Nobel Aliens:Olga and Peter

By so much am I above gods and above men - seiren chruseien ex ouranothen kremasantes: A chain of gold from heaven hang.

       The Nobel Prizes in Literature go to ...  Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke 

       The winners of the 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature have now been announced, and they are: Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and Peter Handke (2019). 
       Tokarczuk receives the prize:

for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life

       Handke receives the prize for

for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience

       Handke had long been thought an unlikely choice because of his unpopular attitude during and after the Yugoslavian conflicts -- and this is going to come up a lot in the Nobel Prize-commentary --, but is certainly one of the grand old men of European literature and it's hard to disagree with this selection from a literary point of view. Tokarczuk has been quickly gaining international (well, European and US) recognition for an impressive body of work -- including winning the 2018 Man International Booker Prize for Flights -- and is a choice that will no doubt be widely seen as a solid one. 
       Considering solely their work, these are certainly very strong choices, though with two Central Europeans this is very much in the old mold of the Academy, for better and worse, and it's a bit disappointing that they did not reach beyond that very narrow area. 

       Decent initial overview-articles now up include:

• Nobel Prizes in Literature Awarded to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke by Alex Marshall in The New York Times
• Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke win Nobel prizes in literature by Alison Flood in The Guardian
• Nobel Prize in Literature: Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke win awards by Martin Doyle in the Irish Times
• Austrian Handke and Poland's Tokarczuk win Nobel literature prizes by Simon Johnson and Niklas Pollard at Reuters

       General commentary about this year's prizes:

• The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Just Trolling Nowargues Alex Shephard in The New Republic
• The Swedish Academy took a year off to fix the Nobel Prize in literature. It’s still broken. finds Ron Charles inThe Washington Post
• The 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature Proves the Academy Hasn’t Changed finds Carrie V. Mullins at Electric Literature
• The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature Was Postponed Over Scandal, but This Year's Choice Just Created More Controversy Marissa Martinelli reports at Slate
• Why this year's doubleheader Nobel Prize for literature is so controversial by Constance Grady at Vox. (Apparently: "Handke's win is complicated")
• Nobel Literature Prize's new 'global vision' picks out two white European writers by John Self in the Irish Times
• Today's Nobel Prizes in literature ? A home run and a strikeout. judges Carolyn Kellogg in the Chicago Tribune (admitting: "I have never read Handke, and I don't plan to start now", making that strikeout call one pulled out of rather thin and purely political/image-conscious air)
• We were promised a less Eurocentric Nobel. We got two laureates from Europe complains Maya Jaggi in The Guardian. (I don't think it was an actual promise ...)
• The light and the darkness of this year's literature Nobelargues Rafia Zakaria at CNN
• Is the Nobel Prize for Literature's compass well and truly 'broken' ? wonders Sana Goyal at Livemint

       Commentary/coverage about Tokarczuk:

• Olga Tokarczuk: the dreadlocked feminist winner the Nobel needed by Claire Armitstead in The Guardian
• Olga Tokarczuk: 'Literature is meant to provoke thought': Q & A with Michal Gostkiewicz at Deutsche Welle
• A Q & A with John Freeman at the Literary Hub
• For Poland, Nobel Prize in Literature Is Cause for Conflict as Much as Congratulation by Marc Santora and Joanna Berendt in The New York Times
• Playful and profound: Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk demands to be read Malcolm Forbes thinks, in The National
• The Nobel Prize Was Made for Olga Tokarczuk her translator Jennifer Croft maintains at The Paris Review's Daily weblog

       Commentary/coverage about Handke:

• PEN America expresses "deep regret" over Peter Handke's Nobel Prize: official statement from PEN America
• Choice to award Peter Handke Nobel Prize is regrettable and distressing to victims opines PEN International
• Congratulations, Nobel Committee, You Just Gave the Literature Prize to a Genocide Apologist reports Peter Maass at The Intercept
• 'A troubling choice': authors criticise Peter Handke's controversial Nobel win in The Guardian
• Theodora Danek wonders Was Peter Handke's revisionism lost in translation ? ((my)short answer: no)
• Handke translator Scott Abbott tries to make the case for the Nobel Prize for Peter Handke at his The Goalie's Anxiety weblog
• Peter Handke: an adversarial talent and controversial Nobel laureate: Hugo Hamilton in The Guardian
• Pierre Assouline considers Le problème avec ceux qui ont un problème avec Peter Handke at his La République des livres weblog
• A Nobel prize that dishonours the victims of genocideopines Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian

       German-language coverage is, of course extensive; see, for example:

• Reaktionen auf Handkes Nobelpreis: Für Jelinek "höchste Zeit" -- an extensive collection reactions, mainly Austrian and German, in the Kurier
• Gerald Heidegger considers Warum Peter Handke ? at some length at the ORF
• Popstar, Prophet, Provokateur by Hubert Spiegel in theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

       Publisher mentions:

• Fitzcarraldo Editions proudly announce that Olga Tokarczuk wins the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature
• Literaturnobelpreis 2019 für Peter Handke at Suhrkamp
• Celebrating Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel Prize at Penguin Random House

       Usually some major newspapers and literary magazines collect and open up for view articles about and reviews of Nobel Prize-winning authors, but they've been slow to do that this year. So far it's only:

• Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke awarded Nobel Prizes in Literature - A selection of articles from theTLS, covering the work of both winners

       For previous general information about Olga Tokarczuk, see, for example:

• Olga Tokarczuk at Culture.pl, a good overview
• Olga Tokarczuk at Granta, where you can find several longer samples of her work
• Olga Tokarczuk's Novels Against Nationalism, Ruth Franklin profile of Tokarczuk in The New Yorker earlier this year

       There is a great deal more about Peter Handke online -- he's been publishing for over fifty years. His first notable appearance was at the (in)famous Princeton meeting of the Gruppe 47; a recording of his contribution is available at the Princeton German site, while The Goalie's Anxiety offers a translation of Peter Handke’s 1966 Speech at the Princeton Meeting of the Gruppe 47. 
       The Austrian National Library's Handke online site is a valuable (German) resource -- and includes Handke's much commented-on but little reproduced (in full) words at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević in 2006. 
       Handke's stance in the Yugoslavian conflicts have come to dominate commentary on the author in recent years -- beginning with the awarding of the Heinrich Heine Prize to him in 2006, which he then turned down; see the useful overview at signandsight.com of The Peter Handke affair. 
       Recent pieces that discuss Handke at some length do tend to bog down some in the Yugoslavian-question, but some in-depth pieces may be of interest; see, for example:

• Taking Refuge in the Loo by Leland de la Durantaye in the London Review of Books
• The Apologist by Michael McDonald in The American Scholar
• Ben Hutchinson considers Peter Handke's wilful controversies in the Times Literary Supplement -- and now, post-Nobel, he looks at Peter Handke: entering the curious canon
• Der Literaturnobelpreisträger Peter Handke: Ein literarischer Seher unter Blinden by Paul Jandl in theNeue Zürcher Zeitung

       Meanwhile, Handke was more recently awarded theInternational Ibsen Award -- and see also Karl Ove Knausgaard's speech on Handke and Singularity. 
       Beyond that, it's certainly worth going back to his fiction (and drama) beyond the narrow political context in which so much of it is now considered. And curious Nobel titbit: Handke has translated two works by another Nobel laureate, Patrick Modiano -- I'm not sure when the last time was this occurred (if ever). (It's great to see an author who has also been such an active translator be Nobel-honored.) 

       No works by Tokarczuk are under review at the complete review, but several Handke works are:

• [Crossing the Sierra de Gredos]
• Don Juan: His Own Version
• Kali
• On a Dark Night I Left my Silent House
• Till Day You Do Part

       See also all the Nobel laureates under review at thecomplete review.