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Guy A. Person posted:In which case I would go back to the nationalism argument, especially since the last American author to win (Toni Morrison) also had her most famous work adapted into film a year later. There's a certain amount of circularity there though -- once an author has won the prize his works get more attention from movie scouts; similarly, authors whose books get made into movies have higher visibility and are going to get more attention from prize committees. I suspect the simpler answer is that a lot of winners aren't writing in English and so their works aren't as familiar to English-speaking audiences and movie concept scouts. I mean, there have been plans to make a movie out of Bridge on the Drina, but they're plans being made by a Serbian director, because when English-speaking audiences hear the name "Ivo Andric" they go "Who?" (edit: It's been over 15 years since I read Bridge on the Drina, it's a great book but, as one might imagine a book about Serbian history to be, rather depressing). Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Feb 18, 2014 |
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Feb 18, 2014 22:14
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Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:It's amazing how well Arrowsmith still skewers academic medicine, public health, and primary care medicine. Really hard to believe it is so old. Just grabbed this, thanks for the recommendation! Only medical-themed books I've read from that time period are the Thorndyke mysteries by R. Austin Freeman -- basically the first CSI style mystery novels; not exactly Nobel material.
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Feb 26, 2014 05:03
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Hedningen posted:
That would be really interesting. I don't think I've read anything by a Scandinavian author that didn't have the word "saga" somewhere in the title. Even Hunger is perpetually sitting on my kindle, downloaded and not yet read, for which, yes, I am ashamed!
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Mar 3, 2014 01:18
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Hedningen posted:Man, you owe it to yourself to read that immediately. It's an amazing book, although I really do need to ask who the translator is. There's an early translation that's wafting around that omits some of the crucial scenes, having been edited for sake of 'decency' back in the day. If it's the Egerton translation, just delete it and find one by Bly or Lyngstad. The Lyngstad is the best (and not coincidentally, the most recent), but Bly is at least a hell of a lot better than Egerton's, which is the version that crops up for free online most of the time. I'm pretty sure it's the Egerton, so thanks -- at one point a couple years ago I downloaded essentially *every* free kindle download and I grabbed it as one of those. I also have a paper copy somewhere a friend gave me but it seems to have floated behind a shelf or something and I can't find it. It's been on my list for a while now but books that I know are going to depress me tend to get bumped down and it doesn't exactly have a cheery title :P
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Mar 3, 2014 03:04
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Hedningen posted:To explain some of the Norwegian backlash against Hamsun, here's the (translated) quote that I think sums up the controversy perfectly. While the man was a wonderful writer, it's hard to justify quotes like this. Ahhh, so he's like Thomas Carlyle -- one of those Great Authors that just got associated too closely with Hitler? But yeah, my biggest roadblock in terms of reading is whether or not I think a book is going to depress me. It's only a problem with books that do the just unreserved absolute bleakness thing, though; i.e., I loved Camus' Plague but couldn't finish The Stranger. As long as their's some strand of hope or comic relief or something I'm fine but when I think a book is just going to be unrelieved bleakness I can't muster the will to pick it up.
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Mar 3, 2014 04:22
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