Name: John Galsworthy
Year Won: 1932
Read: The Forsyte Saga
Original Language: English
Reason: "for his distinguished art of narration, which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga"
About: The Forsyte Saga follows the rise and fall of the Forsytes (sound familiar?), particularly Soames Forsyte, a businessman who cares for little other than what his money can buy who remains baffled by his beautiful wife, Irene, who longs for romance and love.
What I liked: Not much, to be honest. This is one of the few books I haven't been able to finish or even particularly get into. I think this is a combination of it being dry (oh so dry) as well as constantly telling us how the characters are feeling rather than showing it to us. I do think there are moments when the prose is lovely, but mere moments. Maybe I would have seen how it was sublime if I'd been able to bring myself to finish it, but I just couldn't.
What I Disliked: This feels like all the bad parts of a saga (many characters, spanning a huge time frame, not necessarily having much of a plot) with none of the good parts (the sense of awe and things coming together). One of the reasons is the long, long strings of exposition that are everywhere where Galsworthy regales us for pages about precisely how the character feels about some minutiae. I'd like to see Irene wrestling with her feelings or Soames doing the same. But instead they just tell us how they feel about everything, including the temperature of their pudding.
Should it have won a Nobel: No. This feels like someone said, "Oh, the Buddenbrooks is great! Let's go for something else like that!" And they did...just they found something like a bad rip off of it that lacks the emotive power.
Next up: Ivan Bunnin's "The Liberation of Tolstoy"
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