It is amazing to me how much the Nobel Prize has come down in importance over my lifetime - maybe that is an American-centric view, because the international winners over the past number of years have been so far out of the normal literary circles featured in U.S. book press that perhaps I am just out of touch. Regardless, it doesn’t feel like the Nobel has the juice it used to…
But Mario Vargas Llosa I know - and bravo. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a personal favorite - even in translation, his technical skills as a storyteller come through.
I tend to agree…Harold Pinter is the most recent Nobel Literature Laureate I could name off the top of my head, and a quick check of the list shows it has gotten extremely niche over the past 5-10 years. That’s not a knock on winners like, say, Herta Muller, but it’s hard to imagine a narrower career-literary path than the minority German experience in Communist Russia. Then again, people have been stumping for Phillip Roth since 2000…
Vargas Llosa is certainly a much broader writer than recent winners. And while I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it’s something of an oversight that he is the only well-known writer from the 60’s-70’s explosion of great Latin American literature (at least in the US). I was lucky enough some years ago to have a friend recommend The Green House after I raved about One Hundred Years of Solitude at a party.
As a Swede I am biased, but it is still percieved as one of the greatest prizes, if not *the *greatest prize, an authour can be rewarded. I don’t believe its influence should be measured by how well-known the prize winners are, as it is a question of authourship first and foremost.
In any case, the state of the Nobel Prize might be a reflection of the book climate as a whole. The past few years, it has seemed to be important for the Nobel Prize committee to elect favorites from yesterday (Vargas Llosa, Doris Lessing). This might or might not be seen as a commentary on contemporary authours, or just as a call from the committee to show appreciation for older masters while they are still here to make an impact.
My own reaction was along the lines of “what, he still didn’t have it?” - I’m exaggerating, but he’s been a huge name for decades and one that I know is familiar to readers from other languages.
WordMan, not writing in English is a huge handicap to become a household name in the US; even not having your main publisher be an American house is a huge handicap. It’s as bad as for movies.
I agree regarding Llosa - I kinda assumed he had one, too.
As for “not writing in English” - yes, that makes sense. I had heard that Haruki Murakami’s name is starting to come up in Nobel talk - he is reasonably popular in translation in the U.S. - certainly commonly held up as a big name alongside U.S. big-dog writers.
cactus waltz - I hear you and hear what you are saying about the book climate; I would also point to the diminishing place the novel holds as a contemporary art form; it feels like it won’t be long before it is a niche specialty, like Latin…
He’s the author of one of my Top Ten Ever novels, The Way to Paradise, about Gauguin and his socialist rabble-rousing grandmother (also a real-life figure). Delightfully enough, I read one of his older novels recently, for no particular reason other than it caught my eye when I was in the stacks – The Storyteller. The man himself is a fine one.
I don’t think the Nobel Prize has changed much. It’s aimed at a narrow band of writers who are published in a lot of languages, and so it’s not always going to be someone we know; but looking down the list (as someone who reads a lot), it looks like mostly familiar names with an occasional “who?”, and no pattern of obscurity.
He finally got it. I thought he was never going to.
As a fellow Peruvian I’m quite happy even if I don’t really like his style (his essays are the only thing I always like).
I’m not an American, so, for what it’s worth, here in Brazil I think the Nobel Prize is still as prestigious as ever.
I just read the list of winners in literature and I recognized the names of some 50% of them. Ironically, over the last 30 years more or less my rate of recognition increased a bit, so from my perspective the winners haven’t been all that obscure. From 1990 till 2010 I recognized Octavio Paz, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, Kenzaburo Oe, Günter Grass, José Saramago, Naipaul, Coetzee, Harold Pinter, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Le Clézio and Vargas Llosa. 13 out of 20 or 65%, which isn’t so bad. By way of comparison, from 1901 to 1923 (to make up for the 2 years in which a prize wasn’t given) I recognized: Theodor Mommsen, Yeats, Anatole France, Knut Hamsun, Rabindranath Tagore, Maurice Maeterlinck and Rudyard Kipling, or 7 out 20, 35%.
I’m not sure what becoming too niche means, but I’ll disagree with you anyway. From my perspective one of the great things about the Nobel is that it not only recognizes those we all know deserve it, but also many authors equally talented we never would have heard about otherwise simply because of their language or nationality.
As a Brazilian I feel very sorry Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Graciliano Ramos never won the Prize. Any Brazilian who cares about such things will tell you one was among the greatest poets of the 20th century and the other was an amazing novelist. As they wrote in Portuguese, they simply weren’t read outside of Brazil, Portugal and a few other countries. Winning the prize wouldn’t change their appreciation here in Brazil, but it would have gained them a greater international audience. Thinking of them makes me wonder how many other fantastic writers I don’t know for the same reasons you probably don’t know those two.
And just so I can disagree with the whole of your post, I hated the two books by Llosa I tried to read so much I can’t even remember which ones they were and I think Philip Roth would be a great choice for the next winner.
Of all these I think I’d have the hardest time making a case for Proust - not because of his writing, but because it was so narrowly focused. If I had to pick the most ridiculous exclusion of those, it’d be Tolstoy.
