Name: Kenzaburō Ōe
Year Won: 1994
Read: The Changeling
Original Language: Japanese
Reason: "who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today"
About: The Changeling follows Kogito Choko as he travels around Japan and Germany, trying to figure out why his friend, Goro, killed himself. It dips back and forth between times and places, often barely differentiating one from the other, as the present and future meld together.
What I liked: Lovely, unpretentious writing, interesting characters, and a really fascinating story structure. I found this to be one of the better books on this list.
What I Disliked: Not much. I found this to be a really interesting story about friendship, loss, and memory.
Should it have won a Nobel: Yes. This has been one of my favorites in a while. It's an actually enjoyable book. It does feel a bit un-literary in a lot of ways for a Nobel prize winner, but to me, that's a major advantage. It feels good because it's good rather than good because it used the right length of run on sentence.
Next Up: "Opened Ground" by Seamus Heaney
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