The Incomprehensible Nobel

~ Clarissa

Once again, the Nobel Prize winner in literature is a writer whose name I never heard.

I honestly don’t believe it’s possible to have a life that revolves more around literature than mine. It’s not a brag, it’s a fact. I decided at the age of 5 that my job was going to be that of a reader and I followed through on that.

You’d think that with all the time I spend reading books, browsing books, searching for good authors, talking about books with others, there’d be a moment I’d at least hear somebody mention one of these authors. If they are, indeed, important authors, wouldn’t one of them have some impact on the authors I do read?

Who are all these writers?

They should have awarded it to Rushdie. He’s a really important world-famous author who has has an enormous impact. The committee clearly wants to give awards only to postmodernists. OK, Rushdie is a postmodernist. But at least everybody knows him. He’s taught at every college in existence.

But Rushdie doesn’t navel gaze, which these recent picks have all been about.

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Published by Clarissa

9 thoughts on “The Incomprehensible Nobel”

  1. Joyce didn’t get the Nobel prize. Proust didn’t either. Many great writers didn’t get it.
    If you run through the list of prizewinners you’ll notice that very few of those writers still ring a bell. They are mostly nobodies, and, in literary terms, were already nobodies when they were awarded the prize and will stay nobodies for eternity. It’s literary justice.

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  2. “a writer whose name I never heard”

    When I first saw the last name I was confused for a moment because I’d confused him with Karin Fossum, another Norwegian writer, but a woman who writes crime novels…. her, at least I’d heard of… him? nada….

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  3. Most Nobels are like that, even the science ones. There are precious few people who are widely recognized (Curie and Einstein come to mind).

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  4. I read a couple of Annie Ernaux’s novellas last year when she won. (I hadn’t heard of her either.) Both forgettable, “clinical” descriptions of traumatic experiences (abortion etc) that didn’t really deal with emotions or consequences. Your average Ruth Rendell thriller delivers way more.

    Seriously, Bob Dylan is the last Nobel laureate to make any impression on me, though his songs are clearly not “literature.”

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  5. All true. I’m obviously not as invested in contemporary literature as Clarissa is so my knowledge is very limited, but the last person to win the Nobel prize whose name I easily recognized was Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017. A really, really great writer (especially his masterpiece, “The Remains of the Day”), and his win was made even more delightful because Margaret Atwood, whose stuff is unreadable, didn’t win it (she was shortlisted, I believe). Before that, it was probably Alice Munroe (a bit of a stretch) and Vargas Llosa. But you’d have to go back almost twenty years to find some real heavy-hitters: Pinter, Pamuk, Lessing, Coetzee.. The choice is usually either overtly politicized or just incomprehensible (let’s see if there is an obscure Ethiopian chap who’s published something that we could award it to…).

    Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize was clearly some exquisite trolling from the Academy. Not only is he one of the worst singers ever to make it big ever, his, ahem, “lyrics” are just crap.

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  6. Ah, yes, awards and prizes, they are given out not to honour the recipients, as many mistakenly believe.

    They are given out to honour the biases and other dysfunctions of the award committees.

    My position on the Nobel Prize has not shifted: the last American who won it and truly deserved it was Sinclair Lewis.

    The Peanut Gallery: “But he was the first American to win it!”

    Quite so. 🙂

    Awards are nice around the time you’re winding down your career.

    Before then, cash is nicer, especially when it comes from people who actually know about your works.

    Hugo Awards are like this, for instance.

    I couldn’t figure out what to do with a Hugo Award …

    … except to agree to sell it to some less successful writer by “awarding” it to the writer on-stage as my “recognition” for his “service”.

    Cash is once again much nicer. 🙂

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  7. Ah, yes, awards and prizes, they are given out not to honour the recipients, as many mistakenly believe.

    They are given out to honour the biases and other dysfunctions of the award committees.

    My position on the Nobel Prize has not shifted: the last American who won it and truly deserved it was Sinclair Lewis.

    The Peanut Gallery: “But he was the first American to win it!”

    Quite so. 🙂

    Awards are nice around the time you’re winding down your career.

    Before then, cash is nicer, especially when it comes from people who actually know about your works.

    Hugo Awards are like this, for instance.

    I couldn’t figure out what to do with a Hugo Award …

    … except to agree to sell it to some less successful writer by “awarding” it to the writer on-stage as my “recognition” for his “service”.

    Cash is once again much nicer. 🙂

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  8. I hadn’t heard of him either, but am intrigued by this review of “Septology”…
    https://archive.ph/75v78
    Excerpt from that article:
    Whatever Asle’s minor encounters and fragmented memories mean on their own, these are ultimately secondary to his detailing an intense, unbroken feeling of connectedness to God. In this way, Asle is not like Gerontion and the rest: He wants “to comprehend the incomprehensible” about his life, about life itself and about God. Moreover, unlike, say, the equivalent desire and quest in Dante’s “Paradiso,” there’s no epic otherworldly journey leading up to a symphony of magisterial-metaphysical ecstasy. In fact, there’s really not much movement, outwardly or inwardly, at all. Asle is, more or less, already there — knowing and feeling known by God. This sense, in turn, irradiates his thoughts and feelings about the vocation and work of an artist, and likewise about what it means for a believer to respond to the felt presence of God in his life — even with a brashly uncultured, nonbelieving fisherman coming by to needle him for painting a weird picture over and over and going to church too much.

    The repetitiveness of the novel’s opening and closing conceits, the paucity of conventional events and the stream-of-consciousness narrating for hundreds of sentence-free pages are, together, finally less provocative than the intactness of the protagonist’s conviction, to paraphrase the opening of John’s Gospel, that the world is a dark place, that a divine light shines through this darkness, and that the darkness does not overcome it. Amid bouts of depression and doubt, Asle deeply believes this, and wants to convey it in his painting:

“It’s always, always the darkest part of the picture that shines the most, and I think that that might be because it’s in the hopelessness and despair, in the darkness, that God is closest to us, but how it happens, how the light I get clearly into the picture gets there, that I don’t know, and how it comes to be at all, that I don’t understand, but I do think that it’s nice to think that maybe it came about like this, that it came to be when an illegitimate child, as they put it, was born in a barn on a winter’s day, on Christmas in fact, and a star up above sent its strong clear light down to earth, a light from God, yes it’s a beautiful thought, I think, because the very word God says that God is real, I think, the mere fact that we have the word and idea God means that God is real, I think, whatever the truth of it is it’s at least a thought that it’s possible to think, it’s that too, even if it’s no more than that, but it’s definitely true that it’s just when things are darkest, blackest, that you see the light, that’s when this light can be seen, when the darkness is shining, yes, and it has always been like that in my life at least, when it’s darkest is when the light appears, when the darkness starts to shine, and maybe it’s the same way in the pictures I paint, anyway I hope it is.”

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