I’m so excited to kick off the first month of the Nobel Prize Book Club Challenge.
This first episode is about the controversial winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature, Peter Handke.
The Works of Peter Handke: Nobel Prize Reading Challenge
And what a great show.
Check out the show notes and timestamps below the episode player to see some the topics we discuss – everything from writing in the tradition of Tolstoy and Flaubert to the value of pretentious avant-garde literature and whether or not Peter Handke deserves the Nobel Prize.
Timestamps:
- 00:20 – why I started the Nobel Prize Challenge Book Club
- 03:30 – on Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize
- 06:10 – what’s the point of the Nobel Prize?
- 07:43 – the schedule for the Nobel Prize Book Club
- 08:40 – what makes a successful reading challenge?
- 10:00 – introducing Peter Handke, Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 2019
- 10:00 – the first controversy: too Eurocentric, too “straight white male”
- 12:00 – the second controversy: Peter Handke and Serbian genocide denial
- 13:40 – what happened when Peter Handke won the Nobel Prize
- 13:55 – is Peter Handke a writer in the tradition of Tolstoy?
- 14:00 – Afternoon of a Writer
- 14:48 – what is Flaubert’s flâneur?
- 15:47 – why Peter Handke is writing in the tradition of Hemingway
- 16:00 – why Hemingway and the avant-garde are boring
- 16:33 – slamming Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer
- 17:00 – pretentious avant-garde vs Les Misérables
- 17:30 – boredom, space, and time in literature
- 18:30 – we have a pandemic of boring egocentric writers
- 19:49 – A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
- 20:30 – the agonising search for le mot juste
- 21:00 – honest depiction of suicide
- 21:30 – why A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is worth reading
- 23:20 – an emotional passage about the power of books
- 26:49 – Peter Handke’s aesthetics and writing process
- 29:00 – The Left-Handed Woman
- 30:00 – what I think of avant-garde literature
- 30:20 – ideas for Hardcore Literature (Play of the Month)
- 30:50 – Offending the Audience
- 31:20 – meta-theatrical anti-theatre
- 32:00 – is the point of literature enjoyment?
- 32:00 – slamming the avant-garde… again
- 33:00 – Wings of Desire
- 33:20 – does Peter Handke deserve the Nobel Prize?
Works & Writers Mentioned:
- Tenet
- Anna Karenina
- Les Misérables
- Afternoon of a Writer
- Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
- A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
- The Left-Handed Woman
- Finnegans Wake
- Louise Glück
- The Paris Review
- Conrad
- Peter Brook
- Wings of Desire
- Kazuo Ishiguro
- Bob Dylan
- Rimbaud
- Svetlana Alexievich
- Alice Munro
- Toni Morrison
This trailer gives me chills:
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