Obscure Nobel Prize Winners

I can almost 100% guarantee there are mistakes here because I compiled this by hand myself during lunch break.

I recently have become interested in exploring the works of obscure Nobel Prize winners. I made this a poll for the fun of voting, but anybody can discuss whatever obscure Nobel winners they like. Of the above, I've read:

1922 Jacinto Benavente (I read a collection of 4 of his plays, very mediocre)
1908 Rudolf Christoph Eucken (This was fine philosophy but very outdated)
1974 Harry Martinson (Aniara is amazing, one of the best epic poems I've read)
1906 Giosue Carducci (I actually really enjoyed his poems, his Hymn To Satan is pretty classic)

Plus I have at home books by Jose Echegaray, Frans Eemil Sillanpaa, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Claude Simon, Grazia Deledda, and Maurice Maeterlinck that I haven't dug into yet.

I recently have become interested in exploring the works of obscure Nobel Prize winners.

And you are my hero

Oddly enough, this list contains all 8 winners from the 4 years where they split the prize between two people.

Simon is the only one I've read.

The three Danes and the one Norwegian are the only one I know. And Claude Simon. I've only read Johannes V Jensen's The Fall of the King, which is like, the greatest Danish book of all times, and you should all rush out and get it. Pontoppidan's Lucky Per was rereleased a while back, and got some tremendous reviews, including one from Frederick Jameson iirc. It's one of those novels I really ought to have read.

I was just about to pull the trigger on The Long Journey by Jensen. Is The Fall of the King better? Hmmm. Pontoppidan is one who I often see show up in comparisons like "Why should we care about an award that has honored the likes of Henrik Pontoppidan over Tolstoy, Woolf, etc." I think he is the stand-by obscure Nobel Prize winner because he has a funny name.

have read only excerpts of mommsen's history of rome, but it's great. he used to be seen as the obvious heir to gibbon, but lack of availability/good english translations has hurt his reputation.

Here we are, Hymn to Satan by Giosue Carducci: http://allpoetry.com/poem/8492167-Hymn-To-Satan-by-Giosue-Carducci

I was just about to pull the trigger on The Long Journey by Jensen. Is The Fall of the King better? Hmmm. Pontoppidan is one who I often see show up in comparisons like "Why should we care about an award that has honored the likes of Henrik Pontoppidan over Tolstoy, Woolf, etc." I think he is the stand-by obscure Nobel Prize winner because he has a funny name.

― justfanoe (Greg Fanoe), 13. december 2013 22:00 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Using Pontoppidan as a strawman is pretty dumb, as he shared the price with Karl Gjellerup, who even in Denmark is completely unknown... Apparantly Pontoppidan was too radical to get it alone. This is the Jameson-essay I was thinking of: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/fredric-jameson/cosmic-neutrality Boy it's long.

Not on the above list because they have too many reads, I've also recently read "The Gentleman From San Francisco" by Ivan Bunin, which was excllent, and "Barabbas" by Par Lagerkvist, which I thought was pretty average

Gabriela Mistral was the first female recipient of the nobel for lit.

enjoyable,sad,lyric poetry.

I have read hardly any of these.

I really want to read Mistral!

FYI, Selma Lagerlof, Grazia Deledda, Sigrid Undset, and Pearl Buck all won before Ms. Mistral.

Also, she took her pen name from Frederic Mistral, also a winner of the prize and both on the above list.

Doh I'm misremembering her being first,and currently only,Latin American woman to win the prize.

had to read a lot of Gabriela Mistral in elementary school Spanish classes.

i don't think i've read any of these but since finding out about Mommsen a few months back i've been v. interested in checking out his History of Rome

Claude Simon isn't so obscure and he is a great writer.
Agnon in the Godfather of israeli writers and is awesome, after you are getting used to the ancient language.

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

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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