Posts in category Nobel literature
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, Kenz...
I finished this book last February, but it was so disturbing I couldn’t bring myself to write about it at the time. This is a collection of four short stories/novellas by Kenzaburō Ōe, who got the Nobel Prize in literature in 1994. The stories are “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away,” “Prize Stock,” “Tea [...]
View with a Grain of Sand, Wisława Sz...
I first encountered Wisława Szymborska’s poetry on JoAnne Growney’s mathematical poetry blog. That poem, “A Contribution to Statistics,” hit me hard.
Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
— fifty-two,
doubting every step
— nearly all the rest,
glad to lend a hand
if it doesn’t take [...]
The Garlic Ballads, Mo Yan
I finished The Garlic Ballads a few months ago as part of my Nobel literature project, but it’s been hard for me to write about it because it was so draining. The book is dark, full of random violence, and bleak. If The Good Earth says that it was hard being a Chinese peasant in the early 20th century, The Garlic Ballads says it was har [...]
The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
I remember reading The Good Earth in middle school or so, but all I remember is that it was a very hard book for me. I think I read all the words, but I didn’t really get any meaning from the text. So I was surprised, though I probably shouldn’t have been, at how much it grabbed me when I picked it up again earlier this month as part of my No [...]
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Love...
I like short stories. That could be my whole review of this collection of short stories by Alice Munro, but I’ll say more. Munro received the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature, and I’m so glad my Nobel literature project gave me the impetus to read her work.
I think what I love about short stories is that they can still be interestin [...]
My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk
I checked out an e-book of My Name Is Red from the public library and finished it in September, I believe. The author Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. Coincidentally, shortly after I finished it, I met a Turkish mathematician at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, and we talked about the book. She says it is the last one [...]
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
I read Lord of the Flies as part of my Nobel literature project. I checked out the e-book from my local library and read it at the end of my travel in Europe this summer. I finished it in CDG waiting for my flight back home. Golding won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1983, the year I was born, but Lord of the Flies was written in 1954, the [...]
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse as part of my Nobel literature project. Hesse received the Nobel in 1946. Siddhartha was published in 1922. I was glad to read a German author in Germany. I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg (translated by Gunther Olesch, Anke Dreher, Amy Coulter, Stefan Langer, and Seymon Chaichenets) and read it on my e [...]
Blindness, José Saramago
Blindness by José Saramago is the subject of the first reflection in my Nobel literature project. Saramago, a Portuguese author, was the Nobel laureate in literature in 1998. Blindness was published in Portuguese (as Ensaio sobre a cegueira, or Essay on Blindness) in 1995 and English in 1997.
I read Blindness in 2011. My memory is a bit hazy, [...]
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