The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014
nobelprize.org
nobelprize.org
I think that your comment corroborates the Nobel committee's decision: "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation"
Despite what you say about a lacking plot, which you may have exaggerated, you still call him a "fantastic author." Which is either irony or there's something to that.
It's not necessary for a book to have a great plot, to be a great book. I haven't read any of this guy's work, but Murakami has a similar "thing" going on... the plots in his books are often fairly dull and leave a lot of plot-lines unresolved... but yet the books are very enjoyable and thought provoking. It's almost like it's the atmosphere that matters, not the plot itself. Perhaps this author writes something similar?
I would love to check out this author's work now.
Several of his novels do feature a man with a cat, and several novels feature distant women. But if I remember correctly, the only other married narrator is the protagonist in South of the Border, West of the Sun, and there is a character in 1Q84 who is married and divorced.
To say that the plots of any of his books have exactly the same plot would be a huge mischaracterization, though. The only two books that are even vaguely similar are Wind-Up and the earlier Dance Dance Dance (the last part of a quadrilogy about the "Sheep Man"); the latter feels a lot like a preliminary sketch for the vastly superior Wind-Up, in particular the fascination about hotel rooms and shared dreams. But the plots are completely different.
I recommend trying Wind-Up again. The first ~100 pages are difficult to get through at times (the narrator is infuriatingly apathetic), but one you get past that, it's an incredible page turner. I liked Kafka a lot, but Wind-Up is his masterpiece.
You started out, perhaps, with other goals, but you've become tied up in explaining how and why everything happens.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1964/dec/17/sartre-...
I particularly like his first reason:
"A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner."
...especially after Pres. Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for simply not being G.W. Bush.
Disclosure: I'm an intern at Godine.
He won the Prix Goncourt 36 years ago. He's not that recent.
That is not to say that whoever got it this year does not deserve it. But still.
Nobel's choice of emphasis on idealism in his criteria for the Nobel Prize in Literature has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word idealisk translates as either "idealistic" or "ideal".[2] In the early twentieth century, the Nobel Committee interpreted the intent of the will strictly. For this reason, they did not award certain world-renowned authors of the time such as James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen, and Henry James. More recently, the wording has been more liberally interpreted. Thus, the prize is now awarded both for lasting literary merit and for evidence of consistent idealism on some significant level. In recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale. Hence the award is now arguably more political.
This is why a lot of authors, who are otherwise considered world-class, don't win.
That, and the fact that there are, of course, lots and lots and lots of breathtakingly great writers out there. I've had the feeling over the past couple of years that the Nobel for literature was often given to authors the commitee felt deserved more attention.
The Nobel committee is becoming a standing joke. Their general incompetence and overt political bias is even evident in the physics category these days. (Blue LEDs? Really?)
Secondly: There are different committees for each category. The Peace prize (which I agree it's a joke) is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel committee.
I strongly disagree with your claim that the other prizes, specifically physics and chemistry, are either incompetent or obviously biased.
And if there were a Nobel Prize in Engineering, I'd be on board with this.
seriously, what discovery do you have in mind?
I don't know. It's not my job to keep up with physics research, it's the Nobel committee's.