The Nobel Prize for Literature for 2016 was recently awarded to Bob Dylan. While this selection may have taken some by surprise, others have been long familiar with the Nobel Committee’s penchant for surprising choices—and, as often, non-choices. Test your Nobel Prize savvy with the quiz below.
1. Who, in its unending quest to deny the Prize for Literature to Philip Roth, will the Nobel committee award it to in 2017?
a. Leonard Cohen
b. Bruce Springsteen
c. Randy Newman
d. Joni Mitchell
e. Sheryl Crow
f. Richard Thompson
g. David Byrne
h. Paul McCartney
i. Phil Collins
j. Robbie Robertson
k. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
l. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
m. Steven Tyler and Joe Perry
n. Carole King
o. Paul Simon
p. Stephen Sondheim
q. Sergio Mendes and Brazil ‘66
r. Peter Paul and Mary
s. Andy Partridge
t. Up With People!
u. Chrissie Hynde
v. Brian Eno
w. Kanye West
x. Elvis Costello
y. Pink
z. Someone, anyone else
2. Match the name with the year in which these authors (and their cited principle works) won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Edgar Wolf George (The Battlement) 1912
Joachim Gauss (Death by Appointment) 1980
Julio Oliveira (El Mundo es Una Lucha) 2003
Giuseppe Santa Croce (Debilitation) 1955
Dietrich Templehoff (Herr Doktor Brandt) 1941
Jarv Gardic (the Wet Stones trilogy) 2010
Tomas Sigurdsen (Wheat in Winter) 1998
Gertrude Greta Rudolph (Magda) 1903
Henri Roger Martin (Ten Cigarettes) 1926
Selma Kristansdottir (Conscience) 1954
3. Multiple Choice: Which one work did the Nobel Committee explicitly cite when it awarded these authors the Prize for Literature?
Vladimir Nabokov: a) Lolita b) Pale Fire c) P’nin
James Joyce: a) Ulysses b) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man c) Dubliners
John Updike: a) the Rabbit tetralogy b) Couples c) In the Beauty of the Lilies
Thomas Pynchon: a) V b) Gravity’s Rainbow c) Mason and Dixon
Joseph Conrad: a) Heart of Darkness b) Victory c) Nostromo
Marcel Proust: a) In Search of Lost Time b) Pastiches c) Pleasures and Days
Virginia Woolf: a) Mrs. Dalloway b) To the Lighthouse c) Orlando
Leo Tolstoy: a) War and Peace b) Anna Karenina c) The Death of Ivan Illych
Franz Kafka: a) The Castle b) The Trial c) The Metamorphosis
Jorge Luis Borges: a) Labyrinths b) Ficciones c) Poemas
4. Alfred Nobel left instructions in his will, in 1895, that a Prize be awarded in his name to rescue his reputation. What had he invented, and how did it threaten his good name?
a) He invented whipped cream, which even then science knew was injurious to one’s health.
b) He invented the self-destroying Dada sculpture, and feared his name would forever be connected with frivolity and lack of seriousness.
c) He invented dynamite, and wished to rescue his reputation from being associated with a revolutionary new way of killing people.
d) He invented the steam-powered jackhammer, and wanted to rescue his literal name from being used to denote “a hellish noise”
e) He invented a method of extracting hydrogen from peat, and feared his name would be associated with horrible explosions once the gas was used commercially in dirigibles.
5. Essay Question: Choose one of the following Nobel laureates in Literature and write a 1,000 word essay on the subject, “What I Like Most About ____’s Writing.”
a) Karl Adolph Gjellerup
b) Grazia Deledda
c) Rudolph Christoph Euken
d) Ivo Andric
e) Patrick White
ANSWERS
1. Any answer is acceptable.
2. Severely berate yourself if you tried to match any name with any year. None of these authors won the Nobel Prize for Literature and, indeed, none of them ever existed. The names are fake. So are the “cited works.”
3. Rap your knuckles with a ruler if you answered any of these. None of these losers ever won the Nobel Prize for Anything.
4. c
5. Give yourself full credit if you wrote anything. These are real Nobel Laureates, and if you’ve read anything by any of them it’s pretty impressive.
SCORING
For having read and answered the questions, give yourself ten points. Now you have ten points. Okay? Happy?
Adam Baker
http://tinyurl.com/q5bfg63
