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glowing-fish posted:I would like to hear what other people have to say, especially about the more obscure names on this list. I definitely wouldn't say that Saramago, Pinter or Pamuk are all that obscure. I have read those 3 from the obscure list and their work wasn't out of print or hard to find: Saramago's Blindness was adapted into film a few years ago and I remember Pamuk's Snow being prominently featured at Borders and other local bookstores shortly after he won (I haven't read that but I did read My Name is Red on Kindle a few years ago, which was fantastic btw). My wife was assigned Pinter in a college class and we both read through Betrayal in a Borders one afternoon (it is super short and we were poor). Honestly, I don't think any authors who have won in the last decade or so will be particularly hard to find. Now, it is harder to say why their cultural impact might not be as great as authors from the middle of last century. My best guess would be due to time and relevance. It is unlikely Steinbeck was taught in high school English when his works were first being published (I may be way off about that since I don't know enough about the education system, so correct me if I'm wrong), but his work has become classic and it is still relevant today for its overall themes as well as things it can teach us about a specific time in American history. It is also fairly tame compared to stuff by Oe or Grass. Nationalism is also going to play a role at least on stuff covered in high school, since it is easier to teach kids stuff when they have a reference point in their own culture and history. Stravinsky posted:I strongly urge people to give Mo Yan a read. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is probably his most well known of his works and it is a pretty great book to read. Basically going through cycles of reincarnation the main character experiences different cultural and political changes that happens in China and is pretty funny. Mo Yan is fantastic. I have read The Garlic Ballads and The Republic of Wine and enjoyed Wine a lot more; both were funny but Ballads was a tad more depressing. Based on your suggestion I'll probably read Life and Death.. next and I have Big Breasts & Wide Hips queued up for eventually. His stuff has been intermittently appearing on the Kindle Daily Deal which is how I picked up all 4, so I would encourage anyone interested to keep an eye out. Guy A. Person fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 18, 2014 21:15
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glowing-fish posted:As an example of how popular Steinbeck was, he released "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1939, and the next year, it was made into a movie directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda, and it won two Academy Awards. So if we look at the winners of the past ten or twenty years, we don't see any of their books being turned into movies directed by Robert DeNiro and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Fair point. Like I said Blindness (from a writer on the "obscure list") was turned into a film starring Julianne Moore but it didn't win any awards (and it was 13 years later). However, if Cormac McCarthy wins anytime in the next few years he will be a fairly good comparison with Steinbeck as far as film adaptations go. 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.
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Feb 18, 2014 22:04
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Hieronymous Alloy posted: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. Oh certainly, which is why I mentioned McCarthy who hasn't won (yet), but it is a popular contemporary American author so he has gotten lots of high-profile film adaptations. I also apparently majorly hosed up the dates on Beloved, which wasn't adapted until well after the novel was made and Morrison had won the prize, so that's irrelevant to my argument. But yeah I totally agree with the language thing, it was part of my point. If we get another American author anytime soon s/he will probably be fairly familiar, and probably have a film adaptation or two (McCarthy has several; Pynchon has Inherent Vice filming; Roth has a few from years ago; who else is even a potential future candidate?) --- Also, while I am on the subject of the obscure authors, I would like to recommend Orhan Pamuk to everyone, specifically My Name is Red. It is about a murder among a group of miniaturists (people who created miniature paintings) in the Ottoman Empire, and obviously a lot of it hinges on the culture and customs of the time and how it brings about/hinders the investigation of the murder. You also have shifting narrators including some unexpected ones like "the color red", as well as (if I recall correctly) many of the drawings themselves. But it is funny and thought provoking and basically just a good read.
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Feb 18, 2014 23:33
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inktvis posted:Have you got through it yet? I've been curious, but well-written sci-fi is a list that, in my experience at least, pretty much starts and ends with Lem. No love for PKD or Vonnegut? But yeah, it would be interesting to read sci-fi from a genuine Nobel Prize winner. I also just finished Death with Interruptions by Saramago, since it popped up on the Kindle sale a month or two ago. It was interesting, although I felt like the style (effectively stream of consciousness with characters speaking in line with no quotation marks are anything, and limited punctuation) was an excuse to jump into different ideas and narrative strings easily without completely resolving others. Which sort've worked since it is basically just a rumination on the nature of death. But at the same time I was just put off by the last bit of narrative which I felt was a bit hokey death falls in love with a dude and then turns into a real girl to be with him.
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Feb 26, 2014 17:33
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Stravinsky posted:I strongly urge people to give Mo Yan a read. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is probably his most well known of his works and it is a pretty great book to read. Basically going through cycles of reincarnation the main character experiences different cultural and political changes that happens in China and is pretty funny. I just finished the first section of this book and it is hilarious so far. At this point I would still put Republic of Wine ahead of it, but this did start out with a bang and I have a long way to go.
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Mar 4, 2014 16:35
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Spadoink posted:I find this thread interesting for the early debate on how to classify the authors. So much is dependent on simple geography! Alice Munro, the 2013 winner, is a Canadian author, and very well known in Canada. We encounter her short stories in high school, not just university, graduate school or in the bookstore. Although we do encounter her at each of these places as well Maybe I am blowing a lot of smoke here, but I also get the impression that the short story medium has sort of fallen out of vogue in America. In school you typically read older lit anyway, but even then it seems like most of the short fiction that is covered is stuff like Poe, or stories from the turn of last century, rather than anything even approaching contemporary. So maybe Munro's lack of recognition has something to do with that. It seems odd to ignore a North American winner anyway since we have so few (especially recently).
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Mar 14, 2014 16:09
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