Search/Destroy Every Nobel Prize Winner For Literature

i read the first two Canopus in Argos book but couldn't go on. i liked everything about them except actually reading them. i don't think they're exactly what doris got the prize for tho.

ooh or Saramago

lots I don't know on here, none I actively dislike.

xp

im a bit ambivalent on lessing. golden notebook is pretty great. some of the other books - a proto "we need to talk about kevin" i had to read in school being the worst i can think of - not so good.

also lessing basically the opposite of a fun read. good to read on a rainy sunday when you're feeling glum.

a scottish person has never won the nobel prize for literature :'-(

Bob Dylan?

is not a true scotsman

apparently he's eligible for everything

Is Pearl S. Buck still considered a major literary figure?

no, not really

i like kipling just fine but rating him over mann, camus, gide, solzhenitsyn, faulkner is a little hard to figure

i have an old abridgment of mommsen's history of rome but have never really cracked it

kipling isnt in the top 20 on this list for me tbh

I probably should take Kipling out of there but I've been re-considering him at the mo. He isn't in the top 20 of mine (if I were to rank them which I won't as I'm not 21 anymore)

Mann - very boring technocratic prose in laying out of the issues in Magic Mountain. Musil was 10x better than this. I want to read his last novel tho'. Death in Venice is great and I do look for the edition of his diaries.

Solzhenitsyn - same but for Soviets. Shamolov and Platonov wrote better prose (partially because they believed in the USSR and were in conflict with it at the same time)

Camus - The Outsider was a bit lucky but I'm told he was v good looking.

Gide - got zilch from his stuff. Rejected the manuscript for Swann's Way, one of the worst literary judgements EVER.

Faulkner - the one guy I want to re-consider.

the fall > the plague > the outsider

Read all of those. Didn't hate it or anything..

kipling was a friggin' genius. there isn't anyone alive who can do everything he could do. i need more kipling.

who is someone who could write fiction and poetry as well as he could? i can't think of anyone.

i wanna stay in his house. not cheap but it's right up the road!

http://landmarktrustusa.org/properties/rudyard-kiplings-naulakha/

God it's actually incredible how much better the Irish are than all the others

My keep list would be something like this: the only Harry Martinson I've read is an epic sci-fi poem set on a spaceship, and it was great

1907 Rudyard Kipling
1913 Rabindranath Tagore
1920 Knut Hamsun
1923 William Butler Yeats
1928 Sigrid Undset
1929 Thomas Mann
1930 Sinclair Lewis
1933 Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
1934 Luigi Pirandello
1936 Eugene O'Neill
1947 André Gide
1948 T. S. Eliot
1951 Pär Lagerkvist
1952 François Mauriac
1955 Halldór Laxness
1957 Albert Camus
1961 Ivo Andric
1962 John Steinbeck
1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize)
1968 Yasunari Kawabata
1969 Samuel Beckett
1971 Pablo Neruda
1972 Heinrich Böll
1973 Patrick White
1974 Harry Martinson
1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer
1980 Czesław Miłosz
1981 Elias Canetti
1983 William Golding
1986 Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
1987 Joseph Brodsky
1988 Naguib Mahfouz
1995 Seamus Heaney
1996 Wisława Szymborska
1998 José Saramago
2002 Imre Kertész
2003 John Maxwell Coetzee
2004 Elfriede Jelinek
2005 Harold Pinter
2011 Tomas Tranströmer
2013 Alice Munro
2014 Patrick Modiano
2015 Svetlana Alexievich

Pre-Dylan, Muller and le Clezio seem like the last big mis-steps. Muller can be a good writer, but so utterly humourless, and le Clezio just seems like an overrated sadist.

i need to read more william golding. his post-piggy books always sound really interesting to me, but i always forget to look for them in used shops which is the only place i'd ever find them. plus, he had the best first edition covers ever.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/FreeFall.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9c/WillianGolding_TheInheritors.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/TheSpire.JPG

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6d/PincherMartin.jpg

Actually Evil:

1953 Sir Winston Churchill
2016 Bob Dylan

I LOLed

Pre-Dylan, Muller and le Clezio seem like the last big mis-steps. Muller can be a good writer, but so utterly humourless, and le Clezio just seems like an overrated sadist.

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), 15. oktober 2016 03:28 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I heard a lot of snickering at Modiano as well, or am I remembering it wrong?

I totally forgot until this second that Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, weird

Anyway, Laxness's "Independent People" is one of the most magnificent things I've ever read, thank you Nobel committee for bringing it to my attention.

Mann - very boring technocratic prose in laying out of the issues in Magic Mountain. Musil was 10x better than this. I want to read his last novel tho'. Death in Venice is great and I do look for the edition of his diarie

You might respond differently to the translator and Joseph and His Brothers, which I finished three weeks ago and wanted another 1500 pages of. The mountains of historical detail reinvented by a self-consciously 20th century narrator provoked the right kind of dialectical thinking.

otoh Thomas Mann exists so that he can win Nobel Prizes.

Kipling's short stories are rather good: terse little things with a good ear for dialect that I'll pick over Hemingway's these days.

who is someone who could write fiction and poetry as well as he could? i can't think of anyone.

― scott seward, Friday, October 14, 2016

Hardy and Lawrence.

1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1972 Heinrich Böll
1973 Patrick White

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

I feel like Kipling and Yeats are the most imperishable here, but I haven't read most of the list. Kawabata is one I want to check out.

otoh Thomas Mann exists so that he can win Nobel Prizes.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 15 October 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He was born for it! Even now absolutely encapsulates what the Nobel for lit is about and...its not pretty.

I don't know, historical novels ain't my bag. My line on translation is that someone who speaks to me will do so even if I come across a translation that is regarded as bad. So if I'm not liking something its either because its something I am not disposed towards or its bad, or I am but I don't like the writing, or these are things I am not ready for just now (on that one Dostoevsky passed me by at 17 but now I'm good with him)

Historical novels aren't mine either, but I loved the Joseph story as a kid and read Harold Bloom's The Book of J in college.

I'm surprised Milan Kundera didnt get a Nobel Prize

or Joyce!

Saul Bellow is the only writer on the list I'm not keen on

Felix Krull is a hoot

yep

making people listen to Patti Smith is kinda mean, Zim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AxfGzW7AdY

this prize wasn't as unjustified as people were saying last year

Louise she's all right she's just near
She's delicate and seems like veneer
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here

this is so mean. has to sting anyone who's been a "rebound"

this prize wasn't as unjustified as people were saying last year

It's more unjustified than people were saying last year, because in the interim Ashbery died and now can never win

Probably fairer to say he has won the only nobel prize that counts

An argument for giving Dril the Prize for Literature - though I suspect this would be complicated by the fact that, iirc, multiple people actually run that account.

The point of the Nobel Prize in Literature is — according to its own stated aims — to honor an author from any country who has produced, as the original Swedish puts it: “den som inom litteraturen har producerat det mest framstående verket i en idealisk riktning,” or, as this line is usually translated: “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”

In the past, this translation has been fraught with controversy. The Swedish word “idealisk” can apparently be translated either as “ideal” or “idealistic”, but either way, no one is quite sure what it means. In the award’s early years, writers who had dedicated their careers to aesthetic realism (as opposed to idealism) tended to be passed over. Thus the French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme won the award in the Nobel's first year, 1901, but his countryman Emile Zola, whose work has proved far more enduring, was never honored. More recently, the phrase “ideal direction” has been interpreted to mean something more like the championing of certain liberal, humanitarian ideals, hence why so many laureates seem to be awarded the prize, at least in part, for their political commitments and beliefs — Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka challenging the authoritarian regimes they lived under; British playwright Harold Pinter taking a vocal stance against the Iraq War.

So does Dril's work move in an “ideal direction”? Upon proper consideration of his work, it would be hard to argue that it doesn't. Dril is a remarkable writer whose work not only helps us understand but helps us to respond to the world in which we are forced to exist.

https://theoutline.com/post/7245/give-the-nobel-prize-to-dril

Thought it was one person.

In any case scientists often share the prize for a single discovery.

Longtime co-authors or collectives should absolutely be eligible for a literature prize. dril is Luther Blissett

oh it's a twitter account? Lmao

give it simon hedges

This annual piece feels a bit recycled now.

Anyway good to see Michon make it to the bookmaker list.

Why are people pissing and moaning about this @alex_shephard thing on the Nobel? It's really funny, y'all need to take more drugs or something. https://t.co/rBszYNRdPp

— Adrian Nathan West (@a_nathanwest) October 4, 2022

So I love Tokarczuk, Saramago, used to love Ishiguro but his last two were rubbish, read one Gurnah which was pretty good, Marquez is fine, Munro is fine but I prefer novels, don't really care for Lessing, not bothered about Coetzee, don't want to read Naipaul... who should I try next?

sir winston churchill 👶🏻

Haven't read her but she sounds better than the last two French winners.

Pierre Joris:

Oh, well. Another weirdo Nobel Prize in Lit: Annie Ernaux, a good, competent, though pedestrian & safe, French writer of autobiographical fiction. So yes, the prize went to a woman, which is good. But this is a totally safe, intra-european gimmick. Actually this is ridiculous in an era when a really great novelist, Salman Rushdie, suffered from an assassination attempt, when Adonis, the greatest poet & writer in the Arabic language, would have been only the 2nd Nobel (after the novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 1988) in that language, when there are.... oh, forget it, the list of major writers who could/should get it is large & very international.

is this guy fucking kidding? Ernaux is utterly incredible and I say this as a reader who generally shuns memoirs.

The Nobel have not given the award for a writer of autofiction before, and looking at the list they are quite good at representing most facets of modern fiction.

Also the Nobel regards literature as mostly European, male affair. So giving it to more women is good, not bad. Even if Ernaux is European.

Shame how Adonis isn't even mentioned now (he was looked at during the height of the Syrian civil war). Assumed he was dead, but no he is 92.

I'm at the library and several of her books are here translated. Gonna check out Happening.

I have a book of hers I bought but haven’t read her yet - recommended to me by xyzzzz__ funnily enough. Rushdie was a great author before he got stabbed, Nobel committee funnily didn’t take that into consideration.

I do always like the "I was going about my business" moments of people winning a Nobel:

Annie Ernaux with journalists in front of her home earlier. She learned the news through the radio. She said: "I'm very happy, I'm proud, but not shaken" and "I will definitely go to Stockholm." @nytimes #NobelPrize2022 pic.twitter.com/encBCdR2f0

— Laura Cappelle (@LauraCappelle) October 6, 2022

See also:

Doris Lessing wins the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, & this is what she finds on her doorstep.
Photo: Shaun Curry pic.twitter.com/isQDz1RlGc

— Deny Fear (@dean_frey) October 22, 2018

Also Joris’s reasoning is a joke if he’s going to bring context outside of writing into it cos

Congratulations to my publisher, @7storiespress for publishing in English the brilliant #NobelPrize2022 winner, Annie Ernaux.
Happening, about her botched illegal abortion, is more urgent than ever.
Buy and share. https://t.co/xyHi097Ci3

— Nina Burleigh (@ninaburleigh) October 6, 2022

wikipedia on its own entry on pierre joris: "This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject"

perhaps he felt *he* deserved the award for autofiction

Next years' Nobel prize winner: The Wikipedia Community

I've finished Kristin Lavransdatter. It took a month! Normally even for such a large book I'd be quicker than that. I never wanted to stop reading though. Each of the three individual books was very good, cumulatively they approached magnificence. Wonderful descriptions of nature; deep, complex, believable characters treated with compassion and generosity; a totally convincing 14th century setting. Eveything in the description many posts above - "attempted human sacrifice, floods, fights, murders, violent suicide, a gay king, drunken revelry, the Bubonic Plague" - happens, but that gives a misleading impression, overall it's much more down to earth. What it does is quietly and confidently capture the simple momentousness of life itself.

There are a few lovely moments which, very occasionally, almost lift it into something more magical or fantastic - the young Kristin thinks she sees a mountain elf; some dreams are written about; someone thinks he sees Kristin leaning over a fence but it's just a tree. Then there's this section which nearly did me in - Simon is riding home in winter, at night, with an arm badly infected from a wound and in a feverish state:

Simon gazed at everything: The full moon was sailing brightly in the pale blue sky, having driven all the stars far away; only a few larger ones still dared wander in the distant heavens. The white fields glittered and sparkled; the shadows fell short and jagged across the snow; inside the woods the uncertain light lay in splotches and stripes among the firs, heavy with snow. Simon saw all this.

But at the same time he saw quite clearly a meadow with tufts of ash-brown grass in the sunlight of early spring. Several small spruce trees had sprung up here and there at the edge of the field; they glowed green like velvet in the sun. He recognized this place; it was the pasture near his home at Dyfrin. The alder woods stood beyond the field with its tree trunks a springtime shiny gray and the tops brown with blossoms. Behind stretched the long, low Raumarike ridges, shimmering blue but still speckled white with snow. They were walking down toward the alder thicket, he and Simon Reidarsson, carrying fishing gear and pike spears. They were on their way to the lake, which lay dark gray with patches of thawing ice, to fish at the open end. His dead cousin walked at his side; he saw his playmate's curly hair sticking out from his cap, reddish in the spring sunlight; he could see every freckle on the boy's face. The other Simon stuck out his lower lip and blew - phew, phew - whenever he thought his namesake was speaking gibberish. They jumped over meandering rivulets and leaped from mound to mound across the trickling snow water in the grassy with meadow. The bottom was covered with moss; under the water it churned and frothed a lively green.

He was fully aware of everything around him; the whole time he saw the road passing up one hill and down another, through the woods and over white fields in the glittering moonlight. He saw the slumbering clusters of houses beneath snow-laden roofs casting shadows across the fields; he saw the band of fog hovering over the river in the bottom of the valley. He knew that it was Jon who was riding right behind him and who moved up alongside him whenever they entered open clearings, and yet he happened to call the man Simon several times. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn't help himself, even though he noticed his servants grew alarmed.

In other places it's sometimes quite oblique, particularly when speaking of offences against god or morality - adultery and the like. This is when we discover about the gay king:

"Yes, it was clever of you to separate the boy from his mother," said Erlend gloomily. "He's still only a child—and now all of us Norwegian men have reason to hold our heads up high when we think about the king whom we have sworn to protect."

“Be quiet!” said Erling Vidkunssøn in a low, dejected voice. “That's . . . surely that's not true."

But the other two could see from his face that he knew it was true. Although King Magnus Eirikssøn might still be a child, he had already been infected by a sin which was unseemly to mention among Christian men. A Swedish cleric, who had been assigned to guide his book learning while he was in Sweden, had led him astray in an unmentionable manner.

The sin is unmentionable, but reasonably clear to infer from the third paragraph. But how Erling figures out that's what Erlend is implying in the first paragraph is a mystery to me.

Nice weekend write-up.

I have The Hive on order. This is a good review of it

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/03/books/review/camilo-jose-cela-the-hive.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytbooks

oh yeah thanks for the kristin recommendation btw!

Glad you enjoyed it (I haven't read it myself)

Kristin Lavransdatter is one of the most impressively convincing historical novels I’ve ever read, just a marvellous book to lose yourself in. The Tiina Nunnally translation is great.

1967 Miguel Ángel Asturias

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/05/25/the-inventor-of-magical-realism-mr-president-asturias/

Among those not mentioned upthread, "The Fall of the King" by Johannes Vilhelm Jensen is really good.

the one asturias i've read is the president which i liked well enough, didn't realise per what i could read of the article that he started on it in the early twenties which was when he was hanging out with the paris surrealists but makes sense

1960 Saint-John Perse

have a big fat volume of his correspondence, but have never succeeded in tracking down any of his poetry (he gets a footnote in the waste land i seem to recall)

T.S. Eliot also translated his work Anabase.

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/