Forgotten Nobel Laureates

[JCamilo]

I haven't read anything by Asturias yet, but the impression I've gotten is that he's more well known for his later works, which are based around indigenous cultures and influences. He was part of a group of latino authors pioneering works regarding indigenous American cultures in this period. El Señor Presidente is one of his earlier works and falls outside of that category. Even looking at this book though, isn't this just an earlier predecessor to the the flood of Latin Boom works about dictators and politicians that would follow? In this sense, perhaps he was an influence on these later writers.

The thing with the bloom is that is not like a movement, with central figuere and ideas, but rather an arbitrary grouping of a heterogenous group of writers from different generations, countries and cultures that just happen to be latin american and write in spanish. Because of this, anyone writting before the 60's when the boom happened is a precussor, even if this really means nothing since the main trigger for the boom still the reckongntion of Borges's prose in Europe (and a bit behind, Neruda's poetry). So, yeah, Austurias is a precussor (to the magic realism too), but since the figure of Borges is so dominating and Borges was never a big fan of Asturias, he does not get advantage of this to be more published.

 

[redhead]

...and also the poetry of Johannes V. Jensen and Salvatore Quasimodo. What do you who have read them think of them?

Haven't read either, though Jensen's prose works have intrigued me for a while (just hard to get). But I did find this on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_King#Critical_acclaim

Apparently he's not so forgotten in Denmark.

 

[Corswandt]

Since the 2016 election It Can't Happen Here has been widely reprinted and at most bookstores I've been to there's big piles of it near the front of the store.

Same in Portugal.

And for prospective writers of du Gard's Les Thibault, beware. Les Thibault is the book I've hated reading the most in my whole life (and I've read a book by Rush Limbaugh...).

I really went out of my way to get the complete (3 vols.) Portuguese translation of that, but I'd say it's near the bottom of the "to read" pile right now, in the same "not a priority and maybe not even looking forward to finally reading" as The Forsyte Saga.

 

[Ben Jackson]

The Nobel Literature prizes has awarded some of the finest writers in history and has also awarded so many forgotten writers. Forgotten lauretes include:
Jose Echegaray
Giouse Carducci (read some of his poems, seems outdated in style)
Carl Spitteler(still baffles me why he won the Nobel, weak and undistinguished poems. I think he was awarded because he was from Switzerland, a neutral country during the first world war)

 

[tiganeasca]

Not sure how I missed this thread, but I will quote my own review of Johannes Jensen (from last May) who, sadly, does not have a lot available in English:

?? Johannes Jensen, The Fall of the King
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 this the best Danish book of the 20th century! Now, having 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 in Wikipedia first. 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!

 

[Leseratte]

Not sure how I missed this thread, but I will quote my own review of Johannes Jensen (from last May) who, sadly, does not have a lot available in English:

?? Johannes Jensen, The Fall of the King
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 this the best Danish book of the 20th century! Now, having 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 in Wikipedia first. 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!

5 stars!

 

[Patrick Murtha]

I had completely forgotten to list Jensen’s six-volume The Long Journey among the romans-fleuves! Knopf published a one-volume edition when he won the Nobel Prize, copies are a little pricey but that edition is downloadable at the Internet Archive.

Now, although Jensen was NOT a fascist or a Nazi, still I can’t imagine that The Long Journey would hold much appeal for contemporary readers, presenting as it does a Nordic writer’s racial-evolutionary theories (and being very pro-Christopher Columbus!). But of course, that is precisely what makes me more interested in it: It is way out of fashion. I like my past to BE the past, warts and all.

Anticipations of later attitudes and approaches are interesting when they occur, but it is possible that we overpraise and misunderstand writers on that basis. (Just because a Gerard Manley Hopkins is proto-modernist in TECHNIQUE doesn’t mean that he’d be down with 2022, or even 1922.)

Someone might notice that I seldom comment in the prize threads, and the reason is that honestly, prizes are of little interest to me until they become part of literary history, and then they can be kind of telling. All the forgotten and neglected Nobel (and Pulitzer, and Booker) winners are in my wheelhouse. (Come home, Carl Spitteler, all is forgiven!)

 

[Benny Profane]

No love for Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Rudolf Eucken, Verner von Heidenstam, Karl Gjellerup, Henri Bergson (Ok, he was a great philosopher at his time) and "The Poetry of Erik Axel Karfeldt", guys?

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive can help with all of those and more. I recently bought a José Echegaray play that only appeared in English translation in a magazine.

My guess is that 75-100 years from now, the ratio of remembered to unremembered Nobel laureates of our own era will be pretty much exactly the same as the much-criticized early years of the prize. Writers who seem important to us now will fade out, others unnoticed will develop major reputations. It always happens that way.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Some might notice, too, that although I certainly have words of high praise for certain writers (Dickens, Cather, etc), because I am easy with the praise, I also have what could seem like a curious tendency to treat most writers, including completely forgotten and overlooked ones, as if they were all on the same level. This is not an accident; it is deliberate. I feel that this strategy yields me more interesting experiences as a reader. It is also why I don’t do that much in the way of ranking, either between authors or within oeuvres. Part of the reason I stay mostly out of the prize threads here is that I don’t think you’ll often hear me saying “Writer X deserves such-and-such a prize more than Writer Y.” I don’t think that way; it is foreign to me. I don’t see literature as a mountain with levels.

 

[Ben Jackson]

No love for Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Rudolf Eucken, Verner von Heidenstam, Karl Gjellerup, Henri Bergson (Ok, he was a great philosopher at his time) and "The Poetry of Erik Axel Karfeldt", guys?

I agree with you except for Henri Bergson. I think works like Time and Free Will is still influential.

It's just as I was saying in the Nobel Speculation Thread. The choices for winners in the early years weren't the same for other decades. The first decade was something like works that held family and society sacred, which meant that Tolstoy, Ibsen, Emile Zola and Thomas Hardy weren't picked. The next decade was more of nationalist interest, the reason for Scandanivians and neutral countries during the First World War winning (Spittler, Maeterlinck, Heidenstam, Pontoppidan), the next decade was great human interest (Hamsun, Bernard Shaw, France, Bergson, Mann, the first four winners didmissed in the previous decade), universal interest with broad outlook (Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Galsworthy), pioneering work (1945-1999, a period where Nobel reputation rose: Faulkner, Eliot, Hesse, Beckett, Neruda, Marquez), to end the century.

Even in this century, some writers will be read while some will be extinct: I see writers like Herta Muller and maybe Jelinek been such examples.

 

[errequatro]

Pontoppidan is great! Even if he had not won it, I would still rate him as a great writer.
So maybe some of the other writers are just waiting to be found by readers.
We tend to dismiss these writers but perhaps there would be great things to learn/read if we decided to go back to them!

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Pontoppidan is great! Even if he had not won it, I would still rate him as a great writer.
So maybe some of the other writers are just waiting to be found by readers.
We tend to dismiss these writers but perhaps there would be great things to learn/read if we decided to go back to them!

I certainly agree with this. At the very least, any such writer is going to be interesting for having won. That in itself tells us something vital about the situation in literary history at the time, and I might as well confess, I love literary history as much as I love literature. ?

 

[alik-vit]

I certainly agree with this. At the very least, any such writer is going to be interesting for having won. That in itself tells us something vital about the situation in literary history at the time, and I might as well confess, I love literary history as much as I love literature. ?

I'm completely agree with you and it's great to hear such high evaluation of Pontoppidan. But his "Lacky Per" is such doorstopper.... I love history of literature too, but when I think about these seven hundred pages of realistic description of Danish society... well, he is still one of two Nobel laureates, which I yet haven't read.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

^ It’s funny, tags like “seven hundred pages of realistic description of Danish society” get me terribly excited. ?

 

[alik-vit]

^ It’s funny, tags like “seven hundred pages of realistic description of Danish society” get me terribly excited. ?

Excitement is such excitement))) but now I have stimulus to read this novel too.

 

[TrixRabbi]

Most of the first two decades of the award, save Rudyard Kipling, are fairly obscure these days at least in the Anglosphere. And I think whether or not a lot of these authors live up to the literary quality the prize is intended to recognize is a separate question from whether or not they're read or well known still. I mean, on one hand, it's kind of ridiculous that authors like Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, etc. never won or in some cases were never even nominated, but also their legacies are secure and they didn't need a Nobel prize to endure for a century-plus.

Meanwhile, those writers who have slipped into obscurity will always be remembered in large part because of the award. So that's one of the greater functions of the Nobel, I think, is that you have this roster of authors who you may never have bothered to explore otherwise.

Of course, it cuts two ways, if the Nobel never awarded great, enduring authors then the prize would be pretty much worthless. But having that odd mixture is part of why the prize commands so much attention and study, I think.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

^ I like this take. Same is true of other prizes. As time passes, they can’t help but be a mixture of the celebrated and forgotten. I am especially drawn to the forgotten.

 

[TrixRabbi]

And as we've seen most recently with Gurnah, it has the potential to lift a writer out of obscurity and into the canon instantly. I know there's a lot of mixed opinions now on whether or not Gurnah was good enough to deserve it, but the effect is significant nonetheless and clearly he really resonates with some people.

Also, yes, in everything I've always been interested in the obscure and the forgotten. I'm trying to sample at least one book by every laureate (still very early in it) and if I end up not caring for a bunch, well it's still something I never would have picked up otherwise.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

I wrote in another thread:

“I think you could place Nobel laureates into one of three groups after enough time has passed:

(1) Did not need the award to create a readership (Camus, Kipling, Yeats, García Márquez, etc). Large group.

(2) The Nobel is an interesting entry on their CV, but did not ultimately create or sustain a significant readership for them (Eucken, Spitteler, Nelly Sachs, Eyvind Johnson, etc). Large group.

(3) The prize may have contributed towards expanding and solidifying their readership over time (Laxness, Canetti, maybe Gurnah eventually). Small group.”

Now, I’m the prize skeptic here, but I also wrote in that same thread (on Somerset Maugham):

“If the Nobel (or any prize) wanted to be USEFUL - well, I can dream - it would go what I would call Full Gurnah and target writers whose output was excellent but whose reputation was not fully established; definitely including younger writers in their 40s and early 50s (although Gurnah was not that young).

I mean, nice if Cartarescu wins the Nobel now, but 15 years ago would have been FAR more impactful. Piling honors and recognition upon people who already have plenty of both makes absolutely no sense to me. It’s just bandwagon thinking.

I might put it this way: I would re-define the prize not as the ultimate recognition for those who ‘deserve’ it - you will NEVER get to all of them - but as an annual and hopefully productive INTERVENTION in the fabric of literature. Nothing more and nothing less.

That would put paid to all the ‘Why have they denied so-and-so?’ nonsense. And it would be more honest, because awards have never had anything to do with who deserved them. They are about the (arbitrary) power of the awarding body to put the spotlight in a certain place.”

So I see this award to Ernaux as interventionist, even though she is older and has had some recognition, because it DEFINITELY affords the possibility of expanding her readership.

Many Nobel laureates start out in my third group and slip back into the second, but it is up to us READERS, and not the Swedish Academy or any other prize-giving body, to make sure that does not happen.