Aaron's Favorite Nobel Laureate Picks
"If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of ." --Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Here are my favorite books by Nobel laureates and why!
Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers by Knut Hamsun: A short novel about living in nature, living with and without people, and each person’s innate potential to go a little mad sometimes. It is florid, impressionistic, and scintillant: as good a summer read as I can envision. A word of caution: if you want to enjoy this book, I wouldn’t recommend trying to like any of the characters.
Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul: As with much of Naipaul’s work, this book takes as its subject the ubiquitous violence that pervades any society subjected to imperial influence. It is abrasive and unsparing in its investigation of the ways a person, a culture, or even a landscape may be brutalized by outside, exploitative powers.
Blindness by Jose Saramago: I am generally wary of “what if” type stories, but this novel—which creatively imagines a city in which all inhabitants (save one) are stricken blind—is a notable exception. Imbued with a good deal of horror, love, skepticism, and even a little humor, Blindness seems to ask one of the most important questions which art can ask of life: are humans born too good or evil?
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro: A great place to start reading one of the greatest short story writers (in English) of the last hundred years. Like only the most disciplined writers, Munro leaves the questions which she poses beautifully unanswered, and lets her stories end without artificial finality. In this respect, they are admirable reflections of authentically lived experience.
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: If you haven’t read this book by now and have been meaning to, there is no longer an excuse to put it off. Ishiguro proved to post-postmodernists that realism in the novel still lives and breathes by taking as his subject the stuffiest, most eminently “British” of themes: an English country manor home and the interior life of its long-time head butler. This beautiful book remains one of only a very few to have made my stalwart, Yankee eyes yield tears.
ABOUT THE BOOKSELLER
Aaron has worked in libraries and loves reading literary classics.