The Blue Bird

Name: Maurice Maeterlinck

Year Won: 1911

 Read: "The Blue Bird"

 Original Language: French

 Reason:  "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations"

About: The Blue Bird is a six act play that involves two children going into a dream world along with their dog, cat, and other inanimate assorted companions (such as sugar, night, light, water, fire, you get the idea...) They learn Valuable Lessons before waking up with their family again on Christmas morning.

What I Liked: It's cute and the scene descriptions are quite amusing. I also really love Dog, who slavishly adores his "little god" and fawns over the humans, sobbing and howling any time he'd not allowed to be with them and defending them to the death. (Honestly, Dog in this is everything!) I also like some of the other characters.

What I Disliked: Does the description scream "Hallmark Movie of the Week" to anyone else? Yeah. It reads like that too. It's very saccharine.

Also, in one case the boy beats up Dog, which is absolutely vile.  That's maybe the only part of this play that doesn't read "Hallmark Movie of the Week" to me.

Should it have won a Nobel: It's hard to say. Nobels are awarded for a body of work and Maeterlinck's other work may be brilliant. But this piece just...wasn't.

It almost feels like the Nobel committee was on a fairy tale kick. In the case of Gosta Berling, that seems entirely reasonable. (It's a good book.)  In this case, it just felt like someone fell in love with this play as a kid and felt the need to enshrine it. It's hard for me to see that this piece was written by someone who was the greatest living author alive in 1911.

(With that said, seeing as Hallmark was not yet a thing, it is entirely possible that this read far better in 1911 when it was novel. But...I'm doubting it.)

 Next up: Poetry by Rabindranath Tagore. (Again, Gerhart Hauptmann is not in my local library) This will also be my first foray into poetry. Whoo! (Maybe.)