File this one under "Award-winning books I will never read," the National Book Award in Fiction was given yesterday to Peter Matthiessen, a prolific novelist and non-fiction writer of more than 30 books with a lauded 50-plus-year career. Best known for his writings on environmental activism and Native American studies, Matthiessen co-founded The Paris Review in 1953 with the likes of Poet Laureate Donald Hall and American literary cornerstone George Plimpton (yeah, I know, it kinda makes Matthiessen look like the George Harrison of Paris Review founders).
Matthiessen's National Book Award-winning novel(s), Shadow Country, is a revision of a fiction trilogy he originally released in the '90s. Matthiessen also won the National Book Award in the Contemporary Thought category in 1979 for The Snow Leopard.
Though not nearly as obscure as this year's Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, Matthiessen seems to be an odd choice for a contemporary literature award (especially considering that the weighty tome is ostensibly a re-release -- sort of like giving the Best New Artist Grammy to the Zeppelin Remaster Box Set). Given that recent short-listers included some younger, more ground-breaking writers like Joshua Ferris (And Then We Came to the End), this choice seems to be moving the Award in the wrong
direction.
<-- Last Year's Shortlist, much more progressive.
Now more than a decade old, and weighing in at 890 pages, Shadow Country is another Award-winner that is unlikely to make it to my bookshelf.
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Comments: 10
I agree that not everyone is going to run down to the book store to grab the Matthiessen book. Hey, but how about the Hemingses of Monticello, the winner for nonfiction. I bet a bunch of people are going to read that one.
Would that be wrong?