A Prize That Shies From Predictability

By Dwight Garner,Published, New York Times, October 8, 2009
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature isn’t always a bolt-out-of-the-blue surprise, a writer whose work is known only to an elite fraction of American readers. It only seems that way.

Since 2000, after all, Nobel recipients have included V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Doris Lessing, writers of vast audiences and outsize reputations.
But the Swedish Academy’s announcement on Thursday that the 2009 prize had gone to the Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller — she is the 12th woman to win the Nobel in its 109-year history — caught more readers than usual off guard (Herta who?) and reinforced the Academy’s reputation for being defiantly, if predictably, unpredictable.
Ms. Müller joins the ranks of Nobel laureates — most recently the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio last year and the Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 — whose work, at the time of their announcements, anyway, was little known and little translated here.
Only 5 of Ms. Müller’s some 20 books have been translated into English. Those translations are suddenly in great demand and short supply; the Nobel committee has given American readers another unexpected and vaguely exotic homework assignment.
The choice of Ms. Müller, whose dark, closely observed and sometimes violent work often explores exile and the grim quotidian realities of life under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, may feed the suspicions that the Nobel Committee has, not for the first time, put political considerations ahead of writerly ones.
Ms. Müller’s story is undeniably fascinating. She was born in 1953 in a German-speaking Romanian town. During World War II her father served in the Waffen-SS. Her mother spent years in a work camp in what is now Ukraine.
Ms. Müller was later fired from a job as a translator at a Ukrainian machine factory after refusing to be an informant for the secret police. She left Romania for Germany in 1987, along with her husband, Richard Wagner. She has often spoken out against oppression and was critical of East German writers who did collaborate with state authorities.

Read the full piece at NYT.

Past Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature