Word: nobels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Reading Gnter Grass's recent Nobel Lecture I was struck by two things: it's rather disjointed--like it was written in a hurry--and it's wrong in a predictable way. The triteness of it took me by surprise. I haven't read any of Grass's books, not even The Tin Drum (heck, I haven't even seen the movie), but it was my understanding that he was one of the best living writers and that his Nobel Prize for literature was long overdue. Maybe so, but his Nobel Lecture strikes me as the sort of thing that...
...lecture, Grass seems to be going through the usual motions: anecdotes from the history of literature, references to his youth, material from his own novels, an armchair liberal's criticism of the dehumanizing influence of modern science and the free market, insinuations that the Nobel Prize is really not such a big deal and a conclusion that portrays literature as a heroic struggle for the future of the human race. None of this is very original, and in this case it does not gel together very well. Past Nobel Lectures like Saramago's, Garcia Marquez's and Faulkner's have...
...almost feel that if the Nobel Prize were conferred on Jacques Derrida, hed start talking like Bill Cosby on Picture Pages. Laureates become the public faces of literature, and they start acting like publicizers instead of writers and scholars: what results can be something as banal and clichŽ-ridden as Nadine Gordimers regrettable new release, Living in Hope and History...
Gordimer appropriates for the title of Living, a compilation of some of her non-fiction essays and speeches, the corniest line in fellow Nobel-laureates Seamus Heaneys corniest poem: Once in a lifetime/...hope and history rhyme...
...house flick [pi], the story of a psychotic, self-mutilating mathematician who discovers a very big number that holds the secrets of the universe.) Books on mathematics, such as Fermat's Enigma and A Beautiful Mind, the tale of a schizophrenic mathematical economist who wins the Nobel Prize, hit best-seller lists here and abroad. (I came to appreciate the eclectic taste of our friends across the pond when my book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers shared the London Times best-seller list with two titillating biographies of Princess...