Search/Destroy Every Nobel Prize Winner For Literature

1901 Sully Prudhomme
1902 Theodor Mommsen
1903 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
1904 Frédéric Mistral
José Echegaray y Eizaguirre
1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz
1906 Giosuè Carducci
1907 Rudyard Kipling
1908 Rudolf Christoph Eucken
1909 Selma Lagerlöf
1910 Paul Heyse
1911 Count Maurice Maeterlinck
1912 Gerhart Hauptmann
1913 Rabindranath Tagore
1915 Romain Rolland
1916 Verner von Heidenstam
1917 Karl Adolph Gjellerup
Henrik Pontoppidan
1919 Carl Spitteler
1920 Knut Hamsun
1921 Anatole France
1922 Jacinto Benavente
1923 William Butler Yeats
1924 Władysław Reymont
1925 George Bernard Shaw
1926 Grazia Deledda
1927 Henri Bergson
1928 Sigrid Undset
1929 Thomas Mann
1930 Sinclair Lewis
1931 Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1932 John Galsworthy
1933 Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
1934 Luigi Pirandello
1936 Eugene O'Neill
1937 Roger Martin du Gard
1938 Pearl S. Buck
1939 Frans Eemil Sillanpää
1944 Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
1945 Gabriela Mistral
1946 Hermann Hesse
1947 André Gide
1948 T. S. Eliot
1949 William Faulkner
1950 Bertrand Russell
1951 Pär Lagerkvist
1952 François Mauriac
1953 Sir Winston Churchill
1954 Ernest Hemingway
1955 Halldór Laxness
1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez
1957 Albert Camus
1958 Boris Pasternak (declined the prize)
1959 Salvatore Quasimodo
1960 Saint-John Perse
1961 Ivo Andric
1962 John Steinbeck
1963 Giorgos Seferis
1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize)
1965 Michail Sholokhov
1966 Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Nelly Sachs
1967 Miguel Ángel Asturias
1968 Yasunari Kawabata
1969 Samuel Beckett
1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1971 Pablo Neruda
1972 Heinrich Böll
1973 Patrick White
1974 Eyvind Johnson
Harry Martinson
1975 Eugenio Montale
1976 Saul Bellow
1977 Vicente Aleixandre
1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer
1979 Odysseas Elytis
1980 Czesław Miłosz
1981 Elias Canetti
1982 Gabriel García Márquez
1983 William Golding
1984 Jaroslav Seifert
1985 Claude Simon
1986 Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
1987 Joseph Brodsky
1988 Naguib Mahfouz
1989 Camilo José Cela
1990 Octavio Paz
1991 Nadine Gordimer
1992 Derek Walcott
1993 Toni Morrison
1994 Kenzaburo Oe
1995 Seamus Heaney
1996 Wisława Szymborska
1997 Dario Fo
1998 José Saramago
1999 Günter Grass
2000 Gao Xingjian
2001 Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
2002 Imre Kertész
2003 John Maxwell Coetzee
2004 Elfriede Jelinek
2005 Harold Pinter
2006 Orhan Pamuk
2007 Doris Lessing
2008 J. M. G. Le Clézio
2009 Herta Müller
2010 Mario Vargas Llosa
2011 Tomas Tranströmer
2012 Mo Yan
2013 Alice Munro
2014 Patrick Modiano
2015 Svetlana Alexievich
2016 Bob Dylan

Blood on the Tracks is great...

Search: Henrik Pontoppidan's hairdo...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Henrik_Pontoppidan_1913.jpg

poll!

Destroy: Theodor Mommsen's hairdo...

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1902/mommsen_postcard.jpg

Maeterlinck got a Nobel prize?

Also just seeing this name:

1965 Michail Sholokhov

Makes me smell unwanted shelves of mildewy goodwill hardcovers

And Sholokhov apparently never even wrote "And Quiet Flows the Don"!

wonder if the number of nazis in this list is statistically significant

i still have never read Beloved...i should read it.

Excellent, good quality literature:

1907 Rudyard Kipling
1920 Knut Hamsun
1968 Yasunari Kawabata
1969 Samuel Beckett
1968 Yasunari Kawabata
1969 Samuel Beckett
1971 Pablo Neruda
1975 Eugenio Montale
1981 Elias Canetti
1982 Gabriel García Márquez
1987 Joseph Brodsky
1991 Nadine Gordimer
1994 Kenzaburo Oe
1995 Seamus Heaney
1996 Wisława Szymborska
1998 José Saramago
2004 Elfriede Jelinek
2007 Doris Lessing
2015 Svetlana Alexievich

Crap/indifferent/yet to see the fuss:

1913 Rabindranath Tagore
1929 Thomas Mann
1934 Luigi Pirandello
1946 Hermann Hesse
1947 André Gide
1948 T. S. Eliot
1949 William Faulkner
1952 François Mauriac
1955 Halldór Laxness
1958 Boris Pasternak (declined the prize)
1959 Salvatore Quasimodo
1957 Albert Camus
1963 Giorgos Seferis
1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize)
1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1972 Heinrich Böll
1973 Patrick White
1976 Saul Bellow
1979 Odysseas Elytis
1980 Czesław Miłosz
1985 Claude Simon
2008 J. M. G. Le Clézio
2009 Herta Müller
2011 Tomas Tranströmer

Read some, not enough to have a one word opinion on - actually going to check now:

1966 Nelly Sachs

Actually Evil:

1953 Sir Winston Churchill
2016 Bob Dylan

Not enough data in the bank to process to an onion.

to process the rest of this list to an onion.

and quiet flows the don is totally great.
some other sholokhov book i attempted to read was utter shit in the worst soviet social realist style

"Not enough data in the bank to process to an onion."

gertrude stein fan...

Gabriela Mistral: first latin american winner.

is on the 5000 peso/5 lucas note in chile:

http://tomchao.com/sa/chile5fx.jpg

must be one of the only nobel laureates to be a school teacher of another

p sure Halldór Laxness is in tartarus reading his own work forever

i have never found the lessing...that i want to read. i've picked up quite a few.

i was such a bellow fanboy when i was young. need to re-read some to see if i still feel the same way.

this comes down to Mahfouz vs. IB Singer for me

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 👶🏻

1922 Jacinto Benavente

Actual answer. I am not going to read it, but I hear good things about it.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451279/kristin-lavransdatter-by-undset-sigrid/9780143039167

ideal choice - female author, "attempted human sacrifice, floods, fights, murders, violent suicide, a gay king, drunken revelry, the Bubonic Plague", and it will beef up my pre 1980 album which only has half a dozen stickers in (pasternak, camus, steinbeck, faulkner, hesse, hamsun).

In the early days there's a lot of Scandinavian names so you get the accusations that it was parochial.

But here you have one of them that's been plucked from obscurity, re-packaged as post-Ferrante.

yep, congrats to the penguin marketing department on that one.

I believe there was a somewhat recent film adaptation of it as well, directed by Liv Ullmann.

1995. Time flies.

Tagore's short stories are good.

Tagore kind of lives on through the Satyajit Ray connection.

also not wanting to give the Nobel ppl undue credit but 1913 is pretty early to consider going beyond the eurocentric, no?

Anyone read any Claude Simon? One of those nouveau roman writers I've never tried

Ha, no, but I remember he was on my list once as well to investigate.

Yes, Simon is great. Check out Flanders Road, it's been reissued.

Will do!

simon is great, yes - i found 'the flanders road' brilliant in places but a little inscrutable at times - multiple narrators, asynchronous narrative, i found it difficult to find a through line. his middle period experimental works 'conducting bodies' and 'triptych' were significant reads for me. 'conducting bodies' is republished by ubuweb here under a new title: https://ubu-mirror.ch/ubu/simon_properties.html

Most likely the next Nobel Prize winner is not on my list (although Glück, Tokarczuk & Handke were on it), but I created this mosaic as a thank you for your comments & support (and as an apology for flooding your timelines for 33 days). It includes every name I mentioned. Cheers. pic.twitter.com/UhQ0jiBn89

— Luis Panini (@TheLuisPanini) October 4, 2022

BREAKING NEWS:
The 2022 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” pic.twitter.com/D9yAvki1LL

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2022

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/

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

Tim Parks is an excellent reviewer of books... he hates Elena Ferrante (and the translator of her works, Ann Goldstein).

Fine with me to give it to someone who deserves to be better known, but I had no problem with finally giving it to Dylan (might've gotten a better response in the 60s?), not faulting him for celebrity, and thinking of songs as texts for performance, as with Nobels awarded to several playwrights.

Can coors and nabozo say a bit about their response to *The Vegeterian*? Not fishing for an argument just wondered what inspired such a negative reaction.

The central character is hollow, the two men are repulsive, it's grotesque, there is little connection between the three parts, and it's not really about vegetarianism. It's wallowing in its dark and gross content, and I didn't see any point, or maybe I didn't care for the social allegory. The first part would have been ok as a stand-alone.

and it's not really about vegetarianism

lol

agreed that the first section is the best though

The book is called The Vegetarian and its not about Vegetarianism?? Fuck!

Gotta say these two statements don't go together in my book (so to speak).
― dow, Saturday, 12 October 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Parks has his reasons, and most critics (and ppl) will have a blindspot. I disagree with them but I usually will look at whatever he is reviewing.

It just seemed like a jarring sequence of statements, since I know (by your favorable posts about Ferrante) that you do disagree with him, but sure, we all have our blindspots, and I'll seek out more of his reviews, which I don't come across in my usual browsing, since I already have such a backlog of reviewed books--but should update---

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.

With the notable exception of Alexievich, who is incredible and who I only found out about and started reading because of the prize.

The central character is hollow - she's been hollowed out by a patriarchal society
the two men are repulsive - how is this a problem
it's grotesque - sounding good
there is little connection between the three parts - they follow on from each other! Admittedly the first part WAS a stand-alone I think originally hence the bittiness
and it's not really about vegetarianism - NEITHER WAS HITLER
It's wallowing in its dark and gross content - if you think this is wallowing you should read some grimdark, ugh
and I didn't see any point, or maybe I didn't care for the social allegory - fair comment

Anyway she seems an odd choice for this kind of honour but amusing to think of H. Murakami waiting by the phone for the call that never comes AGAIN. Go and perv over some earlobes, fella. The only thing funnier would be if Ryū Murakami wins it next year.

"It's wallowing in its dark and gross content"

"Oh no! My worldview has been challenged by a book! Oh no!!"

Good for her.

https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=384056

"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

― corrs unplugged, 12. oktober 2024 16:07 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think Han Kang already led a bunch of people to read South Korean literature. From a Guardian article from a few years back: Rocco points out that young people “don’t seem to be reading the languages that were classically regarded as the drivers of the canon”, that is, western European languages. In fact, of the 2m books of translated fiction sold in Britain last year, she tells me, “the single most popular language – just under half a million volumes – was Japanese” (not including manga), “followed by South Korean”. (Anton Hur, a Booker-longlisted translator, recently wrote that after The Vegetarian won in 2016, “all of a sudden, Korean literature was seen as edgy and fierce”.)

I think of wallowing as inertia, getting bogged down, sometimes miserablist complacency---not meant as a comment on her book, which I haven't read. Wallowing can also come across as enjoyment, resting, cooling off in the mud: an early 70s reference to Little Richard currently "wallowing in insane vaudeville" doesn't come across as that bad a thing, especially considering how many other performers didn't make it through those years (maybe wallowing iiv helped?)

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

― corrs unplugged, 12. oktober 2024 16:07 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Even if this is as bad as you say, I don't think ppl would immediately give up on South Korean books.

People will get to read of characters in a different setting, who think about things in a slightly different way. Even if the result isn't to that reader's liking this stuff could get them to go further.

I think Han Kang already led a bunch of people to read South Korean literature.
― Frederik B, Sunday, October 13, 2024 6:05 PM (yesterday)

Definitely made it easier for translators to get funding / gave a hook for people to promote other South Korean novels/novellas (Bae Suah's Nowhere To Be Found did decently in New Zealand - here's a good interview with the translator, Sora Kim-Russell: https://better-read.com/2019/03/13/found/ )

I discovered my wife bought The Vegetarian ebook some years ago, so I read it. I thought it was very good. Extraordinary energy to the first part, the way everyone treats her as though she has voluntarily and deliberately transformed into a monstrous giant insect. The other two parts very effective at taking you into the mind of a horrible jerk, and showing the experience of dealing with someone with severe mental health issues.

There's something to be said about those later sections that align the book with the Life and Times of Michael K - not so much that she enters a state of grace (one of Coetzee's central themes) but, crudely, how do we get the world to leave us alone?. I need to think it through.

It's a theme in the Banshees of Inisherin as well.

the first part of the vegetarian is one of those rare pieces of writing with that super powerful g-force momentum. very fond memories of reading it