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

I've tried two different White novels and given up. The dude's ponderous.

did you try Voss? it's awesome.

my dad loves Lee Child :)

my dad loves all those guys. and "gals" as he would say. that's all he reads. james lee burke up the wazoo.

actually not true. he is kinda particular. there are crime dudes he just won't read.

HOW MANY OF YOU GUYS CHECKED OUT THE POETRY OF Tomas Tranströmer AFTER HE WON THE NOBEL LAST YEAR, HUH??? HUH????

yeah, that's what i thought. he does write poetry, right?

and none of the winners are "obscure". not in their home countries anyway.

― scott seward, Thursday, 11 October 2012 21:59 (1 hour ago) Permalink

you should

I read some Tranströmer, and I thought it was excellent (I'm Danish, though, and that might help in knowing what all the nature-descriptions are about). And good on Mo Yan. Here is a short story of his: http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Frogs Haven't read it yet, but I'll get to it some time this year.

Everybody should go and read Octavio Paz, and not just the poems either cos his essays on art & lit are just wonderful too.

The market for global fiction's declined since the fifties and sixties, no?

National Insecurity

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X
and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.

As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground
so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.

A helmet worn by no one has taken power.
The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.

read one! i do enjoy turtles...

i'm not sure what an ear-drop is but its evocative.

drop earrings yeah?

transtromer translation problems. apparently. buyer beware!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/books/review/tomas-transtromers-poems-and-the-art-of-translation.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

"drop earrings yeah?"

yeah i mean that's what i guessed but i've never heard anyone use the words ear-drops to describe earrings before. makes me think of medicine.

for a body of work - and for what the nobel crowd goes for - roth is the only american i can think of who actually deserves some sort of medal. not that i read all his stuff, but i think he's probably the only "important" american writer alive. and i don't even know why i think that. i just do.

― scott seward, Thursday, October 11, 2012 6:03 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

what about pynchon...

Maya Angelou maybe?

they will never give it to pynchon in case he doesn't turn up

I read Conjunctions and Disjunctions by Octavio Paz. It was cool, but also seemed quite old-fashioned anthropology. Some good stuff about sex in christianity vs hinduism. I've read stuff by only four of the people who have won the nobel prize this century: Kertesz, Pamuk, Vargas Llosa and Tranströmer. And I've studied comparative literature...

I'm really rooting for Pynchon. They've given it to people who probably wouldn't show up before, though that was mainly dissidents... Also, because they gave it to someone from east asia this year, we won't have to listen to all the people who say that murakami should win for a few years. yay.

it'd be so awesome if they gave it to pynchon and he actually showed up.

Scott is not a Pynchon fan iirc?

this is gonna sound mean and i swear i'm not trying to be mean but i think i'd need to be a bigger nerd to be a pynchon fan? i just suck so bad at math and science. i feel the same way about zappa. basically: all that brain power in the service of a titty joke? why, frank, why? i think you need to think that pynchon is funny AND that he is worth following through all the twists and turns. i'm down with borges though. but basically i get all my pynchon-esque needs met by science fiction and stanley elkin novels. and peter de vries is way funnier to me. i don't learn anything from pynchon either, i guess. not that that's a prerequsite for me, but it helps. like nabokov, he feels like a closed system. or a locked room. or an airless room and everyone else in the room doesn't need to breathe air and i do. i could completely change my mind in ten years time. it happens with me. i am constantly changing and evolving. i love eating mushrooms now. i was really enjoying a nina simone album the other day. i would never rule out liking pynchon someday. i should probably try one of the later shaggier ones. i dunno though....i'll look in one of his books sometimes and its like someone gave tom robbins smart drugs and some PKD books to read. for some this is heaven.

good overview: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/11/hallucinatory-realism-of-mo-yan-the-first-official-chinese-winner-of-the-nobel-prize-for-literature.html

I read The Crying of Lot 49 and V. (and earlier short stories he was embarrassed about later, in the intro to Slow Learner) while I was in high school, where I also was noooo good at math (kicked in the head by a mule). But I also had nooo probs with those books (also np w first couple Mothers Of Invention records--later met a muso who said Frank told him he started playing guitar in the mid-60s; if true, that may well be why he didn't get very freaking fancy on the good old early stuff)

Oh yeah and I (more recently) enjoyed the poems of Tomas Tranströmer too. Must've lucked out w the translator, whose name I forget (this was in the New Yorker).

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
7/2
Haruki Murakami
9/2
Svetlana Aleksijevitj
6/1
Adonis
10/1
Ismail Kadare
10/1
Patrick Modiano
10/1
Jon Fosse
12/1
Philip Roth
12/1
Peter Handke
12/1
Assia Djebar
14/1
Peter Nadas
14/1
Joyce Carol Oates
16/1
Adam Zagajewski
20/1
Nawal El Saadawi
20/1
Milan Kundera
25/1
Mircea Cartarescu
25/1
Thomas Pynchon
25/1
Cees Nooteboom
25/1
Bob Dylan
25/1
Les Murray
25/1
Bei Dao
25/1
Ko Un
33/1
Umberto Eco
33/1
Nuruddin Farah
33/1
Darcia Maraini
33/1
Margaret Atwood
33/1
Don DeLillo
33/1
Amos Oz
33/1
Antonio Lobo Antunes
33/1
Richard Ford
33/1
Don Paterson
33/1
Karl Ove Knausgard
33/1
Paul Muldoon
33/1
Karel Schoeman
33/1
Juan Goytisolo
33/1
Salman Rushdie
50/1
Javier Marias
50/1
Cormac McCarthy
50/1
William Trevor
50/1
John Le Carre
50/1
Tom Stoppard
50/1
Colm Toibin
50/1

Go Pynchon!

That would be tiresome.

Interesting names that I would like to read and don't see any translations of:

Nawal El Saadawi
Assia Djebar
Darcia Maraini
Nuruddin Farah

an of course Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

If Murakami wins I'm punching somebody

Most overrated living "literary" writer

Would Murakami be winning mostly for the wind up bird chronicle? I've read many books by him and i think he's good but WUBC is the only one i can think of that could possibly be considered "great" or "important."

Guess I'm kind of over Murakami myself.

bob dylan should win a nobel prize. i mean, not really... but really.

treesh........

^good answer

treesh would be a more deserving winner than bob dylan

bloody over rated rubbish!

.....

kadare is such a nobel winner he might as well be given it now

fairly sure he would be given it now if he had cancer or something

Shaun Hutson or gtfo

What makes Murakami such a likely pick? He doesn't seem particularly more Nobel-ish (idealistic, oppressed) than plenty of others.

Murakami would be a populist pick. After a populist pick last year, maybe that's the way the current committee leans. Kundera at 25-1 seems like appealing odds.

the more i think about it, the more insane murakami seems a pick. his protagonists are mostly slacker everymen who get dragged into a world of sexuality and the unconscious, only to return from it mostly unchanged: a little humbler in some ways, maybe, but in a more important sense more self-assured. this is the same as judd apatow movies.

In truth, the most insane pick on that list would be Svetlana Aleksijevitj, at least from a historical standpoint. The only two solely nonfiction writers the award has ever gone to have been Winston Churchill and Theodor Mommsen (the second ever winner of the award). Would be nice to see them expand their horizons though.

awards are terrible why do we do this to ourselves

xp to myself, wind up bird chronicle is the same as this in every respect but integrating the stuff about the japanese occupation of china has interesting consequences. you discover that the placelessness of murakami's books, where most of the cultural reference points are american and characters all speak in the same inflectionless faux-naive manner, is a thin facade concealing a history that has been violently repressed. 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. although, murakami wouldn't be murakami if he was capable of the sort of un-ironic, literal commitment to an ideology that undid mishima in the end.

it's interesting to me that america hasn't had to reckon with its atrocities in the same way. i mean, in the wind up bird chronicle it seems that both the violence in nanking and the shame of the atom bombs are too traumatic to integrate into a coherent national identity. better to be global citizens. why isn't slavery like this? why aren't the atom bombs like this from our end? are we just assholes or do history's victors just never have to explain themselves?

also he goes into a well and then the book is over or something

plus he has to kill his brother-in-law in a dream in order to fulfill an oedipal fantasy that will bring his wife back to him and also kill this brother-in-law in real life.

yeah i dont really get/remember that part