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Been a long time since we had one of these. I went on a bit of a run reading Nobel Prize winner works—I have a goal to read at least one major work by every literature nobelist, excluding the poets. I’m most of the way there and every once in a while I’ll make the effort to knock off 2 or 3 more.

This started when I found Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjiang at a used bookstore. It was not very good. One more example about how terrible the whole postmodern movement was for literature. Generations of talent wasted writing works that are all about building puzzles and playing with form and narrative structure instead of creating interesting characters or telling stories that readers would care about. Thankfully fashions have changed and contemporary literature has gone back to a focus on the human.

Even worse was the next up, The Days of his Grace by Eyvind Johnson. For its first 50 or so years there was a huge Scandinavian bias in the award, and Johnson was one beneficiary. This was a historical novel about war and love and lust and revolution in the age of Charlemagne, which managed to be really boring and pointless and completely unbelievable in the character motivations. I think he was trying for a commentary on Fascism, but it didn’t work at that level either for me.

Speaking of allegories about fascism, I also reread the Plague by Camus, for the third time. Still fantastic, one of the best books of the 20th century.

That led me to reread the Rebel, which is very good but also very dense, with some deep dives that I think were a bit much, and kind of obscure. And I sometimes lost the forest of his larger argument in the trees of specific details. But it’s also full of really amazing flashes of insight and beautiful turns of phrase. And the bookending intro and conclusion are fantastic.

Next, I read Human Acts by Korean writer Han Kang, which was incredibly powerful. It’s an example of a book using innovative narrative structure, moving through time and across different characters to give a panoramic view of a student rebellion in Gwangju in 1980. It was also educational for me—I was completely unaware of the massacre here even though it was just as bloody and brutal as the Tiananmen Square massacre by the Chinese. But it was a US ally, I guess, so we ignored it.

Lastly was another really powerful and interesting book, Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz, an autobiographic work about his experiences as a Hungarian Jew in the Holocaust. It’s different in that the narrator is slightly different and distant, while still being very real, which gives the story a different feel and color. And it explores much of the experience outside of Auschwitz, which has tended to dominate attention, for good reason.