Search/Destroy Every Nobel Prize Winner For Literature

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.