Undeserving Laureates

[Refus de Sejour]

Now, the Nobel Prize for Literature is a contentious topic; I'm sure everyone here could name writers who they think should have been awarded it, but never were.

The question I open this thread with is slightly different:

Are there any Nobel Prize winners whom you believe did not deserve it? If so, why not?

Now, I confess I am familiar with the work of only a handful of past winners. But I do believe Grass, Saramago, M?rquez, Singer, Neruda, Beckett, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Eliot all deserved it. From the little I have read of le Cl?zio and Pamuk, they too seem worthy recipients.

So who wasn't?

 

[anchomal]

Re: The Nobel Prize

I also haven't read enough of the winners to be able to say any of them didn't deserve the prize.

I think, though, the problem is not whether an individual winner deserved it but whether he or she deserved it more than... (fill in the blanks). When you look and the calibre of writers overlooked you do have to wonder.

Take, for instance, the period when the likes of Borges, Nabokov, Graham Greene (to name just a very few) would have been in contention and then consider the writers who won during these years...

Personally, I like when the Prize goes to a writer that had not previously shown up on my radar. Mahfouz, Oe Kensaburo, Saramago etc... During that time they could perhaps have awarded (maybe justifiably) the likes of Updike or Roth, but I already knew them.

Not exactly answering the question you proposed, Refus. Sorry!

 

[Bubba]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Hmm, "deserving" seems to me beside the point: if the Swedish Academy sees fit to award the prize to this or that writer, he "deserves" it. But I do very much regret that the recognition and money that come with the prize go to the likes of Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky, Pamuk, Jelinek, the Chinese guy, Le Cl?zio, Coetzee, and a bunch of others I can't remember offhand. I'm glad Updike keeled over before some old Swedish fool decided to bestow the Nobel upon him. I hope the same will happen to Atwood, Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates, to mention three eternal North American candidates for the prize.

I should of course say that I haven't read a word of Jelinek's or the Chinese guy's work and have no plans to, but I have little doubt I would find it off-putting. (Yes, yes, I know. I suspect it's for opinions like these that I'm one of those being called arrogant and humorless ego-trippers on the "Whither WLF" thread. Add "paranoid" and the portrait would be complete.)

Neruda's is an interesting case: he won only after Sartre refused the prize. And he won for his communist politics. Despite the popular image of Neruda--a kindly avuncular old gent--his behavior as a member of the Chilean diplomatic corps in soon-to-be occupied France, as a father, as a human being, in short, was despicable; if he were a great poet you might be tempted to overlook these personal failings, but, as a close look at almost any of his poetry makes immediately clear, he isn't. Far from it, in fact.

Some twenty years later you have Brodsky, another clumsy poet, winning the Nobel, this time, oddly enough, for his anti-communism.

More than once too I've wondered if several members of the Swedish Academy have fixations with bowel movements and the products thereof. I wonder because a lot of books by recent Nobel laureates (Saramago's Blindness, Lessing's The Good Terrorist, almost everything by Coetzee) seem, to me at least, to dwell somewhat excessively on shit. Coetzee, for example, lingers almost lovingly over bucketfuls of feces produced by men with severe intestinal disorders.

I foresee a bright future, a noble future, as it were, for Jonathan Littel, he of that highly scatological French book, whose name slips my mind just now.

 

[miobrien]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Pamuk's award seems somewhat politically motivated. That's not to say a Nobel can't be politically motivated, but it seemed more about politic than his writing. I think he's too young for the award. He'll be around for years, I'm sure -- and this is coming from someone who enjoys his writing.

Dario Fo's award seems inappropriate, but I've not read much of his work, so perhaps it's my mistake.


Bubba: I'm wondering what you don't like about Coetzee's work.

 

[Mirabell]

Re: The Nobel Prize

I have read quite a few of Dario Fo's and Franca Rama's plays and stuff about their theatrical work and I totally understand and support that prize.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: The Nobel Prize

I also haven't read enough of the winners to be able to say any of them didn't deserve the prize.

I think, though, the problem is not whether an individual winner deserved it but whether he or she deserved it more than... (fill in the blanks). When you look and the calibre of writers overlooked you do have to wonder.

Take, for instance, the period when the likes of Borges, Nabokov, Graham Greene (to name just a very few) would have been in contention and then consider the writers who won during these years...

You're hitting the nail with this statement pal. It's not who won, is who was the opponent at the time. If the Nobel had a short list, then we could say the winner did or didn't deserve it comparing it to the finalists. In this case as we have no idea who was a finalist and the comparison must go with every single writer of the world it's hard to say who deserved it or who doesn't.
I can say that all the Nobel laureates have good moments in their fictions, some of them more than others, but again that's personal likings. We all have our favorites and we can agree or disagree who wins, tha's normal. All I ask to the Swedish Academy is more diversity to different languages and regions.

 

[miobrien]

Re: The Nobel Prize

A bit off topic but interesting. This is from an interview with Coetzee:

David Attwell: First, the warmest possible congratulations on winning this, the most prestigious of literary prizes.

J M Coetzee: Thank you.

DA: How do you see its significance, both personally, and in more general terms?

JMC: In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.)

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

An exclusive interview with J M Coetzee - DN.se

 

[Stiffelio]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Dario Fo's prize was a joke. He's no writer at all but almost a clown. Imagine the Academy awarding David Letterman or Stewart or Benny Hill.

Jelinek was undeserving of the Nobel.

The Brits have also had a fair share of not-great Nobel laureates: e.g. Churchill (as great a stateman as he certainly was, he was no literary genius), Pinter and Lessing.

Pamuk and M?ller are excellent writers but probably got the Nobel too soon in their careers.

As for Cela, there were no fewer than five Spanish writers worthier of the Nobel when he got it..

 

[Refus de Sejour]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Hmm, "deserving" seems to me beside the point: if the Swedish Academy sees fit to award the prize to this or that writer, he "deserves" it

I don't quite see your point here Bubba. I'm not disputing the Academy's legal and moral right to award the prize to whomever they see fit. But if they award it to an inferior writer ('inferior' being subjective, I admit), I see no problem describing that writer as 'undeserving.'

I agree with you on Carol Oates; she seems a hugely overrated writer.

You're hitting the nail with this statement pal. It's not who won, is who was the opponent at the time. If the Nobel had a short list, then we could say the winner did or didn't deserve it comparing it to the finalists. In this case as we have no idea who was a finalist and the comparison must go with every single writer of the world it's hard to say who deserved it or who doesn't.

Daniel, I both agree and disagree. The fact is, if the Nobel went to Paulo Coelho, we wouldn't need to know the shortlist before going into convulsions of disgust.

I was a little surprised to see Churchill on the list. I'm aware of his big multi-volume history of the War, but, without having done any extra research, I find it hard to believe his literary output merited the prize.

Does anyone have a opinion on Herta M?ller? Her work was virtually unknown in the English speaking world before the award, so I'm curious about her status in Germany (pre- and post-award)

 

[Mirabell]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Dario Fo's prize was a joke. He's no writer at all but almost a clown.

I must have imagined reading the books then
and being blown away by them
odd thing that


and Pinter, his first and second phase of plays...flabbergasting.
And Lessing's Golden Notebook must EASILY rank among the ten most important and influential post-war novels, that prize was a no-brainer.


Jelinek is one of the five maybe? best living writers in German. I have seen one of her new plays performed here, and she's a great, great writer. Die Kinder der Toten is probably her best novel, and it's frightfully well written and conceived. THAT control of language and literary knowledge is really really rare, her language is so absolutely stunning and unique that I'm always rather doubtful it can be translated well. Overall, post-war, only Bernhard has more great works to his name. Not Grass, not Lenz, not B?ll can equal her consistent excellence in writing.

 

[kpjayan]

Re: The Nobel Prize

With my limited knowledge and reading, I thought Perl S Buck wasn't one who will stand with others in the list.

 

[waalkwriter]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Hmm, "deserving" seems to me beside the point: if the Swedish Academy sees fit to award the prize to this or that writer, he "deserves" it. But I do very much regret that the recognition and money that come with the prize go to the likes of Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky, Pamuk, Jelinek, the Chinese guy, Le Cl?zio, Coetzee, and a bunch of others I can't remember offhand. I'm glad Updike keeled over before some old Swedish fool decided to bestow the Nobel upon him. I hope the same will happen to Atwood, Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates, to mention three eternal North American candidates for the prize.

I should of course say that I haven't read a word of Jelinek's or the Chinese guy's work and have no plans to, but I have little doubt I would find it off-putting. (Yes, yes, I know. I suspect it's for opinions like these that I'm one of those being called arrogant and humorless ego-trippers on the "Whither WLF" thread. Add "paranoid" and the portrait would be complete.)

Neruda's is an interesting case: he won only after Sartre refused the prize. And he won for his communist politics. Despite the popular image of Neruda--a kindly avuncular old gent--his behavior as a member of the Chilean diplomatic corps in soon-to-be occupied France, as a father, as a human being, in short, was despicable; if he were a great poet you might be tempted to overlook these personal failings, but, as a close look at almost any of his poetry makes immediately clear, he isn't. Far from it, in fact.

Some twenty years later you have Brodsky, another clumsy poet, winning the Nobel, this time, oddly enough, for his anti-communism.

More than once too I've wondered if several members of the Swedish Academy have fixations with bowel movements and the products thereof. I wonder because a lot of books by recent Nobel laureates (Saramago's Blindness, Lessing's The Good Terrorist, almost everything by Coetzee) seem, to me at least, to dwell somewhat excessively on shit. Coetzee, for example, lingers almost lovingly over bucketfuls of feces produced by men with severe intestinal disorders.

I foresee a bright future, a noble future, as it were, for Jonathan Littel, he of that highly scatological French book, whose name slips my mind just now.

I am also not a fan of Neruda, though he is a hip, popular poet. I much prefer Gabriella Mistral.

Yeah, Gao's award upset a lot of Chinese. My professor put it simply that nobody knows who he is, he wasn't even a major intellectual dissenter or a well known writer.

 

[waalkwriter]

Re: The Nobel Prize

I must have imagined reading the books then
and being blown away by them
odd thing that


and Pinter, his first and second phase of plays...flabbergasting.
And Lessing's Golden Notebook must EASILY rank among the ten most important and influential post-war novels, that prize was a no-brainer.


Jelinek is one of the five maybe? best living writers in German. I have seen one of her new plays performed here, and she's a great, great writer. Die Kinder der Toten is probably her best novel, and it's frightfully well written and conceived. THAT control of language and literary knowledge is really really rare, her language is so absolutely stunning and unique that I'm always rather doubtful it can be translated well. Overall, post-war, only Bernhard has more great works to his name. Not Grass, not Lenz, not B?ll can equal her consistent excellence in writing.

Jelinek did not read well in English. But not necessarily because of the style. I do understand and respect that you are a fan of her, but I can't handle the constant, neurotic anti-penis quality of her work. Quite simply I feel she's an emotionally scarred individual and it shows in her works treatment of sex in general, at least what I read of it, there is no such thing as a normal human relationship, just pages upon pages of a woman's disgust with any sexual intimacy, even her child's fantasies about subjecting her to his own desire. Die Kinder der Toten...would that translate The Children That Die, or The Children that are Dead?

Pinter is good, but the thing for me at least is that I feel like American playwright Edward Albee is better, and has continued producing good work for more than 50 years, and hasn't gotten a prize.

I think Lessing would have gotten the award much earlier if it weren't for her strange, sci-fi Sufism, neo-spiritualism phase in the 80s, with the Shakista books.

 

[Bubba]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Bubba: I'm wondering what you don't like about Coetzee's work.

Well, the buckets of runny feces, for one thing. The humorlessness, for another.

I read Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians with interest, but couldn't get through anything else of his I started (Michael K., Elizabeth Costello, Age of Iron, Dusklands, one volume of the third-person memoirs). For my taste, Coetzee's narcissism and self-centeredness permeate his work too heavily.

I don't quite see your point here Bubba. I'm not disputing the Academy's legal and moral right to award the prize to whomever they see fit. But if they award it to an inferior writer ('inferior' being subjective, I admit), I see no problem describing that writer as 'undeserving.'


Does anyone have a opinion on Herta M?ller? Her work was virtually unknown in the English speaking world before the award, so I'm curious about her status in Germany (pre- and post-award)

I'm not entirely sure what my point was, either. Maybe just that the Swedish Academy awards the prize on criteria I'm not familiar with. I'm quite sure, in any case, that it isn't meant to go to the "best" working writer, or to the working writer with the "best" body of work, so when it doesn't--and it almost never does, not even close--I'm not sure it makes sense to speak of the prize's going to someone unworthy of it.

I have an opinion of M?ller's work, but, not having read a line of it, it would perhaps be slightly unwise of me to give voice to it.

 

[peter_d]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Die Kinder der Toten...would that translate The Children That Die, or The Children that are Dead?

I think this would tranlate as 'The children of the dead', right Mirabell?

I think, though, the problem is not whether an individual winner deserved it but whether he or she deserved it more than... (fill in the blanks). When you look and the calibre of writers overlooked you do have to wonder.

Take, for instance, the period when the likes of Borges, Nabokov, Graham Greene (to name just a very few) would have been in contention and then consider the writers who won during these years...

As Daniel pointed out, this is exactly the actual question. Did they deserve it in comparison to other writers of their own generation.

And then, what is the objective of the prize, is it to expose great but relatively unknown writers to a bigger audience? In that case Herta M?ller absolutely did deserve it. She produced works of very high quality but was relatively unknown in many parts of the world before she got the nobel.

Or is the Nobel a sort of a lifetime achievement prize, which I always thought it was. In that case it is doubtful whether Herta M?ller and Ohran Pamuk already deserved it.

So in short: whether an author deserves it depends on:
1. what is the objective of the prize?
2. are they better than others?

 

[Amoxcalli]

Re: The Nobel Prize

I've always thought Sir Winston Churchill won the award because he won the War, not because he was such a literary genius. Haven't read anything by him, but I don't really see how someone who wrote no more than a handful of fiction works can realistically win the most prestigious literary prize in the world.

I don't think the Academy did a bad job over the years, but if you compile a list of authors who didn't win the prize, and a list of those who did, you'll find that the former is all the more impressive. Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Cort?zar, Ionesco, Nabokov, Borges, Tolstoy, Chekhov and even the Scandinavian Ibsen didn't win it. Granted, Kafka and Proust couldn't possible win it, because they died too soon, but even without them it's an impressive list.

That said, they got it right most of the time. Mahfouz is quite possibly my favourite author of all time and in all likelihood not one we'd have missed if he hadn't won the prize. I'm lead to believe that the Academy played a crucial role in the recognition of his work in the western world.

On a side note, Kundera really ought to win it now. He's a brilliant author and almost dead.

 

[Eric]

Re: The Nobel Prize

Actually, I agree with most of what the self-styled humourless ego-tripper Bubba says. Jelly-Neck also won because she exhibited traits of armchair Communism and some pretty screwed-up ideas about bourgeois life (the only life she knows, no doubt) and sexuality. I too am not going to read her books, even if her language is brilliant (also in translation?).

Nor do I have any insights into what Chinese writers write given the fact that China is a huge undemocratic monolith. You can never be sure whether any Chinese author winning a big prize is doing so because of talent that is measurable by standards of Western-style democracy and literary achievement, or whether it's exotic to have an exiled Chinese dissident from France or wherever as a name to sell more books.

My default position regarding an award of a million dollars by a few Swedes (now including the postmodernist novelist Lotta Lotass) is one of suspicion. I cannot understand how the Swedish Academy, even if all 18 members were working full-time on the project, could possibly identify a genius, often from a language they cannot read and have to rely on translations.

And as I have said many times before, the interest in the Nobel is almost certainly generated by the large amount of money awarded, rather than by any cultural considerations. People are hypnotised by the gold involved. When they only award a glass vase and a free dinner, no one cares a damn. It is a bribery of brains.

Another most interesting, wide-ranging, and sometimes pretty paranoid, but mostly perceptive, author who didn't win the prize was August Strindberg. If ever the Swedish nation should have given the prize to a Swede (which seems incestuous) it should have been Strindberg. I may have read somewhere why he didn't get it, but I've forgotten what I read.

Some of the recent choices, such as Herta M?ller, have been good. But equally many have been odd.

As for Littell, I find it disappointing that a number of young Yanks (OK, he writes in French) have cashed in on the Holocaust when so many worthy authors who actually experienced it never won the prize.

Mirabell is waxing lyrical today, using expressions like "ten most important", "flabbergasting" and "absolutely stunning and unique". If I read such stuff on the back cover of a book, I would run a mile.

 

[anchomal]

Re: The Nobel Prize

It will be interesting to see some of the names bandied about when we get around to guessing who'll win this year (still quite a while away yet, I suppose). Can it be another European, or another woman? Will it be someone relatively young again, instead of some of the venerated elders. And what are the chances of a poet winning? Will it be someone none (or very few) of us has ever read or even perhaps heard of?

Worthy or not, I certainly wouldn't have called, or even really considered, the last few winners (which says a lot about my woefully limited knowledge of world lit, though that is something I am trying to correct...).

 

[Mirabell]

Re: The Nobel Prize

I demand a poet. I wouldn't be unhappy about Hill or Muldoon, but I WANT Ashbery to win.

 

[Mirabell]

Re: The Nobel Prize

I can't handle the constant, neurotic anti-penis quality of her work.

It's not quite true but even if it were, doesn't it nicely begin to balance out the constant, neurotic pro-penis quality of Grass' work or Roth's or whoever?