Review by Beatrice_Greenwald -- The Nobel Prize

[Beatrice_Greenwald]

[Following is a volunteer review of "The Nobel Prize" by Mois benarroch.]

---

2 out of 4 stars

---

Share This Review

---

“Everything we write is about writers, if you write about a doctor you are writing and therefore all the characters are influenced by the fact that the writer is writing, so all of them are writers, in one way or another.”
-Mois Benarroch, The Nobel Prize, p.53

This quote from the book The Nobel Prize, written by Mois Benarroch, shows in a concise way that all people are ordinary, but also insane, only in different ways. Reminiscent of Luigi Pirandello’s play, Six Characters In Search of an Author, which plunges the viewer into a Russian doll effect of actors, Mois Benarroch does much the same in terms of writers and how they perceive the world and each other.

The narrator, his name unknown until the end of the novella, but revealed to be Jorge Acuardio, encounters an acquaintance with whom he had been in a group of writers. The acquaintance tells him about another member of the group who had become mad and was in the insane asylum, becoming one of his characters every day. Intrigued, the narrator visits him and notices that the insane writer sometimes becomes a man wanting to fire his driver, a man without several appendages, and even a woman believing that her child had been kidnapped. The narrator researches the novels that the insane writer has written and so continues to visit him, knowing how to cope with the characters that are within the writer each passing day. Along the way, the narrator meets other people who confuse and scare him with their vague answers and bizarre ways of going through daily life.

The Nobel Prize novella takes the reader on a brutally honest journey through the mind of a writer, combining thought-to-text writing and philosophical ramblings of a meta-literary nature. Mois Benarroch shows the reality of writers’ lives, presenting the often unheard-of facts about their prestige, awards and the poverty-stricken hassle that they have to cope with because of this prestige. In this regard, all the writers portrayed in this novella start to lose their sanity, wanting to become their characters even more in order to escape.

Personally, I found the book a bit strange, as it is miles away from regular realism novels/novellas. It was well written, and most of the conversations between the narrator and the other characters in the book are vague and mysterious enough to the reader to open up space for a myriad of interpretations for the exact meaning of a phrase or description. The narrator tends to contradict himself in his personal rambling thoughts and that leaves the reader, as I have experienced, sitting wide-eyed and confused for many minutes on end after reading a section of the novella. It is a novella that stays in the back of one’s head because of its strangeness, and in my opinion, it is a good thing. A book’s plot should always stay in the mind, thus it is a good plot.

I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars, because this novella can be classified under the meta-literature section. Not many people like this genre, as one must be adept at analyzing all the abstract concepts of the plot and the arbitrary characters within it. This book will be well suited for university lecturers and philosophers, but the general public would, for the most part, not find the book’s messages within the strange lines of dialogue and thought. Also, the book (given to me in PDF format) sometimes have language and punctuation errors.

******
The Nobel Prize
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on iTunes

Like Beatrice_Greenwald's review? Post a comment saying so!