Re: The Nobel Prize
If you're giving an individual a million dollars, which they can spend on booze, give away to charity, or have extracted from them by the mafia or sycophants with different degrees of pressure, you have to consider carefully to whom you are giving it. Hence my rather cynical comments. But the important thing is that it is given to a person worthy of the award.
One important point mentioned by Daniel and Waalkwriter is: the award should most certainly not be given for just one book. If any award or prize should consider a whole body of work, it should be the Nobel. If one book is long-winded and obscure, the next may be succinct and a work of genius. But even two books can't make or break an author. When an author has written about fifteen collections of poetry, novels, plays or similar, then maybe they are in the running.
Despite the fact I like to spar with Mirabell on certain topics, I do agree with him on certain things. But I think I, an English-speaker, do side with Liam about Jelinek. The subject-matter itself already rings alarum bells. I am, once again, going to fall back on my old defence, prejudice, and avoid reading any of her books.
As for Ashbery and vocabulary, I do like the subtleties of the English language and the fact that we have thesauri full of synonyms. But sometimes it just isn't necessary to show off by using the obscurest of the obscure word, just to show readers that you are educated.
As for politics, both Pinter and Jelinek were avowedly left-wing. But terribly bourgeois with it. Pinter, although a humble East End of London Jew by origin, married one of the ?lite of the ?lite, Lady Antonia Fraser, the establishment daughter of Lord Longford, from an Anglo-Catholic family (and you can't get much posher than that! - remember Brideshead?) and Jelinek wasn't exactly the daughter of a worker either. I do believe that Antonia Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble know Fraser.
Though the Swedes pulled out all the right stops when they gave the Martinson & Johnson duo the Nobel - good working class chappies, without a whiff of the bourgeoisie. The fact that they themselves were sitting on the Nobel committee was conveniently forgotten. In all fairness, the little I've read of Martinson & Johnson is good. But it is a bit of a disaster to give an international prize to two of your compatriots.
As for anti-Yankyism, Sweden has a very ambiguous attitude to the United States. Olof Palme, the descendant of Baltic-German baronial Latvians, by the way, so another non-working-class socialist leader, steered the Swedes, during the Vietnam war, in a very anti-USA direction. Yet just about the only foreign language most young Swedes can speak nowadays is English - with an American accent. This is telling.
