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by Adam Krause

With his recent acceptance in Oslo, President Barack Obama becomes one of a few individuals, along with Al Gore and Jimmy Carter, to have won both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Grammy. (Watch out, gentlemen: Bono is on your tail.) However, what he does not yet have, and the following five writers do, is the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature. These writers are not necessarily strange choices for the prize, since each of them received it after a long and distinguished contribution to the literature of their country. But their work itself, which combines the macabre and the sublime, black comedy and original philosophy, pulses with all the vital strangeness of writing that deserves to be read decades later. Genius breaks all the rules.

1) Heinrich Boll (1972)

German critics have called his work “Trummerliteratur”: the literature of the rubble. It deals with the traumatic, bombed-out aftermath of World War II in Germany. He was strongly rooted in his working-class Catholic town of Cologne, and was horrified to see it taken over by the Nazis and then nearly destroyed in Allied bombing raids. His distaste for anyone who misused their power, from fascist governments to hypocritical religious leaders, manifested itself in the acid wit of his books.

Sample work: The Clown

The Clown surely has one of the most depressing covers of all time, and in this case you can judge a book by its cover. The hero is a failed traveling clown who has real artistic ambitions but is often too drunk to attend his own performances, and hardly has the money for cigarettes. He is trying to win back his old lover, Maria, who has married a pious Catholic businessman. But the clown can see with more clarity from the gutter than from the church window: as he tells us, “The children of this world are not only smarter, they are also more humane and more generous than the children of light.”

2) Par Lagerkvist (1951)

Swedish author Par Lagerkvist, by contrast, said that he “had had the good fortune to grow up in a home where the only books known were the Bible and the Book of Hymns.” Religious parables are a prominent part of his work, and his restrained prose style has been compared by one Swedish critic to John the Evangelist: they are “both masters at expressing profound things with a highly restricted choice of words.”

Sample work: Barabbas

This short novel follows Barabbas, the thief who was pardoned by Jesus on the day of the crucifixion. He goes back to his thieves’ lair and wanders about in a sort of daze. His friends worry that he has lost interest in crime (though he does sneak up behind a man in a crowd who has called for the stoning of an innocent woman, and stabs him in the back.) Eventually he becomes a slave working in a mine, and is interrogated by a powerful Roman who learns that he personally met Jesus. Barabbas, who has not become a Christian from the experience but still has a dim inkling that there is something more to life, can only answer: “I want to believe.”

3) Yasunari Kawabata (1968)

Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize. He was orphaned at four and was raised by his grandparents, who both passed away by the time he was fifteen. Without any family to return to, he threw himself into boarding-school life and soon gained fame for both his literary writing and his reporting for the Mainichi Shinbun, still Japan’s biggest newspaper. The public suicide of his friend and fellow writer Yukio Mishima, who did not want to live in a Japan humbled by its World War II defeat (see the film Mishima for a terrific rendering of Mishima’s life and his death by seppuku, which involved plunging a dagger into his own heart while a friend beheaded him) affected Kawabata greatly. He had recurring dreams of Mishima for nearly a year before committing suicide himself, through gas, in 1972.

Sample work: The Master of Go

This was Kawabata’s favorite of his novels, based on his reporting experience as a young man. The aging Go master, Honinbo Shusai, is playing a last match with his reputation at stake against the young challenger Otake. The match, which takes six months due to various stalling techniques by Shusai as he sees with dismay that the younger man has what it takes to defeat him, is a media event that transfixes the nation. Some critics have read it as an allegory of the contest between Japan and America in World War II.

4) Jean-Paul Sartre (1964)

Sartre was one of the last philosophers to be considered a celebrity in his own time: when he was arrested at a student protest in 1968, the French president intervened, telling the police, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” In his most famous work, Being and Nothingness, he put forth the existentialist philosophy that the possibilities of consciousness are infinite, but the practical constraints that life puts on us due to the need to be physical actors in the world are limiting, causing a constant dichotomy and anguish. He is the first Nobel Prize recipient to turn down the prize: he was, by that time, dismissive of literature, which he saw as a way to avoid real political commitment. However, multiple accounts claim that he tried to ask for just the cash part of the prize.

Sample work: No Exit

This play about purgatory, written shortly after Sartre’s experience being confined in a German prisoner-of-war camp, is a demonstration of one of his key ideas: that the gaze of others is what keeps us confined in our societal roles. Three sinners end up in a room together, and instead of the torments of fire and brimstone, they torture each other with probing conversation that exposes their worst anxieties. When the door is finally opened at the end of the play, none of the characters will leave for fear of what the others will think of them. Sartre’s most quotable aphorism appeared in this play: “Hell is other people.”

5) William Faulkner (1949)

This most distinguished of Southern writers was not widely read in America until he won the prize, owing perhaps to the difficulty of his novels, which employ stream of consciousness, radical shifts in point of view and sometimes-obscure regional dialect. His acceptance speech, which can be listened to on YouTube though it is nearly unintelligible, is regarded as the best Nobel Prize acceptance speech ever given in any category. He called upon writers to concern themselves with “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

Sample work: As I Lay Dying

This unusual novel, with most chapters just a page or two long and one as short as five words – “My mother is a fish” – concerns the odyssey of the Bundren family through rural Mississippi to bury their mother in her home town. Fifteen characters, including the corpse, narrate the novel.  Faulkner wrote this book in a period of four weeks while working the night shift at a powerhouse, so don’t complain that you have no time to write!