Nobel Prize winners POLL: 2000-09

Oops @ the broken quotes from Nobel committee, maybe it was for the best.

Anyway - notes:

Have read: Jelinek and Le Clezio - both great, especially Jelinek. I am voting for her.

Will def read next year sometime: Gao Xingjian, Doris Lessing, more Le Clezio and Jelinek.

Pinter - seen 1xplay. On TV. This was good.

Naipul and Coetzee: both won the booker so I kinda take a dislike to them already.

Muller: first Nobel winner that I had a novel by before she won it yay me! Looking forward to more translations in future. Definitely the equivalent of 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days winning at Cannes, and since that's one of my favourite films ever...the signs are good.

Have read two of these: Coetzee before he won and Pamuk after.

Disgrace was spectacular, so good that I finished it off while wandering from the tube at rush hour, I simply could not wait until I'd got to my desk. Youth I liked because I could see a lot of myself in the main character, but there was less going on in that one. Strangely, I can remember virtually nothing from either novel, which is hardly a ringing endorsement.

Snow started off quite interesting, but it was sl-ow and I ended up abandoning it for another day, which is something I rarely do. I didn't abandon it for being junk, it certainly has promise, but I got the impression that it was let down by a ponderous translation.

Not terribly interested in the others to be honest, other than Naipaul of whom I have Among The Believers deep in my pile, plus an essay collection and some book about him and Paul Theroux. I don't really know a great deal about him, but I rather like that he's universally acknowledged as a bit of a tosser. Not sure why, I despise the likes of Martin Amis after all, maybe it's because he's got a lower profile so I can't see exactly how much of a tosser that actually is.

So that has to be a vote for Coetzee I suppose.

Never read Gao Xingjian, V. S. Naipaul, Imre Kertész, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller. Got two pages into a book by Orhan Pamuk once. Put Coetzee off for years; found Disgrace absolutely fantastic when I finally read it. It does a lot of things well that are rarely done well: animals and music, particularly. Kind of keen to read some others. Read a fair bit of Pinter as a teen and didn't really get it; watched a TV production of The Birthday Party long ago and was a lot more impressed. But Pinter's work, his good work, seems kind of of a kind, and all fairly young man's work, I think. Lessing I have only read one of her SF novels: it was probably the best SF novel by a non-SF author I have read, actually. Clezio I got seven or eight pages in and still hadn't got to a sentence with a recognisable object so gave up.

So: either Coetzee or Lessing or one of the five I've never read.

I will read Disgrace sometime, now. Thanks for speaking so highly of it.

The Birthday Party was the TV production I saw as well. It was excellent, and lookign at your comments, thomp, it made me think of Pinter's work as something very un-young man - a mostly sober/resigned mood cast all round, as I recall. Whereas the statements made when he was older and his engagement with politics was perhaps more young man like. But I don't know anywhere near enough as I'd like.

Next week I may do another decade of the Nobel. 60s or 70s. Stay tuned and all that.

I've never paid that much attention to the Nobel Prize for Literature - is this for their entire body of work or a specific piece? If it's the former, then it is Pinter by a mile.

I'd go Coetzee, Pinter or Lessing, but I'm obviously biased on what I've read, and what's even available in English.

Emily: There is an article published in The Times yesterday about the process of choosing the novelist that wins it (they interview one of the panelists), but I can't find it. Its for an entire body of work, and it seems like a novelist has to make it into the shortlist for 2-3 years before actually being given the nod, if at all. The interviewer did not ask as to how much the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall might have influenced the decision (not everybody wins so its my suspicion that something as banal as this was responsible), which is why I don't pay too much attention to prizes, either, but I have zoned in on works in translation (mostly French, Italian and Central European) a lot this year so the Nobel is perfect.

have read Naipaul, Jelinek and Pinter. I enjoy Naipaul at his best (Mr. Biswas), think his famed personal nastiness creeps often into both his fictions & nonfictions but his style is just so good. Pinter is the sort of thing I kinda just don't get. Jelinek is one of my favorite living writers, so I voted for her. I expect to read both Pamuk & Müller before too much more time has passed so if I end up regretting my vote I will clarify matters on my deathbed

Coetzee over Naipaul, if only because Coetzee's last three novels surpass Naipaul's.

i dig pamuk but wouldnt force him on anyone. "snow" was better than my name is red but as ismael said it can be sort of boring; it was rewarding to me as a book that i picked up and read a hundred pages of every couple weeks.

kertesz is horribly depressing. i cant really remember if i even liked the book (liquidation) just that i wanted to cry the whole time. one pivotal moment goes:

"You were silent. Then you asked why the man was punishing the woman merely because she wanted a child.
'Because it is not permissable to want anything.'
'Why?'
'Because of Auschwitz.'"

naipaul is a beautiful writer and a big asshole

probably going to vote coetzee on gut instinct

the nobel really does favor ppl who write about unpleasant shit

so do most of us as readers I'd guess & I'm hardly immune (my three favorite living writers are all depressing as fuck) but it's still pretty glaring when you look at these together, bunch of people who write stuff about which ppl say things like "i dig pamuk but wouldnt force him on anyone"

haha actually pamuk is probably the least depressing of all the 2000s nobellists ive read!!!

hes just sort of... a not-funny italo calvino??

kertesz, meanwhile, is like reading a suicide note for the human race

i guess naipual isnt depressing except in the sense that its depressing that a guy that smart could be that racist

Guerillas is plenty depressing, and a lot of his reflections on India & the hopelessness of the postcolonial situation are pretty rough going. Much of his nonfiction that I used to read seemed to come from a standpoint beginning with "well, the situation is hopeless -- here's how"

Finished Muller's 'Green Plums' last night. Hmm. Definitely fits into the depressing/people are all fucked category. Not a brilliant book, imo--characters too sketchy and interchangeable, for the most part, but then I can't judge the body of work for which she's presumably been awarded the prize on the basis of the one book.

I assumed that was all of hers that had been translated into English, but there do seem to be a few others.

Really don't feel depressed when I read someone like Jelinek, just glad I've not been...short-changed? I guess if the writing has plenty of things to reckon with, and all that seems to be expressed powerfully then I'm fine with it. The Nobel I'd say focuses on having to say something profound about the world (and no scare quote on profound at that). The newspapers seldom carry happy stories, etc.

Having said that Kertesz sounds frightening. Here is an old interview I was looking through earlier.

My Hungarian informant tells me that Kertész hates Hungarians, and is hated in return especially by Hungarian Jews for his merciless candor. He spends most of his time out of the country. She thinks that Kertész got the Nobel for not falsifying the truth. She doesn't like his literary style much.

I've read a couple of Kertesz--'Liquidation' was so-so, but 'The Pathfinder' was rather excellent.

it is not permissable for anything to be excellent

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