todos los rincones, ahondando los surcos

Tres veces, cuatro veces por cada uno de los cuatro lados

De la tierra anhelante, señalando y borrando

Las marcas. Dentro de esos límites

Avanzo ahora por la tierra carnosa y ahí siguen todavía

Pisadas ya curadas hace tiempo de uno que llegó

De no se sabe dónde, alguien desconocido, no acosado por nadie,

Con uniforme caqui y unas lustrosas botas del ejército,

Magullando los acres abiertos de la parte de atrás de nuestro campo

Hasta tropezar con el anillo mágico de la tierra sembrada,

Cogerme de la mano y llevarme de vuelta

Por el viejo portón al patio mismo

Donde han aparecido todos de repente,

Todos en pie, esperando.

 

 

As the Team’s Head Brass, by Edward Thomas

As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn

The lovers disappeared into the wood.

I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm

That strewed an angle of the fallow, and

Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square

Of charlock. Every time the horses turned

Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned

Upon the handles to say or ask a word,

About the weather, next about the war.

Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,

And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed

Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest

I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,

The ploughman said. ‘When will they take it away?’

‘When the war’s over.’ So the talk began –

One minute and an interval of ten,

A minute more and the same interval.

‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’

‘If I could only come back again, I should.

I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose

A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,

I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone

From here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Many lost?’ ‘Yes: a good few.

Only two teams work on the farm this year.

One of my mates is dead. The second day

In France they killed him. It was back in March,

The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if

He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’

‘And I should not have sat here. Everything

Would have been different. For it would have been

Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though

If we could see all all might seem good.’ Then

The lovers came out of the wood again:

The horses started and for the last time

I watched the clods crumble and topple over

After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

 

 

 

The War Poets revisited: a modern-day response to 1914

To mark the centenary of the first world war, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy invited poets to respond to the poetry, letters and diary entries from the trenches and the home front – including Seamus Heaney, whose specially written poem is posthumously published here for the first time. Click on the poppies to read the poems …

http://www.theguardian.com/books/interactive/2013/oct/26/war-poets-1914-carol-anne-duffy-seamus-heaney

08 Spain’s communist model village

Spain’s communist model village

Marinaleda, in impoverished Andalusia, used to suffer terrible hardships. Led by a charismatic mayor, the village declared itself a communist utopia and took farmland to provide for everyone. Could it be the answer to modern capitalism’s failings?

Workers in the Olive groves of El Humoso, Marinaleda

Workers in the Olive groves of El Humoso, Marinaleda. Photograph: Dave Stelfox

In 2004, I was leafing through a travel guide to Andalusia while on holiday in Seville, and read a fleeting reference to a small, remote village called Marinaleda – “a communist utopia” of revolutionary farm labourers, it said. I was immediately fascinated, but I could find almost no details to feed my fascination. There was so little information about the village available beyond that short summary, either in the guidebook, on the internet, or on the lips of strangers I met in Seville. “Ah yes, the strange little communist village, the utopia,” a few of them said. But none of them had visited, or knew anyone who had – and no one could tell me whether it really was a utopia. The best anyone could do was to add the information that it had a charismatic, eccentric mayor, with a prophet’s beard and an almost demagogic presence, called Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo.

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Eventually I found out more. The first part of Marinaleda’s miracle is that when its struggle to create utopia began, in the late 1970s, it was from a position of abject poverty. The village was suffering more than 60% unemployment; it was a farming community with no land, its people frequently forced to go without food for days at a time, in a period of Spanish history mired in uncertainty after the death of the fascist dictator General Franco. The second part of Marinaleda’s miracle is that over three extraordinary decades, it won. Some distance along that remarkable journey of struggle and sacrifice, in 1985, Sánchez Gordillo told the newspaper El País: “We have learned that it is not enough to define utopia, nor is it enough to fight against the reactionary forces. One must build it here and now, brick by brick, patiently but steadily, until we can make the old dreams a reality: that there will be bread for all, freedom among citizens, and culture; and to be able to read with respect the word ‘peace ‘. We sincerely believe that there is no future that is not built in the present.”

As befits a rebel, Sánchez Gordillo is fond of quoting Che Guevara; specifically Che’s maxim that “only those who dream will someday see their dreams converted to reality”. In one small village in southern Spain, this isn’t just a T-shirt slogan.

In spring 2013 unemployment in Andalusia is a staggering 36%; for those aged 16 to 24, the figure is above 55% – figures worse even than the egregious national average. The construction industry boom of the 2000s saw the coast cluttered with cranes and encouraged a generation to skip the end of school and take the €40,000-a-year jobs on offer on the building sites. That work is gone, and nothing is going to replace it. With the European Central Bank looming ominously over his shoulder, prime minister Mariano Rajoy has introduced labour reforms to make it much easier for businesses to sack their employees, quickly and with less compensation, and these new laws are now cutting swaths through the Spanish workforce, in private and public sectors alike.

Spain experienced a massive housing boom from 1996 to 2008. The price of property per square metre tripled in those 12 years: its scale is now tragically reflected in its crisis. Nationally, up to 400,000 families have been evicted since 2008. Again, it is especially acute in the south: 40 families a day in Andalusia have been turfed out of their homes by the banks. To make matters worse, under Spanish housing law, when you’re evicted by your mortgage lender, that isn’t the end of it: you have to keep paying the mortgage. In final acts of helplessness, suicides by homeowners on the brink of foreclosure have become horrifyingly common – on more than one occasion, while the bailiffs have been coming up the stairs, evictees have hurled themselves out of upstairs windows.

When people refer to la crisis in Spain they mean the eurozone crisis, an economic crisis; but the term means more than that. It is a systemic crisis, a political ecology crack’d from side to side: a crisis of seemingly endemic corruption across the country’s elites, including politicians, bankers, royals and bureaucrats, and a crisis of faith in the democratic settlement established after the death of Franco in 1975. A poll conducted by the (state-run) centre for sociological research in December 2012 found that 67.5% of Spaniards said they were unhappy with the way their democracy worked. It’s this disdain for the Spanish state in general, rather than merely the effects of the economic crisis, that brought 8 million indignados on to the streets in the spring and summer of 2011, and informed their rallying cry “Democracia Real Ya” (real democracy now).

Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, mayor of Marinaleda, attending a protest in Seville.Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, mayor of Marinaleda, attending a protest in Seville. Photograph: Dave StelfoxBut in one village in Andalusia’s wild heart, there lies stability and order. Like Asterix’s village impossibly holding out against the Romans, in this tiny pueblo a great empire has met its match, in a ragtag army of boisterous upstarts yearning for liberty. The bout seems almost laughably unfair – Marinaleda’s population is 2,700, Spain’s is 47 million – and yet the empire has lost, time and time again.

In 1979, at the age of 30, Sánchez Gordillo became the first elected mayor of Marinaleda, a position he has held ever since – re-elected time after time with an overwhelming majority. However, holding official state-sanctioned positions of power was only a distraction from the serious business of la lucha – the struggle. In the intense heat of the summer of 1980, the village launched “a hunger strike against hunger” which brought them national and even global recognition. Everything they have done since that summer has increased the notoriety of Sánchez Gordillo and his village, and added to their admirers and enemies across Spain.

Sánchez Gordillo’s philosophy, outlined in his 1980 book Andaluces, Levantaos and in countless speeches and interviews since, is one which is unique to him, though grounded firmly in the historic struggles and uprisings of the peasant pueblos of Andalusia, and their remarkably deep-seated tendency towards anarchism. These communities are striking for being against all authority. “I have never belonged to the communist party of the hammer and sickle, but I am a communist or communitarian,” Sánchez Gordillo said in an interview in 2011, adding that his political beliefs were drawn from those of Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Marx, Lenin and Che.

In August 2012 he achieved a new level of notoriety for a string of actions that began, in 40C heat, with the occupation of military land, the seizure of an aristocrat’s palace, and a three-week march across the south in which he called on his fellow mayors not to repay their debts. Its peak saw Sánchez Gordillo lead a series of expropriations from supermarkets, along with fellow members of the left-communist trade union SOC-SAT. They marched into supermarkets and took bread, rice, olive oil and other basic supplies, and donated them to food banks for Andalusians who could not feed themselves. For this he became a superstar, appearing not only on the cover of Spanish newspapers, but in the world’s media, as “the Robin Hood mayor”, “the Don Quixote of the Spanish crisis”, or “Spain’s William Wallace”, depending on which newspaper you read.

A socialist mural in Marinaleda.A socialist mural in Marinaleda. Photograph: Dave StelfoxIn the darkness of a winter morning, between 6 and 7am, Marinaleda’s workers are clustered around the counter of the orange-painted patisserie Horno el Cedazo. Here they stand, knocking back strong, dark coffee accompanied by orange juice, pastries and pan con tomate: truly one of the world’s best breakfasts, a large hunk of toast served alongside a bottle of olive oil and a decanter of sweet, salty, pink tomato pulp. Pour on one, then the other, then a sprinkling of salt and pepper, and you are ready for a day in the fields. Those with stronger stomachs also knock back a shot of one of the lurid-coloured liqueurs arrayed on a high shelf behind the counter; the syrupy, pungent anís is the most popular of these coffee chasers. All work in the Marinaleda co-operative in shifts, depending on what needs harvesting, and how much of it there is. If there’s enough work for your group, then you will be told in advance, through the loudspeaker on the van that circles the village in the evenings. It’s a strange, quasi-Soviet experience, sitting at home and hearing the van drive past announcing: “Work in the fields tomorrow for group B”. The static-muffled announcements get louder and then quieter as the van winds through the village’s narrow streets, like someone lost in a maze carrying a transistor radio.

When the 1,200-hectare El Humoso farm was finally won in 1991 – awarded to the village by the regional government following a decade of relentless occupations, strikes and appeals – cultivation began. The new Marinaleda co-operative selected crops that would need the greatest amount of human labour, to create as much work as possible. In addition to the ubiquitous olives and the oil-processing factory, they planted peppers of various kinds, artichokes, fava beans, green beans, broccoli: crops that could be processed, canned, and jarred, to justify the creation of a processing factory that provided a secondary industry back in the village, and thus more employment. “Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs,” Sánchez Gordillo explained to me. This philosophy runs directly counter to the late-capitalist emphasis on “efficiency” – a word that has been elevated to almost holy status in the neoliberal lexicon, but in reality has become a shameful euphemism for the sacrifice of human dignity at the altar of share prices.

Sánchez Gordillo once suggested to me that the aristocratic family of the House of Alba could invest its vast riches (from shares in banks and power companies to multimillion-euro agricultural subsidies for its vast tracts of land) to create jobs, but had never shown any interest in doing so. “We believe the land should belong to the community that works it, and not in the dead hands of the nobility.” That’s why the big landowners planted wheat, he explained – wheat could be harvested with a machine, overseen by a few labourers; in Marinaleda, crops like artichokes and tomatoes were chosen precisely because they needed lots of labour. Why, the logic runs, should “efficiency” be the most important value in society, to the detriment of human life?

The town co-operative does not distribute profits: any surplus is reinvested to create more jobs. Everyone in the co-op earns the same salary, €47 (£40) a day for six and a half hours of work: it may not sound like a lot, but it’s more than double the Spanish minimum wage. Participation in decisions about what crops to farm, and when, is encouraged, and often forms the focus of the village’s general assemblies – in this respect, being a cooperativista means being an important part of the functioning of the pueblo as a whole. Where once the day labourers of Andalusia were politically and socially marginalised by their lack of an economic stake in their pueblo, they are now – at least in Marinaleda – called upon to lead the way. Non-co-operativists are by no means excluded from involvement in the town’s political, social and cultural life – it’s more that if you are a part of the co-operative, you can’t avoid being swept up in local activities outside the confines of the working day.

Private enterprise is permitted in the village – perhaps more importantly, it is still an accepted part of life. As with the seven privately owned bars and cafés in the village (the Sindicato bar is owned by the union), if you wanted to open a pizzeria or a little family business of any kind, no one would stand in your way. But if a hypothetical head of regional development and franchising for, say, Carrefour, or Starbucks, with a vicious sense of humour and a masochistic streak, decided this small village was the perfect spot to expand operations, well – they wouldn’t get very far. “We just wouldn’t allow it,” Sánchez Gordillo told me bluntly.

Marinaleda’s alternative is decades in the making, but other anti-capitalist alternatives are sprouting in the cracks of the Spanish crisis, in the form of numerous quotidian acts of resistance, not just strikes and protests, but everyday behaviour – the occupation of vacant new-builds by those made homeless by their banks, firemen refusing to evict penniless families, doctors refusing to turn away undocumented immigrants. There is also a new Marinaleda-style farming co-operative in Somonte, a collective farm established on occupied government land in 2012, only an hour or so’s drive from the village. When I visited Somonte earlier this year, I met Marinaleños who had left their home to bring Sanchez Gordillo’s message of “land belongs to those who work it” to new terrain.

When I visited in February this year, a young man called Román strode bare-chested through the endless fields to greet us, looking strong but tired – they work from dawn until dusk, stopping only to dip into much-needed cauldrons full of pasta, rice and bean stews; surplus vegetables are sold on market day in nearby towns. They were growing beans, pimentos, potatoes and cabbages when I visited, planting trees and trying to resuscitate 400 hectares of idle land – as best they could, with only two dozen pairs of hands. Paradoxically, in light of Spain’s staggering unemployment figures, they still need more people to join their co-operative, and have more farmland than they can currently cultivate. One of the murals painted on the Somonte barn wall contained a telling slogan, alongside portraits of Malcolm X, Geronimo and Zapata: “Andalusians, don’t emigrate, fight! The land is yours: recover it!” It’s a message cried somewhat into the void, as thousands of young Spaniards scurry down the brain drain to Britain, Germany, France and beyond.

But Somonte is not without support. Hundreds of people have visited at weekends or for short stays, from Madrid, Seville and many from overseas, bringing their labour and other resources, to help with the land, to build infrastructure or paint murals, donating secondhand farming equipment, furniture and kitchenware. As we strolled past a small collection of chickens and goats, Florence, a French woman who had been living in Marinaleda before joining the “new struggle” in Somonte, explained that the land was some of the most fertile in Spain, but had for decades been used by the government to grow corn, to bring in European subsidies – it created next to no work, and no produce; the corn was left to rot. Those 400 wasted hectares were about to be auctioned off privately by the government when the Andalusian Workers’ Union turned up in March 2012; they occupied it, were evicted by 200 riot police, and in true Marinaleda style, returned the next day to start again. The auction never took place. Somonte is now 18 months old, growing slowly but steadily, and is the kind of Marinaleda domino effect that the crisis may yet bring more of.

No one ever forgets “that strange and moving experience” of believing in a revolution, as George Orwell reflected after arriving in Barcelona on the brink of civil war to a society fizzing with energy as it fleetingly experienced living communism. Marinaleda is neither fully communist nor fully a utopia: but take a step outside the pueblo and into contemporary Spain, and you will see a society pummelled, impoverished and atomised, pulled into death and destruction by an economic system and a political class who seem not to care whether the poor live or die. Sánchez Gordillo’s achievements are more than just the concrete gains of land, housing, sustenance and culture, phenomenal though they are: being there is a strange and moving experience, and, as Orwell suggested, an unforgettable one.

In the eight or so years I have known about Marinaleda, I have sometimes had to remind myself of the gap between the grandiose claims made about the village, by left and right alike, and the humble size and intimacy of the place itself. It is a village which means so much to so many people, across the world; but it has only 2,700 inhabitants, and whole hours can pass in which the only noise emanates from a motorcycle speeding down Avenida de la Libertad, or the vocal exercises of a particularly enervated rooster.

It is both poignant and appropriate that Sánchez Gordillo seems to see no bathos, or discrepancy, in devoting as much attention and passion to the local specifics of the pueblo – the need to start planting artichokes this month, not pimentos – as he does to the big picture, persuading the world that only an end to capitalism will restore dignity to the lives of billions.

The indignado movement had informed not just Spain, but the world, that millions of Spaniards were unwilling to brook the crisis. They were desperately looking for an alternative to the current system – and yet, in their midst, there was already one in operation. Faced with the massed ranks protesting in Puerta del Sol in Madrid, in Wall Street in New York, and outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the damning questions rang out from conservatives and liberals: “What’s your alternative? What’s your programme? How would it work in practice?”

They may have ignored the village before, or dismissed it with a chuckle as a rural curiosity run by a bearded eccentric; but they can do so no longer. “What’s your alternative?’ bark the dogs of capitalist realism. Increasingly, the indignados are able to respond: ‘Well, how about Marinaleda?'”

This is an edited extract

Dan Hancox is speaking at Bristol Festival of Ideas on 23 October; details at ideasfestival.co.uk

08 Eleanor Catton becomes youngest Booker prize winner

Eleanor Catton becomes youngest Booker prize winner

Judges praise 832 ‘extraordinary’ pages of The Luminaries that New Zealander began writing when she was 25

Eleanor Catton receiving the Booker prize

Eleanor Catton, centre, receives the Booker prize, with the Duchess of Cornwall, left, and the chair of the judges, Robert Macfarlane, right. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/AP

Eleanor Catton made Man Booker prize history twice on Tuesday night the youngest winner for, at 832 pages, the longest novel.

The New Zealander was 25 when she began writing The Luminaries, an epic 19th-century gold rush murder mystery. Now 28, she also becomes an “end of an era” winner: the last recipient of a Booker prize which, for 45 years, has only allowed Commonwealth and Irish writers – next year, the Americans are coming.

This year’s chair of judges, the writer and critic Robert Macfarlane, admitted readers needed to make a “huge investment” in the doorstopping book; it is challenging with a slow start but the dividends were more than worth it.

“We have returned to it three times,” he said. “We have dug into it and the yield it has offered at each new reading has been extraordinary.”

Macfarlane said it took just under two hours for the judges to decide on the winner and there was no need for a vote. “There was pretty tough discussion, we put the novels to the test … and, at the end, we were all very happy.”

It was a pleasant judging process, he said. “I don’t want it to sound tranquil to the point of tranquillised because it wasn’t that. We brought pressures to bear on the novels but it was a very happy process.”

Catton’s novel easily set a new longest winner record, beating Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which was 672 pages long and AS Byatt’s Possession, at 624 pages.

Catton became only the second New Zealander to win after Keri Hulme in 1985 for The Bone People. It was also the first win for the publisher, Granta.

The novel had been up against the shortest work ever to be shortlisted: Colm Toibin’s 30,000 word novella The Last Testament of Mary and the bookies’ favourite, Jim Crace’s Harvest. Also missing out were Ruth Ozeki for A Tale for the Time Being; Jhumpa Lahiri for The Lowland and NoViolet Bulawayo for We Need New Names.

Link to video: Booker prize 2013: why Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries should winCatton takes the youngest winner title from Ben Okri who was 32 when The Famished Road won the Booker prize in 1991.

But Macfarlane praised the maturity of the work. “You read every sentence and you are astonished by its knowledge and its poise,” he said. In a way, the winner is a classic Victorian novel with murder, red herrings, conspiracies and fallen women.”

Catton said hearing she was the winner was like hitting “a white wall”. She said: “I remember I’d written something down and it was in the depths of my handbag … I’ve just bought a new handbag because my old one wasn’t big enough to fit in my book.

“It’s a curious thing about writing a novel: you never see it until it’s finished. When I was nearing the end I started to get a sense that when I pressed save on my Word document it took an awfully long time. It wasn’t until I got a proof of the book I thought ‘jeepers this is quite big’.”

A key theme of the book is astrology. Catton, a Libra, admitted she had not checked her horoscope but there was a significant astrological aspect to her winning, as the last New Zealander to win was 28 years ago, an important astrological number – “it is the time that Saturn takes to orbit around the Earth.”

She joked: “I’m already sounding like a lunatic.”

The Luminaries is Catton’s second novel after The Rehearsal, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Guardian first book award.

The shortlist had been widely heralded as one of the strongest in years and was diverse in its subject matter and geographic span, from the English countryside to shanty town life in Zimbabwe.

But this year’s prize has been overshadowed by the announcement of a controversial rule change. Since 1969, when PH Newby was named the first winner, the Booker has been open only to citizens of the Commonwealth and Ireland but next year it will be open to anyone writing fiction in English. In essence, it means that US writers will become eligible: it becomes much more competitive.

The decision has sparked a literary storm. Those against the changes include Crace, the 2011 winner Julian Barnes and Philip Hensher, who wrote in the Guardian: “It seems quite baffling to many writers that a major prize that has so successfully promoted them should move its terms so radically and for no good reason.”

Hensher fears the Booker will become viewed as a minor American award, but the prize’s chairman, Jonathan Taylor, said a failure to change the rules would be like not allowing China into the Olympics. Helena Kennedy, a Booker trustee, said the current rules were like having the border control agency involved.

The widespread and denied suspicion is that the decision is a response to the creation of the Folio Prize for fiction, open to all fiction works written in English.

Catton wins £50,000, which was presented by Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, at a black tie dinner in London’s Guildhall.

Jon Howells, a spokesman for Waterstones, said another historical fiction was “great news for readers as this is a hugely enjoyable and compelling affair.” It is also “potentially the biggest seller on the shortlist and will now benefit massively from the Booker boost”.

The other judges this year were the biographer and critic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, the writer and broadcaster Natalie Haynes, the BBC journalist Martha Kearney and the writer and critic Stuart Kelly.

08 Alice Munro, una extraña en el país de los Nobel

Alice Munro, una extraña en el país de los Nobel

  • Solo trece mujeres han sido reconocidas en más de un siglo de premios
  • El perfil de los literatos premiados sigue siendo eurocéntrico y masculino
  • Munro incluye a Canadá en el selecto club de los países con Nobel
  • Francia es el país con más premiados pero el inglés es hegemónico
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Ir a fotogalería File picture of Canadian writer MunroAlice Munro, Premio Nobel de Literatura.REUTERS/Mike Cassese/Files

A. FERNÁNDEZ 10.10.2013 – 18:30h

Cuando Alice Ann Laidlaw (luego Alice Munro) nació en 1931 una granja al oeste de la provincia de Ontario (Canadá) solo tres mujeres habían ganado el Premio Nobel de Literatura. Las tres eran europeas (una sueca, una italiana y una noruega) y apenas suponían el 10% de los galardones que se habían dado haste ese momento.

Ochenta años después la relevancia de la literatura hecha por mujeres es mucho mayor, pero apenas se ha notado en las decisiones de los jurados de los Nobel. Con Munro, son 13 las ganadoras del premio más prestigioso del mundo literario, menos de un 12% del total de galardonados por el jurado noruego.

Un solo país, Francia, cuenta con tantos premios nobel de literatura como todo el sexo femenino, aunque más de la mitad de los reconocimientos a escritoras se han realizado entre 1991 y 2013, en lo que supone un reflejo del cambio de actitud del jurado de los premios, que en los últimos años ha tratado de equilibrar la tendencia a premiar a hombres europeos que reinó sin apenas discusión durante la mayor parte del siglo XX.

Desde el galardón a la sudafricana Nadine Godimer, han sido reconocidas la estadounidense Toni Morrison, la polaca Wislawa Szymborska, la austríaca Elfriede Jelinek, la británica Doris Lessing, la rumana Herta Müller y ahora la canadiense Alice Munro.

Más allá de Europa

Con la relatista también se logra plasmar otra de las tendencias en boga: reconocer otras literaturas más allá de Europa y ampliar el club de países con un premio Nobel de Literatura.

Canadá se estrena con Munro, al igual que Sudáfrica lo hizo con Godimer. El anterior galardonado en 2012, Mo Yan, era el segundo chino que acudía a Oslo a recoger el premio. El primero, Gao Xinjan, data del año 2000.

Así, aunque el chino sea el lenguaje más hablado del planeta, su literatura apenas ha empezado a ser reconocida por los Nobel, que en los últimos 50 años han acentuado el dominio de los escritores de lengua inglesa debido al empuje de la literatura estadounidense y al reconocimiento de la labor realizada por autores en antiguas colonias británicas, como Sudáfrica o la propia Canadá.

Detrás del conglomerado de países angloparlantes se sitúan el francés y el alemán, cuyas literaturas dominaron los galardones en la primera mitad del siglo pasado. El castellano, pese al boom latinoamericano, se sitúa en cuarto lugar, por delante del sueco, que tiene un lugar privilegiado dadas sus vinculaciones con los Nobel.

La hegemonía del inglés, el francés, el alemán y el castellano viene acompañada con un claro predominio europeo en el reparto de los premios: tres de cada cuatro escritores galardonados provienen del Viejo Continente. Los premios a literaturas como la latinoaméricana no llegaron hasta 1945 mientras que África y los países árabes tuvieron que esperar a los años 80.

Pero pese a que el androcentrismo y el eurocentrismo fueron de la mano en el comienzo de la historia de los Nobel, las diferencias entre europeos y no europeos se han recortado dramáticamente en los últimos 30 años, algo que no ha ocurrido con el ‘gap’ entre hombres y mujeres. Así, entre 1980 y 2013 ha habido siete mujeres premiadas, mientras que el número de no europeos galardonados fue el doble, 14.

Una prueba de lo que las escritoras aún tienen que esperar más de lo habitual para ser premiadas es la propia Munro, que con 82 años se convertirá en el quinto galardonado más longevo que recogerá el premio. En cabeza de este ranking de ‘ancianos’ ganadores del Nobel están dos mujeres: la británica Doris Lessing lo recogió con 88 años y la alemana Nelly Sachs con 85.

 

Ampliar foto Alice Munro está considerada como una "maestra del relato corto". La imagen es del 25 de junio de 2009, datada en Dublín.Alice Munro, ganadora del Nobel de Literatura 2013, está considerada como una “maestra del relato corto”. La imagen es del 25 de junio de 2009, datada en Dublín.AFP PHOTO/ Peter Muhly

Ir a fotogalería File picture of Canadian writer MunroAlice Munro, Premio Nobel de Literatura.REUTERS/Mike Cassese/Files

ESTEBAN RAMÓN 10.10.2013 – 15:00hComo el final de un relato redondo: se retira de la literatura y le dan el Nobel. Aunque los escritores suelen cultivar todo tipo de géneros, rara vez la Academia sueca galardona a un especialista del relato corto. En parte porque no abundan y en parte porque es un género de prestigio menor. Con Alice Munro (Ontario, 1931), se quiebra la tendencia. La escritora canadiense de 82 años es una auténtica cultivadora de los cuentos. Relatos en los que disecciona los sentimientos ocultos de personajes de la vida ordinaria, normalmente ambientados en lugares de su biografía: el Ontario rural y Vancouver.

Decimotercera mujer (y primer canadiense) con el Nobel de Literatura, todo el mundo se apresura a destacar lo celosa que ha sido de su vida privada. Apellidada Laidlaw de soltera, Munro es el apellido que conserva de su primer matrimonio del que se divorció en 1972. Su segundo marido, Gerald Fremlin, falleció en abril de este año.

“Tiene un vida bastante interesante, tuvo que compatibilizar el hecho de ser una mujer, madre y escritora”, ha destacado Elvira Lindo en una entrevista con el Canal 24h. “Una biografía escrita sobre ella se titula A double life (Una doble vida), es una mujer muy discreta con una vocación muy fuerte. Se hizo conocida por los relatos que se leían en la radio y al principio la desdeñaban porque hablaba de la gente pobre. Sufrió el desprecio y fíjate dónde está ahora”.

Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino ha traducido su último libro publicado en España: Mi vida querida. Es decir, la colección de relatos con la que ha decido callar su voz literaria. “Aunque siempre te parece que hay mucha carga biográfica en sus relatos, porque siempre parecen verdad, este libro la peculiaridad es que es declaradamente autobiográfico y sabes que todo lo que cuenta son emociones que ella ha sentido”, explica la traductora RTVE.es. “Son relatos aún más depurados, sin ningún adorno y nada amables consigo mismo: habla de cuando de pequeña odiaba a su madre a quién le costó adaptarse a una vida que era menos de lo que ella esperaba, de las palizas que le daba su padre, y habla sin ningún tapujo, con mucha crudeza y a la vez con amor”.

Su primera colección de cuentos, Dance of the Happy Shades, se publicó en 1968. A través de obras como Secreto a voces, Escapada o La visita desde Castle Rock, ha conformado un fresco personal ambientado en esa vida ordinaria canadiense nominado ya como Munro Tract (o Condado Munro). En su estilo hay ecos de escritoras como Carson McCullers o Eudora Welty.

“Es una persona muy celosa de su privacidad”, continúa su traductora. “Es una gran maestra, disecciona muy bien el corazón humano, las emociones que todos llevamos dentro.“us personajes son seres aparentemente normales, pero ella revela siempre un mundo interior muy rico. Nada amable, no es cursi, ni endulza las cosas, pero siempre encuentran en ella una luminosidad que contrarresta esos aspectos más crudos de la naturaleza humana”.

El Nobel corona una larga lista de reconocimientos como el Governor General’s Literary Award, el Giller Prize, y el Man Booker International Prize en 2009. El Nobel, de alguna manera, recuerda a todos los grandes cuentistas de la literatura. Y para los amantes la obra de Munro se abre una pequeña esperanza a que la escritora, a sus 82 años, retome su universo.

 

Alice Munro, una extraña en el país de los Nobel

  • La Academia Sueca la define como “la maestra del relato corto”
  • Es la primera escritora o escritor canadiense que gana el Nobel
  • La autora de 82 años sucede en el palmarés al chino Mo Yan
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Ir a fotogalería File picture of Canadian writer MunroAlice Munro, Premio Nobel de Literatura.REUTERS/Mike Cassese/Files

LAURA G. TORRESLAURA G. TORRES 10.10.2013 – 13:01hLa escritora canadiense Alice Munro, considerada una de las voces más importantes de la literatura en lengua inglesa, se ha convertido en la ganadora del Premio Nobel de Literatura 2013.

La Academia Sueca, al anunciar su fallo a las 13.00 horas de este jueves, ha definido a Munro como la “maestra del relato corto contemporáneo” y  ha destacado que es aclamada por su “armonioso estilo de relatar, que se caracteriza por su claridad y realismo psicológico”.

Munro se convierte en la primera escitora (o escritor) canadiense que gana el más importante galardón de las letras mundiales desde su creación en 1901. Munro sucede en el palmarés al chino Mo Yan.

“Ganar el Nobel siempre ha sido uno de esos castillos en el aire que podían ocurrir, pero que probablemente nunca lo harían”, ha declarado la autora a CBC News tras saberse ganadora.

Munro, de 82 años y nacida en Wingham (Ontario), recibió en 2009 el Man Brooker y fue finalista del Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras en 2011.

La maestra del relato

Tal y como ha subrayado el jurado, la canadiense es autora principalmente de relatos breves y es considerada por algunos críticos como “la Chejov canadiense”.

Sus relatos están basados en las relaciones humanas y la vida cotidiana y están recopilados en obras como El secreto del amor, Secretos a voces, Escapada o Demasiada felicidad.

El denominador común de estas narraciones cortas que componen el grueso de su obra es su localización geográfica en una zona conocida como ‘Munro Tract’ (el Condado de Munro) y están protagonizadas por personas normales inmersas en situaciones cotidianas.

Esta característica de su estilo literario ha hecho muchos críticos la comparen con grandes narradores del sur de Estados Unidos como William Faulkner o Flannery O’ Connor, e incluso hay quien ve paralelismo con la Tierra Media de Tolkien.

La carrera de esta octogeneria escritora, cuya vocación literaria arrancó muy joven (en 1950 publicó su primera historia, The dimensions of a shadow) ha sido reconocida con diversos premios literarios, como el Governor General’s Literary Award, en 1978, el Canadian Booksellers Award of Lives of Girls and Women, el National Book Critics Circle Award y el Giller Prize, que obtuvo en 1998, además del Man Booker.

Su hija la despierta para darle la noticia

En declaraciones a la cadena CBC, la autora canadiense ha explicado que ha sido una de sus hijas la que la ha despertado para darle la noticia: “Aquí es mitad de la noche y lo había olvidado por completo, por supuesto”.

La escritora ha asegurado a este medio que se trata de “una cosa maravillosa” recibir este honor y ha dicho que su marido, fallecido hace unos meses, estaría muy contento, y ha añadido que su exmarido, Michael Munro (cuyo apellido de casada ha conservado -el de soltera es Laidlaw-), y su familia estaban encantados.

Según la CBC, Munro reveló hace tres años en una entrevista en Toronto que había estado luchando contra el cáncer, aunque no reveló más detalles, y el pasado junio dijo que “probablemente” no iba a escribir nunca más.

Su última obra es Mi vida querida (publicada en 2012 en inglés y en 2013 en español por la editorial Lumen), que es de carácter declaradamente autobiográfico.

13 mujeres con el Nobel de Literatura en 112 años

La autora canadiense es la decimotercera mujer que recibe el Nobel de Literatura en los 112 años de historia de los premios fundados por Alfred Nobel.

Munro recibe el galardón cuatro años después de que lo hiciera la rumanoalemana Herta Müller, que lo logró en 2009.

Las anteriores ganadoras del premio fueron la novelista sueca Selman Lagerloff (1909),  la italiana Grazia Deledda (1926), la noruega Sigrid Undset (1928), la estadounidense Pearl S. Buck (1938), la poeta y dramaturga de origen judío Nelly Sachs (1966), la sudafricana de origen judío Nadine Gordimer (1991), la estadounidense Toni Morrison (1993), la poetisa polaca Wislawa Szymborska (1996), la austríaca Elfriede Jelinek (2004) y la británica Doris Lessing (2007).

El Nobel de Literatura está dotado con ocho millones de coronas suecas (922.000 euros o 1,3 millones de dólares) y su entrega se realizará el 10 de diciembre en Estocolmo, coincidiendo con el aniversario de la muerte de Alfred Nobel.

Alice Munro, una extraña en el país de los Nobel

  • Silvia Querini luchó nueve años para fichar a Munro por Lumen
  • Querini: “Refleja el mundo que quiero mostrar a mis lectores”
  • Muñoz Molina: “Comprime el tiempo y la vida en el espacio de un cuento”
  • Javier Marías: Munro alcanza grandes cotas de hondura y de emotividad
Ampliar fotoAntonio Muñoz MolinaAntonio Muñoz Molinanoticias

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AGENCIAS 10.10.2013 – 15:30h

a editora de Lumen, Silvia Querini, que tiene los derechos en español para la obra de Alice Munro, definió la obra de la Premio Nobel de Literatura como un universo que muestra “la complejidad que está hirviendo debajo de la aparente banalidad”.

Querini hizo esa declaración ante un grupo de periodistas en la Feria del Libro de Fráncfort tras llegar al stand del grupo Random House visiblemente emocionada por el galardón concedido a la escritora canadiense.

“Es una satisfacción tan grande”, dijo Querini sin salir todavía de su conmoción, pese a que no es la primera vez que uno de sus autores obtenía el Premio Nobel de Literatura.

En esta ocasión la emoción tenía algo especial porque, según explicó, había luchado nueve años por obtener los derechos de Munro.
“Luché nueve años por tener a Alice Munro en Lumen. Si hubiera que ilustrar el catálogo de Lumen con una sola imagen, esa imagen tendría que ser la foto de Alice Munro”, dijo.

Querini (editora): “Munro plantea buenas preguntas”

“Alice Munro refleja el mundo que le quiero mostrar a mis lectores cuando edito libros”, agregó.

Querini, al ser preguntada por si no había tenido algunas reservas ante una autora que escribe fundamentalmente cuentos -lo que no suele agradar a los editores- dijo que ante una obra como la de Munro sólo se pueden tener “las mismas reservas que se pueden tener ante Borges“.

La editora señaló a Efe en declaraciones por telefónicas que “hay autores que en sus escritos dan respuestas, pero Alice Munro planeta buenas preguntas”.

“Ahí radica su éxito, en la perplejidad, en no darlo todo por descontado, en saber que debajo del hule de la mesa de una cocina puede haber muchas historias que no son fáciles de contar, y Munro lo consigue con las 26 letras del alfabeto”, señaló.

La “alegría gigantesca” de Muñoz Molina

El escritor Antonio Muñoz Molina ha sentido hoy “una alegría gigantesca, enorme” al saber que había ganado el Nobel de Literatura la canadiense Alice Munro, una mujer “prodigiosa que tiene la virtud de comprimir el tiempo y la vida en el espacio de un cuento”.

“En un cuento de Alice Munro caben novelas completas”, aseguraba hoy en declaraciones a Efe Muñoz Molina, al que se le notaba que le “entusiasma” la autora canadiense, situada en su opinión “entre los mejores escritores del mundo”.

Es muy raro que haya tanta justicia como se ha hecho hoy”, sobre todo porque la nueva Nobel de Literatura es “una persona que tiene tan pocas pretensiones intelectuales, en el sentido de que no es el tipo de escritor que a la gente que rige la moda le llame la atención”.
Munro, prosiguió el gran novelista español, “ha hecho lo que ha querido toda su vida”, y eso se nota tanto en sus cuentos de hace cincuenta años como en los de ahora. “Ella ha ido cambiando cuando no le hacían mucho caso y también cuando sí se lo han hecho, y siempre ha ido evolucionando con soberanía”.

Muñoz Molina “descubrió” hace unos quince años a la autora canadiense en la revista “New Yorker”. Allí empezó a leer sus cuentos y, desde entonces, ha leído todo lo que ha publicado. “Lo primero que hago cuando sale un libro suyo es correr a comprarlo”, comentaba hoy Muñoz Molina, que no cesaba de repetir: “estoy contentísimo”.

“Es el escritor que más confianza me ofrece. Jamás la he visto desfallecer, siempre es extraordinaria, y, además, de una manera tan poco llamativa. Es muy discípula de Chéjov y en sus relatos hay también ese tono en apariencia menor”, añadía el escritor.

Muñoz Molina cree que, si Munro fuera española, “en España no le harían ningún caso, la tratarían con desprecio porque es una mujer que escribe sobre mujeres.

Un premio “muy justo para Javier Marías”

El escritor Javier Marías considera “muy justo” el Premio Nobel de Literatura que ha ganado hoy la canadiense Alice Munro, y se alegra en particular de que la Academia Sueca haya reconocido a una autora que, sobre todo, escribe cuentos, un género que “desde hace varias décadas está muy dejado de lado”.

“Munro ha alcanzado en su obra, de una manera muy sobria, grandes cotas de hondura y de emotividad. Sus cuentos son emocionantes”, aseguraba hoy en declaraciones a Efe Javier Marías, que en más de una ocasión había dicho que “si algún escritor vivo merecía el Nobel por encima de cualquier otro era ella”. “Es una escritora excepcional”.

El novelista español no sabe “cómo lo logra Munro”, pero cree que también “es muy destacable” que sus relatos “consigan unas dosis de profundidad y de emoción sorprendentes” y lo hacen “con una considerable economía de medios, con sobriedad, sin casi nunca acentuar nada ni subrayar nada, hablando de personas más bien normales”.

Y en una época, subraya Marías, en la que se da tanto “la literatura de buenos sentimientos, que suele ser empalagosa, como la de malos sentimientos, llena de psicópatas y de estudios sobre la maldad, como si eso en sí mismo tuviera interés”, Munro ha hecho su obra sobre personas normales, “con sus ambigüedades, con sus partes oscuras”.

 

08 The 100 best novels, No 3 – Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

 

The 100 best novels, No 3 – Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels comes third in our list of the best novels written in English. Robert McCrum discusses a satirical masterpiece that’s never been out of print

 

gulliver

On the island of Lilliput: a colour print from an 1860s edition of Gulliver’s Travels. Photograph: Alamy

Seven years after the publication of Robinson Crusoe, the great Tory essayist and poet Jonathan Swift – inspired by the Scriblerus club, whose members included John Gay and Alexander Pope – composed a satire on travel narratives that became an immediate bestseller. According to Gay, Gulliver was soon being read “from the cabinet council to the nursery”.
In its afterlife as a classic, Gulliver’s Travels works on many levels. First, it’s a masterpiece of sustained and savage indignation, “furious, raging, obscene”, according to Thackeray. Swift’s satirical fury is directed against almost every aspect of early 18th-century life: science, society, commerce and politics. Second, stripped of Swift’s dark vision, it becomes a wonderful travel fantasy for children, a perennial favourite that continues to inspire countless versions, in books and films. Finally, as a polemical tour de force, full of wild imagination, it became a source for Voltaire, as well as the inspiration for a Telemann violin suite, Philip K Dick’s science-fiction story The Prize Ship, and, perhaps most influential of all, George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver (to give its original title) comes in four parts, and opens with Gulliver’s shipwreck on the island of Lilliput, whose inhabitant are just six inches high. The most famous and familiar part of the book (“Lilliputian” soon became part of the language) is a satirical romp in which Swift takes some memorable shots at English political parties and their antics, especially the controversy on the matter of whether boiled eggs should be opened at the big or the little end.

Next, Gulliver’s ship, the Adventure, gets blown off course and he is abandoned on Brobdingnag whose inhabitants are giants with a proportionately gigantic landscape. Here, having been dominant on Lilliput, Gulliver is exhibited as a curious midget, and has a number of local dramas such as fighting giant wasps. He also gets to discuss the condition of Europe with the King, who concludes with Swiftian venom that “the bulk of your natives [are] the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

In the third part of his travels, Gulliver visits the flying island of Laputa (a place-name also referenced in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove), and Swift mounts a dark and complicated assault on the speculations of contemporary science (notably spoofing the attempted extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers). Finally, in the section that influenced Orwell (Gulliver’s Travels was one of his favourite books), Swift describes the country of the Houyhnhnms, horses with the qualities of rational men. These he contrasts with the loathsome Yahoos, brutes in human shape. Orwell would later echo Swift’s misanthropy, looking ahead to a time “when the human race had finally been overthrown.”

At the end of it all, Gulliver returns home from his travels in a state of alienated wisdom, purged and matured by his experiences. “I write,” he concludes, “for the noblest end, to inform and instruct mankind… I write without any view to profit or praise. I never suffer a word to pass that may possibly give the least offence, even to those who are most ready to take it. So that I hope I may with justice pronounce myself an author perfectly blameless…”

When he died in 1745, Swift, remembered as “the gloomy Dean”, was buried in Dublin with a famous epitaph “ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (where fierce indignation can no further tear apart his heart) inscribed on his tomb.

A note on the text:
Swift probably started writing Gulliver’s Travels in 1720 (when Crusoe fever was at it height), and delivered the manuscript to the London publisher Benjamin Motte in March 1726. The book was published, anonymously, at top speed. Motte, who sensed a bestseller, used several presses to foil any attempt at piracy, and made many cuts to reduce the risk of prosecution. The first edition appeared, in two volumes, on 26 October 1726, priced 8s 6d, and sold out its first printing in less than a week. In 1735 the Irish publisher, George Faulkner printed a collection of Swift’s works. Volume III became Gulliver’s Travels, based on a working copy of the original manuscript. The textual history of Gulliver’s Travels now becomes incredibly complicated, and Swift later disowned most versions, including Motte’s first edition, saying it was so much altered that “I do hardly know mine own work”. Later scholarly editions of Swift have to choose between Motte and Faulkner, but whatever the version it has never been out of print since the day it first appeared.

Don’t agree that Gulliver’s Travels is Jonathan Swift’s best book? Which of the below would you put in your top 100 list?
  10% A Tale of a Tub (1704)
  90% A Modest Proposal, an essay (1729)
Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1739)

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