Search/Destroy Every Nobel Prize Winner For Literature

Not to be weird, but I’d never read Anabase when a blurber for my last book compared my writing to it in a favorable manner. I liked it upon my own reading, tho like said blurber noted, Anabase the similarities end at some shared formal strategies.

It’s a pretty easy book to find used, worth it if at all interested.

I read Ivo Andric's Nobel-winner this year, The Bridge on the Drain, it's great.

boy have I given these three a number of chances. Am I reading the right White? What's a good start?

btw Alfred I tried Patrick White too and had the same results. Will probably try again at some point.

That's a relief.

I got The Bridge Over the Drina out of the library now.

Finished Jenny by Sigrid Undset. It's very good, doesn't deserve its reputation - seemingly forgotten in English, though there was a new translation in 1998. It doesn't start too auspiciously - lots of description of clothes as well as landscapes, the characters use first names and surnames more or less at random so it's hard to tell who's who. But it soon develops into a rich psychological work. It feels very transitional - for an early 20th century novel, there are young women living independent lives, they stay out all night drinking, they sleep around (or their male friends do - it's still quite coy about this). Of course people have been doing this since the dawn of time, but in 19th/early 20th century novels, not so much. But they speak like characters in a 19th century novel, very romantically, with that almost artificial sounding articulateness. Jenny in particular is trapped by her idea of a romantic life - this is the driving force of the novel, really. It's ambiguous in many ways - modern and old fashioned, moving and melodramatic, clear at times and at other times quite opaque, the characters sometimes eliciting sympathy, sometimes being quite bewildering. But it's beautifully written and ultimately very moving, even heartbreaking.

I recently read Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk from 1956, the first novel in his Cairo trilogy, about a family in Cairo during the British occupation in WWI in 1917, with the patriarch of the family imposing restrictions on his family during the war, and his children finding different ways of rebelling

Annie Ernaux doc making the rounds in London - The Super 8 Years. Basically her husband bought a camera in the early 70's and this is all footage of their lives from then to their break up in the early 80'. Ernaux narrates over it and if you dig her writing you'll dig this. They went on holiday a lot, often choosing their destinations with gauchiste awareness - so very cool footage from Chile, Albania, Soviet Union. Also a bit of London and even a little Portugal, but clearly by the time they went there they were in such a marital crisis that no one felt much like filming, alas.

Excellent piece on Cela's The Hive

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/tim-parks/buttockitis

I alas found it a grind after about fifty pages.

Will try it again in a few weeks.

Probably the first essay that talks about what Ernaux is doing in her fiction in pretty good length.

For me a French author: working class or not, diaristic, a woman, using life, writing flatly...is a thing I have seen before but Haslett talks about how she is able to replace the 'I' with 'We', and she really is very interested in showing how the lived is transformed by the diaries she has issued.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/all-the-images-will-disappear/

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nobel-prize-in-literature-odds-favorites-revealed-by-swedish-betting-giant-betsson-302269692.html

Paul Simon: 50.0

So you're saying there's a chance

when does Alex Shepard's annual preview in the New Republic drop?

Stephen King: 50.0

Do it, cowards!

Interested to see Gerald Murnane at 5/1 odds with UK bookmakers for the Nobel Prize in Literature, placing him just behind Can Xue and ahead of Anne Carson.

— David Grubbs (@blackfaurest) October 8, 2024

embargo email just dropped! being in the know one day early's one of the real highlights of being a bookseller pic.twitter.com/QeEyWzR6Z4

— London Review Bookshop (@LRBbookshop) October 9, 2024

Congrats Rick Stein!

Han Kang. "For her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” That's a great description of 'Human Acts', which is a masterpiece, so that's a good choice for me.

Vegetarian is an excellent novel. Read Human Acts too.

Good to see Korea finally get one (they have wanted this for a long time). They might also be alternating between men and women too, though we will only be sure in a few years.

Nobel has felt way too familiar over the last decade. Most of the authors (if they don't write in English already) are fairly recognized in the literary world, they've won a prize already. Want to wtf @ it, which is part of the fun.

Is this the youngest one in recent memory? I think of Kang as Important Contemporary Author rather than the Living Legend status I associate the Nobel with, this is not a complaint tho.

The youngest since Joseph Brodsky, who was 47 in 1987, as far as I can tell.

She is 53, so technically, yeah, but there's been a couple more in their fifties this century. Pamuk was 54. Tokarczuk 56.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates-by-age/

She's 18th youngest overall, if I got them all.

Rudyard Kipling, 1907, age 41
Albert Camus, 1957, age 43
Sinclair Lewis, 1930, age 45
Pearl Buck, 1938, age 46
Sigrid Unset, 1928, age 46
Joseph Brodsky, 1987, age 47
Eugene O'Neill, 1936, age 48
Maurice Maeterlinck, 1911, age 49
Gerhart Hauptmann, 1912, age 49
Romain Rolland, 1915, age 50
Selma Lagerlöf, 1909, age 50
Frans Eemil Sillanpää, 1939, age 51
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1970, age 51
Wole Soyinka, 1986, age 52
Rabindranath Tagore, 1913, age 52
William Faulkner, 1949, age 53
Halldór Laxness, 1955, age 53
Han Kang, 2024, age 53

I haven't read her. I put a hold on Human Acts at the library and will buy a copy of The Vegetarian this afternoon.

Was she predicted as a favourite anywhere? She isn't in the Betsson list. Ladbrokes had her very far down.

No, it was a very big surprise.

Fun fact: Kangs latest novel, We Do Not Part, is already out in Swedish. They do like to give it to someone where they're ahead of the English speaking literaty world - Books of Jacob by Tokarczuk another example.

The Vegetarian was not good, this is a weird choice

I mean it's better than Bob Dylan obv

I don't know. I like Dylan's new writing:

I ran into one of the Buffalo Sabres in the elevator at the Prague hotel. They were in town to play the New Jersey Devils. He invited me to the game but I was performing that night.

— Bob Dylan (@bobdylan) October 9, 2024

I thought The Vegetarian was fantastic but not to be taken lightly. I need to read Human Acts.

Wait, is Dylan himself now posting from his official Twitter account? The last four tweets from the account could all have been written by him.

The Vegetarian was not good, this is a weird choice

I haven't read it, but maybe this was because of the quality of the translation?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jan/15/lost-in-mistranslation-english-take-on-korean-novel-has-critics-up-in-arms

i enjoyed ‘the vegetarian’

The Vegetarian was fantastic. Will now search out the rest of her translated works

Tim Parks is an excellent reviewer of books and I personally love a lot of his translation work.

He has been highly critical of a lot of translation work over the years. 'Greed' by Jelinek and he hates Elena Ferrante (and the translator of her works, Ann Goldstein).

Whatever the flaws in the translation of The Vegetarian are things I am not a close enough as a reader to have a handle on. But the story does have a power to it.

Is that enough for a Nobel? Not really but I only read another book of hers, then dropped off.

There are many contemporary novels I find disappointing or dispensable. The Vegetarian was atrocious. You could give her a second Nobel Prize and I wouldn't read it again.

It's amusing how all the reactions in the novel are like "well if she had gone vegetarian for health reasons I would understand but...".

Cf the latest Hong Sang Soo film where the mother is shocked that, under Isabelle Huppert's influence, her son is only eating salads and bread, not "real food" (tbf she makes him a kimchi stew so she ain't all wrong).

I can sympathize with the Nobel Prize committee's struggles with awarding the Literature prize lately. The audience for literature, considered as poetry and literary fiction, has greatly receded over the decades since the prize was instituted. Non-fiction writers have been pretty comprehensively snubbed since they gave the 1902 prize to Mommsen. Not sure why they lopped off that whole arm of literature, but they have.

If they're going to stick to fiction, then genre fiction is where all the audience and all the real action is, but it lacks the requisite prestige and they can't figure out if any of the genre authors has enough importance.

They need to bite the bullet, break their taboos, and get out of their self-imposed strait jacket(s). They tried to do that with Dylan, but they had to disguise it as a prize for poetry and just invited ridicule on themselves for that evasion.

It is a bit weird to me that they've overlooked writers who have influenced tons of other writers, like, say Pynchon or Ashbery or a bunch of others, in favor of lesser known folks with a couple of books like this year's winner.

I know he was already widely translated and reasonably well knowm but Saramago winning was HUGE in Portugal when it happened, I figure every country prob has someone of that stature and am happy whenever someone I'd never heard of gets it. Not like Pynchon needs it, he's gonna get read regardless.

That being said I do think of it as a sorta lifetime achievement thing so do wonder how someone like, say, Hwang Sok-yong feels about this.

thinking of the nobel prize for anything as a boost to give someone who could use the exposure maaan is woeful stuff imo

What else would it be good for?

(The lit one specifically, I know the economics one is good for propaganda purposes)

I think of the lit prize as a nice way of introducing European audiences to other literary cultures.

Far more important that people get to know other South Korean/East Asian authors through Han Kang's prize.

"Not like Pynchon needs it, he's gonna get read regardless."

Bigger thing here is that I assume he is already widely translated. If an obscure US/European author won it then then getting them translated into other languages would be a benefit to them.

This is where I think the Nobel Lit prize's power lies.

Fuck a Nobel as a glorified endcap display

Yeah fuck learning something new!

I think of the lit prize as a nice way of introducing European audiences to other literary cultures.

Far more important that people get to know other South Korean/East Asian authors through Han Kang's prize.

that's a nice approach

but if you choose Han Kang as your starting point, maybe you're not going to want to go much further

I'll stop now

If they set up a Nobel Discover Weekly I’ll check it out