COVER TO COVER

A SHELF OF FADING NAMES: ON NOBEL LAUREATES AFTER THE APPLAUSE DISSOLVES

AMALIA PETRESCU

November 26, 2025

We turn our attention to the half-life of literary fame, beginning with the fleeting announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize. On a single shelf, thirty years of laureates reveal how quickly certainty fades and how memory reshapes itself. This is our meditation on what endures, and what slips away without protest.

---

I am writing this on a late November afternoon, when the day seems to withdraw not in stages but in a single gesture. It pulls away from the room as if tugged by an invisible string, leaving behind the impression of a space hollowing itself out. A few weeks earlier, in mid-October, when the season was already leaning toward its own disappearance, the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. László Krasznahorkai. The name flashed across my phone display in the way news does now: briefly, almost shyly, before drowning in the undertow of other notifications.

I paused when I saw it. Not because I didn’t know who he was—Satantango (1985 in Hungarian; 2013 in English translation) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989 in Hungarian; 1998 in English translation) had traveled with me through different phases of my life—but because the announcement felt strangely disconnected from the world around it. The articles quoted phrases like “visionary intensity” and “the grandeur of collapse,” but even those admirable superlatives seemed to evaporate upon contact with the present moment. I read the first paragraph of one profile, half of another, then set my phone down. For a while I tried to summon the feeling I once had when the prize was announced—a kind of anticipatory curiosity, a sense that literature still broke through the noise—but it never arrived.

A few days later, the announcement was already receding. Story after story displaced it. My memory of the moment thinned. What remained was only the faint echo of Krasznahorkai’s name somewhere in the background of a week filled with other distractions. But that very faintness—its rapid drift into obscurity—is what stayed with me now as I stood in front of my bookshelf. Something about the distance between the spectacle of the announcement and the quiet of this room made me think of past winners, the ones who had once seemed unmissable, urgent, definitive.

Eyes that suggest novels are not written, but exhumed

The shelf is not organized in any way that suggests clarity. Some people arrange their books by genre or by color, while others organize them by the logic of the authors’ biographies, or by the desire to impress guests. I arrange mine by aspiration. The books that I believe will make me intellectually formidable are at eye level. The ones I bought because everyone else seemed to be buying them live closer to the floor. Somewhere between those categories are the Nobel Prize winners, yet their spines suggest an authority that no longer feels as solid as it once did.

They were meant to signal seriousness. Permanence. Continuity. But permanence is fragile. Continuity is wishful thinking. Now, on this particular November afternoon, with Krasznahorkai’s victory already slipping from collective attention, I looked at the laureates of past decades and realized how many of them I had forgotten.

The look of a writer who knows that style—like irony—is a lifelong commitment

There is Dario Fo, the 1997 laureate, whose play collection I purchased in college in a translated paperback edition from 1998. The cover is louder than I remember—bold reds, a theatrical mask—the kind of design that seemed clever at the time but now looks like something salvaged from the lost and found of European political theater. I flip through Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! (1974), noticing how the jokes land differently now, if they land at all. The urgency that once animated these plays feels as remote as a newspaper left out in the rain. Satire expires quickly. Its targets mutate. A joke is a living thing; once the world it mocks has vanished, it collapses into an artifact. Fo wrote to shake the system, and perhaps he did. But it is a strange thing to realize, all these years later, that the system he shook is not the system we live in now.

I return the volume to the shelf.

The calm look of a person who knows that ideas, not applause, outlive us all

I move to Gao Xingjian, whose Soul Mountain (1990 in Chinese; 2000 in English translation) came with me through three apartments, including two relocations across borders. The Nobel committee honored him in 2000 for what it called a “universal validity” born of exile. I remember believing that phrase when I first read it. I wanted universality. I wanted the sense that literature could bridge continents and translate the interior life of one culture into the interior life of another. Now the book feels like a postcard from an older self who read with a particular kind of naivete. Gao’s exile—literal, political—met a Western hunger for narratives that clarified geopolitical complexities through the vessel of a single individual. I turn the pages and recognize the aura of that moment, the way the world briefly positioned him as an essential guide to something larger than himself.

It is not that the book has diminished; it is that the scaffolding of discourse surrounding it has dissolved.

Proof that sometimes the greatest reward for a lifetime spent alone at a desk is finally being allowed on stage in a tuxedo

Next is Imre Kertész, laureate of 2002. My copy of Fatelessness (1975 in Hungarian; 1992 in English translation) is a slim paperback, its pages yellowing not from misuse but from time’s steady erosion. I remember reading it when I believed that learning about atrocity was itself a moral act, a way of placing oneself on the right side of history by merely witnessing it on the page. But books do not absolve. They never did. Kertész’s work is precise, unadorned, almost unbearably clear. And yet his presence on my shelf has faded into the general anonymity of “Holocaust literature,” a category that flattens as much as it preserves. The world keeps manufacturing new crises, new testimonies, new traumas to absorb cultural attention. The result is that earlier urgencies become background noise. This is no failure of Kertész’s. It is ours.

I slide the book back.

The expression of someone who already regrets every interview about to follow

I move to Elfriede Jelinek, whose The Piano Teacher (1983 in German; 1988 in English translation) is full of annotations I no longer understand. She won the Nobel in 2004. At the time, there was a spectacle around her selection—arguments about her hostility, her feminism, her supposed misanthropy. Those arguments have evaporated like steam. What remains is a book that resists assimilation: jagged, elliptical, demanding. It is odd to realize how little remains of once-fierce controversies. The cultural storms that surrounded her have dissipated entirely, leaving the book itself oddly unmoored.

I return it to its place, aware that difficult literature often becomes invisible not because it has nothing left to say, but because the world has developed new anxieties to orbit.

Nothing says literature like receiving a medal from a king who has not read any of your books

Beside her is Herta Müller, laureate of 2009, with The Hunger Angel (2009 in German; 2012 in English translation). The prose is crisp, sickened by fear, shaped by the lived knowledge of state surveillance and enforced silence. Yet even this kind of writing—once treated as essential reading for understanding the brutality of the Eastern bloc—has fallen out of the Western bloodstream. There was a period when readers sought out these accounts as if the truth of the twentieth century required a steady supply of them. That period has passed. It is unsettling to admit that even truth has seasons.

Her book feels like a shard of cold light in my hands. But I place it back.

A speech so polished, even the marble behind him considered applauding

Patrick Modiano—laureate of 2014—now stares out from a row of muted covers. I own at least six of his books, though I remember the specifics of none. There is Missing Person (1978 in French; 1980 in English translation), Dora Bruder (1997 in French; 1999 in English translation), and Suspended Sentences (2014). His worlds run together: Paris, memory, disappearance, identity, shadows of the Occupation. Modiano’s books blend into a kind of atmospheric haze. Perhaps this is deliberate. His real subject was always the instability of recollection, the way personal and national history intertwine until both lose their outlines. I open Missing Person and realize that the feeling of forgetting him is not a failure of mine; it is part of the aesthetic he cultivated. His characters vanish. His places dissolve. And now he does, too.

I put the book down and feel the particular melancholy of realizing that even a writer dedicated to memory cannot preserve himself from cultural amnesia.

A smile earned by several thousand pages of human misery, memory, and the kind of sentences that leave readers quietly ruined

I turn next to Svetlana Alexievich, who won in 2015. For a year after her selection, she was ubiquitous—profiles, interviews, translations published in rapid succession. Voices from Chernobyl (1997 in Russian; 2005 in English translation) sits on my shelf like an artifact from a period when nuclear dread felt hypothetical, atmospheric, a backdrop rather than a forecast. Reading it again, even briefly, I sense why the book mattered so vividly then: The testimonies were unfiltered, raw, almost unbearable. But testimony, once absorbed, seldom retains its force. The shock of recognition dulls. Pain becomes data. In the years since, catastrophe has ceased to be an exception. Crisis is ambient. The stories Alexievich preserved were once an indictment; now they feel like a primer for a world in which disaster is routine. Still, her disappearance from the cultural conversation astonishes me.

I place the book back, aware that what she captured has only grown more prescient, even as she has been pushed to the margins.

The alchemy of prestige: add one medal, and suddenly every backlist book becomes a prophecy

The last of the volumes I pull from the shelf is Abdulrazak Gurnah, laureate of 2021. I own By the Sea (2001) and Desertion (2005). When the prize was announced, a number of readers—not all of them embarrassed—confessed they had never heard of him. I was among them. His novels are gentle in a way that does not attract the current appetite for spectacle. They handle displacement with clarity rather than flourish. The tone is quiet. The effect cumulative. But quiet books are the easiest to forget. I leaf through By the Sea and feel the lingering ache of its opening chapter, the calm voice arriving at an English airport, the bureaucratic labyrinth beginning at once. It is the kind of book that grows in the mind slowly, then recedes quietly. Literature like this does not announce itself. It stays low to the ground. In a culture vibrating with overstatement, understatement becomes almost illegible.

I place Gurnah back, knowing that his presence on this shelf means something even if the world has already passed him by.

At some point in this ritual of taking books down and returning them, I come to a realization that is less revelation than accumulation. The Nobel Prize is not a guarantee of permanence. It never was. Prestige has a half-life. The glow fades. The world grows louder. What remains on the shelf is the lingering question of what it was we thought the prize validated in the first place.

Perhaps the forgetting is not even about the writers themselves. Perhaps it is about us. When I bought these books, I believed in the kind of reading that reorganized a life. I believed that purchasing a Nobel laureate’s novel was a way of attaching myself to a lineage of seriousness, of joining a conversation that stretched across continents and decades. But conversations shift. Interests decay. The canon reshuffles itself in ways no institution can predict.

Standing in front of the shelf now, I realize the deeper truth: We forget not only because the world moves on, but because we move on. The self that once underlined passages, that once believed the right book could alter the course of an entire year, no longer occupies this room.

But the books remain. Their dates remain. Their authors remain in the paradoxical state of being both present and forgotten. The shelf becomes a record not of what I know, but of what I intended to know. Even the act of leaving the room feels haunted. I do not choose a book to reread. I do not rearrange the spines. I turn off the light and let the books settle back into shadow. But as I close the door, I have the faint sense that something essential persists—not the memory of the stories, not the lessons, not even the writers’ names, but the trace of having once cared enough to bring these volumes home.

A shelf is never just a shelf. It is a map of older commitments, older selves, older convictions about what matters. These Nobel laureates are not forgotten in any final sense. They wait in their quiet way. They keep their place. They insist, simply by existing, that forgetting is not the opposite of remembering. Forgetting is a layer. Remembering is another. Both coexist. And perhaps that is enough.

Amalia Petrescu (born 1977 in Bucharest) was educated in Vienna, where she studied music before abandoning notes for sentences that refused to stay in key. She describes her work as an attempt to “document the historical odors nobody bothers to open a window for.” Her essays are known for their precise emotional temperature—cool, meticulous, and quietly devastating, like a politely delivered indictment.

Cover image: Gold: humanity’s most portable proof that someone once paid attention