Literary Rotating Nominations

[paola]

Originally Posted by issybird

A trip to Mexico will save you a bit of money over Seattle. I also don't know if purchases from Washington State get charged sales tax; obviously your friend would know. Very nice that Inconvenient Indian is couponable! I shall buy it also in any case.

I am thinking of going down the mexico way myself for the Inconvenient Indian - with a big fat February 50% coupon :-)

[issybird]

Originally Posted by paola

I am thinking of going down the mexico way myself for the Inconvenient Indian - with a big fat February 50% coupon :-)

*cough*50feb*cough*

I got mine; I hope they don't run out!

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by issybird

A trip to Mexico will save you a bit of money over Seattle. I also don't know if purchases from Washington State get charged sales tax; obviously your friend would know. Very nice that Inconvenient Indian is couponable! I shall buy it also in any case.

One of my cousins married a Mexican - I wonder if that is close enough?

Thanks for the tip - I'll have a look.

[sun surfer]

Who would like to take their turn selecting the nominations for the upcoming rotating month in April?


(if you have any questions, you can refer to the first post or just ask)

It's been seven days since the offer was extended so consider this a thread bump. That and if no one else wants the opportunity I am willing. So unless interested parties are willing to select from a short list of books of my choosing . . .

[Bookpossum]

Good for you, Hamlet!

[issybird]

Oh, good! I'm glad you've stepped up.

[BelleZora]

Looking forward to your list, Hamlet.

[sun surfer]

Sounds great Hamlet53 and thanks for volunteering. April is yours! I'll ask for your selections at the beginning of the month.

[fantasyfan]

I 'm looking forward to your list!

[issybird]

I'm greatly enjoying the rotating months and my sense of the world has expanded exponentially as a result, but so has my to-read list as with each of the four preceding turns I've added books to my to-read list. I know Hamlet's slate will be no exception.

Alas, as yet I've only managed to get to the wonderful The Islandman, courtesy of fantasyfan. Perhaps I need to create a mini-challenge of one also-ran per month, say.

[Bookpossum]

Indeed - so many books, so little time! I plan on living to about 150 to try to read everything I want to read, but the trouble is, there will be more books coming out all the time. But a winner plus one sounds a good way to help expand the horizons.

[sun surfer]

It's time for April's selections. Hamlet53, what choices do you have for us?

So time flies. Here is the list I propose that a book be selected from. No theme this time, just all books written by past winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The authors were selected on the basis that I have never read any books by them (expect for one of them), and the idea that at least some might be new to others in this fine group. Each is one of the more highly regarded books by the author. All are available as ebooks, at least in the US.

Akhenaten by Naguib Mahfouz

Spoiler:

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.

In this beguiling new novel, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in the United States, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--and the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.—Goodreads

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

Spoiler:

In the brilliant novel V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.— New York Times

Desert by J.M.G. Le Clézio

Spoiler:

“Desert” is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. Weaving together two stories that span the 20th century, Le Clézio tells of the last days of the Tuareg, the desert warriors known as the blue men, who are being driven from their ancestral lands in North Africa by the French colonial army and “the new order,” and in counterpoint, the travails of a later generation trapped in the projects and shantytowns of Tangier and Marseille. His central characters are the stalwart young boy Nour, who in 1909 is migrating north across the Western Sahara in a caravan of nomadic Berber tribes, and a dreamy, copper-skinned young orphan named Lalla, descended from the blue men, whose parentage helps her survive immigrant life in the 1970s. — New York Times

Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Spoiler:

The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers that she is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continued to love Oki and has never forgotten him, but his return unsettles not only her but also her young lover. This is a work of strange beauty, with a tender touch of nostalgia and a heartbreaking sensitivity to those things lost forever.—Howard Hibbett (Translator)

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago

Spoiler:

This is a skeptic' s journey into the meaning of God and of human existence. At once an ironic rendering of the life of Christ and a beautiful novel, Saramago' s tale has sparked intense discussion about the meaning of Christianity and the Church as an institution.—Goodreads

Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

Spoiler:

This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger, a young woman from South Africa cast in the mold of a revolutionary tradition. Rosa tries to uphold her heritage handed on by martyred parents while still carving out a sense of self. Although it is wholly of today, Burger's Daughter can be compared to those 19th century Russian classics that make a certain time and place come alive, and yet stand as universal celebrations of the human spirit. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born and lives in South Africa.—Amazon

The Passport by Herta Müller

Spoiler:

The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Müller (Herta Mueller) describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, poetic language, Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.—Amazon

No Man's Land by Harold Pinter

Spoiler:

Do Hirst and Spooner really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity - and the comedy - intensify with the arrival of Briggs and Fraser. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination.

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

Spoiler:

The most popular work from provocative Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher is a searing portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears boring, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night and watched sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first—but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher’s subdued exterior explode in a release of perversity, violence, and degradation.—Amazon

The Pathseeker by Imre Kertesz

Spoiler:

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history..."

The acclaimed Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész continues his investigation of the malignant methodologies of totalitarianism in a major work of fiction.

In a mysterious middle–European country, a man identified only as “the commissioner” undertakes what seems to be a banal trip to a nondescript town with his wife—a brief detour on the way to a holiday at the seaside—that turns into something ominous. Something terrible has happened in the town, something that no one wants to discuss. With his wife watching on fearfully, he commences a perverse investigation, rudely interrogating the locals, inspecting a local landmark with a frightening intensity, traveling to an outlying factory where he confronts the proprietors ... and slowly revealing a past he's been trying to suppress.—Amazon

[sun surfer]

Such an interesting selection, and I love the idea of all Nobel winners! I'll have the poll up shortly.


ETA - And the poll is now up!