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Florida Betty posted:I actually read the French translation of The Beginning and the End, but I read the English version of Palace Walk and I thought it was pretty good. I loved Yacoubian Building, by the way. I've been meaning to read something else by Alaa al Aswany, if anything else of his is available in English. There's his short story collection Friendly Fire that supposedly was banned in Egypt for a long time. Anyway, OP's classification is bizarre. I run a second-hand charity bookshop in the UK, and out of those 'obscure' authors we always get tons of Galsworthy, Hamsun, Patrick White, Mahfouz, Saramago, Coetzee, Pinter, Pamuk, Lessing, Muller and Llosa and quite regularly some of the other ones as well. In Central/Eastern Europe people like Deledda, Lagerlof, Andric, Brodsky, Bunin, Sienkewicz, Mauriac, etc. are very well known. There are a few names among the laureates that I wouldn't recognize, but then again I'm only a guy in mid 20s with an average interest in classics, so... I would like a 'World literature' (i.e., not English-written) thread, though, and this could be promising!
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Feb 18, 2014 09:40
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Stravinsky posted:I have The Good Terrorist sitting on a stack of books to be read for over a year now so I'll just parrot what some one told me when I bought the book: she is a feminist commie who sucked a mystic's cock and occasionally wrote scifi. I don't think that was meant as an endorsement but I took it as one. That's pretty close, yes. She also wrote a lot about race relations in South Africa, which is where she grew up. It means it's hard to find a representative book of her whole career. I've only read one of her South African books as a teenager. It was good but nothing terribly remarkable, I thought. I have the first book of her crazy sci-fi sequence and "The Golden Notebook" which is supposed to be her main achievement. Her 'mystic' was Idries Shah, who's a very interesting (and crazy) man in his own right. He called himself a Sufi and brought lots of their stories to the West, including Nasruddin tales, which everybody should read as they're still hilarious. (In Eastern Europe we got them from other sources, and a collection of them I had fell apart from all the reading and re-reading I did.) However, most Sufis would call him a fraud and a self-serving mystic instead. He was into Wicca, withcraft and Gurdjieff, all of which he said was tapping into Sufi tradition. He also produced a translation of Khayyam from a manuscript his family had been keeping for centuries that supposedly showed Khayyam was a Sufi as well. However, he was never able to show the manuscript to all the scholars and skeptics who asked for it. Basically ignore Idries Shah apart from his translation of traditional stories (which he probably 'improved' though) and as an influence to Lessing.
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Feb 26, 2014 11:15
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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, I haven't, so I can't say much unfortunately.
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Feb 26, 2014 12:25
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Just finished reading a selection of Grazia Deledda's (1926 Nobel winner) stories from throughout her career. They seemed to get more and more like moralistic tales towards the end, although still with some flashes of greatness. Still, I assume one of her novels could be a better way to go, if you're in the mood for some well written but quite melodramatic country-ish tale of repressed young monks and passionate women.
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May 2, 2014 09:02
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I know I'm opening a can of worms here, but I think Murakami is really too lightweight if you look at the profiles of previous winners. And it's unlikely to be another North American after Alice Munro won the prize last year, especially seeing as there's been only one previous occasion in all the history when the prize stayed outside of Europe for three years straight (and it was due to Walcott who lives in UK anyway). While I wouldn't write off the chances of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (and he is really good from what I've read) or the perennial poet duo Adunis & Ko Un, I really think it will be a European this year. The most often mentioned names are Ismail Kadare and Javier Marias, but people like Svetlana Alexievitch (although the conflict in Ukraine might damage her chances as this Nobel committee doesn't seem to want to get political), Jon Fosse (but he's probably too young still), Laszlo Krazsnahorkai, Juan Goytisolo, Milan Kundera (his time might've passed by now) and others are also ranking highly.
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Sep 18, 2014 08:09
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