LITERATURE
10 Quotes by 10 Recent Nobel Laureates for Literature
Oh the people we can meet… through reading.
Over the years I’ve tried to familiarize myself with the important writers of this past century. There are all kinds of lists designed to aid us, though I tend to dismiss “bestseller” lists since much of that is simply marketing or stories pushed out because they’re trendy.
There are are many great writers who labor in a quieter place, removed from the excessive praise of pop culture enthusiasts, but whose work is significant, and painfully beautiful. I think here of Alan Paton who wrote Cry, the Beloved Country, a novel that only sold 3,000 copies in its first run if I remember correctly.
By reading through the Nobel Prize winners of the past century you will discover names both familiar and unfamiliar. What if you select two from each decade whom you’ve never and begin stretching reading horizons?
I remember when Bob Dylan was selected in 2016 there were numerous voices raised asking “why him and not this writer?” It’s strange to me now because I can’t recall voices raised the next year or the next or the most recent. (The next year was Ishiguro, and who could argue with that anyways.)
Here’s a list of the past 10 Nobel laureates with a notation regarding their significance, and quote from their work. What is it that made the Nobel selection committee take note of each of these writers? I share this list with the hope that you’ll find a few connections, discover a new writer or two with whom you were previously unfamiliar.
2019 — Peter Handke
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2019 was awarded to Peter Handke “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”
“Tense, unnerved, and close to madness before writing — and when I read what I’ve written it looks so calm.” — The Weight of the World
2018 — Olga Tokarczuk
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 was awarded to Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
— Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
2017 — Kazuo Ishiguro
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
“I have a sense of having just left without saying goodbye, and of this whole other world just kind of fading away. … I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.” — Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro
2016 — Bob Dylan
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
“Like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?” So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.”
— Nobel speech
2015 —Svetlana Alexievich
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone — the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.” — Voices from Chernobyl
2014 — Patrick Modiano
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 was awarded to Patrick Modiano “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”
“When you are young , you neglect certain details that might become precious later.” — After the Circus
2013 — Alice Munro
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 was awarded to Alice Munro “master of the contemporary short story.”
“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind… When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.” — Too Much Happiness
2012 — Mo Yan
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 was awarded to Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”
“Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?”
— Red Sorghum, A Novel of China
2011 — Tomas Tranströmer
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 was awarded to Tomas Tranströmer “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”
“We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is me. The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones.” — For the Living and the Dead
2010 — Mario Vargas Llosa
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
“Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form — writing and structure — elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.”
— from the Nobel Lecture
