Who will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

The odds make little or no sense, but that's novelty odds I guess

get the sense that Murakami's chances are increasing year by year, but I think it's dumb money that really pushes him to favourite (the heuristic seems to be something like "is non-anglophone, have heard of, is literary/rated").

I'm a bit surprised that Kundera's down with the long shots (20/1 and longer, say), but then no-one seems to talk about him now. Did people just switch off when he moved into French?

Don Paterson being on the list at all is quite odd. Maybe ppl thought a Scot would get it if they voted yes?

Handke at 12/1 seems v short, given the fuss over the Ibsen award.

japanese identity is what the narrator is looking for in the well, i think, but he doesn't find it and eventually he stops looking. this solution to japan's national shame might be unsatisfying but it seems preferable to mishima's fate.

I think you are reaching. iirc Murakami isn't that preoccupied with Japanese identity as much as Mishima or Kawabata.

Murakami seems a bit light for the Nobel, but the Nobel is always good at confusing people - some years its 'political' on the left, then right, then something else.

In terms of people you (or the bookies) never heard of she might be good:

http://www.seagullindia.com/books/md.asp?cbosearch=category&txtkeyword=Selected%20Works%20of%20Mahasweta Devi

Learjet 85's private, high-tech luxury to cost a mere Learjet 85's private, high-tech luxury to cost a mere $20.8M0.8M

Dylan can only afford eight lear jets before he's toast

that's not even enough to fly the band and road crew let alone the caterers

https://twitter.com/lrb currently running through archive articles on the favourites

Patrick Modiano won

xp murakami only seems interested in japanese history and identity in the wind up bird chronicle. but questions about japan are always looming in his books as an absent presence due to how thoroughly "americanized" things seem.

Modiano seems like Le Clezio in 2008. Someone in the academy likes this kind of french stuff. Of course, I say this without having read a line of Modiano, but his wiki-page seems dull!

Seems boring like Le Clezio, was what I meant to write.

re: Murakami. to me he is lamely referencing western pop culture as opposed to the other Japanese authors like Mishima who had nationalist leanings. I don't think -- and its been a few years -- the referencing ever leads to questions around history and identity

France has the most Nobel laureates in literature by some margin and a high percentage of them are boring, forgotten novelists.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/emma-brockes-column/2014/oct/09/patrick-modiano-nobel-prize-literature-prize-philip-roth-loser

Within mins there is an article fit for the question the thread is asking.

xp

that doesn't seem true! or they might be boring but they aren't forgotten. Roger Martin du Gard is the only whose name's a total blank for me.

JOHN D WUZ ROBBED

OK OK I exaggerated, their Nobel record probably isn't worse than most other countries. But JMG Le Clezio was the worst selection of the last several years.

My favourite French writers are Celine, Proust, Duras and Genet (and a few other poets too) and none of them have won it.

There is a piece on Modiano in the LRB (Michael Wood). A quote about 'time' again and I don't think I can finish it.

Re: Proust - this was interesting on the wiki page for the prize:

Nobel's choice of emphasis on idealism in his criteria for the Nobel Prize in Literature has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word idealisk translates as either "idealistic" or "ideal".[2] In the early twentieth century, the Nobel Committee interpreted the intent of the will strictly. For this reason, they did not award certain world-renowned authors of the time such as James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen, and Henry James.[4]

Joyce and Proust were never even nominated

found out by dicking around with this:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/literature/database.html

The Royal Swedish Academy’s appointed judges themselves say they don’t like the effects of the creative writing school battery farms on the New York publishing scene

redlined: no matter your talent, perspective, or volume/quality of creative work there's always some middle aged French guy to whom they'd rather award the prize

Remember this thread

redlined: no matter your talent, perspective, or volume/quality of creative work there's always some middle aged French guy to whom they'd rather award the prize

The winners since, say, '68 have been from a few countries (not that many French winners since then) and perspectives.

I don't think there is a lot that has come out of NY that would trouble the Nobel. Even if they hadn't chosen Modiano there are easily a dozen living writers from around the world you'd turn to before UK or US.

So is Modiano good? Has anyone read him? I'm seeing almost no mentions in the ILX archives.

Dunno, but might now get around to finally watching my DVD of Lacombe, Lucien (Modiano co-wrote the screenplay)

Read an excerpt once, seemed like typical French navel-gazing to me, but I couldn't determine whether it was the good kind of navel-gazing or the bad kind.

So nobody's read this guy but we've decided he's a boring conservative choice anyway then?

He has a few film credits, the most notable of which by far is co-writing Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0595272/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1

Nah, I have no opinion on Modiano in particular, but the default assumption for a Nobel winner is that it was a boring, conservative choice.

FYI it's not exactly fair to criticize the Nobel on Proust. At the time he died, only half of In Search of Lost Time had been published.

Englund said: “Patrick Modiano is a well-known name in France but not anywhere else. He writes children’s books, movie scripts but mainly novels. His themes are memory, identity and time.

“His best known work is called Missing Person. It’s the story about a detective who has lost his memory and his final case is finding out who he really is: he is tracing his own steps through history to find out who he is.”

He added: “They are small books, 130, 150 pages, which are always variations of the same theme - memory, loss, identity, seeking. Those are his important themes: memory, identity and time.”

This could be in a "make up a Nobel Literature laureate" thread.

So nobody's read this guy but we've decided he's a boring conservative choice anyway then?

― Matt DC, Thursday, 9 October 2014 15:23 (25 minutes ago)

never get between americans when theyre wounded about their worthless boomer culture being overlooked

Hey, I was the first one to call it a boring choice, and I sure as heck am not American! I do root for Pynchon, though.

But what do you want us to do? It's the nobel-prize, nobody's ever read the winner. What should we do, not have an opinion like a goddamn idiot?

And I'll still say it's a boring choice. They gave it to another from France just six years ago, and there are so many worthy potential recipients all over the world. Even if Madiano is worthy, and he could very well be, it's still a boring choice. Much better than Murakami, though. Whom I've also never read.

“His best known work is called Missing Person. It’s the story about a detective who has lost his memory and his final case is finding out who he really is: he is tracing his own steps through history to find out who he is.”

lol

it turns out hes the killer at the end

heavy stuff

Are you saying there's a way to convey trauma and the mysteries of identity without resorting to amnesia? I'd like to see that.

Modiano is different from Le Clezio who had a different trajectory: started off writing Noveau Roman then seemed to go off toward dispatches from different regions of the world, and I think its the later part of his writing that got him the Nobel.

I feel a lot of French fiction on the latter half of the century had much of its energies slowly sapped by what was going on in film so having a sometime screenwriter winning it suits.

xp theres a way but its so brutal and shocking that you wouldn't remember it

So, I'll chime in since Modiano's one of my favorite contemporary authors and I've read probably half of his output (the guy is prolific). In France, he is a household name, you can probably buy his latest book in any supermaket with a small book section.
He is extremely consistent in his themes and style so you probably only need to read one of his books (usually short and breezy to read) to figure out whether he is for you or not. Memory and nostalgia for periods and places now gone are his bread and butter.

smh nobel handing out awards to euro supermarket authors while our most esteemed cranky misogynists remain unloved

ha as it turns out patrick modiano is my wife's distant relative, modiano is her old family name.

probably fourth cousin twice removed or w/e, who the hell knows.

that make you about 1/50th of a nobel prize winner

which is still a useful amount of a money

http://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/homer-rocking-chair-gun-twirl.gif

just heard the news, what a disaster for bob dylan

I don't believe in Zimmerman.

Le Clezio seems a very weird choice in retrospect--I'd not read him before he got the Nobel, and have read several of his books since. Someone so into endless descriptions of animal torture doesn't seem as though he'd be the Nobel committee's bag.

Is Paul Auster im sopermarkets in France as well? I have a feeling he is. And he's also probably wondering why he isn't on the odds chart.

In supermarkets, that is. (tablet typing)