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    The Nobel Prize
    The Nobel Prize
    The Nobel Prize
    Ebook90 pages48 minutes

    The Nobel Prize

    By Mois Benarroch

    5/5

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    About this ebook

    "If I had a nomination vote for the nobel prize Mois Benarroch would be in the running." Klaus Gerken, Ygdrasil editor.

    A group of Hispanic writers live in the foreign city of Irxal. Years later a successful and controversial writer from the group discovers that one of them is in a mental institution, his illness is peculiar and unknown to his psychiatrists: he becomes one of the characters of his books every new day. The writer becomes obsessive about his transformations and goes to visit him almost every day, until the day he is awarded The Nobel Prize. The book is full of frustrated writers, strange characters, nurses and even aliens.

    This is what Azorin award winner Spanish writer Javier Perez had to say about the novel:  "Writing and madness are never too far away, and some of the greatest writers of all time have been unbearable types settled on a logic at least doubtful. The Nobel Prize, Mois Benarroch forces us to follow through humor, irony and satire and crude acidity through the ravings of a writer who has admitted himself to a mental institution and one of his friends, who he is interested in trying to decipher the keys to his mentality and his work. As neighboring theme, or perhaps central, doubt between popularity and good work, the desire to write for someone without actually bowing to the tastes of the public, a public increasingly less interested in thinking about anything, and jealousy among writers, who systematically lie to one another about publishing, contracts and the number of copies sold of their latest work. Despite its brevity, in the Nobel Prize we can be find nurses having fun with the quirks of their patients, aliens seeking sex with any living creature, wives who doubt whether literature is a profession or a pretext and all kind of characters, some real and some fictional, punctually fulfilling their roles in the farce, disappearing at the right time. In my opinion, although the book wants to look like a humorous entertainment, is a tremendous complaint wrapped in laughter, perhaps because saying it straight could be too crude. It reminded me of lost illusions, of Balzac, with key Sephardic humor." Javier Perez

    "The narrator tells us with a bit of humor about the life of a writer. He tells it from the perspective of a writer looking for a story. He explains what it is like not to hear from publishers and the struggles that being a writer can bring. After visiting his friend, the narrator starts to question his sanity at times.

    We are also given a look at how a writer can become their characters, in this case literally. We are shown throughout the book how each of a writer's characters are part of the writer himself….. I liked this aspect of the book. I enjoyed the content of the book. I liked how the narrator developed in the book. I think that the topic of a writer becoming his characters was interesting. I think this would be a good book for anyone interested in the psychology of the mind and the life of a writer." online Book Club

    "I think the premise was what really drew me in and kept me reading. The narrator is a writer who finds out that an old member of his writing group is in a mental institution. When the narrator visits the hospital, he finds this other writer is acting like his characters, taking on the personality of a different character every day. As the narrator documents his visits to the hospital, his life grows more surreal, as the line between fiction and reality is blurred. The narrative is filled with playful jabs at writers and the craft of writing, and shows how every good writer is just a little insane."  TCC Edwards.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMois Benarroch
    Release dateMay 10, 2015
    ISBN9781513006840
    The Nobel Prize
    Author

    Mois Benarroch

    "MOIS BENARROCH es el mejor escritor sefardí mediterráneo de Israel." Haaretz, Prof. Habiba Pdaya.

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      Book preview

      The Nobel Prize - Mois Benarroch

      Narrating, my father said, is like playing poker, the whole secret is to look like a liar when you are telling the truth.

      Ricardo Piglia

      1.

      AT THE TIME, I WAS not sure whether I was a writer or something else that could not be defined. Obviously, I was one; you are a writer once you have published 20 controversial books. People remember only the parts that bothered them and I was more controversial than read. I never expected at the age of 50 that this would be my literary destiny, and I could not or did not know how to do anything else but write. For my endeavors, I earned little money and, from sheer inertia, wrote one book after the other, like a machine. My books would often go unpublished, or, worse, published by small presses with minimal runs and poor sales. I was like a typewriter, a machine that was not aware of what it was doing. I did not know where I was going, or what had led me there. In middle age, I was still waiting for something to happen.

      I socialized with very few people, hardly talked to the world; I could only talk to the page. Years before, I had been very social, but in those cold days of winter, I did not want to talk to anyone.

      I was walking to the post office to see if a publishing contract or a book from a friend had arrived, when I met one of those writers nobody hears about, who you meet 20 years after you were part of a clique. We greeted each other, He said he had followed my publications, read two of my books which he did not like very much, and that I was surely full of money from all the books, as they were being translated into many languages.

      I wished it were so. I hardly made enough money to buy bread. Sometimes it even cost me money: I would be invited to a big city for a reading of my book and at the end of the day I would spend a fortune and sales would barely cover my expenses.

      He laughed aloud as if it was a joke coming from the mouth of the best comedian in New York, and I did not understand why. More and more often, I made people laugh without intending to do so and at night, it made me weep.

      Suddenly he asked an unexpected question: He asked me if I remembered Jorge, the writer who was older than we were and who was a part of our group. At first, I thought: Jorge who?

      —The one who was already bald, now we all are, but he was the first to be bald, and used to laugh at his baldness, whilst reminding us ’that it was just a matter of time for all of us.

      —No idea.

      —The one who fell from a balcony in one of those parties in Pinto Street.

      Now I started to remember.

      —But are you sure his name was Jorge? Wasn’t it Pablo or Raul?

      —He was the first of us to publish a novel.

      —O! That one...

      —And he was a doctor or something like that.

      —Maybe, I think a... healer, some kind of natural medicine. Look, it turns out the guy is in a psychiatric hospital, completely mad, but the interesting thing is that each day he becomes a different person. Nobody knows what he has.

      —It’s called Dementia.

      —Yes, well. The other day I met a literary critic who had been following him for years and he said he was a bit like Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, who in his last days believed he was Tarzan and spent his days calling Jane and shouting his famous scream. It turns out that Jorge becomes one of the characters in his books every day. That is what the critic said. He also said that the psychiatrists do not understand his disorder.

      —And here I am living at the expense of my wife...

      —What?

      The truth is I have no idea why I gave him that answer. Did I feel guilty about living on the expense of others? Or did I say it because I had thought several times that the goal of a writer is to become and live like characters in books. I dreamt of being a character that had no debts. A character’s life seemed simpler than a writer’s life. Maybe that is why some people prefer to be slaves.

      —I see you in many anthologies, lately, you are becoming a classic writer...

      He stopped my thoughts.

      —You are well paid for it, right?

      The guy seemed obsessed with what the money I earned from my writing.

      —Yes, very much, five kilos of lentils per anthology.

      I laughed to myself, remembering that my friend Javier Perez once won a prize consisting of a few kilos of lentils. I love lentils and I thought it was a good prize, and tax free.

      —You say strange things—, he laughed.

      I still could not attach a name to

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