De Amerikaanse schrijver Thomas Pynchon werd op 8 mei 1937 geboren in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007.

Uit: The Crying of Lot 49

“One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work. She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she’d always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them. Was that how he’d died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

The letter was from the law firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles, and signed by somebody named Metzger. It said Pierce had died back in the spring, and they’d only just now found the will. Metzger was to act as co-executor and special counsel in the event of any involved litigation. Oedipa had been named also to execute the will in a codicil dated a year ago. She tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to the Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble’s variorum recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden, reading of book reviews in the latest Scientific American, into the layering of a lasagna, garlicking of a bread, tearing up of romaine leaves, eventually, oven on, into the mixing of the twilight’s whiskey sours against the arrival of her husband, Wendell (“Mucho”) Maas from work, she wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn’t she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer’s deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye.”

Thomas Pynchon (Glen Cove, 8 mei 1937)

De Amerikaanse schrijver en criticus Edmund Wilson werd geboren op 8 mei 1895 in Red Bank, New Jersey. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007.

Uit: The Historical Interpretation of Literature

“To begin with, it will be worth while to say something about the kind of criticism which seems to be furthest removed from this. There is a comparative criticism which tends to be non-historical. The essays of T. S. Eliot, which have had such an immense influence in our time, are, for example, fundamentally non-historical. Eliot sees, or tries to see, the whole of literature, so far as he is acquaninted with it, spread out before him under the aspect of eternity. He then compares the work of different periods and countries, and tries to draw from it general conclusions about what literature out to be. He understands, of
course, that our point of view in connection with literature changes, and he has what seems to me a very sound conception of the whole body of writing of the past as something to which new works are continually added, and which is not thereby merely increased in bulk but modified as a whole—so that Sophocles is no longer precisely what he was for Aristotle, or Shakespeare what he was for Ben Jonson or for Dryden or for Dr. Johnson, on account of all the later literature that has intervened between them and us. Yet at every point of this continual accretion, the whole field may be surveyed, as it were, spread out before the critic. The critic tries to see it as God might; he calls the books to a Day of Judgement. And, looking at things in this way, he may arrive at interesting and valuable conclusions which could hardly be reached by approaching them in any other way. Eliot was able to see, for example—what I believe had never been noticed before—that the French Symbolist poetry of the nineteenth century had certain fundamental resemblances to the English poetry of the age of Donne. Another kind of critic would draw certain historical conclusions from these purely esthetic findings, as the Russian D. S. Minsky did; but Eliot does not draw them.

“Another example of this kind of non-historical criticism, in a somewhat different way and on a somewhat different plane, is the work of the late George Saintsbury. Saintsbury was a connoisseur of wines; he wrote an entertaining book on the subject. And his attitude toward literature, too, was that of the connoisseur. He tastes the authors and tells you about the vintages; he distinguishes the qualities of the various wines. His palate was as fine as could be, and he possessed the great qualification that he knew how to take each book on its own terms without expecting it to be some other book and was thus in a positions to appreciate a great variety of kinds of writing. He was a man of strong social prejudices and peculiarly intransigent political views, but, so far as it is humanly possible, he kept them out of his literary criticism. The result is on of the most agreeable and most comprehensive commentaries on literature that have ever been written in English. Most scholars who have read as much as Saintsbury do not have Saintsbury’s discriminating taste. Here is a critic who has covered the whole ground like any academic historian, yet whose account of it is not merely a chronology but a record of fastidious enjoyment. Since enjoyment is the only thing he is looking for, he does not need to know the causes of things, and the historical background of literature does not interest him very much.”

Edmund Wilson (8 mei 1895 – 14 juni 1972)

De Amerikaanse dichter Gary Snyder werd geboren op 8 mei 1930 in San Francisco. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007.

Riprap

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles —
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
Four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

After Work

The shack and a few trees

float in the blowing fog

I pull out your blouse,

warm my cold hands

     on your breasts.

you laugh and shudder

peeling garlic by the

     hot iron stove.

bring in the axe, the rake,

the wood

we’ll lean on the wall

against each other

stew simmering on the fire

as it grows dark

            drinking wine.

The Spring

Beating asphalt into highway potholes

        pickup truck we’d loaded

road repair stock shed & yard

a day so hot the asphalt went in soft.

        pipe and steel plate tamper

took turns at by hand

then drive the truck rear wheel

a few times back and forth across the fill–

finish it off with bitchmo around the edge.

the foreman said let’s get a drink

& drove through the woods and flower fields

        shovels clattering in back

into a black grove by a cliff

        a rocked in pool

        feeding a fern ravine

                      tin can to drink

numbing the hand and cramping in the gut

surging through the fingers from below

        & dark here–

let’s get back to the truck

get back on the job.

Gary Snyder (San Francisco, 8 mei 1930)

De Franse schrijver, vertaler regisseur en diplomaat Romain Gary werd geboren op 8 mei 1914 in Vilnius, Litouwen. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007.

Uit: Frühes Versprechen (La Promesse de l’aube, nieuwe Duitse vertaling  door Giò Waeckerlin Induni)

Mit dreizehn, glaube ich, habe ich zum ersten Mal meine Berufung geahnt.
Ich besuchte damals die dritte Klasse am Gymnasium von Nizza, und meine Mutter hatte im Hotel Négresco eine der »Vitrinen« auf den Korridoren gemietet, wo sie modische Accessoires ausstellte, die die Luxusgeschäfte ihr in Kommission gaben; sie bekam für jede verkaufte Bluse, für jeden verkauften Gürtel oder Schal zehn Prozent Vermittlungsprovision. Ab und zu nahm sie eine kleine unerlaubte Preiserhöhung vor und steckte die Differenz in die eigene Tasche. Sie lauerte den ganzen Tag auf mögliche Kunden und rauchte nervös unzählige Gauloises, denn unser täglich Brot hing damals von diesem unsicheren Geschäft ab.
Allein, ohne Ehemann, ohne Liebhaber, kämpfte sie schon seit dreißig Jahren mutig, um jeden Monat unser Auskommen zu sichern, um die Butter zu bezahlen, die Schuhe, die Miete, die Kleider, das Steak zum Mittagessen – dieses Steak, das sie jeden Tag fast feierlich auf dem Teller vor mich hinstellte, als sei es der Beweis ihres Sieges über das widrige Geschick. Ich kam aus der Schule und setzte mich zu Tisch. Meine Mutter stand daneben und sah mir beim Essen mit dem zufriedenen Blick einer ihre Jungen säugenden Hündin zu.
Sie weigerte sich, das Steak anzurühren, beteuerte, sie möge nur Gemüse, und Fleisch und Fette seien ihr strikt untersagt. Eines Tages stand ich vom Tisch auf und ging in die Küche ein Glas Wasser trinken. Meine Mutter saß auf einem Schemel; sie hielt die Pfanne auf den Knien, in der mein Steak gebraten worden war. Sie wischte den Pfannenboden sorgfältig mit Brotstücken auf, die sie dann gierig verschlang, und obwohl sie die Pfanne rasch unter der Serviette versteckte, erfasste ich blitzartig die ganze Wahrheit über den wirklichen Grund ihrer vegetarischen Diät.
Ich stand einen Moment versteinert da, betrachtete fassungslos die halb unter der Serviette versteckte Pfanne und das schuldbewusste Lächeln meiner Mutter, dann brach ich in Schluchzen aus und rannte davon. Am Ende der Avenue Shakespeare, wo wir damals wohnten, verlief ein hoher, fast senkrechter Damm die Eisenbahnlinie entlang, und dorthin rannte ich mich verstecken. Ich dachte kurz daran, mich vor den Zug zu werfen und mich so meiner Beschämung und meiner Hilflosigkeit zu entziehen, doch gleich darauf flammte wilde Entschlossenheit in mir auf: Ja, ich würde die Welt wieder in Ordnung bringen und sie eines Tages, gerecht, glücklich und ihrer würdig, meiner Mutter zu Füßen legen. Das Gesicht in den Armen vergraben, überließ ich mich ganz meinem Kummer, doch die Tränen, die so oft meinen Schmerz gestillt hatten, brachten mir diesmal keinen Trost. Ein unerträgliches Gefühl von Entbehrung, Entmännlichung, von Lähmung nahm von mir Besitz; je älter ich wurde, desto mehr wuchs meine Frustration, und mein verschwommenes kindliches Bestreben verblasste nicht etwa, sondern verwandelte sich nach und nach in ein Verlangen, das weder Frau noch Kunst je würden stillen können.“

Romain Gary (9 mei 1914 – 2 december 1980)

De Ierse schrijver Roddy Doyle werd geboren in Dublin op 8 mei 1958. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007.

Uit: The Deportees

“In April 2000, two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin, Abel Ugba and Chinedu Onyejelem, started publishing a multicultural paper called Metro Eireann. I read an article about these men in the Irish Times, and decided that I’d like to meet them. Three or four years into our new national prosperity, I was already reading and hearing elegies to the simpler times, before we became so materialistic — the happy days when more people left Ireland than were born here; when we were afraid to ask anyone what they did for a living, because the answer might be ‘Nothing’; when we sent our pennies and our second-hand clothes to Africa but never saw a flesh-and-blood African. The words ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ were being flung around the place, and the stories were doing the rounds. An African woman got a brand new buggy from the Social Welfare and left it at the bus stop because she couldn’t be bothered carrying it onto the bus, and she knew she could get a new one. A man looked over his garden wall and found a gang of Muslims next door on the patio, slaughtering an Irish sheep. A Polish woman rented a flat and, before the landlord had time to bank the deposit, she’d turned it into a brothel, herself and her seven sisters and their cousin, the pimp. I heard those three, and more, from taxi drivers. I thought I’d like to make up a few of my own.”

Roddy Doyle (Dublin, 8 mei 1958)

De Engelse schrijfster Pat Barker werd geboren in Thornaby-on-Tees op 8 mei 1943. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007.

Uit: Life Class

„They’d been drawing for over half an hour. There was no sound except for the slurring of pencils on Michelet paper or the barely perceptible squeak of charcoal. At the center of the circle of students, close to the dais, a stove cast a barred red light onto the floor. The smell of burning coke mingled with other smells: sweat, hot cloth, cigar and tobacco smoke. Now and again you could hear the soft pop of lips inhaling and another plume of blue smoke would rise to join the pall that hung over the whole room.

Nobody spoke. You were not allowed to talk in the life class. In the Antiques Room, where they spent the mornings copying from casts of Classical and Renaissance sculpture, talking was permitted, and the students—a few of the women, in particular—chattered nonstop. Here, apart from the naked woman on the dais, the atmosphere was not unlike a men’s club. The women students had their own separate life class somewhere on the lower floor. Even the Slade, scandalously modern in most respects, segregated the sexes when the naked human body was on display.

Paul Tarrant, sitting on the back row, as far away from the stove as he could get, coughed discreetly into his handkerchief. He was still struggling to throw off the bronchitis that had plagued him all winter and the fumes irritated his lungs. He’d finished his drawing, or at least he’d reached the point where he knew that further work would only make matters worse. He leaned back and contemplated the page. Not one of his better efforts.”

Pat Barker (Thornaby-on-Tees, op 8 mei 1943)

De Oostenrijkse schrijfster Gertrud Fussenegger werd geboren op 8 mei 1912 in Pilsen. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007.

Uit: Ein Spiegelbild mit Feuersäule

„Ich fluchte dem Krieg, der da als silberfunkelnder, hundertfach geflügelter und geschwänzter Drache schräg über mir im sonnigen Blau dahinzog, satanisch schön. Aber ich fluchte auch dem Frieden, der uns mit verlogenen Parolen und schmeichlerischen Entwürfen in einen verderblichen Traum gewiegt hatte. Ich fluchte der Glasglocke, in die mich die Liebe der Meinen gesetzt und in der sie mich verpäppelt und mit verzuckerten Illusionen genährt hatte. Diese Glasglocke war jetzt endgültig unter dem Schlag einer entsetzlichen Belehrung zerborsten. Ich sah unter den immer steigenden Erdfontänen, unter den Detonationsflammen und wirbelnden Trümmern die eigene Jugend mit allen ihren verwegenen Glückserwartungen und Ansprüchen in einem Malstrom von Dreck und Feuer vergehen. In mir war Haß, aber Haß nicht nur auf die Mächte der Vernichtung und die verbrecherische Narrheit, die diese Vernichtung auf uns losgelassen, sondern auch auf den Traum von bürgerlicher Sicherheit, in dem ich erzogen worden war, auf diesen Traum voll Hochmut und Selbstgewißheit, der jetzt unter dem Keulenschlag einer brutalen Erniedrigung endgültig in die Brüche ging.”

Gertrud Fussenegger (Pilsen, 8 mei 1912)

Zie voor onderstaande schrijvers ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007.

De Amerikaanse schrijver Sloan Wilson werd geboren op 8 mei 1920 in Norwalk, Connecticut.

De Deense schrijver Sophus Schandorph werd geboren op 8 mei 1836 in Ringstedt.

De Amerikaanse schrijver Thomas Pynchon werd op 8 mei 1937 geboren in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. Zijn vader, een landmeter, was een kennis van president Theodore Roosevelt. Thomas Pynchon zelf verliet de universiteit (Cornell, waar ook Kurt Vonnegut, 10 jaar eerder, studeerde) om twee jaar lang dienst te nemen bij de Amerikaanse marine. Na zijn terugkomst zei hij de wetenschap vaarwel en studeerde hij  af met een graad in de filologie. Zijn eerste korte verhalen publiceerde hij in 1959. Na zijn studie ging hij werken voor Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Hij gaf zijn werk op om zijn eerste roman te voltooien, V. (1963). Terwijl verreweg de meeste auteurs zich verheugen in de belangstelling van de media (voor zover deze media zich voor hen interesseren), beslistte Pynchon volledig uit het publieke leven te verdwijnen. Nooit heeft hij een interview gegeven, en sinds 1963 zijn de enige tekens van leven zijn werk zelf, behoudens wat journalistiek werk, enige recensies van andermans werk. Zijn hoofdwerk is Gravity’s Rainbow (1973, vertaald als Regenboog van Zwaartekracht). Dit werd bekroond met de belangrijkste literaire prijs in de VS, de National Book Award. De prijs werd opgehaald door een clown. Voor de William Dean Howells Medal, een vijfjaarlijkse prijs voor het belangrijkste Amerikaanse fictiewerk, bedankte hij met een briefje waarin stond dat er maar één manier is om “neen” te zeggen, en dat is “neen”. Ook werd hem een Pulitzer toegekend, maar de beslissing van de jury werd teniet gedaaan door de beheerders van deze prijs, omdat het book (o. a.) ‘obsceen’ zou zijn.

Uit:  Gravity’s Rainbow:

“Kekeul? dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is going to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity – most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to being with, of no value to anyone or anything but the Systems, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .”

Thomas Pynchon (Glen Cove, 8 mei 1937)

De Amerikaanse schrijver Sloan Wilson werd geboren op 8 mei 1920 in Norwalk, Connecticut. Hij studeerde in Harvard en diende tijdens WO II in de Coast Guard. Wilson schreef vijftien boeken, waaronder The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) en A Summer Place (1958) die allebei verfilmd werden.

Uit: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“A major, coming to squat beside him, said:” Some of these goddamn sailors got heads. They went ashore and got Jap heads, and they tried to boil them in the galley to get the skulls for souvenirs”.

Tom had shrugged and said nothing. The fact that he had been too quick to throw a hand grenade and had killed Mahoney, the fact that some young sailors had wanted skulls for souvenirs, and the fact that a few hundred men had lost their lives to take the island of Karkow—all these facts were simply incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. That, he had decided, was the final truth of the war, and he had greeted it with relief, greeted it eagerly, the simple fact that it was incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. Things just happen, he had decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind.”

Sloan Wilson (8 mei 1920 – 25 mei 2003)

De Amerikaanse schrijver en criticus Edmund Wilson werd geboren op 8 mei 1895 in Red Bank, New Jersey en werd opgeleid aan Princeton. Hij begon zijn carrière als een verslaggever voor de New York Sun, en diende in het leger tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Hij was hoofdredacteur van Vanity Fair magazine in 1920 en 1921, en werkte later bij de kranten de New Republic en de New Yorker. Wilson was geïnteresseerd in moderne cultuur in zijn geheel, en veel van zijn schrijfselen gaan buiten het gebied van de pure literaire kritieken. In zijn boek To the Finland Station bestudeerde hij het verloop van het Europese socialisme dat toeloopt op de aankomst van Lenin op het Finland Station in Sint-Petersburg als aanvoerder van de revolutie van de Bolsjewieken. Wilson’s vroege werken zijn erg beïnvloed door de ideeën van Freud en Marx, en hij had een diepe interesse in hun werk. Hij was een goede vriend van schrijver F. Scott Fitzgerald, en hij redigeerde Fitzgeralds’ laatste boek voor postume publicatie.

Uit: The Fifties

“Had dinner with Wystan Auden before Elena [ Wilson’s wife ] arrived. He was pleased at having what he described as an honor on the part of the Establishment. He has been made an honorary fellow (I think that is the phrase) of Christ Church [ College, Oxford ] . I gather that he can retire and live there for nothing. He thinks that “Down There on a Visit” is Isherwood’s best book — I was just in the middle of reading it. He says the disintegrating homo on his horrible island in Greece was a real person whom he knew and the only person he knew who would drink the spirits out of lamps when there was nothing else to be had. He thought that “Paul” was the best of the stories. I agreed with him when I came to read it; but the whole book is rather disgusting. I am getting sick of this subject. The attitude in these books toward homosexuality involves of course a revolt against society. See the diatribe of the man on the island about putting the heterosexuals in ghettos. Paul is made by Isherwood into a hero. But Genet is the best of these writers. He is the most in revolt, the most genuinely an outlaw. Cambridge, Spring 1962.”

Edmund Wilson (8 mei 1895 – 14 juni 1972)

De Amerikaanse dichter Gary Snyder werd geboren op 8 mei 1930 in San Francisco. Zijn werk werd beïnvloed door de Amerikaanse dichters Walt Whitman en Ezra Pound. Hij wordt gerekend tot de Beat Generation.  Het werk van Snyder is doordrongen van een diep respect voor de natuur en doordrongen van Oosterse filosofie. In 1975 won Snyder de Pulitzer Prize voor zijn bundel Turtle Island.

Rolling In At Twilight

Rolling in at twilight — Newport Oregon —

   cool of september ocean air, I

saw Phil Whalen with a load of groceries

   walking through a dirt lot full

   of logging trucks, cats

      and skidders

   looking at the ground.

I yelld as the bus wheeld by

   but he kept looking down.

   ten minutes later with my books and pack

       knockt at his door

“Thought you might be on that bus”

             he said, and

   showed me all the food.

Manzanita

Before dawn the coyotes

            weave medicine songs

            dream nets — spirit baskets —

            milky way music

                        they cook young girls with

                        to be woman;

            or the whirling dance of

            striped boys —

At moon-set the pines are gold-purple

Just before sunrise.

The dog hastens into the undergrowth

Comes back panting

Huge, on the small dry flowers.

A woodpecker

Drums and echoes

Across the still meadow

One man draws, and releases an arrow
Humming, flat,
Misses a gray stump, and splitting
A smooth red twisty manzanita bough.

Manzanita     the tips in fruit,

Clusters of hard green berries

The longer you look

The bigger they seem,

            `little apples’

Gary Snyder (San Francisco, 8 mei 1930)

De Deense schrijver Sophus Schandorph werd geboren op 8 mei 1836 in Ringstedt. Hij studeerde theologie in Kopenhagen, verwisselde die studie echter voor romanistiek en werd daarna leraar. Schandorph behoorde tot de schrijvers van de „Moderne doorbraak“ van 1871 die zich oriënteerden aan Brandes. Ook Toergenjev en Zola hadden invloed op hem.

Uit: Stina Becomes a Farmer’s Wife  (vertaald door Sally Ryan)

“SINCE Midsummer Day not a drop of rain had fallen, and now August was nearing its end. The road looked like a trail of spilled flour winding through bare fields. The stubble land was cracked with drought. The fallow fields gleamed yellow agains
t crumbling grayish white soil. The low ditches were lined with ugly dusty grass, like long tangled wisps of hair. All growing things were drying up in an abandonment of despair. The light blue cloudless sky had tortured them too long. The sun, with its self-complacent smile, had scorched them so mercilessly, so continuously, that now, in spite of their burning thirst, they had grown too listless to implore the heavens for a drop of water. In all the dazzling whiteness of the landscape there was not a spot of deeper color to rest the weary eye.

A peasant girl of short, broad stature came walking along the road. Every step she took raised the dust like a low, dense cloud of steam. She seemed as resigned as the plants, but with a considerably greater vitality. No sentimental pity for her floral fellow-creatures moved her–at least she did not waste one glance on them. Only when a cow began to prance in the field she slightly turned her snugly kerchiefed head.”

Sophus Schandorph (8 mei 1836 – 1 januari 1901)

De Fransjoodse schrijver, vertaler regisseur en diplomaat Romain Gary werd geboren op 8 mei 1914 in Vilnius, Litouwen. Hij schreef vooral in het Frans, maar ook in het Engels. Na het overlijden van zijn vader trok hij met zijn moeder in 1928 naar Nice. Al in 1935 publiceerde hij twee korte verhalen in het tijdschrift Gringoire. Nadat hij in 1945 tot de diplomatieke dienst was toegetreden verscheen zijn eerste roman Éducation européenne. Het werk werd in zevenentwintig talen vertaald. Voor Les racines du ciel kreeg hij in 1956 en voor La vie devant soi  in 1975 de Prix Goncourt. Hij is de enige schrijver die deze prijs tweemaal ontving.

Uit : La vie devant soi

« La première chose que je peux vous dire c’est qu’on habitait au sixième à pied et que pour Madame Rosa, avec tous ces kilos qu’elle portait sur elle et seulement deux jambes, c’était une vraie source de vie quotidienne, avec tous les soucis et les peines. Elle nous le rappelait chaque fois qu’elle ne se plaignait pas d’autre part, car elle était également juive. Sa santé n’était pas bonne non plus et je peux vous dire aussi dès le début que c’était une femme qui aurait mérité un ascenseur.

Je devais avoir trois ans quand j’ai vu Madame Rosa pour la première fois. Avant, on n’a pas de mémoire et on vit dans l’ignorance. J’ai cessé d’ignorer à l’âge de trois ou quatre ans et parfois ça me manque.

Il y avait beaucoup d’autres Juifs, Arabes et Noirs à Belleville, mais Madame Rosa était obligée de grimper les six étages seule. Elle disait qu’un jour elle allait mourir dans l’escalier, et tous les mômes se mettaient à pleurer parce que c’est ce qu’on fait toujours quand quelqu’un meurt. On était tantôt six ou sept tantôt même plus là-dedans.

Au début, je ne savais pas que Madame Rosa s’occupait de moi seulement pour toucher un mandat à la fin du mois. Quand je l’ai appris, j’avais six ou sept ans et ça m’a fait un coup de savoir que j’étais payé. Je croyais que Madame Rosa m’aimait pour rien et qu’on était quelqu’un l’un pour l’autre. J’en ai pleuré toute une nuit et c’était mon premier grand chagrin. »

Romain Gary (9 mei 1914 – 2 december 1980)

De Ierse schrijver Roddy Doyle werd geboren in Dublin op 8 mei 1958. Voor zijn eerste succes was hij leraar Engels en aardrijkskunde aan de Greendale Community School in Kilbarrack, Noord-Dublin, waar hij nog steeds woont. Zijn boeken gaan over de werkende klasse in Dublin, en zijn luchthartig maar hebben een serieuze ondertoon.

Uit: A Star Called Henry

“Henry rushed, he skipped all the way, but he dreaded the quick trip home and what he’d find there. Melody was about to give birth. Again. . . . They moved again, to a house on Summerhill. The room was smaller, the house meaner. . . . This was the room that Henry was rushing home to. This was their last chance, he was sure of it. He was panting when he turned onto Summerhill. He was getting old; he was twenty-six. His hair was greying, although he hadn’t seen it. He was stooped, carrying the heavy ghosts of his children. He could still feel them in his arms. He could smell them. Little Henry, little Lil. His love for them was an unending fight in his chest. He was always on the verge of seeing them. He didn’t sleep any more.”

Roddy Doyle (Dublin, 8 mei 1958)

De Engelse schrijfster Pat Barker werd geboren in Thornaby-on-Tees op 8 mei 1943. Zij publiceerde haar eerste roman, Union Street, in 1982. Beroemd werd ze met haar Regeneration trilogie, die handelt over WO I. Voor het derde deel daarvan, The Ghost Road, kreeg ze in 2001 de Booker Prize.

Uit: Double Vision (2003)

“Christmas was over. Feeling a slightly shame-faced pleasure in the restoration of normality, Kate stripped the tree of lights and decorations, cut off the main branches and dragged the trunk down to the compost heap at the bottom of the garden. There she stood looking back at the house, empty again now — her mother and sister had left the morning after Boxing Day — seeing the lighted windows and reflected firelight almost as if she were a stranger, shut out. A few specks of cold rain found her eyelids and mouth. All around her the forest waited, humped in silence. Shivering, she ran back up the lawn.

Gradually she re-established her routine. Up early, across to the studio by eight, five hours’ unbroken work that generally left her knackered for the rest of the day, though she forced herself to walk for an hour or two in the afternoons.

The weather turned colder, until one day, returning from her walk, she noticed that the big puddle immediately outside her front gate was filmed with ice, like a cataract dulling the pupil of an eye. She heated a bowl of soup, built up the fire and huddled over it, while outside the temperature dropped, steadily, hour by hour, until a solitary brown oak leaf detaching itself from the the frost-hard ground with a crackle that echoed tree fell onto through the whole forest.”

Pat Barker (Thornaby-on-Tees, op 8 mei 1943)

De Oostenrijkse schrijfster Gertrud Fussenegger werd geboren op 8 mei 1912 in Pilsen. Zij studeerde in Innsbruck en München geschiedenis, kunstgeschiedenis en filosofie. Zij begon met het schrijven van historische roman. Haar katholieke afkomst is van invloed op haar werk. Omstreden is haar houding in de tijd van het nationaalsocialisme toen zij door kon gaan met publiceren. Na de oorlog hield zij zich echter steeds weer bezig met de schuld van de Duitsers bezig.

Uit: Das Haus der dunklen Krüge

“Es war im Jahre 1870: im Hause Bourdanin wurde Hochzeit gefeiert.
Ehe die Sonne des langen glühendheißen Augusttages unterging, führte der Bräutigam, der kaiserliche und königliche Rittmeister Balthasar Bourdanin, seine jungangetraute Frau aus der Gesellschaft der Festgäste hinweg, in die für ihn eingerichteten Gemächer seines Vaterhauses. Die Stuben waren still und leer. Die Fenster standen offen; durch die weißen Schleierbahnen der Vorhänge drang, in schräge Balken gebrochen, das schwere gelbrote Abendlicht. Der Rittmeister warf Hut und Handschuhe ab und schwang seinen Hochzeitsrock über die Sessellehne. „Und nun”, sprach er, „nun sage mir auch, Marie, wie glücklich du bist.”
Zwischen den Fenstern hing ein Spiegel. Der Mann konnte es sich nicht versagen, sein Bild mit einem Blick zu messen. Balthasar Bourdanin war ein schöner Mann, fest und gedrungen gebaut, breitschultrig, rundköpfig, von kräftiger Hautfarbe und dunklem Haar. Die Nase stand zwar ein wenig schief in dem Angesicht und zielte mit ihrer Spitze abwärts gegen den buschigen Schnurrbart; doch stand sie nicht übel zu dem festen Mund, zu der starken Braue, zu dem dunkelrollenden hephai= stischen Blick. Der Rittmeister mußte es sich selbst gestehen, er war ein in seiner Art prächtiger Mann; darum hielt er die Frau, die ihn bekommen, für ein vollendet glückliches Geschöpf.”

Gertrud Fussenegger (Pilsen, 8 mei 1912)