Read that novel now, my friend. One of the best books you'll read in years. I would say Aramburu doesn't have the international projection to win the Nobel though, I also don't know if the rest of his books are of the same quality as Patria.
just found out that it was translated into pt here in Brasil
Thank you and Ludus for the recommendation! I'll put it on my list.
Same!
I was pondering over this question of two women winning in a row when this thread was opened, but decided not to go that way; but since you touched on it: I keep thinking the SA for some reason believes they’d run out of really worthy women to award real quick (in terms of having a thematically consistent and overall strong body of work — no doubt there should be tons of writers of the gender who have written, say, one or two great books, but perhaps the rest just doesn’t live up to them... I don’t know, I’m just trying to reason as a member of the academy perhaps would) if they go on to give the prize to a woman the likes of a Carson or Ernaux or Can Xue (etc) year after year, making them look bad when they award a man for some 5-10 years in a row.
I haven’t read him yet, so I can’t comment on his merits as a writer (or lack thereof), but, well, given the amount of his books out from the library, I guess we should all be ready for it, as a real possibility ??
...
Well... I don’t. I don’t know them, we can only make suppositions (unless it can somehow be proven, like that Engdahl quote about American literature being too insular — even if his comments were mostly misunderstood).
We can only make suppositions about the abysmal gender balance, let's just abstract the fact that world societies have been deeply and structurally misogynistic for centuries, these phenomena have no causal relationship I can see, no indeed.
Women = 50% of the population, not 1/3. They're getting better, though, yes.
...again, mathematically, yes, if you repeat the experiment enough times. That's how statistics work. That the laureates of the Swedish academy have a bad gender balance overall should make us ask interrogate why that's the case, not airily wave away concerns saying we can only make suppositions as Bartleby said which is what I was responding to.
I'm not calling for "strict performative benchmarks", just attention to what the situation is and why. As to whether recognition of past bias and reparative action is necessarily being "sexist against other genders" (the reverse-discrimination argument), I don't necessarily want to get into it here, but it's an open question.
And I heartily approve and hope they keep it up! Again, repeated enough times, and without bias, the experiment evens out. Which goes back to the original issue: why not a second woman winner in a row? Not convinced by Bartleby's waffle below.
Why not, of course. I just hope and expect the SA doesn't care as much about gender as the public seems to, and they make their decisions based strictly on literary merit. If that happens to be women for 10 straight years then that's great, just as it would be if it were men victors for 10 straight years.
