Hamishe22
Well-known member
So, last year, while waiting for the SA to announce the new Novel laureate, I decided to read at least one work from every Novel laureate. With some exceptions I have only been reading Nobel laureates this past year. (Although I have been reading more than one book from many of them). I haven't made a lot of progress! Anyway, I thought that maybe people would be interested in my experience. Feel free to disagree or agree or react in any way, and also please offer any advice.
Note: I've been reading writers in a random way, in order to have some variety. But I will write them in the chronological order here.
José Echegaray: I read The Great Galeoto. Seemed to me to be too moralistic and melodramatic for my taste. I definitely would have awarded Ibsen over him.
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Finished reading With Fire and Sword and now I'm reading The Deluge. His work is definitely very entertaining, but I don't think he'd have any chance of winning the Nobel in our current era. His work seems too close to popular literature, especially considering its romances that are very cliche.
Rudyard Kipling: Read most of his prose plus a selection of poetry. Definitely a master of prose and poetry, but subjectively speaking, I didn't like him. I don't think that the artistic merit is enough to make swallowing the reactionary politics worth it.
Rabindranath Tagore: read one selection of short stories and one selection of short poems. I loved the poems of his that describe nature. Very intriguing and nuanced, being both environmentalist yet not ignoring the harsher face of the nature.
Knut Hamsun: Read The Growth of the Soil. Very beautiful descriptions and atmospheric, but I didn't love it. The characters were too simple and the story was too boring and again, while I try my best not to judge books ideologically, the story simply wasn't interesting or thought provoking or complicated enough to stave off the annoyance at the anti-modernity message.
George Bernard Shaw: read too many plays to list. Honestly, despite having an MA in English literature, I had somehow never read this iconic figure. I loved him so much! So funny in his funny plays, so ahead of his time, and such great characters. I loved how suitable for reading they were and made reading the stage directions to be fun. My favorite is Saint Joan.
Thomas Mann: Read Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice. Three absolute masterpieces. One of my favorites now. Reminds me of George Eliot in the first, which is the highest possible compliment I can give to a writer.
Sinclair Lewis: Read Babbitt. An excellent satire. Sadly, I don't think writers liken this win Nobel anymore.
Roger Martin du Gard: Bit of a trivia for you first: while it seems that he is mostly forgotten in the English speaking circles, du Gard's Les Thibault is one of the most popular and widely read novels in my country, Iran. Well I have to agree with my compatriots! I really enjoyed reading it. Really loved the family dynamics with an abusive father. The seventh book is a major slog though, filled with reams of unnecessary political debates.
Mikhail Sholokhov: another forgotten writer who's very popular in Iran. Read his Don novel. I expected this to be USSR propaganda but it really wasn't. Now I have no idea why he was Stalin's favorite writer. I loved the sense of epic and history, how he captures the essence of the community. But I thought the characters were too simplistic and this stops it from being a masterpiece.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago. The most horrifying non-horror writer. Obviously conveys the horrors of Stalin's repression very effectively, but to me what elevates him to true greatness is how complicated and polyphonic his portrayal of people in these situations are, from dissidents to victims to oppressors and most interestingly, reluctant collaborators.
Patrick White: Read Voss and The Eye of the Storm. Another instant favorite writer. Voss is just a transcendental and moving masterpiece that I can mostly describe like I'm describing music. The latter novel is one of the most compelling portrayals of abuse.
William Golding: Read The Lord of the Flies and The Spire. Both masterpieces. Especially loved the very unique portrayal of religiously fueled obsession in the latter novel.
José Saramago: OK, this is going to be the controversial one. I read The Blindness and I absolutely hated it. A simplistic and nonsensical and whiny novel, reminding me of Adam McKay films, basically a "we live in a society" meme in the novel form. Am I crazy? Either way, one day I'll read his other novels, hopefully I'll like them more.
Patrick Modiano: Read The Occupation trilogy. I can't deny that the novels are narratively clever and impressive and very daring and honest in how they unflinchingly treat their subject matters which are incredibly sensitive and (one imagines) personally resonant for the author. But I honestly don't know what the whole thing is supposed to add up to. At the end of the first and the third novels, I can't help asking 'so what', and while reading them and understanding what is going on can be very difficult, but I'm not sure that overcoming the difficulty is worth the effort, the way a Joyce or a Llosa might be. To me, in the end, there is no deep insight or complex characters, more techniques and less substance. I can't say these novels are bad or flawed. More, they're just not great. Like a passable science fiction or mystery, only the genre cliche it's adhering to in a competent but ultimately unimpressive way is Nobel bait.
Writers I still haven't read (please recommend what to read from them if you'd like): Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Frédéric Mistral, Giosuè Carducci, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Selma Lagerlöf, Paul von Heyse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Romain Rolland, Verner von Heidenstam, Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan, Carl Spitteler, Anatole France, Jacinto Benavente, Władysław Reymont, Grazia Deledda, Henri Bergson, Sigrid Undset, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, John Galsworthy, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Gabriela Mistral, Pär Lagerkvist, François Mauriac, Winston Churchill, Halldór Laxness, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Boris Pasternak, Salvatore Quasimodo, Saint-John Perse, Ivo Andrić, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson, Eugenio Montale, Vicente Aleixandre, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Odysseas Elytis, Elias Canetti, Jaroslav Seifert, Claude Simon, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, Camilo José Cela, Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Wisława Szymborska, Dario Fo, Gao Xingjian, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Imre Kertész, John Maxwell Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Tomas Tranströmer, Peter Handke, Abdulrazak Gurnah
Every writer not mentioned, I had already read before starting this project.
Thanks for reading this long post! See you next year?
Note: I've been reading writers in a random way, in order to have some variety. But I will write them in the chronological order here.
José Echegaray: I read The Great Galeoto. Seemed to me to be too moralistic and melodramatic for my taste. I definitely would have awarded Ibsen over him.
Henryk Sienkiewicz: Finished reading With Fire and Sword and now I'm reading The Deluge. His work is definitely very entertaining, but I don't think he'd have any chance of winning the Nobel in our current era. His work seems too close to popular literature, especially considering its romances that are very cliche.
Rudyard Kipling: Read most of his prose plus a selection of poetry. Definitely a master of prose and poetry, but subjectively speaking, I didn't like him. I don't think that the artistic merit is enough to make swallowing the reactionary politics worth it.
Rabindranath Tagore: read one selection of short stories and one selection of short poems. I loved the poems of his that describe nature. Very intriguing and nuanced, being both environmentalist yet not ignoring the harsher face of the nature.
Knut Hamsun: Read The Growth of the Soil. Very beautiful descriptions and atmospheric, but I didn't love it. The characters were too simple and the story was too boring and again, while I try my best not to judge books ideologically, the story simply wasn't interesting or thought provoking or complicated enough to stave off the annoyance at the anti-modernity message.
George Bernard Shaw: read too many plays to list. Honestly, despite having an MA in English literature, I had somehow never read this iconic figure. I loved him so much! So funny in his funny plays, so ahead of his time, and such great characters. I loved how suitable for reading they were and made reading the stage directions to be fun. My favorite is Saint Joan.
Thomas Mann: Read Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice. Three absolute masterpieces. One of my favorites now. Reminds me of George Eliot in the first, which is the highest possible compliment I can give to a writer.
Sinclair Lewis: Read Babbitt. An excellent satire. Sadly, I don't think writers liken this win Nobel anymore.
Roger Martin du Gard: Bit of a trivia for you first: while it seems that he is mostly forgotten in the English speaking circles, du Gard's Les Thibault is one of the most popular and widely read novels in my country, Iran. Well I have to agree with my compatriots! I really enjoyed reading it. Really loved the family dynamics with an abusive father. The seventh book is a major slog though, filled with reams of unnecessary political debates.
Mikhail Sholokhov: another forgotten writer who's very popular in Iran. Read his Don novel. I expected this to be USSR propaganda but it really wasn't. Now I have no idea why he was Stalin's favorite writer. I loved the sense of epic and history, how he captures the essence of the community. But I thought the characters were too simplistic and this stops it from being a masterpiece.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago. The most horrifying non-horror writer. Obviously conveys the horrors of Stalin's repression very effectively, but to me what elevates him to true greatness is how complicated and polyphonic his portrayal of people in these situations are, from dissidents to victims to oppressors and most interestingly, reluctant collaborators.
Patrick White: Read Voss and The Eye of the Storm. Another instant favorite writer. Voss is just a transcendental and moving masterpiece that I can mostly describe like I'm describing music. The latter novel is one of the most compelling portrayals of abuse.
William Golding: Read The Lord of the Flies and The Spire. Both masterpieces. Especially loved the very unique portrayal of religiously fueled obsession in the latter novel.
José Saramago: OK, this is going to be the controversial one. I read The Blindness and I absolutely hated it. A simplistic and nonsensical and whiny novel, reminding me of Adam McKay films, basically a "we live in a society" meme in the novel form. Am I crazy? Either way, one day I'll read his other novels, hopefully I'll like them more.
Patrick Modiano: Read The Occupation trilogy. I can't deny that the novels are narratively clever and impressive and very daring and honest in how they unflinchingly treat their subject matters which are incredibly sensitive and (one imagines) personally resonant for the author. But I honestly don't know what the whole thing is supposed to add up to. At the end of the first and the third novels, I can't help asking 'so what', and while reading them and understanding what is going on can be very difficult, but I'm not sure that overcoming the difficulty is worth the effort, the way a Joyce or a Llosa might be. To me, in the end, there is no deep insight or complex characters, more techniques and less substance. I can't say these novels are bad or flawed. More, they're just not great. Like a passable science fiction or mystery, only the genre cliche it's adhering to in a competent but ultimately unimpressive way is Nobel bait.
Writers I still haven't read (please recommend what to read from them if you'd like): Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Frédéric Mistral, Giosuè Carducci, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Selma Lagerlöf, Paul von Heyse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Romain Rolland, Verner von Heidenstam, Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan, Carl Spitteler, Anatole France, Jacinto Benavente, Władysław Reymont, Grazia Deledda, Henri Bergson, Sigrid Undset, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, John Galsworthy, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Gabriela Mistral, Pär Lagerkvist, François Mauriac, Winston Churchill, Halldór Laxness, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Boris Pasternak, Salvatore Quasimodo, Saint-John Perse, Ivo Andrić, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson, Eugenio Montale, Vicente Aleixandre, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Odysseas Elytis, Elias Canetti, Jaroslav Seifert, Claude Simon, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, Camilo José Cela, Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Wisława Szymborska, Dario Fo, Gao Xingjian, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Imre Kertész, John Maxwell Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Tomas Tranströmer, Peter Handke, Abdulrazak Gurnah
Every writer not mentioned, I had already read before starting this project.
Thanks for reading this long post! See you next year?
