Mirabell #5, you yourself should win a little prize for saying something concise but informative about Atemschaukel. I'm glad that one of our number has read a book by her. As I've said elsewhere, I started reading Heute w?r ich mir lieber nicht begegnet yesterday. I borrowed the Dutch translation as well, to support me where my German fails me. Too expensive? We have public libraries where I live, ones which even have a few German books. Though from today there'll be a horrible rush in the bookshops to shove M?ller into the display windows.
I agree with Peter D that there is a whiff of a leak. Someone said somewhere that Austrian TV had arranged an interview with her. Seems a bit of a co?ncidence.
I'm perfectly happy for the Nobel gang to swing in the direction of anti-Communism, as opposed to JellyNeckism (bourgeois screwed up armchair loony sexyslimyfuck revolutionism) when they previously picked a German-speaking female (Frauenzimmer, to you).
As for Peter Englund, he strikes me as a right 'nana. I suppose he's trying to tell Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc., not to sulk because they once again haven't got anything. But after Horrors the Hedgehog started banging on about the USA last year, you would have thought that Swedish Academy bigwigs would have had the sense to keep their big gobs shut this year.
A bit of Eurocentrism does no harm. Isn't it time that the other continents started creating prestigious literary prizes of their own, also worth a million quid or so? Brazil is half a continent with a fine literary tradition and a minority of very rich people; so why doesn't Lula scrape around for a million quid? Or maybe that sophisticated cultural figure, the Chav of Venezuela, will start one. We Europeans should be Eurocentric in order to provoke other countries, regions, and continents to stop whingeing, get off their bottoms, and fork out for a big prize. When is that Jewish gentleman, Mr Sabourjian, going to finance a literary prize instead of hoarding nuclear warheads?