pamelad reads Nobel laureates

52 laureates, 53 if I include Bob Dylan.
117 books, probably more because I've only recorded absolute certainties from the seventies and eighties.

Plans for 2023

The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

2001 -

2001: V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr Biswas
A Bend in the River
India: A Million Mutinies Now
The Enigma of Arrival

2002: Imre Kertész
The Pathseeker

2003: J. M. Coetzee
Disgrace

2004: Elfriede Jelinek
2005: Harold Pinter

2006: Orhan Pamuk
My Name Is Red

2007: Doris Lessing
The Grass Is Singing
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
In Pursuit of the English
The Golden Notebook

2008: J. M. G. Le Clézio

2009: Herta Müller
The Appointment

2010: Mario Vargas Llosa
The Feast of the Goat
Death in the Andes
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
The Bad Girl

2011: Tomas Tranströmer
2012: Mo Yan
2013: Alice Munro
2014: Patrick Modiano

2015: Svetlana Alexievich
Voices from Chernobyl
Second-hand Time
The Unwomanly Face of War

2016: Bob Dylan

2017: Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day
An Artist of the Floating World
Never Let Me Go
The Unconsoled
A Pale View of the Hills

2018: Olga Tokarczuk
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

2019: Peter Handke
2020: Louise Glück

2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah
By the Sea

2022: Annie Ernaux
The Years
Happening

2023: Jon Fosse

2024: Han Kang
The Vegetarian

1981 - 2000

1981: Elias Canetti

1982: Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Love in the Time of the Cholera
Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Of Love and Other Demons

1983: William Golding
Lord of the Flies

1984: Jaroslav Seifert
1985: Claude Simon
1986: Wole Soyinka
1987: Joseph Brodsky

1988: Naguib Mahfouz
Palace Walk
Palace of Desire
Sugar Street
Midaq Alley

1989: Camilo José Cela
1990: Octavio Paz

1991: Nadine Gordimer
July's People
Burger's Daughter

1992: Derek Walcott
1993: Toni Morrison
1994: Kenzaburo Oë
1995: Seamus Heaney
1996: Wislawa Szymborska
1997: Dario Fo
1998: José Saramago
Blindness

1999: Günter Grass
2000: Gao Xingjian

1961 - 1980

1961: Ivo Andrić
The Bridge on the Drina
Bosnian Chronicle

1962: John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men
Cannery Row

1963: Giorgos Seferis

1964: Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea

1965: Mikhail Sholokhov
1966: Nelly Sachs
1966: Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1967: Miguel Angel Asturias

1968: Yasunari Kawabata
Thousand Cranes
The Sound of the Mountain
Snow Country

1969: Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot

1970: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The First Circle
The Gulag Archipelago
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

1971: Pablo Neruda

1972: Heinrich Böll
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
Group Portrait with Lady
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

1973: Patrick White
A Fringe of Leaves
The Twyborn Affair
The Aunt's Story
Voss
The Tree of Man

1974: Eyvind Johnson
1974: Harry Martinson
1975: Eugenio Montale

1976: Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Augie March
Dangling Man

1977: Vicente Aleixandre

1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Family Moskat

1979: Odysseus Elytis
1980: Czeslaw Milosz

1941 - 1960

1941: -
1942: -
1943: -
1944: Johannes V. Jensen
1945: Gabriela Mistral
1946: Hermann Hesse

1947: André Gide
Strait Is the Gate

1948: Thomas Stearns Eliot
The Waste Land

1949: William Faulkner
Light in August

1950: Bertrand Russell
1951: Pär Lagerkvist
1952: François Mauriac
1953: Winston Churchill

1954: Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms
For Whom the Bell Tolls

1955: Halldór Laxness
Independent People
The Fish Can Sing

1956: Juan Ramón Jiménez

1957: Albert Camus
The Plague
The Outsider
The Fall
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

1958: Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago

1959: Salvatore Quasimodo
1960: Saint-John Perse

1921 - 1940

1921: Anatole France
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

1922: Jacinto Benavente
1923: William Butler Yeats
1924: Wladyslaw Reymont
1925: George Bernard Shaw

1926: Grazia Deledda
Cosima

1927: Henri Bergson
1928: Sigrid Undset

1929: Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks
The Magic Mountain
Confessions of Felix Krull
Death in Venice

1930: Sinclair Lewis
Babbitt
Main Street
Free Air

1931: Erik Axel Karlfeldt

1932: John Galsworthy
The Forsyte Saga

1933: Ivan Bunin
1934: Luigi Pirandello
1935: -
1936: Eugene O’Neill
1937: Roger Martin du Gard

1938: Pearl Buck
The Good Earth

1939: Frans Eemil Sillanpää
1940:

1901 - 1920

1901: Sully Prudhomme
1902: Theodor Mommsen
1903: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
1904: Frédéric Mistral
1904: José Echegaray
1905: Henryk Sienkiewicz
1906: Giosuè Carducci

1907: Rudyard Kipling
Kim

1908: Rudolf Eucken

1909: Selma Lagerlöf
The Saga of Gosta Berling

1910: Paul Heyse
1911: Maurice Maeterlinck
1912: Gerhart Hauptmann
1913: Rabindranath Tagore
1914: -
1915: Romain Rolland
1916: Verner von Heidenstam
1917: Henrik Pontoppidan
1917: Karl Gjellerup
1918: -
1919: Carl Spitteler

1920: Knut Hamsun
Hunger

8

9

10

Nice list, Pam. It's interesting to see where we overlap and get suggestions for authors I haven't tackled yet.

>11 labfs39: Patriotism compels me to recommend Patrick White!

You've read multiple books from some of my unread laureates, so they must be favourites. A good guide.

>12 pamelad: Yes, I must get to White. Where would you recommend I begin with him?

It's a long time since I've read it, but perhaps The Tree of Man because I remember the characters as people rather than symbols, unlike Voss, which I read much more recently. I also enjoyed A Fringe of Leaves, which is based on the story of Eliza Fraser who was shipwrecked. She was found by Aboriginal people and lived with them until she was found by an escaped convict who helped her return to white society. Larissa Behrendt, an Indigenous writer and lawyer, has written Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling, which looks at the same story.

My reviews of A Fringe of Leaves, Voss and Finding Eliza are on their book pages.

>14 pamelad: Thank you. Several of these look interesting. I read about Patrick White on Wikipedia. Interesting life, after a rather rocky childhood.

Blindness by Jose Saramago.

The first man to go blind is stopped in his car at the traffic lights, the cars behind him beeping impatiently. A taxi driver, who appears to be a Good Samaritan, takes the blind man home and, soon after, loses his sight as well. As blindness spreads rapidly through the population, the authorities take steps to control the epidemic, beginning with the forcible incarceration of the blind and their contacts. They're locked in a disused mental asylum, left to their own devices, and guarded by armed soldiers who are so fearful that they shoot on sight.

The central characters, who acquired their blindness from the first man, share the same ward. They are his wife, the taxi driver who escorted him home, the ophthalmologist who treated him and the people who were in the ophthalmologist's waiting room - an old man with an eye patch, a young woman who sleeps with men in a semi-professional way, and a small boy with a squint. The doctor's wife faked her blindness so that she could accompany her husband, so she looks after the group and is a witness to the terrors that ensue as blindness spreads though the population and society descends into chaos.

A worthwhile, thought-provoking read, which I recommend highly.

It's the fiftieth anniversary of Patrick White's Nobel Prize.

Contemplating a re-read of The Tree of Man.

>17 pamelad: I have yet to read Patrick White. Is The Tree of Man your favorite?

>18 labfs39: It's many years since I read it, but I remember liking it.

>17 pamelad: I should re-read some White as well. I think The tree of man would be a good way in for someone who hasn’t read him at all. Or Voss, perhaps.

The Tree of Man by Patrick White

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Patrick White's Nobel Prize, so I have re-read The Tree of Man which I first read in the seventies when White, until then barely known in his own country, came to our awareness.

At beginning of the 20th Century Stan Parker's father leaves him a remote bush block. Stan clears the trees by hand and builds his own house, then marries a young woman from the nearest town. Amy is an orphan, overworked and underfed by her aunt and uncle. She and Stan work hard to establish their small farm and look toward the future. At first theirs is the only house in the area, but others move in and establish small farms. By the end of the book the ramshackle farms are gone, replaced by neat brick houses on suburban blocks, and the once-remote, nameless place is an outer-suburb of Sydney. We see Stan and Amy grow together, then apart, and finally settle together into an undemanding affection. Once they tried to know one another, but they realised they never could. White depicts Amy as growing increasingly coarse and superficial as Stan becomes more spiritual. She resents his separateness.

I very much enjoyed the first section of the book, where the Parkers faced the future with optimism. As their lives narrowed, gloom and misery descended. Their two children, Ray and Thelma, were a great disappointment and both Stan and Amy were oddly detached parents, giving me the impression that the children were more vehicles for carrying White's philosophy than actual people. Both Ray and Amy moved to the city where their sad and pointless lives contrasted with their parents' hard work and simplicity.

White's idiosyncratic prose brings the bush to life, and his descriptions of a flood and a bushfire are just as real. The fifty or so years and nearly 500 pages of The Tree of Man are well worth the effort.

I read Voss in 2021 and noticed some similarities: the contrast between the corruption of the city and the spirituality of the country; the almost-biblical language; the man who searches for enlightenment; the venal characters on whom White focuses his loathing. That's the hardest thing about reading Patrick White: so many people disgust him.

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The first part of Snow Country was published in 1935, but Kawabata continued to add and revise, with the final version being published in 1948. The introduction by the translator, Edward Seidensticker, is informative and well worth reading.

Shimamura is a married man from Tokyo, travelling to a hot spring in the snow country to rekindle a romance with a young geisha, Komako. He is a wealthy dilettante, a useless and superficial man. She is generous and passionate, with an aura of innocence despite her profession, but a hot springs geisha is little better than a prostitute and she is already of the road to decay. She has fallen in love with Shimamura, despite knowing that the love of a geisha for a client is futile. A theme of decay runs through the book, with the seedy surroundings of the hot springs and the poverty of the nearby villages contrasting with the majesty of the mountains. The lives of the geisha are almost feudal, a remnant of traditional Japan that cannot survive.

Kawabata's descriptions are poetic and cinematic, starting with Shimamura's night train journey into the snow country. He is fascinated by a young woman whose face is a reflection in the window, through which Shimamura watches the landscape move by. Initially I was impatient with what I saw as digressions that interrupted the narrative, but realised that you can't read quickly as though this is a straightforward story, and have to stop and picture the scenes that unfold.

Added a brief review of Blindness to >16 pamelad:.

Nice review. Snow Country is on my TBR pile.

>22 pamelad: I really enjoyed Snow Country when I read it a couple of years ago. The language is beautiful.

It's been a long time between laureates.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Yeong-hye stops eating meat because her dreams are drenched in blood. Her violent father and her husband, Mr Cheung who relates the first section of this three-part story, try to force her to do what they want but Yeong-kye would rather die than eat meat.

In the second section Yeon-hye is seen through the eyes of her brother-in-law, a video artist who has been obsessed with her ever since he was told that she has a birth mark, a Mongolian mark that is often found on children but rarely on adults.

In-hye, the older sister of Yeon-hye, narrates the third and last section and in trying to see her sister's point of view, realises how little autonomy she herself has.

Yeon-hye is seen only from the perspective of others, except for her dreams, which intersperse Mr Cheung's narrative. The three male chracters are all awful, and the two women have little control over their lives. The book is steeped in misery and gloom, but since it's short the bleakness is manageable. The Vegetarian is fascinating and strange.

I haven't read any laureates lately either, and I still need to read something by Kang. Not sure I want to start 2025 off with this one though!

>27 labfs39: No, save it for when a bit more gloom won't matter!