Daniel del Real
Moderator
Not at all. All of them are weak choices, even though I don't dislike Auster.
Maalouf, Oz, Kadare are better choices than Kertesz, Jelinek or Harold fucking Pinter.
Franz Kafka Prize
- Thread starter Eric
- Start date
Not at all. All of them are weak choices, even though I don't dislike Auster.
Maalouf, Oz, Kadare are better choices than Kertesz, Jelinek or Harold fucking Pinter.
adaorardor
Reader
No, you described Auster as an "OK" choice and the others as "weak choices." Those just aren't weak choices, I'm sorry, and Auster just is.
Daniel del Real
Moderator
For me they are weak choices, for you they aren't, so what's the problem? I respect what you think and I tell off what I think. Period.
Liam
Administrator
As far as these four go, I quite agree with Daniel. I think fifty years from now most people will find these writers unreadable, especially Lessing and Jelinek. Kertesz is a good writer, but not in the same league as other Nobel winners. That's what's always bugged me about this Prize. They give it to giants like Yeats and Eliot (not to mention Faulkner and Thomas Mann) and then total nonentities also receive it, for purely political reasons. One obvious conclusion follows: Awards are meted out by people, and people are full of shit. Sometimes they get it right, but most of the time they get it wrong.
adaorardor
Reader
What would your list look like? I know I'm the only one OCD enough to do this, but it's too bad, because seeing individual poster's lists/personal canons/hierarchies of literary value and analyzing that the way we analyze these prizes would be fascinating.
adaorardor
Reader
PS. I urge you to read some of Pinter's plays. And have you read Fatelessness, or Kaddish for an Unborn Child, or Liquidation??
Liam
Administrator
I don't think you are, we have all compiled our own little lists around here, and mine's tucked away somewhere in the Nobel thread.
To repeat: Imants Ziedonis (Latvia). Cathal O Searcaigh (Ireland). Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (Ireland). Gerald Murnane (Australia). Laszlo Krasznahorkai (Hungary). Donald Hall (USA). Mary Oliver (USA). I would also venture to suggest Victor Sosnora (Russia), but I've no idea if he's still alive.
I was also rooting for Janet Frame up until the day she died.
I've read a couple, and have been to a performance of one of them. I didn't see what was so great about Pinter. Nothing he does is, strictly speaking, innovative or psychologically profound; other playwrights have done it better, and let's face it, he won the Nobel for his political convictions that year, not on the strength of his talent.
I've read Lessing's first novel (The Grass Is Singing) in its entirety and also tried to read one of her last books (forget the title) and was revolted by the preachy tone.
Jelinek is not a hack, but she's not a great writer by any stretch of the imagination. The Piano Teacher is an excellent exploration of a sick woman's (read: society's) psyche, but as a novel it fails on many levels. I've read a couple of her shorter novels (in Russian translation) and found them simplistic, sensational and revolting. I've given The Children of the Dead a try and found it unreadable.
Kertesz is OK. I've only read Fatelessness, and was not swayed either way. I neither loved nor hated the book, but I will say this: there are better writers (whether Holocaust survivers or no) out there; the only reason why he got the Nobel was because he was in the right place at the right time, sort of like Gordimer and Coetzee. Oh, what, do you think they would have gotten the Nobel if apartheid never happened? Don't make me laugh.
adaorardor
Reader
Who is Victor Sosnora? Never heard of him. School me, as they say.
When I said make your own list, I mean with 20-20 hindsight who would you have given the prize to, going all the way back, if you were in charge. Not which 5 or 6 might deserve it most today.
And let's separate the reason why a writer might have received the prize from whether or not he/she deserved it. Coetzee certainly deserves it for his brilliant work, regardless of whether the Committee chose him in order to highlight apartheid. Pamuk was certainly a politically appealing choice for them, but he certainly deserves it for The Black Book, My Name is Red, etc. even if the real words that got it for him were the stupid statement he made to a German newspaper that led to his legal problems back home.
When I said make your own list, I mean with 20-20 hindsight who would you have given the prize to, going all the way back, if you were in charge. Not which 5 or 6 might deserve it most today.
And let's separate the reason why a writer might have received the prize from whether or not he/she deserved it. Coetzee certainly deserves it for his brilliant work, regardless of whether the Committee chose him in order to highlight apartheid. Pamuk was certainly a politically appealing choice for them, but he certainly deserves it for The Black Book, My Name is Red, etc. even if the real words that got it for him were the stupid statement he made to a German newspaper that led to his legal problems back home.
One shouldn't use the "I've never heard of him" argument, as this implies that if one person has never heard of an author, he just can't be important. I bet you that most of you had never heard of Imants Ziedonis, were it not for the fact that Liam and myself had brought him up on several occasions.
More analysis is needed as to why you would give the prize to a particular individual. Otherwise the whole debate is reduced to a bitchy adult version of a junior school playground with children arguing using the time-tested expressions "'cos I say so" and "so there". It is not enough to keep on repeating words like "brilliant", as this constitutes an unsubstantiated opinion, not anything in the region of analysis and reasoning.
Those who are in academia can be accused of double standards. They always write serious papers for their tutors using quotes (or plagiarism from the internet), but when they have to come up with something here, utter subjectivism is the order of the day.
More analysis is needed as to why you would give the prize to a particular individual. Otherwise the whole debate is reduced to a bitchy adult version of a junior school playground with children arguing using the time-tested expressions "'cos I say so" and "so there". It is not enough to keep on repeating words like "brilliant", as this constitutes an unsubstantiated opinion, not anything in the region of analysis and reasoning.
Those who are in academia can be accused of double standards. They always write serious papers for their tutors using quotes (or plagiarism from the internet), but when they have to come up with something here, utter subjectivism is the order of the day.
Rumpelstilzchen
Former Member
Well, well. I can only add that I would never dare to judge a writer after having read only ONE or TWO books of him/her. Such arrogance!! Eric is quite right about the school playground. I just read the posts above, what a silly thread this is...
Pratically all of the Nobel laureates I read in more detail I found quite worthy of the prize. I also had the impression that some of the others were just good writers with a strong political message, but since I only read one or two books of those I would never dare to insist on my observation.
And again, I do not think they gave the award to any writer for plain "political" reason the last decade, if they ever did this in the recent past... they are taking the integrity of the author and his works into account, yes, and this makes good sense as I argued on the Nobel thread somewhere.
Pratically all of the Nobel laureates I read in more detail I found quite worthy of the prize. I also had the impression that some of the others were just good writers with a strong political message, but since I only read one or two books of those I would never dare to insist on my observation.
And again, I do not think they gave the award to any writer for plain "political" reason the last decade, if they ever did this in the recent past... they are taking the integrity of the author and his works into account, yes, and this makes good sense as I argued on the Nobel thread somewhere.
Last edited:
adaorardor
Reader
I wasn't using that as any kind of argument against this Victor Sosnora! I was just saying, "I haven't heard of him, so tell me about him, I'd like to learn something." Sheesh.
Rumpelstilzchen
Former Member
As so often you are mixing things up here. There is the literary quality of books/writers and there is the significance and influence they have on later generations. It is very difficult if not impossible to predict the latter. So a few decades later it is always easy to say how stupid they were not to see this, or how stupid they were to take authors, who are completely forgotten 20 years later. And if you look at the literary quality of the Nobel (or Kafka) laureats of the last decade it is really difficult imo to argue that they are NOT writers of the highest standards (i.e. belonging to the top ~100 writers around the word. Choosing one of those ~100 "best" writers is a matter of taste and very subjective anyway). For the latter it does not matter much in my opinion if they also produced some average or even shitty works. The pinnacle of their work is what's important. And some of those writers will be forgotten in a few decades, sure.
Last edited:
Liam
Administrator
Victor Sosnora (1936-), who IS still alive after all, is a strange mix of futurism and avantgardism, and reads a bit like a cross between Marina Tsvetaeva and Velimir Khlebnikov, except he's much more dark, hopeless and bitingly pugnacious than the other two. Combining intricate archaisms in most of his poetry, he couples it with a postmodern subject matter, producing a kind of vertiginous effect in the reader.
We have a huge two-volume set at home (each volume approximating 900+ pages), one containing his prose works, the other his poetry. I haven't had enough time to delve into the former, unfortunately, but opening the book at random, I came across the following sentence. The speaker stands upon the shores of a stormy sea on a particularly gray and gloomy day, and he says: "The sea breaks, like a cobweb." I don't know why I thought this line was so very beautiful, but I did.
Initially I didn't think his stuff was something that would have appealed to me: my mother finally convinced me when she said that he rewrote some of the Old Russian texts (like The Song of Igor's Campaign) in his collection The Horsemen, along different lines. Here's where his historical negativity comes in. Imagine somebody rewriting Beowulf, and every bit as brilliantly as the original anonymous poet or poets, except portraying him as a serial rapist. Sosnora doesn't exactly glory in Russian history, he exposes it as a bloody farce.
There's a French and Russian Wiki page on him, if you read any of those two languages. Amazon has one book by him in English on offer, namely A Million Premonitions, collecting some of his poetry in one volume. I've no idea if it's any good (but can check the quality of the translations at my local library, which has the book), as I've only read Sosnora in the original, which, by the way, is not for the faint-hearted. I asked my mother, who's a better Russian-speaker than I am, if he was meant to be this difficult, or if it was just me, and she said, No, that's the way he writes. Insanely complicated syntax, coupled with new word-coinage.
One of his short stories that I've read in full talks about a mentally unstable man staying in the countryside for the summer, whose holiday is ruined when he comes across a crucified frog nailed to his door! It may not sound like much, but it is a very powerful short story, all the more powerful because it ends where it does--we never find out who did it, or why, or what happens to the narrator afterwards. A single moment of cruelty, illuminating the speaker's day like a sudden epiphany, and then, the end. I think that pretty much sums up Sosnora's negative view of life.
We have a huge two-volume set at home (each volume approximating 900+ pages), one containing his prose works, the other his poetry. I haven't had enough time to delve into the former, unfortunately, but opening the book at random, I came across the following sentence. The speaker stands upon the shores of a stormy sea on a particularly gray and gloomy day, and he says: "The sea breaks, like a cobweb." I don't know why I thought this line was so very beautiful, but I did.
Initially I didn't think his stuff was something that would have appealed to me: my mother finally convinced me when she said that he rewrote some of the Old Russian texts (like The Song of Igor's Campaign) in his collection The Horsemen, along different lines. Here's where his historical negativity comes in. Imagine somebody rewriting Beowulf, and every bit as brilliantly as the original anonymous poet or poets, except portraying him as a serial rapist. Sosnora doesn't exactly glory in Russian history, he exposes it as a bloody farce.
There's a French and Russian Wiki page on him, if you read any of those two languages. Amazon has one book by him in English on offer, namely A Million Premonitions, collecting some of his poetry in one volume. I've no idea if it's any good (but can check the quality of the translations at my local library, which has the book), as I've only read Sosnora in the original, which, by the way, is not for the faint-hearted. I asked my mother, who's a better Russian-speaker than I am, if he was meant to be this difficult, or if it was just me, and she said, No, that's the way he writes. Insanely complicated syntax, coupled with new word-coinage.
One of his short stories that I've read in full talks about a mentally unstable man staying in the countryside for the summer, whose holiday is ruined when he comes across a crucified frog nailed to his door! It may not sound like much, but it is a very powerful short story, all the more powerful because it ends where it does--we never find out who did it, or why, or what happens to the narrator afterwards. A single moment of cruelty, illuminating the speaker's day like a sudden epiphany, and then, the end. I think that pretty much sums up Sosnora's negative view of life.
Rumpelstilzchen
Former Member
Let me make one example of what I mean based on the example of Kertesz from above, in particular people referenced the author's novel Fatelessness. I would like to point to the Kertesz page at the Complete Review for this, whose main editor I respect very much:
http://www.complete-review.com/authors/kertesz.htm
I want to quote a few things from this page:
-Translation issues -- lack thereof, confusing double translations, general difficulty of translating his text
- [...] Kertesz shows great care with language -- and surprising versatility. Fatelessness is deliberately straightforward, while later texts circle back within themselves in Thomas Bernhard-like reflections. The stark humility and the generous (and often surprising) gentle humour found throughout his works stand in contrast to much of the bitter Holocaust literature -- though Kertesz books are ultimately no less sharp or resonant for that.
Only a limited number of Kertesz works are available in English translation as of 2004, making it difficulty to fully appreciate his range and talents; nevertheless, what little there is is -- in the new Tim Wilkinson translations ! -- well worth seeking out.
-[SIZE=-1]The first translators did their own inaccurate interpretations of his work. "The translators didn't understand what I wrote about," says Kertész, still cringing. "The radical nature of my words was something that estranged them. They thought in the interest of the reader, they would make the text more human, to round it off and chisel it a bit." [/SIZE]
So please one should always keep in mind the translation issues. In addition look at the list of reviewed books, including:
Fatelessness is a fine work, but -- unlike Kertész's later works -- ultimately not a truly remarkable one. Nevertheless, in laying the foundation for almost everything he wrote afterwards (and for understanding the man) it remains an essential text. It is good place to start on Kertész, but should be just that: the start. In moving from this book to his later works one moves from a simple, affecting story to true literature, from reality to art.
And based on those informations please reconsider a statement like this made by someone above:
"Kertesz is OK. I've only read Fatelessness, and was not swayed either way. I neither loved nor hated the book, but I will say this: there are better writers (whether Holocaust survivers or no) out there; the only reason why he got the Nobel was because he was in the right place at the right time[...]"
And let me add that everybody around here should be well aware that the most popular or bestselling book of an author is in many cases not the best one.
This example makes me doubt how serious I should take claims about the Nobel (un)worthiness of certain authos on this forum. Some people tend to draw premature conclusions.
http://www.complete-review.com/authors/kertesz.htm
I want to quote a few things from this page:
-Translation issues -- lack thereof, confusing double translations, general difficulty of translating his text
- [...] Kertesz shows great care with language -- and surprising versatility. Fatelessness is deliberately straightforward, while later texts circle back within themselves in Thomas Bernhard-like reflections. The stark humility and the generous (and often surprising) gentle humour found throughout his works stand in contrast to much of the bitter Holocaust literature -- though Kertesz books are ultimately no less sharp or resonant for that.
Only a limited number of Kertesz works are available in English translation as of 2004, making it difficulty to fully appreciate his range and talents; nevertheless, what little there is is -- in the new Tim Wilkinson translations ! -- well worth seeking out.
-[SIZE=-1]The first translators did their own inaccurate interpretations of his work. "The translators didn't understand what I wrote about," says Kertész, still cringing. "The radical nature of my words was something that estranged them. They thought in the interest of the reader, they would make the text more human, to round it off and chisel it a bit." [/SIZE]
So please one should always keep in mind the translation issues. In addition look at the list of reviewed books, including:
- Detective Story (B+)
- Fatelessness (B+)
- Fiasco (A-)
- K. dosszié (A-)
- Kaddish for an Unborn Child (A)
- Liquidation (A-)
- The Pathseeker (B+)
- The Union Jack (A-)
- Valaki más (A-)
Fatelessness is a fine work, but -- unlike Kertész's later works -- ultimately not a truly remarkable one. Nevertheless, in laying the foundation for almost everything he wrote afterwards (and for understanding the man) it remains an essential text. It is good place to start on Kertész, but should be just that: the start. In moving from this book to his later works one moves from a simple, affecting story to true literature, from reality to art.
And based on those informations please reconsider a statement like this made by someone above:
"Kertesz is OK. I've only read Fatelessness, and was not swayed either way. I neither loved nor hated the book, but I will say this: there are better writers (whether Holocaust survivers or no) out there; the only reason why he got the Nobel was because he was in the right place at the right time[...]"
And let me add that everybody around here should be well aware that the most popular or bestselling book of an author is in many cases not the best one.
This example makes me doubt how serious I should take claims about the Nobel (un)worthiness of certain authos on this forum. Some people tend to draw premature conclusions.
Last edited:
Rumpelstilzchen
Former Member
I would like to plead for some humility and in addition for some respect for those people working in the Nobel academy. They are not some idiots. I guess they know what they are doing quite well. Nevertheless they will have their tastes and opinions and prejudices, and some of them are definitely too old for such a job, so some questionable or bad decisions are to be expected. But to say that they are mostly doing crap there is too much. Some other prizes may have more competent or more international juries, but at least the two given examples (Asturias, Kafka) are NOT standing out with respect to the Nobel one.
And one more thing: you should also not blame them if they are following Nobel's will when choosing the laureats. The "ideal" direction of the work is explicitely mentioned in there. There are pros and cons about this add-on, but I think one cannot blame the academy members themself for this. They already reduced its influcence quite significantly. Alternatively one should think about stimulating a public discussion in what sense this add-on could be abandoned completely without any legal consequences concerning the will and the heirs of Nobel. But my personal opinion is that it makes sense to have some weak restrictions with respect to the "allowed range of morality or ethics" of the author's work or worldview. It cannot make sense that in the worst case hatemongers could get the prize with their confused blather.
And one more thing: you should also not blame them if they are following Nobel's will when choosing the laureats. The "ideal" direction of the work is explicitely mentioned in there. There are pros and cons about this add-on, but I think one cannot blame the academy members themself for this. They already reduced its influcence quite significantly. Alternatively one should think about stimulating a public discussion in what sense this add-on could be abandoned completely without any legal consequences concerning the will and the heirs of Nobel. But my personal opinion is that it makes sense to have some weak restrictions with respect to the "allowed range of morality or ethics" of the author's work or worldview. It cannot make sense that in the worst case hatemongers could get the prize with their confused blather.
Last edited:
Daniel del Real
Moderator
I totally agree with you about Coetzee and Pamuk. I mean, I'm sure Pamuk could have waited a few years to give some space for older writers, but I think he already had the body of work to contend for a prize that big in 2006.
You see adaorardor, we're not so different after all
Rumpelstilzchen
Former Member
You see, I think statements about the Nobel worthiness as made on this forum can be taken much more serious than statements about the unworthiness of authors. This is the main reason why I read and take part in the Nobel speculation thread: I get new input on worthwhile authors. I just have to ignore opinions about the unworthiness of authors , in many cases those are just crap. Unfortunately Mirabell is not around anymore, he was one of the few exceptional people around here where you could be sure that he did not hastily render verdicts on authors. His statements about literature were always well founded. It is a shame...
, in many cases those are just crap. Unfortunately Mirabell is not around anymore, he was one of the few exceptional people around here where you could be sure that he did not hastily render verdicts on authors. His statements about literature were always well founded. It is a shame...
Daniel del Real
Moderator
Do you work for the Svenska Akademien or some relative of your joins the committee? You're making a major campaign on their favor.
Rumpelstilzchen
Former Member
Hehe
. No I jsut feel sympathy for them since they get so much beating here and elsewhere..
Liam
Administrator
And this entire post reads like a premature ejaculation, so please take care. My god, how I detest stained bedsheets,
.