Reading About Writers I Like

 Three writers I found in prison have pieces published about them this weekend.

I admit to not reading much by Deborah Levy, a now 13-year-old short story, and reading much about her. The more I read about her, the more I think there is to learn from her. The Guardian did a podcast How Deborah Levy can change your life, which I listened to this morning. Women readers, women writers might be profit the most, but men should not ignore her. She seems to be working out what I stumbled upon – that realism that does not include our mental life of dreams and the like is not reality.

Whoever finally reads my posts on writing and books, will notice I am a Zadie Smith fan. Anyone questioning why this should be so, will do well to read The Guardian's profile, Zadie Smith: ‘I get in trouble when I talk about the state of the nation’, of which this is not even the best part

Smith was subjected to the media glare when she was barely out of university. “Most of the terrible stuff that went on when I was young was not really to do with me, it was an insane projection,” she says now. “You are dealing with what people themselves want.” Nobody could believe that a young woman wouldn’t want to be endlessly profiled, with her photo in the papers on the flimsiest excuse. “But I really didn’t want it. I don’t want to be a photograph in the newspaper because it fills some space.”

Neither did she want to present a TV show, write a column or any of the other things that were relentlessly pushed her way in her 20s. “As I made very clear, I want to write novels. Could you let me write them, please?”

Which is exactly what she did. White Teeth was followed by the often overlooked The Autograph Man, about the corrosive effects of fame. Its protagonist, the British-Jewish-Chinese Alex-Li Tandem, is “a weird, nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy … he’s probably more like me than any character I ever created”, Smith admitted in a recent essay. Her next novel, On Beauty, a classy reworking of EM Forster’s Howards End transferred to a New England college town, won the Women’s prize in 2006. She was just 30.

There was a seven year gap until NW, a formally experimental but deeply personal novel about friendship and success, in 2012. Then came Swing Time in 2016, which also took in celebrity and shaming and was set partly in west Africa.

While all of Smith’s novels deal with race and class and gender – from Black girls growing up on a council estate in Swing Time to a forward-thinking 19th-century housekeeper in The Fraud – she doesn’t feel any sense of responsibility. “I take pleasure in it. That’s something I think I take from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. It is not some tedious moral weight. It is a delight,” she says. “I’m not here to represent anybody,” she adds. “I barely represent myself. My job is to think about things and to express them in language.” She pauses. “I want people to read me because I can write. That matters to me more than anything else.”

Finally, another Guardian review (yes, its book review newsletter was full of much goodness this morning), In the forest of the soul is more a biography and overview of Kenzaburo Oë's life and work. Oë won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I found far more amazing than even Murakami. There is life and love in Oë.

Oë's commitment to Hikari (nicknamed "Pooh" after AA Milne's bear) inspired, over 30 years, a unique cycle of fiction whose protagonists are fathers of brain-damaged sons. That experience pervades his complex vision, in fiction and essays, of militarism and nuclear disarmament, innocence and authenticity, faith and redemption. His translator John Nathan, professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and author of Japan Unbound (2004), says that, like Natsume Soseki, the early 20th-century modernist, Oë "created a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese writers before him. He's excruciatingly self-conscious and aware, painfully looking beneath the surface of things." Although Nathan feels Oë (pronounced oh-way) has been "undertranslated - he's terribly hard to do", his work has reached more foreign readers since his Nobel prize for literature in 1994.

Henry Miller likened him to Dostoevsky in his "range of hope and despair", while the late Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his "extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding", particularly across cultures. Who else, Said wrote in a public exchange of letters in 2002, would repeatedly warn of the "danger to Japan of too much imperial swagger and economic delusion?", a peril rooted, for Oë, in a failure to learn from the past. According to the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, he has "always been fascinated by what's not been said about the Japanese role in the second world war".

Please give all three writers a chance, and also the original articles. There is much to be learned in them.

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