Nobel Prize in Literature 2022

[Leseratte]

Nice interview. Wonderful French, clear and simple to understand.

 

[Leseratte]

Major can also refer to area of study.

Thanks. I didn´t know that.

 

[nagisa]

It's what I have right now, what about your libraries?
View attachment 1748

Yay

 

[nagisa]

Quarto contains: Les armoires vides - La honte - L'événement - La femme gelée - La place - Journal du dehors - Une femme - «Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit» - Passion simple - Se perdre - L'occupation - Les années & various short texts

Read everything except Se perdre & L'occupation (hetero passion are two things foreign to me), and "Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit" because my grandmother also had Alzheimer's and I didn't want to go under Ernaux's knife. Of course, the prize is a push to polish it off.


I'm rather delighted she got it (satisfaction with the quality, approval of the direction of expanding "literature", a touch of [reprehensible] smugness at having read her pre-prize). French opinion is already going nuts though, as she is labeled "extreme-left" (and doesn't really object either) — all the right-wing commentariat is out for blood (and bemoaning that Houellebecq didn't get it instead. lol )

 

[Hamishe22]

I also think that the Nobel shouldn't become only an award for obscure writers. There is usually a good reason that someone is famous, and that reason is usually that they're doing something well. Nobel wouldn't be a prize awarded mostly to great writers if it endeavored to only award obscure writers.

It'd be bad for the obscure writers themselves too. People would stop paying attention to them only if the most obscure writers win. I will definitely watch any movie which wins a Palme D'or, even the obscure ones, because the director is deemed a peer of people like Michael Haneke and Pedro Almodovar.

It's not only the prize honoring the writers. The writers must lend legitimacy to the prize too. Sometimes you just award a really great writer just to signal that you know what literary greatness is. I don't think Samuel Beckett needed the Nobel, but I know that I wouldn't have been drawn to the award without seeing names like his, and the absence of people in the caliber of Henrik Ibsen in the first three decades makes me reluctant to check out the writers from that era, even though I've decided to read something by every single Nobel laureate anyway.

 

[hayden]

I will definitely watch any movie which wins a Palme D'or, even the obscure ones, because the director is deemed a peer of people like Pedro Almodovar.

I'm not here to nitpick— especially because I agree with everything you're saying— but (unfortunately) Almodovar doesn't have a Palme.

I get what you're saying though. All good. An award only holds the weight of its recipients.

 

[Hamishe22]

I'm not here to nitpick— especially because I agree with everything you're saying— but (unfortunately) Almodovar doesn't have a Palme.

I get what you're saying though. All good. An award only holds the weight of its recipients.

You're right, and that's a travesty

 

[HaveOneOnMe]

I also think that the Nobel shouldn't become only an award for obscure writers. There is usually a good reason that someone is famous, and that reason is usually that they're doing something well. Nobel wouldn't be a prize awarded mostly to great writers if it endeavored to only award obscure writers.

It'd be bad for the obscure writers themselves too. People would stop paying attention to them only if the most obscure writers win. I will definitely watch any movie which wins a Palme D'or, even the obscure ones, because the director is deemed a peer of people like Michael Haneke and Pedro Almodovar.

It's not only the prize honoring the writers. The writers must lend legitimacy to the prize too. Sometimes you just award a really great writer just to signal that you know what literary greatness is. I don't think Samuel Beckett needed the Nobel, but I know that I wouldn't have been drawn to the award without seeing names like his, and the absence of people in the caliber of Henrik Ibsen in the first three decades makes me reluctant to check out the writers from that era, even though I've decided to read something by every single Nobel laureate anyway.

I think you've touched on a really important point. If the Nobel's 'raison d'etre' is to formally acknowledge literary capital G Greatness, then it's actually sort of crucial that it has a fairly high hit rate of writers whose work is going to go the distance (at least fifty years, say). It's not to say that obscurity and posterity are mutually exclusive qualities but I think if it's only recognising great but niche writers, whose work is likely to become known only slightly beyond the borders of their pre-win readership, the prize would be operating under different terms and aims and the face of the prize, its heft, would be different. Ishiguro is going to be around for the long haul. Gluck too, I think (her work is beautiful, haunting, 'accessible', and the kind of thing you reach for during moments of loneliness; it's timeless). But if you take a winner like Alexievich, even though I love her work, I think, realistically, in fifty years' time, the only people reading her work will be scholars interested in the pocket of history she's writing about. Her win is important, but giving the prize to big name writers is necessary for the 'brand'.

 

[Uemarasan]

I'm not here to nitpick— especially because I agree with everything you're saying— but (unfortunately) Almodovar doesn't have a Palme.

I get what you're saying though. All good. An award only holds the weight of its recipients.

And Cannes is all the poorer for it. It’s quite unbelievable that Almodovar has yet to win the highest accolade in any of the three major European film festivals.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

I'm rather delighted she got it (satisfaction with the quality, approval of the direction of expanding "literature", a touch of [reprehensible] smugness at having read her pre-prize). French opinion is already going nuts though, as she is labeled "extreme-left" (and doesn't really object either) — all the right-wing commentariat is out for blood (and bemoaning that Houellebecq didn't get it instead. lol )

Well, I don’t know whether to be relieved or depressed that this kind of political-cultural polarization is as prevalent in Europe as in the US, but I think I’ll settle for depressed. ?

 

[Americanreader]

I always love these little interviews they do, and she seems like a kind and warm lady. I also like her writing advice.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

I scrolled quickly through about an hour’s worth of tweets about the win. 90% were NOT in English, which is a little unusual for Twitter, and most of the ones that were in English were not very substantive. I clicked through to one linked article, and it opened “Annie Ernaux, a chronicler of illegal abortion…” ?

I hope the media in Europe are better, but in the US, if it can’t be sensationalized, it can’t be sold.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

^ That wasn’t some rag, either; it was the Los Angeles Times. A lot of other US headlines are linking Ernaux and reproductive rights, because this HAS to be about something other than literature. Alex Shephard pulled the same shit in his pre-award New Republic piece.

You know, I’m for reproductive rights too. But this kind of reductionism makes me want to spit. ?

 

[Morbid Swither]

^ That wasn’t some rag, either; it was the Los Angeles Times. A lot of other US headlines are linking Ernaux and reproductive rights, because this HAS to be about something other than literature. Alex Shephard pulled the same shit in his pre-award New Republic piece.

You know, I’m for reproductive rights too. But this kind of reductionism makes me want to spit. ?

Yes, unfortunately I expected this would happen in the event that she did win. Yes, it's reductionism. "Cleaned Out" and L'evenement offer a perspective on abortion, but not a pointed statement. There is so much complexity, so much emotion, in these works, it really disappoints me: to see it reduced to something so tiresome, so banal...

The reaction, the way it is once more, is just a lot of noise, loud noise.

The thing about literature is, the world at large doesn't read! So, I don't care what It has to say. The thing about literature is you actually read it! You're supposed to prepare for QUIET time and LISTEN.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

The thing about literature is, the world at large doesn't read! So, I don't care what It has to say. The thing about literature is you actually read it! You're supposed to prepare for QUIET time and LISTEN.

So very true. US society is not neutral on that; it is actively opposed to it. This is one reason why I have liked Mexico and Korea, and why I would undoubtedly like Europe. The majority of people in the world may be non-intellectual, but they are not ANTI-intellectual. Anti-intellectualism is largely a problem in Anglophone countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia.

I’ll always remember what a scientist from MIT said. “In Africa, India, China, Europe, Brazil, almost anywhere in the world, if I tell people that I’m from MIT and I do science, they are impressed, they are interested, they want to help. If I tell them that in Ohio, they could give a rat’s ass.”

 

[Morbid Swither]

Yes, I can only speak to my experiences as an American, but in my experience, there is certainly a phenomenon I see everywhere I look (probably guilty of it myself) where the anti-intellectualism is there, running rampant, but so to is the need to be perceived as "woke," to generate automatic judgment. So, it's easy to see how toxic this is, how mad! "I don't need to understand it." -- No, no. All that matters is to simultaneously reduce something until its meaningless, then extrapolate from that ant-eaten carcass something you can have an opinion on.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Yes, I can only speak to my experiences as an American, but in my experience, there is certainly a phenomenon I see everywhere I look (probably guilty of it myself) where the anti-intellectualism is there, running rampant, but so to is the need to be perceived as "woke," to generate automatic judgment. So, it's easy to see how toxic this is, how mad! "I don't need to understand it." -- No, no. All that matters is to simultaneously reduce something until its meaningless, then extrapolate from that ant-eaten carcass something you can have an opinion on.

Exactly, I see reductionism from both sides, although the Right’s is more toxic. But none of it is positive. All of my good teachers in high school and university warned me against the evils of reductionism, an intellectual cardinal sin, and they were right to do so. But here we are and almost everyone is practicing it.

 

[Morbid Swither]

Exactly, I see reductionism from both sides, although the Right’s is more toxic. But none of it is positive. All of my good teachers in high school and university warned me against the evils of reductionism, an intellectual cardinal sin, and they were right to do so. But here we are and almost everyone is practicing it.

Absolutely, I think that this, along with the scathing exposé she gradually expresses in her essays, on the zeitgeist cursed with “disinformation” (lies) and the power of rhetoric and propaganda to override public consciousness, is why I endorse Ugresic.

 

[Morbid Swither]

I have a deeply personal appreciation for Annie Ernaux's work, and a general fondness for her as a human being.

I intend to write an essay on her work that is also an expression of how her work has:

• in the specific instances of Getting Lost and Passion Simple: helped me grieve the loss of someone I once loved, and on how the process directing the pain, indeed the "mind fuck," of that experience of loss, of abandonment, of rejection, into something I could move on from was a literary type of psychoanalysis and self-actualization
• in the myriad ways her testimony overlaps with the biography of my own mother (my maternal grandparents remarkably similar to the personages profiled in La place & Une femme; the shame of an abortion ( a secret I almost hate myself for divulging here ) when she was about the same age (~23); the death of my grandmother from Alzheimer's and the impact of this on her (and me, as I was Mema's "secondary primary caregiver"); and other serendipitous parallels....

But, here, this evening, I did want to tell you a little about my day:

I recently bought Mema's house and am in the process of remodeling and repairing it. There are still so many things that need to be done (I am behind schedule on moving into this house, and on listing my current one), so I took a week off from work to prioritize some of the major things I was feeling overwhelmed about and that needed some undivided attention, with this special occasion (the Nobel Prize, of course--I wanted to be able to, for a change, really indulge in my obsession). Anyways...

I have (with obvious reservations) been trying to convince my mom, who is a good reader but not an avid reader, to read Annie Ernaux's books. In particular "A Man's Place/Positions," but she really wasn't having it. After that failed, I tried to convince her to read Brood by Jackie Polzin, but I don't think that's happened either. But occasionally, she will read a recommendation from me. I think the last time this happened was (speak of the devil, Ironweed by William Kennedy, which she liked.)

Today we actually spent a little time together. My mom and I.

And I said, while we were doing some work, as usual, "Remember that French lady that I've been trying to get you to read..? [........] Well, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature today."

Later on...like, about an hour ago, I sent her a text with the link to Alex Shephard's "Annie Ernaux Is A Perfect Nobel Laureate" and asked her to, "Please Read."

This is what she said: her uncharacteristically long reply:

“I read just now. My take away is follows. I am not well read as you are but that fact should not take away from something I have read that moves me. It may be something I am not familiar with such as GRAPES OF WRATH. But the story was told so I can understand. THE HEN WHO WISHED SHE COULD FLY. I totally understand. It was written so beautiful that it allows ME to acknowledge someone else can put into words something I know but can’t verbalize . Kurt Vonnegut satire of human conditions with humor. All these things brings me to this: thank god someone know how to do. Pleasure in reading that takes you to another place that you can relate to or makes you rethink what you thought is amazing. The power of the words is amazing. I don’t think I am qualified to make judgements in the Nobel prize world but books. Stories poems should be for everyone. Not every story for everyone but a story that reaches some. Then another story that reaches someone else. I think that you do not write for the masses but you write from the heart and let leaves fall where they will. Amazing things may grow underneath that leaf.”

I didn’t edit or modify or clarify anything she said. My mom has been a fan of Vonnegut for a long time. And she read the Steinbeck in college. “The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly" is a gorgeous little Korean book I gave her for a Christmas and she did read.

But, I think my mom rocks and I love what she said. Presumptively, I would be able to say/write something half this good.

 

[hayden]

A reminder to check out the 2021 film L'événement (Happening) if you haven't already.

I caught it late last year. Harrowing take on Ernaux's words. Can't say it's for the squeamish.


As for me, I've read a good handful of Ernaux's books, and I think she's a very worthy laureate. She does something that not quite any laureate before her has, and her stark, honest style stands out from the crowd. However, I'm going to disagree with calling her a perennial candidate. I personally don't ever recall her name being brought up in regards to the Nobel before (maaaaybe) 2019. Despite being one of the oldest writers to win the prize, I think her time is here and now, and 2022 is an excellent year for her to win.

I look forward to picking up a few works by her I haven't gotten around to yet, including (English titles)—
Getting Lost
Simple Passion
A Frozen Woman
Do What They Say Or Else