An insular view of the Nobel prize
The Nobel prize for literature doesn't really have much to do with literary excellence - and that's not a bad thing

Marco Roth writing in guardian.co.uk, Wednesday October 08 2008

I feel a little sorry for Horace Engdahl, although not too sorry. His comments to American journalists last week gave us a glimpse into how the mind of at least one Nobel literature prize judge works, and it wasn't pretty. American writers, en masse, he claimed, were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture".

Then he launched into one of those incoherent anti-American rants that somehow transformed all of American literature into Sarah Palin and George Bush: "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," he said. It's unclear who "they" are in all of this.

Presumably Engdahl meant US publishers, not US authors. Even so, he forgets that one of the largest of those publishers is now a fief of a multinational corporation based in Germany, where the bottom-line decisions are made. The remarks are so general as to be nonsensical. Where does that big dialogue of literature take place, actually, and how does one participate in it?

Although he was not acting as a spokesperson for the Nobel academy, Engdahl's opinions have been taken as representative of the academy as a whole, or at least a majority of it. The AP story that broke Engdahl's views to the world also printed the predictably outraged and baffled responses of American editors and academicians, but did not bother to get any other members of the "notoriously secretive" prize committee on the record. Still, the prejudices of one man tend to cast doubt on the actual prestige of winning the award. What kind of a badge of excellence is it when a writer earns the approval of someone like that?

Read the full story at the Guardian online.