Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize in Literature

[Mr.lucifer]

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Canadian writer Alice Munro won this year's Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.

The Swedish Academy, which selects Nobel literature winners, called her a "master of the contemporary short story."

She's the first Canadian writer to receive the prestigious $1.2 million award since Saul Bellow, who won in 1976 and left for the U.S. as a boy.

Munro's writing has brought her numerous awards. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize, Canada's highest literary honor.

Often compared to Anton Chekhov, the 82-year-old writer has attained near-canonical status as a thorough, but forgiving, documenter of the human spirit.

Her published work often turns on the difference between Munro's growing up in Wingham, a conservative Canadian town west of Toronto, and her life after the social revolution of the 1960s.

In an interview with AP in 2003, she described the '60s as "wonderful."

It was "because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around," she said.

Last year's Nobel literature award went to Mo Yan of China.

The 2013 Nobel announcements continue Friday with the Nobel Peace Prize, followed by the economics prize on Monday.

[JBI]

'Bout time.

[cafolini]

Well-deserved is too little to say.

[TheFifthElement]

Whoops with joy *digs out copy of Runaway*

Well deserved winner.

[Kafka's Crow]

Canadians are doing really well these days.

[Eiseabhal]

S math siud

[Seasider]

S math siud

At the risk of.revealing my ignorance,what does that phrase mean and what relevance does it have to Alice Munro and the Nobel Prize for Literature?

[Seasider]

S math siud

At the risk of.revealing my ignorance,what does that phrase mean and what relevance does it have to Alice Munro and the Nobel Prize for Literature?

[WICKES]

Surely no-one takes the Nobel prizes seriously do they? They are governed by pure political correctness. Look at some of the 20th century writers who've failed to win one: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, D H Lawrence, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, PG Wodehouse, Proust, WH Auden, CS Lewis, Tolkien, Primo Levi, Kafka...then look at some of the winners: Kipling, Churchill, Hesse, Hemingway!!! Is anyone going to argue that Hemingway and Kipling were better novelists than James Joyce, D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Proust??!!! Personally I'd rank Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse far above Hemingway. Hesse won because he was a German writer who despised nationalism and was anti-Nazi; Churchill won it because, well, he was Churchill; Bertrand Russell won because he was an outspoken humanist who'd opposed WW1 and campaigned for nuclear disarmament etc. I love all three of them and enjoy their writings (especially Russell), but, as writers, are we really going to place them above Proust, Woolf, Joyce and Wodehouse?

[ChicagoReader]

Surely no-one takes the Nobel prizes seriously do they? They are governed by pure political correctness. Look at some of the 20th century writers who've failed to win one: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, D H Lawrence, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, PG Wodehouse, Proust, WH Auden, CS Lewis, Tolkien, Primo Levi, Kafka...then look at some of the winners: Kipling, Churchill, Hesse, Hemingway!!! Is anyone going to argue that Hemingway and Kipling were better novelists than James Joyce, D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Proust??!!! Personally I'd rank Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse far above Hemingway. Hesse won because he was a German writer who despised nationalism and was anti-Nazi; Churchill won it because, well, he was Churchill; Bertrand Russell won because he was an outspoken humanist who'd opposed WW1 and campaigned for nuclear disarmament etc. I love all three of them and enjoy their writings (especially Russell), but, as writers, are we really going to place them above Proust, Woolf, Joyce and Wodehouse?

While I certainly agree with your main claim, that the Nobel is largely political, I think Hemingway was certainly deserving of the award (though so were the many writers you mentioned that were left out). I think that along with politics, a writer's influence is a large consideration. For instance, Hemingway pretty much launched his terse, declarative style into the forefront of American literature. His style is evident throughout many of the late 20th century's writers, especially short story writers, namely Raymond Carver. I agree with your claims about Hesse and Churchill etc., though I absolutely love Hesse. I haven't read any Waugh or Wodehouse, maybe any suggestions?

I'm also curious as to what you think of Alice Munro winning, how was that politically correct (because she's a woman)?

[WICKES]

. For instance, Hemingway pretty much launched his terse, declarative style into the forefront of American literature. His style is evident throughout many of the late 20th century's writers, especially short story writers, namely Raymond Carver. I agree with your claims about Hesse and Churchill etc., though I absolutely love Hesse. I haven't read any Waugh or Wodehouse, maybe any suggestions?

I'm also curious as to what you think of Alice Munro winning, how was that politically correct (because she's a woman)?

Tbh I know nothing about Munro- she may be a wonderful novelist who fully deserves the award, but I suspect there are plenty of writers more deserving.

Like you I love Hesse. In fact I think he shaped my personality more than any other writer (I even considered learning German so I could read him in the original, but stupidly opted for French instead!).
Hemingway was unquestionably a good writer, but (imo) overrated: that 'world-weary', 'I've seen it all', 'battle-scarred veteran' macho pose irritates me so much. Hemingway was never really a soldier- he sort of flirted with war so he could sit in cafes boasting. If you want to know what war is really like, read Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That, his account of life as a British infantry officer on the front line in WW1. Graves took part in bayonet charges, in hand to hand fighting, was wounded and left for dead etc and writes about it in the same stripped down, spare, objective way as Hemingway (this work was also written before Hemingway even got going).

Wodehouse and Waugh are wonderful. Most of Wodehouse's stuff is great, especially the Jeeves and Wooster novels. As for Waugh, my favourites are 'Decline and Fall' (possibly the funniest novel in the English language) and the 'Sword of Honour' trilogy- the book I'd take with me to a desert island.

[JBI]

Tbh I know nothing about Munro- she may be a wonderful novelist who fully deserves the award, but I suspect there are plenty of writers more deserving.

Like you I love Hesse. In fact I think he shaped my personality more than any other writer (I even considered learning German so I could read him in the original, but stupidly opted for French instead!).
Hemingway was unquestionably a good writer, but (imo) overrated: that 'world-weary', 'I've seen it all', 'battle-scarred veteran' macho pose irritates me so much. Hemingway was never really a soldier- he sort of flirted with war so he could sit in cafes boasting. If you want to know what war is really like, read Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That, his account of life as a British infantry officer on the front line in WW1. Graves took part in bayonet charges, in hand to hand fighting, was wounded and left for dead etc and writes about it in the same stripped down, spare, objective way as Hemingway (this work was also written before Hemingway even got going).

Wodehouse and Waugh are wonderful. Most of Wodehouse's stuff is great, especially the Jeeves and Wooster novels. As for Waugh, my favourites are 'Decline and Fall' (possibly the funniest novel in the English language) and the 'Sword of Honour' trilogy- the book I'd take with me to a desert island.

We've been over this. Tolstoy could not have one, being only eligible for a couple years. The next half of your list are almost all English authors, which, sorry to say, are not the be all and end all of the literary world, especially with a Nobel community dominated by their own exposure and education, namely in Germanic or Scandinavian works. The omissions of your favorite English novelists is sort of expected. As for Kafka, think about what position he must have had in his life? Most of his works were not complete, and the prize tends to be for a substantial career or a specific work. By the time of his death, he was not the Kafka we read today, which is much assembled by editors.

As for Hesse, he was regarded as one of the premier anti-Nazi authors of his day.

Maybe you should just read the author instead of making dismissive statements about her deserving, or about it being all politically correct. This author is from small-town Canada - there is no overt political edge to her works, and she has not shied from writing about sensitive issues, in the sense of the small-town Ontario she depicts.

[ChicagoReader]

Hemingway was unquestionably a good writer, but (imo) overrated: that 'world-weary', 'I've seen it all', 'battle-scarred veteran' macho pose irritates me so much. Hemingway was never really a soldier- he sort of flirted with war so he could sit in cafes boasting. If you want to know what war is really like, read Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That, his account of life as a British infantry officer on the front line in WW1. Graves took part in bayonet charges, in hand to hand fighting, was wounded and left for dead etc and writes about it in the same stripped down, spare, objective way as Hemingway (this work was also written before Hemingway even got going).



Seems like you just have a personal issue with Hemingway. I don't see how Hemingway's military history factors into the issue, and to be picky, he was near-fatally injured. Not encountering hand-to-hand combat doesn't mean his understanding of war is incomplete or insignificant. I quite like Robert Graves and thoroughly enjoyed Goodbye to All That; Graves is certainly an excellent writer, though I haven't read nearly enough of his work to properly evaluate him. I do find him a bit pompous, having read some of his interviews, especially the one on The Paris Review.

[mande2013]

I think the point is that just as cinephiles don't take the Oscars seriously, bibliophiles shouldn't be taking the Nobel Prize in Literature seriously. It's a middlebrow, crypto-imperialist, establishment institution. Sure, once in a while there'll be a deserving winner, but it's mere coincidence, just like Jean-Luc Godard's receiving an Honorary Oscar was mere coincidence and a form of cooption to an extent.

[OrphanPip]

There is nothing middlebrow about the group of Scandinavian academics who pick the Nobel for Literature. A major problem with that analogy is that it conceives of the Nobel as some kind of "best of" prize, when it is a particular prize for recognition of a major body or work by an author. More authors have valuable and major bodies of work than there are years to give the prize out, and I think there are relatively few undeserving winners of the Nobel for Literature. Whether one thinks Russell is a particularly good writer, he was the most influential writer of philosophical writings for a mass audience of the past century. The Nobel also has to be given to a living author, which makes it difficult to always recognize who will be the most influential writers in the moment. Proust died before much of In Search of Lost Time was even published in translation, and Virginia Woolf committed suicide unexpectedly at a relatively young age.

Churchill receiving the award for memoirs and oratory is actually an interesting choice, and I think it's commendable of the Swedish Academy to consider such a wide breadth of literature. Awarding not only popular novelists, who comprise all of WICKES list with the exception of Auden, but a range of non-fiction prose, poetry, drama and short story authors.

[mal4mac]

Surely no-one takes the Nobel prizes seriously do they? They are governed by pure political correctness. Look at some of the 20th century writers who've failed to win one: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, D H Lawrence, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, PG Wodehouse, Proust, WH Auden, CS Lewis, Tolkien, Primo Levi, Kafka...then look at some of the winners: Kipling, Churchill, Hesse, Hemingway!!!

I prefer Kipling to any of the names you mention. "Kim", "Jungle Book", and "Indian Tales" are magical. Hemingway and Hesse beat most of the others, for me. Can you really be serious about Wodehouse, Waugh, Lewis, and Tolkein? Two comic writers, a religious crank, and Hobbit toshery? Seriously? Kafka was dead before his work came out, and the Nobel is only awarded to living authors. Russell is a superb writer, probably the most readable philosopher of first class status the world has seen since the prize began. Churchill has a great reputation as a historical writer of great literary merit (besides making history!) Orwell's politics were great but he's not a great literary writer, not in the Nobel class. Huxley was clever but his novels are rather wooden. I think there is too much slamming of Nobel winners, I usually find they are "the best" when I try them. A recent discovery was Isaac Bashevis Singer, who I'd put up there with Kipling. Good for them keeping Proust, Joyce, Woolf and Burgess off the list. The obscure modernists get too much praise from trendies; good to see the Nobel committee keeping away from all that.

[mande2013]

And Kipling, Hemingway, and Churchill are overvalued by reactionaries.

[Eiseabhal]

The phrase means I am happy to hear that she has received the international recognition that such an award brings her.

[mal4mac]

And Kipling, Hemingway, and Churchill are overvalued by reactionaries.

"During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there." - George Orwell

It's not difficult to find other broad-minded radicals who admire Kipling; the old jingo just happened to be a great writer.

"After you have read Kipling's fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories." - Randall Jarrell

"Jarrell—a devotee of Marx and Auden— embraced his teachers' literary stances while rejecting their politics." - Stephen Burt.

Alexander Korda, who produced the film version of The Jungle Book, was actually arrested by reactionary elements in his native Hungry for supporting the short-lived Communist government in 1919.

T.S. Eliot greatly admired Kipling, and although a bit of a reactionary himself, indicated why his appeal was so broad: "An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle."

Billy Bragg, who aims to reclaim English nationalism from the right-wing, has attempted to use Kipling to generate an inclusive sense of Englishness. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xppmt

And Kipling is certainly not always for the English overlord. For instance, his poem "A Pict Song" is all about the glory of the Scottish underdog, as are many of the works of Alice Munro.

[JBI]

Kipling has the bad luck of being one of the last major authors of a dying sort of British colonial identity. The problem with current readers I would think has a lot to do with a sort of displacement of British identity, especially to North Americans. We associate in our geographic understanding an England which is connected first to Scandinavia, then to France, then to the US, and finally to European conflicts. We ignore certain other aspects of the great colonial empire, and we certainly do not associate South Asia, which for the North American is almost completely unstudied, as a sort of British identity. Somewhere like Myanmar (Burma) which has been absent almost entirely from the American imagination. Now, knowing that over 100,000 British troops died there fighting Japanese soldiers during the second world war is something completely alien to our understanding of the world. That many were from India is even more confusing to our understanding of the world.

Situating Kipling then becomes somewhat problematic, as he is quintessentially English, and very Colonial in his understanding of the world, yet also very marginal and broad in his geography. He is at once the author on works about Burma (which seem to still be the only English books on the country currently read) yet also the author of poems like "Tommy". The England of James Bond and European commerce is not the Britain of the East India trade company, or the player in the Great Game (I believe the term was made popular by Kipling).


Take Alice Munro for example, she is (with the exception of Saul Bellow who is an American novelist) the only Canadian author so honored by the reward. This is to say she has been associated as a sort of writer out of the margins who sprang out of nothing, in the cold Canadian wilderness. That she has a long line of forerunners who paved the way, and created the genres that made her famous is completely misunderstood by both the international market and perhaps the Nobel Committee. The world of provincial Ontario is one which is a constant and major genre in Canadian literature, yet nobody will ever understand such a world. We will not get the works of Margaret Laurence read, despite Munro's acknowledgement of her debt to those works.

From what I can see, the general commentary on Munro's win has been "oh, good job for women writers" and nothing to do with a) good job to Short story writers, who are elevating a genre apart from novels, and b) good job for Canadian fiction, and Canadian literature, which are both getting extra press time because of this. There is also another body, which seeks to slam the award from the top, and therefore discredit the accomplishments of the authors who have won it, who, for the most part, though perhaps not the "greatest" living authors at the time of receipt, all seemed to have embodied a sort of mass-acclaim in their time (with the exception of a handful of weird choices over the years).

Quite simply, most of you have never read much Canadian literature written before 1980, and many have not read much after 1980. Do we need to rip on an author who is getting these artists recognition, simply because Kipling is not our favorite author? Let her enjoy her money, and fame, and perhaps maybe we can read more of her work, and decide for ourselves.