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/lit/ - Literature

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19259774 No.19259774 [Reply] [Original]

Who are the least deserving winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature? I'm sure a lot of people will say Bob Dylan. Sully Prudhomme won the first one but has been all but forgotten today. Some Swedes won solely by virtue of their nationality. And honorable mention goes to Yeats; he's possibly the most important English-language poet of the 20th century, but he didn't write most of his important poems until after he won the Nobel.

>> No.19259782

>>19259774
I think the last one truly deserving was Alice Munro in 2013 or Mario Vargas Llosa in 2010.

>> No.19259818

>>19259774
Sartre
Camus
Hamsun
Mann
Hesse
Russell
Churchill
Solzhenitsyn
Bellow
Fo
Gluck

>> No.19259908

>>19259818
Read Marlborough. Churchill wrote one of the greatest books on politics of the 20th century and at the same time produced a fantastic piece of literature.

>> No.19259916

>>19259818
>Gluck
>deserving
??

>> No.19259955

>>19259916
Read the thread title retard

>> No.19259968

Dylan is so bad that he makes those two Swedes who gave it to themselves look defensible.
It might be the award given to anyone in the history of artistic awards.

>> No.19260144

>>19259774

I'd say Par Lagerkvist just because I read the Dwarf in high school one time and it was a stupid and boring book. Strictly speaking the Nobel Prize (in lit) is a sham prize because they encourage life-affirming, humanist lit, i.e. falsehoods which misapprehend reality.

>> No.19260174

>>19259916
I find the Gluck Gluck 5000 quite worthy of praise

>> No.19260190

>>19259968
Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson did not participate in the process that year. Martinson committed suicide just a few years later; he'd been very distraught by the whole thing. Johnson was certainly a better novelist than most of the trite shit you anons spam about in every fucking Nobel Prize thread.

>>19260144
Lagerkvist is exceptional.
>because they encourage life-affirming, humanist lit
Yeah that's the fucking prize is about. As Alfred Nobel said in his will. And people get upset over that pathetic mediocrity Houllebecq not getting it year and year.

>> No.19260202

>>19259908
>Churchill wrote one of the greatest books on politics of the 20th century and at the same time produced a fantastic piece of literature.
No.

>> No.19260220

Russell
Steinbeck
Buck
Solzhenitsyn

>> No.19260315

>>19260190
based

>> No.19260327

>>19259955
I'm sorry bro :(

>> No.19260390

>>19260220
>>19259818
>Solzhenitsyn
Commies seething.

>> No.19260503

>>19260390
>prisons are... LE BAD
Give this man a Nobel!

>> No.19260516

>>19260390
He hardly criticizes communism, he just seethes about the soviet union.
You can BTFO communism much easier by just pointing out that people aren't equal and trying to pretend they are is evil even in theory, you don't need to provide any examples, equality is evil by itself

>> No.19260537
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19260537

Andre Gide.

This faggot right here. Unquestionably he had to suck off someone on the committee. Or he just hung out with the right people. There's no other explanation for how he got the Nobel.

The Immoralist is one of the most poorly written books ever, even disregarding the subject matter.
The Counterfeiters is basically a soap opera, also with some of the worst prose writing I've ever read.
Then again it could just be the translation but I highly doubt it.

Also he turned down Proust from being published because his tiny brain didn't get it, which almost assuredly secured his place in Hell.

>> No.19260710

>>19260537
>which almost assuredly secured his place in Hell.
kek

>> No.19260834

>>19259782
Handke definitely deserved it.

>> No.19260854

>>19260537
Do you read French?
Gide is a fine writer, admired by Joyce and others. No idea what you're talking about.

>Then again it could just be the translation but I highly doubt it.

Oh, never mind...

>> No.19260863

>>19260854
Moralists are incapable of finding aesthetic value in anything.

>> No.19260866

Do you guys actually read Nobel Prize winner? It seems like most of them are not very popular around here

>> No.19260974

>>19260866
I (not the OP) have read a few, though not many of the most recent ones.
True innovators and experimentalists rarely win the prize.
Among this century's winners, of those I've read, Handke, Transtromer, Vargas-Llosa, Pinter, and Kertesz were the ones who seem to me to have really deserved it.
The stuff I've read by Pamuk, Coetzee, Dylan, Gluck, doesn't justify it, not when you had authors like Geoffrey Hill, Thomas Pynchon, Yves Bonnefoy or Adonis, who didn't win it.
Pamuk et al. are not even bad, there's just no real spark in their writing. They are the Sully Prudhommes of our day (or worse). He was technically accomplished, even good, certainly not bad at all, but of course he was no Mallarmé, no Apollinaire, no Valéry, not even a Jammes.
And I won't mention some of the other winners, because I refuse to read their books. I tried reading Ishiguro and felt disgust at the amount of clichés.

Here's Steiner:

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/30/books/the-scandal-of-the-nobel-prize.html

>Even the specialist in modern literary history will be hard put to recall, let alone have any serious awareness of, such luminaries as Rudolf Eucken, a philosopher crowned in 1908; as the Danish novelist Henrik Pontoppidan (1917); or as Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian novelist who, in 1926, became one of the very few women to be chosen. Even where the recipients are illustrious, their work has repeatedly fallen outside normal definitions of literature. Eucken, Bergson, Bertrand Russell are philosophers. Theodor Mommsen, honored in 1902, was a great historian and epigrapher of ancient Rome, but hardly one whose prose has made the German language live. Churchill (1953) . . . was Churchill.
>Obscurity and caprice of selection are, of themselves, only waste. They do not harm the masters and the life of letters. What matters is the omission, the willed ostracism from the roll of Nobel laureates in literature, of so very much of the best in 20th-century drama, poetry and fiction. It is the black holes at the center of Swedish perception that count.
>Taking into sympathetic account the widest margin of human error, is it possible to take seriously an institution and procedure that passes over the majority of the greatest novelists and renewers of prose in the modern age? James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka (whose presence towers over our sense of literature and of the meaning of man), Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Andre Malraux, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, D. H. Lawrence, either escaped the notice of or were, on nomination, rejected by the Nobel committee. Can one defend a jury which prefers the art of Pearl Buck (1938) to that of, say, Virginia Woolf? Paul Claudel, whose dramas we can set fairly beside those of Aeschylus and of Shakespeare, never received the accolade. Paul Heyse was chosen, not Bertolt Brecht. Galsworthy is a Nobel, not Carlo Emilio Gadda, one of the most original and inventive writers of fiction in this century.

>> No.19261007

Kawabata
Those two swedes
Gluck
Dylan
Bellow
Churchill
Hesse
Sartre
Modiano

Haven't read a lot of nobel prize winners but ones that I can confidently say did deserve it

Gurnah
Oe
Ishiguro
Munro

>> No.19261040

>>19261007
>I can confidently say did deserve it

Nice trolling.

>> No.19261444

>>19260516
>people aren't... LE EQUAL!
Not even a commie, but you don't know anything about communism.

>> No.19261910

>>19260220
>Steinbeck
really?

>> No.19261919

>>19261007
Churchill is a great writer

>> No.19261941

When Tolstoy learned he was given a Nobel Prize in literate, he was furious. He believe his work was belittled. In the end, he didn't even take the prize.

>> No.19261979

>>19260866
>Do you guys actually read Nobel Prize winner?
I've read a few, but it was by chance and/or because someone suggested me the book first. Kawabata, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa come to mind.

>> No.19263680

>>19259774
Buck winning was so controversial it led to the unwritten Lex Buck, a law for the Nobel denying anyone the prize who wasn't nominated at least twice.

>> No.19263684

>>19261941
Based, also fuck Sartre for asking for the money later on kek

>> No.19263706

>>19260190

Shame on you for everything in your second graph. You sound like another pathetic bunch of Houellebecq critics I've been writing up the past few days.

>> No.19263922

>>19260974
Good post. I'll read the Steiner article, have been meaning to read him.

>> No.19264695

I come from the future and my pick is R.C. Waldun

>> No.19264748

>>19261910

There are credible allegations that Steinbeck plagiarized a lot of his writing from lesser-known authors, specifically The Grapes of Wrath.

Additionally,
>Fifty years later, in 2012, the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot. "There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry Olsson.

>> No.19264764

Reymont

>> No.19264842

>>19260537
>realizes proustrash for what it is
>not based
Your jewish tricks won't work.

>> No.19264928

>>19259818
>Camus
Fuck off, he's like the one who most deserved that shit.

>Mann
Yeah fuck you


Solzhenitsyn never deserved shit but a bullet tho, that's alright.

Doris Lessing wrote like shit and I never liked her
Also half of the French authors on there wrote shit poetry and prose.

>> No.19264934

>>19261007
>>19259818
Seriously everyone that doesn't want Churchill on there need to neck themselves.

>> No.19264958

>>19259782
Vargas Llosa is one worst authors and politicians I have ever read.
He's the least deserving latin american author to receive the Nobel.

Honestly the fact that he got it and Borges, Cortazar, Bolaño, Rulfo or Sabato never got any mentions, shows that the Nobel is a fucking joke and should never be taken seriously.

>> No.19264974

>>19263706
I am not a Houllebecq critic, I am simply a Houllebecq disregarder. I just like to insult people who go on and on about him all the time, especially during discussions pertaining the Nobel Prize.

>> No.19264975

>>19264842
Wait until you see Gide recant his refusal to publish Proust and acknowledge his mistake

>> No.19264982

>>19264958
No one cares, Pedro.

>> No.19265172

>>19264982
Fuck off, Seamus.

>> No.19265302

>>19264975
Paradise too good for that

>> No.19266087

>>19264958
Vargas Llosa can be extremely retarded when it comes to politics and he's a really irritating man. He's novels are still very good; I think it's always good to be more mature when approaching an author's works and accept someone can be a retard and still be a good writer.
He was better than Sabato. Rulfo never was going to get the Nobel, he wrote too little. Bolaño died too young. Borges really did deserve it though, but he not getting doesn't mean that Vargas Llosa didn't deserve it. I will admit though that I think he's the less complex and more straightforward writer of the five Boom guys, though.

>> No.19266313

>>19266087
You're probably right, I maybe never liked his style and his approach to politics.
But I never liked Sabato or Borges approach to politics either but still.
I just couldn't separate the art from the artist, I guess.

>> No.19266328

>>19264958
Why is Bolaño even in this discussion? lmao

>> No.19266331

>>19266328
Better than Llosa

>> No.19266336

>>19266328
So good of a writer it's a joke

>> No.19266385

>>19266331
Not really lol Bolaño himself would disagree. He has an article where talks about three novellas, one by García Márquez, one by Cortázar, and one by Vargas Llosa, and he concludes that Vargas Llosa's novella is the superior one out of the three.

Vargas Llosa is a better novelist and prose stylist than Bolaño. Faggots only hate VLl because of politics, not because of his work.

>> No.19266419

>>19266385
Literally any writer is better than Márquez; he is a hack.