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SStockholm, on this season, is wearing crimson and ocher. Under a metallic mild, the Baltic Sea embraces Lake Mälaren. However, within the area, the time has not come for outpourings. Tensions between Russia and the Nordic international locations have been palpable since Sweden’s accession to NATO, which the top of the Kremlin described as a provocation. The majestic spectacle of the fiery crimson Baltic Sea within the fading mild would nearly make you overlook that it’s the potential theater of army operations.
The references to Alfred Nobel, which pepper the Swedish capital – from the museum devoted to him to the fridge magnets bearing his picture – appear to attract the identical thread from struggle and devastation. Because the prize, so prestigious, is the fruit of the need of an arms and explosives producer, who didn’t blush to current himself, on the finish of his life, as an apostle of peace. This man, one of many richest of his time, put down on paper, on November 27, 1895, his need to create prizes that may bear his title. He wrote it in Paris, at 242, rue de Rivoli, an influence district par excellence, between Place de la Concorde and Place Royale. Not far-off, Dietrich von Choltitz, then army governor of Paris in 1944, acquired orders to explode town.
An uncompromising view of the world
Through the creation of the Nobel Prizes for drugs, physics, economics, literature and peace, the inventor of dynamite, the warmonger carried out a whitewashing operation, all of the extra vital since an explosive take a look at had led to the demise of his brother, aged 20. Other failures price the lives of manufacturing unit staff close to the sorcerer’s apprentice laboratories. The one who labored all his life for destruction declared that he needed to create these costs in order that the world wouldn’t “fall apart” and to face in opposition to the “peace breakers.” “.
Taking its source from troubled waters, the Nobel Prize for Literature casts a shadow over its prestige. And yet. The power of the books of distinguished writers over nearly 125 years is striking: Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Gide, Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Steinbeck, Solzhenitsyn, Kawabata, Beckett, Gabriel García Márquez, Bunin, Pirandello, Gabriela Mistral, Hemingway, Nelly Sachs, Camus, Neruda, Pasternak, Toni Morrison…
By reading them, continents open up to us. By waging battle on their page, they reward us with nuanced characters, an uncompromising vision of the world and restore the nobility of the human condition.
Literature, a furrow in a shattered world
Great writers are the lookouts of the world. Because their clairvoyance and sensitive intelligence are extraordinary, they are one step ahead of our societies as they go. They embody a “Promethean power of subversion and liberation”, to use the words of publisher Olivier Nora in Places of memory.
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They know quite a bit in regards to the nice modern “tectonics”. It is sufficient to delve into the fictions of Nobel Prize winners Han Kang and JMG Le Clézio to know the advanced dynamics that hyperlink people to their surroundings, learn Kazuo Ishiguro’s newest work to know the mutation of man below the onslaught of expertise, learn Patrick Modiano to measure the significance of reminiscence, Annie Ernaux to decipher class relationships, JM Coetzee and Wole Soyinka to query the legacies of colonialism, Herta Müller for staying looking out within the face of the rise of nationalism, Svetlana Alexievitch for figuring out collective trauma, Peter Handke for exploring the “rotten peace” that reigns in sure international locations, Jon Fosse for turning into conscious of the lack of human ties… And now László Krasznahorkai for feeling this boring pressure below menace of an invisible cataclysm.
These essential reflections from dwelling writers show the relevance and engagement of literary works. Between the inventor of dynamite and the constellation of those that profess religion in writing, a prize has continued for practically 125 years. And it is a beacon within the evening. Here we do not forget that literature, extra tenacious than explosives, nonetheless traces its furrow in a shattered world. The existence of those males and women-books within the 4 corners of the globe is a consolation and a defend in our compassless universe.
https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/les-laureats-du-prix-nobel-de-litterature-des-reperes-dans-un-monde-instable-09-10-2025-2600660_3.php