Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Hardboiled Nobel?

From: Patrick King ( abrasax93@yahoo.com)
Date: 11 Oct 2007


It's important to remember that the Nobel Prize for Literature is also aimed at body's of work that promote world peace. Hemingway campaigned for it but did not get it for years because his work promoted war and hunting, at least from the perspective of the judges. It was The Old Man and the Sea that actually won the Prize for Papa and in their decision, the judges remarked about this. I doubt any real genre writer can hope to win the Nobel Prize. If you write about murder, you'd need to do it from a very anylitical view point. I suspect Dostoyevski could have won it with Crime and Punishment and The Brothers, but Cain and Thompson, probably not. I mean, obviously they did not while Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner & O'Neil did. Can't help thinking the Committee really missed Thomas Wolfe and Vladimir Nabokov.
  Patrick King
--- jacquesdebierue < jacquesdebierue@yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Juri Nummelin"
> <juri.nummelin@...> wrote:
> >
> > I notice the Nobel prize went to Doris Lessing.
> Who do you think is the
> > Nobel prize winner who comes closest to
> hardboiled? Faulkner, perhaps.
> >
> Faulkner more than Hemingway, I would say. The
> latter shows a
> sentimental side, whereas Faulkner is tough as
> nails. Of the rumored
> candidates this year, Cormac McCarthy would be 100%
> hardboiled, but he
> didn't win. Another candidate, Australian poet Les
> Murray, would also
> fit the bill, I think. The problem is that novelists
> who write in the
> "genres" are not usually considered, even though
> they take up a large
> majority of the readership. For example, it's a
> shame that Dick or
> Bradbury didn't win the Nobel. No objective reason
> could be given for
> such ommissions. If Chandler (our best guy,
> probably) had lived
> longer... he still wouldn't have been considered.
>
> The idea that, say, an Elmore Leonard or James
> Ellroy novel is "less
> serious" than a Lessing or a Roth or an Updike novel
> strikes me as
> ludicrous. What's not serious about them?
>
> Best,
>
> mrt
>
>

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