July-September 2015: Nobel Laureates Writing in a Language Other Than English

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July-September 2015: Nobel Laureates Writing in a Language Other Than English

1arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 29, 2015, 7:16 pm

Well, Here we begin the journey of the Nobel laureates. In the entries below are the results of my research. I've not yet completed the 2000's, but am opening the thread for comments anyway. I hope to complete information for the laureates I have not yet written about over the next couple of days, but hopefully, these are the writers who are already more familiar to you.

Just for general information, most of my research consisted of Wikipedia, the Nobel Web site, and The New Guide to Modern World Literature by Martin Seymour Smith. All references to "Seymour-Smith" are to this work.

Before I began my research I had this idea that the Nobel Prize for Literature was the "Prize of Prizes"--that no prize could be more prestigious for a writer. I even had this idea that I wanted to read at least one work by each literature laureate. I've learned that it is true that the award is prestigious, perhaps the most prestigious literary award, but I have come to the conclusion that the prestige of the award does not mean that each laureate is still worth reading, or even that at the time the award was made the recipient was the most deserving, as I discovered many instances in which in all likelihood the award was given for reasons extraneous to literary merit.

So, as you read the laureates, I'm curious about what you think. Do you think the author deserved the prestigious award? If you read one of the earlier works, do you think the work has stood the test of time, and deserves to continue to be read? If you read a contemporaneous work, do you think the work will stand up? Do you think there was a more deserving candidate that year?

Despite these caveats, I will say I discovered dozens of works that appeal and attract, and I can't wait to read. I hope the same is true for you. Enjoy!

2arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 23, 2015, 9:32 pm

Since it was instituted in 1901, 107 Nobel prizes in literature have been awarded. (The prize was not awarded in 1914, 1918, 1935, 1940, 1941, 1942, and 1943.) The Nobel prize in literature was shared between two individuals on four occasions, 1904, 1917, 1966, and 1974, and thus during the period 1901-2014, 111 individuals have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Of these, shamefully, only 13 have been female.

Although it is technically possible, no one has been awarded the Nobel for literature more than once.

The average age of all Literature Laureates is 65. The youngest Literature Laureate was Kipling, who was 42, and the oldest was Doris Lessing, who was 88.

Two people have declined the Nobel prize for literature: Boris Pasternak in 1958, who accepted first but was later caused by the USSR to decline, and Jean Paul Sartre in 1964, because he consistently declined all official honors.

The Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded posthumously only once, in 1931 to Erik Axel Karfeldt. After 1974 the rules stipulate that the prize cannot be awarded posthumously, unless death occurred after the prize was announced.

For a long time the award was criticized as "Euro-centric". In 1984, the Swedish Academy declared that attention to non-European writers was increasing and that attempts were being made "to achieve a global distributuion."

Literature Nobel Laureates to date have written in the following languages:
English 27
French 14
German 13
Spanish 11
Swedish 7
Italian 6
Russian 6
Norwegian 3
Danish 3
Greek 2
Japanese 2
Arabic 1
Bengali 1
Chinese 2
Czech 1
Finnish 1
Hebrew 1
Icelandic 1
Hungarian 1
Occitan 1
Serbo-Croatian 1
Turkish 1
Yiddish 1

Not included in the English total above are Tagore (1913) wrote in Bengali and English; Samuel Beckett (1969) who wrote in French and English; and Joseph Brodsky (1987) who wrote in Russian and English.

Literature Nobel Laureates have received their prizes for the following types of writing:

Drama:
Mistral (1904); Echegaray (1904); Heyse (1910); Maeterlinck (1911); Hauptmann (1912); Benavente (1922); Shaw (1925); Pirandello (1934); O'Neill (1936); Sartre (1964); Beckett (1969); Fo (1997); Jelinek (2004); Pinter (2005)

History
Mommsen (1902); Churchill (1953)

Philosophy/Essay
Eucken (1908); Bergson (1927); Russell (1950)

Poetry
Sully-Prudhomme (1901); Bjornson (1903); Carducci (1906); Heyse (1910); Tagore (1913); von Heidenstam (1916); Gjellerup (1917); Spitteler (1919); Yeats (1923); Karlfeldt (1931); Mistral (1945); Eliot (1948); Lagerkvist (1951);Jimenez (1956); Pasternak (1958); Quasimodo (1959); Perse (1960); Seferis (1963); Sachs (1966); Neruda (1971); Martinson (1974); Montale (1975); Aleixandre (1977); Elytis (1979); Milosz (1980); Seifert (1984); Soyinka (1986); Brodsky (1987); Paz (1990); Walcott (1992); Heaney (1995); Szymborska (1996); Transtromer (2011)

Prose
Bjornson (1903); Sienkiewicz (1905); Kipling (1907); Lagerlof (1909); Heyse (1910); Maeterlinck (1911); Hauptmann (1912); Rolland (1915); von Heidenstam (1916); Gjellerup (1917); Pontoppidan (1917); Hamsun (1920); France (1921); Reymont (1924); Deledda (1926); Undset (1928); Mann (1929); Lewis (1930); Galsworthy (1932); Bunin (1933); Pirandello (1934); du Gard (1937); Buck (1938); Sillanpaa (1939); Jensen (1944); Hesse (1946); Gide (1947); Faulkner (1949); Lagerkvist (1951); Mauriac (1952); Hemingway (1954); Laxness (1955); Jimenez (1956); Camus (1957); Pasternak (1958); Andric (1961); Steinbeck (1962); Sartre (1964)' Sholokhov (1965); Agnon (1966); Asturias (1967); Kawabata (1968); Beckett (1969); Solzhenitsyn (1970); Boll (1972); White (1973); Johnson (1974); Martinson (1974); Bellow (1976); Singer (1978); Milosz (1980); Canetti (1981); Marquez (1982); Golding (1983); Simon (1985); Soyinka (1986); Mahfouz (1988); Cela (1989); Paz (1990); Gordimer (1991); Morrison (1993); Oe (1994); Saramago (1998); Grass (1999); Xingjian (2000); Naipul (2001); Kertesz (2002); Coetzee (2003); Jelinek (2004); Pamuk (2006); Lessing (2007); Le Clezio (2008); Muller (2009); Vargas Llosa (2010); Yan (2012); Munro (2013); Modiano (2014)

While the prize is for a writer's life work, nine Laureates were singled out for a specific work: Sholokhov--And Quiet Flows the Don; Hemingway--The Old Man and the Sea:; Du Gard--The Thibaults; Galsworthy--The Forsyte Saga; Mann--Buddenbrooks; Reymont--The Peasants; Hamsun--Growth of the Soil; Spitteler--Olympian Spring; Mommsen--A History of Rome.

The Nominations and the opinions written by the committee are kept secret for 50 years. There is a nomination data base on the web site which includes information through 1963. This data base includes information such as the fact that Tagore, Lewis, Pirandello, Buck, and Faulkner were awarded their prizes after being nominated in one year only. In addition, several previous winners have nominated later winners. For example, Thomas Mann nominated Herman Hesse, Sinclair Lewis nominated Carl Sandburg and H.G. Wells, and Pearl Buck nominated Lin Yutang.

As of June 11, 2015, the Nobel Prize web site lists the following as the ten most popular literature Laureates (it does not state the criteria on which the determination of popularity was made):

1. Patrick Modiano
2. Rabindranath Tagore
3. John Steinbeck
4. Ernest Hemingway
5. William Faulkner
6. Albert Camus
7. Szymborska
8. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. Winston Churchi;;
10. Pablo Neruda

3arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 23, 2015, 9:42 pm


1901-1910

1901 RENE F.A. SULLY-PRUDHOMME (1839-1907)
France
Male
Poetry, Philosophy

Awarded for his "lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect"

Sully-Prudhomme was a "Parnassian" poet. The Parnassus School of poetry was a reaction to Romanticism, and tended toward art for art's sake. Parnassian poetry was also influenced by the development of archeaological studies and Buddhism (interpreted as a pessimistic religion of acceptance). The ideal Parnassian poem was "emotionally restrained, descriptive, often pictorial: in a word it set out to achieve....impassiveness." The main Parnassian poet is Baudelaire.

Sully-Prudhomme originally studied to be an engineer. He attempted to transform his extensive knowledge of science and philosopy into poetry, but ended up devoting himself to prose. His most well-known poem is "Le Vase Brise'" ("The Shattered Vase"). According to Seymour-Smith, his lyrical gift was "slight."

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1902 THEODOR MOMMSEN (1817-1903)
Germany
Male
History

Awarded for being "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work "A History of Rome."

Mommsen is chiefly known for his History of Rome (1885), and the academy specifically referenced this work in making the award to him. This work covers Roman history up to the end of the Roman republic, and is one of the great classics of historical works. The presentation speech states that:

"...it is difficult to decide whether one should give higher praise and have more admiration for his vast knowledge and the organizing powers of his mind or for his intuitive imagination and his ability to turn carefully investigated facts into a living picture. His intuition and his creative power bridge the gap between the historian and the poet."

Fellow Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw cited Mommsen as one of the inspirations for his play "Caesar and Cleopatra".
Mommsen's works on Roman law and the law of obligations had a significant effect on the German Civil Code.

FACTOID: Until 2007 when Doris Lessing won, Mommsen was the oldest person to receive the prize.

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1903 BJORNSTEINE BJORNSON (1832-1910)
Norway
Male
Poetry, Drama, Fiction

Awarded "as a tribute to his noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, which has always been distinguished by both the freshness of its inspiration and the rare purity of its spirit."

As a writer, Bjornson was overshadowed by Ibsen. A lyric poet, he wrote Norway's national anthem. According to Seymour-Smith, his novels are didactic and ponderous; however, he wrote some charming short fiction, and his tales of peasant life are likely to continue to be read. His play, "A Gauntlet" attacks the blindness and hypocrisy of authority.

Bjornson was a staunch supporter of Alfred Dreyfus. He was also one of the original members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee which awards the Nobel Peace Prize and on which he served from 1901 to 1906.

FACTOID: The presentation speech said of Bjornson's schooling: "He did not do brilliantly, but the development of a great poet is not always measured by such standards."

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1904 FREDERIC MISTRAL (1830-1914) and JOSE ECHEGARAY (1832-1910)

MISTRAL
France
Male
Poetry, Lexicography of Occitan (Provencal) language.

Awarded for "the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and the native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Provencal philologist."

Mistral wanted an autonomous Provence, and he and his work represent Provence as no other. His poems were written in Provencal, and translated by him into French. He wrote lyrical poetry and three long successful epic poems, including "Mireille" (1859), the basis for an opera by Gounod. His huge dictionary of Provencal (Tresor du Felibrige) has been called "a classic of erudition and knowledge of Provencal customs and history".

He devoted his half share of the prize to the creation of the Museum at Arles, considered to be the most important collection of Provencal folk art.

ECHEGARAY
Spain
Male
Playwright

Awarded for "the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama."

Echegaray's most famous play is "El Gran Galeoto", a melodrama. It was filmed as a silent movie under the title "The World and His Wife".

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1905 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ (1846-1914)
Poland
Male
Novelist

Awarded for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer."

Sienkiewicz was one of the most popular Polish writers of the turn of the 20th century, and many of his novels are still in print. His most well-known book is Quo Vadis (1896), which has been translated into more than 30 languages. It is the story of early Christianity set in Nero's Rome. Possibly his best novel is Dogma (1891) in which he examines the division between Christian and pagan with more honesty than in Quo Vadis.
20th century Polish novelist and dramatist Witold Gombrowicz has described Sienkiewicz as a "first-rate second-rate writer." Seymour-Smith evaluates Sienkiewicz as good with a vast historical canvas, but displaying little interest in character. It is perhaps telling many of those nominating Sienkiewicz were "eminent historians."

FACTOID: He completed university, but failed to receive his diploma because he did not pass the exam in Greek language.

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1906 GIOSUE CARDUCCI (1835-1907)
Italy
Male
Poet

Awarded "as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces."

Carducci is considered modern Italy's national poet. He was proudly anti-Christian and anticlerical, and opposed to romanticism. His poetry often had a civic national function. He retired as a professor of Italian literature at the University of Bologna in 1904. Best known work is "Barbarian Odes". (1877-1879).

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1907 RUDYARD KIPLING (Wrote in English)

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1908 RUDOLPH C. EUCKEN (1846-1926)
Germany
Male
Philosophy

Awarded "in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life."

Eucken was considered one of the most prominent thinkers of his time.

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1909 SELMA LAGERLOF (1858-1940)
Sweden
Female
Fiction

Awarded "in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings."

Lagerlof was the first female winner of the prize. She will be remembered for her first novel, The Story of Gosta Berling (1891), which is really a series of short stories about the womanizing Gosta. She is also known for The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906-7), a geographical portrait of Sweden as seen from the back of a goose, and The Soul Shall Bear Witness (1912), a novel of the supernatural. Her novel Jerusalem (1901) is the basis for the 1996 movie of the same name. She is considered one of the last great epic writers, writing inventive tales of great complexity from raw folk material.

FACTOID: At the start of WW II she sent her Nobel Prize medal to the government of Finland to help raise money to fight the Soviet Union. The Finnish government raised the money by other means and returned the prize to her.

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1910 PAUL J. L. VON HEYSE (1830-1914)
Germany
Male
Poetry. Drama, Fiction

Awarded "as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world reknowned short stories."

Heyse wrote novellas, novels, lyrical poetry, and more than 50 plays. One of the Nobel judges stated that Germany had not had as great a literary genius since Goethe. He was the first Jewish Nobel laureate.

FACTOID: His father was Felix Mendelssohn's tutor (and his mother was the cousin of the mother of Felix Mendelssohn).

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4arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 23, 2015, 9:50 pm

1911-1920

1911 MAURICE MAETERLINCK (1862-1949)
Belgium
Male
Drama, Poetry, Prose

Awarded "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations."

Maeterlinck began his literary career as a poet. Much of his early poetry was in free-verse, and was influenced by Walt Whitman. Maeterlinck's poetry, in turn, influenced Yeats, Rilke, Eugene O'Neill and others. His later work includes the dramas "Pelleas et Mellisande"", adapted into an opera by Debussey, "L'Oiseaubleu" (described by Seymour-Smith as "an optimistic and charming crib of Barrie's "Peter Pan,") and "The Sightless", in which the guide for a group of blind people suddenly drops dead, and they are left to grope in terror until they meet a stranger (death?). (I wonder if Saramago was familiar with this work when he wrote Blindness?) Maeterlinck's novel, Diary of a Chambermaid, was translated into English in 1966. He is considered an important part of the Symbolist movement.

FACTOID: Although he was Flemish, Maeterlinck wrote in French.

FACTOID: Maeterlinck had been proposed and considered for the prize several times before.

(An aside: according to wikipedia, Maeterlinck, suffering from depression, rented or bought the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Wandrille in Normandy as a place to stay to help him relax. By so doing, he rescued the Abbey from the desecration of being sold and used as a chemical factory. We visited the Abbey in November 2014, and I'm glad it was saved!)

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1912 GERHART HAUPTMANN (1862-1946)
Germany
Male
Drama, Novels

Awarded "primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art."

Hauptmann originally studied to be a sculptor. He took the German-speaking world by storm with his first play "Before Dawn", which began the naturalistic movement in modern German literature. He is also remembered for another important drama," The Weavers", and a lively comedy, "The Beaver Coat". He is also known for his novels The Fool in Christ: Emmanuel Quint (1910), which shows a modern misunderstood Christ coming to grief, and The Heretic of Soana (1918), in which a priest is converted to neo-paganism. The presentation speech stated that Hauptmann's particular virtue was his penetrating and critical insight into the human soul.

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1913 RABINDRANATH TAGORE (1861-1941)
India
Male
Poetry, Fiction

Awarded "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."

Tagore was the first non-European to win the prize. He wrote in Bengali, but translated some of his own works into English. His importance in Bengali literature stems from his use of colloquial language in his writings. He wrote poetry, fiction, plays and philosophical works. He also produced accomplished works of art and music. He is most famous for his book of verse, Gitanjali (widely praised by the likes of Yeats), and that is the work to which his Nobel prize is attributed. His best single work is his novel Gora, which considers the clash in all educated Indians between Westernization and "Indianess". His novel The Home and the World is also widely read.

FACTOID: It was Tagore who bestowed upon Ghandi the title Mahatma.
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FACTOID: Tagore's compositions were chosen by two nations for their national anthems: India (Jana Gana Mana) and Bangladesh (Amar Shonar Bangla).

FACTOID: In March 2004, Tagore's Nobel Prize was stolen from the vault at Visva-Bharati University along with several other of Tagore's possessions. In December 2004, the Academy decided to present replica prizes to the university.

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1914 No award

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1915 ROMAIN ROLLAND (1866-1944)
France
Male
Drama, Fiction, Biography

Awarded "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings."

Rolland, a pacifist in WW I and a supporter of Dreyfus, has been said to be perhaps more important as an idealist than as a writer. He was a musicologist, and was named the first chair of music history at the Sorbonne in 1903. He wrote biographies of Beethoven and Ghandi, among others. As a playwright he wrote "The Wolves" which was about the Drefus affair, and he wrote a cycle of 10 revolutionary dramas entitled "The Triumph of Reason." His long (10 volume!) novel Jean-Christophe is about a musician, and was singled out by the academy in awarding the prize to Rolland. In 1921, his close friend Stefan Zweig published a biography of Rolland
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FACTOID: Hermann Hesse, a future Nobelist, dedicated Siddhartha to "my dear friend" Romain Rolland.

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1916 VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM (1859-1940)
Sweden
Male
Drama, Poetry, Fiction

Awarded "in recognition of his significance as the leading representative of a new era in our literature."

von Heidenstam received his first literary recognition for his poetry when he published a collection which marked an abandonment of naturalism that dominated Swedish literature at that time. With his friend and fellow Swede he wrote the play" "Pepita's Marriage", which satirized naturalistic gloom. He also wrote short stories and historical fiction, such as The Tree of the Folkungs, the epic story of a clan of medieval Swedish chieftains. He is considered a minor writer.

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1917 KARL GJELLERUP (1857-1919) and HENRIK PONTOPPIDAN (1857-1943)

GJELLERUP
Denmark
Male
Poetry, Fiction

Awarded "for his varied and rich poetry, which is inspired by lofty ideals."

Gjellerup began writing naturalistic fiction, but later became a new romanticist. His wife was German, and he moved to Germany, and was considered by many Danes as a German rather than a Danish writer. His most important early novel is The Learner of German. In his later years he was influenced by Buddhism, and his novel The Pilgrim Kamanita, which is his most widely translated work, features an individual's journey from earthly pursuits towards nirvana. He also wrote a drama, "The Wife of the Perfect", inspired by the life of Buddha. Today, he is almost forgotten in Denmark, and it is said that his Nobel Prize came as a shock to everyone, including the Danes.

PONTOPPIDAN
Denmark
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark."

Pontoppidan is regarded by many as Denmark's greatest novelist. He wrote realistic fiction, frequently describing the lives of peasants and country workers. He later portrayed psychological and naturalistic problems in socially engaged fiction. He attempted to live a Tolstoian life. His three main novels are considered "description of society" novels in the tradition of Zola and Balzac. These are The Promised Land (1896), Lucky Per (1898) and The Realm of the Dead (1916). Pontoppidan's last novel is Man's Heaven (1927), the story of a power-seeking man and the corruption of almost everyone during World War I. Today Pontoppidan remains one of the most discussed Danish novelists, but unfortunately he is not widely translated into English.

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1918 No award

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1919 CARL F.G. SPITTELER (1845-1924)
Switzerland
Male
Poetry

Awarded "in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring."

According to the Nobel web site, Spitteler actually received the prize one year later, in 1920. During the 1919 selection process, the committee decided that none of the year's nominations met the criteria. According to the Nobel Foundation's statutes, the prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and it was under this statute that Spitteler received the prize for 1919 in 1920.

"Olympic Spring" is an allegorical epic poem mixing religious and mythological themes. The presentation speech describes it as "a verse epic of 600 pages about the gods of Olympus. Notably, the speech also pointed out that Spitteler had "intentionally chosen a subject and an approach which were bound to bewilder and indeed even repel many readers...."

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1920 KNUT HAMSUN (1859-1952)
Norway
Male
Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Essays

Awarded "for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil."

Hamsun is an important influential and innovative literary stylist. His work spans 70 years and he wrote more than 20 novels. He influenced writers such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Herman Hesse, and Maxim Gorky. He pioneered techniques such as stream of consciousness. Isaac Bashevis Singer called him, "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect--his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun."

However, he remains a controversial figure, as during World War II Hamsun supported the German war effort. He met with high Nazi officials, including Hitler and Goebbels, and is reported to have sent Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift. After the war he was detained by the police for commission of acts of treason, but criminal treason charges were dropped due to his advanced age and "permanently impaired mental faculties." However, he was fined in a civil liability case.

He first received literary recognition for his novel Hunger (1890), which describes a young man's descent into madness caused by hunger and poverty. In Growth of the Soil, the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, there is a strong connection between his characters and their natural environment. Many consider his novel Mysteries (1892) to be his best work, and Martin Seymour-Smith says that Mysteries carries within it "the seeds of most of the experiments in fiction that have been made since."

FACTOID: Actor Max von Snydow played Hamsun in a movie based on the book The Hamsun Trial (1978) by Thorkild Hansen, about Hamsun's civil treason.

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5arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 19, 2015, 8:04 pm

1921-1930

1921 ANATOLE FRANCE (1844-1924)
France
Male
Fiction, Poetry

Awarded "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament."

The son of a bookseller and a bibliophile himself, France first achieved recognition with his novel The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). He took an important part in the Dreyfus Affair, and signed Zola's Manifesto is support of Dreyfus. He wrote about the Dreyfus Affair in his novel Monsieur Bergeret (1901). His later works include the satirical Penguin Island (1908) and a work of historical fiction set during the French Revolution, The Gods Will Have Blood (1912). Another work of historical fiction, the novel Thais (1896), is set in the Alexandrine world when Christians were vying with the survivors of Hellenic civilization. The Revolt of the Angels (1914) is another of his novels still read today.

FACTOID: France's entire works were put on the Prohibited Books Index of the Roman Catholic Church in 1922. He regarded this as a "distinction."

FACTOID: France is believed to be the model for the narrator's literary idol Bergotte in Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

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1922 JACINTO BENAVENTE Y MARTINEZ (1866-1954)
Spain
Male
Drama

Awarded "for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama."

According to Martin Seymour-Smith, Benavente "rescued Spanish theatre from ...crude and melodramatic sensationalist realism...." He wrote over 100 plays of all varieties--children's fantasies, character dramas, historical plays, social satire, and tragedies, among others. His most famous play is "The Passion Flower" on the theme of incest. He also translated Shakespeare into Spanish.

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1923 WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (Wrote in English)

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1924 WLADYSLAW REYMONT (1867-1925)
Poland
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his great national epic, The Peasants."

The Peasants (1902-1909), a four volume novel, presents a complete picture of country life in Poland in the "now" of the late 19th century over the course of four seasons. It is written in dialect, and presents an authentic feel for the customs and lives of the immense cast of characters it depicts. Seymour-Smith considers this novel to "outdo Zola", noting that The Peasants is more profound than Zola's Earth. According to the presentation speech:

"Reymont acknowledged that the idea for his book was evoked by Zola's Earth---but not through admiration but through indignation and opposition. He found it conventionalized, distorted and coarsely characterized the class of society in which Reymont had grown up. Reymont knew this class of society from abundant experience from within and with full understanding."

Another "Zolaesque" novel is The Promised Land, perhaps Reymont's best-known novel. It is set in the city of Lodz during the industrial revolution and depicts the struggle for survival of three main characters, a German, a Jew, and a Pole. The Promised Land has been translated into 15 languages and has been made into a movie twice.

FACTOID: In 1922 Reymont wrote a novella entitled Bunt, which describes a revolt of animals and which was a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution. It is not known whether George Orwell was aware of this work when he wrote Animal Farm more than 20 years later.

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1925 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (Wrote in English)

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1926 GRAZIA DELEDDA (1871- 1936)
Italy
Female
Fiction

Awarded "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general."

The second woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, Deledda was a native of Sardinia, and much of her work features the life, customs and traditions of the Sardinian people. As a writer, she is convincing in demonstrating how social customs and tradition both impel people to unwise actions and cut them down. Her first real success came with Elias Portolu (1903) about a convict who returns to Sardinia to have a tragic love affair with his brother's wife. Also notable are After the Divorce (1902) and Ashes (1904), which is described as "almost Faulknerian." The manuscript of her novel Cosima was discovered after her death and was published posthumously.

Deledda died of breast cancer at age 64. Her last novel was a semi-autobiographical account of a young woman coming to terms with her breast cancer.

FACTOID: Deledda had a beloved pet crow named Checcha.

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1927 HENRI BERGSON (1859-1941)
France
Male
Philosophy

Awarded "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented."

Bergson's major works are: Time and Free Will (1889); Matter and Memory (1896); Creative Evolution (1907); and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). He posited that the processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.

FACTOID: He married a cousin of Marcel Proust, who was his best man at his wedding.

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1928 SIGRID UNDSET (1882-1949)
Norway
Female
Fiction

Awarded "principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages."

Undset was born in Denmark, but moved to Norway at an early age. The academy cited her depictions in her historical fiction in which, "honour retains all the rigour and all the weight that it had for the chevaliers and great landowners of the fourteenth century. The demands of honour are clearly stated, and the conflicts it creates are worked out regardless of their brutal consequences. Religious life is described with startling truth."
Her best known work is the trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter which portrays life in the Middle Ages. Seymour-Smith calls this a "middle-brow historical novel." She is also known for the 4 volume The Master of Hestviken.

FACTOID: A crater on the planet of Venus is named after her.

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1929 THOMAS MANN (1875-1955)
Germany
Male
Fiction

Awarded "principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature."

Buddenbrooks (1901) was Mann's first novel, and brought him phenomenal success at the young age of 26. It tells the story of the decline of a great bourgeois merchant family (partially based on Mann's own family) over three generations. It has been described as both effective popular fiction and as "highbrow." It is the most realistic of his fiction (I've read it twice and loved it both times).
His novella Death in Venice is as highly regarded as his full-scale novels. Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, relate his struggles with bisexuality, which were sometimes reflected in his work, notably Death in Venice.
In The Magic Mountain (1924), Hans Castorp, a young engineer goes to a Swiss sanatorium for a three week visit and ends up staying seven years, during which he is "educated" out of his obsession with death. Mann himself said that The Magic Mountain is "a queer, ironical, almost parodic" version of the Bildungsroman.
Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1943) is a Biblical tetralogy written while Mann was in exile during World War II. Doctor Faustus (1947) presents a portrait of a composer, and explores the price of creativity. In The Holy Sinner (1951) the protagonist is born in incest, marries his "sister" (who is his mother), and becomes Pope. Mann's last book, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, is a picaresque novel, and is often considered his best novel since his first, Buddenbrooks.

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1930 SINCLAIR LEWIS Wrote in English

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6arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 23, 2015, 4:28 pm

1931-1940

1931 ERIK A KARLFELDT (1864-1931)
Sweden
Male
Poetry

Awarded for "the poetry of Erik Axel Karlfeldt."

The prize was awarded to Karlfeldt posthumously. It is rumored that he was offered the award in 1919 and declined it, so the Academy decided to grant the prize to him after his death. He wrote symbolist poetry, and his works include "Fridolin's Songs" (1898), "Fridolin's Garden" (1901), and "Arcadia Borealis".

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1932 JOHN GALSWORTHY (Wrote in English)

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1933 IVAN BUNIN (1870-1953)
Russian
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing."

Gorky called Bunin the best Russian writer of the day, and he was the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He is best known for his two short novels, The Village (1910) and Dry Valley (1912). The Village is a bleak portrayal of Russian villiage life full of brutality and harsh realities. It shattered the idealized dream of the virtuous peasant. Dry Valley concerns the fall of a great land-owning family. He is also known for his autobiographical novel The Life of Arsenyev (1929). Collections of short stories include The Gentleman From San Francisco (1916) and Dark Avenues (1946).

Bunin is considered to be the only 20th century Russian writer to whole-heartedly carry on pre-revolutionary Russian traditions. He lived in exile after the revolution, and was a Russian emigre in Paris at the time he received the prize. In Russia itself, Bunin's receipt of the prize was considered to be "an imperialist intrigue."

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1934 LUIGI PIRANDELLO (1867-1936)
Italy
Male
Drama, Fiction

Awarded for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage."

According to Seymour-Smith, Pirandello is as important to world drama as Ibsen or Strindberg. He led a cruelly unhappy life. His family lost all of its wealth in 1903, which event also drove his wife into an incurable paranoic madness. During this time he wrote his first novel, The Late Mattia Pascal, which contains some autobiographical elements. He continued to live with his wife and care for her until he was forced to institutionalize her 16 years later. He was a member of the Fascist party, and gave his Nobel medal to the government to be melted down.

The Late Mattia Pascal contains the germ of Pirandello's later work, but he found that the dramatic form was necessary to express his basic themes. The dramas that are considered his masterpieces are Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) (a play within a play); Each in His Own Way (1928) (a play outside the play); Tonight We Improvise (1930) (scripted improvisation); and Henry IV (1922), which deals with insanity and its relationship to reality. In the Nobel presentation speech, it was said that Pirandello had "the magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre."

He also wrote many short stories, most of which have been translated into English, and a total of 8 novels His last novel, One, None and a Hundred Thousand (1926) is his most controversial and fascinating. It is a study of the fragmentation of a personality dissolving into madness.

FACTOID: Pirandello was born in the village of Kaos (Chaos) on the island of Sicily

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1935
No award

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1936 Eugene O'Neill (Wrote in English).

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1937 Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958)
France
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for the artistic power and truth with which he has depicted human conflict as well as some fundamental aspects of contemporary life in his novel-cycle Les Thibault."

du Gard was one of the most private writers of the 20th century, and he lived most of his life in strict seclusion, although he was a close personal friend of Andre Gide. He trained as an archivist, and this comes through in the massive build-up of detail in his fiction.

The Thibaults, du Gard's major work, and the work for which he received the award, is a multi-volume "roman fleuve" (a narrative method relatively little concerned with composition, which "advances like a river across vast countries reflecting everything in its way. The essence of such a novel, in large as well as in small matters, consists in the exactitude of this reflection rather than in the harmonious balance of its parts....") The novel follows the fortunes of brothers Antoine and Jacques Thibault through the end of World War I. Six volumes were published between 1922 and 1929. Later a final two installments, Summer, 1914 and Epilogue, which focus on the historical situation leading to the outbreak of war, were completed. Other novels are Jean Barois, set in the context of the Dreyfus Affair and Lieutenant Colonel de Maumort, unfinished at du Gard's death and published posthumously. (As an aside, I have read most of Lieutenant Colonel de Maumort and can attest to the "massive build-up" of detail--in its attention to capturing the entirety of each moment, it reminded me of Proust, although the sentences were not as wandering.)

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1938 Pearl Buck (Wrote in English).

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1939 Frans E. Sillanpaa (1888-1964)
Finland
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature."

Sillanpaa was born into a peasant family and his fiction is all almost entirely set in and about the small region of Finnish peasants Sillanpaa grew up among. In his work, he attempted to completely represent the harsh realities of their lives, and his work is naturalistic with psychological interpretation and insight into the characters. His style is terse and simple, "in a language of rather limited literary background." He won international fame with his first novel, Meek Heritage (1918), written during the Finnish civil war fought between the nationalists and the communists. He is also known for his novel The Maid Silja (1931). His last important novel is People in the Summer Night (1934).

In the presentation speech in December 1939 (Sillanpaa was not able to attend the ceremony), it was stated, "At the present moment even the name of your country is significant everywhere. As simple as you see them, your people find themselves a prey to fateful powers....In our thanks for what you have given, our thoughts go still further. They go, with all our admiration and the emotion which grips us, to your people and your nation." I was curious about the context of this statement, and so I did some research to learn that Sillanpaa received the award during the so-called "Winter War" between the Soviet Union and Finland. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, resulting in the Soviet Union's expulsion from the League of Nations. Finland fought bravely, but in the Treaty of Moscow, concluded in March 1940, Finland ceded territory representing 11% of its land and 30% of its economy to the Soviet Union. As I've researched the Nobelists, I couldn't help but wonder whether the award for 1939 was a political act by the academy. If so, it would not be the only time that the award was politically motivated.

FACTOID: An asteroid discovered in 1938 is named after Sillanpaa.

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1940 No award.

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7arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 23, 2015, 5:58 pm

1941-1950

1941, 1942, 1943 No prize was awarded.

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1944 Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1873-1950)
Denmark
Male
Fiction, Poetry

Awarded "for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style."

Johannes Jensen is considered the father of Danish modernism, and in 1999 his novel The Fall of the King (1901), a work of historical fiction about King Christian II, was called the best Danish novel of the 20th century. He was born in Himmerland, and his father was a veterinarian. Seymour-Smith calls his first book, People of the Himmerland (1898), "among the best of all modern regional literature." He has a vast body of work, and wrote in many genres, which included, according to the academy presentation speech, "epic and lyric, imaginative and realistic, essays, philosophy and scientific...." He was also a stylistic innovator and a student of biological and philosophical evolution.

Jensen invented a new form he called the "myth", a short piece, often without a plot, concentrating on essences. These are collected in 9 volumes in The Myths (1907-1944). He also wrote a cycle of six novels entitled The Long Journey (1908-1922), which follows man's development from a soulless herd-life where men worship a fire god, to a state of primitive civilization up through the time of the explorations of Christopher Columbus. This work incorporates a number of Jensen's "myths." The Long Journey has been called a "Darwinian alternative to the Biblical Genesis myth".

Jensen's poetry is also highly regarded. He had traveled America, and his poetry was influenced by Walt Whitman. One of his most famous poems, At Memphis Station, begins:

Half-awake and half dozing,
In an inward seawind of dadaid dreams
I stand and gnash my teeth
At Memphis Station, Tennessee.
It is raining.

Presumably because of the war, a ceremony was not held in Stockholm in 1944. Rather, there was an award luncheon in New York at which Jensen was not present. The medal was actually presented the next year, 1945, in Stockholm.

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1945 Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957)
Chile
Female
Poetry

Awarded "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world."

Mistral is the first Latin American to win the prize, and also the first female poet to win. She was raised in small Andean village and attended a school taught by her older sister. Her formal education ended when she was 12 years old. Nevertheless, she was able to obtain a teaching position and rose to progressively more prestigious posts, partially because of her publication of poetry in various national magazines and newspapers. Ultimately she was appointed director of Santiago's most prestigious girl's school, and later went to Mexico to work with its Minister of Education on educational reforms. She also traveled widely in the U.S. and Europe, and lived many years in France.

She was born Lucila Godoy Alcayaya, and reportedly chose the pen name Gabriela Mistral from her two favorite poets, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frederic Mistral. Her first important literary recognition came in 1914 when she won a national prize for her work "Sonnets of Death," which was dedicated to a man she loved who had committed suicide. She never married or had children, although she is known for her love of children. She adopted a nephew, and he tragically also committed suicide.

Her other works include "Desolation" (1922); "Tenderness" (1924) (simple songs for children); "Tala" (1938) (for the infant victims of the Spanish Civil War); and "Wine Press" (1954). Seymour-Smith says she wrote, "candid--but not really erotic--poetry of love," and that she wrote "with as deep an insight into children as any poet of her generation...." Further, he states,

"If the Nobel Prize were a reliable measure of creative merit, then possibly the poetry of Gabriela Mistral would not be quite up to the
mark....but she was a suitable recipient because of her personality; sorrowful, humane, radiant, remarkably genuine--and with a much
more than merely competent poetic output."

FACTOID: Pablo Neruda was at one time one of her students.

FACTOID: Her portrait is on the 5000 Chilean bank note.

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1946 Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
Switzerland/Germany
Male
Fiction, Poetry

Awarded "for his inspired writings, which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style."

In his time, Hesse was popular and well-known in the German-speaking world. However, by the time of his death he was little read, despite his Nobel prize winner status. This changed in the 1960's, though, as the themes of his work--the quest for enlightenment--resonated with the counter-culture, the "hippies." In the space of just a few years, Hesse became one of the most widely read and translated authors of the 20th century. He was especially popular with younger readers, a trend that continues even today.

Hesse was born in Germany, but later moved to Switzerland and became a Swiss citizen in 1923. His mother was born in India, and his uncle was a prominent scholar of India, which may have influenced some of his work. His early work includes the novel Peter Camenzind (1904), about a Swiss peasant who becomes a famous writer, but renounces the decadent life of the city to return to his native countryside. Although he achieved success as a writer, Hesse was unhappy, and this prompted him to visit India in 1911. On his return, he underwent Jungian analysis, and this resulted in his first major novel, Demian (1919). Demian concerns the protagonist, Emil Sinclair's, exploration of a "dark" world in defiance of his bourgeois parents. There are elements akin to magical realism, and Seymour-Smith deems the novel fascinating and readable.
Hesse's next novel, Siddhartha (1922), drew on his Indian experiences, and tells the tale of a Brahmin whose quest for enlightenment, first as an ascetic, then as a sensualist, does not bear fruit until he becomes the assistant of a ferryman who plies between the two worlds of the spirit and of the flesh. Next came Steppenwolf (1927), which draws on the fairy tales of E.T.A. Hoffman. The protagonist, Haller, who has devoted himself to pure spirit, enters into "the Magic Theatre" and becomes entranced by the world of the flesh. Other works include Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943).

FACTOID: T.S. Eliot was a fan of Hesse, and quoted him in the notes to The Wasteland.

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1947 Andre Gide (1869-1951)
France
Male
Prose

Awarded "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writing, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight."

Gide was born in Paris to strict Calvinist parents. He wrote fiction, essays, criticism, travel and political books. Many critics claim his best work is his Journals (1889-1939). Gide had a strong tendency to homosexuality, although he married his cousin. She is portrayed in his semi-autobiographical novel, Strait Is the Gate (1909).

Gide's other major works include Fruits of the Earth (1897), which is described as the pagan expression of his reaction to his strict upringing. In The Immoralist (1902) a depraved hero takes his wife to Africa, contracts and recovers from TB, and surrenders to his appetites, including his attraction to young Arab boys. The Vatican Cellars (1914) concerns the theme of "the gratuitous act" by which a man may become free. In this case, the hero commits an act of disinterested murder. In The Counterfeiters (1926), perhaps his most highly regarded work of fiction, a group of young men surround a novelist who is writing a book of the same name.

Seymour-Smith opines that, "there is a full understanding of passion in {Gide's} fiction; but it is not conveyed in the texture of his writing---it is observed."

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1948 T.S. Eliot (Wrote in English).

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1949 William Faulkner (Wrote in English).

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1950 Bertrand Russell (Wrote in English

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8arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 24, 2015, 2:11 pm

1951-1960

1951 Par Lagerkvist
Sweden
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavours in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind."

Lagerkvist is well-known in Sweden for his lyrical poetry. In translation, he is better known for his novels. These include The Dwarf (1944), about a hideous creature drawn against a colorful Renaissance background; Barabbas (1950), a tragic work about the thief who was to have been crucified, but whose place was taken by Christ; The Hangman, a medieval allegory of contemporary (Nazi) evil. Seymour-Smith does not think much of Lagerkvist--his "high philosophical intentions are more impressive...than his creative solutions of them,"---and concludes that the judgment that he is the foremost Swedish writer of the 20th century is "clearly wrong."

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1952 Francois Mauriac (1865-1970)
France
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life."

Mauriac was born in Bordeaux and had a sheltered upbringing with a strong maternal influence. Most of his work is set in the area in which he grew up. He remained a life-long Catholic, and his themes frequently include the "meaningless misery of existence without God." However, his is not a rigid dogma, but a self-questioning, merciful and liberal mindset. His first major novel was The Family (1923), which was a study of murderously intense maternal possessiveness and the loneliness of a weak man. Other works include Therese Desqueyroux (1927), in which a young married woman is tempted by boredom into sin (poisoning her husband). In Desert of Love (1925) an estranged father and son are doomed never to find fulfillment in love. The Viper's Tangle (1932) is the story of a millionaire who spitefully intends to disinherit his wife and family, and expresses his hatred of them in a long letter to be read on his death. A Woman of the Pharisees (1941) is the study of a "sour and evil" monster. In the presentation speech, the academy states that Mauriac plunges us into the midst of man's weaknesses and vices; Mauriac himself viewed his work as expressing that "Each of us knows he could become less evil that he is." Seymour-Smith claims that "his books are bewitchingly readable."

Mauriac is also remembered for his bitter dispute with Albert Camus following World War II. Camus believed that France should purge itself of Nazi collaborator elements; Mauriac argued that such disputes should be set aside in the interests of national reconciliation. In later life Mauriac was a journalist and commentator on current affairs.

FACTOID: Mauriac encouraged Elie Wiesel to write about his experiences during the war, and wrote the forward to Wiesel's book, Night.

FACTOID: Mauriac is the father of the writer Claude Mauriac, and the grandfather of Anne Wiazemsky, a French actress married to the French director Jean-Luc Godard.

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1953 Winston Churchill (Wrote in English).

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1954 Ernest Hemingway (Wrote in English)

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1955 Halldor Laxness (1902-1998)
Iceland
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland."

Laxness is the first literature laureate born in the 20th century, and the sole Icelandic literature laureate. As a young man he traveled widely. He lived more than a year with Benedictine monks in Belgium, and then spent two years in Hollywood attempting to write screenplays for the movies. Some of his work reflects his travels--the early novel The Great Weaver From Kashmir (1927) tells the story of a young Icelander roaming Europe after World War I--but all his important works have Icelandic themes. He is considered an excellent painter of Icelandic settings, and as having "an extraordinarily fine sense of the concrete things of human life, and at the same time an exceptional gift for storytelling...."

His masterwork, Independent People (1934) has been called one of the best books of the 20th century. It was released as a Book of the Month selection in the U.S. in 1946, and became an immediate bestseller. It tells the story of Bjartur, an man with an indomitable will for freedom and independence, and the touching love for his foster daughter Asta Sollilja. Other works include The Bell of Iceland (1943), a work of historical fiction; The Atom Station (1948), which satirized the American presence in Iceland; Paradise Reclaimed (1960), about Iceland's Mormons; Happy Warriors (1952), another work of historical fiction; The Fish Can Sing (1957); and Under the Glacier (1968).

FACTOID: An adaptation of Independent People was filmed in 1954 by Sven Nykvist, a celebrated Swedish cinematographer who frequently worked with Ingmar Berman.

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1956 Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958)
Spain
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity."

Jimenez was born in Andalucia, and celebrated the region in a prose poem about a writer and his donkey, Platero and I (1914). During the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile in Puerto Rico, where he was a Professor of Spanish language and literature at the University of Puerto Rico. Later, he held professorships at the University of Miami at Coral Gables and at the University of Maryland. His poetic output was immense, and according to Seymour-Smith, "his poetry seeks to uncover the language of reality, to relearn the meaning of words." One of his most important contributions is considered to be his advocacy of the French concept of "pure poetry." Seymour-Smith considers his early poetry to be impressionistic and sentimental--"over-decorative"--but his later style is more austere free verse. He was a shy and retiring person, and his wife, who died of cancer two days after he was awarded the Nobel, protected him from the outside world. A selection of his poems in English can be found in Three Hundred Poems (1962).

FACTOID: The epigraph to Farenheit 451--"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."--is a quotation from Jimenez.

FACTOID: With his wife, Jimenez translated the complete poems of Tagore.

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1957 Albert Camus (1913-1960)
France
Male
Prose

Awarded "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our time."

Camus was born in Algeria to a mother of Spanish descent. His father died in World War I when Camus was one, and he was raised by his mother, an illiterate housecleaner. He attended the University of Algiers, but, having contracted TB at age 17 was only able to study part time.

His name is often associated with that of Sartre, and with the philosophy of existentialism. He did not consider himself an existentialist, and he said, "Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked." His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as "absurdism", i.e. the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent meaning and value in life, and the human inability to find any such meaning or value. He was politically active through-out his life, at times a member of the French communist party (from which he was expelled when he joined the Algerian People's Party), and was also associated with the French anarchist movement. Because of his TB he was rejected from the French army in WW II, but was active in the Resistance publishing an underground newspaper. As a human rights activist he was torn when the Algerian War began in 1954; he identified with the pied-noirs (French living in Algeria), to which his own parents belonged, and, unrealistically, believed the pied-noirs and Arabs could coexist.

Camus' works include The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) which consists of essays supporting his thesis that man is like Sisyphus in an absurd task, but happy in his losing battle. His novel The Stranger was also published in 1942. The protagonist, Merseault, kills an Arab in apparent self-defense, and through his indifference and an incompetent attorney is condemned to die. In The Plague (1947), a doctor and his assistant tirelessly battle a rat-carried virus. In The Fall (1957), according to Seymour-Smith, the anti-hero, Clamance, "a Gallic Felix Krull a con-man, a disembodied voice 'confesses'...in a Dutch bar, a Paris lawyer abdicated from 'business' to the Amsterdam waterfront because he 'fell' when he failed to rescue a girl from drowning." Exile and the Kingdom (1957) consists of six short stories each with a different technical approach. He is the second youngest recipient of the award, after Rudyard Kipling.

Camus died in a car accident in 1960. In his obituary, Sartre wrote, "Camus could never cease to be one of the principal forces in our cultural domain, nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and of this century."

FACTOID: Camus used his prize money to adapt and stage Dostoevsky's Demons. His adaptation required 33 actors, had 24 scenes and lasted 4 hours.

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1958 Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
Soviet Union
Male
Poetry, Fiction

Awarded "for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition."

Pasternak is probably one of the more controversial literature laureates. The novel for which he is most well-known, Doctor Zhivago (1957), was forbidden to be published in the Soviet Union at the time the prize was awarded. When the prize was announced, Pasternak initially accepted and sent a telegram expressing his gratitude. Then after "spontaneous demonstrations" in the Soviet Union denouncing Pasternak, he sent a second telegram stating, "In view of the meaning given the award by the society in which I live, I must renounce this undeserved distinction which has been conferred on me. Please do not take my voluntary renunciation amiss."

Following this, for years there were rumors that the CIA and the British Intelligence Agency M16 had lent a hand to ensure that Doctor Zhivago was submitted to the committee in an attempt to influence its decision, so that Pasternak would win and the credibility of the Soviet Union would be harmed. Finally in 2014, the CIA released declassified documents confirming that it had undertaken a massive propaganda campaign intended to influence the Nobel committee. In order to turn the novel into an international bestseller, the CIA purchased thousands of copies as they were printed through-out Europe. These declassified documents also show that the CIA published thousands of copies of Doctor Zhivago in Russian to be distributed to Soviet visitors at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussells. The CIA also funded the publication of a miniature light weight version of Doctor Zhivago that could be easily concealed for smuggling.

Seymour-Smith considers Doctor Zhivago to be "over-praised", and that Pasternak's true talent was as a poet. He considers Pasternak's two long poems, "1905" (1926) and "Lieutenant Schmidt" (1927) to be powerful. Other works of poetry are "My Sister Life" (1922) and "Themes and Variations" (1924). Pasternak also wrote the autobiographical The Childhood of Lovers (1925), a fragment of a longer novel which was destroyed.

Although his work was displeasing to the Soviet authorities, it is believed that Pasternak survived the Stalinist purges because Stalin liked his Georgian poetry. Pasternak was close friends with poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. He was present when Mandelstam read his poem "The Stalin Epigram", for which Mandelstam was arrested and exiled. Pasternak tried to intercede on behalf of Mandelstam, but was unsuccessful.

FACTOID: Pasternak's father was an important Russian post-Impressionist painter, and illustrated some of Tolstoy's works. Tolstoy was a family friend. Pasternak's mother was a concert pianist, and the composer Scriabin was also a family friend.

FACTOID: Pasternak studied music composition and theory for six years, and intended to be a composer, until he turned to poetry.

FACTOID: Pasternak's son was ultimately able to accept the prize on behalf of his father in 1988.

FACTOID: Bill Maudlin produced a political cartoon which won a Pulitzer in 1959. It showed Pasternak and another inmate chopping trees in what is apparently Siberia, and the caption reads, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?"

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1959 Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)
Italy
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for his lyrical poetry which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times."

Quasimodo was born in Sicily, and in 1929 he moved to Florence. He published his first collection of poetry "Waters and Earths" in 1929. According to Seymour-Smith, "no one has achieved so intense a poetry of social despair, nor so exact an indication of where peace could spring from (the individual's recognition of his nature)." Translations are available in Selected Writings (1960) and To Give and To Have (1975).

An example of a famous short poem from his first collection:

We stand alone on the world's heart
Stabbed by a ray of sun:
And suddenly it's night.

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1960 Saint-John Perse (1887-1975)
France
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for the soaring flight and the evocative imagery of his poetry which in a visionary fashion reflects the conditions of our time."

Perse was born on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe to a French family that had settled there in the 17th century. At the age of 11, he and his family moved to France. He had a long and successful diplomatic career under his real name, Alexis Leger, including a number of years in Peking. He went into exile after France's occupation by Germany in World War II, and spent most of the rest of his life in the U.S.

His first literary success came with "To Celebrate a Childhood" (1910) with poems evoking memories of the exotic paradise of Guadeloupe. "Anabasis" (1924) is an epic poem written while he was in China, and relates the tale of a mysterious war-like expedition into a desert. Other works include "Exile" (1942); "Rains" (1943); "Winds" (1946); "Snows" (1944); "Seamarks" (1957); "Birds" (1963). His admirers include many of the illustrious names of the 20th century, including Rilke, Eliot and Gide. In fact, the translator of Anabasis was Eliot.

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9arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 29, 2015, 12:44 am

1961-1970

1961 Ivo Andric (1892-1974)
Yugoslavia
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country."

Because of his unique circumstances--born in Bosnia, to Croat parents, and later living in Serbia-- Andric's work has been claimed to be part of Serbian literature, Croatian literature, and Bosnian literature. Seymour-Smith characterizes Andric as essentially an epic novelist whose main themes are man's isolation and insignificance before the huge panorama of history. Much of his fiction is set in Bosnia under Turk rule.

His main works are Bosnian Story (1945), which takes place in the time of the Napoleonic Wars and concerns such things as the rivalry between French and Austrian consuls, revolts of Serbo-Croatian peasants, and religious wars between Muslims, Christians and Jews; Bridge on the Drina (1945), which surveys life in the little Bosnian town of Visegrad from the time the first bridge was built in 1516 until World War I; and The Woman from Sarajevo (1945), a purely psychological study of avarice. Together, these three novels are known as the Bosnian Trilogy, although they are not thematically related. Another important work is Devil's Yard (1954), which is an account of the prison at Istanbul during the Ottoman past.

FACTOID: Andric donated all of his prize money for the improvement of libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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1962 John Steinbeck (Wrote in English)

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1963 Giorgos Seferis (1900--1971)
Greece
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeing for the Hellenic world of culture"

Seferis is the first Greek to receive the award, and is considered one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century. He described himself thusly: "I am a monotonous and obstinate man who for twenty years has not ceased to say the same things over and over again." According to the Academy. his poetic output was not large, but "because of the uniqueness of its thought and style and the beauty of its language, it has become a lasting symbol of all that is indestructible in the Hellenic affirmation of life."

Seferis was born in Smyrna, but grew up in Greece. He spent years in the Greek diplomatic service, and went into exile with the Free Greek government during World War II. After the military coup d'etat in 1967, and the repressive rule of the colonels, Seferis took a stand against the regime in an important statement on the BBC. He did not live to see the end of the junta.

One of his most famous stanzas was read at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Olympics in Athens. From "Mythistorema":

I wake with this marble head in my hands;
It exhausts my elbows and I don't know where to put it down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream.
So our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again.


English translations of his poems can be found in Complete Poems (trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (1995). Seferis also wrote an important book called On the Greek Style (1962).

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1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
France
Male
Prose

Awarded "for his work, which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age."

Sartre dominated the French literary scene for more than 25 years, as a "sort of" philosopher, political activist, critic, playwright, and novelist. Known for his existentialist philosophy, Sartre sees man in an absurd and godless universe, but capable of attaining meaning if he would undertake to make the choice to exist as himself. However, man's activity (bourgeois and in bad faith) instead consists of perpetual attempts to alienate himself and others from the freedom involved with choice. As a matter of principle, Sartre refused to accept the Nobel prize.

Some of Sartre's more important early works are: Nausea (1938), his first and semi-autobiographical novel, and Intimacy (1939), short stories consisting of "gloomy accounts of the various mechanisms by which people remain trapped in boredom...." Another important work is Roads To Freedom, a trilogy consisting of the novels The Age of Reason (1945); The Reprieve (1945); and Iron in the Soul (1949). The hero of the trilogy, Mathieu, is "a true representation of intellectuals of Sartre's generation," and his story is set against France's descent into the disgrace of the Vichy reign.

Sartre was also a dramatist, and No Exit (1945) is considered his best play. In this drama, the characters are confined after their deaths to the drawing room of hell to discuss their lives. Its most famous line is "Hell is other people." His most moving play is Crime Passionel (1948). It is an attack on the inhumanity of certain totalitarian tactics. Loser Wins (1959) is on the theme of personal responsibility/German war-guilt.

FACTOID: Sartre's mother was the first cousin of Albert Schweitzer.

FACTOID: While he was in the French army, Sartre served as a meteorologist.

FACTOID: After Sartre was arrested for civil disobedience during the May 1968 strikes in Paris, Charles de Gaulle pardoned him, saying, "You don't arrest Voltaire."

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1965 Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984)
Russia
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people."

Sholokhov was not a Cossack, but he wrote about the Cossack culture movingly and authentically. His best-known book is And Quiet Flows the Don (1940), a great epic novel covering the Revolution, World War I, and the Cossack revolt. Its hero Gregory is delighted with the abolition of the tsars, but hates the Bolsheviks; he recognizes the old Russia is dead, but can't accept the new. Seymour-Smith calls the book a "lyrical affirmation of agricultural life." Other books, Virgin Soil Upturned (1932) and Harvest on the Don (1960) concern the collectivization of the farmlands, and give a true picture of the misery involved.

Sholokov's award was not without controversy. He had been accused of plagiarizing And Quite Flows the Don. A special committee was formed to investigate, and ultimately accepted his authorship. However, the plagiarism allegations were raised again in the 1960's (with Solzhenitsyn a major proponent of the plagiarism theory). In the 1980's further statistical analysis and documents again concluded there had been no plagiarism.


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1966 S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970) and Nelly Sachs (1891-1970)

S.Y. Agnon
Israel
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people."

Agnon was born in a part of Galicia that was Austrian at the time of his birth, but is now Russian. He settled in Israel in 1907, although he lived in Germany for a period from 1913-1924. He was among the best known Hebrew writers for many years, but did not become internationally well-known until after he was awarded the prize. His main subject was the European Jewish diaspora, and not until later in life did he begin to write about Israel.

His most famous book is The Bridal Canopy (1930), which is set in early 19th century Galicia. Reb Yudl travels all around Galicia to collect dowries for his daughters in this episodic novel, which has been called the Jewish counterpart to Don Quixote and Til Eulenspiegel. Other works are And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1916), short stories; A Guest For The Night (1945) which considers Galician life between the wars--life is chaotic and the Holocaust looms; Just Yesterday (1947) which is about Galicians living in Israel before World War I; and In the Heart of the Seas (1935).

Agnon is considered a sophisticated writer, and has often been called a surrealist. He frequently used stream of consciousness techniques. The Nobel committee said of his writing that there is, "always a mystical admixture which lends to even the greyest and most ordinary scenes a golden atmosphere of strange fairy-tale poetry, often reminiscent of Chagall's motifs...."

FACTOID: Agnon, with a list of his works, appears on the 50 shekel bill introduced in 1985 by Israel.

Nelly Sachs
Germany/Sweden
Female
Poetry

Sachs, born in Germany, fled to Sweden in 1940 and became a Swedish citizen. She was friends with Selma Lagerlof. She was a poet whose experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for her fellow Jews. When awarded the prize, she said, "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people." During her life she suffered several major nervous breakdowns. She experienced hallucinations and paranoia, and spent a number of years institutionalized. Her works are collected in Journey to the Beyond (1961). She also wrote a play about an 8 year old boy beaten to death by a German soldier in Poland, Eli (1950).

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1967 Miguel Asturias (1899-1974)
Guatemala
Male
Prose

Awarded "for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of the Indian peoples of Latin America."

Asturias was the second Latin American to win the prize. Although he was born and raised in Guatemala, he lived a significant portion of his life abroad. His writing style has been described as "tropical baroque." His first book, Legends of Guatemala (1930) consists of nine stories exploring Mayan myths. It is considered the "first major anthropological contribution to Spanish American literature." His most important novel is The President (1946), a magnificent and tragic satire criticizing a prototype Latin dictator. The novel was influenced by Tyrant Banderas by Valle-Inclan, and explores how evil spreads downward. Another important work is Men of Maize (1949), which is considered a defense of the Mayan culture. The title refers to the Mayan belief that their flesh was made of corn. It is written in the form of a myth, and has been described as experimental and difficult to follow.

Asturias is also known for The Banana Trilogy on the theme of the struggle of exploited Indian plantation workers against the domination by American corporations as epitomized by the United Fruit Company. The three novels in the trilogy are Strong Wind (1950), The Green Pope (1954), and The Eyes of the Interred (1960) (the title of which refers to an Indian belief that the dead sleep with their eyes open until justice reigns on the earth). This trilogy earned Asturias the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966, the year before he was awarded the Nobel.

Of himself, Asturias said, "Among the Indians there's a belief in the Gran Lengua (Big Tongue). The Gran Lengua is the spokesman for the tribe. And in a way that's what I've been: the spokesman for my tribe." Regarding the propensity of Latin American writers to magical realism, Asturias said, "...an Indian or a mestizo in a small village might describe how he saw an enormous stone turn into a person or a giant, or a cloud turn into a stone. That is not a tangible reality but one that involves an understanding of supernatural forces. That is why when I have to give it a literary label I call it 'magic realism'." He further noted that in these cultures, the border between reality and dream is "porous, not concrete."


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1968 Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972)
Japan
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind."

Kawabata is the first Japanese to receive the Nobel in literature. The committee stated that his writing is "reminiscent of Japanese painting," and that Kawabata "is a worshiper of the fragile beauty and melancholy picture language of existence in the life of nature and in man's destiny." Kawabata believed that only three groups of people were capable of generating "pure beauty" (which he believed it was the function of literature to record): small children, young women, and dying men.

His major works include: Snow Country (1934-1947), the story of the love affair between a Tokyo man and a provincial geisha; A Thousand Cranes (1949-1951), which centers on the tea ceremony as the backdrop to ugly human affairs; The Sound of the Mountain (1949-1954), which concerns the themes of incest, impossible love, and impending death; The Master of Go (1951), which is the fictionalized account of a major Go match that took place in 1938; The House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) which collects three stories. In the title story an old man is advised to visit a brothel and spend the night with silent and passive young women (drugged?). He does so, and returns again and again. In the second story, "One Arm" a young man has a dialogue with his girlfriend's arm, which she has lent him for the night. In the final story, "Birds and Beasts" a birdkeeper watches his birds die as he considers his affair with a dancer who is dying. His last major work was Beauty and Sadness (1964) which is about a man's reunion with a lover from his past.

Kawabata committed suicide in 1972.


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1969 Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Ireland
Male
Fiction, Drama

Awarded "for his writing which---in new forms for the novel and drama---in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."

Beckett, though Irish, settled in Paris in 1937, and did almost all of his writing in French. He stated that he wrote in French as a discipline, to prevent himself from lapsing into rhetoric and because it was easier for him to write "without style." In making to award to Beckett, the committee stated that it was "addressed to one man, two languages and a third nation, itself divided."

Although Beckett wrote in French, Seymour-Smith considers him in manner and material an Irish writer. One of the chief influences on him was Jonathan Swift, and in Paris he was a member of the literary circle around James Joyce. As Beckett himself described it, for a time he felt he would always be in the shadow of Joyce, and then one day during a visit to Dublin he had a revelation. "I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more....I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding." He decided that in the future his focus would be as a "non-knower" and a "non-can-er" Thus, Waiting for Godot (1952) is a play in which "nothing happens."

His novels include: Murphy (1938), his first novel was written in English. His trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953) were written in French, but according to Seymour-Smith "define Irishness" with their hopelessness, helplessness and despair. Seymour-Smith also stated of Beckett that, "His importance is undoubted; but he is pre-eminently a historian of mental anguish...."

FACTOID: Beckett regularly played chess with French artist Marcel Duchamp.

FACTOID: In 2009 a new bridge named the Samuel Beckett Bridge was opened in Dublin. It is just downstream from the James Joyce Bridge, opened on "Bloomsday" in June, 2003.

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1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Russia
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable tradition of Russian literature."

Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian and critic of Soviet totalitarianism whose works were suppressed in the Soviet Union, but raised awareness of the gulag world-wide. He served in the army in World War II, and in 1945 he was arrested and tried for making derogatory remarks about Stalin in private letters. He was sentenced to 8 years in the labor camps. He spent time in several camps, and his experiences served as the basis for his masterpiece One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962). He also spent part of his sentence in a special scientific research prison facility, and that experience contributed to his novel The First Circle (1968). After his prison sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent into exile in Kazakhstan where he was diagnosed with cancer. His treatment experience is the basis for his novel Cancer Ward (19).

After Khrushcev's "secret" speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile. He approached an editor at the Novyi Mir magazine in 1960 with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and it was published in an edited form with Khrushchev's explicit approval. During Khrushchev's time, the book was even studied in Soviet schools.

However, after Khruschev was removed in 1964, the climate became more repressive, and Solzhenitsyn had several run-ins with the KGB, including one in 1965 in which the KGB seized the manuscript for The First Circle. In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union of writers. He did not attend the 1970 Nobel award ceremony because he was afraid that if he left the Soviet Union, he would not be allowed to return. In 1971, the KGB attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn with ricin. He became seriously ill, but survived.

During all this time, Solzhenitsyn was secretly working on The Gulag Archipelago. In 1974, triggered by the publication abroad of The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn had previously resisted all attempts to persuade him to live outside the Soviet Union.

The Gulag Archipelago consists of three volumes and is based on Solzhenitsyn's personal experiences, his own research, and the testimonies of more than 200 former prisoners. It details everything about the Soviet prison system, from interrogation procedures, prison transports, camp culture, prison uprisings, and international exile. According to Anne Applebaum, it is one of the most impactful books of the 20th century.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. He was a somewhat controversial figure during his exile in America, as he commented on "weaknessess" in American character (some of these remarks caused him to be admired by one Richard Cheney and one Donald Rumsfeld, then aides in the administration of Gerald Ford). Before his death in 2008, he expressed admiration for Putin's attempts to restore a sense of national pride in Russia.

Other works include August, 1914 (1971) and November, 1916 (1983). Seymour-Smith evaluates him as the "author of one minor classic--his first novel--and two semi-autobiographical works of great humour and generosity {Cancer Ward and The First Circle}." He views The Gulag Archipelago to be of immense historical importance, but not "distinguished as literature."


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10arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 30, 2015, 12:37 pm

1971-1980

1971 Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
Chile
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams."

As a youth Neruda knew and was mentored by prior Latin American Nobelist Gabriela Mistral. During the years 1927-35 he traveled widely. He was greatly affected by the Spanish Civil War, and especially the murder of Garcia Lorca, whom he knew. In 1945 he was elected a senator in the Chilean government but left Chile again in 1949 when the government changed (he was a member of the communist party). Later, he was close to Chile's socialist president Allende, and was in the hospital at the time of the coup d'etat that ousted Allende and brought Pinochet to power.

He died shortly after the coup, and Pinochet refused permission for a public funeral. Nevertheless, thousands disobeyed the curfew and took to the streets to honor Neruda. In 2011, after allegations that Neruda had been murdered by the Pinochet regime as he prepared to go into exile, a judge ordered his body exhumed. In 2013, the investigators stated that "no relevant chemical substances that could be linked to death were found."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez called Neruda the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language. Harold Bloom includes him as one of 26 writers central to the western tradition in his book The Western Canon. However, Neruda was a somewhat controversial choice because at one time he wrote quite admiringly of Stalin. Borges, asked about Neruda in the late 1960's stated, "I think of him as a very fine poet, a very fine poet. I don't admire him as a man, I think of him as a very mean man."

Twenty Love Poems, published when Neruda was only 20, is his best-known work. He is also known for Canto General (1950), a Whitmanesque catalogue of South America history and nature. Elemental Odes (1956), odes to ordinary and useful things like socks, wood, salt and watermelon is also a popular collection.

FACTOID: During his exile in the 1950's, Neruda's stay in a villa on the island of Capri was fictionalized in a book by Antonio Skarmata, which inspired the popular film Il Postino (The Postman, 1994).

FACTOID: A children's book written by Pam Munoz Ryan, The Dreamer, is a fictionalized biography of Neruda. It is illustrated by Peter Sis.

FACTOID: Neruda wrote in green ink.

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1972 Heinrich Boll (1917-1985)?
Germany
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his writing which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to the renewal of German literature."

With Gunter Grass, Boll is the most celebrated post-war German novelist. He was the first German to win the Nobel since Thomas Mann in 1929. Seymour-Smith considers him a "prolific, versatile and gifted writer," but "a greatly overrated one." His first book, The Train Was on Time (1949) is about a soldier traveling to the Russian front. Acquainted With the Night (1953) is about the effects of war on family life. The Unguarded House (1954) contrasts the fates of two families, one rich, one poor, who were made fatherless by the war.
His later works became more complex. Billiards At Half-Past Nine (1959) is a study of the concerns that keep generations apart. In The Clown (1963), Hans, a clown, finds his work tolerable while he lives with Marie, but when Catholic intellectual friends influence her to leave him he flounders. The entire novel takes place over the course of a few hours. Group Portrait with Lady (1971) is one of his most admired novels. The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum (1974) considers the theme of the cruelty and amorality of contemporary journalism.

Boll is considered a leader among German writers who tried to come to terms with the memory of Germany's role in World War II and the guilt of the Holocaust.

FACTOID: When Solzhenitsyn was expelled from Russia, he first took refuge in Boll's cottage. Boll, in his role as president of West Germany's PEN, had recommended Solzhenitsyn for the Nobel.

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1973 Patrick White (Wrote in English)

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1974 Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson

The choice of Johnson and Martinson to receive the Nobel in 1974 was extremely controversial, since they were both on the panel that chose the recipient of the award. Other candidates for that year included Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Jorge Luis Borges. When the prize was announced, there were immediate indignant reactions to the fact that the academy had awarded the prize to two of its own members. A later article posted on the Nobel web site considers the worthiness of Johnson and Martinson, and concludes that criticism was directed not against their literary merit, but only against the fact that the academy named two of its own.

Eyvind Johnson (1900-1976)
Sweden
Male
Prose

Awarded "for a narrative art, far-seeing in lands and ages, in the service of freedom."

Eyvind Johnson belongs to the school of Swedish proletarian literature. These were self-taught writers whose works investigated working class life. Johnson himself left school and began work at age 14. He labored as a sawmill worker, plumber's assistant, and railroad worker, among many other jobs. He began to write in 1920. His book The Novel of Olof (1934-37) is autobiographical and describes his adolescence and apprenticeship as a timberman. Return to Ithica (1946) is a modern version of The Odyssey. The Days of His Grace (1960) is a dissection of the totalitarian spirit set in the time of Charlamagne. Krilon (1941-3) is a massive trilogy which is an allegory of Natzism. Seymour-Smith finds Johnson sophisticated, but "too restlessly experimental."

Harry Martinson (1904-1978)
Sweden
Male
Prose

Awarded "for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos."

Harry Martinson is also a member of the Swedish proletarians. He was orphaned at age 6 and had a tough early life. He became a sailor at a young age. His novel Cape Farewell (1933) records some of his adventures. His novel The Road (1948) is considered his best book. It is about the life of a hobo in the first decade of the 20th century. His most popular novel is Flowering Nettles (1935), a fictionalized autobiographical account of his life as a foster child in the countryside where he was an outsider. This book has been translated into more than 30 languages.

He is also famous for his poetry, including "Anicara" (1956) a long poem about a spaceship drifting in the void. This poem was adapted into an opera.

Martinson committed suicide in 1978, and some have speculated that he found it difficult to cope with the criticism of his receiving the award.


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1975 Eugenio Montale (1896-1981)
Italy
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life no illusions."

Montale is considered a great Italian lyric poet. His first collection, "Cuttlefish Bones" was published in 1935. His output was small. Seymour-Smith says he "records his experience of life faithfully and in sober but lyrical language."

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1976 Saul Bellow (Wrote in English)

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1977 Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984)
Spain
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, and at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of the Spanish poetry between the wars."

Aleixandre studied law, but after 1925 devoted himself to literature. He was plagued by serious illness for much of his life, and, an invalid, he did not go into exile during the Spanish Civil War. According to the academy, "his poetry is difficult, anguished and private," but "always characterized by a glow of feeling toward others."

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1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902- 1991)
US/Poland
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life."

Singer is considered the most important of all Yiddish writers. He was born in Poland, where his father was a rabbi. All his books are originally written in Yiddish, although he lived in the US since 1935. He translated most of his own fiction into English, but referred to his English versions as his "second original." Singer is considered unmatched in his understanding of Jewish-Polish folk-lore, and Irving Howe states of him that his greatness is that he could write of a vanished past as if it still existed. Many of his works were first published in installments in Yiddish newspapers and magazines.

He is the author of at least 18 novels, 14 children's books, a number of memoirs and essays, and dozens of short story collections. His first novel was Satan in Goray (1935) which recounts events stemming from an attack by Cossacks in 1648 in which one-third of Jewish population was lost. His novel The Famiy Moskvat (1945) is considered the Jewish Buddenbrooks, and chronicles the decay of a family in Poland. The Slave (1967) concerns a 17th century Jewish scholar who is sold into slavery. Other important novels are The Manor and The Estate (1933-35), The Magician of Lublin (1968), and Enemies, A Love Story (1972). Short story collections include Gimpel the Fool (1957) and The Spinoza of Market Street (1961). In my Father's Court (1956) is a collection of memories of his father's rabbinical court in Lublin. Seymour-Smith says, "no major modern writer's work has so rich and so affirmative a glow to it."

In addition to the Nobel, Singer has received two US National Book Awards, one in fiction for his book A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974) and one in children's literature for his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970). His children's book Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (ill. by Maurice Sendak) (1966) was a runnerup for the Newberry.

FACTOID: His short story "Yentl" is the basis for the film of the same name starring Barbra Streisand.

FACTOID: Singer spoke English, Hebrew and Polish fluently, but he considered Yiddish his natural tongue.

FACTOID: Singer was a committed vegetarian. When asked if he became a vegetarian for health reasons, he replied, "I did it for the health of the chickens."

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1979 Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996)
Greece
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek traditions, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness."

Elytis was born on Crete and his poetry was first published in 1935. His most famous poem is "The Axion Esti" (1959) in which he fuses the creation with the modern history of Greece. "Maria Nephele" (1978) consists of long monologues by the poet and a hippy girl. One of the most moving poems to come out of World War II was written by Elytis: "Heroic and Mournful Song the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign" (1945).

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1980 Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)
Poland
Male
Poetry

Awarded to Milosz "who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts."

Milosz, who had published two volumes of poetry in the 1930's, served as the Polish cultural attache in Paris and in Washington, D.C. after World War II. However, he broke with the Polish government in 1951, and went into exile in France. In 1960, he moved to the US, and became a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Berkley from 1961 to 1998, when he retired. He became a US citizen in 1970. He is fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French. He wrote his poetry, fiction, and essays in Polish. He is known for his lyrical memoir of his Lithuanian childhood, The Issa Valley (1953) and Native Realm (1959), another memoir. He is also known for The Captive Mind (1953). a study of how intellectuals behave under a repressive regime .

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11arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 30, 2015, 12:43 pm

1981-1990

1981 Elias Canetti (1905-1994)
Bulgaria
Male
Prose

Awarded "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power."

Canetti was born in Bulgaria, but his mother tongue was Ladino, an archaic dialect of Spanish. As a child he moved to Vienna, and in 1938 he emigrated to London. He became a British citizen in 1952. He was a novelist, playwright, memoirist, and nonfiction writer, and he wrote in German.

His foremost fictional achievement is the novel Auto da Fe (1935), which was to be part of a planned series of novels taking the shape of a "comedie humaine of madmen." He is also the author of Crowds and Power (1960), an examination of the origin, composition, and reaction patterns of mass movements. He wrote three plays, all "more or less absurd" portraying "extreme situations...and human vulgarity..." His memoirs stand out--he wrote two large volumes covering his childhood and youth.

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1982 Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2014)
Columbia
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."

Columbian author Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, the basis for his imaginary town Macondo---a mountain surrounded swampy wilderness on the Caribbean. From the beginning, his idea was to create a town in which everything "Latin American" could and did happen. He was raised by his grandparents. Garcia Marquez called his grandfather, a veteran and hero of the Thousand Days War, his "umbilical cord with history." His grandmother he considered the "source of the magical, superstitions and supernatural view of reality." Apparently, no matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. His works were also influenced by William Faulkner, whose narrative techniques, historical themes and rural settings influenced many Latin American authors.

Garcia Marquez began his writing career as a journalist. His first novel, Leaf Storm (1955) portrays the ruin of Macondo in interior reminiscences taking place over less than an hour, as an old colonel attempts to give a proper burial to an unpopular French doctor, supported only by his daughter and grandson. No One Writes the Colonel (1961) is also set in Macondo. An eccentric old colonel whose father served Colonel Aureliano, son of the founder of Macondo, awaits his pension which never arrives. In his third novel, In Evil Hour (1966), the inhabitants of Macondo are driven to panic as a series of posters appear on the streets announcing scandals about them. A number of short stories featuring Macondo also were written during this time. Some critics have said that everything he wrote before One Hundred Years of Solitude is really part of that novel as well.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the story of the founding of Macondo and of its rise and fall. It is very real, although strange things do happen. There is magical realism, but Seymour-Smith says, "in truth Macondo is as near as any author could come to recreating the whole of Latin America." Author William Kennedy called it "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race." It is Marquez's most enduring work, and has sold more than 30 million copies.

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) was Marquez's "dictator" novel. The dictator is an absurd but all-powerful madman, and there are many allusions, and parodies of other writers, including Carpentier. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) is a combination of journalism and detective story as it recreates a murder which took place in Columbia in 1951. In Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), lovers find love in old age, with death all around them. The story of the young lovers is based on the story of Marquez's own parents, as his grandparents did all they could to thwart the marriage of their daughter to Marquez's father. Marquez says the story is also based on a newspaper article he read about two Americans who were almost 80 years old, but, married to others, met each year in Acapulco until one year they were murdered. Marquez said, "Through their death, the story of their secret romance became known. I was fascinated by them." Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) is the love story of an old man and a young concubine. The General in His Labyrinth (1989) is historical fiction about Simon Bolivar.

Marquez also wrote nonfiction. The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970) was adapted from newspaper articles he wrote while he worked as a journalist. It details the true story of how a Columbian navy vessel came to be shipwrecked. In News of a Kidnapping (1996) a series of kidnappings and other terrorist actions committed by the Medellin cartel are examined. He also completed the first part of his projected three part autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale (2002).

Overall, Seymour-Smith says that the power of his writing "lies in its deadpan innocence, Homeric range and his calm acceptance of the fantastic." He is considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century, and on his death in April 2014, Columbian president Juan Manuel Santos described him as "the greatest Columbian who ever lived."

FACTOID: Because of his outspoken views on US imperialism, Marquez was labeled a subversive and for many years was denied a visa to visit the US. After Bill Clinton was elected president, he lifted the ban, citing One Hundred Years of Solitude as his favorite novel.

FACTOID: Marquez is known through-out Latin America as "Gabo" or "Gabito".

FACTOID: In 1976 Marquez was publicly socked in the face by Mario Vargas Llosa, until then a good friend. They did not speak again.

FACTOID: Where the name Macondo came from: Marquez describes a train trip he took with his mother as a young man:
"The train stopped at a station that had no town and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I had never heard anyone say it and I did not even ask myself what it meant....I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the cieba."

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1983 William Golding (Wrote in English)

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1984 Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986)
Czechoslovakia
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for his poetry which endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indominatable spirit and versatility of man."

Jaroslav Seifert wrote more than 30 volumes of collected poems over a career spanning more than 60 years. In the 1920's he was considered a leader in the Czech avant garde, and as a young man believed in socialist ideals. He later disassociated himself from communism and the anti-intellectual turn communism took. Seymour-Smith calls him "a minor poet (and a man of courage who raised his voice against the limitations of Stalinism)..."

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1985 Claude Simon (1913-2005)
France
Male
Prose

Awarded to Simon "who in his novel combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition."

Claude Simon began to achieve recognition in the 1950's in connection with the "nouveau roman" (new novel) movement in France. These were novels that broke the rules that a novel should have a realistic story and move along in a coherent way, and consisted instead of fragmented narratives. Such novels were often described as collages, and took place in memory as apparent free association. Fragments from different times would be closely joined on the basis of content or emotional feel. Influences from the visual arts were strong.

Simon's early novels were partly autobiographical. His first novel was The Cheat (1946), and its was strongly influenced by Proust and Faulkner, with sentences going on for pages and pages. His more experimental novels began with The Wind (1957) and The Grass (1958), both of which take place in the south of France. The main character in The Wind is a mysterious man who returns to claim a small fare he inherited and is caught up in various conflicts. Over it all howls the mistral--the wind--an inhuman element in which all the characters are imprisoned.

The Flanders Road (1960) made Simon internationally famous in literary circles. In this strongly autobiographical novel, long flowing narrative framentations pile up. There are discontinuous scenes and stories within stories. It takes shape as a description of the French collapse in 1940, a battle at which Simon fought and was deeply affected by. Cruelty and absurdity dominate. The Flanders Road is considered his best novel.
The novel The Palace (1962) concerns Simon's experiences in the Spanish Civil War. The Georgiques (1981) involves fighters against Franco who split into factions and fight each other. Other works are Histoire (1967) and The Acacia (1989).

Not everyone admired Simon's work. Christopher Hitchens said, "The award of the Nobel Prize to such a shady literary enterprise is a minor scandal, reflecting the intellectual rot which has been spread by pseudo intellectuals."

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1986 Wole Soyika (Wrote in English)

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1987 Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)
Russia
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for an all embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."

Brodsky was born in Leningrad, and survived the Siege of Leningrad as a young child. He began writing poetry when he was 18. As a young man he was sentenced to exile for "social parasitism", and in 1972 he was involuntarily deported from the Soviet Union. He came to the US and became a US citizen in 1977. He worked as a visiting professor or poet in residence at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University, among others. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he was invited to return, but never did. He died of a heart attack at the young age of 55.

According to the academy, he "belongs to the classical Russian tradition with names such as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova....and Boris Pasternak." One of his more famous collections is To Urania (1988). His book of essays on the arts and politics, Less Than One (1986) won the National Book Award for criticism. In 1991, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the US.

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1988 Nguib Mahfouz (1911-2006)
Egypt
Male
Fiction

Awarded to Mahfouz "who through works rich in nuance---now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous---has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind."

Mahfouz is the only Arab to have won the Nobel Prize for literature. He wrote 34 novels, 350 short stories, 5 plays, and many movie scripts. He was the youngest child of seven and had a strong Islamic upbringing. In later life he said, "You would never have thought that an artist would emerge from that family.

His most famous and enduring work is The Cairo Trilogy, which consists of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957). In these novels he follows three generations of one Cairo family from World War I until after the 1952 coup that overthrew King Farouk.
Other works include Children of the Alley (1959), which relates the story of Gebelaawi and his children. This book was banned through-out the Arab world, with the exception of Lebanon, until 2006 when it was finally published in Egypt. (In 1994, Islami extremists attempted to assassinate Mahfouz by stabbing him in the neck. He survived, but nerves in his upper right limb were permanently damaged.) The Thief and the Dogs (1961) depicts the fate of a thief released from prison and planning revenge. Miramar (1967) develops from multiple first person points of view. In Arabian Nights and Days (1981) Mahfouz drew on traditional Arabic narratives. Another of his popular works is Midaq Alley (1947).

Mahfouz has stated, "In all my writings you will find politics. You may find a story which ignores love or any othey subject, but not politics...."

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1989 Camilo Jose Cela (1916-2002)
Spain
Male
Fiction

Awarded "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability."

Born in Galicia to a Spanish mother and Italian-English father, Cela has written more than 100 books. More than any other writer he was at the center of the Spanish Civil War. After being wounded, he debuted as a writer. His first novel was The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942), which inaugurated the term "tremendista" novel, so called because the reader's shock at the horror and brutality it reveals is "tremendous." In fact, when the censors read The Family of Pascual Duarte, they banned it. It relates the story of a multiple murderer, and the academy stated that "Next to Don Quixote it must be the most widely read of all Spanish novels."

Cela's next book, Rest Home (1943) seems less violent, but is actually more despairing. It involves tubercular patients in a sanatarium. The Hive (1951), one of Cela's better-known works, relates the story of life in Madrid during Franco's reign. It has over 300 characters and according to Seymour-Smith, "It accuses the society it describes, but only by telling the truth." This novel was banned in Spain, and after its publication Cela exiled himself to Mallorca. Other books include Mazurka For Two Dead Men, in which Cela returned to the lives of ordinary people in Galicia.

In terms of nonfiction, Cela wrote some classic travel books in the 1940's and 1950's, including Journey to the Alcarria (1948). He also wrote a modern version of the first Spanish picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1946), which gives a grotesque and distorted vision of Spain.

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1990 Octavio Paz (1914-1998)
Mexico
Male
Poetry

Awarded "for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity."

Paz is a Mexican poet, who also served as a diplomat for Mexico to places such as France and India. He wrote his important book The Labyrinth of Solitude, a fundamental study of Mexican identity, while serving in France. The Labyrinth of Solitude, according to Seymour-Smith is "essential" reading for anyone seeking insight into Mexico and its revolution. However, Seymour-Smith says of Paz: "Unequalled as a poet-critic..., his own poetry is unable to find direction," and "ultimately disappointing."

Paz himself considers poetry "the secret religion of the modern age." His works include Collected Poems 1957-1987 (1987). His book of essays Alternating Current (trans by Helen Lane) won the National Book Award for translation in 1974.

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12arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 29, 2015, 6:45 pm

1991-2000

1991 Nadine Gordimer (Wrote in English)

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1992 Derek Walcott (Wrote in English)

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1993 Toni Morrison (Wrote in English)

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1994 Kenzaburo Oe (1935- )

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1995 Seamus Heaney (Wrote in English)

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1996 Wislawa Syzmborsica

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1997 Dario Fo

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1998 Jose Saramago

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1999 Gunter Grass

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2000 Xian Gia

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13arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 29, 2015, 6:47 pm

2001-2010

2001 V.S. Naipul (Wrote in English)

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14arubabookwoman
juny 10, 2015, 5:45 pm

2010-2014

15arubabookwoman
Editat: juny 29, 2015, 7:23 pm

The academy is currently considering the award for 2015. According to the Novel web site, it has received 259 proposals, resulting in 198 nominated persons. Of these, 36 are first time nominees. What do you think--should we set up a separate thread to speculate on who some of these nominees are, or who we think deserves to win? Or just comment here? Or not discuss this at all here?

I don't know if I could think of 198 living writers I think worthy of the prize. My general personal thought would be that since women are shamefully underrepresented, I would hope the academy considers a female writer. Geographically, it also seems to be that the Mideast is also underrepresented.

16thorold
juny 30, 2015, 4:31 am

Deborah - thanks for doing all that work. What an impressive introduction - we hardly need to read any of the books now!

Independently of this theme, I've accidentally drifted into challenging myself to see how long I can go without reading any books by men, so my priority is going to be with the Magnificent Seven: Selma Lagerlof, Grazia Deledda, Sigrid Undset, Gabriela Mistral, Nelly Sachs, Herta Müller and Elfriede Jelinek.

Shamefully, I've only read one book of Jelinek's and nothing by any of the others. I've got another Jelinek on the TBR pile, which I put aside knowing that this was coming. Since I read German, it will be strange if I don't manage to read anything by Müller or Sachs in the next three months, but I think I might start with Deledda, the only one of the seven whose name meant absolutely nothing to me until I read the introduction above. There are quite a few of her books available online, and I think my Italian might just about be good enough to struggle through one...

(For when I get bored with boycotting male writers, I have Pirandello, Paz, Cela and Canetti waiting on the TBR shelf, and I ought to have a proper go at Beckett some time...)

Speculating about the next laureate is a fairly futile exercise (I've never yet guessed right). And it can be depressing: half the time, when you think of good candidates and look them up, it turns out that they are no longer with us. Last year everyone was shouting "Murakami" and "Ngugi wa Thiong'o", I expect they will be this year again. And Modiano wasn't a bad choice: I'd only vaguely heard of him before, but the Nobel encouraged me to read three of his novels (admittedly, I rather lost interest after the third one...).

17LolaWalser
juny 30, 2015, 10:57 am

>9 arubabookwoman:

Because of his unique circumstances--born in Bosnia, to Croat parents, and later living in Serbia-- Andric's work has been claimed to be part of Serbian literature, Croatian literature, and Bosnian literature.

If I may, it's not just because of "unique circumstances" (nor are the circumstances of his birth unique in ex-Yugoslavia.) Andric was an ideological Yugoslav, i.e. someone whose national and political identity transcended ethnic origin, passionately dedicated to union. He was also a high-ranking diplomat in the service of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (posted ambassador to Germany in 1939) and therefore also had formal reasons for self-describing in a way that represented the unified South Slavs.

As he wrote both in ijekavian (Croatian and Bosnian) and ekavian (Serbian) versions of the language, it's not surprising everyone claims him. He really does belong to everyone.

18rebeccanyc
juny 30, 2015, 11:22 am

Thanks for doing such a wonderful job introducing the Nobel Laureates to us, Deborah. I love the factoids too!

I am going to start off by reading a book that's been on my TBR for several years, Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986-2006. Of course it includes several writers who wrote in English, but I think it should put me in the frame of mind for this theme read. Then, I have books on my TBR by writers I've previously read and enjoyed, including Saramago, Le Clezio, Milosz, Undset, Soyinka (I know he wrote in English . . . but he has a Nigerian frame of mind), Mo Yan, and Singer as well as books by writers I haven't previously read including Solzhenitsyn, Agnon, and Neruda. And I plan on rereading Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann because I don't feel I really absorbed it the first time around. And I may well be tempted by other authors too . . .

I love many of the other Nobel Laureates too, including Lagerlof, Andric, Pasternak, and Asturias (one book). As a teenager, I liked Hesse, but am not sure if he would hold up; earlier, I enjoyed Garcia Marquez; and I disliked the collection of stories by Bunin that I read.

This will be a fun reading journey.

19Tara1Reads
juny 30, 2015, 1:47 pm

Thanks for the information on the laureates arubabookwoman!

I am hoping to read off my TBR shelves which gives me the possibilities of Boris Pasternak, Orhan Pamuk, and Gabriel García Márquez.

20Limelite
juny 30, 2015, 4:00 pm

If I've read a dozen of the non-English language winners, I'd be surprised. I'm woefully poorly read when I examine your list.

But I began wondering. . .How many of these winners are still read and as highly regarded, or even as popular as they were in their lifetimes? I went there because of your question about how the most popular winners were chosen, and the only thing I could think of was they were ranked so by book sales figures. If people are still buying books by a laureate alive at the turn of the last century, then those books stood the ultimate test -- the test of time.

For a work of fiction to survive for 100 -200 years and retain its popularity is very rare among writers in the English (say, Austen) whose books may have been more readily and widely available to the reading public than books in other than it and the more widely spoken European languages (Portuguese, etc.). Hence the Eurocentricity of the award -- if Chinese, Indian, and Nigerian writers were not translated into English or other popular European languages, they simply didn't get "discovered" for consideration.

How lucky we are to live in a global library rather than a mostly national or small continental one, where books are more readily translated and so much more easily accessed by everyone.

21thorold
Editat: juny 30, 2015, 4:55 pm

>20 Limelite:
The question of Eurocentricity is complicated: it's not just the language problem, but also the not insignificant difficulty that people need to learn how to create western-style literary forms (and somehow get access to printing presses, electric light, and bookshops) before you can give them western-style literary awards. You don't give Nobel prizes to village storytellers or anonymous authors of traditional plays, you give them to people like Soyinka who've gone through western-style education and worked out from that how to put ideas from their own cultures into a form that we can identify as "high culture" and with their name on the book jacket.

22LolaWalser
juny 30, 2015, 4:58 pm

>21 thorold:

Damn right, no Nobels for Homer!

23thorold
juny 30, 2015, 4:59 pm

>22 LolaWalser:
Homer 0 : Walcott 1

24LolaWalser
juny 30, 2015, 5:06 pm

There were schools and poets in China before European aristocracy chanced upon the idea that literacy is a Good Thing.

I'd like to think that the literary committee, some odd past choices and misses notwithstanding, is not composed habitually of complete idiots, and that they might recognise works of literary merit from people who didn't pass through a Western-style educational process, such as any number of literate non-Western writers past and present. If you can get it down on paper or get someone to do it for you, it should be analysable as literature, don't you think? I'm not sure having a Western-like education is a prerequisite at all.

25LolaWalser
juny 30, 2015, 5:08 pm

This reminds me--but only in the sense that I know I can't remember what or where--of some shock I've felt or read about feeling (yes, it's got to the point I can't tell sometimes which), concerning a famous Chinese writer who'd never heard of Dante and Petrarch.

But I think he may have been a Nobelist.

26Limelite
juny 30, 2015, 5:10 pm

>21 thorold:

Agreed. But I saw I was becoming an essayist and chose to shut up.

My choice (at the moment) for the 2015 Prize is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Have you made one?

27Limelite
juny 30, 2015, 5:15 pm

>25 LolaWalser:

Is that Gao Xingjian? I tried to read his Soul Mountain but I guess either I'm too Western, or he's too Eastern.

28LolaWalser
juny 30, 2015, 5:30 pm

>27 Limelite:

Could be, could be not, I'd best not commit myself to a possible slander, error, or hallucination...

It'll come to me in a few years, I'm sure.

29thorold
Editat: jul. 1, 2015, 4:19 am

>24 LolaWalser: >25 LolaWalser:
You're right. I wasn't really thinking about China - that would be the obvious case of a culture with its own literary forms that would/should be recognisable as such by a bunch of Swedish professors without prior exposure of the authors to Western culture. I had people like Achebe, Soyinka and Senghor in mind.

(On topic: how did Senghor manage to avoid winning the Nobel?)

30LolaWalser
jul. 1, 2015, 10:05 am

Too Communist?

31MMcM
jul. 1, 2015, 4:27 pm

>27 Limelite: >28 LolaWalser:

Perhaps less likely, as he referenced Dante by name in his Nobel Lecture.

32Limelite
jul. 1, 2015, 5:14 pm

>31 MMcM:

I tried to find the reference to Dante but couldn't. He refers to Descartes, paraphrasing him to read, "I say, therefore I am." He also mentions Shakespeare's plays and Greek tragedies making the point that the works survive because they're about universal truths of the human condition. And he mentions early on several international authors who had to flee in order to preserve their writing voices.

What I did notice is that he makes only the most general remarks with no particular references to their works to illustrate his pints. I felt that he may have only become acquainted with them by dint of reading widely since he's been exiled from China. But I have no evidence.

His address was warm and well reasoned, nothing too abstract; he makes lots of points about the writer's relationship to himself and the reader and both party's relationship to the characters being the artistic framework that surrounds the literary world, makes it important and necessary. I liked the speech better than Soul Mountain. But now I regret having given my copy away.

Plz drop a hint where I can find Dante, as I've completely missed it.

33LolaWalser
jul. 1, 2015, 5:19 pm

I hope I haven't started anyone on a wild goose chase... :)

34charl08
Editat: jul. 2, 2015, 11:55 am

Fascinating list Deborah, this must have taken ages.

I'm most excited to find Milosz, one of my favourite poets, wrote memoirs as well as the amazing poetry, so have ordered that from my library. I'm also intrigued by the Icelandic take on 1930s Europe, but this looks sadly tricky to get hold of.

35rebeccanyc
jul. 2, 2015, 9:03 am

>34 charl08: Milosz's The Issa Valley, a novel that is loosely connected to his childhood, is amazing!

36Limelite
jul. 2, 2015, 12:12 pm

A question for all regarding this topic:

How do we consider contemporary Indian authors in regards to this topic? Almost all of them write in English, which is, with Hindi, the official language of that country. Do we classify based on native or official language? Or are we more flexible in making a decision, beyond creating a false choice?

37MMcM
jul. 2, 2015, 1:35 pm

>32 Limelite: eighth paragraph:
回顧文學史,從東方到西方莫不如此,從屈原到但丁,到喬伊斯,到托馬 斯.曼,到索忍尼辛
Surveying the history of literature in the East and the West this has always been so: from Qu Yuan to Dante, Joyce, Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn
Exemplen är många: Qu Yuan, Dante, Joyce, Thomas Mann, Solzjenitsyn

38Limelite
jul. 2, 2015, 1:52 pm

>37 MMcM:

Danke! Merci! Ευχαριστώ!

39rebeccanyc
jul. 2, 2015, 2:09 pm

>36 Limelite: Were there any other Indian winners besides Tagore? Deborah has written that Tagore wrote in Bengali and translated some of his work into English himself.

40thorold
jul. 2, 2015, 2:16 pm

Elias Portolu (1903) by Grazia Deledda (1926 Laureate: Italy / Sardinia)

My first read for this theme was this simple little pastoral tragedy, Grazia Deledda's third novel and the one that first brought her to popular attention.

I picked Deledda to start with because I knew absolutely nothing about her before reading Deborah's introduction to this thread. I must have seen her name in lists of Nobel laureates, but I wouldn't have known without looking her up whether she was a novelist, a tennis player or a 1950s film legend. And I suspect that I'm not the only one - the only thing anyone outside Italy ever seems to mention about he is the Nobel.

Anyway, this book is a fairly straightforward tale of a young shepherd who returns to his family in Sardinia after a spell in jail on the continent and falls heavily in love with the girl that his brother is about to marry. As he evidently has a self-destructive urge as strong as any of Thomas Hardy's unhappy heroes, we have a pretty good idea that things aren't going to work out for the best, and they don't. But of course that's what we're paying for: the interesting thing to watch on the way is how Deledda plays with the interaction between the characters, the Sardinian landscape, and the almost overtly pagan religion of the islanders. There's a wonderful set-piece description of the annual pilgrimage to a mountain chapel to celebrate the festival of Santu Franziscu that clearly has only the most tenuous connection with any sort of Catholicism that would be recognised in Rome, and the hero's mother is forever doing divination ceremonies at her domestic altar.

So, it's a nice example of early twentieth-century pastoral quasi-realism, with the added benefit of Sardinian scenery, but I couldn't help feeling (even though it's a cliché to say this of any Italian story) that it would have worked better as an opera. Elias, in particular, is forever delivering apostrophes to the reader that are only a gnat's crochet away from being arias, and you just imagine the Shearers' Chorus...

(I found the full text of this novel here: http://digilander.libero.it/testi_di_deledda/deledda_elias_portolu.html)

41arubabookwoman
jul. 2, 2015, 2:40 pm

Will post more later, but just piping in to say there have been no other Indian literature laureates. Coincidentally, I am just completing Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie, and in that book he several times mentions discussions he has had with other contemporary Indian writers, including Anita Desai, about the fact that in his opinion the most prominent Indian writers of today are all writing in English. He mentions writing an essay or op ed on the subject.

I found the subject of the language the laureates wrote in fascinating. Beckett, a native Irishman who hung out with James Joyce for Pete's sake, almost always wrote in French (so he would have "no style" he said). I considered including some info on Wole Soyinka, who I consider an African writer, but then he always wrote in English, and I was tired, so I let it pass.

I will say that as far as I'm concerned, there is no reason to limit our discussion or reading to the Nobelists who did not write in English.

42arubabookwoman
Editat: jul. 2, 2015, 2:48 pm

>40 thorold: Thorold Thank you for the review on Deledda. She is known for including in her novels Sardinian folklore, superstitions, rituals etc. I read her book After the Divorce a few years ago, and it included some fascinating descriptions of an exorcism ritual performed after one of the characters is bitten by a tarantula. It also included some interesting descriptions of the burial ceremonies/rituals. Deledda is one of the Nobelists I'd like to read more of--she's easy to read, interesting and I think an overall good writer.

Even though I didn't read it for this topic, here's my comments on After the Divorce from a few years ago:

Grazia Deledda was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1926, the second woman to be so honored. Many of her novels depict the day-to-day lives of Sardinian peasants, and such peasants are the subject of After the Divorce. Giovanna and Costantino are a young happily married couple with an infant son, when Costantino is wrongly accused and convicted of murder. He is sent to prison on the mainland. Giovanna and their son and her mother, face a life of penury and starvation.

When Giovanna's mother learns that the law has been changed to allow a woman whose husband is in prison for a long time to divorce her husband, she begins to pressure Giovanni to divorce Costantino. Brontu Dejas, a wealthy (by peasant standards) young man who Giovanna had spurned in favor of Costantino, alleges he still loves her and wants to marry her. Giovanna fights the pressure as long as she can, but eventually succumbs to the pressure. After she marries Brontu, she learns that he is a drunken brute, and he and her mother-in-law treat her no better than a slave. Tragically soon after she divorces and remarries, the true murderer is discovered and Costantino is released and returns to the village.

Deledda writes poetically and lyrically--for example, this description of Giovanna's mother: "...a tall tragic-looking figure all in black. The gaunt, yellow face, shaped like that of some bird of prey...two brilliant green spots indicated eyes, deep-set, overhung by fierce, heavy brows and surrounded by livid circles." She is also clearly knowledgeable about peasant life and practices. For example, she describes a rite of exorcism for the cure of a tarantula bite which is nothing less than surreal---the victim must first wallow in a dung heap, and then roast in an oven, all the while accompanied by twenty women "chanting in melancholy monotone" a song of exorcism. Not surprisingly, victims rarely survived. (Although I have heard that tarantula bites are not necessarily fatal.)

Highly recommended

43thorold
jul. 2, 2015, 4:49 pm

>42 arubabookwoman:
Hmm. From your summary, After the divorce sounds like all the same elements as Elias Portolu put together in slightly different combinations. Probably not a good one to read next! I did also download Canne al vento, so I might have a look at that later.

BTW: I get the feeling that Deledda wasn't exactly a hardline feminist. The women in Elias Portolu just seem to appear as accessories to the men. They don't get anything much to say, especially not to each other, and no-one - including the narrator - seems to be interested in what they are thinking or feeling, apart from motherhood and sexual attraction.

44Limelite
jul. 2, 2015, 6:03 pm

>39 rebeccanyc:

Sorry, I don't remember checking that. . .Just checked and there could be some controversy if V S Naipaul should be counted. Indian ethnicity but native Trinidadian. Otherwise, Tagore is it.

That Tagore wrote in Bengali probably made it imperative to translate his own work into English. Otherwise, he might never have become well known nor widely read since Hindi and English are India's two official languages. Even in India he might have been overlooked nationwide if his works only appeared in Bengali.

45arubabookwoman
jul. 2, 2015, 8:45 pm

>34 charl08: Charlotte-- here is what I wrote about The Issa Valley when I read it a few years ago:

"The Issa Valley has the distinction of being inhabited by an unusually large number of devils."

So begins this magical autobiographical coming of age novel by Nobelist Milosz. Thomas lives in a remote valley in the disputed area between Lithuania and Poland with his grandparents. The time is just after World War I, and pagan spirits and ancient spells are very real to the villagers and to Thomas. As a young boy, Thomas explores nature with scientific avidity. When he's a bit older, he idolizes one of the peasants who is a skilled hunter, and seeks to emulate him, until he discovers he is unable to kill. As Thomas comes of age, the cycles of nature in all its glory and wonder are also prominently displayed. Although there is not much plot, Milosz writes beautifully of Thomas's world, with a unique sense of place and time.

46MMcM
jul. 3, 2015, 9:37 am

>44 Limelite: since Hindi and English are India's two official languages

I'm afraid that does not do justice to a very complex situation. That Hindi is the official language at the national level means that laws and proclamations are published in it. It does not even mean that the day-to-day business of interacting with the federal government is carried out in Hindi. At the state level, there are 22 official languages. The language of instruction in primary school is generally the child's mother tongue. And even that is an oversimplification. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled against Karnataka, which had sought to make Kannada the sole medium of primary education.

if his works only appeared in Bengali

Bengali is an official language of West Bengal, which has about 100M people. Add Bangladesh, and there are easily 200M native speakers. By comparison, Hindi has about 300M. A plurality in India, but not a majority (40-odd %). The sociolinguistic result of which is that while the country doesn't hopelessly fall apart by language, neither is there language hegemony, unless it's English.

Moreover, consider that in English Tagore is known as a poet and writer of short fiction, while in Bengali his intellectual reputation is as a much broader man of letters, in, say, art and politics.

47Limelite
jul. 3, 2015, 12:21 pm

>44 Limelite:

India is, as you make clear, a complex country with widely variant subcultures with just as many languages and dialects as there probably are states. But the point persists that Tagore translated his own work into English and not any other native language of India. Perhaps he wasn't fluent in them; perhaps native speakers of those languages who also spoke Bengali did the job for him. Maybe you know. I certainly don't. But he felt compelled to have his work published in a Western European tongue and the way he wanted it comprehended.

As I understand it Hindi (in a certain form) is the official written language of India and as such, I assume all Indians are educated in it. Likewise English is official perhaps in the capacity as a spoken language? (I don't know) So, it is taught across all schools, too, making all literate Indians literate in at least two languages.

I can only conclude that the simplest reason why he took the trouble he did would be because he wished to reach a wider audience than a state or even national Indian one, and that he was concerned with his literary legacy among the Western canon when it came to his fiction. His legacies in the other areas of art he recognized as being local to his cultural tradition rather than universal as the best literature is, no matter what its language of origin.

If my speculation happens to be correct, I don't understand the logic of Tagore being concerned with personally translating his own writing into English on its face. After all, English was widely spoken and there were probably many qualified Indians who could do the job for him. Similarly, many Indians cold translate Bengali into less widely spoken Indian languages. And in that case, he seems unconcerned.

The fact that he insisted on doing the English translation himself is interpreted by me that he felt very strongly that his fiction should be as artful as he could make it in that language as it is in Bengali. He wanted his work recognized by Western literary "standards" on the par of works written by native English speakers, and probably to show the Western audience that excellent literature was being produced beyond its own culture and that they should pay attention to it.

Seems to me he succeeded.

These are just personal thoughts.

48banjo123
Editat: jul. 3, 2015, 3:21 pm

Chinua Achebe, who was never awarded a Nobel, but IMO, should have, had interesting thoughts about writing in English. I understand that his thought evolved over time. Here is a like to an article on the topic. It's obviously a difficult issue for a lot of writers.

I think that the value to reading works not originally written in English, is that it expands our reading to include writers that we'd be otherwise less likely to read from.

That said, I am starting this challenge with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Clandestine in Chile, because I just picked up a copy, and I am still on my quest to read all of the works of GGM.

49charl08
Editat: jul. 6, 2015, 5:52 am

>45 arubabookwoman: Thanks Deborah, I am very much looking forward to getting my hands on this!

50rebeccanyc
Editat: jul. 4, 2015, 5:23 pm

Ngugi wa Thiong'o -- who I think deserves a Nobel -- originally wrote in English, but then switched to Kikuyu and translated his own books to English. He wrote about this in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.

51Limelite
jul. 4, 2015, 1:10 pm

Two writers who are not Nobelists, -- but one day may be -- who write/wrote in their native languages and are now appearing in English translation are Carlos Ruiz Zafón, famous for The Shadow of the Wind, and Pramodya Ananta Toer (Indonesia's Solzhenitsyn, d. 2006) the Java-born creator of the Buru Quartet of which This Earth of Mankind is the first volume.

While there are many Spanish speakers who can enjoy Zafón's writing in the "original," I am not one of them. So, I'm grateful that he's translated into English 'cause I love his stories.

I bought Toer's first book of his Quartet, which he wrote in Indonesian while imprisoned by the Dutch for his dissident activity during his country's fight for independence. But I haven't read "This Earth" yet.

Keep telling myself how lucky I am to be alive when so many books are being translated into languages other than their original and becoming available in e-format so that I can literally own a world library that can go with me anywhere held in the palm of my hand.

52banjo123
jul. 4, 2015, 2:21 pm

>48 banjo123:; >50 rebeccanyc: and >51 Limelite: Now there's another idea for a theme--writers who we believe deserve the Nobel! I would agree on Ngugi wa Thiong'o! And now I am curious to read Toer.

Speaking of Solzhenitsyn; I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a couple of years ago, and was surprised at how good it was, and it's short. It could be a good choice for this challenge, if you want to squeeze in a Russian. It made me want to read Gulag as well, but I don't know that I have the stamina for it this summer.

53avatiakh
jul. 4, 2015, 5:19 pm

I'm not doing well with the themed reading so have pulled a shorter work, S. Y. Agnon's novella In the heart of the seas, off the shelf. I thought his Only Yesterday was a brilliant novel and have meant to keep reading his work.

>51 Limelite: What's interesting about Zafon is that he lives in California but continues to write in Spanish and works very closely with his translator, Lucia Graves. I tried to find an article about their translation process but only found this Q&A. My interest is because I went to a talk he gave a couple of years ago and he talked quite a bit about the translation process.
Lucia Graves: Living Life in Translation

54rebeccanyc
Editat: jul. 4, 2015, 6:06 pm

>51 Limelite: >52 banjo123: I read the first two volumes in the Buru Quartet (This Earth of Mankind and Child of All Nations) when we had the Southeast Asia theme read, and have the remaining two on the TBR. I found them fascinating, but a tad didactic and preachy. Incidentally, Toer can't be a Nobelist because he's dead.

55Limelite
jul. 4, 2015, 5:47 pm

>53 avatiakh:

Now that's very interesting. Do you remember any tidbits from his talk; for instance, why he moved to CA?

Several years ago when we lived in the environs of Miami, we always attended the week long annual Nov. Book Fair (as seen on CSPAN). That particular year, the featured literary guests were native Chinese writers. Some spoke in English, but most chose to speak in their native Chinese (I assume Mandarin) and trusted the interpreter to do his/her best. While the topic was more in keeping with dissident and exiled writers, reflecting their personal experiences, they touched on translations of their works, making the point that they depended on the mostly French and English translations circulating in the West to make their reputations beyond the borders of China where their works were suppressed and often banned.

56Limelite
jul. 4, 2015, 5:59 pm

>54 rebeccanyc:

Of, course, my bad. Well, the committee may have overlooked a deserving recipient. On the other hand, they may have felt as you noted, that his work was too didactic and pedantic, or even propagandistic, to merit their regard.

It's probably difficult for most writers who are inspired by major political events and the impact they have on their lives to create great "art" from those experiences, especially when things like torture and imprisonment are involved. The only thing I know about the Buru Q is that Toer wrote and dictated it mostly while imprisoned by the Dutch under pretty dreadful conditions.

I'll take a gander at the first volume but probably won't finish it if it's as you describe.

57avatiakh
jul. 4, 2015, 6:32 pm

>55 Limelite: Just that as he is so fluent in English he works closely with Graves on phrasing etc, possibly too closely(?). I presume that if you've written a novel in one language that the last thing you'd want is to spend time translating it. Graves has translated all his work, she loved his first novel The shadow of the wind so much that she convinced him that she was the right person for the job. So do writers usually choose their translators?

58spiphany
jul. 5, 2015, 5:10 am

Do writers choose their translators? It depends, I think.

Translation rights are often handled through an author's agent or publisher(s). Some publishers have a pool of translators they frequently work with; others may look for similar books in the same language combination and see if they can contract the person who translated them (i.e., there are translators who specialize in crime novels, or children's books, etc).

Authors living in another country but still writing in their native language are an interesting case, as there is an opportunity for them to be involved more closely in the translation process than is usual. I'm trying to remember if Thomas Mann worked much with H. T. Lowe-Porter (apparently she wasn't his first choice of translator).

The author's knowledge of the language the book is being translated into matters, too. Translations are not necessarily into a commonly-spoken language from a less-widely-spokeon on -- there's a ton of translation the other way around. If a bestselling novel written in English is going to be translated into, say, French, German, Hungarian, and Chinese, there's not much chance that the author is going to be fluent enough in all of those languages to judge the quality of the translations, much less choose the translators.

Then there's the issue of self-translation that came up earlier (Tagore, Ngugi wa Thiong'o; Samuel Beckett also comes to mind). This, too, is complicated, as there are a lot of reasons why an author may choose (or choose not to) translate their books into another language they are fluent in (as is the choice of which language to write in in the first place). A lot of it is going to depend on the author's relationship with both of the languages in question. Is the author living in exile or did they grow up bilingual? Is one of the languages associated with oppression or, conversely, with personal/national identity?

Apart from political and cultural considerations, the individual writing process and aptitude are also going to make a difference. Translation is a very different skill than writing, and even if an author is bilingual it doesn't necessarily mean that they are a good translator -- it requires stepping back from the piece and accepting that it isn't going to sound the same as the original. I believe it's either Nabokov or Brodsky who have been criticized for being bad translators of their own work because they remain too influenced by the original rather than letting the language of the translation blossom in its own way. Some authors who self-translate say that the translation ends up being a different work, because what they have to say shifts and changes when it is written in a different language.

Of course, control also plays a role. Obviously, the more involved an author is with the translation of a work, the more control they can maintain over how the translation turns out. Being translated requires a huge amount of trust -- often blind trust -- and it's natural that the author not want to relinquish all the control. This can be a good thing (the author can catch any mistakes the translator might make, or suggest what nuances they intended) or a bad thing (particularly if the author's grasp of the language of translation is imperfect). Borges must have been an interesting person to translate for -- I vaguely recall there's an anecdote by one of this translators that he found the translation process very fascinating, particularly the chance to write in a different voice; he kept telling the translator to make his text terser, directer, more "Anglo-Saxon". But he may be an exception here.

(Not an expert, just someone with a complicated relationship with two languages who is fascinated by how languages and linguistic identity affect the creative process.)

59rebeccanyc
jul. 5, 2015, 11:09 am

>57 avatiakh: >58 spiphany: I find the question of translation endlessly fascinating, have read several books about it, and have several more on the TBR.

60thorold
jul. 5, 2015, 11:30 am

The saga of Gösta Berling (1891) by Selma Lagerlöf (1909 Laureate, Sweden) - 2009 Penguin translation by Paul Norlen



I don't know quite why, but I was expecting this to be a kind of generic late 19th century novel - agricultural realism, a family struggling to hang on to their estate in difficult times. And of course it turns out to be something quite different, much harder to pigeon-hole. There is an element of realism in the underlying description of ordinary people's lives, but there's also a picaresque arbitrariness about the sequence of events that seems almost 18th century; larger-than-life characters stomp about in seven-league boots in a rather ETA Hoffmannish way; there's a Faust-story that keeps popping up in the background when we least expect it; nature intervenes whenever it chooses; the whole thing is set seventy years back in the 1820s in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and narrated by someone who claims to have been around at the time (but Lagerlöf was only in her late 20s/early 30s when she wrote it); altogether it's difficult to work out when you are supposed to be.

While the story is full of parties, celebrations, escapades and practical jokes, there's a very hard moral line under it all. Frivolity is good and necessary, but as soon as it's taken too far (as it invariably is, here) we are brought down to earth with a painful bump and shown that events have consequences that are almost always both nasty and irreversible. Without order, work, and moral discipline the community falls apart into chaos (but we can't rely on established institutions to keep us in line: it's a matter of individual responsibility). Mostly, but not exclusively, it's the men who make a mess of everything and the women that suffer and try to patch it up again. But practically everyone in the novel is weak and fallible and makes at least one culpable mistake. But don't imagine that it's all dour moralising: apart from the occasional sentimental deathbed scene, the atmosphere is consistently light and ironic, and there are some very good jokes.

I'm one of those evil people mentioned earlier in this thread who try to put translators out of work by knowing more than one language. But I haven't advanced far enough in Swedish to tackle something like this, so I was grateful for Paul Norlen's translation, which reads very naturally and mostly manages to avoid being either intrusively modern or archly Victorian. Penguin are clearly patting themselves on the back because this is the first new English translation in over a hundred years, but that does rather lay them open to the question why didn't they commission one earlier? Could it be that they were just waiting for Lagerlöf's copyright to expire...?

61thorold
jul. 5, 2015, 11:52 am

>58 spiphany:
More examples of exiles: W.G. Sebald, who left Germany before he was twenty, but stuck to German for all his literary work (I believe he had a couple of regular translators who worked very closely with him); Nabokov and Conrad, who switched to writing in English...

Sebald's often mentioned as someone who would have won a Nobel if he hadn't died before they got around to him. A good argument for choosing non-geriatric laureates from time to time!

62rebeccanyc
jul. 5, 2015, 11:59 am

>60 thorold: The Saga of Gosta Berling grew on me as I read it (although some of the piety in it annoyed me).

63thorold
jul. 5, 2015, 2:55 pm

>62 rebeccanyc:
I enjoyed the beginning more than the end: too many morals being drawn and sinners redeemed in the last few chapters. But what I really enjoyed about it was the sense that Lagerlöf knew exactly what kind of novel she wanted to write and wasn't going to listen to anyone who told her that that isn't the way it's done.

64thorold
jul. 6, 2015, 3:32 am

Just for fun, I've started a new list https://www.librarything.com/list/10360/all/Nobel-non-laureates-non-male# for great women writers who could/should have been Nobel laureates but either died too young or were never noticed by the committee. I put a few of the most obvious names on the list to get it started...

65charl08
jul. 6, 2015, 5:55 am

>64 thorold: That's going to be a long list!

66rebeccanyc
jul. 6, 2015, 7:49 am

>64 thorold: Anoplophora is leading our fourth quarter read on women writers who wrote in languages other than English. She has asked for assistance here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/189398#5191432. So, all you who are thinking about women writers, please give her any ideas you have. (While I'm thinking of this, I'm going to post this in the Girlybooks and Reading Books by Women groups too.)

67thorold
jul. 6, 2015, 8:51 am

>65 charl08:
I hope so. But so far the names that come to mind are mostly "the usual suspects" from Europe and N America. All additions welcome, provided that they are dead and could theoretically have won the prize (i.e. they died after 1901 and published significant works during their lifetime).

I did notice that quite a few of the women I have added to the list died well below the average age of Nobelisation (65, according to Deborah's post above), so they wouldn't have been likely winners, even if the rest of the selection process were totally free of gender-bias.

68banjo123
jul. 6, 2015, 11:08 am

>64 thorold: -- I like your list!

69arubabookwoman
jul. 6, 2015, 1:01 pm

The nomination information is kept secret for 50 years, but information is available on the Nobel web site for years prior to 1964 as to who was nominated, who were considered serious prospects, etc. I haven't had a chance to search that aspect of the site, but it might be interesting to search the data base to see how many women, including some of those on the list started by Thorold, were even considered (and rejected) by the committee over the years.

It's also true that the committee seems to wait until candidates are exceedingly geriatric, so I wonder how many writers who died prematurely had been considered and rejected before their deaths.

70LolaWalser
Editat: jul. 6, 2015, 1:35 pm

>69 arubabookwoman:

Could you help me find the info about "serious prospects"? I don't think the entire list of nominations is interesting because practically anyone can nominate anyone... but knowing who was in the "later rounds", i.e. candidates actually considered by the committee, would be dynamite.

ETA: A historic first is perhaps interesting on those grounds alone: Malwida von Meysenbug, in 1901. (first female nomination for Literature) Wow, she was born in 1816.

71LolaWalser
Editat: jul. 6, 2015, 1:57 pm

This is fun. I looked at several sets at +10 years from 1901.

In 1911, these women were nominated: Molly Seawell and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.

In 1921, Grazia Deledda.

In 1931, Concha Espina de la Serna, Laura Mestre and Ivana Brlic-Mazuranic.

In 1941, Henriette Charasson, Maria Madalena de Martel Patrício, Ruth Young, and Gabriela Mistral.

In 1951, Katherine Susannah Prichard and Maria Enriqueta Camarillo y Roa.

In 1961, Giulia Scappino Mureno, Gertrud von le Fort, Karen Blixen, Cora Sandel and Simone de Beauvoir.

I've read or at least heard of of 7 out of these 17 authors.

Edited to add author touchstones (some absent).

72thorold
jul. 6, 2015, 1:52 pm

>70 LolaWalser: Malwida von Meysenbug

Wow indeed! She must have been quite something. If her German Wikipedia page is to be believed, she was friends with just about everybody who was anybody in the 19th century: Memoiren einer Idealistin goes on the reading list...

73LolaWalser
jul. 6, 2015, 2:01 pm

>72 thorold:

Oh, yes. Same here. She was nominated by her son-in-law, how sweet.

74LolaWalser
Editat: jul. 6, 2015, 2:17 pm

Looking at those nominations, I think these might BE the "seriously" considered? They seem too few to be general. In 1961, out of 93 nominations only five were women... does it seem plausible that only five women were nominated in total?

ETA: Oops, just realised that this is not a grab-bag all-purpose Nobelists thread. Apologies!

75arubabookwoman
jul. 6, 2015, 4:20 pm

>70 LolaWalser: Lola--I based that on what I read on the site for the 1964 nominations, which said there were 76 nominations, 6 of whom were considered "most relevant." The 6 considered most relevant were Sartre, Beckett, Ionesco, Tanizaki, W.H. Auden, and Sholokhov. This resulted in two "suggested" by the committee as winners, Sartre and Sholokhov, and the actual winner for 1964 was of course Sartre.

I briefly skimmed the 1964 nominations and found among the 76 only 4 women nominated, although I was not familiar with all the names and there may potentially be one or two more. These were Judith Wright (Australian poet--I googled since I had never heard of her), Katherine Anne Porter, Nelly Sachs (who later won in 1966), and Ina Seidel.

For what it's worth here's who's allowed to make nominations:

1. Members of the Swedish Academy, or other similar academies, institutions, and societies;
2. Professors of literature and linguistics at universities and colleges;
3. Previous literature laureates; and,
4. Presidents of societies of authors that are representatives of the literary production in their countries.

(This is possibly not complete, but it's what my notes indicate)

76thorold
Editat: jul. 6, 2015, 4:41 pm

>75 arubabookwoman: ...Nelly Sachs (who later won in 1966), and Ina Seidel

Eek! You can see why they don't publish their nominations until 50 years later. If Nelly Sachs had known she'd been on the same list with the lady who composed birthday odes for Hitler...

77avatiakh
jul. 6, 2015, 5:36 pm

>58 spiphany: Thanks for your thoughts on translation. I was thinking that a writer is more interested in the creative process and so translating their own work from one language to another would be a fairly tedious task or perhaps lead them to want to 'improve' their story/writing in some way.
This is a very interesting topic and possibly one that needs a thread of its own.

>64 thorold: Janet Frame was rumoured to have been nominated several times. In 2003 there was a lot of coverage and expectation in our local news here in New Zealand mainly due to a Swedish news report hinting at her win.

Anyway I started In the Heart of the Seas. Agnon wrote in Hebrew though his birth language would have been Yiddish. He learnt Hebrew at a very early age.
I just read this on wikipedia: In later years, Agnon's fame was such that when he complained to the municipality that traffic noise near his home was disturbing his work, the city closed the street to cars and posted a sign that read: "No entry to all vehicles, writer at work!"

78arubabookwoman
jul. 6, 2015, 5:46 pm

Kerry--I read that about the sign posted on Agnon's street too! Was going to include it as a "factoid" but didn't.

79LolaWalser
jul. 6, 2015, 7:17 pm

>75 arubabookwoman:

Thank you. I thought there'd be a larger "slush pile" of nominations. There does seem to exist a trend towards more nominations as we move in time. Hm, well, it's rather depressing then how few women get at least nominated...

>76 thorold:

I know! (It's also amazing how little Seidel's prestige seems to have suffered in West Germany after the war.)

80Limelite
jul. 6, 2015, 9:34 pm

>71 LolaWalser:
Simone de Beauvoir is a writer who I thought would have been a winner, being such a prominent force behind "modern feminism." Ah, well, I can't help thinking that may be why she never received a Nobel.

>75 arubabookwoman:
Katherine Anne Porter's novel, Ship of Fools is one of less than dozen books that I've cited on my Profile as being a life-influence work to me. Just speculating, but since that is her only novel and the bulk of her output was short stories and less so, essays, that may not have met the Academy's production quota. But what a novel -- an allegory of racism and bigotry for a world on the verge of WWII.

81banjo123
jul. 6, 2015, 9:50 pm

>77 avatiakh: I will be interested in your review of In the Heart of the Seas. I read only Yesterday a few years ago --it was quite good. I think I remember reading at the time that Agnon's Hebrew was a unique mix of Biblical and Modern Hebrew; which would make sense given the time he wrote in.

>79 LolaWalser: The lack of women nominees is sad, and I suspect that there are a number of reasons for this. One would be the lack of educational opportunities for women in many parts of the world.

82thorold
Editat: jul. 9, 2015, 4:01 am

Jumping ahead a century from Gösta Berling, and I've got a feeling that we're not in Värmland any more...

Lust (1989) by Elfriede Jelinek (2004 Laureate, Austria)



A darkly comical satire on the sex lives of the Austrian Bourgeoisie. Jelinek wants to make us see how the ideas about sexual relations, consumer products, high culture and winter sport that we get from the dominant ideology are all there to reinforce the abusive power of rich over poor, strong over weak, industry over nature, and men over women that go together - in her view - with modern capitalism. She does this by turning all these propaganda tools around to say the opposite of what we're used to hearing. The language of porn is used (quite literally, ad nauseam) to make us see sex as repulsive and abusive; lines from advertisements, political manifestos, poems, and the Bible are wilfully misapplied (a line from a Schubert song suddenly turns out to be talking about a penis instead of a romantic poet...). Very clever, and something only a writer with Jelinek's overpowering anger and magical facility with words could even begin to get away with.

The story follows the lives of a model Austrian family in a small community in the mountains: the Herr Direktor who runs the paperworks that is the only important local employer (and hence has a quasi-feudal power of life or death over everyone in the village); his wife Gerti, and their annoying small son who talks all the time and gets in the way when they want to have sex (evidently a little dig at Hamlet...). Gerti passively acquiesces in her husband's frequent, complex and increasingly obnoxious sexual demands (unfortunately, the HIV panic is at its height, and he's forced to seek all his pleasures at home for the time being), and she accepts the new clothes, hairdressing appointments and consumer durables that she gets in return, but she's also taking to the bottle, and drifts into a brief, unhappy affair with the heartless but angelic skier, Michael. In this world, sex is only marginally about the prospect of brief - and usually illusory - pleasure; what's really going on is men getting a thrill from their dominance and possession, whilst women desperately try to find the validation of having someone out there who needs and appreciates them. Jelinek makes it clear that the Herr Direktor puts Gerti firmly in the same category as his Mercedes, his hi-fi, and the workers' choir he conducts: an expensive bit of precision engineering he can bend to his will by twiddling the appropriate knobs.

I think what Jelinek is doing here is not attempting to persuade us that all marriages are like this, or that Austria is run by robber-barons who haven't changed much since the 14th century, but rather she's using her exaggerated disgust to show us how easily the discourse of sex can be twisted to feed us false ideas. If she can do this to us in 250 pages, how far have our minds been warped by all the stuff we've read about sex and romance, and all the films and washing-powder commercials we've seen...?

I read Die Klavierspielerin (The piano teacher) last year when we did the German theme read: that's a (slightly) more conventional novel and might be a more approachable book to start with if you don't know Jelinek's work yet. But both are highly recommendable. If you've got a reasonably thick skin and a broad mind, that is! And you should be aware that reading Lust might well ruin your illusion that you have a happy sex-life...

83thorold
Editat: jul. 9, 2015, 4:16 pm

Gedichte (Selected poems, 1977) by Nelly Sachs (co-laureate with Agnon in 1966, Germany)



You can't read a collection of lyric poems in one go as you can a novel, so this is a first impression, rather than a review.
This collection was put together posthumously in 1977 by the poet Hilde Domin, who knew Sachs and was also an exile from Germany during the Hitler period. It includes a short but very helpful afterword by Domin summing up Sachs's career, the main themes in her poetry, and her critical reception in postwar Germany.

The poems in this collection are selected from the whole course of Sachs's career as a serious poet (broadly-speaking 1943-1968 - she never allowed her pre-war "juvenilia" to be republished). Most deal in one way or another with her experience as a refugee and as someone who survived when so many were killed. Some are specifically addressed to the man she loved, others to victims and survivors more generally. I was struck by the absence of direct topical references in the poems: as Domin also points out, they come out of the specific event of the Holocaust, but they actually speak just as well for the survivors and refugees of other cataclysmic events. They haven't lost any of their relevance: Domin talks about Vietnam, we could say Syria or North Africa. What's crucial to these poems is that they always seem to be looking for ways to move forward, not dealing in revenge and recrimination. Domin describes the process Sachs is engaged in as giving the victims a worthy burial.

There are also some more obscure, more or less mystical poems in the collection, which didn't mean very much to me on a first reading: she repeatedly uses the same set of images in these poems in different contexts (fish, butterflies, stars, sand, footwear...), and there's obviously a particular language that you need to be familiar with. But I'm quite happy with the idea of keeping this book on my bedside table for a few months to dip into and gain familiarity with the way her poetic imagination works: I'm sure it will be worth it.


Ein Fremder hat immer
seine Heimat im Arm
wie eine Waise
für die er vielleicht nichts
als ein Grab sucht.

(A stranger always has / his home in his arms / like an orphan / for whom he's perhaps only / seeking a grave.)

84thorold
Editat: jul. 12, 2015, 5:22 am

Herztier (Land of green plums, 1993) by Herta Müller (2009 laureate, Romania/Germany)



This is probably Müller's best-known work, a semi-autobiographical account of a group of young people growing up in Ceaușescu's Romania and getting into conflict with the authorities. It's particularly about the way the experience of living under an authoritarian regime interferes with the freedom to articulate ideas. Everything has to be deflected into oblique images, as we learn on the opening page of the novel: the things that start out as simply encoded forms of communication (the nail-scissors, shoes and colds that stand for interrogations, searches and being followed in the group's letters) turn out to be deeply internalised in the narrator's own thought-processes.

This is a theme that is clearly central to Müller, and she came back to it in her Nobel lecture, where she uses a trivial image, the handkerchief, to tie together incidents from her own experience with her relatives' experiences under fascism and in Russia in the aftermath of the war. She talks about the moment when she realised that there were things she could not possibly express in speech, and started to write: "Ich lief dem gelebten im Teufelskreis der Wörter hinterher, bis etwas so auftauchte, wie ich es bisher nicht kannte." (I ran after experiences in the vicious circle of words, until something surfaced in a way I hadn't known it before) — that's a process that you can clearly see reflected in her very indirect, elliptical narrative style. And which ties in with her well-known fondness for making collages out of words cut from newspapers.

Interestingly, she uses two key incidents in the Nobel lecture that also appear in this novel: the time when she found that her office at work had been allocated to someone else, and she continued to work sitting on the stairs; and the time when her mother, locked up for the day by an irritable policeman, finds a bucket and spring-cleans the police station for want of anything better to do.

One thing that struck me about this much-translated book is the way it has two quite different families of titles, both referring to key images in the book, but oddly enough bringing out quite different aspects of what the book is about. In the German original and about half the other languages in the list that I can understand, it is called Herztier, "Heart-animal". This is a comforting image used by the narrator's grandmother, the invisible animal accompanying everyone, whose form and size reflect the strength with which we face the challenges of the outside world. (It reminded me of Philip Pullman's "daemons".). In English and the other half of the languages it is The land of green plums: Müller consistently and deliberately uses rural, agricultural imagery that we would normally think of as idyllic and nostalgic to represent the backward, inward-looking and mean-spirited qualities of peasant culture which she identifies as the driving force of the Romanian dictatorship. People who live in small villages are accustomed to denounce their neighbours for petty advantage (in fact it's probably a necessary survival strategy). Policemen are best recruited from raw peasants who haven't learnt the civilised ways of the big city, and who go around helping themselves to plums from the trees. So Herztier seems to be a novel about the internalisation of oppressive politics; Green plums becomes a novel about dictatorship as the apotheosis of rural poverty. And both are valid interpretations, of course...

85thorold
jul. 12, 2015, 8:10 am

...flushed with enthusiasm, I started in on Kristin Lavrandatter, but it turns out that the ebook I got is the Archer and Scott translation into a hideous 1920s version of Ivanhoe-ese. “I saw you had your daughter with you,” she said, when she had greeted them, “and methought I must needs have a sight of her. But you must take the cap from her head; they say she hath such bonny hair.” Which is quite comical for a couple of pages, but I don't think I can bring myself to read any more. I know there's a recent Penguin translation (although apparently not available in the Netherlands as an ebook) - is that any better?

86Settings
Editat: jul. 12, 2015, 8:58 am

Tiina Nunnally's translation of Kristin Lavransdatter is excellent, and even won an award for best translation. I guarantee it is better than what you've excerpted. Don't miss it.

-

The Treasure; or Herr Arne's Hoard by Selma Lagerlöf.

This is short (novella-length), an easy read, and available online for free. It reads like a folk tale.

Copy-pasted from above, Lagerlöf won the Nobel, "in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings." Lofty idealism, definitely, and definitely a strong Christian spiritual perception. As Thorold said about Lagerlöf's The Story of Gösta Berling, the many characters here are weak and fallible, yet there is always the chance for redemption.

87rebeccanyc
jul. 12, 2015, 9:23 am

>86 Settings: I agree about both Tina Nunnally's translation and The Treasure. I also enjoyed Lagerlof's the Saga of Gosta Berling, which I read first.

88banjo123
jul. 19, 2015, 4:25 pm

Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This short non-fiction book is about Chilean film maker Miguel Littin. Littin was exiled by the Pinochet regime, and in 1985, disguised as an Uruguayal public relations agent, returned to Chile to film a documentary about Chile under siege. It's an interesting story, with harrowing and comic turns. It was difficult for Littin to be back in his beloved country, but not be able to be himself, and to visit family and friends. GGM's prose is lovely to read.

89thorold
jul. 20, 2015, 9:01 am

>72 thorold:, >73 LolaWalser:
I started on Memoiren einer Idealistin last week, since I was on a boat and didn't have much else to distract me. The first few chapters were slow going and a bit syrupy (what a good little girl I was and how much I loved all my family before they threw me out as a dangerous radical...), but it livens up quite a lot when it gets to 1848, the Hamburger Hochschule and the London exiles. I've just got to Mazzini, and am looking forward to seeing who turns up next!

One thing that makes it harder to read is that since she originally published it anonymously, she missed out many of the names of people and places and identified them indirectly ("the north German town", "my married brother",etc.). Obviously she only put a few key ones back when she later revised the book, which gives some bizarre effects and makes it hard to keep track of who's who. Her home town (Kassel) is named in Chapter 1, but never subsequently, for instance.

90rebeccanyc
jul. 25, 2015, 8:22 am

Desert by J.M.G. Le Clézio



I'm a Le Clézio fan, and I had been looking forward to reading this book for some years, but I didn't end up liking it as much as other books by him I've read. The novel consists of two interwoven stories, set off typographically. The first, taking place in the early years of the 20th century, tells the tale of the Saharan (and some sub-Saharan) Muslim groups that were targeted by mostly French Christian armies, and thus had to migrate from their traditional homes and livelihoods to find a place where they could be safe and find work/food. This part of the novel focuses on a boy named Nour and a holy man/sheik named Ma al-Aïnine, or Water of the Eyes. (They are Blue Men, or part of the Tuareg tribe.) The second part of the novel takes place probably in the mid-20th century and concerns a teenager named Lalla, a descendent of this group, who lives initially in a run-down area on the coast of Morocco and then ends up in Marseille, fleeing an older rich man who gives her family presents because he wants to marry her.

But the novel really isn't about these characters: it is about, primarily, the harshness and the beauty of the desert and the natural environment in general. In their seemingly endless travels, Nour and his tribe and the tribes that travel with them experience the heat, the light and the darkness, the sand, the dust, the thirst, the hunger, the illnesses, the death that the desert brings. Lalla has a friend, a mute orphan sheepherder, known as the Hartani, who introduces her to the rocks and dunes and hillsides around where she lives, and teaches her how to hide. In both these environments, Le Clézio makes the natural world come alive, as he did in previous books I read. It just seemed these sections went on too long and almost became repetitive after a while. Of course, it could be argued that that's what life was like, especially for Nour, and the book is just reflecting this.

The section in which Lalla flees to Marseille is titled "Life with the Slaves" and the mostly colonized people Lalla meets there are, if not slaves, at least wandering in a desert that is unfamiliar to them. This is in part a book about colonialism, as the ending sections of Nour's story make clear; they are dated (with 1912 dates) and reveal the final attacks by French troops (largely black African colonial soldiers with of course white French officers). Although the French think they are attacking ferocious guerrilla leaders, the reader knows that these are starving men, women, and children who were trying to find a place they could live. The attacks end up being massacres.

To come back to Lalla, she discovers she is pregnant and the end of the book was a little too melodramatic for my taste. But Lalla is a very strong character, both physically and psychologically, and I appreciated that Le Clézio could create such a female character. Lalla also has the ability to see beyond the present, in almost trance-like states.

So why didn't I like this book as much as others? Mainly it's because I thought it was too long and even repetitive, as noted above. The other Le Clézio books I've read were tighter and more focused.

91thorold
Editat: jul. 27, 2015, 7:27 am

Not a laureate, but relevant to this thread because as, >70 LolaWalser: discovered, this was the only woman to be nominated in 1901, the first time the literature prize was awarded:

Memoiren einer Idealistin (originally published in 1869) by Malwida von Meysenbug (1816-1903)



Like her close contemporary, Queen Victoria, Malwida von Meysenbug had her roots in a small, protestant German princely court and developed a great fondness for the Isle of Wight. But beyond that, her career was very different from the home life of our own dear queen. Despite her family having been on the receiving end of a small popular uprising when she was a little girl (their house was surrounded by an angry mob for some hours, and her father was obliged to go into exile together with the ruling prince whose chief minister he was), she grew to become a radical democrat and an atheist (or at times agnostic), determined not to accept the role that society and her family of minor statesmen and diplomats had defined for her as a woman. She was an excited spectator of the events of 1848 in Frankfurt and Berlin, was actively involved in a project to set up a women's higher education college in Hamburg, and had to leave Germany in a hurry when the Prussian police started to take an interest in her contacts with radicals and revolutionaries.

A period of exile in London gave her the opportunity to break with her family and build up an independent career for herself as a translator and journalist, as well as bringing her into close contact with the dazzling array of subversive foreign geniuses that were living in London at the time. In particular, she became very close to Johanna and Gottfried Kinkel, Alexander Herzen, and Giuseppe Mazzini. Presumably because of her friendship with the Kinkels, the most famous London revolutionary of them all, Karl Marx, is only mentioned once, rather dismissively. Whilst she firmly resisted any suggestion that she should take up the demeaning role of governess, she did look after the widowed Herzen's two young daughters "as a friend" for a time. She broke off this arrangement for a while when he installed his Russian mistress and her husband in the house, but went back to him later, adopting Olga Herzen as her "elective daughter".

She was a devoted Wagnerite, becoming a fan of his books before she had ever heard any of the music. She met him a couple of times in London, and later became a firm friend of the Wagners during a stay in Paris. She and Olga were excited participants in the celebrated controversy over the Paris premiere of Tannhäuser in 1861, which she describes in the final chapters of this memoir.

Memoiren einer Idealistin was originally published anonymously, in French, in 1869, and later translated and revised by the author a number of times. Even in the later editions, the book shows signs of its original anonymous form, and is sometimes frustratingly evasive about names and places. It's not a work of outstanding genius, but she generally comes across as a remarkably open and honest narrator. However, there are moments where she does seem to be deliberately muddying things. I was struck by the way she managed to imply that she was still a naive young thing - practically a teenager - during the events of 1848, when she was already over thirty. And the whole business of her relationship with Herzen is rather odd. Very possibly it was all as purely platonic as she says, but she certainly behaved towards him in the way you would expect a jealous lover to do...

For modern readers, the most obvious reason to tackle these three substantial volumes (plus the single-volume postscript Der Lebensabend einer Idealistin of 1896) is probably the glorious feast of nineteenth-century name-dropping (even die-hard eurosceptics will have the pleasure of bumping into Lord Palmerston (MvM was not a fan), Mrs Gaskell and Richard Cobden!). That was my starting point, really, but I found myself drawn in to a surprising amount by MvM's account of her own intellectual development. The "question everything" attitude she taught herself to adopt from an early age reminded me very much of growing up in the 1960s and 70s - it was really fascinating to see it coming out in someone born a couple of years after Waterloo, growing up in exactly the period when fat-headed reaction and social conservatism were becoming the dominant forces in upper-middle-class life throughout Europe. The book seems to have been quite an inspiration to the subsequent generation of feminists, and MvM was something of a minor cult figure for a while, although she now seems to be retreating into obscurity again.

Probably not for everyone, but good fun if you're a fan of 19th century Europe.

92BLBera
jul. 29, 2015, 10:42 pm

Wow, what a great introduction, Deborah. Thanks for doing this. Margaret Atwood should be in the mix, but will probably have to wait because Munro got one just a couple of years ago.

93Tara1Reads
jul. 30, 2015, 5:13 pm

Turkish

Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Finished: July 22



Reasons I Hate Snow:

-The main character being called Ka when that was just a shortened version of his real name. The sound annoys me and I hated saying it over and over in my head.
-We hardly need to have a debate about political Islam but suffice it to say I really don't agree and reading the character's opinions really pissed me off. There were so many egregious statements made about Westerners (which to the people in Kars, Turkey the West seemed to be primarily the UK) such as all Westerners are literature-loving atheist snobs.
-There was much of the same old arguments regarding women's rights. One of the characters said that women wearing head scarves "are protecting themselves from the animal instincts of the men in the streets." Because of course all men cannot control themselves and it's the women's job to prevent them from acting on their animalistic notions! Please!
-Amongst the political upheaval that occurs in the three days Ka is trapped in Kars during a snowstorm there are assassinations, beatings and raids carried out by the police, murders, etc. and Ka just walks around the snowy streets writing poems when he feels the need and meeting with people involved in the political battle for no real reason. It's also hard to believe all these events are supposedly happening over just three days!
-There were multiple pages taken up 3 separate times by stories/fables that really weren't necessary and could be completely taken out. One of these stories was the beginning of sci-fi novel one of the religious high school boys was writing. That had no purpose being in the book. Pamuk seemed to need more padding to add to the padding he already had to make this pointless book go over 400 pages.
-Ka keeps getting accosted in the streets by teenage boys from the local religious high school who ask him off-the-wall personal questions and ask him over and over again if he feels suicidal. Why??
-Ka is not even from the city of Kars. He travels there because he is in love with a former classmate of his and has found out she is recently divorced. Ka has not seen or spoken to the woman, Ipek, in years nor did they ever date. But he's convinced he's in love with her. Upon seeing her for the first time in years one of the first thing he says to her is that he loves her and soon after he tells her he wants to marry her! Yet some pages later he says Ipek's sister is beautiful and he could see himself falling in love with her. Ka is 42 but has an immature notion of what love is, can never make up his mind about anything, and never seems to have a real purpose for being in Kars other than to be with Ipek. But half the time he's too afraid to talk to Ipek or express his feelings around her and her family that she lives with. He really lacks conviction in the romance department and in his religious and political beliefs that are questioned throughout the novel. I couldn't connect with him at all.
-Ka lies and says he is reporting for a newspaper in Germany about the suicides of the religious girls that were banned from wearing their head scarves to school and that's the reason he is in Kars. The book needed to stay focused on Turkish politics and government and how it interferes with religion and how it impacts the people like the head scarf girls if the book was going to have any kind of impact and actually say something about political Islam. Instead the book goes off into a military coup that's referred to as a revolution and the head scarf girls and the suicides are not mentioned for a large portion of the book. After the action of the military coup, the book actually got more boring and I fell asleep reading it on more than one occasion despite drinking two cups of coffee.
-Orhan Pamuk inserts himself into the book as a character. This could work in some books but Pamuk could not pull it off. It makes me see Pamuk as a pathetic writer who was desperate to try some fancy literary tricks.

Someone on kidzdoc (Darryl)'s thread commented that they gave up on Snow halfway through because it felt like dragging a lead weight around with them. I have to agree but I plundered through because I wanted to read something off my shelves for this quarterly theme read, somehow Snow made it onto the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list, and it fit the criteria for several of my personal reading challenges.

94whymaggiemay
ag. 8, 2015, 12:56 pm

>93 Tara1Reads: Thank you! You have said so much of what I felt when I slogged through it for a book club read. I also got tired of constantly being introduced to another character as if the town were filled with hundreds of his old acquaintances. I was so glad when I finished.

95Tara1Reads
ag. 8, 2015, 1:33 pm

>94 whymaggiemay: I was also immensely happy to be done with it and move on to better books!

96thorold
Editat: ag. 19, 2015, 7:01 am

>85 thorold:, >86 Settings:, >87 rebeccanyc:
I was hoping to pick up a copy of the Tina Nunnally Kristin Lavransdatter while I was in the UK, but I didn't come past any bookshop large enough to have it in stock. I had to wait until I got back from my holiday before I could order it. Should be arriving today, so I might even get to read it before the end of the quarter. On reflection, it might have been quicker to learn Norwegian (but then I'd have had to find someone who would sell me Norwegian books in Hollland, so maybe that would take even longer...).

97thorold
Editat: ag. 24, 2015, 4:07 am

...Volume 1 read this weekend:

The Wreath (Kristin Lavransdatter, part 1, 1920) by Sigrid Undset (tr. Tiina Nunnally)



It's obvious from the start that Undset was a very competent historical novelist in the Walter Scott tradition, thoroughly familiar with the primary sources for the period she was writing about, and able to put herself very convincingly into the heads of medieval Norwegians and show us what the world might have looked like through their eyes. There's little intrusive scene-setting and explanation — sometimes almost too little — the narrator never steps outside the frame to relate her story to modern times. But it's hard to see in the early chapters where the added value is going to be: it could almost be the chapter on "medieval farming" from an early 20th century schoolbook. Even when Kristin gets into her teens, it looks for a long time as though this is just going to be another nice girl/bad boy romance. You have to get a long way into the book before it becomes clear that Undset must have read some Ibsen as well as all those medieval texts in her youth, and that she has set up rather a sophisticated and modern psychological study of the main characters. Very subtle and clever, even if it does turn out that it all boils down to Roman Catholic guilt and she's just as much of a crusty old Tory underneath as Sir Walter was...

The Nunnally translation is definitely a lot better than the couple of chapters I read in the Archer/Scott translation. It comes across as very low-key and unobtrusive, with simple, direct syntax. Archaic words seem to be confined to the places where they are essential to convey a precise meaning (the only one I found intrusively quaint was "maiden", but given the plot it might have been hard to find a less dated alternative there). Nunnally's minimal and unpedantic notes and her introduction with a short biographical sketch of the author are also quite helpful. But you may need a brown-paper wrapper to distract you from the very twee imitation Preraphaelite cover art, which conveys the distinct impression that Penguin see their target audience as seven-year-old girls...

(continuing with Volume 2 ...)

98SassyLassy
ag. 24, 2015, 9:57 am

So glad you persisted to find the Ibsen, although I am a Walter Scott fan. You're absolutely right about the Nunnally translation. I too had read the older translation and thought it was awful, but thought there was enough underneath it to read it again with the Nunnally translation. I hope you get to read all three books.

Just as a side note, your comments on the cover made me look at my own cover, which I knew was different. Much to my horror, LT had managed to change it for me to the one you have. I have changed it back to the one my copy has, which is probably more representative of the book. Here it is:

99rebeccanyc
Editat: ag. 24, 2015, 10:20 am

I'm so glad you're enjoying Kristin Lavransdatter. I read it in the omnibus edition -- it was quite a tome! This is the striking but not very expressive cover.

100thorold
Editat: ag. 24, 2015, 11:11 am

>98 SassyLassy:, >99 rebeccanyc:

I went for separate volumes because I thought the omnibus would be too big to read comfortably, even though it's quite a bit cheaper. When I ordered them from BOL, I thought from the pictures on the website that I was going to get the covers SassyLassy has for at least two volumes, but they must have got new stock from the publisher, as all three came with the black covers and fairy-tale princesses.

(And just to be clear, Scott is a writer I admire very much, too.)

BTW: Do they say anything about what the omnibus cover art is meant for? It looks a bit like a 17th century memorial tablet to me...

101rebeccanyc
ag. 24, 2015, 12:03 pm

>100 thorold: I'm not at home now, but when I return I'll look up what it is.

102berthirsch
Editat: ag. 25, 2015, 12:54 pm

>10 arubabookwoman:

regarding Pablo Neruda

Some time ago I received a LT review copy of Roberto Ampuero's novel The Neruda Case.

for those Neruda "junkies" this would be a fun complement.

ps- unfortunately for English language users this is the only Ampuero translation available.

are there other novels with Nobel Laureates as characters?

103thorold
Editat: ag. 26, 2015, 7:50 am

>102 berthirsch: are there other novels with Nobel Laureates as characters?

Well, Mario Vargas Llosa has written several in which the main character is a novelist called Mario Vargas Llosa, but that probably doesn't count...
There are at least two other Neruda novels - The Postman (basis for the film Il Postino), and The dreamer. Probably more.
Churchill has walk-on parts in hundreds of WWII novels (e.g. A dance to the music of time). There are probably a few historical novels where he's a main character.
Russell and Sartre both appear in Sophie's World (a book I'm sure none of us will admit to having read...).
Hemingway is a main character in at least Any human heart, The Paris wife and The Kilimanjaro device, and crops up in a host of Paris-between-the-wars or Spanish-civil-war novels.

I'm sure there are many more examples.

104spiphany
ag. 26, 2015, 3:02 pm

I started keeping a list at one point of more-or-less realistic historical novels featuring prominent (or less prominent) writers as characters: http://www.librarything.com/list/717/all/Lives-of-the-Poets-and-Philosophers-

I don't recall there being any Nobel winners among the titles I'd found, but the list is very incomplete and was mostly inspired by the results of reading my way through contemporary German fiction and the surprising number of German authors who engage with the literary tradition this way, so it's a bit skewed.

There does seem to be a certain "charisma" factor in choosing writers as the subject of fictional works -- i.e., someone (like Hemingway) who lived an especially interesting life, or was known for having a colorful character, or was particularly troubled. So that raises another question, I suppose: how many of the Nobel Prize winners have had unusual biographies which influenced their writing, and is that necessarily an important factor in the ability to produce "great world literature"...

105thorold
ag. 27, 2015, 8:24 am

>104 spiphany: unusual biographies

I think background plays more of a role than biography. There aren't all that many Nobelists in literature that had a famously exciting life (apart from the already-mentioned Hemingway, Neruda and Churchill), but there are lots who are noted for writing about the particular place, culture, or historical moment they happen to have grown up in. Even Modiano is more interesting because of who his parents were (and what he was able to do creatively with that background) than for anything non-literary he's done.

106arubabookwoman
ag. 27, 2015, 2:46 pm

>102 berthirsch:
>103 thorold:
Interesting question, Bethirsch. And thanks for the response Thorold. The only other one I could mention (and I don't know how accessible it is) is the 1978 book by Thorkild Hansen about the legal proceedings against Knut Hamsun for his pro-Nazi activities during WW II, The Hamsun Trial, which was also made into a movie starring Max von Snydow as Hamsun

>104 spiphany: Thanks for the link to the list Spiphany.

Not a novelist writing in a language other than English, but apropos of the discussion re missed opportunities for awarding the prize to a woman writer, I've recently revisited Edith Wharton, after not having read her for probably 30 years, and I think the committee missed the boat in not considering her for the award. (Or maybe they did consider her, but didn't consider her worthy--not sure whether she was ever nominated.) I read Summer, and it was wonderful.

107spiphany
ag. 27, 2015, 3:24 pm

>195 I think background plays more of a role than biography. There aren't all that many Nobelists in literature that had a famously exciting life (apart from the already-mentioned Hemingway, Neruda and Churchill), but there are lots who are noted for writing about the particular place, culture, or historical moment they happen to have grown up in.

Yep, I think you may be right about that; this is what I was sort of vaguely thinking also without really having read enough of the authors on the list to feel that I have an adequate sample size. It does seem that sometimes (often?) they are chosen less for their brilliant and original literary talents, but because they capture something characteristic about an era.

I mean, not that there aren't a lot of excellent writers among them, but if I think about the authors who have really changed literary history, who are still read in part because they are so good at the craft of writing and do interesting and challenging things with words and narratives -- often these are the authors who are conspicuously absent from the list of Nobel Prize winners. Then, again, the ideological element which has always played a role in the selection may have something to do with this as well.

108Limelite
ag. 27, 2015, 4:48 pm

Ha! Thanks to this thread I've just learned that the author, Kenzaburo Oe, of the novel I'm currently reading, A Personal Matter, is a Nobel Laureate, awarded in 1994. At the time he was the second Japanese winner of the prize, Kawabata being the other. Kawabata's novel, Snow Country is stunning. Stylistically, it is as quietly written as falling snow and as devastatingly cold hearted as Japanese winter in the mountains.

Oe's protagonist is immature, immoral, and disgruntled. There's nothing to like about him (yet), still I carry on reading in morbid fascination to follow him as he stumbles from one poor choice to another worse one when he reaches crossroads in his day-to-day life. He has just become the father of an abnormal child born with a "brain hernia" who is not expected to live. Beyond riding numbly in the back of an ambulance to accompany his infant son's transfer to a another hospital, his ineffectiveness takes over and he grabs the proffered bottle of Johnny Walker from his father-in-law after delivering the news of what he's become grandfather of and taxis to his nymphomaniac ex-girlfriend's house to get drunk with her.

Somewhere, and soon I hope, he has to fall in love with this baby; otherwise I will find nothing redeeming in the 1960s post WWII Japanese character, since even the minor players are rude and unempathetic. Quite a taste of what the consequences of their pre-WWII culture led them to throughout the war and especially following the annihilations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So far, nothing but hopelessness of a "lost" generation.

109LolaWalser
ag. 27, 2015, 10:00 pm

>108 Limelite:

Oe has a severely disabled son who is the inspiration for all such characters in his work--and they do occur frequently.

Personally I prefer him to Kawabata by quite a lot...

110thorold
ag. 28, 2015, 11:29 am

>107 spiphany: the authors who have really changed literary history, ... often these are the authors who are conspicuously absent from the list of Nobel Prize winners.

Maybe it's more realistic to judge the Nobel Committee by the number of (with hindsight - ) nonentities they pick rather than the geniuses they overlook. Missing someone important could happen (as we've seen) for all sorts of reasons. As long as you insist that the recipients are alive and you have a fixed annual cycle, there are going to be people who deserve the prize but don't get it, simply because they are never the "top nominee" in a year when they would have been eligible. On the other hand, there's no excuse for giving the prize to someone who clearly doesn't deserve it.

Of the people on the list whose works I've read, there are a few I'd class as "worthwhile but not outstanding", and a few who obviously got it more for their ideas than for the influence they had on literature, but I don't see any really undeserving cases. I can't speak for the ones I haven't read, of course, and I probably shouldn't for people like Lagerkvist where I failed to be bowled over by the one book I tried...

111Limelite
ag. 28, 2015, 9:34 pm

>109 LolaWalser:

Yes, I am aware his son has a disability and find myself fascinated that Oe discovered his inspiration there. A strange muse. But what I notice more is the lack of empathy in any of his characters for each other. All seem oddly disassociated from their fellows. Odder still is their nastiness and rudeness on all occasions and in all stations of life.

You probably know that Oe is considered shocking and a fair share of his critics dislike his "precise brutality" of language, which departs from the Japanese literary tradition. It's impossible for me to say I prefer one over the other because Kawabata and Oe are stylistically divergent. I bet the critics have no difficulty with the former's language, though.

112thorold
ag. 31, 2015, 5:42 am

The Wife (Kristin Lavransdatter, part 2, 1921) by Sigrid Undset (tr. Tiina Nunnally)


Volume II sees Kristin married and living on her husband's estate at Husaby (near modern Trondheim). Even after producing industrial quantities of babies and discovering that just about everyone she knows has some kind of sexual irregularity in their family history, she is still distracted with lovely Catholic guilt about the circumstances of her marriage. If you step back a bit from the story, it's a bit hard to accept this central premise - surely she wouldn't have had time for wallowing in the past with a large estate and a herd of small sons to manage and her husband constantly away on military service? But obviously, Kristin isn't meant to be "any normal (medieval) person", and Undset does make a fairly convincing case for her peculiar psychological state. Within the parameters of the novel, you can just about convince yourself that it makes sense, but it does go rather over the top a couple of times. It isn't Undset's fault, of course, that since her time, Evelyn Waugh made it impossible for readers to take seriously any chapter that self-indulgently describes the Good Death of a Catholic Aristocrat...

As in Volume I, the technique involves highly-detailed scenes with jumps of several months or years between them, but this time there's a lot of politics happening offstage in between the acts that Kristin isn't completely aware of. Some of this is explained to the reader, but not all, and I would probably have been rather lost without Sherrill Harbison's introduction explaining the political situation in 14th century Norway and helping the reader sort out what really happened and what Undset added.

113kidzdoc
Editat: set. 1, 2015, 11:23 am

Pedigree: A Memoir by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti



This brief memoir by Modiano, the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, concerns the first 21 years of his life, after he was born to an indifferent Flemish actress and a ne'er-do-well Jewish man in Paris who met during the Occupation. He was the unmarried couple's only surviving child, and he was passed on to relatives and friends like an unwanted pet for most of his early years. Although his parents appear to be colorful, if irresponsible, characters and his childhood would seem to have been a chaotically unique and potentially interesting one, Modiano chooses to list the people that entered and exited his life in a droll chronological matter, without analysis or reflection, as if he was filling out a lengthy school entrance or government form about his past, which made this book a mind numbingly dull read. Fortunately it was a short book, but it was worth about 1/100th of the $25 I paid for it.

114Limelite
set. 1, 2015, 4:31 pm

I'm gonna be pilloried. Just finished the iconic novel of Nobel laureate, Kenzaburo Oe who probably has many fans on LT and I panned it in my review.

I accept that I may be banned from the site as a result. All I can say in my defense is, "À chacun son goût."

115berthirsch
set. 14, 2015, 6:09 pm

An interesting comparison with Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978 and Elias Canetti in 1981.

While it is well known that Singer wrote in Yiddish, the Jewish common language of Ashkenazi's- Jews form Eastern Europe, Canetti grew up speaking Ladino which is the common Jewish language of Spanish Jews who fled the Iberian Peninsula after the Inquisition. While Canetti wrote in German his native tongue was a cousin's of Singer's.

116LolaWalser
set. 14, 2015, 6:17 pm

>115 berthirsch:

Hm, linguistically? I think there's as big a difference between Yiddish and Ladino as between German and Spanish.

Ladino is, as far as I could tell from limited sources (a collection of poetry and several CDs with songs), basically Spanish with some lexical and syntactic idiosyncrasies.

117berthirsch
set. 15, 2015, 6:58 am

this is true. I was thinking more of the ethnic similarities.

additionally I am aware that Singer became better known to English speaking readers through the translation of his work as done by another laureate: Saul Bellow.

118FlorenceArt
set. 16, 2015, 9:20 am

Hi! I just joined this group and am a bit late for this thread (I haven't even finished reading all the posts yet), but I wanted to introduce myself. I am reading a Modiano right now, but that doesn't really count for this group as I am French, so he is not "global" to me. On the contrary, he is very local and I am following the search for the narrator's past in Rue des boutiques obscures with a map of Paris at hand (well, on the same iPad as the book anyway).

The name of Octavio Paz keeps coming up in my readings lately, so I think I might try reading one of his books next, but maybe not in time for this thread.

119rebeccanyc
set. 26, 2015, 11:28 am

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa



This is a complex book, as much about storytelling as it is about the ostensible subject, the unsuccessful revolutionary Alejandro Mayta. Each chapter starts with a writer, who says he went to Catholic school with Mayta and has been interested in him ever since, interviewing someone who knew Mayta, but then switching, in typical Vargas Llosa style, back and forth without attribution between Mayta's life and the interviews. (The main action of the novel took place in the late 50s, the interviews 25 years later.) The writer assures everyone he talks to that he is making up the life of Mayta, that it will be fiction, and that he won't use their names. (Of course he does.)

It turns out that Mayta, as described by the writer, started caring about the poor early on and even limited his food so he could experience what they experienced. He later joined a very small offshoot of a very small communist party -- the Revolutionary Worker's Party (Trotskyist), or RWP(T) -- which only seems to have seven members. At a birthday party for a relative, he meets a lieutenant, Vallejos, who appears to be involved in a revolutionary plot in the Andes where he works running a jail in the town of Jauja. Mayta is entranced by the possibility of action, rather than talk, but fails to convince the other members of his party; in fact, they suggest that Vallejos might be an informer. And, it turns out, Mayta is gay, and that ultimately gets him kicked out of the RWP(T), although they state it is for more high-minded revolutionary reasons. Inevitably, Mayta goes to Jauja, the plot of course fails (but why?), and it is a mystery what happened to both Vallejos and Mayta until the very end of the novel. Through this plot, Vargas Llosa satirizes much "revolutionary" activity.

But this plot summary is infinitely more straightforward than the novel. Not only is it occasionally hard to figure out who is talking and what is happening, but part of the novel is about how the writer does his interviewing and what he makes up and what is real. At the end, the "truth" about Mayta is revealed. But is it true? The reader doesn't know.

I am a Vargas Llosa fan, but this wasn't one of my favorites of his.

120SassyLassy
Editat: juny 20, 2021, 11:34 am

Iceland's Bell by Halldór Laxness, translated by Philip Roughton



Iceland in the early eighteenth century was one of the most dismal places on earth. Life there was a true example of Hobbes's "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Death came from starvation, freezing or plague. A colony of Denmark, it was exploited and plundered at every turn. The Great Northern War occupied the Danes and Iceland had to contribute whatever it could. Religious leaders imposing the "Lutheran heresy" were stern. The administration of justice was harsh and severe. The only national treasure was a bell, given to the people by the Norwegian king in 1015. The bell was at the courthouse in Pingvellir, where Icelanders had held their national assemblies and from where they were now ruled by Denmark.

One year when the king decreed that the people of Iceland were to relinquish all their brass and copper so that Copenhagen could be rebuilt following the war, men were sent to fetch the ancient bell at Pingvellir by Öxará.

The king's hangman brought Jón Hreggviðsson, a liar and a thief, to cut down the bell. Jón slandered the king and unable to pay his fine, was subjected to twenty-four lashes, administered by the hangman. Following the punishment, a drunken night ensued for all involved. In the morning, the king's hangman was found dead in the stream. Jón Hreggviðsson was too drunk to remember anything.

Laxness moves quickly, introducing all his major characters right away, setting up the different story lines that are the three books of the text. Before page twenty, we have them all together in Jón Hreggviðsson's hovel under the most unusual circumstances. Arnas Arnæus, an Icelandic scholar living in Copenhagen had come to Iceland
to purchase any and all ancient tatters of writing, whether on parchment or paper: old scrolls, scraps, anything resembling a letter or book that was decaying now in all haste in the keeping of the destitute and wretched inhabitants of this miserable land.

He wanted to
find for these poor scraps of books a place of refuge in his own great mansion in the city of Copenhagen, to be stored for all eternity so that the learned men of the world could be sure that once upon a time there had lived in Iceland folk to be reckoned men.
With Arnæus were the Bishop, and the Magistrate's daughter, Lady Snæfriður. If Jón represented the dregs of Iceland, Snæfriður was all that Iceland wanted to be. She was the very stuff of legends, the girl who would become Iceland's Sun. She was no stereotypical maiden though. She emerges as one of the strongest and most independent women in literature.

Jón would become a convicted murderer, would escape execution and travel as a down and out Everyman through much of northern Europe over the next thirty years, never losing his sense of independence, his insolence, or his gift for seeing through to the heart of things. His attitude to all and sundry, and the resultant escapades, provide the humour that is needed in any great tale.

Arnæus, a fictional representation of the real life Árni Magnússon, is a man consumed by his hunt for every last scrap of Icelandic literature, even if it is a literal scrap. As a friend of the Danish king and his assessor, he is able to wield much influence on the course of events.

Laxness tells the story of these three characters like reciting a saga, all facts and dialogue. We only get to know the characters through his recitation of their words and actions. We also get to know and care a lot about Iceland itself, to want it to have a better fate. Iceland won its independence from Denmark in 1944, while Laxness was writing this book, one which provides a lesson on what colonial status can do to a nation.

Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. Iceland's Bell is just one reason why.

_______________

cross posted from my Club Read thread
________________________________
originally posted Oct 16, 2015, edited to restore cover

121SassyLassy
Editat: juny 20, 2021, 11:36 am

Cela won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1989.



Mazurka for Two Dead Men by Camilo José Cela translated from the Spanish by Patricia Haugaard 1992
first published as Mazurca para dos muertos in 1984

This book made me work. That's not a bad thing, but along the way it almost drove me crazy. I couldn't make sense of it. Was there a clue in the title? I looked up the structure of a mazurka to see if there was a link between that and the prose rhythm. There wasn't.

Then one day, about one hundred and seventy-five pages in, I discovered the secret. Up 'til then, I had been reading it in ten to twenty page segments, and that day I read about seventy. It clicked. This is a book which requires immersion. There is a rhythm and music to it which can't be appreciated in brief bursts.

Set in a rural village in Galicia during the Spanish Civil War, the novel tells a story of clan loyalty and revenge that could have happened in any era, but is one which the war magnifies and repeats again and again. The mazurka in question is one which the blind accordion player from the brothel will only play twice: once for the oldest of the nine Gamuzo brothers, Lionheart, when he was murdered in 1936; and once more when his death was avenged three years later. However, the novel starts with another murder, that of Lazaro Codesal, whose death had caused the rain to fall continuously ever since, obliterating the line of the mountain range beyond it, and keeping the villagers in their own world. Here we have the two great themes of the novel: revenge and superstition.

Imagine an old bard telling a story. There is repetition. There are digressions, complications, and red herrings. Cela's novel is like that, only there is not just one narrator there are many. There are no chapter breaks and it is up to the reader to know when the changes in narrator occur. Added to these voices is that of the recorder, who sometimes interjects his own thoughts, and sometimes stops his recording altogether to converse with a narrator. Time is like a tide in this novel, ebbing and flowing back and forth.

As each assertion is introduced, it seems like a simple fact. It grows with a slight embellishment each time it is repeated, connecting to other facts, other characters, setting up rivalries, explaining family histories. It's like elderly aunties competing with each other to air the dirty laundry in the baldest of language, leaving nothing out. These are peasants, close to the land, their animals and each other. Often they fail to make the usual distinctions. Always there is that underlying bloodlust, that drive to avenge the murder. As the arrangements are made, the pace quickens, a certain tension is introduced.

In this novel of layers though, there is yet another death that must be avenged. Cidrán Segade was killed half an hour after his comrade Lionheart. His wife Adega's wish was to live long enough to see the murderer dead and buried. She wouldn't utter his name, she just wanted to see him dead and his remains sullied. Sullied they were when the time came after revenge had been extracted. Even then, Adega could not speak his name, calling him always "the dead man that killed my old man", one of the refrains of the novel.

Throughout, Cela pokes fun at those in authority. He gets his last dig in with a coroner's report on the dead man. While there is truth in it, it is so far off the mark as to be ludicrous. The villagers have won.

___________________

originally posted Feb 25, 2018
edited to restore cover

122Gypsy_Boy
juny 18, 2021, 4:16 pm

I had never heard of Johannes Jensen outside of seeing his name as a Nobel Prize winner. In the course of picking something to read, I learned that in 1999, two leading Danish newspapers, independently of each other, both named The Fall of the King the best Danish book of the 20th century! Now, having now read it, I am completely baffled: why on earth isn’t Jensen better known? The book is about the fall of a king as well as about many people whose life stories Jensen weaves together brilliantly. But in some ways, every person and every story of those people is incidental. The book is not so much about the characters as it is about Denmark under King Christian II in the early 16th century. Warning: unless you know something about Denmark’s conquest of Sweden in that period or the Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520, do yourself a favor and read a little about it first (Wikipedia is as good a place as any to get a sense of the issues and history). I got lost trying to follow the story given how Jensen presents it. But the book is brilliant. The writing is sometimes straightforward narrative, sometimes lyrical description, sometimes metaphysical musing. Some scenes are so vivid that I had to stop reading to let myself calm down a bit. What a gifted writer!

123rocketjk
gen. 10, 2022, 12:41 pm

I finished Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first novel, originally published in Poland (in Yiddish) in serial form in 1933, and then in novel form in 1935. The novel wasn’t published in English until 1955. Satan in Goray is an historical novel, taking place in 17th Century Poland, and based on two historical facts. One is the uprising of Cossack armies in 1648. They were revolting against Polish rule, but they found their easiest targets among the Jewish towns across the country, and the result was a series of furious attacks and massacres. The other is the rise several years later of Sabbatai Zevi, a charismatic figure who claimed to be the Messiah that Jews had been waiting and praying for since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were to be finally redeemed, their suffering on Earth at an end! Zevi gathered a huge following of Jews desperate to believe in the end of their travails.

And so we come to Goray, “the town that lay in the midst of the hills at the end of the world,” and practically obliterated by the pogroms. The action of the story begins 20 years later. The scattered survivors of the town have gradually drifted back to their homes. The town’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, it’s attempting to restore a sense of normalcy through the age old religious teachings of the Torah that have been followed for centuries. But first one and then another messenger arrive in the town heralding the rise of the new Messiah. Soon, the agony of the Jews will be over. Why follow old laws and old rules of morality? And so the battle is on. It’s a fascinating novel about a tragic, horrifying time and place, but it also tells a deeper tale of good vs. evil, old ways vs. new, and human folly.

I noticed this thread in “Conversations” link on the book’s work page, so thought I’d come here and post about my reading.

124rocketjk
Editat: ag. 3, 2022, 7:10 pm

I finished The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s second novel, published originally in 1950, or approximately 15 years after Singer’s immigration from Poland to the U.S. The novel portrays the at first gradual and eventually rapid collapse of the Jewish community of Warsaw in particular and of Poland in general, from the early years of the 20th century through the German invasion in 1939. The novel ends with bombs falling over the city.

The book is alive with detail and movement. Life, fear, lust, squalor, crowds, noise and smells. Near the beginning of the narrative, Singer propels us into the midst of a marketplace in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw as if ejecting us from a carriage with a boot to the small of the back. In an instant we are in the midst of a rousing blast of striving and clamor.

The tale is told through the lense of the life of the titular family. As the book opens, Menshulam Moskat is the late-middle aged financially successful patriarch of a sprawling family. Adult children, in-laws and grandchildren abound, though Menshulam’s right-hand man in business is not a family member at all, but a retainer named Koppel Berman. The family is a mixed bag. Some are still pious Jews, even Chassidim, while others have become more secular, gradually or entirely turning their backs on the old religious ways. At the beginning, the tale of the feuding, fractious but insular family is told in almost comic fashion. And into the mix comes young Asa Heshel Bennett, who comes to Warsaw to get away from the smothering Jewish culture of a small shtetl town on the Polish-Belorusse border and instantly falls in with Abram Moskat, Menshulam’s most ne’er do well son who takes the young newcomer under his wing.

As the decades go by, the family’s fortunes deteriorate, as does the coherent nature of Polish Jewry, as younger generations increasingly (but certainly not entirely) turn their back on old ways. Many become socialists, Communists, Zionists, hedonists, academics . . . the whole range within the whirlpool of European intellectual life in the 20s and 30s.

Singer looks at these phenomena with a complex mix of understanding, criticism and sadness. In his own life, Singer was the son of a Warsaw rabbi and saw these developments at first-hand, himself turning from the religious to the secular/intellectual. I’ll finish up with a lengthy quote that in many ways sums up the sadness that, understandably, runs through The Family Moskat. Here, Asa Heshel has returned to his hometown village to visit his mother:

After the meal . . . Asa Hershel walked off along through the village. For a while he stopped at the study house. Near the door, at a long bare table, a few old men bent over open volumes dimly illuminated with flickering candles. From the shul Asa Hershel turned into the Lublin Road. He halted for a moment at a water pump with a broken handle. There was a legend current in Tereshpol Minor that although the well underneath had long since dried up, once during a fire water had begun to pour from the spout, and the synagogue and the houses around it had been saved from destruction.

He turned to the road that led to the woods. It was lined with great trees, chestnut and oak. Some of them had huge gashes torn in their sides by bolts of lightning. The holes looked dark and mysterious, like the caves of robbers. Some of the older trees inclined their tops down toward the ground, as though they were ready to tumble over, tearing up with them the tangled thickness of their centuries-old roots.

125labfs39
ag. 7, 2022, 8:43 am



Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker
Published 1956, translation 1984, 175 p.

Yasunari Kawabata's early life was marked by loss. He was born in 1899 and orphaned as a toddler. He was taken in by his grandparents, but his grandmother died when he was seven and his grandfather when he was fifteen. His only sister died when he was ten. These early losses were compounded by rejection by his first love after she was raped by a monk. Kawabata became well-respected for his short stories while still in college and with other young writers started a literary movement called "Shinkankakuha," with the meaning of "new impressions or sensations." Snow Country was written in installments between 1934 and 1937 and is considered one of his best works. In 1968 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Japanese person to do so. Four years later, he died by gassing, probably suicide, in the wake of his friend and fellow writer Mishima's own suicide.

Snow Country refers to the area west of the central mountains where there is heavy snowfall, in excess of fifteen feet at times. The area is also known for it's hot springs and hot spring geishas. In his informative introduction, the translator, Seidensticker, writes that at the time men would travel to the snow country to ski or see the leaves or cherry blossoms, but without their wives and families. The hot spring geishas were provincial and little better than prostitutes, as opposed to their urban counterparts. In this short novel, the emotionally stunted dilettante, Shimamura, seduces a young girl without family, then returns two more times over the course of three years. The girl, Komako, is initially described as clean and pure, but inevitably becomes a geisha and begins to decay. Unable to love, Shimamura, can only admire women then move on, both literally and figuratively. Komako, meanwhile, is rooted to the place by her obligations and burdens.

Shimamura is not devoid of self-awareness and the descriptions of him are both beautiful and ugly. He is wealthy enough not to need to work, but amuses himself by publishing articles about western ballet, despite never having seen one himself.

He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang. Off on a trip, he saw no need to hurry himself.

He spent much of his time watching insects in their death agonies.


The moths that litter his room on his last visit are symbolic of the decay that surrounds him and his own degenerate state.

As he picked up a dead insect to throw it out, he sometimes thought for an instant of the children he had left in Tokyo.

Yet he is also moved by their dead beauty and loneliness.

Although short, this novel needs reflective reading. Much like poetry, it's the images that drive the story forward, not necessarily the plot. On the train, Shimamura spends hours looking at the reflections created by the light from inside the carriage on the window. Although the nature outside is still visible, another surreal world is superimposed, and creates the sort of hazy reality that appeals to him. He falls in love with a woman's face he can barely make out.

Another similarity with poetry, particularly haiku, is Kawabata's use of opposing images in juxtaposition to reflect beauty. For instance,

Black though the mountains were, they seemed at that moment brilliant with the color of snow.

The brightness of the snow was more intense, it seemed to be burning icily.

Black but brilliant with color and snow burning icily are but two of the many such descriptions that I savored.

Quiet, understated, gem-like, all words I could use to describe Kawabata's writing. I have a collection of his short stories, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, and I look forward to more of the same.

126rocketjk
gen. 6, 2023, 3:08 pm

One more Singer novel for me, The Magician of Lublin

We are in Poland in the early 20th century. Poland is still part of the Russian Empire rather than independent, and the Czar is still on his throne in Moscow. Occasional revolutions against the occupiers rock Poland, but for the most part the Poles live life resigned to dealing with their Russian occupiers, who seem to intrude on their lives on a daily basis very little. Yasha Mazur lives in the Eastern Polish city of Lublin. In fact, he is known as the Magician of Lublin. He is a master of slight of hand, hypnotism and acrobatics. Cards, both marked and unmarked, fly from his fingers. Never a lock has he been confronted with that he could not spring open in a few seconds. He is known, in fact as The Magician of Lublin, and his name is known around the countryside and as far as the great city of Warsaw. Tasha things himself an honest man. Although he is pals with the members of the thieves brotherhood in Lublin, who clamor at him to join their ranks ("With your skills, you could skim the cream right off the top!"), Yasha refuses to use his talents for crime. Monogamy, however, is another issue. Yasha has a loving wife, Esther, who waits patiently at home for him during his long performing road trips, even knowing that he has mistresses along his route. Yasha has a mistress in Lublin and has been having a longterm affair with his young performance assistant. Most alluring of all is the beautiful widow in Warsaw, Emilia. Professionally, Yasha should be at the top of the world. He is held back only by the fact that he is a Jew in Poland. Though he is well known, the very best theaters are closed to him, and the fees his manager is able to obtain for him are well below what his status should be bringing. Emelia is the well-meaning temptress. In Western Europe, or even in America, she tells Yasha, such antisemitism is no longer paramount, especially if he were to convert. Yasha must forsake Esther once and for all, run off to France or England with Emelia and her teenage daughter, where, once he has converted, they will be married. The problem is that it will all take money that neither of them have. Yasha believes in God, and identifies as a Jew, but has very little use for the trappings of Orthodox Judaism. Until, that is, he wanders into a synagogue a couple of times during the story and finds himself moved by the fervent belief of the worshippers, whose prayers remind him of his childhood in his father's house, where religion was all encompassing.

So here are the questions of practice and morality that Singer sets up for us in the early pages of this exhilarating blast of a novel, utilizing his standard whirlwind style of prose that crams details into each setting that serves to drop his readers straight into the maelstrom of daily life on the streets of urban Poland and in the minds of his characters.

Here are my favorite two lines in the book (especially the second):

"He stood staring at a spot on the door latch, feeling hemmed in on all sides by uncanny forces. Behind him the silence rustled and snorted."

Singer skillfully sets up these choices for Yasha, the choices that must be made between fame and love and pleasure on the one side and loyalty, self-respect and morality on the other. Can Yasha really abandon Esther, repay her for her years of love, forbearance, understanding and emotional support in this cruel manner? Can he turn from his people and from the religion of his father, all he's ever known and the way he's defined himself for a lifetime and join the persecuting others in order to get ahead? Can he cross the firm line he's drawn for himself and use his talents to steal the money he needs to gain his goals of riches and fame in a foreign country? It is Skinner's great skill that all of these choices are seen as human choices, the moral questions that each of us, in some manner or other, are more than likely to confront. Skinner, in the telling, does not moralize, but instead shows us Yasha wrestling with these issues, as Jacob wrestled with the angel. And we do not get the idea that, no matter which decisions Yasha makes, Singer is going to cast judgement. As readers we feel confident that Tasha, the Magician of Lublin, is alive enough, and self-aware enough, to steadfastly judge himself, should the need arise.