2010 Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2010/

by razin • 16 years ago

36 26 16 years ago

nobelprize.org

hugh34• 16 years ago

The Nobel Prize in Literature is odd. Looking through the list of every prize they've ever given out,

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2010/10/07/List-of-Nobel...

I see a lot of names whom time has failed to vindicate.

joe_bleau• 16 years ago

Yep. How about the award in 1974 to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson? Maybe it's easier to win when you're both on the panel that picks the winner?

compay2• 16 years ago

> whom time has failed to vindicate.

Yet.

joshfinnie• 16 years ago

I always thought that the Nobel prize winners are always very abstract. There are better awards to look at for examples of books you actually want to read...

arethuza• 16 years ago

Try reading "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn - an extraordinarily straightforward wee book.

henrikschroder• 16 years ago

The will explicitly says:

"one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency"

Think of it as the more technical academy awards. A movie that gets the Oscar for best sound editing might not be a great movie or a box-office hit, but still deserve the award.

diego_moita• 16 years ago

> I see a lot of names whom time has failed to vindicate.

And I don't see : Virginia Wolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Fernando Pessoa, ...

gaius• 16 years ago

I voted for Pablo Coelho.

c1sc0• 16 years ago

Is it Pablo or Paulo Coelho? Or does Pablo == Paulo assert True in Portuguese? Amazing writer, I was blown away by The Alchemist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemist_(novel)

Vargas4• 16 years ago

Pablo => Spanish. Paulo => Portuguese.

Spanish speakers tend to spanify Portuguese words, for convenience and for the fun of watching Portuguese speakers get annoyed :P

Sao Paulo => San Pablo

compay2• 16 years ago

I enjoyed some of his books, but pop fiction is unlikely to win that award any time soon. :) And no, Paulo != Pablo, but it's an axiom that if a Brazilian becomes popular enough in the Spanish-speaking part of Latin America, he or she will eventually acquire a hispanicized nickname.

Tomek_• 16 years ago

Just for the sake of having some balance in the opinions here (I'm not really willing to go into any flame war) I'd like to state that in my opinion Paulo Coehlo is a bad writer, by which I mean that a) he has a poor style of writing, b) his books don't provide any serious value for the reader.

To end on a positive note I recommend anyone to read "Master & Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov, a masterpiece that for some reasons isn't as popular as it should be (in the western world at least).

Vargas4• 16 years ago

He truly deserves it. I don't like his personality but it always seemed unfair that Garcia-Marquez had it while Vargas Llosa didn't.

bentoner• 16 years ago

I like science fiction but it's felt for a while that I've read everything good. Recently, I've found myself reading a lot of historical fiction (anti-science fiction?). The two genres are quite similar in that they both examine how humans behave in weird or unfamiliar settings. For example, Russia in Tolstoy's time feels more different to me than an awful lot of science fiction.

Vargas Llosa's "The War of the End of the World" is set in the wilds of 19th century Brazil, and it's brilliant. It's one of my favourite novels. I found "The Time of the Hero" fascinating but I can't remember if I enjoyed it. It's about hazing rituals in Peruvian military school. I tried to read "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," which is set in more modern times, but I didn't get very far.

clueless123• 16 years ago

try "Pantaleon and the visitadoras", it is very light and funny

2010 Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa

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