Pulitzers

I'm honestly puzzled about the Pulitzer for fiction going to Oscar Wao. (We're got a review of it here.) Not that the book sounds bad or anything, but it wasn't exactly one of the major and/or interesting novels of 2007.

Tree of Smoke was also a nominee, and we've got some lengthy coverage of it here.

Comments

[Richard]

I'd assumed it was the favorite, but maybe that's because it was by far the best 2007 novel I read and I don't read that much.

I was excited about the drama award going to "August: Osage County," an amazing play (I'm always puzzled that so-called literary people don't seem much interested in drama. As a teenager, I preferred reading plays to just about anything) and the music award going to David Lang, a very well-read friend of lots of writers, for his Little Match Girl Passion.

[Jon]

Thank god someone finally said it... I was irked enough when it won the ToB.

"Tree of Smoke," "Remainder" and "Savage Detectives" I all found to be far more affecting (though I've still got 1/4 to go on the Bolano) ...

"Diary of a Bad Year" was so good and strikingly original that I want to call it Coetzee's greatest achievement (where the heck was that one in the ToB).

Oscar Wao... hmmm. It was handled well, pretty fun, and borderline touching... but the '10 year opus/immigrant voice/mishmash-geek-brilliance' hype-rocket shaded what could have been dismissed as gimmick or relegated to obscurity like Jessee Ball's much more exciting 2007 debut "Samedi the Deafness" For me, the story is totally lost to the exterior and was a textbook example of the image taking over. Blah -- it just didn't work, while Remainder, ToS, & DoaBY all rattled me to the core...