bookreport

Bridget Jones‘s diary

This novel from 1996 by Helen Fielding is written in the form of a personal diary, the main character and writer of the diary is Bridget Jones, a single woman at the age of thirty-something. She smokes, drinks alcohol, feels fat and she is single. At New Year she sets out to lose weight, stop smoking and to find a nice man. Naturally someone like Bridget Jones is too awkward to manage all this in one year; she gets involved in some (more or less) romantic affairs and has to deal with her friends and family.
This book is particularly suited for a rainy day: it’s easy to read and so humorous that while reading it one can forget about time just to look up and see the sun shining again.
Elisa D. 12b

bookreport

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury



Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is the most impressive book I’ve ever read. It’s a negative- utopia that shows a world in which humanity is stultified and dulled. The fire brigade doesn’t erase fire, they light the fire and burn books. Books are prohibited because they make people think about their lives. What shocked me most is the emotional frigidity of society, for example it’s usual that children kill each other. Furthermore the media is nearly the only purpose in life and the outbreak of a nuclear war is imminent, but no one thinks about it or cares. Guy Montag is the main character of the book and a fire fighter, but he changes during the book. First he conforms to the totalitarian system, but some events make him change his point of view and so he develops into an active resistance fighter.
In my opinion Fahrenheit 451 shows many problems and threats of our society although it was published in 1953. It made me think about the behaviour of our society and some of the aspects of society in the novel already seem to have become real.
All in all it is a very interesting book which will make you think about many things.
Daniela S. 12b

Harry Clifton - Ireland Professor of Poetry

The art of poetry made the front pages in Ireland recently as Dublin poet, Harry Clifton was awarded the title of Ireland Professor of Poetry for the next three years. The awarding of such a position may seem a small matter nationally and internationally, but if you consider some of the past poets of Ireland whom he now represents - Yeats, Kavanagh, Wilde, Joyce - he certainly has considerable responsibility. However, raising the profile of contemporary poetry will probably be his biggest challenge. The main aim of the position is to help maintain the value of poetry in Irish culture, both at home and abroad. One of the trustees of the position, Seamus Heaney is a Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Harry is in good company!

This year on the press. Nobel Literature Prize

Herta Müller and the Nobel Literature Prize

An Impulse for a New Central Europe

By Ulrich Baron http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,654063,00.html

Herta Müller's is a political voice that can also sing poetic. Her writing unites the great virtues of literature. Her work pleads for justice that transgresses all borders. It was correct and important to award her the Nobel Prize.

Every year, the Nobel Prize for literature is a source of surprises. This year's shocker? The committee's choice isn't much of a surprise at all. From publishers to critics, most agreed that Herta Müller was a good candidate for the award. Indeed, thanks to her most recent novel "Atemschaukel," (the working title of the English translation is "Everything I Have I Carry with Me." An English excerpt can be read here) she is also on the shortlist to receive the 2009 German Book Prize, which will be awarded at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week.

Indeed, it seems that this year, the annual debate about whether the winner should have won may be skipped entirely -- in favor of a focus on the recipient herself. Müller was born on Aug. 17, 1953 in Banat, a region of western Romania. It is a region that was home to a large number of Germans -- indeed Müller's native language was both German and the idiom of a minority.

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Photo Gallery: Herta Müller

Müller learned to speak Romanian only when she was 15 years old. Her first book, published in English as "Nadirs," was heavily censored by the communist authorities when it was published in Bucharest in 1982. An uncensored version appeared in Germany in 1984. She earned her living as a private German teacher.

It wasn't long, however, before pressure from the Romanian secret service became intolerable, and in 1985 she applied to leave the country. Since then, aside from brief stints as "writer in residence" at a number of universities in Europe and the United States, she has lived in Germany.

Yet Müller's language is different -- and not just because she comes from a German enclave that spent centuries developing its own German dialect. Rather, her language is bold and up front, as though she were obsessed with using it a bit differently than it is normally used.

Writing against Terror

The band of prose she wrote in West Berlin, "Traveling on One Leg," describes leaving one country called home and arriving in another. Müller confronts readers with the alien world of the Ceausescu regime, but also with the alienation in her own life.

Life under totalitarian rule was also a central theme in her novel "Even Back Then, the Fox Was a Hunter" (1992), "The Land of the Green Plums" (1995) and "The Appointment" (1997). She wrote about the aftermath of her Romanian experiences in "Hunger and Silk" (1995).

With "A Lady Lives in the Hair Knot" (2000), Herta Müller collects collages for a headstrong poetry album, which depart from the nadirs of life like children's rhymes and rythmic verses.

The literary creations in her latest work are also lined with a sort of childish linguistic charm -- she originally wanted to write about the experiences in a Soviet gulag of her deceased colleague Oscar Pastior. Her books have titles that almost seem to come together in unison against the hunger, death and darkness that are themes in those novels. As if they can't bear alone all that they want to say.

Communicating without Boundaries

You can of course disagree with both the eulogists of "Everything I Have, I Carry with Me," and also with the decision made in Stockholm. One complaint is that the content and qualities that have been praised and rewarded here could also have been discovered and rewarded in works of contemporary Chinese literature.

The Nobel Prize jury's decision was nevertheless an original one because it has foiled the perpetual debate over which country and which author should get his or her turn this time. It has awarded the prize to an author, who stands and writes in her own unique way -- between national territories.

It could send out an impulse for the the concept of a Central Europe that has been placed on the sidelines through the Yugoslavian tragedy and European Union expansion. A concept in which identities aren't determined by nation-states, but rather through cultural ties.

If the Nobel literature prize has succeeded in that, then we would have Herta Müller to thank.