Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Haruki Murakami / The Art of Fiction


Haruki Murakami
BIOGRAPHY
The Art of Fiction 
182
Interviewed by John Wray


Summer 2004
The Paris Review No. 170

The first manuscript page of Wild Sheep Chase, 1982


Haruki Murakami is not only arguably the most experimental Japanese novelist to have been translated into English, he is also the most popular, with sales in the millions worldwide. His greatest novels inhabit the liminal zone between realism and fable, whodunit and science fiction: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, for example, features a protagonist who is literally of two minds, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, perhaps his best-known work outside of Japan, begins prosaically—as a man’s search for his missing wife—then quietly mutates into the strangest hybrid narrative since Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Murakami’s world is an allegorical one, constructed of familiar symbols—an empty well, an underground city—but the meaning of those symbols remains hermetic to the last. His debt to popular culture (and American pop culture, in particular) notwithstanding, it could be argued that no author’s body of work has ever been more private.

   Murakami was born in 1949 in Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, to a middle-class family with a vested interest in the national culture: his father was a teacher of Japanese literature, his grandfather a Buddhist monk. When he was two, his family moved to Kobe, and it was this bustling port city, with its steady stream of foreigners (especially American sailors), that most clearly shaped his sensibility. Rejecting Japanese literature, art, and music at an early age, Murakami came to identify more and more closely with the world outside Japan, a world he knew only through jazz records, Hollywood movies, and dime-store paperbacks.
   As a student in Tokyo in the late sixties, Murakami developed a taste for postmodern fiction while looking on, quietly but sympathetically, as the protest movement reached its high-water mark. He married at twenty-three and spent the next several years of his life running a jazz club in Tokyo, Peter Cat, before the publication of his first novel made it possible for him to pay his way by writing. The novel, Hear the Wind Sing, translated into English but not available outside Japan at the author’s request, won him the coveted Gunzo Literature Prize and the beginnings of a readership. With each book that followed, his acclaim and popularity grew, until the publication in 1987 of his first realistic novel, Norwegian Wood, transformed him into a literary megastar and the de facto “voice of his generation”—eighties’ Japan’s version of J. D. Salinger. The book has sold more than two million copies in Japan alone, the equivalent of one for every household in Tokyo.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Saul Bellow / The Art of Fiction


Saul Bellow
BIOGRAPHY

The Art of Fiction
Interviewed by Gordon Lloyd Harper


The interview “took place” over a period of several weeks. Beginning with some exploratory discussions during May of 1965, it was shelved during the summer, and actually accomplished during September and October. Two recording sessions were held, totaling about an hour and a half, but this was only a small part of the effort Mr. Bellow gave to this interview. A series of meetings, for over five weeks, was devoted to the most careful revision of the original material. Recognizing at the outset the effort he would make for such an interview, he had real reluctance about beginning it at all. Once his decision had been reached, however, he gave a remarkable amount of his time freely to the task—up to two hours a day, at least twice and often three times a week throughout the entire five-week period. It had become an opportunity, as he put it, to say some things which were important but which weren't being said.
Certain types of questions were ruled out in early discussions. Mr. Bellow was not interested in responding to criticisms of his work that he found trivial or stupid. He quoted the Jewish proverb that a fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover. Nor did he wish to discuss what he considered his personal writing habits, whether he used a pen or typewriter, how hard he pressed on the page. For the artist to give such loving attention to his own shoelaces was dangerous, even immoral. Finally, there were certain questions that led into too “wide spaces” for this interview, subjects for fuller treatment on other occasions.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

All Nobel Prizes in Literature


All Nobel Prizes in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 104 times between 1901 and 2011. 
2011
Tomas Tranströmer
2010
Mario Vargas Llosa
2009
Herta Müller
2008
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
2007
Doris Lessing
2006
Orhan Pamuk
2005
Harold Pinter
2004
Elfriede Jelinek
2003
John M. Coetzee
2002
Imre Kertész
2001
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
2000
Gao Xingjian
1999
Günter Grass
1998
José Saramago
1997
Dario Fo
1996
Wislawa Szymborska
1995
Seamus Heaney
1994
Kenzaburo Oe
1993
Toni Morrison
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
1982
Gabriel García Márquez
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
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
1957
Albert Camus
1956
Juan Ramón Jiménez
1955
Halldór Kiljan Laxness
1954
Ernest Miller Hemingway
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
1943
No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.
1942
No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.
1941
No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.
1940
No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.
1939
Frans Eemil Sillanpää
1938
Pearl Buck
1937
Roger Martin du Gard
1936
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
1935
No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section.
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
1918
No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section.
1917
Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
1916
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam
1915
Romain Rolland
1914
No Nobel Prize was awarded this year. The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section.
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
1901
Sully Prudhomme

TO CITE THIS PAGE:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/