How many Nobel laureates in Literature did you read?
Whom of them do you like\dislike and why?
Whom of them you have not read yet but eager to do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Literature
>Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain is top tier
>Hermann Hesse
Good but sort of too wrapped up in his style to transcend
>Andre Gide
Didn't really click with me, still interested in giving another go
>William Faulkner
A favorite
>Ernest Hemingway
Better short story writer than a novelist. While For Whom The Bell Tolls may be overrated, he himself isn't.
>Albert Camus
Worth the hype, The Plague is top tier.
>John Steinbeck
Haven't read that much but a decent american writer.
>Yasunari Kawabata
Don't see the appeal, really. He's described as comfy but I find that translates as narcoleptic.
>Gabriel Garcia Marquez
An undeniable talent
>William Golding
Strange inclusion, his only lasting legacy is that one book you read as a HS freshman.
>Kenzaburo Oe
Didn't blow me away but still interested in reading more.
Ive read and enjoyed: Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw, Lewis, O'Neill, Hesse, Gide, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Camus, Steinbeck, Sarte, Sholokhov, Kawabata, Beckett, Solzhenitsyn, Böll, Bellow, Marquez, Mahfouz, Morrison, Ōe, Saramago, Grass, Llosa.
Seriously people shit on the Nobel but that list has same GOAT literature on it. All of those are worth reading.
I'm not particularly interested in reading the new laureate, but I might check out some of the older ones.
>>7518077
I read 31 of them
>Alexievich
Pass
>Modiano
Excellent
>Munro
Good
>Yan
Good
>Tranströmer
Heard he's good
>Llosa
Excellent
>Müller
Heard she's good
>Le Clézio
Pass
>Lessing
Good
>Pamuk
Good
>Pinter
Excellent
>Jelinek
Pass
>Coetzee
Excellent
>Kertész
Pass
>Naipaul
Excellent
>Xingjian
Soul Mountain sounds interesting
Sully Prudhomme - didn't read and cant say anything about him
Theodor Mommsen - didn't read and cant say anything about him
Bjornstjerne Bjornson - didn't read and cant say anything about him
Frédéric Mistral - didn't read but should to do someday since he wrote in a rare languge - Occitan
Henryk Sienkiewicz - read i his Trilogy 7/10
Rudyard Kipling - read many of his works. Agreat writer! 10/10
Selma Lagerlöf - read Adventures of Nils 7/10
Rabindranath Tagore - read a dozen of poenms(translated) - 6/10
Sigrid Undset - dropped a boring historical novel
Thomas Mann - Doctor Faustus, The Magic Mountain - 9/10
John Galsworthy - read The Forsyte Saga and something more 7/10
Ivan Bunin- read some shrt novels 6/10
Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf 7/10
André Gide - The Counterfeiters 9/10
T. S. Eliot - 6/10
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, short stories - 8/10
>>7518285
Winston Churchill -don't know what he is doing in this list
Ernest Miller Hemingway - read almost all, 9/10
Ernest Hemingway - read many of his works 9 /10
Albert Camus - La Peste 7/10
Boris Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago 8/10
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath 7/10
Jean-Paul Sartre - La Nausée 6/10
Mikhail Sholokhov - dropped And Quiet Flows the Don, shame om me
Samuel Beckett - dropped Molloy
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - read One day in the life of Ivan denisovich, dropped Gulag Archipelago - 7/10
Pablo Neruda -some poems, 7/10
Gabriel García Márquez - read almost all, 10/10
Joseph Brodsky - some poems, 7/10
i read the chernobyl one by the recent lady and enjoyed it ten times more than i thought i would
it's super interesting and really well put together
Got Second-hand Time (last book from Svetlana Alexievich) for my birthday. I found it a very powerful book (though only could relate to it through my parents) but something was bothering me about it a little. There is a part when in the early 90s a woman in Moscow is shocked that people are selling their soviet medals, party membership certificates etc for dollars. She asks a policeman if this is legal, he replies only drugs and pornography is illegal. She then argues that selling medals and party memberships for a few dollars is pornography. This is a minor moment in the book, but from this point it was always in my head that this book is in fact pornography. The writer interviewed people who told her about their lifelong suffering in intimate detail, crying and breaking down in the process, making associations they haven't even thought before, and you just keep reading all that shit and can't put down the book. Maybe I'm just a fag but the whole book felt very sick in this sense, probably because the stories are (supposed to be) real, and the depth people get in their tales. If you like soviet history and depressing shit don't miss this book though.
>>7518174
Saramago is overrated af imo. Beckett is Best-Tier. Hamsun has many different faces. I liked Hunger and Mysteries. The Growth of the Soil was boring. I'm into repetition but man IDEFK.
>>7518142
>Seriously people shit on the Nobel but that list has same GOAT literature on it. All of those are worth reading.
This!
I've just finished picrelated abd that's amazing!
>>7519406
no it's not that's a meme. actually look at the list and also consider the first decade or two are "formative" years. lit prize remains important for everyone in literature, which of course means it gets mocked by keyboard warriors and "outside observers"
Why he still doesnt have Nobel prize?
>>7519482
and he
>>7519482
btw is Numero Zero any good
>>7518366
try to pickup Beckett again. Everything be did is incredibly well written and interesting.
>>7519531
Yep.A bit simple comparing with his other works but still good.
>>7518131
>Don't see the appeal, really. He's described as comfy but I find that translates as narcoleptic.
The Japanese author that deserved it that year was too radical for the committee.
I have read these authors. They are all great.
Knut Hamsun
Sigrid Undset
Thomas Mann
Luigi Pirandello
Hermann Hesse
André Gide
William Faulkner
Pär Lagerkvist
Ernest Hemingway
Albert Camus
Yasunari Kawabata
Samuel Beckett
Heinrich Böll
Saul Bellow
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Elias Canetti
Gabriel García Márquez
Camilo José Cela
Toni Morrison
Kenzaburō Ōe
José Saramago
Günter Grass
Imre Kertész
J. M. Coetzee
Elfriede Jelinek
Harold Pinter
Doris Lessing
J. M. G. Le Clézio
Mario Vargas Llosa
Patrick Modiano
When I was 17 my lit teacher told me 'you should read some Alice Munro, she's going to win the nobel prize next year', and then she did. What a cool guy. Anyway, every nobel prize winner I've read I have enjoyed. The only thing that shits me about the nobel is that the only australian to ever win is patrick white who was born in the UK, went to a fancy boarding school in the UK and then went to uni at oxbridge, and had the most pommy accent possible. it's like you can't succeed as an australian writer unless you're actually british and just happen to live in australia.
also JM Coetzee is based but nobody in their right mind would consider him australian (at least, at the time of his winning the prize)
>>7519695
Uh, and kind of simple, bro.
>>7519684
Hehe, my school teacher told "you should read Svetlana Alekseevich"in 2000 or 2001
>>7519684
He's got Australian citizenship, man. He writes books set in Australia. He's lived in Australia since before the prize. But of course you'd have to be a drooling maniac to consider him Australian.
Tbh I'd call this an example of the always-already; so that we could say he was always-already an Australian.
And it's political as always: the Scandies hate Australia and everything about Australians. The anti-intellectual anti-immigrant militant conservative colonial state, with first world status and major wealth. The country's existence pisses them off; only if you really, really hated it could you get far with the Nobel committee.
Wow.
Reading the list, you have to be amazed out how fair, open-minded, and objective the Norsemen are. If something akin to the Nobel Prize existed in the United States, at least 50% of the recipients would be Americans, but only one Norseman has won the Nobel Prize in Literature in the past 42 years. And he wasn't even a Norwegian, it was a Swede.
>>7519715
>eco
>simple
sorry you're too dumb to see past the simplest stuff
>>7519763
and you bet he deserved it.
when transtromer won all the anglophone media seized on the opportunity to revive the 1970s "only obscure scandinavians win nobels" boogeyman, when it was blatantly obvious no one has actually bothered reading transtromer. some of the most heartfelt, beautiful, and insightful imagery ever. spanned so many intimate human emotions and communicated so much.
hell, even martinson, who was criticized for being a favoritism winner (he was on the academy at the time) fully deserved it. the fact that aniara is out of print right now is a fucking crime. martinson was so bothered by the doubt and criticism from his nobel win that he ended up killing himself some years later, which was also a huge pity.
look you can criticize the nobel committee for being too conservative, too safe, sometimes too political, but i really find it difficult to see how anyone else can/has done a better job at promoting good literature, and they're definitely on the objective/fair side of the coin.
>>7519601
Who would that be?
>>7520125
he's talking about mishima and he's completely wrong.
mishima wrote a set of extremely good works (the tetralogy) but his earlier works were obviously inferior/deficient/juvenile in various ways. had he lived longer he definitely could've ascended to the heights kawabata did, but as stands, he was unfortunately a bit lacking.
also saying kawabata isn't good/is boring/doesn't deserve the prize betrays a lack of understanding of his works.
>>7520056
He packages deep things in simple packages so that simple people can read them and think that they are not simple. His novels are OK. His true talent is non-fiction. He isn't a bad author, and he is much better than Murakami, but he's not Nobel level. Additionally, his last novel was really fucking pat.
>>7518460
The Growth of the Soil is god tier.
>>7519684
I reckon Murnane is more likely to get a prize in the future before any currently publishing British novelists
>>7520134
Kawabata only got the prize because he pressured Mishima into writing to the Academy and telling them to give it to his mentor rather than him. Mishima is rumoured to have ghost-written much of Kawabata's later work anyway.
>>7518077
>Sully Prudhomme
Beautiful sonnets. Perfectly measured and crafted alexandrines. Not afraid of lyricism, but attentive to the precision of his imagery. Readonly in french or if you trust the translation.
>Maeterlinck
Bullshit poet. I'm belgian, but I can't say I take any pleasure in seeing him on this list. Most of his work consists of undeciferable popular songs with odd metrics and whole verse repetitions in every stanza. Doesn't do anything for me.
>Tagore
I wish I could read him in the original. "The home and the world" is a fucking beautiful novel, and I sincerely believe the Gitanjali can save lives in the 21st century.
>Hamsun
Hunger is great. Haven't read anything else by him.
>Anatole France
The french Dickens.
>Mann
Buddenbrooks is awesome. Magic Mountain is awesome.
>Roger Martin du Gard
Balzac-lite
>Hesse
He's alright. Don't need to read everything to understand what he's getting at, though. Narcissus & Goldmund and Siddhartha should suffice. I didn't like Steppenwolf, too edgy.
>André Gide
Fruits of the Earth is great. Counterfeiters is insanely good. I have a soft spot for him because he was one of the very few to support Francis Jammes.
>Eliot
Interesting take on poetry. To bad he led to the debauchery we know today.
>Faulkner
Great novelist.
>Mauriac
#1 french wordsmith. No one else has yet reached the heights he explored as a prose artist.
>Hemingway
Too few epithets for my taste.
>Camus
Major existentialist. Mandatory read for his ideas. Prose is nothing much though.
>St-John Perse
He's like a less ruminating, more contemplative french Eliot. Often evokes childhood in a way that hits home. I know one or two of his by heart. Too bad he didn't bother to write verse.
>Steinbeck
East of Eden is good. Didn't care much for the rest.
>Sartre
Fuck. That. Guy.
>Böll
Ballsy writer. Lohengrin's death will probably stay with me.
>Gabo
Great novelist. Love in the time of cholera is a life-changing book.
>>7520134
Well I mean I did exactly say I don't get him. It may be since I only read snow country but I don't exactly desire to read more. The train station scene was vivid, the rest is a blur except for the limp melodrama at the end.
>>7518157
>Alexievich
>Pass
Chernobyl was a top tier book, and extremely well edited and written.
>>7518077
Henryk Sienkiewicz - Great author, interesting subject matter
Rudyard Kipling - Kim is my favorite novel.
William Butler Yeats - Beautiful poetry
Pearl S. Buck - The good earth is a masterpiece, all men are brothers is a bastardization
Hermann Hesse - Awesome
T. S. Eliot - Wasteland is a masterpiece
Sir Winston Churchill - His life of Marlborough is my favorite biography
Ernest Hemingway - of course
Albert Camus - 10/10
Boris Pasternak - Dr. Zhivago is a great movie
John Steinbeck - Overrated
Miguel Ángel Asturias - The President is a great book
Yasunari Kawabata - Master of Go is great
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Ive read everything
Gabriel García Márquez - Doesn’t amuse me when he tortures his protagonists
William Golding - 10/10
Sir V. S. Naipaul - on my to do list
J. M. Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians is an interesting book
Mario Vargas Llosa - better than Marquez
Mo Yan - A master, doesn’t write bad books
Svetlana Alexievich - the shit she got here for being a woman and a collector of oral tradition is unfounded, Chernobyl is a book that /lit/ types would seem to really enjoy
Faulkner is the most overrated faggot ever, and Mishima's year of death was skipped in memory of him, and well deserved
>>7520622
False. The only credible one is house of sleeping beauties. Cite or gtfo.
>>7518077
>William Butler Yeats
His early and late period poems are extraordinary. I'm not so fond of the work he did immediately before receiving the Nobel prize.
>George Bernard Shaw
One of the best playwrights of the age, although any literary critic who dislikes Homer and Shakespeare is inherently contemptible.
>Herman Hesse
I'll pass.
>Thomas Stearns Eliot
Obviously one of the great Modernist poets, though if any poet deserved the Nobel prize "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry", it was Ezra Pound.
>William Faulkner
I love Faulkner, one of my favourite novelists of the 20th Century.
>Bertrand Russell
An awful ambassador for philosophy.
>Sir Winston Churchill
His winning the Nobel Prize for Literature is a good example of the obvious political connotations the award still has.
>Ernest Hemingway
I am fond of his novels for sentimental reasons, but I'm not sure he benefits from comparison with other Nobel laureates.
>Albert Camus
Fantastic writer, although certainly the only worthwhile thing to come out of French existentialism.
>Jean-Paul Sartre
I don't like him.
>Samuel Beckett
A genius, the best Irish writer since Joyce.
>William Golding
Lord of The Flies is a brilliant novel, although like Hemingway he probably suffers from being surrounded by superior writers.
>Seamus Heaney
A very good poet, although the best thing he has done is encourage people to read Patrick Kavanagh.
>>7520620
Murnane would deserve it. He'd make us look weird as hell to the international community, though.
anyone read some Ivo Andric?
>>7522801
Serbs probably did
>>7521790
>Hermann Hesse
>I'll pass
Which works of his have you read? Why didn't you like it?
>>7518077
>tfw Camus is your fav and no-one takes you seriously
One good thing about the Nobel list is some kind soul uploaded most of the authors onto piratebay and KAT in nice foldered files with legit typo-free epub and pdf files.
>>7522962
>Noble
obvious fix
I think we can all agree that Toni Morrison did not deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature for Beloved
when you need to get EVERY PROMINENT BLACK WRITER IN THE UNITED STATES to write in to the nobel committee asking them to pretty please validate your career with the shiny medal it's pretty fair to say your work didn't deserve it in the first place
>>7523022
yes. im a fervent defender of the nobel prize but i definitely agree morrison was a huge misstep.
and to atone for it they havent given the lit prize to anyone from america since. so desu all the americans who are salty they get passed over for "obscure europeans" should really be directing their anger at morrison.
dont care if ive read any
nobel prizes are just shiny baubles. the only difference between them and the oscars is that they've been around longer. why should i let a bunch of swedes tell me what to read or what the canon is
>>7523717
cause they're smarter and more well read than you
go back to reddit
>Bjornstjerne Bjornson
Synnove Solbakken is probably his most well-known work, and worth a read for a peek into life in 1800s Norway
>Rudyard Kipling
read his stuff as a kid, kim and the jungle book
>Selma Lagerlöf
as an author of children's books, she's brilliant. the wonderful adventures of Nils is amazing
>Knut Hamsun
Hunger, Mysteries and Wayfarers are my top three. Pan and Growth of the Soil are strong runner-ups.
>Sigrid Undset
I read Kristin Lavrandsdatter when I was a teen and thought it dull. idk, maybe it's good?
>Thomas Mann
I've only read Doktor Faustus so far, but I loved it.
>Gabriela Mistral
just get any old collection. her poems gives a nice insight into what rural Chile was like
>Hermann Hesse
Siddharta was alright, I'm still procrastinating on The Glass-bead Game
>Faulkner
I've only read As I Lay Dying, but from what I recall I loved it
>Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms is his strongest novel, IMO
>Camus
drop the stranger and go for the plague instead
>Sartre
read nausea and it was just so-so
>Beckett
>godot
>Gabriel Garcia Marquez
100 yrs, basically. love in the time of cholera and memories of my melancholy whores are so-so
>José Saramago
the history of the siege of lisbon the best I've read of him so far. but I haven't gotten around to ricardo reis, caligraphy or the stone raft, yet
>Günter Grass
only read the tin drum, it was alright. eyeing the flounder next.
>Herta Müller
Herztier
>Mario Vargas Llosa
Death in the Andes is still my favourite of his
>Mo Yan
only read Life and Death (...), it was amusing and a light, and funny read. don't expect any groundbreaking criticism of Mao, but it was surprising how much of it they allowed him to get away with
>Patrick Modiano
Missing Person is the only I've read so far. First half was brilliant, second half not so much, though I'm not sure how much of it was due to a (botched) translation.
I've a copy of Voices from Chernobyl in my shelf, so I'll be getting into that next year
Mo Yan is really really goid, a highly rec Big Breasts and Wide Hips, if you liked 100 Years of Solitutde youll love it. Sandalwood Death is also fantastic.
Can anyone rec me authors similar to Hamsun?
Morrison pales in comparison to everyone else desu.
>implying the camus is better than borges
>>7524524
>highly rec Big Breasts and Wide Hips
ya I like that stuff too
