So much for being non-biased: Nobel Prize judge Horace Engdahl has crapped all over American literature to the Associated Press, so if you’ve got money on Philip Roth or John Updike to be the next winner, you’re going to lose. Engdahl thinks that American authors are “too sensitive to their own mass culture…the U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”
What American books has this huckleberry read recently? The Swedish Academy seems to be run by a pack of snobs who’ve decayed the Nobel into a political prize, so if you’re not criticizing some government you don’t stand much of a chance of winning. The prize will continually go to somebody no one’s ever heard of or cares about. No doubt Roth or Updike would love to win it for the prestige—not to mention the nice chink of change—but to get books into reader’s hands an author honestly would be better off being tapped by Oprah than Engdahl. So screw you, pal.
[See LJ News for additional coverage of this story.]
About Michael Rogers
Ironically, Mike, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was Sinclair Lewis, whose great novel Babbitt was a scathing portrait of American conformity, narrow-mindedness, and insularity, the very qualities for which the Swedes are now criticizing our literature..
Hey, I’d love to debate you guys on this, but I’m taping for Oprah in a little bit, so you’re on your own.