Arubabookwoman's Nobel Reading

ConversazioniNobel Laureates in Literature Challenge

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Arubabookwoman's Nobel Reading

1arubabookwoman
Modificato: Dic 30, 2022, 10:51 am

So I will be joining in on the Nobel reading. I am not a completist, and I already know there are some Nobelists I have no interest at all in reading, so unless I live til 150 they will probably remain unread by me. I have over the years read a fair number--I've gone through my LT library and will list in the opening paragraphs below those I've read, with the year I read it (if I remember) in parentheses, and also those books by Nobelists I currently have on my shelf. My plan will be to probably read those books already on my shelf first, particularly those books by Nobelists I have not yet read.
I will note that my reading is heavily skewed in favor of novels, as I am not much of a poetry/drama/philosophy/history reader. I will try to remedy this, at least insofar as poetry goes.

2arubabookwoman
Modificato: Dic 30, 2022, 10:51 am

I will use this entry to list my 2023 Nobel reading (and future years if the group continues).

3arubabookwoman
Modificato: Set 22, 2023, 10:44 am

2020's

2022 Annie Ernaux

Read: The Years
On Shelf: A Woman's Story

2021 Abdulrazak Gurnah

Read: By the Sea (2003)
Admiring Silence (2004)
Desertion (2010
On Shelf: Gravel Heart
Read in 2023: Paradise

2020 Louise Gluck

8arubabookwoman
Modificato: Set 22, 2023, 10:51 am

1970's

1979 Odysseus Elytis

1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer

Read: The Family Moskat (1980's, 2018)
A Crown of Feathers (1980's)
Enemies, A Love Story (1980's)
The Manor and the Estate (1990's)
Shosa (2004)
The Slave (2005)
On Shelf: Satan in Goray
Shadows on the Hudson

1977 Vicente Aleixandre

1976 Saul Bellow

Read: Adventures of Angie March (1960's)
Herzog (1980's)
Henderson the Rain King (1980's)
The Dangling Man (1980's)
Humbolt's Gift (1980's)
Ravelstein (2000)
Read in 2023: The Victim

1975 Eugenio Montale

1974 Eyvind Johnson

1973 Patrick White

Read: A Fringe of Leaves (1970's)
The Eye of the Storm (1980's, 2007)
The Tree of Man (1980's)
Voss (1980's, 2011)
The Solid Mandala (2012)
Riders in the Chariot (2012)
The Vivisector (2012)
On Shelf: The Hanging Garden
The Living and the Dead

1972 Heinrich Boll

Read: Group Portrait with Lady (1970's)
The Clown (1970'2)
The Lost Honor of Katerina Blum (1970's)
And Never Said a Word (1970's)
The Safety Net (2011)

1971 Pablo Neruda

1970 Alexander Solzhenitsin

Read: August 1914 (2011)
November 1916 (2011)
In the First Circle (1980's)
Cancer Ward (1980's)
Stories and Prose Poems (1980's)
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1960's)
The Gulag Archipelago (1980's)--one volume abridged version released back then
On Shelf: The Gulag Archipelago--3 volume version released a few years ago

10arubabookwoman
Modificato: Set 22, 2023, 10:52 am

11arubabookwoman
Modificato: Set 22, 2023, 10:53 am

1940's

1949 William Faulkner

Read: Go Down Moses (1970's)
The Sound and the Fury (1960's, 1990's, 2008, 2021)
Absalom, Absalom (1970's, 1990's, 2015)
As I Lay Dying (1980's, 2010)
Intruder in the Dust (2003)
Light in August (2010)
Sanctuary (2010)
On Shelf: The Wild Palms
Selected Short Stories (Modern Library)
Read in 2023: The Snopes Trilogy

1948 T.S. Eliot

Read: The Wasteland
other individual poems

1947 Andre Gide

Read: The Immoralist (1980's)
On Shelf: Strait Is the Gate
The Counterfeiters

1946 Herman Hesse

Read: Siddhartha (1960's)
Steppenwolf (1960's
Journey to the East (1960's
Demian (1960's)

1945 Gabriela Mistral

1944 Johannes Jensen

13arubabookwoman
Modificato: Dic 31, 2022, 6:36 pm

16arubabookwoman
Dic 31, 2022, 7:00 pm

In moving forward with my Nobel reading, I will probably start with books I have by Nobelists whose works I have yet to read. These would include Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke, Herta Muller, Gao Xingjian, Claude Simon, Miguel Angel Asturias, S.Y. Agnon, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Roger Martin du Gard, Ivan Bunin, Anatole France, Selma Lagerlof and Bjornstjerne Bjornson. That should keep me busy a while.

I am also eying on Amazon the four volume work The Peasants by Ladislas Reymont (1924). It's been on my wishlist forever, but I've just never come across it in my bookstore searches.

Then there are the books I have on my shelf by authors I've read and liked. This would include in particular Annie Ernaux, Svetlana Alexievich, Doris Lessing, Imre Kertesz, Gabriel Garcia Marrquez, Patrick White, William Faulkner, and Thomas Mann.

And I really need to educate myself in reading poetry.

17labfs39
Dic 31, 2022, 7:09 pm

>16 arubabookwoman: And I really need to educate myself in reading poetry.

This is an area I need to study as well. Do you have plans as to how to accomplish it?

18arubabookwoman
Gen 1, 2023, 10:28 am

Hi Lisa. I'm not sure how to do this. However, a few years back when I expressed a similar sentiment, on CR, someone (I think LizM) recommended reading Camille Paglia's Break Blow Burn, which I bought but haven't yet read. I also have How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch. So I might start with reading, or at least dipping in and out of these two books.

If anyone who loves poetry has any recommendations, I would love to hear from you.

19arubabookwoman
Set 22, 2023, 10:01 am

I guess it might be about time to post an update on my Nobelist's thread. I have read a few this year, though not as many as I would have liked, and especially not as many new-to-me Nobelists. HOWEVER, I see this as a multi-year thread. I will add new Nobelist books to the opening entries on this thread indicating the year read, as I post.

This first one is by an author I've read before, and it is not one of my favorites:

Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah (1994) 251 pp

This is Gurnah's second novel, but the first to be published in the U.S. At the age of 12, Yusuf is taken by the man he knows as Uncle Aziz to work as a sort of indentured servant to secure his father's debts. He never sees his family again. Over the years he interacts and observes many people of the various cultures and factions vying for control in the colonial east Africa of the time, including Muslims, Indian merchants, European settlers, and even German soldiers as WW I approaches. He also accompanies "Uncle Aziz" on a trading safari into the deepest interior wilderness. Interspersed with Yusuf's story, we learn a lot about the superstitions of the various cultures, and of many of the folktales prevalent in the area.
I have read a couple of other books by Gurnah, and this is not his best. As basically a coming of age story, I expected to feel more empathy for Yusuf, yet I felt distanced from him. I found parts interesting, but this was not a book that particularly moved me.

First Line: "The boy first. His name was Yusuf, and he left his home suddenly during his twelfth year."

Last line: "He glanced around quickly and then ran after the column with smarting eyes.

3 stars

20arubabookwoman
Modificato: Set 22, 2023, 10:31 am

This was a new-to-me Nobelist. I will look for more by her to read.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk(2009) 283 pp

"The familiar cold, wet air that reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Mankind, and for at least half the year, it shows us how very hostile it is to us."

This book is a combination of a weird and fable-like fairy tale with a murder mystery. It is also very message-driven, as the author explores the ways in which some living creatures are privileged above others. Finally, it is an examination of how we stigmatize those who are "different."

Sixty-something Janina (she hates her name) lives in the mountains as the winter caretaker of vacation cottages. She has a reputation as a crank and obsessive animal-lover. She is interested in horoscopes, translating the poetry of William Blake, and nature. She gives everyone a name based on the characteristics she sees in them, so we have her neighbors Oddball and Big Foot, Dizzy, with whom she is collaborating in the Blake translation, Good News, a friend, and so on. When the novel opens, Oddball has discovered the body of Big Foot. Although Big Foot apparently choked on a bone, Janina begins to think he may have been murdered. There follow in quick succession a number of other deaths which clearly were homicides. One thing that connects the victims is that they were all hunters, so Janina tries to convince the police that they were all murdered by animals who are taking their revenge for the mistreatment of animals by hunters.

From this description, I think you can see that this book is original, inventive, and unusual. I enjoyed it very much. There were many sentences and phrases I highlighted, and Tokarczuk has created a unique and memorable character in Janina. I won't soon forget this book, and will definitely be reading more by this author.

4 stars

21arubabookwoman
Set 22, 2023, 10:33 am

A Nobelist I've read before.

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro (1971) 290 pp

Alice Munro is known as a master of the short story, but in a note at the beginning of this book she called this a novel, "autobiographical in form but not in fact." Structurally, it consists of what appear to be short stories, roughly in chronologically order, narrated by Del, telling the story of her life, her family, and her town.

Briefly, as follows, the stories are:

THE FLATS ROAD--Del and family are living out of town on a fox farm This story focuses on Uncle Benny's disastrous marriage.
HEIRS OF THE LIVING BODY--Del's mother's failure to be accepted by her father's family: "My mother went along straight lines. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace wove in and out around her, retreating and disappearing, and coming back...."
PRINCESS IDA--Again the focus is on Del's mother, who becomes an encyclopedia salesperson. "I felt the weight of my mother's eccentricities as something absurd and embarrassing about her--the aunties would just show me a little at a time." Del, her mother, and her brother are now living in town while her father is out at the fox farm.
AGE OF FAITH--Del wants to know if there is a god. "Sometimes I thought of the population of Jubilee as nothing but a large audience for me...."
CHANGES AND CEREMONIES--Del and her friend Naomi are becoming interested in boys and the mysteries of sex. In Jubilee, "reading books was something like chewing gum, a habit to be abandoned when the seriousness and satisfactions of adult life took over. It persisted mostly in unmarried ladies, would have been shameful in a man."
LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN--As a teenager Del is sexually molested by the boyfriend of her mother's boarder.
BAPTIZING--In high school, Del has boyfriends; loses her virginity.
EPILOGUE: THE PHOTOGRAPHER--A story imagined by Del, who has failed her college scholarship exams, but who wants to be a writer. "And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together--radiant, everlasting."

4 stars

22arubabookwoman
Set 22, 2023, 10:36 am

Another Nobelist I've read before:

In the Heart of the Country by J.M. Coetzee (1977) 160 pp

"The land is full of melancholy spinsters like me, lost to history, blue as roaches in our ancestral homes...."

"I do not think it was ever intended that people should live here. This is a land made for insects who eat sand and lay eggs in each others corpses and have no voices with which to scream when they die."

This short novel is one of Coetzee's early works. It consists of 206 numbered passages, which are generally short, some merely a short paragraph long. Coetzee has said that in structuring the novel he was influenced by film and photographic methods. And despite being short, the chapters and the prose are frequently dense and require (at least for me) much concentration to read.

The narrator, Magda, lives on a sheep farm deep in the veldt with her widowed father. The story she tells is disturbing, and we sense from the beginning that Magda is/will be an unreliable narrator. We can never be sure whether Magda is telling the truth, or whether the events she described even actually happened. What we can be sure of is that the novel follows the descent and decline of Magda as she (probably) kills her father, and is slowly starving herself, as all around her the farm deteriorates.

Not an easy read, but very powerful.

23arubabookwoman
Set 22, 2023, 10:38 am

Again an author I've read before:

The Victim by Saul Bellow (1947) 250 pp

This is Bellow's second novel, so a very early work for him. Asa Leventhal is alone for the summer, his wife having gone to help her mother move. Walking through the neighborhood one evening, Asa is accosted by an old acquaintance, Kirby Albee, who is drunk. Kirby accuses Asa of having caused him to be fired from his job several years previously. Over the next six weeks or so Kirby becomes increasingly more aggressive in his attacks on Asa, many of which Asa interprets as anti-semitic.

While all this is going on, Asa must also help out with his absent brother's wife and her very ill son. He also is trying to figure out, contacting others from his past, whether he really had played any part in Kirby's being fired from his job.

In the introduction, the book is described as "a parable in the guise of a middle-European realist novel." At the time he was writing it, details of the Holocaust were just becoming known to the world. Bellow has said that the theme of the book is guilt and it is somewhat about anti-semitism. There is a definite play about the ambiguity over who is the victim--Asa or Kirby? In fact they victimize each other.

I found the style of writing very distancing from the characters. I could never work myself up to sympathize with any of the characters. The writing beautifully portrayed life in post-WW II New York City--the heat of the summer, the crowds, the grittiness, and I enjoyed reading about what life was like in the city then. But it was never a book that called to me because I was enjoying it so much or because I wanted to find out what was going to happen next. So, mildly recommended.

3 stars

24arubabookwoman
Set 22, 2023, 10:43 am

Another author I've read before, and a favorite author at that. I read this for the Snopes Trilogy Group read on Club Read. (It's Volume I of that trilogy). Instead of a review, I'll just post a summary of my comments/notes:

The Hamlet by William Faulkner

Reading this for the Snopes Trilogy group read, I had a hard time getting into The Hamlet, though I've loved most of the other works by Faulkner I've read (especially The Sound and the Fury, Absalom Absalom, Light in August and As I Lay Dying). I especially love Faulkner's prose style--the meandering sentences, the "story-telling," the southern colloquialisms. I think it was because when I started the book, I was only able to read in short snatches of time, and I wasn't finding any continuity and was having to reread, and that made the first two books in The Hamlet, "Flem" and "Eula" so much less enjoyable to me than the last two books, which I read much more quickly, over just a couple of days.

I'll just give my thoughts organized by the individual books in which they occurred:

"Flem"--The first book is about Flem, but we only see him from the outside, and to me, at least, he remained enigmatic at the end of Book I as well as at the end of The Hamlet. We know he arrives in town, the son of a poor sharecropper, and by the end of Book I he (or relatives he's placed in position) is running the store, running the gin, lending money, wheeling and dealing, and the right-hand man for Will Varner, the richest man in town. I kind of enjoyed the barn-burning stories, but have to admit, perhaps the Snopeses are smarter than me because I had difficulty following the horse trading story.

I liked the character of Ratliff. In my experience, with Ratliff, Faulkner utilizes a techniques he often uses: having one character, usually a "country folk," sometimes a minor character with no role to play other than as a storyteller, relate events about the main character or characters to advance the plot. Here I think we can say Ratliff is a fairly prominent character with a part to play other than as a storyteller. By the end of the whole book, I began to see Ratliff as a counter-ploy to Flem. He is a wheeler-dealer like Flem, but he is Nice, where Flem is downright Nasty. So in Book I, Ratliff tries to outsmart Flem in the matter of the goat farm and the notes signed in Flem's name he got from Mink, but ends up being outsmarted himself. He seems to take it all in good humor though (and even pays over some money to help feed Ike). Whereas, we have to think that had Flem gotten outsmarted, he would be seeking revenge. The maneuvering re the goat farm and the notes were again just beyond the range of my understanding of what was actually going on, but I got the gist.

Book II Eula

This for me was the most over-the-top section of the book. I found Eula on the one hand to be passive and apathetic, but on the other hand to be extremely strong-willed and opinionated, if that even makes sense. Nevertheless, to me, Faulkner thoroughly succeeded in creating such a contradictory character as Eula and making her believable. And Eula can definitely take care of herself. We don't get to see much, if any of her interaction with Flem. I have to wonder what she really felt about marrying him. I am not sure what the timeline for the succeeding books is, but I am interested to see if we are ever going to get more of an inside look at the relationship between Eula and Flem in either of the future books. (Or even of either Flem or Eula individually).

I really didn't care much for the descriptions of Eula's extreme sexuality (even back into the womb!). I kept picturing her as a pint-size Dolly Parton. And I thought the bit about the school teacher Labove went on too long. Probably my least favorite part of the book.

Book III The Long Summer

The novel really picked up for me with this section, and I began reading it compulsively. Ike falling in love with the cow is over-the-top, but I believed it. It was also interesting to get to know more about all the various Snopes relations. And although in Book II, I thought the side-story about Labove went on too long, here, I enjoyed reading Houston's side-story.

With the story of Houston's murder, we begin to see just how low these Snopes folks will stoop: once Mink learns he may have left $50 on Houston's body, he's going back after it, even if reexposing Houston's body may be what ultimately leads to his arrest. And if that's not enough, Mink takes even bigger chances because he doesn't want to share with Lump any part of the $50. And, am I correct in thinking that Mink ended up killing Houston over the $3 for pasturage he had to pay when he lost the suit regarding the cow? Mighty petty amount, even back then, to murder someone over.

There was a very Faulknerian quote I noted in this section:

"He fled to from the past but to escape the future. It took him twelve years to learn that you cannot escape either of them."

And the bit of humor in naming Eck's son "Wallstreet Panic."

Book IV The Peasants

This was my favorite part of the book. The whole long set piece about the Texan and the auction of the wild horses was so masterfully choreographed and written by Faulkner. Can't you just see the horses whizzing back and forth around the corral like a school of skittish fish? And Ratliff in his underwear jumping out the window when a wild horse appears in the doorway of his room at the boarding house?

I think it is in the section that we are introduced to the character of Henry (at least I don't remember him in any of the earlier sections). With just a few actions, his stealing his wife's money to buy a horse, his fear of getting cheated, his whining and sniveling, we get such a clear picture of his character.

And we get a little more insight into Flem's character. The Texan gives Henry's wife's $5 to Flem and tells her Flem will give her back her money tomorrow. For at least a few pages, we are left to wonder whether Flem will do the honorable thing, whether he will do at least one nice thing. We aren't left to wonder long, though.

Since I'm sure Ratliff and Bookwright were familiar with Henry's character, I'm wondering why they joined with him in the final scheme of the book to try to outwit Flem. But they did, and unfortunately it turned into another situation in which Flem outwitted Ratliff. Actually, I kind of was wondering as they began digging whether Flem had set them up. During the course of the book we've learned just enough about Flem that we should not have been surprised. You'd think Ratliff would have known better too. Greed blinds us all I guess, but Ratliff remains good natured.

And so although the book is complete, there's still a lot for us to find out. I'm looking forward to reading The Town.

I will say this is not my favorite Faulkner. There was a lot to like in many of its bits and pieces. But somehow, it didn't all come together for me. Hopefully that will come with the trilogy as a whole.

I'm wavering between 3 1/2 and 4 stars, but I'll be generous and give it

4 stars