2010 Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa | Hacker News Reader

2010 Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa

nobelprize.org

36 pointsrazin26 comments

I like science fiction but it's felt for a while that I've read everything good. Recently, I've found myself reading a lot of historical fiction (anti-science fiction?). The two genres are quite similar in that they both examine how humans behave in weird or unfamiliar settings. For example, Russia in Tolstoy's time feels more different to me than an awful lot of science fiction.

Vargas Llosa's "The War of the End of the World" is set in the wilds of 19th century Brazil, and it's brilliant. It's one of my favourite novels. I found "The Time of the Hero" fascinating but I can't remember if I enjoyed it. It's about hazing rituals in Peruvian military school. I tried to read "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," which is set in more modern times, but I didn't get very far.

try "Pantaleon and the visitadoras", it is very light and funny

The Nobel Prize in Literature is odd. Looking through the list of every prize they've ever given out,

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2010/10/07/List-of-Nobel...

I see a lot of names whom time has failed to vindicate.

Yep. How about the award in 1974 to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson? Maybe it's easier to win when you're both on the panel that picks the winner?

> whom time has failed to vindicate.

Yet.

I always thought that the Nobel prize winners are always very abstract. There are better awards to look at for examples of books you actually want to read...

Try reading "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn - an extraordinarily straightforward wee book.

The will explicitly says:

"one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency"

Think of it as the more technical academy awards. A movie that gets the Oscar for best sound editing might not be a great movie or a box-office hit, but still deserve the award.

But even if the Oscar for Best Sound Editing goes to a terrible and unpopular movie which happens to have good sound editing (e.g. Pearl Harbor, 2001) then there's still a lot that can be learned about sound editing from that movie. You can, for instance, hire the sound editor from Pearl Harbor to do the sound editing on a good film.

I'm not sure what the authors of mainstream fiction can learn from Harold Pinter, though.

> I see a lot of names whom time has failed to vindicate.

And I don't see : Virginia Wolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Fernando Pessoa, ...

He truly deserves it. I don't like his personality but it always seemed unfair that Garcia-Marquez had it while Vargas Llosa didn't.

I voted for Pablo Coelho.

Is it Pablo or Paulo Coelho? Or does Pablo == Paulo assert True in Portuguese? Amazing writer, I was blown away by The Alchemist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemist_(novel)

Pablo => Spanish. Paulo => Portuguese.

Spanish speakers tend to spanify Portuguese words, for convenience and for the fun of watching Portuguese speakers get annoyed :P

Sao Paulo => San Pablo

With the English version being Paul and St.Paul.

I never heard a Spaniard referring to São Paulo as San Pablo.

Spaniards are less than 10% of the Spanish speaking population.

Maybe so, but they're the ones who speak proper Spanish, just like only the English (specifically the Queen) speak proper English.

I don't know if you are being serious, but the spanish language is defined by the R.A.E, and it is influenced by other national academies, so it is more or less supposed to be country-neutral. If, say, peruvians speak closer to R.A.E's spanish than spaniards, then they are the ones speaking proper spanish. It is also worth noting that for many spaniards the language we call "spanish" is not their first language.

I actually didn't know that, so thanks.

It's interesting the way English gets along just fine without an official body making pronouncements about what is and isn't correct.

It doesn't. English does not get along just fine.

Say 'cucumber'. The sound of the first syllable is very different from the second, even though both are written the same.

Say 'stake' and 'steak'. Different graphs for the same phonemes.

Say 'E as in elephant'. Two different sounds for 'e'.

etc.

Present day English is so bad that written language is divorced from spoken language, but it is not bad enough to unite all speakers behind a spelling reform.

Even the US has more Spanish-speaking people than Spain.

However, Spain is still very influential in the development of the language. The "Real Academia de La Lengua" dictates the rules, and there's a network of "Instituto Cervantes" throughout the world. There's even one in Chicago, where I live now.

I'm from Spain. We do refer to São Paulo as San Pablo. I actually never heard a fellow Spaniard say São Paulo.

I'm from Spain also and have never ever heard "San Pablo" around here.

I enjoyed some of his books, but pop fiction is unlikely to win that award any time soon. :) And no, Paulo != Pablo, but it's an axiom that if a Brazilian becomes popular enough in the Spanish-speaking part of Latin America, he or she will eventually acquire a hispanicized nickname.

Just for the sake of having some balance in the opinions here (I'm not really willing to go into any flame war) I'd like to state that in my opinion Paulo Coehlo is a bad writer, by which I mean that a) he has a poor style of writing, b) his books don't provide any serious value for the reader.

To end on a positive note I recommend anyone to read "Master & Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov, a masterpiece that for some reasons isn't as popular as it should be (in the western world at least).

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