Reading Challenge: Nobel Prize for Literature

The aim of this challenge is to read at least one book by as many Nobel Prize winners as possible.

2010
Mario Vargas Llosa

2009
Herta Müller

2008
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
The Book of Flights

2007
Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

2006
Orhan Pamuk

2005
Harold Pinter

2004
Elfriede Jelinek

2003
John M. Coetzee
Boyhood
Diary of a Bad Year
Disgrace
Life and Times of Michael K
Slow Man
Summertime
Waiting for the Barbarians
Youth


2002
Imre Kertész

2001
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

2000
Gao Xingjian

1999
Günter Grass

1998
José Saramago
Blindness
Seeing


1997
Dario Fo

1996
Wislawa Szymborska

1995
Seamus Heaney

1994
Kenzaburo Oe

1993
Toni Morrison
A Mercy


1992
Derek Walcott

1991
Nadine Gordimer

1990
Octavio Paz

1989
Camilo José Cela

1988
Naguib Mahfouz

1987
Joseph Brodsky

1986
Wole Soyinka

1985
Claude Simon

1984
Jaroslav Seifert

1983
William Golding
Lord of the Flies

1982
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera


1981
Elias Canetti

1980
Czeslaw Milosz

1979
Odysseus Elytis

1978
Isaac Bashevis Singer

1977
Vicente Aleixandre

1976
Saul Bellow

1975
Eugenio Montale

1974
Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson

1973
Patrick White

1972
Heinrich Böll

1971
Pablo Neruda

1970
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

1969
Samuel Beckett

1968
Yasunari Kawabata

1967
Miguel Angel Asturias

1966
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs

1965
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov

1964
Jean-Paul Sartre

1963
Giorgos Seferis

1962
John Steinbeck

1961
Ivo Andric

1960
Saint-John Perse

1959
Salvatore Quasimodo

1958
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago


1957
Albert Camus
The Fall
The Outsider

1956
Juan Ramón Jiménez

1955
Halldór Kiljan Laxness

1954
Ernest Miller Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea


1953
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

1952
François Mauriac

1951
Pär Fabian Lagerkvist

1950
Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell

1949
William Faulkner

1948
Thomas Stearns Eliot

1947
André Paul Guillaume Gide

1946
Hermann Hesse

1945
Gabriela Mistral

1944
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

1939
Frans Eemil Sillanpää

1938
Pearl Buck

1937
Roger Martin du Gard

1936
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

1934
Luigi Pirandello

1933
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin

1932
John Galsworthy

1931
Erik Axel Karlfeldt

1930
Sinclair Lewis

1929
Thomas Mann

1928
Sigrid Undset

1927
Henri Bergson

1926
Grazia Deledda

1925
George Bernard Shaw

1924
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

1923
William Butler Yeats

1922
Jacinto Benavente

1921
Anatole France

1920
Knut Pedersen Hamsun

1919
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler

1917
Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan

1916
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam

1915
Romain Rolland

1913
Rabindranath Tagore

1912
Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann

1911
Count Maurice (Mooris) Polidore Marie Bernhard Maeterlinck

1910
Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse

1909
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf

1908
Rudolf Christoph Eucken

1907
Rudyard Kipling

1906
Giosuè Carducci

1905
Henryk Sienkiewicz

1904
Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray y Eizaguirre

1903
Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson

1902
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen

The Book of Flights - J.M.G. Le Clezio

Read: December 2008

The Book of Flights in one tweet sized chunk:
Like being hit over the head with a thick philosophical tome, The Book of Flights is experimental, strange, and impossible to call a novel.

“Literature, in the last analysis, must be something like the ultimate possibility that presents itself of playing a game, the final chance of flight.”

Like most people around the world, I had never heard of Franco-nomadic writer J.M.G. Le Clezio before he was made Nobel Laureate in 2008. I remember reading the press release and heaving a great big sigh, knowing that there would be customers wanting to buy his books and unable to appreciate that they were just not available. I found Wandering Star still in print in the U.S. and ordered that in and otherwise had to stand there and inform disbelieving customers that none of his books were in print in the U.K. It was all a bit of a pain.
And yet, there was something exciting about this unknown winning such a major award. I eagerly anticipated the inevitable release of the backlist, particularly when columnists started writing about his nomadic style, his interest in cross-cultural interaction and the search for freedom. Then, from the moment I saw the cover of The Book of Flights, and read the synopsis, I knew I wanted to read it. The premise is an intriguing one: a young man seeks to escape the claustrophobia of a nameless modern metropolis, in the process celebrating and questioning both the freedom of life, and the craft of writing itself. I went home and started reading immediately.
And what a disappointment it was.

The Book of Flights is a dense, difficult to read novel with a disrupted narrative, awkward plot, strange authorial intrusions, and copious philosophical ponderings. It is a book all about the power of words: the claustrophobic ways in which they shout out from advertising; the expectations loaded upon them; their transient inability to explain our surroundings. At times it reads like stream of consciousness poetry, at times like medieval monks chanting, at others it is just powerful words placed one after another to shock and overpower you. It is a book designed to disorientate the reader.
The plot, what little there is, follows Young Man Hogan as he flees the crowds and words and expectations of a nameless necropolis. There is a song by US singer-songwriter Bright Eyes called ‘Light Pollution’ which forced its way into my head during the first chapter of The Book of Flights and remained entrenched there throughout the rest of the book. It is the last verse particularly, which seems to encapsulate the atmosphere perfectly.

“And all at once he saw the dust
And heard every tiny sound
Got in his truck and turned around

Drove out through the crowd and the cops
Drove out past that centre mall
Drove out past that sickening sprawl
Out past that fenced in gold

And maybe he lost control
Fucking with the radio
But I bet the stars seemed so close
At the end.”

The Book of Flights is a celebration of freedom of expression and adventure, a crazy swelling journey across continents and societies, seeking out some place where the world cannot follow. The strange thing is that in terms of themes and ideas The Book of Flights is exactly the sort of book I enjoy reading. It is thoughtful, and deals with the nature of writing, the urge to travel, the claustrophobia of modern life. Many of these ponderings are worth thinking further about. They have a timeless quality. For instance:

“The really extraordinary thing about any revolution is its capacity to make people want to live for something more than just earning money, to make them conceive of life in terms that go beyond the old mathematics of earning and spending.”

The problem is just reading it is too little like reading a novel and a little too much like being hit over the head with a big thick tome of philosophical ramblings. Le Clezio is well aware of this – he even mentions it in the self-criticisms of the book which intersperse the narrative. This is an archetypal work of 1960’s post-modernism. It is – damned with feint praise – experimental. I cannot imagine there are many people who would enjoy reading this. If you are good at excavating the good from the turgid then there are things to interest you, just don’t expect these to include a plot, characters, or any emotional resonance. Well, not until the lovely simple image upon which it ends. An ending which I have stolen as the long sought final line of my half written novel.

“In the village filled with this atrocious peace, Young Man Hogan waited for the bus.
Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.
(To be continued.)”

5 out of 10