The Nobel Laureates, Pt.1

August 2, 2023·30 min·2 clips

Toni Morrison calls racism a bully's cowardice and says electing Barack Obama felt like a nation taking its courage back.

The episode opens with host Anne Beattie introducing a retrospective of Bookworm, the KCRW literary program hosted by Michael Silverblatt for 33 years, during which he recorded over 1,600 conversations. Silverblatt is currently on hiatus for health reasons. Beattie frames the episode around four of the eight Nobel Prize laureates Silverblatt interviewed over the show's run. The Nobel Prize in Literature, established by Alfred Nobel's will, has been awarded annually since 1901 for work produced in an idealistic direction. The first segment features Toni Morrison, who received the Nobel Prize in 1993. Silverblatt describes a 1998 phone interview in which Morrison agreed to speak about the novel Beloved without discussing the Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Demme film adaptation. Morrison argues that the true center of Beloved is not the historical infanticide but the philosophical question of when love of another eclipses love of self. The interview was so significant that the Los Angeles Times requested a transcript, which Morrison agreed to edit herself. A second Morrison conversation from 2009, conducted in person, focuses on her novel A Mercy, set in 1690 and depicting the racial and social diversity of early America. Morrison reflects on Barack Obama's election, describing national fear after 9/11 as a form of cowardice and comparing severe racism to a bully's fear of losing. She praises Obama's genuine bicultural identity and the courage she saw in voters. The second segment features Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel laureate and first African to receive the prize, interviewed in 2006 about his memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn. Soyinka discusses how recollection of past injustices can act either as restraint or as propulsive force. He expands the definition of creativity to encompass politics, arguing that managing human beings toward viable community requires the same integrity and innovation as art. He also reflects on exile during the Abacha dictatorship, insisting that deprivation of choice is what he finds truly unacceptable. The third segment features Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel laureate, discussing his novel The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk explains that the novel uses the taboo of virginity in 1970s Turkey to represent the repression of a vast culture, describing it as a love story in a repressed society. He discusses the physical sensation of love pain and his effort to render it honestly rather than idealize love. Pamuk then addresses the burden of representation that comes with global translation, noting that being translated into 57 languages caused his Turkish readers to view his work as an exposure of their private lives to outsiders. He compares his novel's preservation of Istanbul's daily life to Joyce's mapping of Dublin in Ulysses, describing novels as museums of daily life. The final segment features Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate, speaking with Silverblatt from Dublin during the Rejoice Festival, which marked the centenary of Bloomsday. Heaney describes Ulysses as an Irish book of life and a language carnival, recalling a story of Joyce laughing alone in his study while writing Finnegans Wake. He draws on Yeats's distinction between the bundle of accident that sits down to breakfast and the writer reborn as something intended and complete. Heaney then reads his poem At Toome Bridge from the collection Electric Light, explaining its layered references to the 1798 rebellion, the Troubles-era checkpoints, and an eel fishery he first wrote about in 1969. The episode closes with Beattie announcing that the next retrospective will feature Kazuo Ishiguro, Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Lessing, and Czesław Miłosz.

As heard by us

A measured Bookworm tribute where Nobel voices meet Michael Silverblatt's exacting, morally alert attention.

Anne Beattie frames this Bookworm retrospective as a tribute to Michael Silverblatt's 33 years on KCRW, then lets the Nobel conversations carry the weight: Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Orhan Pamuk, and Seamus Heaney in the first half of a two-part gathering.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a Bookworm retrospective with Nobel-laureate company and real gravity.

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