literature

STOCKHOLM — Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, whose philosophical, bleakly funny novels often unfold in single sentences, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

The Nobel judges praised his “artistic gaze which is entirely free of illusion, and which sees through the fragility of the social order combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art,” Steve Sem-Sandberg of the Nobel committee said at the announcement.

“László Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through (Franz) Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the Nobel judges said.

The work that won the Nobel Prize in literature

Zsuzsanna Varga, a Hungarian literature expert at the University of Glasgow, said Krasznahorkai’s apocalyptic and surreal novels probe the “utter hopelessness of the condition of human existence,” while also managing to be “incredibly funny.”

Varga said Krasznahorkai’s near-endless sentences made his books the “Hotel California” of literature – once readers get into it, “you can never leave.”

Other books include “The Melancholy of Resistance,” a surreal, disturbing tale set in a small Hungarian town, and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” the sprawling saga of a gambling-addicted aristocrat.

Several works, including his debut, “Satantango,” and “The Melancholy of Resistance” were turned into films by Hungarian director Béla Tarr.

Varga suggested readers new to Krasznahorkai’s work start with “Satantango,” his debut, which set the tone for what was to follow.

“Satan who is dancing a tango — I mean, how surreal can you be?” she said.

Krasznahorkai has also written several books inspired by his travels to China and Japan, including “A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East,” published in Hungarian in 2003.

How Krasznahorkai came to win

Sem-Sandberg said that Krasznahorkai had been on the Nobel radar for some time, “and he has been writing and creating one outstanding work after another.” He called his literary output “almost half a century of pure excellence.”

Krasznahorkai, 71, couldn’t immediately be reached for his reaction. He didn’t speak at the announcement.

He was born in the southeastern Hungarian city of Gyula, near the border with Romania, and has since traveled the world. Throughout the 1970s, he studied law at universities in Szeged and Budapest before shifting his focus to literature.

Krasznahorkai has been a vocal critic of autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, especially his government’s lack of support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion.

But in a post on Facebook, Orbán was quick to congratulate the writer, saying: “The pride of Hungary, the first Nobel Prize winner from Gyula, László Krasznahorkai. Congratulations!”

In an interview with Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet earlier this year, Krasznahorkai expressed criticism both of Orbán’s political system and the nationalism present in Hungarian society.

“There is no hope left in Hungary today and it is not only because of the Orbán regime,” he told the paper. “The problem is not only political, but also social.”

He also reflected on the fact that he has long been a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, saying: “I don’t want to lie. It would be very interesting to get that prize. But I would be very surprised if I got it.”

Previous awards for Krasznahorkai and the other Nobels this year

Krasznahorkai has received many earlier awards, including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. The Booker judges praised his “extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way.”

He also won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the U.S. in 2019 for “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.”

The American writer and critic Susan Sontag once described Krasznahorkai as the “contemporary master of the Apocalypse.” He was also friends with American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg and would regularly stay in Ginsberg’s apartment while visiting New York City.

He’s the first winner from Hungary since Imre Kertesz in 2002. He joins an illustrious list of laureates that includes Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro.

The literature prize has been awarded by the Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy 117 times to a total of 121 winners. Last year’s prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang for her body of work that the committee said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

The literature prize is the fourth to be announced this week, following the 2025 Nobels in medicine, physics and chemistry.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday. The final Nobel, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, will be announced on Monday.

Nobel Prize award ceremonies are held on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite who founded the prizes.

Each prize carries an award of nearly $1.2 million, and the winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma.

Manenkov, Lawless and Corder write for the Associated Press. Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands, and Lawless from London. Justin Spike contributed to this report from Budapest, Hungary.

With next week’s publication of his ninth novel, “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon’s secret 20th century is at last complete.

For many of us, Pynchon is the best American writer since F. Scott Fitzgerald. Since the arrival in 1963 of his first novel, “V.,” he has loomed as the presiding colossus of our literature — revered as a Nobel-caliber genius, reviled as impenetrable and reviewed with increasing condescension since his turn toward detective fiction with “Inherent Vice” in 2009.

Now comes “Shadow Ticket,” and it’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, “Shadow Ticket” capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.

Only now can we finally see that Pynchon has been quietly assembling — one novel at a time, in no particular order — an almost decade-by-decade chronicle no less ambitious than Balzac’s “La Comédie Humaine,” August Wilson’s Century Cycle or the 55 years of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury.” This is his Pynchoniad, a zigzagging epic of America and the world through our bloodiest, most shameful hundred years. Perhaps suffering from what Pynchon called in “V.” our “great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in,” he has now filled in the only remaining blank spot on his 20th century map: the 1930s.

A photograph of Thomas Pynchon in 1955. The elusive novelist has avoided nearly all media for more than 50 years.

(Bettmann Archive)

It all begins in Depression-era Milwaukee as a righteously funny gangster novel. In a scenario straight out of Dashiell Hammett’s early stories, a detective agency operative named Hicks McTaggart gets an assignment to chase down the runaway heiress to a major cheese fortune. Roughly midway through, Pynchon’s characters hightail it all the way to proto-fascist Budapest, where shadows more lethal than any Tommy gun begin to encroach. By the end, this novel has become at once a requiem, a farewell, an old soft-shoe number — and a warning.

When Pynchon’s jacket summary of this tale of two cities first surfaced six months ago, cynics could be forgiven for wondering whether an 88-year-old man, hearing time’s winged chariot idling at the curb, hadn’t just taken two half-completed works in progress and spot-welded them together. Younger people are forever wondering — in whispers, and never for general consumption — whether some person older than they might have, you know, lost a step.

Well, buzz off, kids. Thomas Pynchon’s voice on the page still sings, clarion strong. Unlike most novelists, his voice has two distinct but overlapping registers. The first is Olympian, polymathic, erudite, antically funny, often beautiful, at times gross, at others incredibly romantic, never afraid to challenge or even confound, and unmistakably worked at. The second, audible less frequently until 1990’s “Vineland,” sounds looser, freer, warmer, more improvisational, more curious about love and family, increasingly wistful, all but twilit with rue. He still brakes for bad puns and double-negative understatements, but he avoids the kind of under-metabolized research that sometimes alienated his early readers.

“Shadow Ticket’s” structure turns the current film adaptation of “Vineland” inside out — that would be “One Battle After Another,” whose thrilling middle more than redeems an only slightly off-key beginning and end. By contrast, “Shadow Ticket” offers a wildly seductive overture, a companionable but occasionally slack midsection, and a haunting sucker punch of an ending.

Mercifully, having already set “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Inherent Vice” largely in L.A., Pynchon still hasn’t lost his nostalgia for Los Angeles, a place where he lived and wrote for a while in the ’60s and ’70s. “Shadow Ticket” marks Pynchon’s third book to take place mostly on the other side of the world, but then — like so many New Yorkers — the novel finds its denouement in what Pynchon here calls “that old L.A. vacuum cleaner.”

Pynchon may not have lost a step in “Shadow Ticket,” but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now. His chapters end with a wink as often as a thunderclap. Sometimes he sounds almost rushed, peppering his narration with “so forths,” and making his readers play odds-or-evens to attribute long stretches of dialogue.

Maybe only on second reading do we realize that we’ve been reading a kind of Dear John letter to America. Nobody else writing today can begin a final chapter as elegiacally as Pynchon does here: “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman. … Like somebody we knew once a long time ago.”

Is this the Statue of Liberty, turning her back at last on the huddled masses she once welcomed? One character immediately suggests yes, another denies it. Either way, it’s a sobering way to introduce an ending as compassionately doom-laden as any Pynchon has ever given us.

Bear in mind, this is the same Pynchon who, a hundred pages earlier, has raffishly referred to sex as “doing the horizontal Peabody.” (Don’t bother Googling. This one’s his.) One early reviewer has compared “Shadow Ticket’s” shaggy charm to cold pizza, and readers will know what he means. Who’s ever sorry to see a flat box in the fridge the next morning?

For most of the way, though, “Shadow Ticket” may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl. The catch is, for an encore — just when you could swear the band might actually be improving on the original — the musicians turn around and blow you away with a lost song that nobody’s ever heard before.

Thus, with a flourish, Pynchon types fin to his secret 20th century. But what does he do now? The man’s only 88. (Anybody who finds the phrase “only 88” amusing is welcome to laugh, but plenty of people thought Pynchon was hanging it up at 76 with “Bleeding Edge.” Plenty of people were mistaken.)

So, will Pynchon stand pat with his 20th century now secure, and take his winnings to the cashier’s window? Or will he, as anyone who roots for American literature might devoutly wish, hold out for blackjack?

Hit him.

Kipen is a contributor to Cambridge Pynchon in Context, a former NEA Director of Literature, a full-time member UCLA’s writing faculty and founder of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library and the just-birthed 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project.

Genocide and displacement has been on my mind this month as “October 7^th” comes and goes. The world is at war. Trump has been re-elected President of the United States and displaced poets are searching for hope, sanctuary and a place/space to call home.

Nixon Mateulah is a Malawian-born award-winning poet, short story writer and novelist. I am in conversation with him today.

He is thoughtful in his answers. They are detailed, comprehensive in scope, and technical. He holds nothing back and is quite straightforward in his approach. It has been some hours since I last spoke with him. He is studying at the University of the Western Cape and greets me every day with a text message that reads, “Good morning, Abigail. I trust you’re well.”

Somehow, one day, a few years ago we got to talking, I think it was Nixon who had approached me. He had just self-published a book. A friendship was formed and we struck up a correspondence. Over the years, the apprentice has surpassed the master, told a few stories, found his niche in academia and even garnered awards and prestigious writing fellowships.

In his own words, “A poet faces a number of challenges in the micro-climate, but at the same time, it offers us the opportunity to better relay our cultural heritage to others without sounding foreign and being overly didactic. I am a keen observer of human life and many critics feel my writing echoes more on social realism.”

But I want to know what makes Nixon tick. I want to delve into the depths of his psychological framework. I ask him exactly what makes him happy or sad about being a poet and writer from Malawi living in South Africa and does he feel people look up to him in some ways and why does he think they look up to him?

“Poetry makes me happy in a sense that it replenishes my sanity. I come from a very unfortunate upbringing. I lost my father, the breadwinner of our family soon after I had written my final secondary school exams. Being first born in the family of five, I had to step into my father’s shoes and try to steer the destitute family further away from poverty. I was a kid who had never experienced adult life. I was very traumatised and melancholic. I had to find a job immediately to start supporting my family, unfortunately I couldn’t get a job. I could not go to college when what we needed most in the family was food.”

His story will make you blink back the tears and applaud his bravery, the bold steps he took in forging a new life in a different country with perhaps a more forgiving landscape.

“Then I sold my father’s only valuable asset – the bicycle, to finance my transport to South Africa.”

Here I pause as I read these words. My mind reflects upon the time I advised him to seek a traditional publisher for his novel.

“I left Malawi on 12 December 1996. The money was not enough to take me to Pretoria, my fare ended at Beitbridge, and a Good Samaritan paid for my taxi fare to Pretoria. I have lived in South Africa almost twenty- eight years now, three years in Pretoria and twenty- five years in Cape Town.”

I tell him that he has the makings of an educationalist. His life has been difficult, tough, and challenging to say the least. He has achieved much, built a legacy for his children, for others to follow in his footsteps.

“What makes me sad as a poet living in South Africa is that I find that immigrants living in South Africa are painted with one xenophobic brush and we are not represented in the poetry landscape of South Africa. I took upon myself to write about our experiences, stories that push one to leave one’s home when home is the mouth of the shark, when home is the barrel of a gun, as poet Warsan Shire puts it. People look up to me as I am a living testimony to them that wherever we come from must not limit our determination to soar high up in society.”

He continues in the same vein, “We must look to our poets for solutions, our novelists for answers and our short story writers for “the way in, the way out”.”

“Everyone is capable of achieving anything as long as he puts his mind to it. I came here with a high school certificate, doing all kinds of odd jobs, and today I am finishing my Master’s degree in Creative writing.” I wonder how many other Nixon Mateulahs’ are are out there, underdogs barely surviving in post-apartheid South Africa.  

There are a number of minor and major challenges and setbacks facing poets in the micro-climate that we are living in in Africa today. I ask Nixon to talk to me about some of the more vital aspects of his writing.

“Live reading is an art that must be mustered. The first time that I read to an audience was terrifying; but there is always a first time to everything, and with time I managed to improve my reading. Most of us poets are introverts. To entertain the audience, you have to dramatize your reading, that was the skill that I lacked in the beginning. You need to intrigue them, amaze them with your performance, and at the end leave them begging for more.” I can hear that he is an introvert in his answers. Every poet is an introvert at heart.

“Who and what inspires you creatively as a poet? What made you want to be a poet and do you keep a journal? Is there anything else you would like to share?” I ask.

“Ordinary people inspire me creatively. I am an ordinary person and there are plenty of stories to write about. With so many stories bubbling up in my head, I felt I could not write them all in novels, so looking at poetry; a genre that demands to economise words to tell a story, I decide to best tell my stories with honesty, courage, precision and compassion by building blocks of poetry which captures stories in vivid imagery like paintings. In poetry words are like bricks in a wall, you take out one brick, the wall is incomplete. As a poet I cannot go out without my journal and if I don’t have a journal, I make sure I got a pen and paper or shop slip with me. Whenever an idea strikes my fancy, I jot it down, whatever I observe worth of poem I jot it down for use later, so it is important for a writer to keep a journal. Take a bus or a train to town and by the time you get off your head will be swimming in a sea of stories. A journal is like a bank where a writer draws out his notes for stories.” I am mesmerised by his words and how he commands language at will.

“I am not a person who takes dreams seriously and most of my dreams I forget them, but this particular dream stayed with me the whole day, then I had to write it down:” I read his words and then I listen for them, for the imagery and visuals to follow.

“I wake up in the morning/I go out and sees no one in the street/No car, no dog, no sounds of day/I run to the cemetery/I find no tombstone or grave/I look up, the sun still hangs up there and unfriendly wind dances the tree branches without a song/I run around the neighbourhood like a mad man looking for his missing bag/“Where are the people?” I shout out like a loudhailer/I run back home, jump onto bed and fall asleep/Next morning, I wake up to a beautiful day/Everybody is back and life goes on as usual without dreams.” I am in awe of this cultural practitioner’s powers and poetric competence.

Nixon reminds me of Haruki Murakami in his interests. He, like Murakami, is a runner.

“I like reading, running, watching soccer and listening to music. I am a fan of old school music; I like to go down memory lane and reminisce about the bygone days. For books, I read widely, though poetry is my main preference over novels. I like to read books that stimulate my creative muse.”

Nixon Mateulah gives me a lot to think about and to be grateful for my own journey as a poet. He is a dreamer, a hard worker, an enigma.

“Growing up we were into karate movies even though we could not understand the stories involved. We were after good, daring fighting. Bruce Lee, Van Damme, Jackie Chan were our favourites and we had to pay at video shops to watch these movies. Now that I can understand the stories behind a movie, I like to watch real life stories; stories that mirror our own lives. I have just watched a new movie: ‘Divorce in the Black’ by Tyler Perry. It has a universal social issue it addresses that echoes in our societies today. It is appalling to note that divorce is shooting high among middle classes than working classes. Eva and Dallas’ story is the epitome of the sick societies that we live in.”  

I ask him, as I am tempted to ask any writer/poet/novelist with roots in the African continent, what motivated him to write doing the pandemic?

Nixon writes that it is hope that recharged his writing batteries. “Writing can heal a disease better than medicine sometimes. You give a poem to a sick person about a person who survived the same disease the patient is suffering from; the patient’s hope of living will increase than when he was just taking medication. So I kept on writing stories and poems to uplift our hopes for a propitious tomorrow.”

I ask him who are the poets and writers that influence his writing, and that inspire him. Nixon is bold in his discourse and extrapolates.

“First and foremost, I should say as a high school kid I was intrigued when I learnt that in Nigeria, a young man of twenty-one years had written and published a complete novel (Flowers and Shadows), and that young man was Ben Okri. Since that time, I said to myself I would like to be like him. I started taking writing seriously and it paid off. Soon after writing my high school exams I published two stories in the local newspapers.

“It was a big deal that time, a high school kid publishing a short story in the newspaper and people reading it! There are so many poets that have influenced my poetry: our own celebrated poet, Jack Mapanje made us poets in Malawi to believe in ourselves, that with hard work we can conquer the world with our poetry. I was also greatly influenced by the poems of W.H Auden, Thomas Hardy, William Wordsworth, A.E. Housman etcetera and when I arrived here in South Africa I found a number of poets who intrigued me with their poetry, the likes of Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali with his bestselling collection – Sound of a Cowhide Drum, Don Mattera, Denis Brutus, and many others. Today South African poetry echoes out with new voices, the likes of Nick Mulgrew, Koleka Putuma, Kobus Moolman, Salimah Valiani, Sarah Lubala, Musawenkosi Khanyile, Gabeba Baderoon, and many others whose works are very phenomenal and inspiring.”

He says being alive motivates him. That he feels fortunate every day when he wakes up and sees the sun rising. Then he knows he still has time to contribute to this day, to make it a good day. 

“No person can guarantee me that when he walks to bed every night can say that if this is my last day to live, I have done what is good and whatever happens whilst I am asleep must happen.”

He leaves us now with a quote by his favourite writer and I am reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

“When land is gone and money’s spent, then learning is most excellent” – George Eliot.

Nixon Mateulah is a poet’s poet. Find his literary work online.

A memory comes to mind from years ago. I am sitting at a desk in a very cold room on a farm. I was invited to go on a writing retreat situated on a farm outside of Makhanda. Things aren’t going so well. I want to write a book on Russia but I am supposed to be writing poems. I think of Boris Pasternak, how I have never read his poems but I am a fan of his nonetheless. I go for long walks. I hide away in my room from the baboons, the host, his wife and the other poets who have been invited to work (see write poems). I eat breakfast and lunch alone trying to find my way, my place in the world. I try to work, I try to work on myself. I wonder about my father’s Makhanda. What he saw, how he felt, how he coped and handled himself in a racist South Africa, a regime that was on tenterhooks.

(I am a writer, a poet writing in a post-apartheid South Africa, a democracy and yet still very much a racist country when aroused, when identified, when fractured.)

I make lots of cups of tea for myself and I eat salads for lunch and scramble eggs with onions in the morning. It becomes something of a mission to get up in the morning. I tell myself it is Russia that is on my mind.

Poetry, reading poetry and writing poetry has taught me not to be angry anymore. It has brought me closer to God, divinity, the spiritual and my own shame.

“If you want to become a philosopher, write a novel,” said Albert Camus.

In response, I say to that that if you want to become poet, become a philosopher. Seek mentors out. Forgive yourself, for a poet writes from trauma, pain and suffering and a minor poet writes about the love they have found, or rather an elusive kind of love that is responsible for their suffering and loneliness.

The minor poet appears at the beginning of his career poised for distinction. He is also a philosopher, schooling the reader on his views of the environment and the circumstances he finds himself in, the lack of common sense in the undisciplined and the degenerate interloper who lives on the fringes of society.

The poet does not write from love although love transforms the poet. When the poet writes with extreme feeling about political undercurrents, human community comes into view and society’s ill feeling is penetrated, then veiled, then cloaked. It is both the minor and the major poets who are heroic in their outlook on life, they want to do away with war, they want to write succinctly about love, the object of their affection (see the third poetry collection Remote Harbour by the South African poet Kyle Allan).

To soak the page with innumerable comments about political standoffs, suns that hover (see the poem Memory Of Sun By the Russian poet Anna Akmatova), the gravitas of the falling leaf, people that exist, hauntings, suicide, insanity, visions and visionaries, inward we turn to find the universe, to make sense of the world and this is a crucial component. That we see this. That life can be beautiful when strangers are kind.

There is substance in being frail and being on the receiving end of pity, understanding, even tolerance. The poet oils death and life with a kind of rational analysis, a perspective that honours the greats and the saints that came before, all that they wrote and said. People and poets aren’t going to live forever. We are all going to die. Nobody will remain at peace or happy forever. Unhappiness and discomfort is unnerving but they are free.

I pluck a meditation from Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Take pleasure out of the simple pleasure of writing. It is dread that drives the pen and not pleasure. Pleasure is the reward but at the beginning of the journey it is dread that drives the pen and annihilates at will.

To aim higher than suspicion, that is what drives the female poet, and that is what drives me who is suspicious of everything. That is why I write. To answer what I question, to find solutions.

In South African Mangaliso Buzani’s poetry collection ‘a naked bone’ there is coherence, a specific timing between humble trusting people and events, virtue, and listening, the kind that trains your brain to become mentally fit when faced with the impossible and daunting. There are mental images that come to mind when I read his poems and I am able to perceive through my own senses and to withstand obstacle and challenge and fear of failure, to be able to face what is left, what you are left with when darkness falls or resentment falls.

Simone Weil asks of us to understand the female philosopher, the feminine mystique and puts us in the position to learn, to teach, to communicate, to be noble, to have the confidence to speak truth into both meaning and memory perfectly and imperfectly with intent and admiration.

What image or component do you conjure up when you think of the female poet, the female philosopher? What is the blueprint for her astonishing and surprising intellectualism? What does she want to achieve, how far does she want to go in life, does she want to have children, a family, stay in one place, travel to exotic locations, what meaning is to be found in the female poet  and female philosopher’s work? The image of this poet/philosopher is turned inward.

Poets are philosophers. Philosophers are poets. The work that is left behind speaks to our past and our future. It is timeless and free, it is of value and it connects us to our childhood where our self-development and search for meaning began.

To put truth first, as South African poets Arthur Nortje and Dennis Brutus did, as South African educationalist George Botha and South African poet Victor Wessels did, as Don Mattera did in his poetry, as the living poet Yusuf Agherdien does is not to be skeptical but to be virtuous and to accept our faults, the faults and our weaknesses, our limitations that we carry within, inherent, that forces us to turn inward, to rid ourselves and to escape ourselves from the irrelevant, from the irrational, to look inward again for coping mechanisms and imagination, illusion and creativity, to look for the real world, normalcy, the betterment of our mind, intellect and psyche in the parasite that is circumstance, manifestation and environment.

It is the poet that yearns for a better world. It is the poet that yearns to live without regret and misery. Misery is a negative emotion. To write poetry is to interact with and to encounter the divine, to collaborate with the universe, to perceive the availability of the recognition of damage, scars, wounding, and frustration. It is when the poet’s anger is justifiable, it is then when they write truth into being.

Charlie English begins “The CIA Book Club” by describing a 1970s technical manual: a dull cover, as uninviting as anything. A book that practically begs you to put it back on the shelf and move on.

Which was exactly the point. Secreted inside the technobabble dust jacket was a Polish-language copy of George Orwell’s “1984,” the boring cover a deliberate misdirection to deter prying eyes. The false front is a bit of skullduggery that harks back to a world where conspiracy to escape detection was a part of everyday life. A world where literature could be revolutionary, “a reservoir of freedom.”

English, formerly a journalist for the Guardian, specializes in writing about how art and literature are used to fight extremism: “The Storied City,” published in the U.K. as “The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu,” spotlights librarians who heroically saved priceless manuscripts of West African history from al Qaeda; “The Gallery of Miracles and Madness” traces the “insane” artists who influenced the early 20th century Modernism movement and Hitler’s attempts to stamp out their art — and them. His new book takes us through five decades of Poles fighting Soviet domination and Communist propaganda with a potent weapon: literature.

Even from the vantage point of the 21st century, when we know what became of the USSR, English’s book reads like a thriller. There are CIA suits, secret police, faceless bureaucrats and backstabbing traitors lurking in these pages. We face tensions between paramilitary cowboys and prudent intellectuals, between paper-pushing accountants and survivors saving a culture. While reading, I worried about figures like Helena Łuczywo, who edited and published an underground newspaper, and Mirosław Chojecki, who smuggled books and printing supplies into Poland. As with the best spy novels, we know the good guy is going to win while reading “The CIA Book Club,” but how English gets us there is exciting.

His best chapters follow the protests in the Gdańsk shipyards that led to the Solidarity trade union. A better future shimmers on the page when Lech Wałęsa climbs over a fence as an unemployed electrician, taps someone on the shoulder and becomes “the face of the Polish revolution.” (Ten years later, he became president of Poland, too.) In the violent crackdown that followed the momentary blossoming of freedom after Gdańsk, we feel the heartbreak and fear of the people. We hope again when fighters like Łuczywo begin printing a scant newsletter whose “main job was just to exist” and remind people they weren’t alone.

The book is gripping, but it doesn’t quite deliver on its subtitled promise to “win the Cold War with forbidden literature.” The story English has researched and put together focuses almost entirely on Poland’s fight for freedom from the USSR. Of course, the CIA’s funding of smuggling illicit literature into the Eastern Bloc is an important story, and a nearly forgotten one. As English mentions in the epilogue, while “the book program’s latter-day budget stood at around $2 million to $4 million annually, [the Afghan operation] by 1987 was running at a cost of $700 million a year, taking up 80 percent of the overseas budget of the clandestine service.” Apparently, an operation costing nearly 200 times the other deserves nearly 200 times the credit as well. The result is that the power of inexpensive books was swept under the rug in favor of expensive shows of force.

Still, the impressive power of the book club might have been better elucidated if details about its impact in other Eastern Bloc countries were brought into the story. The focus on Poland obscures what was happening in the USSR. English focused on Poland because the country had a long history of underground revolutionary culture; when the USSR turned independent Poland into a client state known as the People’s Republic of Poland, the Poles already knew how to go underground to fight back. The lifestyle doublespeak people used to survive under successive dictatorships in Eastern Europe came a little more easily to Poles, who had practiced it before. When the CIA offered funding, they were ready. Still, it would have been nice to see how “1984” inspired people in Ukraine or Moldova or Kyrgyzstan. If books are an answer to dictatorships — and as strong as “an organization packed with spooks and paramilitaries who fought in warzones” — it would be inspiring to see more of that. Hopefully a sequel is in the planning stages.

What this book does incredibly well is document an oral history of Polish resistance that has, until now, only been told in bits and pieces. There is archival research in here, but it is in the nature of dictatorships to destroy evidence of their crimes. Fortunately, English talked to many of the people who were there, publishing underground newspapers and smuggling in illicit literature. What information has been declassified — and much of it hasn’t been — bolsters the memories of survivors.

One of the most interesting details of “Book Club” is not that books inspired a nation but which books did. Philosophical tracts and political satires were smuggled in, of course; Poland received its share of “Animal Farm” and “1984” and “Brave New World.” But just as important to the Poles living under Soviet dictatorship were art books, fashion magazines, religious texts, lighthearted novels and regular newspapers. More influential than anti-Communist diatribes were the reminders that there was a world outside Soviet propaganda; each book read was a bid to avoid brainwashing, to not become a tool of the state.

This literary history is a prescient one. As book bans increase around the United States and peaceful protests are met with state violence here in Los Angeles, a tale of when stories saved the day is inherently hopeful. This book is a reminder that words are powerful and that stories matter. Sometimes the most rebellious thing one can do is read a book.

Castellanos Clark, a writer and historian in Los Angeles, is the author of “Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of.”

“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is a catchy, provocative title for writer-director Laura Piani’s debut feature, but it is a bit of a misnomer. Her heroine, Agathe (Camille Rutherford), may harbor that fear deep inside, but it’s never one she speaks aloud. A lonely clerk working at the famed Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, she gets lost in the love notes left on the store’s mirror and complains to her best friend and coworker Felix (Pablo Pauly) that she was born in the wrong century, unwilling to engage in casual “digital” connection. Highly imaginative, Agathe perhaps believes she’s alone because she won’t settle for anything less than a Darcy.

Good thing, then, that Felix, posing as her agent, sends off a few chapters of her fantasy-induced writing to the Jane Austen Residency. And who should pick up Agathe from the ferry but a handsome, prickly Englishman, Oliver (Charlie Anson), the great-great-great-great-grandnephew of Ms. Austen herself. She can’t stand him. It’s perfect.

“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is the kind of warm romance that will make any bookish dreamer swoon, as a thoroughly modern woman with old-fashioned ideas about love experiences her own Austenesque tumble. While Agathe initially identifies with the wilting old maid Anne from “Persuasion,” her shyly budding connection with Oliver is more Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.” A pastoral English estate is the ideal setting for such a dilemma.

The casting and performances are excellent for this contemporary, meta update: Rutherford is elegant but often awkward and fumbling as Agathe, while Anson conveys Oliver’s passionate yearning behind his reserved, wounded exterior with just enough Hugh Grantian befuddlement. Pauly plays the impulsive charlatan with an irrepressible charm.

But it isn’t just the men that have Agathe in a tizzy. The film is equally as romantic about literature, writing and poetry as it is about such mundane issues as matters of the flesh. A lover of books, Agathe strives to be a writer but believes she isn’t one because of her pesky writer’s block. It’s actually a dam against the flow of feelings — past traumas and heartbreaks — that she attempts to keep at bay. It’s through writing that Agathe is able to crack her heart open, to share herself and to welcome in new opportunities.

“Writing is like ivy,” Oliver tells Agathe. “It needs ruins to exist.” It’s an assurance that her past hasn’t broken her but has given her the necessary structure to let the words grow. The way the characters talk about what literature means to them — and what it means to put words down — will seduce the writerly among the viewers, these discussions even more enchanting than any declarations of love or ardent admiration.

If you’ve read any Austen (or watched any of the films made from her novels), Piani’s movie will be pleasantly predictable in its outcome, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an enjoyable journey. It’s our expectations, both met and upended, that give the film its appealing cadence. It never lingers too long and is just sweet enough in its displays to avoid any saccharine aftertaste or eye-rolling sentiment.

There’s a salve-like quality to “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” a balm for any battered romantic’s soul. It may be utter fantasy, but it’s the kind of escape you’ll want to revisit again and again, like a favorite Austen novel. And, as it turns out, our main character is wrong. Jane Austen didn’t wreck her life, rather, she opened it up to the possibilities that were right in front of her.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.