Another relatively obscure writer wins the Nobel Prize.
The Nobel Prize for Literature announced it’s winner for 2020.
It wasn’t Haruki Murakami.
It wasn’t Don DeLillo.
Nor was the Nobel Prize winner Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, or Joyce Carol Oates.
It was Louise Glück.
You know, the Louise Glück who wrote…
Oh wait, how embarrassing, I actually don’t know any of Louis Glück’s works.
Better “educate myself”, look her up, and order some of her books.
Go to Goodreads, then Amazon, and realise that the few books that are listed, those with very “self-pub” covers, are actually not available to buy.
Not because the writer is so popular and renowned, but precisely the opposite.
They don’t print books that aren’t in demand.
And Louise Glück’s books are so not in demand that there are only a couple of pre-owned copies at inflated price left.
This is not a dig at Louise Glück.
Congratulations to her for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I’ve ordered some of her volumes (second hand, from overseas, inflated price, and the last ones available, which should arrive in around 34 days) and I look forward to reading them. Apparently she’s a good poet.
And I’m not sure this is a dig at Nobel either.
But this absolutely is a call to anyone – either someone who works on the Nobel committee or someone who might have a nuanced answer – to provide me with an answer to the question:
How the heck do the Nobel Prize people choose their winners?
Remember the furore back in 2016 when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize?
Such furore that the jilted judges, humiliated by the fact that their musical idol ignored them for so long, so embarrassed by the public’s confusion even went as far as to say: “Fine! No prize next year!”
Of course, they relented, and awarded Kazuo Ishiguro the Nobel Prize, which actually makes sense.
The thing with Bob Dylan receiving the prize (or one of the many things) is that I personally think it would make sense on account of his songwriting and his lyrics.
But then the Nobel people, and every jealous academic in the world, went as far as to say he didn’t receive the award because of his lyrics (in the words of Oxford’s late Professor of Poetry Geoffrey Hill: “Bob Dylan is not poetry!”)
Apparently Dylan got the Nobel because he was a talented writer of prose.
Okay, search for books by Bob Dylan and you find Chronicles.
It’s a biography. A musician’s biography. And it’s okay. But it’s just a musician’s biography. Miles Davis has one. David Bowie has one. Mick Jagger has one. Why no Nobels for these gents?
Don’t get me wrong.
I believe the Nobels do get it right sometimes. Often, even.
Svetlana Alexievich in 2015 was an inspired choice.
Alice Munro in 2013 was extremely well deserved.
Toni Morrison back in 1993 was a great choice too.
But the only “problem” I have, if indeed it can be called a problem, is that I simply don’t know who the heck most of the winners are, and nor do most people.
Some might say that’s the point.
No, it’s not the point of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It’s not about promoting obscure writers and bringing them to the public eye.
It’s not about diversity.
It’s about celebrating a lifetime of achievement and dedication to the craft of literature, in whatever form that takes.
I am not the most well-read person in the world.
But I think I’m pretty close.
I know practically every writer worth knowing, and tons more not worth knowing, in every corner of the literary world.
Oxford educated, a writer myself, and a voracious reader.
Barring working in a library or bookstore and pow-wowing with the literary pretentia after dark, I don’t know how more “well read” I can be.
And I simply don’t know who Louise Glück is.
Nor do I know 2019’s Nobel Prize winner, Peter Handke.
Although I do have some of his works sitting on my kitchen table now.
In the off chance that the Nobel people know something I do not, and they have access to a magical realm of life-changing writers, I’ll be following a reading challenge for the next year.
One Nobel Prize winner’s work per month.
Obviously, like every sensible person, when I think of who the Nobel Prize committee is comprised of, I immediately think of a group of extremely white, Swedish, self-hating men with moustaches, small penises, and bank accounts not reflective of the value they actually put out into the world.
BUT, I’m willing to pretend for the next year that they might be able to provide a few good book and author recommendations.
If you want to follow this reading challenge too, and hopefully discover what all the fuss is about, I’m working in backwards chronological order.
So, no Hemingway or Faulkner for a while, I’m afraid.
If you read one Nobel Prize winner’s work per month, you should be able to get through the whole catalogue in a couple of decades. Yay. Let’s hope it’s worth it.
I’ll do a book review for each of these Nobel Prize winners each monthly. So it’s a monthly book review, maybe with some check-ins along the way, so feel free to follow along and let me know your reviews of these books (or other Nobel winners) too.
My schedule, along with specific assigned reading (books chosen based on what general literati consensus deems their best works, but with considerations of shorter more accessible works), will look like this:
The Nobel Prize Reading Challenge Schedule
- October: Louis Glück (2020) “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal” – Averno
- November: Peter Handke (2019) “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”- A Sorrow Beyond Dreams EPISODE AVAILABLE HERE
- December: Olga Tokarczuk (2018) “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life” – Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
- January: Kazuo Ishiguro (2017) “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” – The Buried Giant
- February: Bob Dylan (2016) “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” – Chronicles
- March: Svetlana Alexievich (2015) “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time” – War’s Unwomanly Face
- April: Patrick Modiano (2014) “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation” – Rue des Boutiques Obscures
- May: Alice Munro (2013) “master of the contemporary short story”- Dance of the Happy Shades
- June: Mo Yan (2012) “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary” – Red Sorghum
- July: Tomas Tranströmer (2011) “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality” – The Half-Finished Heaven
- August: Mario Vargas Llosa (2010) “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat” – The Bad Girl
- September: Herta Müller (2009) “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”- The Hunger Angel
There’s a few non-magnum-opus choices there.
I’ve already read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and many of his other works, but if you haven’t I believe you should start with that one. Great book.
I’ve also read Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, one of my favourite books, and other works, so start with that if you haven’t already read it.
I’ll read Dylan’s biography. I’ll bite. But I’d much rather just listen to Blood on the Tracks on repeat.
If this results in a good reading year – which I define by 80% of the books being at least relatively insightful, allowing for only 2-3 duds, and hoping for at least 2-3 stand-out extraordinary books – then I’ll renew the challenge, kicking off with whatever randomer wins the Nobel Prize for 2021 and going back to 1998.
If this results in a bad reading year – which I define by literally throwing a book across a room or incinerating a work more than once – we’ll do another reading challenge.
Just don’t ask me about the Booker Prize.
So many people ask me about the Booker, which results in me literally spitting my coffee out of my mouth and shitting my pants with disgust, which is really embarrassing because it’s always in public and I often have to waddle home great distances with soiled cheeks.
(Although George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker in 2017 and is one of my all-time favourite books.)
Happy reading.