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Great thread. About a decade back now, I made a list of Nobel Prize winners and decided on one book that I would read from each. I figured I would go in reverse chronological order. Since this was in 2004, I started with Elfriede Jelinek, who of course I had never heard of. For each writer I decided not to just go to the "big novel" they wrote that pushed them into Nobel territory, but rather whatever seemed most interesting. For some unknown reason, I picked Jelinek's Lust over The Piano Teacher, which was adapted to a movie. To this day I still don't know what to make of Lust. It tells the story - in excruciating detail - of a powerless woman with a young son who endures years of marital rape from her sadistic husband, who is a figure of some authority in the town since he runs the paper mill. For more than 100 pages, that's all the book is - descriptions of what the husband thinks up next to degrade, humiliate and rape her. And we're talking about stuff like not letting her bathe for a week and then violently sodomizing her repeatedly, pissing on her, etc. The woman reaches out for help to a young man she meets at a ski lodge, but he winds up raping her too. In the end, the woman takes her toddler son in her arms and walks into a lake, drowning them both. That's it. The writing is quite good, and the whole thing is brutal and haunting, but you're really left with this sense of, drat, what the gently caress did I just read? What was the point of all that - what am I supposed to walk away with? I gave up on this "Nobel reading list" idea after subsequently encountering what I felt were a series of clunkers. I could not get into Saramago's Blindness, Gunter Grass' The Rat, Omeros by Derek Walcott (a long poem that I do mean to at some point re-attempt) and Hesse's Steppenwolf. The latter was a huge disappointment because I am a huge fan of Siddhartha and Demien. I do think it's worthwhile to explore all of these authors, but for anyone attempting to do so I would say that it's probably best to stick with the "hits" first with a lot of these writers.
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Mar 16, 2014 13:33
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Guy A. Person posted: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). In general yes, the short story has fallen out of vogue. There are exceptions, and as a bit of counterpoint, every year the NY Times recommends at least one book of short stories in its Top 100 list.
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Mar 16, 2014 13:37
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Hedningen posted:
The Dwarf is great. We were assigned that in my senior year of high school as part of an A.P. Humanities course. It's a heady book - a contemplation on the nature and course of evil - but I'd highly recommend it.
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Mar 16, 2014 17:23
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