The Nobel Prize in Literature

After a year's hiatus the Nobel Prizes in Literature for 2018 and 2019 have just been announced: Olga Tokarczuk for 2018, and Peter Handke for 2019.

ooh, thanks!

>2 karenb: You're welcome! These are two very solid and worthy laureates, and I think it's fair to say that the judges have reestablished the credibility of the most prestigious award in literature. I own three of Tokarczuk's books, House of Day, House of Night; Flights, the winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize; and her latest translated novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker International Prize and is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for Translated Literature; I'll read it soon. I've read the only book I own by Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, so I'll be on the lookout for more of his works.

The winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature is the American poet Louise Glück, “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Louise Glück was born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Apart from her writing she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. She made her debut in 1968 with ‘Firstborn’, and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. She has received several prestigious awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize (1993) and the National Book Award (2014).

Louise Glück has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry. All are characterized by a striving for clarity. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her. In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self. But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works. The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice – the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed – are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid.

With collections like ‘The Triumph of Achilles’ (1985) and ‘Ararat’ (1990) Glück found a growing audience in USA and abroad. In ‘Ararat’ three characteristics unite to subsequently recur in her writing: the topic of family life; austere intelligence; and a refined sense of composition that marks the book as a whole. Glück has also pointed out that in these poems she realized how to employ ordinary diction in her poetry. The deceptively natural tone is striking. We encounter almost brutally straightforward images of painful family relations. It is candid and uncompromising, with no trace of poetic ornament.

It reveals much about her own poetry when in her essays Glück cites the urgent tone in Eliot, the art of inward listening in Keats or the voluntary silence in George Oppen. But in her own severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith she resembles more than any other poet, Emily Dickinson.

Louise Glück is not only engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss. In one of her most lauded collections, ‘The Wild Iris’ (1992), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, she describes the miraculous return of life after winter in the poem ‘Snowdrops’:

“I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring –
afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.”

It should also be added that the decisive moment of change is often marked by humour and biting wit. The collection ‘Vita Nova’ (1999) concludes with the lines: “I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. / Then I moved to Cambridge.” The title alludes to Dante’s classic ‘La Vita Nuova’, celebrating the new life in the guise of his muse Beatrice. Celebrated in Glück is rather the loss of a love that has disintegrated.

‘Averno’ (2006) is a masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death. The title comes from the crater west of Naples that was regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Another spectacular achievement is her latest collection, ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’ (2014), for which Glück received the National Book Award. The reader is again struck by the presence of voice and Glück approaches the motif of death with remarkable grace and lightness. She writes oneiric, narrative poetry recalling memories and travels, only to hesitate and pause for new insights. The world is disenthralled, only to become magically present once again.

Okay--I've read her poetry a few times but it's been a while. I remember liking it.

I haven't read anything by Glück, and I've only barely heard of her. I just purchased the Kindle edition of Poems: 1962-2012, so that I can become more familiar with her work. At first glance she certainly seems like a worthy choice, although I was hoping that 2020 would be the year that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o would finally win the prize.

I've read Louise Gluck's collected poems, most of them at least twice, and can recommend to my fellow poetry readers.

#6---to be honest kidzdoc with everything else going on this kind of snuck up on me. Most years I would have started wondering about this a month or so ago. I agree with you on Ngugi--he's a terrific writer and certainly among those who I think would deserve it.

>6 kidzdoc: and >8 lriley: I've also been wishing for this! Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is not getting any younger...
Meanwhile, I've downloaded and started Faithful and Virtuous Night. It's a wonderful discovery (I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Louise Glück before 1 PM today). I hadn't expected to be moved by it so much. It really speaks to me...

I looked and I actually have a review of her First four books of poems that goes back to 2006. It's an almost embarrassing bad effort on my part though.

Congratulations to the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is high on my list of favorite African writers, and my favorite novels by him are By the Sea, Paradise, Desertion, and Admiring Silence.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/summary/

I hadn’t heard of Gurnah but I ordered a book from the book depository in England. His two most noteworthy books mentioned were in very short supply when I looked on Abebooks and the cheapest was about $60 so the publishers need to get to work and get copies out at a reasonable price.

>12 lriley: I'll admit to being moderately surprised that you haven't heard of Gurnah, as you're one of the most widely read LTers I've met. I'm not sure that any of his books have been published in the US, so that probably explains why you're not familiar with him. I was going to recommend visiting The Book Depository to purchase one or more of his books, but there has clearly been a run on them there; I ordered a copy of Afterlives, his latest novel, for $12.37 on Thursday morning, just after Gurnah was announced as this year's Nobel Prize laureate, but I just saw that my order was cancelled.

Several of his most recent novels are available in electronic format; I purchased Dottie and Pilgrims Way for my Kindle on Thursday, and I bought Admiring Silence a year or two ago.

#13–I look at literature as a a big vast ocean kidzdoc. It’s really impossible to cover everyone and everything. I do have holes. I just do the best I can. I’ve slowed down in the last few years too.

The other thing going on though is I’ve had some major health issues in the last year and have been in the hospital twice—in January for a fractured L-5 vertebra and the last time in April/May for an autologous stem cell bone marrow transplant. I’m doing much better now but I’ve still a ways to go to get back to normal.

>14 lriley: That's a great point, and I completely agree with you. Of the previous 10 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature before Gurnah I had only read books by one of them, Kazuo Ishiguro, even though I think I'm better read than all but a small minority of American readers.

I'm very sorry to read about your recent health problems; it's certainly understandable that your reading has slowed down. My reading has dropped off drastically in the past five years or so, but for different reasons, mainly my elderly parents' failing health and major health crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a general inability to concentrate on reading for pleasure during the Trump presidency. I'm glad that you're doing better, and I hope that 2022 is a much better year for you.

>14 lriley: Several of his most recent novels are available in electronic format;

Yes, and my local library system immediately acquired them all. Hooray!

#15–there’s been a lot of awful in these past several years between 45 and Covid. I’ve been keeping out of situations that might be harmful which means pretty much every kind of public place. I’m okay but it is more than just annoying that so many won’t get vaccinated. I was vaccinated in February/March and on the advisement of my transplant doctor got revaccinated in August and got another dose last week. So I’ve had 5 shots of Pfizer. In some respects getting an autologous stem cell transplant is like being reborn again. A nurse the day after with a Caribbean or Jamaican accent told me ‘you should know that you have brand new baby stem cells just like the first day of your life’. Right now I have some immunity to Covid and I’ve gotten a flu shot. The rest of my vaccinations I’ll start getting in two weeks on the 28th. The thing also is there are a lot of positives I take out of what’s happened—the love and support of family and friends, the hard work of doctors, nurses and staff at the local cancer clinic and the cancer hospital in Rochester NY. I have no bad things to say about anyone and I very much appreciate what they’ve done for me. I’m in a clinical trial now by the way.

But to Nobel’s I think it’s great when a more obscure writer is the pick from some unexpected country is the pick. It expands horizons.

#16–I’ve always been a physical book person. When it comes to technical advances I’ve always been way behind most people anyway.

>17 lriley: I completely agree; the past five years have been an unending nightmare in this country, and the state of affairs here has cemented my decision to retire abroad, probably to Portugal, when I'm ready to hang up my stethoscope later this decade. (I'll probably work until I turn 66 in March 2027.) I'm glad that you're receiving excellent care in one of the top hospitals in the US, and that you are improving.

I work as a pediatric hospitalist in one of the larger hospital systems in the country, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, which is affiliated with Emory University, where I completed my pediatric residency after I graduated from Pitt's medical school nearly a quarter of a century ago. We continue to see plenty of patients with acute COVID-19, usually unvaccinated teenagers with pneumonia who are old enough to get the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine, which is approved for use for anyone ≥12 years of age, and younger patients with MIS-C, multisystem inflammatory syndrome of childhood, which follows a mild or asymptomatic case of COVID-19 acquired 2-4 weeks previously and can be a life threatening illness, even worse than COVID-19 in most children. My partners and I have routinely had to deal with abusive and hostile parents who are often anti-vaxxers, science deniers and conspiracy theorists who think that the vaccines "kill people", as one deluded mother told me, and trust remdesivir, the monoclonal anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody cocktails, and other aggressive treatments far more than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, even though mRNA vaccine technology has been studied and perfected over several decades, not just the past year. Before the pandemic I firmly believed that the vast majority of parents were intelligent and had the best interests of their children, families and themselves at heart. Unfortunately that is no longer the case for a significant minority of parents and adult patients, and the decades long trust many of my fellow physicians had for essentially all of their patients has been fractured, if not irrevocably broken.

Back to the Nobel Prize, and Dr Gurnah: I listened to a short interview of him on the NPR broadcast Here and Now on the drive back home from the hospital about an hour and a half ago; here's a link to it:

Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah uses fiction as a bridge to the realities of colonialism, refugees

I agree that it's great that a highly talented but largely obscure author like Dr Gurnah was chosen as this year's Nobel Prize laureate, especially since his books are so timely and relevant to what is taking place in the US, UK and other Western countries, in addition to being very well written. I'm sure that it won't be long before his novels are back in print, given the current high demand for them.

>18 lriley: I do love my Kindle, but it took me several months, if not years, to jump on the e-reader bandwagon, as I'm not an early adopter of cutting edge technology.

>19 kidzdoc: in Chemung County where I live (approx. 85,000 people) just over 48% of the population are vaccinated. Right now in our county 46 people are hospitalized. Neighboring Steuben where my unvaccinated second sister lives is a little less than that. The rural Northern Tier Pa. counties that border us are in their 30’s. People from there like to come here to do their shopping. It’s a conservative region around here and for me the unvaccinated are dangerous to be around. The solution to ending all this is in front of them and they won’t take it.

….and kids more often than not are going to adapt the ideologies of their parents. Some good things about NYS—kids are required to wear masks in school, our new Gov. Hochul has weeded out the unvaccinated nurses, doctors and staff in our hospitals. In some parts of NY to walk into a restaurant, a movie theatre, an arena or stadium you need to show proof of vaccination.

Back in 2020 when this started it should have been a national response but Donald abdicating his duty as leader of the country decided to drop the ball on all the governors so that we have 50 different variations of how to tackle this problem and really what Florida and Texas do keeps this pandemic going.

What would be best is a central medical authority with real power that could set policy and response when catastrophes like this come along. If we had a national health care system that covered everyone that central authority would be easier to realize.

Kind of as a last note. I’ve watched a lot of video of local and national tv teams in Covid wards. A lot of it is very graphic. A lot of people I don’t think realize what being intubated means or what an awful way Covid is to die or for the survivors what a long road they’re going to have of rehabilitation.

I will check out the Gurnah interview. Speaking of Portugal right now I’m reading the newly translated Lobo Antunes Warning to the Crocodiles.

>19 kidzdoc: I heard the NPR interview. He was so sweet and humble when someone called with the news he didn’t believe it and thought it was a joke.

Congratulations to the French author Annie Ernaux, one of my favorite writers, who is this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory". I've read seven of her books so far, with my favorites being A Woman's Story and A Man's Place. I wrote an article about her for Belletrista, the former online literary magazine that celebrates women writers from around the world, which you can read here:

Trio: Three by Annie Ernaux