Jorge Luis Borges

Because he never wrote anything of substantial length and development. He's like the Erik Satie of literature

> nobel prize

because like every award the nobel prize is political nonsense first and foremost and borges didn't play the game right

The nobel is fucking bullshit now, and has been for at least 25 years. The prestige that it had once was lost to progressivism.

The Nobel guys like polticial humanitarian shit so I don't see why they'd give the award to some dude writing about mazes and mirrors and shit.

Why win the Nobel when you can list everyone who won the Nobel in a story which does not win the Nobel?

Would their winning a prize make the stories better? Are they any worse for not having won a prize? The best thing about Borges was that he was just a fucking writer's writer. He wrote, and that's more than enough.

Just about no one worth a damn has ever won it.

This is far from true. Don't be silly.

silly silly man.

Go through their entire list of laureates from 1901 to now. There are maybe 10-15 names worth mentioning over the whole list, and none of them were the absolute best of their time. The award has always been pure political wankery with no substance.

This man, in my country he is everything.

He is the Argentinian Murakami after all.

He explicitely announced his support for the military dictatorship in Argentina (not sure about Pinochet) and he disliked democracy. Once he said "Democracy is an abuse of statistics"

No swedish communist refugee-loving cuck would have ever given him the prize.

Because they're awful

It's not a lie, go and google it senpai.

Just reading Ficciones for the first time, masterpieces all of them.

Pinochet gave him a prize and Borges accepted, and that did not go well with some people.

>Arlt
Sabe

Just 'cause you don't understand them that doesn't make them awful.

Although I will admit Finnegan's Wake was puzzling to me.

Politics definitely, and I say this as a leftie.

Ableism

This. Same goes for the Oscars.

>Would their winning a prize make the stories better? Are they any worse for not having won a prize?
'The validity of winning a Nobel prize can be disputed, it is clearly not the only standard of what is considered 'great literature' nor does it try to be.
But Borges wanted to win it, a lot. He wanted to be part of that Parthenon of writers, no matter how foolish of a pursuit that may seem.

True. Too many blacks and females who deserved it much less than other people have won. Great authors still win it sometimes, though.

Pantheon, not Parthenon. The Parthenon is a building.

There are like 50 names worth mentioning at least, unless you don't really care about literature.

Very obviously this - thank you.

Not a valid point. His stories are perfectly substantial in themselves, and Satie is a great composer anyway.

It's an absolutely valid point. The literature prize isn't like the science; you win the prize for a body of work, not for a single accomplishment. Read the bases given for each prize: they each reflect in some way on the career and character of the author (with the exception of Albert Camus; who was only awarded it so the committee could counter-snub Sartre, anyway).

What? Borges has a very substantial body of work. He has plenty of great stories, poems and essays, and he's considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. I have no idea how he doesn't qualify in this respect.

Yeah, but nobody from the left would have accepted a prize from Pinochet. And he hated Perón and the Argentinian left, so I think is safe to assume that he at least didn't dislike Pinochet.

Eh, maybe you're right.

At least 2/3 of the winners since 1920 have been deserving (discounting earlier winners since they used different criteria at the time). Great authors who won the award include Carducci, Kipling, Hamsun, France, Yeats, Shaw, Undset, Mann, Lewis, Galsworthy, Bunin, Pirandello, O'Neill, Hesse, Gide, Eliot, Faulkner, Lagerkvist, Mauriac, Hemingway, Jimenez, Camus, Pasternak, Quasimodo, Perse, Andric, Steinbeck, Seferis, Sartre, Agnon, Asturias, Beckett, Solzhenitsyn, Neruda, Boll, White, Montale, Bellow, Aleixandre, Singer, Elytis, Milosz, Garcia Marquez, Golding, Seifert, Simon, Soyinka, Brodsky, Mahfouz, Cela, Paz, Gordimer, Walcott, Morrison, Heaney, Saramago, Grass, Naipaul, Coetzee, Pinter, Lessing, Vargas Llosa, Transtromer and Munro.

>Munro
>and not Mo Yan
Please. Munro is just an innovator of plot; in that way she's practically an opponent of literature.

That's a really silly opinion.

Shit. Forget what I said then.

I like to have when I organise my weltanschauung and value-schema. As a part of having fun, I've also let myself have this opinion: the fact that my opinions come from a more fun place than yours, makes them more valid than yours.

Alice Munro a shit.

Oh no! *I like to have fun, I meant

He didn't like democracy.

>he liked Pinochet
Peter Englund has said that he thinks this was the reason. This was also one one of the reason they wanted to give Yan the price.

you forget Tagore you dumbfuck

Didn't say those were the only great ones.

did he take his poo to the loo?

he won Cervantes Prize which is the Spanish superior equivalent so, who cares?

It's not as much money.