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

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.

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

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Saturday, October 11, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There is a volume on Seagull btw, looks really good.

Laszlo Krasznahorka
25/1

he's been my vote for a while, but i suspect his list of published works is too short for the committee to recognize (maybe five or six novels over his career, handful of short stories and essays)

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

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, October 6, 2015 9:47 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Me too but what about Dag Solstadt, the guy who wrote the novel she read to learn Norwegian, is he in the running?

I don't think so...have read one of his books earlier this year and certainly would like to see more in translation.

Excellent piece on what those odds are, there is no long list or anything to go with apart from what ppl bet on: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123058/who-will-win-nobel-prize-literature

So Dag Solstad could win. I am always selfish here -- want to see someone who hasn't been that translated into Eng -- so its Dag or Sergio Pitol (who is actually being translated now).

Lydia Davis is an all-round great personality, writer and translator. Perfect fit for the prize. Then again all notions of what they go for are up in the air. The article recognizes but can't help to play the game, casting writers as this or that, uncomfortably so: Vargas Llosa and Munro are quite popular (these things are so relative when it comes to literature) (and post-Marquez few thought Llosa would get the nod, so not too late for Kundera). Pynchon as weird, its more that he is v comfortable with talking and engaging with pop (conversely enough that's a reason that could discount Murakami too)

Dag would be a perfect reason not to give it to Knausgaard. That's one thing I have noticed, they will often recognise some kind of literature years after, and they'll never give it to the writer who was there 'first' or anything (Beckett for Irish modernism, Kawabata for a certain kind of Japanses lit and not Mishima, Gide instead of Proust, Jelinek instead of Bernhard). Possibly Marquez was the only time where it seemed to be at right person, right moment.

Other US writer would be Harry Mathews. Don't think an Oulipo member has won this so it would reward that tradition. Seems like a gap on Nobel's CV.

Now that last would be an interesting choice.

Every time I see this thread title I think of that one Kinks song.

Svetlana Alexievich (bookies fave) wins!

Philip Roth grumbles!

eh roth is sitting around watching alf reruns w/ mia farrow

Svetlana Alexievich, you're a winner

her books sound interesting. especially the oral history ones. dalkey archive put one of them out. i do like that they pick a lot of people i've never heard of or people i know little about. they are always keeping their eye out for the next halldor laxness.

that petered out. can anyone here tell us more about svetlana? what to read in english? i know there's a couple of soviet lit devotees around.

Has to be "Voices from Chernobyl": http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=15872&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ThreePercent-Article+%28Three+Percent%29

'has to be' as in 'only book currently in print in english'?

More or less. Complete Review has the state of play:
http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/archive/201510a.htm#sz3

This Work?