The Nobel Farce

Today the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio and I would be fine with that if not for this article.

To recap for those that don't want to read the article, the gist is that a Nobel judge things the US is too irrelevant in the literary world to be considered for a prize.

Horace Engdahl, a permanent Nobel judge, says that "[t]he U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," and that our collective "ignorance is restraining".


So instead of giving the award to any American author that deserved it (who apparently hasn't existed since 1993 when Toni Morrison won the award), they give it to an obscure French writer, who, by the way, lives in New Mexico.

The Nobel Prize is a great honor, but it loses some legitimacy when you consider how many brilliant writers didn't win: Tolsty, Chekov, Joyce, Borges, Nabokov, Auden, Twain, Zola and Ibsen come to mind. It's not as though the awards were given to better authors and the reasons for not awarding the writers listed above seem to be purely political.


So I don't think Le Clezio is undeserving (how could I: I've never read or even heard of anything he's written), but I think you could make a pretty good case for Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote etc. ad nauseam. Is Le Clezio really a better written or more important culturally than anybody I've listed? I don't think he is, but (for those who may think I'm being a literary Jingo) is he more important than Rushdie or Amis or Margaret Atwood or Alan Paton or Chinua Achebe?

Not even close, right?

And to claim that the United States doesn't play a big enough role in the literary world? Really? The can't be true, can it?

The irony of it all is that the Nobel judge says that the US doesn't translate enough, but how many English translations of Le Clezio's 30 books have I found at my library?

One.