It's Nobel Lit Prize time again and they're not going to give it to Philip Roth or Thomas Pynchon or James Ellroy because the Swedish Academy has been going through a rather sad anti American hissy fit for the last decade or so. Who are they going to give it to? Well, I'll tell you but first I'm going to look at who they have chucked it at recently and give you my views - not in any meaningful depth mind you but rather in a lazy list fashion something like this:2007 - Doris Lessing: she's not bad actually.
2006 - Orhan Pamuk: an elliptical Turkish novelist, who writes about tedious people in tedious situations, tediously. But maybe it's just the translation - my Turkish isn't what it was.
2005 - Harold Pinter : delighted the Academy with his off the hook rant about George Bush, America, etc. You want to know how good Pinter is today? Watch the remake of Sleuth. Yikes.
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek : A fellow Serpents Tail author. Honour behooves me etc.
2003 - J. M. Coetzee : Coetzee? Really? Thin little books about South Africa, with a few fairly obvious observations about human nature.
2002 - Imre Kertész: The award that should have gone to Primo Levi.
2001 - V. S. Naipaul : Who doesn't love the grumpy Trinidadian misanthrope? I agree with this one whole heartedly.
2000 - Gao Xingjian : Yikes again. Soul Mountain has been staring at me from my bookcase for eight years. Once I took it on a longhaul flight to force myself to read it. I ended up watching The Graduate five times.
1999 - Günter Grass : Would they have given him this if he'd admitted that he was a volunteer in the Waffen SS? Probably not. Dog Years is ok.
...
2006 - Orhan Pamuk: an elliptical Turkish novelist, who writes about tedious people in tedious situations, tediously. But maybe it's just the translation - my Turkish isn't what it was.
2005 - Harold Pinter : delighted the Academy with his off the hook rant about George Bush, America, etc. You want to know how good Pinter is today? Watch the remake of Sleuth. Yikes.
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek : A fellow Serpents Tail author. Honour behooves me etc.
2003 - J. M. Coetzee : Coetzee? Really? Thin little books about South Africa, with a few fairly obvious observations about human nature.
2002 - Imre Kertész: The award that should have gone to Primo Levi.
2001 - V. S. Naipaul : Who doesn't love the grumpy Trinidadian misanthrope? I agree with this one whole heartedly.
2000 - Gao Xingjian : Yikes again. Soul Mountain has been staring at me from my bookcase for eight years. Once I took it on a longhaul flight to force myself to read it. I ended up watching The Graduate five times.
1999 - Günter Grass : Would they have given him this if he'd admitted that he was a volunteer in the Waffen SS? Probably not. Dog Years is ok.
...
So who is going to win this year? Four clues:
1 No one with an X or a Z in their name has won for a while.
2 Of the last 17 winners most have been ardent enemies of Imperalism(this ain't going to be Christopher Hitchens' year).
3 Every decade or so they give it to a random Frenchman.
4 To balance out the intellectuals who write vague pop psychology books cloaked in impenetrable language a la Elias Canetti (19
81) they often give prizes to muscular earthy writers like Hemingway and Laxness.
81) they often give prizes to muscular earthy writers like Hemingway and Laxness. ...
So don't be shocked if the winner is Xavier Zscent-Benardin, a former bricklayer turned radical rive gauche playwright whose Iraq War play Booshed shocked the 11 people who went to see it. Either him or Carla Bruni Sarkozy, poet, author, song writer, muse, friend of Sweden, and chic first lady of France. Mark my words.
15 comments:
That's quite a well-reasoned and fair conclusion. Thought-provoking stuff. If I was a betting man, I'd split my cash both ways for the win.
gb
Ger,
Always put it on the nose, that's how I've consistently lost hundreds of dollars over the years.
Note to self. Ignore betting advice from AMcK.
gb
So,I'll give you my impression on your evaluation of the recent Nobel winners,not in any meaningful depth mind you,more in a lazy fashion:
Noone writing in a language other than English is worth the effort.
At best,Günter Grass is ok.
I suppose we should be grateful that the prize has never been given to writers like:
Tolstoj- who wrote about tedious people in tedious situations, tediously
Dostoyevsky-some books about Russia,with a few fairly obvious observations about human nature
Borges- Pretty inscrutable poetry and prose, but maybe in Spanish its great.I'm sceptical.
The solution is simple:the Us should join the Booker Prize,who has a history of high-quality,uncontroversial winners,like the one last year,and can boast names like Golding, Keneally, Coetzee (2 or 3 times).
That way we could finally have every year a really worthy representative for the Literatures of the World.
Cheers,
Marco
Marco
Really you'd compare the recent winners with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Are you sure?
Tolstoy is the supreme genius of the nineteenth century. Anna Karenina is about as good as fiction can get; though the last 100 pages of W&P IS pretty tedious. Dostoyevsky never wrote a dull word. Even his worst book, say, The Double, is better than anything produced in the last five years by any of the recent winners. I wouldnt want to put any of the recent winners up against Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol or Turgenev.
Borges is the supreme essayist of the twentieth century and his stories aint bad, but let me ask you something in his long life did Borges win the Nobel Prize? No, he didn't. Borges's politics were all wrong for the Nobel Committee. He liked America too much and was an enemy of knee jerk Yankee bashing.
I think part of the problem is that the Nobel Prize Committee feels compelled to educate the world with their choices. I also wonder if its a good idea to give a prize EVERY single year.
If Philip Roth doesnt win I dont think it would be so bad joining Primo Levi, Borges, Graham Greene and James Joyce as writers that the Swedes didnt like.
Cheers mate,
Adrian...
Marco
Also consider that if I dont like someone its more a reflection of my own natural laziness rather than anything to do with their abilities. Soul Mountain is a good example of this - if I wasnt so lazy I bet I could like that one. It's all pretty subjective, (except for my views on L Ron Hubbard, of course).
A few comments from a French guy, in a very poor English, sorry.
1. You are lucky to live so far ... How dare you ironize on our fist lady, first poet, first singer, first .. No second, ... no third wife of our super president ? Shame on you.
2. I don't know how are the English translations of Saramago, but French one's are quite good. His version of Christ life is a great novel, as well as the one where he descrobes the "road-book" of two men across Spain and Portugal leaving Europe and "sailing" on the Atlantic Ocean.
3. How could James Ellroy have the Nobel ? He writes crime fiction ! That's not really literature isn't it ?
JM
Mais tres chic, non?
I'll be willing to try S. again. I'm always willing to try. I know Clive James raves about S. and I love Clive James.
Ellroy's been writing this trilogy of books about the 1950's, 60's and 70's in America. It began with American Tabloid and The Cold 6000 and will conclude with Blood's A Rover. I may be wrong but I think in a couple of decades this trilogy will be seen as a major work of art.
We'll see.
Thanks for the comment
A...
Really you'd compare the recent winners with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Are you sure?
I could say- Pynchon? Sentences at times three pages long,massive infodumping,horrible jokes and bad songs,characters with names like Profane,Slothrop or Oedipa.You'd compare Pynchon with Joyce,who does most of the same things infinitely more elegantly?Roth with Proust? Updike with Mann? are you sure?
I happen to like some of the names you casually dismissed,(and Pynchon too) but that's not the point.
Comparing stats may be right for baseball,not literature.
An evaluation needs distance and a sense of perspective,which aren't easy for contemporaries,and the will to engage the works seriously and on their own merit,otherwise it's all too easy to pass trouncing judgements.
Yes,the Nobel missed all the authors you mentioned,and many others.I can think of a lot of authors from Latin America,for instance,who would have been more worthy than those who did win.
Often the reaction may be "If they wanted to premiate an author from X,they probably could have gone for Y instead".
But only in the Us the discussions on the Nobel take the form "Another year,and neither DeLillo nor Roth nor McCarthy have won.
Oh,by the way, the prize went to some unreadable hack who writes in the post-structuralist jargon much loved by the French Intelligentsia."
Borges's politics were all wrong for the Nobel Committee. He liked America too much and was an enemy of knee jerk Yankee bashing. The politics of Camilo Josè Cela were right for the Committee? Or Najpaul? maybe more than the "politics" the problem was that,unlike Solzhenitsyn,he never denounced a dictatorship in his own country?
I think Jim's points (at least 1 and 3) are meant to be ironic.
If anything in France the distinction b/w highbrow and lowbrow is less marked than elsewhere.
Noone would say Simenon is not really literature.
The kernel of truth in Engdahl argument seems to me that Americans are much less curious of what goes around today in languages other than English.
Ciao
Marco
Marco
Who mentioned Updike?
Not me.
Engdahl's "argument" seems pretty thin to me. Its a parody of America. Engdahls America is like Herge's America, filled with gangsters and rednecks and sailors on shore leave. Obviously he hasnt spent a lot of time there, or if he has he's spent it in New York. The thing is, America is a continent 3000 miles wide with 310 million people living in it. Engdahl's comment that Americans aren't curious about the world is a dead giveaway - that's what Swedes and many Europeans want to believe. The big powerful lion is basically stupid, insular, moronic, it's a country of millions of George W Bushes. Its absolutely false of course. Every single ethnic group, interest group, minority religion etc. in the world bubbles in the US melting pot. They all have their newspapers, literature, critics. Its rich to call America inward looking from a land that is the whitest, blandest, most insular place in the world. Judging America by Hollywood fare and bad TV shows is good sport but pretty silly.
I like Thomas Pynchon. I find him very funny, but humour is a subjective thing. I dont like clowns, some people do. They're not wrong. I'm not wrong.
Cheers Marco
Adrian...
Sweden is not all that white anymore,actually.
And I don't think his (or my) point was that the Us is a country of uneducated morons;rather that there's not much interest for foreign literature,and the number of translations is,in comparison with the main Eu countries,very small.
I live in a small town, but in my local bookshop I can find,in addiction to a slew of American titles,literature from Scandinavia,Eastern Europe,South America,the Maghreb,etc.
At times it seems even Canadian or British novels have a hard time making it to the American market.
And I do like Pynchon;I think that while his prose has occasional flashes of brilliance more often than not is somewhat stiff,but he more than makes up in other departments.
However,all these jokes at the expense of his poor characters...
Ciao,
Marco
Adrian- when can we expect the Wake of Scotchy Finn? Also- you claim to be in some kind of place called Australia but my American education has assured me that if a place isn't on the US map then it doesn't exist. Care to clarify just where mythical place is located? ; )
Dylanj
Its that big island next to Africa on Larry King's map - god save us.
Scotchy Finn's Wake is either going to be a free novella that I'll post on the blog or a free short story that I'll post on the blog. I havent decided which. Time's going to be an issue. I've got to get everything with 50 G finished in the next few weeks and then I'm under the gun to do a Y/A novel by February and then I owe a couple of short stories and a book chapter to some people, but then I have nothing...a big, empty, scary void of nothingness so there's a pretty good chance I'll do it then just to - as Nietzche said - keep my own thoughts of oblivion at bay for a while before the inevitable blackness.
They should've given it to Carla Bruni. She's better looking. And I'm going out on a pretty long limb here, but she probably has a better voice too. But I can't be too harsh on the Swedes because 1/4 of their blood pumps through my veins. Zlatan Ibrahimovic for life!!!
Liam
Call me shallow but would I rather have dinner with Carla or the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Lit?
No contest.
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