Roberto Bolaño, for many reasons, but I cite one: Courage. How many others truly put their lives on the line as he, or Pedro Lemebel did for the sake of truth. (Yes countless others of course, many silenced and unknown, precisely why these two voices-as-survivors are all the more powerful to me.)
I am not Chilean, though I was married to a native of that complex, dark land and culture. I still try to read Bolaño’a poetry in Spanish. I greatly admire the courageous and creative denizens of Stonewall, but consider Lemebel’s existence in the time of Pinochet.
Im not suggesting they should or shouldn’t have won the Nobel, or any prize. One may as well spit in the ocean.
Karl Ove Knausgard?
3
Some of sins of omission Edith Wharton, Leo Tolstoy, August Strinberg, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Natsume Sōseki, Rainer Marie Rilke, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Virginian Woolf, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Italo Svevo, Bertholt Brecht, E.M. Forster, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Anna Akhmatova, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, R. K. Narayan, Marguerite Yourcenar, Primo Levi, Pramoedya Ananta Toer .Michel Tournier, Chinua Achebe, and Peter Matthiessen.
My prime still-living candidate is Michael Ondatjee, followed by Yu Hua, Louise Erdrich, and Peter Cameron.
3
Reading this column is like listening to French. I love the sound, cadence, smoothness, though I can’t understand a word. So many authors I haven’t read, will probably never read, but nice to read about them, know they are out there, somewhere. We who read trashy novels, mysteries with predictable but comfy plots, characters- still like to hear, other music, languages, just for the...sound.
3
Of course all literature is political, especially those works that appear not to be.
Ngugi from Kenya, who towers above so many contemporary authors, may have not been given the grand prize because he has been so overtly political. For those critics who wish to keep politics out of literary discussions, they are welcome to read Ngugi's stunning fiction and fully realized non-fiction. As a college professor, the only other author whose fiction and non-fiction I regularly assign is Brecht's. I don't believe anyone mentioned Brecht.
Had Brecht lived longer, he may have been recognized. But before we lament his support of the Soviet Union under Stalin, we must recall the US Red Scare ran him out of the US.
1
Attn: Parul Seghal
Wole Soyinka, of Nigeria, is black.
Lots of talk about Roth but no one in this article when asked about who is deserving that hasn't won mentions him. Such a shame, but then he's in great company with Ibsen, Mailer and Tolstoy et al. And yes, the Nobel for Literature is a sham, and while it's the sham we have, why does it matter what a small insular group of Swedes think they know about World literature.
2
I don't remember seeing Henry James mentioned here. Good Lord, why not? He wrote the most perfect novel ever in "The Wings of the Dove."
1
Faulkner - nuff said
2
Both Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene are non-winners who deserved serious consideration after their early novels. And then, to continue to ignore both through their lengthy, prolific careers was a real injustice.
4
@Horace Dewey
I'm not sure whether or not I should congratulate you for your great sense of humor. I can't be the only one who knows who Carolyn Keene was (or do any of us really know?)
5
@Horace Dewey
LOL -- Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew!!
3
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A Nobel winner I don't see mentioned anywhere in the discussion so far. Whatever the merits of the award, I can't imagine a writer more relevant and compelling, brave and humane, insightful and skillful, now or at any other time. I'm old enough to remember when his Nobel win had a hell of an impact globally, for the good, by speaking truth to power. I do hope we're not abandoning that latter goal as one vital part of what literature does.
1
You know, it's just an article in the Book Review, and the Nobel Prize is just an award. What I find so humorous in the Times sometimes are the comments, which presume that the articles are proclaiming truth, disagree that it is the truth, and then proclaim that THEY know the truth. How can anyone judge the humor in a literary work, when they have no understanding of the absurd?
3
As Raymond Sokolov once noted, it's by far the most important Swedish book award.
4
Thirty one nominations for Robert Frost without being awarded the prize. No larger oversight stands in the history of the Nobel.
2
@Apple Jack
As a Buffalo Bills fan, I now know that there are others who've suffered the misery of near-wins even more times than we have. Maybe it's a shameful kind of schadenfreude, but I'll admit to being finally relieved of a terrible, long-held burden.
No one mentioned the great cuban writer Alejo Carpentier.
1
@Eduardo
An enthusiastic YES to your recommendation of Alejo Carpentier as a great writer. "Los pasos perdidos" (or "The Lost Steps") is for me one leading contender for the title of "the Great American Novel" (extending the notion to the whole of the Americas). And there's so much more to this body of work also.
I'm guessing your suggestion is Carpentier should have won in the past, given he's no longer eligible, having died in 1980. Anyway, thanks for reminding everyone of that fantastic writer. He deserves and rewards reading now, perhaps more than ever.
1
It's remarkable how so many of the alternative winners suggested by this quartet of reviewers are authors from North America or Europe. Fair enough to question the Swedish Academy, but this alternative viewpoint seems even less aware of the full panorama of great literature from around the world (notwithstanding a couple of outstanding authors named towards the end). I'm curious to know how many languages the four NYT staffers can read literature in, beyond English (apart from Ms. Szalai's one reference to reading Kertesz in Hungarian). Given you've stated that the "quality of the language" is a distinguishing feature of literature, per se, it seems an odd kind of an exercise to be judging the merits of non-English literature only via its translations into English.
And Clive James for the Nobel?! Words fail me... If you want to search among the ranks of the Aussies, please try Kate Grenville (or many others) before the fawning pseudo-intellectualism of Mr. James. Otherwise you risk doing something akin to picking Kipling over Tolstoy.
2
@V.B. Zarr Aussies deserving consideration IMHO are David Malouf and Peter Carey.
1
I notice most of the proposed worthies write in English. The Nobel Prize has one main value: it makes us realize there's a whole world of literature in other languages, most of which we would know nothing about because they're not commercial. Personally I'm grateful to have met Transtromer, Szymborska, Soyinka, Kawabata in this way.
4
The list of non-winners also includes Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Henrik Ibsen.
1
I say give it to Dylan again.
2
@wsflorin
I suspect Dylan would turn it down this time around, making him the first writer both to accept and reject it. Might be worth doing, just for the fun. Or maybe go one better and give him both awards this year, just to see what he'd come up with as a third option beyond saying yes and no to the first two prizes?
1
Dwight Garner's remark, "John Steinbeck seems like an error," unsupported and rather nakedly gratuitous, exemplifies a strain of casual literary condemnation that prefers the exotic and the clever to strong narrative, realistic settings and broad public reach. There is room for the exotic and clever, however limited the audience, but there is also room for Steinbeck and writers like him who should not be snarkily dismissed as merely an "error."
5
@Robert LaRue
I quite like the exotic and clever, and I suspect Mr. Steinbeck did too, having read quite a bit of his work. But I do enjoy Steinbeck also, and I'm with you in questioning Mr. Garner's questioning of Steinbeck's merits. I often enjoy Mr. Garner's reviews, but I wonder in this case if he's not disapproving of Mr. Steinbeck for what's now seen as the embarrassing earnestness and naivety of his work. Whatever the reasoning, I think Steinbeck achieved enough to deserve a fair trial rather than be condemned so peremptorily.
1
Among English-language writers, I think Ian McEwan and George Saunders are ready. Among poets, nobody has a better oeuvre than Paul Muldoon.
2
Me thinks no good no Roth. Why troubadour Bob instead? And I love him since 1967. Though. Me thinks. More deeper European literature, less same upper middle class US problems. Suburbs, gender, race. Thank for your time!
Sehgal is right. Humor needs more recognition. Humor is hard to write! The old saying, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard," is right. Whether it's the Nobel or the Academy Awards in movies, drama gets all the recognition while humor is ignored. Imagine life without humor.
4
@Linda
Well, there's Beckett, which is one way to have a laugh, and Bernard Shaw, which is another way. Dario Fo also provides laughs, albeit of a serious, socially concerned kind. Vargas Llosa definitely does comedy, same goes for Marquez. But, yeah, could be the Swedish sense of humor runs a bit darker, hence the drift of the choices.
For my money, the most notable non-winner was George Orwell, perhaps the most influential English language writer of the century, not just for his incomparable reportage (the benchmark for all thinking journalists), but also of course for the two greatest political satires since Swift, "Animal Farm" and "1984" (and for giving the English language its most chilling adjective: Orwellian). Two other British non-winners come to mind: Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, both of whom were guilty of the cardinal sin of being funny.
11
@Charles Michener
Agreed, in retrospect. Could be his iconoclasm of others on the left caused an issue among Academy voters. Or maybe it was that he died before his masterpiece, 1984, had achieved the major impact it came to have.
I am eternally grateful to the Nobel for introducing me to Jose Saramago. Just read his acceptance speech and you will be drawn in to his magic.
4
How many Nobel Prize winning writers have been awarded the prize who wrote to and for the the prize, as many students are taught to learn a subject by writing to the test of what they’ve been taught, not what there is to learn of the subject? We’ll not know unless the rule to keep the Committee deliberations on the Nobel decisions for fifty years is scrapped.
2
No mention of Salman Rushdie by these opiners? They *have* read him, heven't they?
3
dumfoonered that Roth missed out; I'd vote for De Lillo or McCarthy.
2
I love you and your taste, typically, Dwight Garner, so am wildly disappointed to see you only able to name Gluck or Dove and not, say, Bernadette Mayer or Harryette Mullen, or more conventionally but still excellently the Howe sisters or Nathaniel Mackey or the sadly deceased C.D. Wright as English language poets worthy of Nobel consideration. That harumphing out of the way, obviously until Ngugi wins the Nobel there is no point in awarding it, as the Academy's failure to recognize the most profound African literary voice of the world who is still living (Achebe, Vera, Saro-Wiwa, and Hove having died, and Soyinka having already won) but won't be for long is a travesty of their sometimes timid taste. McCarthy is a tiresome American critical choice, who hasn't written a book worth reading since Blood Meridian and even then was too much of a Faulkner-cribber to fully realize the ambition ascribed to him. Like Roth, his reputation is entirely beyond the examples of his work to explain, and utterly unjustified.
1
in 2019 BOTH a 2018 and a 2018 prize in literature should by awarded by the Nobel Prize Committee.
And, that delayed 2018 prize should be awarded even if the winner was still alive in 2018, died in 2019 (ignoring the living-winner rule just for the delayed 2018 winner).
@PoliteInquiry That's the plan.
Also, Geoffrey Hill was a serious miss. And Vila-Matas, Antonio Muñoz Molina, or Gerald Murnane should win. Or Thiong'o.
It's ridiculous, absurd, arbitrary. And I've thought about little else for the last 30 years. That's how we roll!
2
I am so tired of this critical condescension
to John Steinbeck. ",The Grapes of Wrath,"
"East of Eden,""Of Mice and Men" are no
"mistakes," they are masterpieces and
far better than anything by Louise Gluck
or Rita Dove,as fine poets as they are.
I suspect that it is his support of the
Vietnam War,in which his son was killed,
that still annoys many so called critics.
let's evaluate him as a writer and not
as a politically correct pariah after all
these years.he was a great genius and
Americans should be proud of him.
15
@Frank
Neither of Steinbeck's sons were killed in Vietnam but both served in that war. John Steinbeck !V, the younger of the two, was a war correspondent.
1
@Frank
East of Eden? In my youth I liked it a lot, but when I turned to it as an adult it did not live up to expectations. The other two novels you mention are indeed masterpieces, and I would add The Pearl.
@redweather To me one of the instances in which the movie was better than the acclaimed book it was based on.
"[I]t’s madness to believe that literary excellence can be conferred by committee....But..."
But nothing. It IS "madness" to believe in the sanctity of awards which are based on opinions, not objective truths. If I win an award for achieving the fastest time in a 100-meter race, that's an objective determination based on fact. If I win an award for producing a film which glorifies a piece of ephemeral political or religious propaganda, then it's just another trivial "accomplishment." Who today remembers the 1945 Academy Award for "Best" picture: "Going My Way" — about a pastor played by Bing Crosby?
“Going My Way” is a beautiful movie:)
3
Have any of you seen Glenn Close's new film, The Wife? It is so germaine to this article. Besides, she is an amazing actor, able to, with a flick of emotion across her face, tell you everything you need to know.
4
What a bunch of snobs. The Nobel is just a prize. Somebody, a single person, is chosen to receive it. Obviously that means a lot of people are going to be unhappy, critics and authors alike. But the Nobel doesn’t seem to be more political than, say, the Booker Prize, which is currently falling all over itself to include women authors, to the exclusion of most men, some of whom must surely have been deserving.
As for myself, I would never have discovered Orhan Pamuk without the Nobel. And what about Knut Hamsun, Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul (oh wait, he’s poitically discredited), Ishiguro? To name just a few of my personal favorites. Even when I’m not acquainted with the work of the Nobel Prize winner, or when I think another author should have won, I always assume that the winner is worthy of the prize. Who am I to question? But critics must quibble. It’s their job.
6
@Margaret Jay
I'll add Wole Soyinka. I had a chance to meet him when he was at UC Davis, not far from you in Sacramento. A brilliant and challenging (in the best way) writer, and an incredibly brave and wise person.
And I'll add Mahfouz, Szymborska and Alexievich as three other great authors--and brave, wise humans--I can thank the Swedish Academy for alerting me to.
If you haven't read 'The Stranger' by Alfred Camus you can not judge other novels. Camus 'won' the Nobel Prize in 1957.
6
I've been pulling for Milan Kundera for years, though it seems like most people have forgotten him as a candidate. (And when he dies, which isn't so far away because he's 89, people will slap their foreheads and go "How could we have forgotten?")
I think Salman Rushdie deserves it, but he probably won't live long enough for the Nobel Committee to feel that it's safe to do so.
One day I hope Hilary Mantel gets the prize, or is at least considered, but she's 66 and has a few years yet.
4
A really disappointing discussion. The people were fixated on English-language writers, mainly based in the US, and were condescending about many prizes awarded to writers from abroad. I do hope Ngugi wins the prize; that was the only real bright spot in the discussion.
6
@John Foster agree. That was what stood out to me. The triumph, if that is what it can be called, of the Nobel is that it regularly makes awards outside the English-language
World.
1
I'd like to see more women Nobel-ly honored. Isak Dinesen never made the cut. . . She always has my vote. .... A bit of Wiki history; not sure how accurate: Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described it as "a mistake" that Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s[77] and when Hemingway won the prize in 1954, he stated that Bernard Berenson, Carl Sandburg and Blixen deserved the prize more than he did.[10] Although never awarded the prize, she finished in third place behind Graham Greene in 1961, the year Ivo Andrić was awarded the prize.[78] In 2012, the Nobel records were opened after 50 years and it was revealed that Blixen was among a shortlist of authors considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, along with John Steinbeck (the eventual winner), Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Anouilh. Blixen became ineligible after dying in September of that year.[79]
3
I have to admit that if an author wins a Nobel, I know that most likely I will find them too dense and dull -- with the one exception being Kazuo Ishiguro. Maybe I just haven't tried enough of them. On the other hand, I generally find I really enjoy Pulitzer Prize and Man Booker winners.
3
@Lisa
Lisa, I would encourage you to try Patrick Modiano who won the Nobel in 1914. His novels are short, unpretentious, and accessible, but are filled with mystery and haunted by memories of Paris during the occupation. I find them spell-binding.
3
@joyM
Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in 2014, NOT in 1914. My apologies for the error.
@Lisa
I'd give Solzhenitsyn a try, and Alexievich too. Not light subject matter, but readable and compelling.
As for the discussion's list of writers who ought to have won the Nobel but didn't --
Tolstoy evidently insisted that he not be considered. (That's not surprising when you consider what he was like in his last years. Poor Sophia sure could have used the cash, though.)
Chekhov, Kafka, and Proust might well have won eventually if they hadn't died so young (44, 40, and 51).
Henry James died just short of age 73 in 1916; he, too, might have received it had he lived longer or been born later.
I suspect that Joyce was still too avant-garde for the Swedish Academy's tastes when he died in 1941. He was just short of age 59 then; maybe the Academy would have caught up to him if he'd lived to, say, age 80.
As for Nabokov, my guess would be that the Academy simply couldn't get past the subject matter of Lolita.
4
Someone mentioned Louise Erdrich. I would add Sinhalese-Canadian Michael Ondatjee, who has written astonding novels set in many places (COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER is my favorite, his most recent one, my least, alas).
4
I'm not a bean counter by any stretch but it's impossible to read lists like this and what was or wasn't included and then include the throwaway line in the last paragraph of the percentage of females who are even considered. These numbers are criminal, as with female film directors, or female CEO's of Fortune 500 companies, female solo museum shows (very interested in the ratio of female to male editors at NYT. Can we throw in people of color and I'd love to see the pay stubs as well)female solo gallery shows. Shall I go on? In this moment, on this day, I would hope NYT would at least include more than an afterthought. Many of us are depending on you to speak the truth about this wonderful new conversation we are finally having. It feels like complicity. It's making me wonder in some type of internal audit at NYT would be in order. Can you keep putting #metoo moments on the cover without letting us know about your own, not just newsroom but all of the other floors.
Now, um, Gravity's rainbow as summer reading? I was once watching squash tournament -they are very loud, a players trophy gf was reading it courtside. I was wondering if she was holding it upside down. I don't think you could say Steinbeck is a mistake. To me, there is plenty mastery to write something truly gripping in such a plainspoken way. To me, the same reason I love Patricia Highsmith. Spare writing that has us gripping a page. Please take her out of the mystery section at the bookstore.
4
Hopefully justice will prevail next year when both Nobel Prizes for Literature -- yes both of them -- are awarded to Donald John Trump for the most outstanding collection of witless, asinine, lying tweets and replies to reporter’s questions ever assembled by the feeble "mind” of a man.
Here now, some golden oldies:
"I will be phenomenal to the women. I mean, I want to help women.”
“Do you believe in punishment for abortion – yes or no – as a principle?”
“The answer is there has to be some form of punishment.”
“For the woman?”
“Yeah, there has to be some form.”
"It's like in golf... A lot of people - I don't want this to sound trivial - but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive... it's weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can't sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist."
“If Obama resigns from office NOW, thereby doing a great service to the country—I will give him free lifetime golf at any one of my courses!”
“An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud.”
It's freezing and snowing in New York--we need global warming!
"I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words."
Top those if you can, Bob Dylan.
16
Garner: "...burned in the sky like a planet." ??
8
@Rob Kinmonth
Hm, yeah, I wondered about that too. I guess it's a good thing the planets shed so much light or the sun would be forever in darkness.
1
Leaving out Roth was an infamia.
But the most disgusting moment in history of the award were the monumentally ignorant and despicable comments of Horace Engdahl, a Nobel judge who revealed the anti-American and Eurocentric cancer metastasizing within the Nobel inner-sanctum.
Engdahl: “There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world...not the United States. The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature...That ignorance is restraining.”
This kind of breathtaking ignorance would be hilarious in its cluelessness if it hadn't led to the shameful shunning of Roth, a master of his craft who to his credit would never have allowed some minor, middle -brow critic to tell him what "big dialogue of literature" he was obligated to enter.
9
@Horace Dewey
Leaving out Roth was an infamia? It was a shonda!
3
@MWnyc Shondfamia?
If Svetlana Alexievich is the committee's idea of a non-fiction writer, they need to read more non-fiction. She's a reporter and the stories were not hers nor did she tell them herself. She mostly used the voices of her "subjects."
I find that particular award to be an insult to other writers whose great works of non-fiction and biography have elevated those genres to art and did so over decades.
I'm thinking of writers like Robert Caro, David McCullough, and Studs Terkel. (Apparently Primo Levi died right before he was nominated)
5
This supplements my post earlier asking who are these four commentors: I have looked them up. Of course, I know John Williams but did not expect him to be commenting on the Nobel. The other three are literary critics, as I suspected, but did not recognize them because I read books, not critics. I do not spend time reading critics because too often -- these three may be innocent -- a critics article is mainly more about the critic and the critic's views than it is about the book or the author. Completely inappropriate. I want to know about the book and the author. That is what the critic's role should be. A concise comment at the end about what the critic thinks is appropriate and welcomed, but that comes too seldom. Good to know what these three think but a dogmatic know-it-all style is off-putting in the extreme. I have noted what your three critics say, but I am with the Nobel's work as it is -- which is clearly only the Nobel Committee's Opinion. Nothing more is claimed for it. And the writings of these three are only their opinions as well, but too often they are by their own words and style clearly claiming more. Not in my thinking.
1
@Tom Jordan
Well, the very first paragraph identified the interviewees as NYT staff critics... as for John Williams, I rather doubt that he's the composer you seem to be thinking of (nor the classical guitarist).
Since reading books takes so much more time than reading reviews, critics can fill a useful role. The desire for critical transparency is quixotic; the real solution is to become familiar enough with critics' tastes, by reading their reviews, to be able to relate their judgments to one's own taste via a suitable transformation of coordinates. I find I need not sympathize with a critic's taste for her or his review to be usefully enlightening.
6
They are reading these works in translation! How can you compare novels, or particularly poetry without having read the author's original words? The prize should be called the Nobel Prize for Translation. How many great novels written in "minor" languages have missed out simply because they were never translated or not translated well?
Celine's incredible Voyage au bout de la Nuit should have won the Nobel for literature, but it is impossible to translate adequately, and Celine, who was a despicable anti-Semite would have been disqualified on political grounds.
5
"Suttree" may never be widely appreciated in this country. It's too weirdly funny. The melon assaulter, who later tries to cash in a brace of dead bats, is a gentle comic oddball straight out of Dickens. Does this vein of humor survive? How may people now read "The Pickwick Papers"?
1
The trouble begins with publishing houses and literary “critics”.
Publishing selections seem to be purely arbitrary. Ditto for the selection of authors who are reviewed. Gore Vidal’s musing on “Swedish wit” is on point. Like art galleries, publishing is a business; it’s about economics, not the merits of art nor the artist’s skill. As Chris Hodges Notes, most of the post war art, for example, is self referential and obtuse and opaque and generally sub-standard; playing more to a comoditizing market than art. Does drip art capture the angst of the human spirit? Witness how few African-American and women painters have been honored by major US museums. The late “60 Minutes” reporter, Morley Safer was aghast that the public needed a bible size “brochure” to understand what one is supposed to be looking at, or it’s hidden meaning.
Which brings us to Bob Dylan; his work, albeit, popular in some circles, doesn’t raise to the pantheon of Nobel Prize winners, not by a long shot. On learning of his win, one got the feeling that a heretofore respected institution had been diminished. On the other end is Virginia Wolf and other magnificent losers whose talent will endure the ages. Like museums ignoring certain segments of our society, so too publishing houses ignore the work of those whose work “won’t sell,” not because they are bad writers, but because of the politics of race, ethnicity or gender An Arab winning the Nobel? What a scandal!
2
@Sam
I recall no scandal when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel in 1988.
4
@Sam
Call Dylan a poet, if you like, and then compare him to Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens. Give me a break.
3
No mention of our greatest poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, who has created a new poetic vernacular. A powerful voice of the nation's conscience.
I take serious issue with Parul Sehgal's characterization of Alice Munro as "genteel." As I understand that word, Munro had no interest in gentility and if anything, as a woman writing a great deal about women and women's lives, her characters are often depicted as pitting themselves against the stultifying and deadening expectations put on them as women to live proper, genteel lives. Her stories are subversive, clever, and dark (and they're not about babies, either. Where did that come from?)
13
@methinks
I suspect that Sehgal meant "genteel" as something like an antonym to, say, "boisterous" or "rollicking" or "uninhibited" -- and Munro's marvelous prose is certainly the opposite of those.
1
@methinks
Where did Alice Munro’s characters come from? Her imagination! Where did her plots come from? Her newspapers!
Would you please tell us who these four interviewees are and, in some specifics, what their role is regarding books and awards? I have lived a long life and am the recipient of an excellent education. I love books and read constantly but I recognize none of them. I do not doubt that they have qualifications or you would not have gathered them, and in asking this I am not objecting to their views re the Nobel. I just want to know from what experience each speaks. From what each says I can guess, but I do not want to guess. It is important to get it right. Most speak with such certainty and authority that we should know who they are and what they have done.
4
@Tom Jordan
"Most speak with such certainty and authority that we should know who they are and what they have done."
Well, the introduction to the discussion says who they are: Garner, Sehgal, and Szalai are NY Times staff book critics (as one might expect of a discussion of books in the NY Times). John Williams is their editor.
2
Playwrights: Tennessee Williams should have won.
The (Currently) Unrewarded:
1. Joyce Carol Oates (who, though she's come close, hasn't yet been awarded a Pulitzer). I confess that over the last five decades I've managed to read only a third of Oates' novels, but her radical, pinpoint empathy toward hundreds of Americans nothing like herself I find magisterial. Also consider the consistent high quality of her prose. I think she may simply be too American for the Academy to assess.
2. Knausgaard. "My Struggle" has become the boulder in the road of what we think a novel can be. There's no doubt that only some will scale that boulder; it's highly likely that many more will walk around it. But that book -- and it is one book -- has indisputably restored the quotidian to our fictional imagining, and I don't think that that reclaiming can ever be discounted.
1
I suppose he was too friendly with Augusto Pinochet, but Borges obviously belongs on the list of notable non-winners. As does Wallace Stegner.
7
The arguments over who has won and who has been omitted from the list speak to the importance of the Nobel Prize. Many of us who are not book critics use the Nobel and Mann/Booker and other nominee lists (not just winners) to select the books they will read with their limited time. Debate is positive and picking a winner among so many deserving candidates will always beg a fight. But Bob Dylan? Please. His apathetic reaction was also predictable. An unfair sample: It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don’t matter, anyhow
An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don’t know by now
5
Churchill's prize was noted (I guess as a bit of an oddity). What about Bertrand Russell? A great thinker and a fine writer, but not precisely who one thinks of for a literature award. In both cases it seems like a Peace Prize got mislabeled (yes, I know it's the Norwegians, not the Swedes, who grant the Peace Prize).
As a lover of literature of all kinds I have to confess to shying away from Nobel winners for fear that they will leave me in the dust. Maybe I missed something in my college lit classes, or maybe I'm just too dense to get it. I'm sorry to say I've never read a Nobel author because they were a Nobel winner.
Most of us, I imagine, read authors because they have been "awarded" the esteem of an esteemed friend who handed us a copy of their work and said, "You have to read this."
13
Mr Garner lists Grazia Deledda as a poet. Is this accurate?
Like any prize -- in the sciences as well as the arts -- awards have an unavoidable subjective component. Hence the appearance of parochiality, such as a distinct Scandinavian bias in the Nobels, as well as the occasional downright odd choice (choose your own -- mine is the physics Nobel for automated lighthouses, awarded in 1912 to Gustaf Dalen, also ticking the Scandinavian-bias box). And awards (covering sufficiently broad categories) handed out annually cannot possibly honor all individuals worthy of them.
That said, there's no gainsaying the benefit of such awards, especially in the arts, in bringing worthy lesser-known artists to prominence, This includes, especially, writers in non-global languages (including the Scandinavian tongues, to be sure).
The Times critics' comments show their subjectivity (which is, of course, not a bad thing): Garner considers primarily American authors, while Szalai and Sehgal have a more global outlook (Szalai also giving a shout-out to the splendid literature of her Hungarian heritage: both global and parochial, and why not?).
During the interwar years, the Nobel committee egregiously overlooked the Hungarian literary polymath, Dezso Kosztolanyi, whose genius bestrode the genres of prose fiction and poetry with greater command than (dare I say it?) any, including Thomas Hardy -- and who was also an outstanding critic and journalist.
Ms. Szalai: I hope you get around to Imre Kertesz in Tim Wilkinson's simply superb translations!
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In recent years when an American has won the Nobel prize, it usually points to someone who is a voice of the nation's conscience. This has certainly been true with Toni Morrison and Bob Dylan, and for that reason I do agree that Rita Dove should win a Nobel in the future.
This is not because the Nobel Committee awards prizes to "political" authors , but rather because the American writer in the 20th century seems to be inevitably concerned with matters having to do with a higher social awareness .
This may explain why the current occupant of the oval office does not read books.....
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The Nobel Committee today is a group of cowards.
If they have ANY courage at all, they would have recognized Salman Rushdie by now, a writer who not only has defended the right to free speech of all, but who has written some wonderful stories.
Too much honoring Rushdie would set inflame Islamic extremists, almost of all whom have never read one of Rushdie's novels.
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@Jay David
Salman Rushdie is only 71, so there may yet be time. But there may not be -- it's hard to say how long the Islamist animus against him will remain so strong, and I can't really blame the Swedish Academy for not wanting to put their lives (and those of people around them) at risk. (Remember how many of Rushdie's translators and publishers have been attacked.)
Being at work on a biography of John Steinbeck, I am distressed that Mr. Garner believes Steinbeck's Nobel was an "error." Like a muffed grounder, I guess. But in fairness, one person close to the situation at the time agreed with Garner's assessment...John Steinbeck.
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Parul Sehgal should be awarded for wisest last paragraph by a critic in an article that elsewhere seems a little limited in scope.
1
Wole Soyinka was the first African to win and he is not white.
Also, only one queer writer has ever won--Patrick White (though there may have been closet-case winners, e.g. Thomas Mann) and he was praised for "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature" (per Sehgal's comment about the Committe's preference for "authors whose work can be read as an allegory for the larger story of their nation or culture."
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@Brian
You're wrong: Andre Gide, for whom homosexuality was central to his writing -- as Antal Szerb wrote, it formed the core of his rebellion against Frenchness -- won the Nobel in 1947.
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@Peter Czipott
Thank you. I had forgotten him. Still strange that only two in all those years--no Willa Cather; Edward Albee; Noel Coward; Tennessee Williams (a huge oversight); James Purdy; Gore Vidal--to name but a few while I eat my lunch.
Crime and Punishment. What stronger moral story?
Dubravka Ugresic.
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There is no doubt the winners are good writers, and in many cases, outstanding writers. However, no committee can say who is best, and all too often over the years the winner was choses because of political considerations.
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The passing over of the US big 3--Pynchon, Roth, and McCarthy--seems borderline criminal. Maybe the Nobel committee needs to read better translations; humor is famously hard to translate, and dark humor harder still. But these writers all also dealt with the major issues of being human. "Mason and Dixon" is simply the greatest book on friendship ever penned. "Blood Meridian" shocks in its story of man's inhumanity to man. I always think of the Latin maxim "homo homini lupus" when I consider that book. I'm much less a fan of Roth's eternal misogyny but he is undoubtedly a masterful writer. Maybe next year...
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@gdrawlings This couldn't be put better. Too late for Roth, whose Sabbath's Theater and Anatomy Lesson are as good as it gets. Mason & Dixon is absolutely astonishing. And Blood Meridian, more than the books mentioned here, will be McCarthy's lasting achievement.
I am pretty sure the committee reads the novels in English. But they may not be attuned enough to American English (in Pynchon's case) or King James English mixed with Faulkner (in McCarthy's) to appreciate these writers.
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Pynchon certainly writes like he’s trying mightily hard to impress...somebody. Not sure it’s the prize committee, though.
I second your opinion. I command PARUL SEHGAL to actually read Billiards at Half Past Nine. I read it in my twenties at the recommendation of a friend who said it was the best book she had ever read, and then again two more times. It's an extraordinary look at what war and resistance does to people, to families, to countries...and the writing is gorgeous. It's not funny, so it wouldn't fit what some reviewers think should be a requirement for the prize, but I think Boll is brilliant.
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@Jane McVeigh
Hear, Hear, Jane! Boll (minus the umlaut) IS brilliant and a particularly worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize. I just finished re-reading "The Safety Net" which was written after he had won the prize. It's often said that by the time an author wins the prize their best work is behind them. Most definitely not so in Mr. Boll's case, who captured the "zeitgeist" like no one else of his era.
If we’re going to consider poets, how about the gifted, subtle and painfully honest Natasha Trethewey, who remembers being taught the history of the Civil War through viewing Gone with the Wind, perhaps the esteemed committee’s most egregious error, and the most pernicious book in American history?
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The answers here, particularly about Dylan, confirm my interest in seeing more reviews from Szalai and Sehgal. By the way, any chance you could kill the rote questions for the "interviews" you keep running with writers of recent books? Rote questions make for very boring responses. Why not run real back-and-forth interviews? Or better yet, kill the interviews altogether, and go back to running a review every day.
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I was disappointed that Updike never got a gong. Read him in college and havealways returned to him.
Showing my australian bias; Tim Winton, Les A. Murray and Gerard Murnane. All are worth a read.
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Les A. Murray is a genius.
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@Johno I like Tim Winton, too.
I spent the summer reading/re-reading Thomas Pynchon’s entire oeuvre, and while I regard the prospect as remote (the Pulitzer Prize governing board developed a severe case of the vapors over “Gravity’s Rainbow” in 1974, overruling the unanimous recommendation of its literary committee, and there’s some reason to suppose that the author would respond with a polite “no thanks”), I was a bit surprised that he does not appear as a contender in this piece.
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As for female poets, while I have no objection to Rita Dove or Louise Gluck, I think an undoubtedly great poet with international reach is Alice Notley, whose imagination and energy have taken on a broad reach of topics and executed them with force and beauty.
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Kazantzakis wrote Zorba the Greek and he never received a Nobel prize for literature. My favorite novel of his is Report to Greco. It’s an excellent if rambling novel.
Kazantszakis wrote many books that have never been translated into English. Every Greek school child has read Kazantzakis in Greek.
Cavafy is another excellent poet who has never been acknowledged even though his Ithaki is still appreciated.
I’m glad the NYT still pays attention to books.
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Someone likes Suttree more than the border trilogy? Gimme a break! If McCarthy doesn't win one of the two next year the award will have failed in its truest goal--to award the best writer
@Junior
What do you mean by "best"?
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@Junior Personally, I think Suttree is fantastic. It reminded me of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Misadventures on the river. I'll never forget it.
@Junior
The border trilogy is simply a terrible, draining, inexplicably popular set of books. Awful writing and clueless story. McCarthy has written good books, but not since Blood Meridian.
Anyone who says he only pretended to read "Billiards at Half-Past Nine" by Heinrich Böhl should be put in book-critic jail. Of the 36 books our book club has read, it is the consensus favorite. The bigger crime is that it appears to be out of print in English and only available as a used paperback.
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@Tom Wells
I also recommend a film based on "Billiards" that captures its essence, "Not Reconciled," the English title, by Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet.
I'm sorry, but I don't have anywhere near the reading time needed to have an opinion on the Nobel committee's choices. Do those with such opinions do anything all day but read?
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@I'm retired. I do water aerobics, walk, some volunteering...and nearly all the rest of the day--I read. It is like an endless summer.
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@franko Reading happens, whether I have time for it or not.
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As much as I disagreed with Borges' political positions I believe he deserved the Nobel prize ( whatever the merit of the prize.)
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It might be possible for all readers (and that includes writers and critics as well) to agree that the Nobel Prize (like all such prizes) is awarded for a variety of reasons, some of which have little to do with literary excellence. How on earth is it possible even to qualify why some are given an award and others passed over? Why does anyone win an Oscar? An Emmy? A Tony? Do chance, grouchiness, inebriation, politics, or boosterism ever enter into the protocols of the choosing process? Of course! These are awards conjured up by human beings and we are not infallible in our judgments...
That said, I have to own I was delighted by the award having gone to Bob Dylan. I would also suggest that two names I've not yet heard mentioned on lists of potential recipients are those of Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.
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It's interesting that the committee passed over Dostoevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and D.H. Lawrence. Eugene O'Neill, on the other hand, resonated with the Nobel committee and in Swedish culture. He won the literature prize in 1936. Then, twenty years later, "Long Day's Journey into Night" had its premiere in Stockholm, where it was received very enthusiastically, before it opened in New York later in the year.
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@Steve
FYI - there's a great production of 'Long Day's Journey into Night' running at the Stratford Festival, in Stratford, Ontario. I've seen other fine productions in other countries, but this is the best I have ever seen.
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@Steve
Dostoevsky died long before the prize started. While some argue the rule against posthumous awards should be overturned (it's not in Nobel's will; giving it next year to Philip Roth would be strangely appropriate on many fronts) it would have been odd to give it to him so long after his death.
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The reviews in The New York Times book review influence what I read far more than whether an author gets a Nobel or not. Sometimes, even a rave review convinces me that the book is not what I’d enjoy or appreciate. Defining great literature is not objective. A lot of what is considered great does not impress me, while some books that are overlooked are gems. It would not affect my reading tastes and choices one bit if there never were a Nobel for literature again.
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Having never been moved to tears, to dance, to cheer or growl by the gifted and celebrated Roth, I too celebrated the Dylan award. Wiped down a stack of vinyl, checked the stylus, and, yes, poetry, authenticity, originality....Yeah.
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@winchestereast I agree about Roth, but I will say this for him: A few years ago I re-read his novella "Goodbye Columbus" and was amazed by how much meaning that young author packed into about 125 pages.
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@winchestereast
And a big nod to Woody Guthrie for his help to Mr. Zimmerman.
2
I agree with the comment re Naguib Mahfouz, whose fame as a Nobel winner first led me to "The Cairo Trilogy" -- masterful, absorbing, vivid and unforgettable.
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@Demetroula
I read the trilogy while working in Palestine. Purchased the books in Cairo. What a pleasure.
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I also agree, in addition to the Cairo Trilogy, the Harafish and Midaq Alley were sublime.
Maybe the Nobel Committee could consider hiring Billy Crystal and making a joke of itself? Oh, wait. They already are a joke. Blowin' in the wind.
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Tolstoy, Joyce and Proust never won?! Heavens to Murgatroyd. That literature prize arena is a peculiar one. I recall some years ago American literati got their noses out of joint because they didn't feel U.S. writers won enough Nobel prizes and some Swedish goof said it was because American writers were too insular and ignorant of the world or some such. Then I checked and noticed that the U.S. ranked second after France in the most prizes awarded. Go figure.
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@Steve
Nor did Mark Twain (infuriating that these critics didn't mention that omission).
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While there are any number of acclaimed writers who can certainly be listed as having been passed over for the Nobel, it’s nonsense to include Kafka on it — much of Kafka’s work was only published after his premature death at age 40. He simply wasn’t around long enough to be appreciated in his own time for what is generally a career honour.
For shame at citing John Steinbeck, one of the most important and widely-read American authors of the 20th century, as somebody whose win was a mistake.
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@Sean C. "The Pearl" and "The Grapes of Wrath" are powerful and brilliant. I don't know about his other works.
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@Steve
Don't forget Travels with Charley. (by the way, Steinbeck once boosted Al Capp for the award!)
@Sean C.
I was about to say the same thing about Kafka. Also, Chekhov died in his early forties in 1904, only three years after the first Nobel was awarded.
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I realize the award is given for a body of work, but Cormac McCarthy could win on the basis of "Blood Meridian" alone. As for the past, what of Rilke? Does poetry get any better? Or Louis MacNeice? Or Olivia Manning?
Finally, I would like to nominate Thomas Traherne (1637-1674). Yes, I know there are those who will cavil as to his dates. So he misses inclusion by a few hundred years. Big deal. He's been overlooked far too long. Show me a more profoundly beautiful poem than his "The Salutation".
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1. I cannot possibly understand how anybody could argue that Steinbeck did NOT deserve the Nobel Prize. "Grapes of wrath" is amazing from a literary point of view, and when it comes to "ideals" you can't find anything better.
2. To make a list of people who should have won the Nobel Prize but didn't is absurd. There's only one prize a year, so of course it's always a selection of ONE laureate belonging to an entire group of outstanding writers who would deserve the price too.
As a consequence, that selection is the result of a choice. I don't see how any choice could be "objective" here, but that doesn't mean it's entirely subjective either. The criteria for what the Academy wants to award are pretty straightforward, and as far as I'm concerned, completely laudable.
And no, taking outstanding work "in an ideal direction" does not necessarily mean "idealism". After all, it's Emile Zola, the Founding Father of literary realism himself, who in his essay "The Experimental Novel" explains that realism isn't about "describing" reality (that's what journalists try to do), but rather about experimenting with fictional characters living in the real world, in order to explore new possibilities, and as such open up the horizon of our moral imagination.
A lot of "postmodern" literature just "reports" how desperate people are today. Steinbeck however manages to show the deep humanity and longing for happiness even in the worst circumstances. THAT is literary "realism" at its best!
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Leo Tolstoy had his name removed from the list for The Nobel Prize. He did that twice during his lifetime. He did not want the prize or the money that went along with it.
The first Russian Nobel Prize winner was Ivan Bunin. Also one of the greats, but not as great as Tolstoy was, in my humble opinion.
And one can just imagine Kafka winning such a prize? I have many funny images in my imaginatioin which makes me laugh. I think he would've died just knowing what is going on in Prague in his name. He was so humble about his talents that he would not have understood any of it.
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@C T Interesting information about Tolstoy.
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@Steve
Yes, I wasn't aware of that. Mark Twain would not have had any problem accepting either the prize or the cash!
@Steve
Yes, it is interesting. Now that I think about it, though, it's entirely in character for the elderly Tolstoy to insist that he not be considered.
Along with the literary micropolitics, its clearly been a rotating regional prize. I was disgusted at Bob Dylan as a calculated avoidance of Roth, or for that matter McCarthy, presumably dead before "America's turn" comes around again.
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Asked by David Remnick of the New Yorker what he thought of Dylan’s Nobel Prize, Roth said, “It’s O.K., but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.”
Being that this a down year for the Prize, Dylan could do his reputation for justice a very good turn now by relinquishing it to Roth.
And it might even help him sell a few more bottles of whiskey.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/business/dylan-whiskey-taste-test.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/04/philip-roths-propulsive-force
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Being that this is a down year for the Prize ....
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@A. Stanton
No reason for Bob Dylan to 'relinquish' anything to anyone. Bob Dylan is a treasure.
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@A. Stanton Roth's actual reply: "those grapes are sour anyway"
Apparently the Nobel Committee hasn't learned the most basic rule about scandals:
Tell the truth.
Right away.
Don't lie.
Instead, they taint decades of wonderful work, trying to shield those who should have ZERO business deciding who deserves such a wonderful, life altering prize.
2
The Nobel Prize in Literature should have been recognized as the joke that it is when Jean-Paul Sartre declined to accept the award that he received for ‘Nausea’.
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@ubique
You mean you believe "Nausea" did not deserve the Prize ... ?
If yes, why, more precisely?
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@ubique Sartre's Nobel prize was not given for Nausea, his 1938 novel which like no other work of good fiction presents a philosophical theory. Camus L'Etranger does not illustrate existentialism like many people think (Camus was not even an existentialist.) Nausea does . Sartre's prize was given for his entire work so far, particularly his partial autobiography Les most.
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@Ana Luisa
Alfred Nobel made his name destroying things for a living.
Jean-Paul Sartre was too good for the Nobel Prize.
You can't say they never reward humorous authors, e.g., Beckett, Laxness, Pinter. But the humor might have been over their heads.
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The only thing more suspect than the Nobel criterion for their selection process is the snobbery, and faux elitism of these critics. One would think we were in the presence of Dickens, or Tolstoy by their demeanor. Actually, I'm not sure those authors would make the grade based on the statements.
Was it Mark Twain who defined an expert as 'a guy from out of town'?
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@Peter I'm at a loss to imagine what would possess one to write such a nasty comment. "Snobbery"? "Faux elitism"? Do you object to all elitism, or just the "faux" variety? The answer is unclear from your post, nor do you provide even a single example of just what in blazes you find so objectionable. My guess is that it offends you that the critics name writers you've never heard of. Sorry, but it's unlikely that the Nobel will ever be awarded to Tom Clancy or James Patterson.
Myself, I found the critics' discussion interesting and informative. I don't agree with everything they say, but I did pick up a few promising tips for further reading.
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"Prizes are accidents, and we should accept them with some skepticism. They are not certificates of immortality. The important thing is to write the best we can, and without thinking of any prize at all." So said Octavio Paz, at (ironically) a meeting of Nobel laureates in literature in 1995 in Atlanta. The panel discussions are worth reading; they are printed in the Winter 1995 issue of the Georgia Review. The Spring 1995 issue, devoted entirely to the gathering of Nobel authors, has a superb essay on the checkered history of the award, by Ingmar Bjorksten.
The Nobel has its flaws, as with every other literary prize. The Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Booker......they all have their errors of omission and commission. The Nobel got me started reading Kenzaburo Oe, Joseph Brodsky, Wole Soyinka, Wislawa Szymborska and others. Perhaps the primary beneficial effect of the Nobel, for Americans, is to bring attention to writers outside their normal reading habits.
Updike should have won, of course. Discussion of his work seems to always start (and sometimes end) with his novels; while he wrote several superb ones, his greatness lies in his short stories. He was a peer of Munro and Chekhov. His essays were also wonderful.
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My beef with the Nobel is that the laureates are too old. No ageism here; I simply think that the prize should be a mid-career recognition, and encouragement to keep up the good work, rather than an end of life consecration. Camus was 42 when he won it; seems about right. If you haven't done it by 50 you probably won't do it. Perhaps late 40s, early 50s, when it can do some good in the writer's life. I agree that consecrating already highly regarded authors is pretty pointless.
Yes, Bob Dylan, but 25 years ago! 2016 was too late.
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@Al from PA
Many outstanding writers only had the time and money to start writing late in life.
Why should that work against them ... ?
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@Al from PA Let me take advantage of reference to mentioning Camus to recommend a book that is a response to L'Etranger and is an interesting well written book, a novel by the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud: Meursault, contre- enquete, 1913.
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@Jorge Rolon I wasn't reading what I was writing. I meant "your mentioning Camus." I do not know if Meursault contre-enquete has been translated into English but it should be.
I'm sorry to hear that the Nobel Committee won't be awarding a Nobel Prize for Literature this year. I have always keenly looked forward to learning which living writer the Nobel Committee would honor for his/her lifetime body of work.
Maybe two (2) Nobel Prizes for Literature could be awarded next year? (Upon reflection, in the year in which I was born, the writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature --- "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" ---- declined the award.)
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@Wes They announced at the time that they would award two prizes next year.
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As the article states, two prizes indeed will be announced in 2019!
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@Wes
I always looked forward to the annual "We're not giving it to Philip Roth" award. With his passing, it's quite appropriate that it be omitted.
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