I actually asked a former head of the Swedish writers' union a couple of weeks ago in Visby, Sweden, about the rumour that Jaan Kross was in the running for the Nobel in 1991, but he dismissed the idea as sheer speculation. I still maintain that Kross should have got it years ago, when you look at his work and the body and quality thereof. And most of his significant novels were available in Swedish, translated by the late Ivo Iliste. But it didn't help. And as I have written elsewhere, Sweden desperately wants to avoid again bringing up the embarrassing episode in 1946, when some 500 Baltic refugees were deported by Sweden to the Soviet Union, and immediately sent to Siberia. This would be highlighted, were a Balt to win the Nobel.
As I say, the still active members of the Swedish Academy will all read English, so Pinter won't have been a problem. Jelinek more so, as she had the bad manners to write in that obscure language, German, spoken by only one hundred million people worldwide. They'll have read her in English translation too, I wouldn't mind betting.
I wanted to obtain a review copy of Sj?n's "The Blue Fox" from Telegram, but have had no success so far. He read a chunk out from that book at the Nordic Translation Conference in London last March. Previous to that event, I'd never heard of him. His translator, who read her version, is the likeable and easy-going Victoria (Vicky) Cribb, who has a penchant for Iceland and visits it often. Sj?n himself plays the role of the Mysterious Half-Mute Scandinavian, but judging by the excerpts, the book sounded good. His books are short, from what I've seen, a happy Scandinavian trend (c.f. Peter Adolphsen.)
Returning to the Swedish Academy, I'm sure that the reason many non-literary people get so mesmerised with Nobel laureates they will never read is because there's one million dollars in the kitty. If the winner only got a glass ornament, a free dinner, and an easy ride in the world of publishing, there would be much less interest.
I don't think that a work of art should always be provocative and politically charged to win prizes. One decade's vibrant political correctness is the next decade's tired old hat. Private life also exists, and does not have to Jelinek?sque, i.e. full of incest and male chauvinist pigs, to make a good novel.
Rushdie and the fatwa did indeed cause a relishable amount of squirming - plus a few resignations from the Academy. Swedes love to be neutral - on the surface at least - and have kept their noses clean during international conflicts. During Palme's reign, they loved America, but hated everything it did.
We're not supposed to be racist, but racial considerations always seem to rear their ugly head when it comes to choosing winners. When Chloe Wofford won the Nobel in 1993, this was, no doubt, because of her ethnic provenance... We're also supposed to be even-handed when it comes to gender. So the Orange excludes all men, in a world where there is a large number of women readers and even publishers. Now the Orange Girls are cringingly suggesting that they should have a token male judge. But they still appear to only want women writers. That's one thing at least that the Nobel does right: no gender bias.
I dread to think what'll happen in Mulisch wins the Nobel. He started out writing interesting short-stories of the weird and Modernist type. But after writing a huge book on metaphysics or similar ("De compositie van de wereld") he wrote a huge novel ("The Discovery of Heaven") that made his name internationally. This was filmed starring Stephen Fry. His "The Assault" will have been much more to popular taste, although the subject matter had been dealt with by both Vestdijk and Hermans years before. But like Jelly Neck, Mulisch's got this gorgeously mixed background: half-Jewish, half-collaborator. But he has indeed written a prodigious amount of literature. He is a very likely candidate if the Nobel jury can get past the fact that he's a white male.
Ending on a gory note, this same former head of the Swedish writers' union, as above, brought up the subject of Harry Martinson's bayonet suicide, saying that the worst thing was that he didn't get it right with the first stab, but had several attempts. Ugh!
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