Who will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

redlined: no matter your talent, perspective, or volume/quality of creative work there's always some middle aged French guy to whom they'd rather award the prize

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redlined: no matter your talent, perspective, or volume/quality of creative work there's always some middle aged French guy to whom they'd rather award the prize

The winners since, say, '68 have been from a few countries (not that many French winners since then) and perspectives.

I don't think there is a lot that has come out of NY that would trouble the Nobel. Even if they hadn't chosen Modiano there are easily a dozen living writers from around the world you'd turn to before UK or US.

So is Modiano good? Has anyone read him? I'm seeing almost no mentions in the ILX archives.

Dunno, but might now get around to finally watching my DVD of Lacombe, Lucien (Modiano co-wrote the screenplay)

Read an excerpt once, seemed like typical French navel-gazing to me, but I couldn't determine whether it was the good kind of navel-gazing or the bad kind.

So nobody's read this guy but we've decided he's a boring conservative choice anyway then?

He has a few film credits, the most notable of which by far is co-writing Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0595272/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1

Nah, I have no opinion on Modiano in particular, but the default assumption for a Nobel winner is that it was a boring, conservative choice.

FYI it's not exactly fair to criticize the Nobel on Proust. At the time he died, only half of In Search of Lost Time had been published.

Englund said: “Patrick Modiano is a well-known name in France but not anywhere else. He writes children’s books, movie scripts but mainly novels. His themes are memory, identity and time.

“His best known work is called Missing Person. It’s the story about a detective who has lost his memory and his final case is finding out who he really is: he is tracing his own steps through history to find out who he is.”

He added: “They are small books, 130, 150 pages, which are always variations of the same theme - memory, loss, identity, seeking. Those are his important themes: memory, identity and time.”

This could be in a "make up a Nobel Literature laureate" thread.

So nobody's read this guy but we've decided he's a boring conservative choice anyway then?

― Matt DC, Thursday, 9 October 2014 15:23 (25 minutes ago)

never get between americans when theyre wounded about their worthless boomer culture being overlooked

Hey, I was the first one to call it a boring choice, and I sure as heck am not American! I do root for Pynchon, though.

But what do you want us to do? It's the nobel-prize, nobody's ever read the winner. What should we do, not have an opinion like a goddamn idiot?

And I'll still say it's a boring choice. They gave it to another from France just six years ago, and there are so many worthy potential recipients all over the world. Even if Madiano is worthy, and he could very well be, it's still a boring choice. Much better than Murakami, though. Whom I've also never read.

“His best known work is called Missing Person. It’s the story about a detective who has lost his memory and his final case is finding out who he really is: he is tracing his own steps through history to find out who he is.”

lol

it turns out hes the killer at the end

heavy stuff

Are you saying there's a way to convey trauma and the mysteries of identity without resorting to amnesia? I'd like to see that.

Modiano is different from Le Clezio who had a different trajectory: started off writing Noveau Roman then seemed to go off toward dispatches from different regions of the world, and I think its the later part of his writing that got him the Nobel.

I feel a lot of French fiction on the latter half of the century had much of its energies slowly sapped by what was going on in film so having a sometime screenwriter winning it suits.

xp theres a way but its so brutal and shocking that you wouldn't remember it

So, I'll chime in since Modiano's one of my favorite contemporary authors and I've read probably half of his output (the guy is prolific). In France, he is a household name, you can probably buy his latest book in any supermaket with a small book section.
He is extremely consistent in his themes and style so you probably only need to read one of his books (usually short and breezy to read) to figure out whether he is for you or not. Memory and nostalgia for periods and places now gone are his bread and butter.

smh nobel handing out awards to euro supermarket authors while our most esteemed cranky misogynists remain unloved

ha as it turns out patrick modiano is my wife's distant relative, modiano is her old family name.

probably fourth cousin twice removed or w/e, who the hell knows.

that make you about 1/50th of a nobel prize winner

which is still a useful amount of a money

http://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/homer-rocking-chair-gun-twirl.gif

just heard the news, what a disaster for bob dylan

I don't believe in Zimmerman.

Le Clezio seems a very weird choice in retrospect--I'd not read him before he got the Nobel, and have read several of his books since. Someone so into endless descriptions of animal torture doesn't seem as though he'd be the Nobel committee's bag.

Is Paul Auster im sopermarkets in France as well? I have a feeling he is. And he's also probably wondering why he isn't on the odds chart.

In supermarkets, that is. (tablet typing)

Carrefour was always a classier proposition, shopping-wise.

Le Clezio seems a very weird choice in retrospect--I'd not read him before he got the Nobel, and have read several of his books since. Someone so into endless descriptions of animal torture doesn't seem as though he'd be the Nobel committee's bag.

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, October 9, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jelinek.jpg

Xxp oh yes definitely, he probably gets his own mini display too

I think jelinek supposedly got it for her plays rather than her novels, and almost none of the plays have made it into English.

Best presentation I've seen, though haven't seen many. Quotations of previous winners' citations, which article's author complains about, don't seem terminally cryptic to me. Anyway, glad to know about the forthcoming Yale collection:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/patrick-modianos-postwar

James the Nobel quote is:

"for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power"

I would expect the plays to tread on a roughly similar terrain to her prose.

I would love to see a staging of some of Gao Xingjian's plays too.

Also this on Modiano, delving deeper:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n23/michael-wood/j-xx-drancy-13-8-42

Got a proof of three Modiano novellas which is coming out soon; read the first one, Afterimage, which was lovely if slight. Looking forward to the other 2.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00OBL1L84.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

By the way, why is this prize so seldom shared? The physics, chemistry and medicine prizes are typically shared.

Science tends to be more collaborative than the arts.

A couple of the lit prizes have iirc been shared but idk what that would mean today - probably give away a few too many clues as to the criteria of what they are judging.

I would guess that the main criteria for giving the prize is who published the defining work first, and in science there is typically more than one author per publication. And this isn't the case with literature

Huh, a split Nobel literature prize happened as late as 1974. Two members of the Swedish academy got it after being recommended by themselves among others, instead of the price going to Nabokov or Borges.

The sensitive Martinson found it hard to cope with the criticism following his award, and committed suicide.[2]

damn

I'm thinking of a case analogous to Physics 1983. The "theme" there was astrophysics, but Chandrasekhar and Fowler never collaborated and worked in separate sub-fields. I wondered why the prize couldn't go for, say, Indian literature one year, shared by two or three writers. Of course writers are jealous gods and might not like the idea.

It's that time of year...

https://sports.ladbrokes.com/en-gb/betting/awards/nobel-prize-in-literature/2015-nobel-prize-for-literature/220019571/

Svetlana Aleksijevitj
5/1
Haruki Murakami
6/1
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
6/1
Philip Roth
10/1
Joyce Carol Oates
12/1
John Banville
14/1
Jon Fosse
14/1
Adunis
16/1
Ismail Kadare
16/1
Ko Un
20/1
Peter Handke
20/1
Amos Oz
25/1
Cees Nooteboom
25/1
Cesar Aira
25/1
Laszlo Krasznahorka
25/1
Marilynne Robinson
25/1
Peter Nadas
25/1

Lydia Davis
33/1

Can you imagine how gobsmacked Paul Auster would be if she got there and he didn't?

Would love if Lydia won it, just for her efforts to learn Norwegian.

Go Pynchon!

I say this each year, and he'll never get it. Still, though.

I know loads of mediocrities have won this but lol @ the idea of Auster ever getting near this.

Bookies once again dutifully offering short odds on Murakami because he's the only contemporary non-English language writer they've ever heard of.

Disgusting sellouts if they choose Roth btw.