Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

which ones do you consider worth reading?

Here's a list:

2007 - Doris Lessing
2006 - Orhan Pamuk
2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J. M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kert�sz
2001 - V. S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - G�nter Grass
1998 - Jos� Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
1993 - Toni Morrison
1992 - Derek Walcott
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1990 - Octavio Paz
1989 - Camilo Jos� Cela
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1986 - Wole Soyinka
1985 - Claude Simon
1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
1983 - William Golding
1982 - Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez


I like some of Naipul's non-fiction, but only one of his novels.
Grass's early books are terrific (Dog Years and Tin Drum), but haven't found any of his later works interesting.
William Golding wrote some great short novels.

I found Pamuk, Jelinek, Coetzee, Gao, Gordimer, Mahfouz and Marquez either unreadable or excruciatingly boring. Paz was borderline interesting. The only thing of Heaney's I've read is Beowulf, which is not the same thing as reading one of his original works--but it was good.

I have the feeling a lot of those listed were chosen for political reasons (I don't particularly accept what the Academy says). If they were really great, why weren't they commonly available in English before they won the Prize?

[VanIslander]

[VanIslander]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[VanIslander]

[OiGirl]

We read Elfriede Jelinek here together once, didn't we?

[VanIslander]

[arjuna]

[yingwenlaoshi]

Skimming through the list, I can say that I probably never read one of them.

Now back to my regularly-scheduled, downloadable program.

[Otherside]

I would say Coetzee is anything but boring. Perhaps you have been unlucky with your choices?

His two best books in my opinion are "The life and times of Michael K" and "Disgrace" (If my opinion is worthless, they both won the Booker prize).

Disgrace I found to be particularly appealling; his writing is short, biting and to the point and the novel manages to cover a lot of ground in only 200 or so pages.

I understand that a lot of the cultural references (and the overall plight of the protaganist) could be quite difficult for a 'non-South African' to understand. However, If you haven't read 'Disgrace' give Coetzee another shot.

PS. My opinions might be slightly biased as I am an English Lit graduate from UCT.

[ddeubel]

I agree with the comments just previous regarding Coetzee. He is top ranked and anything but boring. See "Waiting for the Barbarians" besides those mentioned. His latest - "Diary of a bad year" is just phenomenally inventive and I'm glad he was recognized long before his creative years were over..... Here's a great book review of the above http://www.nybooks.com/authors/523

I think we also have to rememeber that a lot of what we read from the authors listed is through translation - we are reading the translator, not the author. That factors into our appreciation big time.

I can agree Paz could be considered "difficult" but I've always loved his writing , especially Double Flame and Labrynth of Solitude. So many good ones previous - in the 70s. Bellow, Canetti, Solzenhetzyn....

The one big stain on that list is Brodsky. An overtly polical choice and he couldn't write his way out of a broken relationship.....

I'd love to see my most favourite writers get a noble. Alas, both dead and gone. Gyorgy Faludy and the brillant Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal . Hrabal's writing and especially Michael Heim's translations are astounding.

DD

[arjuna]

On Doris Lessing:

A Nobel Prize For Science Fiction
by Michael Maiello
[at Forbes.com]

Doris Lessing has lived beyond boundaries. In her 50 books, the 87-year-old writer from the United Kingdom has written fiction and journalism, memoir and science fiction. Some of that genre jumping has caused raised eyebrows over her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. But that, and a life without borders, is what turned Lessing into the "epicist" that was honored this year.

She was born in what's now Iran, then called Persia, lived much of her life in Africa and stopped school when she was 13. The experience of a large life is crucial to the epic writer, and Lessing is a master of that narrative form.

Lessing's willingness to follow her imagination led her into genre fiction, with her 1,200-page Canopus in Argos: Archives--a galactic space opera inspired by Old Testament themes that commented heavily on 20th century spiritual, political and gender issues. Writing where her imagination took her, Lessing might not have realized that she had entered the literary ghetto that is science fiction.

Soon after the announcement, the grumbling began. It's in some of the very first stories.

"Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable ... fourth-rate science fiction," said American literary critic Howard Bloom to The Associated Press. In that article, Bloom dismisses the award as "pure political correctness."

Humph.

Lessing has dealt with such sniping before. In 1978 she wrote a short essay called "Some Remarks" as an introduction to the collection of her five Canopus novels. The essay is a defense of speculative fiction.

"It is by now commonplace to say that novelists everywhere are breaking the bonds of the realistic novel because what we see around us daily becomes wilder, more fantastic, incredible," she wrote. Lessing then describes a problem familiar to 20th century science fiction writers--she said she dreamed up a dog-cat hybrid for her novel The Memoirs of a Survivor only to find that her contemporaries in science were out to make just such a beast.

"Yes, I do believe it is possible, and not only for novelists, to 'plug in' to an overmind, or Ur-mind, or unconscious, or what you will, and that this accounts for a great many improbabilities and 'coincidences.' "

In short, Lessing went out into the galaxy because, on both conscious and unconscious levels, she understood that her readers were already out there. Lessing noticed the effect it had on literature and then predicted the kind of backlash that would spew from the mouth of Harold Bloom 30 years later: "The old 'realistic' novel is being changed, too, because of influences from that genre loosely described as space fiction. Some people regret this."

During a talk at an American college, Lessing says that she praised "space fiction" as some of the most original writing out there at the time. The professor hosting her discussion quipped, "If I had you in my class you'd never get away with that!"

Lessing got away with it.

Maybe now there's hope for Kurt Vonnegut.

[arjuna]

On the other hand...


Does the Nobel Prize matter?
Freny Manecksha
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1127412

Literature award is full of strange ommisions and inclusions

Shmuel Yozef Agnon, Nelly Sachs, Imre Kertesz�Who? Ardent bibliophiles may be forgiven for scratching their heads at these and some even more obscure names that grace the list of Nobel laureates for literature.

So there�s almost a sense of relief in this year�s winner being declared � Doris Lessing whose Golden Notebook was the feminists� bible in the swinging �60s.

Lessing�s books have, at least, graced shelves all over the world and she does not generate as many lifts of the eyebrows as Elfriede Jelinek who won in 2004.

Problem though is in the timing. Something that Lessing herself alluded to when she said, �I had forgotten all about it actually. My name has been on the short-list for such a long time� This has been going on for something like 40 years. You can�t go on getting excited every year about this.�

That in a nutshell sums it up. The Nobel for literature scarcely causes even half the buzz of the Booker despite its hallowed name and prize money of about 10 million Swedish kroners.

Much of the problem is that it is virtually impossible to apply objective yardsticks to literary works unlike say scientific achievements or heroic endeavours for peace. It becomes more acute because the Nobel prize is not restricted to any one continent but is meant to encompass the entire body of global literary works.

Never mind that in the list of awardees the continents of Asia, Africa and South America are represented few and far between.

The other problem lies in the way the jury is constituted and the nomination procedure. The selection of the winner is done by the Swedish Academy comprising of 18 members � writers, members of literary academies, linguists, and a prominent jurist.

After nominations are received and the list is narrowed down to five the works are reviewed by the jury. The candidate who receives more than half the votes is declared to be the winner. But the important clause is that all deliberations and nominations remain a secret for 50 years.

This shroud of secrecy as well as the jury�s compulsions to interpret Nobel�s stipulation of the works being moored in �ideal direction� means that the prize is more about honouring a statement or movement rather than significant literary achievement.

A literal following of the dictum of a �lofty and sound idealism� ideal saw non-conformist literary giants like Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen and Emile Zola being given the heave-ho. It has also been suggested that WH Auden�s remark that Dag Hammarskjold was a homosexual cost him the prize even though his translation of the peace prize winner�s Vagmarken was high on the list of best sellers.

In 1953 it was surprise, surprise � Winston Churchill. Since they could not honour him with a peace prize he was given the literary one for his expertise in history and biography and more truthfully his �brilliant oratory�.

In 1974 Eyvind Johnson and Henry Martinson were given the prize over undisputed literary heavyweights like Graham Green, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov � all of whom had been nominated that year. The mystery clears up when one discovers that Johnson and Martinson just happened to be Swedish authors who were jury members of the prize itself!

Again who can doubt that 1971�s decision to give the prize to Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was a political one even though it was couched in the elliptical statement of lauding his works for the �ethical force with which he pursued indispensable traditions of Russian literature�.

[...]

Perhaps it is time to salute the long and distinguished list of those who did not make it � Graham Greene, Salman Rushdie (�too popular�), Arthur Miller, Boris Pasternak (he rejected it), Jean Paul Sartre (gave the jury an ignoble thumbs down as well), and of course the incredible, inimitable James Joyce.

[Woland]

[JMO]