Re: The Nobel Prize
Hmm, "deserving" seems to me beside the point: if the Swedish Academy sees fit to award the prize to this or that writer, he "deserves" it. But I do very much regret that the recognition and money that come with the prize go to the likes of Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky, Pamuk, Jelinek, the Chinese guy, Le Cl?zio, Coetzee, and a bunch of others I can't remember offhand. I'm glad Updike keeled over before some old Swedish fool decided to bestow the Nobel upon him. I hope the same will happen to Atwood, Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates, to mention three eternal North American candidates for the prize.
I should of course say that I haven't read a word of Jelinek's or the Chinese guy's work and have no plans to, but I have little doubt I would find it off-putting. (Yes, yes, I know. I suspect it's for opinions like these that I'm one of those being called arrogant and humorless ego-trippers on the "Whither WLF" thread. Add "paranoid" and the portrait would be complete.)
Neruda's is an interesting case: he won only after Sartre refused the prize. And he won for his communist politics. Despite the popular image of Neruda--a kindly avuncular old gent--his behavior as a member of the Chilean diplomatic corps in soon-to-be occupied France, as a father, as a human being, in short, was despicable; if he were a great poet you might be tempted to overlook these personal failings, but, as a close look at almost any of his poetry makes immediately clear, he isn't. Far from it, in fact.
Some twenty years later you have Brodsky, another clumsy poet, winning the Nobel, this time, oddly enough, for his anti-communism.
More than once too I've wondered if several members of the Swedish Academy have fixations with bowel movements and the products thereof. I wonder because a lot of books by recent Nobel laureates (Saramago's Blindness, Lessing's The Good Terrorist, almost everything by Coetzee) seem, to me at least, to dwell somewhat excessively on shit. Coetzee, for example, lingers almost lovingly over bucketfuls of feces produced by men with severe intestinal disorders.
I foresee a bright future, a noble future, as it were, for Jonathan Littel, he of that highly scatological French book, whose name slips my mind just now.