Obscure Nobel Prize Winners

I've read some Maurice Maeterlinck - he wrote the play Pelléas et Mélisande that both Debussy and Schoenberg subsequently based musical works on. Have read the Eliot translation of Anabase by Saint-John Perse too. So long ago though, I barely remember a thing about these.

Nostormo, I never would have put Simon (or Gabriela Mistral) on a list of obscure Nobel prize winners if I was personally putting it together, but by the criteria I used (lowest number of ratings on goodreads) they fit. I find it really hard to believe that Simon has less ratings than, say, Odysseus Elytis or Miguel Angel Asturias or Wladyslaw Reymont, but there it is.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

only read the one claude simon novel which was a totally exhausting experience: one long unparagraphed block with upside down text, various untranslated (non french)languages, everything melting together into a phantasmagoria of some sort.

read a little bit of seferis, he shows up in miller's colossus of maroussi, from memory.

so: st-john perse, friend of valerie larbaud and 'surrealist at a distance' to quote breton.

So, since above posts, I read Eloges by Saint John Perse, which was good not great and Fall of the King by Johannes Jensen which, as advertised, was excellent

Really happy you liked Fall of the King. I really want to re-read it soon. Also, I got Pontoppidan's Lucky Per for christmas.

Frederick, feel like I missed out on important context by not being Danish, plus translation stuff, but the prose is beautiful.

I don't know how important the context is, I don't really understand what is going on as well... Most of it the history is like, vaguely familiar from school. I think the historical stuff is forgotten by most Danes as well, exept the Stockholm bloodbath.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLs1gXyVwAAM4un.jpg

?

Anyway, Maurice Maeterlinck wrote a play called The Blue Bird, which was turned into a Shirley Temple movie. It's a little odd to see a purely 19th century writer living through the Hollywood era and past WWII.

Almost a month prior to the film's release, The Blue Bird was dramatized as a half-hour radio play on the December 24, 1939, broadcast of The Screen Guild Theater, starring Shirley Temple and Nelson Eddy. It was during this radio performance that a crazed woman made an attempt on Temple's life. As Temple was singing "Someday You'll Find Your Bluebird," the woman arose from her seat and pulled out a handgun, pointing it directly at her. The woman froze however just long enough for police to get to her. It was later discovered that the woman had lost a child on the day it was publicly stated that Temple was born and she blamed her for stealing her daughter's soul. What the woman did not know however was that Temple was born in 1928, not 1929.

Maeterlinck also plagiarized a South African writer on termites. (The original work, The Soul of the White Ant, was turned into a Living Theater-style radio play. I heard it once, it's a weird period piece.)

Abdulrazak Gurnah is also a literary critic, having edited the Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie.

I don't *think* the Academy's Nobel committee would ever give someone the prize just to troll, but if they did…

— Kári Tulinius (@Kattullus) October 7, 2021

The policy of the UK and many European countries towards migrants is inhumane, ferocious, irresponsible. I have decided to donate the entire amount of money received with the Nobel Prize to international organizations that deal with the reception and protection of migrants.

— Abdulrazak Gurnah (@AGurnahAuthor) December 8, 2021