Vox Populi and the Nobel

The divide between art vs. commercial movies in India was too wide back when I was a kid.  I would assume that the gap has further widened over the decades that I have been away from the old country.

I longed for the arty movies.  As I have blogged here in plenty about movies by the likes of Adoor Goplakrishnan and Satyajit Ray, I found them engaging.  They made me think about the human condition.  There was so much to learn about the world, and the art movies were wonderful teachers.  The commercial movies were, well, I had my fill of those too.

The printed word, too, seemed to fall into classic works vs. potboilers.  Sure, the pulp fiction met my cheap thrills. But, with the little money that I had I purchased only the classics.  And read them.  And held on to them for a long time.  And loved going to book fairs!

Such divides have always been there.  They won't go away anytime soon. Perhaps never. 

In recent years, the Oscars even expanded the number of films for the ultimate prize because of PR concerns that the Oscar "best picture" was not one that resonated with the public opinion.  With an expanded list and other changes, the Academy hoped to regain a level of cultural relevance that it seemed to once have.

In a world in which most people do not care for the "arty" should we be surprised that the latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature is an unknown back in his old country?

Of course, Abdulrazak Gurnah is not a household name.  Despite all my pretentious artsy-ness, I had no idea about Gurnah.  Usually my select news and magazine sources tip me off about phenomenal authors and then I read a work or two of theirs.  Like how it happened with the Polish author Olga Tokarzcuk.  But, Gurnah was not in my radar.

Hey, at least I have an excuse: I neither live in the UK, which is Gurnah's adopted home, nor in Tanzania (Zanzibar)--his old country.  But, "in bookshops across the East Africa nation, Gurnah's novels are nowhere to be found."  Oh my!

TPH Bookshop, the sister company of Mkuki na Nyota, in Tanzania's main city Dar es Salaam, has been one of the few bookshops in the country to stock Gurnah's work. 

"We saw a huge gap in the publishing industry in Tanzania, which focuses solely on educational books. To address that we started producing and selling fiction, poetry and other literary works. Particularly works written by Tanzanians," says Mr Bgoya. 

"Gurnah's novels took a long time to sell, so we didn't restock."

After the Nobel announcement, we got a chance to read one his relatively recent works.  And then read an essay of his that is geographic.

I hope the recipient of the award will be a name that won't be new to me ;)