Re: Swedish Academy - The Peter Englund era
Yikes. This EllisIsland character is quite toxic.
I don't think there are many people on this board who would argue with Pynchon getting the prize - he likely won't, though, because he is difficult to make contact with. His life is so private. And the Academy felt a great deal of shame when Sartre refused the prize, I imagine. Why run the risk of letting that happen again?
Well said, Liam. I don't think that there are very many writers out there who have a truly international appeal insofar as they have a sizeable following around the globe. Maybe Murakami? Maybe Rushdie? I think Vargas Llosa had that in spades when he was selected. Aside from him and Alice Munro, though, I hadn't heard of any of the winners who were selected under Engdahl's lead, and I suspect I had only heard of Munro because she is a fellow Canadian, and one that we are very very proud of. Do they know of her in India, or China, or Brazil? Two of these countries alone comprise of nearly 30% of the world's population - how can we say somebody has a truly international appeal if they don't have a decent sized following in these two behemoth countries?
Regardless, I'm ok with saying that Engdahl's period could be recognized for providing an international reputation for several exciting authors. Transtrommer, for all of his literary talents and reputation in Europe, was invisible in Canada except for at the most niche bookstores in our biggest cities. Now I can easily find his recent publications celebrating his with, if not individual folios of his collections. Same with Modiano, unless you were at a french book store in Quebec or a in community with a sizeable francophone population. Mo Yan was entirely unknown, and Muller was a surprise to even the most well-read literature critics on this board. Munro I wanted to win, and Vargas Llosa's win is probably the reason that I read world literature at this point (his interview on our national radio was charming, and my silly young self knew that the Nobel Prize was quite the incredible honour).
I can't speak much to the previous period at all - I wasn't reading world literature during that period. However, looking at that list, I don't know if I see anybody who shouldn't have won the prize. Of course, I haven't read everybody's work, and the distaste for Jelinek on these boards has several times dissuaded me from reading one of the two volumes of hers that I own (but that won't be an acceptable excuse for much longer). In the end, there are always going to be several winners who could be subjectively replaced with others, of course. But somebody who should have outright not won the prize? I don't know - generally I'm willing to trust the academy's assessments, and recognize that for everybody chosen there are a good half dozen others that also could have deservedly received the prize. Which brings us back to Pynchon. Surely he deserves the prize, right?