Nobel Prize time! I don’t know about you, but nothing gets my literary list juices flowing quite like the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sure, the National Book award is usually the most literary, the Pulitzer creates the most buzz, and the Booker opens our eyes to World literature, but it’s the Nobel that warms my coffee cup. It’s the Nobel that often surprises, but never disappoints. This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is the Peruvian juggernaut of political and social satire, Mario Vargas LLosa.
So come on in, pick up a title or two by Vargas Llosa. Since I’ve never read him, we’ll discover him together. But while your working through Vargas Llosa, why don’t you check out these other Nobel Laureates that are close to my heart:
J.M. Coetzee: Winner of the 2003 Nobel, Coetzee is the ultra controversial South African writer whose sparse writing and unlikeable characters have helped him become equally love and loathed amongst the literary establishment. Count me a fan. I haven’t read anything by him that wasn’t incredibly smart, and although “Disgrace” led to one of the most remarkable discussions my book group, The Voyage Out Book Group, has ever had, Coetzee’s newest book Summertime, which bubbles with racism and sexual deviance while remaining funny and endearing, would be the book I would recommend highest.
Kenzaburo Oe: No writer has entered my daily life more than Oe. His books are filled with lessons about broken lives and give us insight into unexpected moments of grace. Some of my deepest held beliefs have come from, or been honed by Oe. He won the Nobel in 1993, and if it wasn’t for his name on the list of recipients, I would never have heard of him. So, thank you Nobel committee. You should read everything Oe’s written, but a great place to start is A Personal Matter, there has never been a more aptly titled book.
William Faulkner: This is an easy one, right? There are great authors, and there are truly gifted artists who change the world with their words, and then there’s the William Faulkners and Fyodor Dostoevskys of the world. Writers like Faulkner, who was relatively unknown until he won the prize in 1949, belong to some different place that’s completely unknowable, yet warmly comfortable. Most people have read some Faulkner, they’ve been dragged through the southern mud in As I Lay Dying or waded through the blood in Light in August, if you haven’t, read those, please. But to those of us who’ve read the ordained ‘major works’, let’s get to the rest. The Hamlet is the first book in the ‘Snopes Trilogy’, and what you’ll notice first is how funny it is. Seriously, this is early Woody Allen slapstick comedy of the first order. You’ll love it.
–Brian Contine
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