To begin, I would also like to see Rushdie win. He's certainly got the body of work to suggest he is deserving, and Midnight's Children is a stellar piece of work which I must return to before too long. Shame is great. I also love Shalimar the Clown. Not everything is fantastic, particularly the works he has produced in the past 15 years, but it might be that his role as a defender of Free Speech is becoming more important to him than his vocation as a truly original and exciting crafter of language. It would be great to see him return to his old, energetic self though.
Yes, exactly. I have no idea why this misconception is so common. Occasionally one work can elevate an author body of work, like Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain, but even then he had a prolific career as a playwright and had published short stories, other novels, literary criticism, etc. If those hadn't been as high quality, I doubt he would've won.
Also, Gregg, I think you make the case for Erdrich with that first post of yours! No winner has really explored Native American life she has. Also, for "deserving" authors, I think the biggest points are that they deal with weighty issues and write with care towards their prose. Those three last winners may not be Nabokov, but that they choose their words with thought and precision is obvious. Beyond that, it's mostly individual preference!
I would agree. It is very rare that a single work gets a citation, and even in the cases that it does (Hemingway, for example), the body of work still remains remarkably strong in support of that single work. As far as I know there are very few writers who have had a single masterpiece so magnificent as to overshadow everything else they have created as to give them the prize even if everything else is horrible. Maybe I am wrong though. I would say that good examples would be Munro and Kawabata, and Modiano and Heaney. These four winners have all released masterful work, consistently, throughout their careers, but none of their individual works would be considered the positive masterpiece of their careers, singularly more wonderful than anything else they have created. No, their body is what matters, not their best works.
With regards to Erdrich, thank you redhead for responding in the only way I possible could have. Nobody writes about the experience of the First Nations in North America with quite the same authority and compassion and love as Louise Erdrich, at least not with her consistently high quality of output or her reputation (though it would certainly be wrong to suggest that there are not quite a few fantastic indigenous writers in North America). Erdrich brings in indigenous notions of nature, religion, experiences with colonialism, government, internal divisions, gender. And she does it in a manner which is both anti-colonial and post-colonial in the way that colonialism in North America almost must be understood in contemporary America - it is a very different kind of tackling of colonialism than one finds in African or Latin American literature.
I mean, TRACKS is an amazing novel. She dances through the many many many themes that she brings forth with complete control. And she's a damn fine writer, in control, like many other writers in North America. She doesn't need to have the flashiest of words, the flashiest of sentence structures. She controls her art by her structure, her shape, her pacing. That control (can I say that word once more in this post?) is fantastic. I wasn´t lying when I said she writes with the power of Morisson. That may, though, be what works against her in a way.
She's also a fine poet, for those who are interested in poetry. Not world-class, but it does not work against her nomination as far as I am concerned. Below I have copied one of her poems, entitled
I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move.
[FONT="]We watched from the house
[/FONT]
[FONT="]as the river grew, helpless
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[FONT="]and terrible in its unfamiliar body.
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[FONT="]Wrestling everything into it,
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[FONT="]the water wrapped around trees
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[FONT="]until their life-hold was broken.
[/FONT]
[FONT="]They went down, one by one,
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[FONT="]and the river dragged off their covering.
[/FONT]
[FONT="]
[/FONT]
[FONT="]Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,
[/FONT]
[FONT="]snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:
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[FONT="]a whole forest pulled through the teeth
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[FONT="]of the spillway. Trees surfacing
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[FONT="]singly, where the river poured off
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[FONT="]into arteries for fields below the reservation.
[/FONT]
[FONT="]
[/FONT]
[FONT="]When at last it was over, the long removal,
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[FONT="]they had all become the same dry wood.
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[FONT="]We walked among them, the branches
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[FONT="]whitening in the raw sun.
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[FONT="]Above us drifted herons,
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[FONT="]alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,
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[FONT="]settling their beaks among the hollows.
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[FONT="]Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people
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[FONT="]moving among us, unable to take their rest.
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[FONT="]Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.
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[FONT="]Their long wings are bending the air
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[FONT="]into circles through which they fall.
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[FONT="]They rise again in shifting wheels.
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[FONT="]How long must we live in the broken figures
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[FONT="]their necks make, narrowing the sky.
[/FONT]
