Prix Médicis shortlist, 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature announced

Two bits of literary news to share, both of which deal with French writers:

It was announced this morning that French writer Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature.  He is the first Prix Goncourt (France's most prestigious literary prize) winner to be selected as a Nobel laureate.

Also, the Prix Médicis, another French literary award that's been around for over 50 years and is intended to recognize writers whose talent outstrips their fame, has released their short list.  Out of the eight titles, I've read/am reading four, and I hope to have reviews of most, if not all, of them posted by early November, when the winner is announced:

• Véronique Bizot, Ame qui vive (Actes Sud)
• Claudie Hunzinger, La langue des oiseaux (Grasset)
• Hedwige Jeanmart, Blanès (Gallimard)
• Frank Maubert, Visible la nuit (Fayard)
• Laurent Mauvignier, Autour du monde (Minuit)
• Eric Reinhardt, L’amour et les forêts (Gallimard)
• Antoine Volodine, Terminus radieux (Seuil)
• Valérie Zenatti, Jacob Jacob (L’Olivier)

And now the Prix Médicis shortlist for translated fiction:

• Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (Robert Laffont), traduit de l’anglais (Canada) par Patrick Dusoulier.
• Lily Brett, Lola Bensky (La grande ourse), traduit de l’anglais (Australie) par Bernard Cohen.
• Anthony Marra, Une constellation de phénomènes vitaux (J.C. Lattès), traduit de l’anglais (Etats-Unis) par Dominique Defert.
• Antonio Moresco, La petite lumière (Verdier), traduit de l’italien par Laurent Lombard.
• James Salter, Et rien d’autre (L’Olivier), traduit de l’anglais (Etats-Unis) par Marc Amfreville.
• Taiye Selasi, Le ravissement des innocents (Gallimard), traduit de l’anglais (Royaume Uni) par Sylvie Schneiter.
• Evie Wyld, Tous les oiseaux du ciel (Actes Sud), traduit de l’anglais (Australie) par Mireille Vignol.

Mo Yan is the 2012 Nobel Literature Laureate

I have heard Chinese writer Mo Yan's name being bandied about for months in some quarters as being a favorite for the Nobel, so it was little surprise that he won.  A quick check of the iBookstore shows that he has already had some books translated into English (and I presume in several other European languages), so I went ahead and bought the e-book edition of The Republic of Wine, which I will read and possibly review late this month/November after I finish writing the Booker Prize reviews and maybe after the National Book Award fiction finalists as well.

Anyone familiar with his writings want to weigh in?

Nobel Prize in Literature winners

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Posting the list of Nobel Prize in Literature recipients as part of a years-long project to note which authors I've read or have works to read.  Currently, I've read or own works by almost 50 of the 108 recipients during the 104 years the prize has been awarded (there were no winners a few years, mostly during the two World Wars).  Bold means I've read the author, italics that I have at least one of their works but have not read anything, and plain text means I have not read anything yet in any language by that author.

2014  Patrick Modiano
2013  Alice Munro
2012  Mo Yan

2011  Tomas Tranströmer

2010  Mario Vargas Llosa

2009  Herta Müller

2008  Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

2007  Doris Lessing

2006  Orhan Pamuk

2005  Harold Pinter

2004  Elfriede Jelinek

2003  John M. Coetzee

2002  Imre Kertész

2001  Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

2000  Gao Xingjian

1999  Günter Grass

1998  José Saramago

1997  Dario Fo

1996  Wislawa Szymborska

1995  Seamus Heaney

1994  Kenzaburo Oe

1993  Toni Morrison

1992  Derek Walcott

1991  Nadine Gordimer

1990  Octavio Paz

1989  Camilo José Cela

1988  Naguib Mahfouz

1987  Joseph Brodsky

1986  Wole Soyinka

1985  Claude Simon

1984  Jaroslav Seifert

1983  William Golding

1982  Gabriel García Márquez

1981  Elias Canetti

1980  Czeslaw Milosz

1979  Odysseus Elytis

1978  Isaac Bashevis Singer

1977  Vicente Aleixandre

1976  Saul Bellow

1975  Eugenio Montale

1974  Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson

1973  Patrick White

1972  Heinrich Böll

1971  Pablo Neruda

1970  Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

1969  Samuel Beckett

1968  Yasunari Kawabata

1967  Miguel Angel Asturias

1966  Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs

1965  Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov

1964  Jean-Paul Sartre

1963  Giorgos Seferis

1962  John Steinbeck

1961  Ivo Andrić

1960  Saint-John Perse

1959  Salvatore Quasimodo

1958  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak

1957  Albert Camus

1956  Juan Ramón Jiménez

1955  Halldór Kiljan Laxness

1954  Ernest Miller Hemingway

1953  Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

1952  François Mauriac

1951  Pär Fabian Lagerkvist

1950  Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell

1949  William Faulkner

1948  Thomas Stearns Eliot

1947  André Paul Guillaume Gide

1946  Hermann Hesse

1945  Gabriela Mistral

1944  Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

1943  No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.

1942  No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.

1941  No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.

1940  No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.

1939  Frans Eemil Sillanpää

1938  Pearl Buck

1937  Roger Martin du Gard

1936  Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

1935  No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.

1934  Luigi Pirandello

1933  Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin

1932  John Galsworthy

1931  Erik Axel Karlfeldt

1930  Sinclair Lewis

1929  Thomas Mann

1928  Sigrid Undset

1927  Henri Bergson

1926  Grazia Deledda

1925  George Bernard Shaw

1924  Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

1923  William Butler Yeats

1922  Jacinto Benavente

1921  Anatole France

1920  Knut Pedersen Hamsun

1919  Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler

1918  No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section.

1917  Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan

1916  Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam

1915  Romain Rolland

1914  No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section.

1913  Rabindranath Tagore

1912  Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann

1911  Count Maurice (Mooris) Polidore Marie Bernhard Maeterlinck

1910  Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse

1909  Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf

1908  Rudolf Christoph Eucken

1907  Rudyard Kipling

1906  Giosuè Carducci

1905  Henryk Sienkiewicz

1904  Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray y Eizaguirre

1903  Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson

1902  Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen

1901  Sully Prudhomme 

Always more to read.  Which ones have you read and what did you think of their works?

Edit:  Found several of these for free or a nominal fee as e-books, many of which are available through Project Gutenberg (the pre-1923 works, or the ones that have been converted to e-book format by that non-profit group).  Plenty of reading in the weeks and months to come.

Tolkien was nominated for 1961 Nobel Prize consideration...and was found wanting

The Guardian had an interesting article online today about the unsealing of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature and who else besides the eventual winner Ivo Andrić (who was a very deserving winner, I might add) was considered for the award and the commentaries made in reference to them.  There were some really good names on that consideration list:  Graham Greene (who was the runner-up that year; sadly, he never won the prize), E.M. Forster, Robert Frost (the latter two were dismissed from further consideration largely due to their age and not the quality of their work), Lawrence Durrell (whose works I've been meaning to read for a while; dismissed due to the eroticism in several of his fictions), Karen Blixen (she wrote Out of Africa, which I've heard of at least; she finished third in the final round of voting), Alberto Moravia (whose works were dismissed for a "general monotony"), and then...

J.R.R. Tolkien.

Oh, I know Tolkien has sold more novels than any of the others on this list (although most of the authors mentioned have done quite well for themselves over the years), but it really is the odd duckling in this group and not because it was a seminal work of epic fantasy.  The comments made about his work (incidentally, the work was nominated by C.S. Lewis, so even the Nobel nominees sometimes show the influence of people too close to the author presenting works for consideration) might spark some discussion:

The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality", wrote jury member Anders Österling. 

Trying to disagree, trying to find fault in this, trying, trying...and I can't.  When compared to the others listed above, Tolkien's prose is drab, the storytelling is not as good, and it just is not at the caliber of the others nominated.   Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina is an extremely powerful fiction, one that I will revisit several times in the years to come.  Greene's The Power and the Glory is captivating in its prose and in the narrative itself.  Frost's poetry is memorable, although I don't rate him as highly as many others do.  Forster's work is impressive.  Durrell and Blixen and perhaps Moravia I hope to read in the near future.

I just can't associate Tolkien's abilities as a writer with any of the ones I've read.  When I reviewed the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings back in 2009, I found myself thinking the prose was variable in quality and that the story in places just did not interest me.  So while I'm surprised his work was even considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature, I am not shocked to discover that it was viewed dimly by those in charge of selecting the prize winner in 1961.  After all, the trilogy did not receive universal praise when it was published in 1954-1955.  Here is a link to the review that renowned American critic Edmund Wilson wrote about LotR, quoted in part below:

The most distinguished of Tolkien's admirers and the most conspicuous of his defenders has been Mr. W. H. Auden. That Auden is a master of English verse and a well-equipped critic of verse, no one, as they say, will dispute. It is significant, then, that he comments on the badness of Tolkien's verse - there is a great deal of poetry in The Lord of the Rings. Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive - through lack of interest in the other department.- to the fact that Tolkien's prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness. What I believe has misled Mr. Auden is his own special preoccupation with the legendary theme of the Quest. He has written a book about the literature of the Quest; he has experimented with the theme himself in a remarkable sequence of sonnets; and it is to be hoped that he will do something with it on an even larger scale. In the meantime - as sometimes happens with works that fall in with one's interests - he no doubt so overrates The Lord of the Rings because he reads into it something that he means to write himself. It is indeed the tale of a Quest, but, to the reviewer, an extremely unrewarding one. The hero has no serious temptations; is lured by no insidious enchantments, perplexed by few problems. What we get is a simple confrontation - in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama - of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good, the remote and alien villain with the plucky little home-grown hero. There are streaks of imagination: the ancient tree-spirits, the Ents, with their deep eyes, twiggy beards, rumbly voices; the Elves, whose nobility and beauty is elusive and not quite human. But even these are rather clumsily handled. There is never much development in the episodes; you simply go on getting more of the same thing. Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. The characters talk a story-book language that might have come out of Howard Pyle, and as personalities they do not impose themselves. At the end of this long romance, I had still no conception of the wizard Gandalph, who is a cardinal figure, had never been able to visualize him at all. For the most part such characterizations as Dr. Tolkien is able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped: Frodo the good little Englishman, Samwise, his dog-like servant, who talks lower-class and respectful, and never deserts his master. These characters who are no characters are involved in interminable adventures the poverty of invention displayed in which is, it seems to me, almost pathetic. On the country in which the Hobbits, the Elves, the Ents and the other Good People live, the Forces of Evil are closing in, and they have to band together to save it. The hero is the Hobbit called Frodo who has become possessed of a ring that Sauron, the King of the Enemy, wants (that learned reptilian suggestion - doesn't it give you a goosefleshy feeling?). In spite of the author's disclaimer, the struggle for the ring does seem to have some larger significance. This ring, if one continues to carry it, confers upon one special powers, but it is felt to become heavier and heavier; it exerts on one a sinister influence that one has to brace oneself to resist. The problem is for Frodo to get rid of it before he can succumb to this influence. 

            NOW, this situation does create interest; it does seem to have possibilities. One looks forward to a queer dilemma, a new kind of hair-breadth escape, in which Frodo, in the Enemy's kingdom, will find himself half-seduced into taking over the enemy's point of view, so that the realm of shadows and horrors will come to seem to him, once he is in it, once he is strong in the power of the ring, a plausible and pleasant place, and he will narrowly escape the danger of becoming a monster himself. But these bugaboos are not magnetic; they are feeble and rather blank; one does not feel they have any real power. The Good People simply say « Boo » to them. There are Black Riders, of whom everyone is terrified but who never seem anything but specters. There are dreadful hovering birds-think of it, horrible birds of prey! There are ogreish disgusting Orcs, who, however, rarely get to the point of committing any overt acts. There is a giant female spider - a dreadfu1 creepy-crawly spider! - who lives in a dark cave and eats people. What one misses in all these terrors is any trace of concrete reality. The preternatural, to be effective, should be given some sort of solidity, a real presence, recognizable features - like Gulliver, like Gogol, like Poe; not like those phantom horrors of Algernon Blackwood which prove so disappointing after the travel-book substantiality of the landscapes in which he evokes them. Tolkien's horrors resemble these in their lack of real contact with their victims, who dispose of them as we do of the horrors in dreams by simply pushing them or puffing them away. As for Sauron, the ruler of Mordor (doesn't the very name have a shuddery sound.) who concentrates in his person everything that is threatening the Shire, the build-up for him goes on through three volumes. He makes his first, rather promising, appearance as a terrible fire-rimmed yellow eye seen in a water-mirror. But this is as far as we ever get. Once Sauron's realm is invaded, we think we are going to meet him; but he still remains nothing but a burning eye scrutinizing all that occurs from the window of a remote dark tower. This might, of course, be made effective; but actually it is not; we never feel Sauron's power. And the climax, to which we have been working up through exactly nine hundred and ninety-nine large close-printed pages, when it comes, proves extremely flat. The ring is at last got rid of by being dropped into a fiery crater, and the kingdom of Sauron « topples » in a brief and banal earthquake that sets fire to everything and burns it up, and so releases the author from the necessity of telling the reader what exactly was so terrible there. Frodo has come to the end of his Quest, but the reader has remained untouched by the wounds and fatigues of his journey. An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly.

Although there are parts of Wilson's review with which I disagree, I think he has some sound points here to make about the deficiencies of the writing and the plot.  Over the course of nearly 60 years, it is easy to forget that not everyone was enamored with the tale and that when placed in context with certain other works, The Lord of the Rings reads less like a seminal work of fiction and more like a flawed continuation of other strands of fantasy that have existed for well over a century.  In that light, I think the criticisms of Wilson and of the Nobel Committee are worth considering in the Year of Our Hobbit 2941.

Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

I learned this morning that Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.  Frankly, I was surprised, not because I don't admire his works (I am a fan), but because I had pretty much given up hope that he would be chosen, especially since he entered politics as a neo-liberal, center-right voice and the Nobel committee seems to have a bias against those who are not at least center-left in their politics.  So it was with a mixture of pleasure and surprise that I read the news.

For those who have not read Vargas Llosa, he is one of the younger members of the celebrated "Boom Generation" of Latin American writers.  But I would hesitate to conflate his works with those of Carpentier, Rulfo, Fuentes, or García Márquez.  For one, his works are less fantastical in content than the others.  But this is not to say that his works don't contain elements of "heightened realism."  Influenced by William Faulkner (Vargas Llosa repeatedly has said that Faulkner was his main influence) in how he utilizes scene and character development, several of his best-known works, such as The War of the End of the World, contain a sense of intensity and apocalyptic fervor that makes his works feel otherworldly at times, even when there is nothing overtly supernatural about the settings or situations.

Vargas Llosa frequently takes the side of the average person, whether it be Peruvian soldiers in some of his earlier novels or the characters that conspire in Conversations in a Cathedral, and it is the voice that he lends to the "voiceless" that make several of his works compelling reads.  His prose is sharp, to the point, yet also containing an elegance that I fear might not be translated adequately into other languages.  I am currently reading his 1985 murder-mystery, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, and I am finding myself, halfway through this 190 page novel, marveling over how adroitly Vargas Llosa sets the mood.  This is some heavy-hitting prose and unless it takes a major turn for the worse, it might be worthy to be on the same shelf as his best-known and lauded works.

Perhaps this Nobel reception will lead to several readers of this blog to at least consider reading some of his works.  Vargas Llosa is a very talented writer, one whose humane approach to characters who suffer inhumane treatment at the hands of junta leaders and dictators.  Their stories are moving and hopefully others will enjoy them as much as I have in the original Spanish.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins Nobel Prize for Literature

OK, this was a bit surprising to me. Not that I would have been familiar with a great many of those who could have been chosen, but rather that I can't recall ever hearing of Le Clézio before now. While I would have preferred that Milan Kundera, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, or Bob Dylan to get it, I am not going to bemoan the Nobel Prize committee's choice, at least not yet.

Instead, I am curious as to which works of his I ought to explore reading. Anyone familiar with Le Clézio's writings have a favorite to recommend to me?