The French writer Jean-Marie Gutav Le Clezio just won the 2008 Nobel prize for Literature. He was eleventh on the list of betting sites, offering 14/1 odds, just between Inger Christensen and Michael Ondaatje. He’s published thirty-odd books, a few of which have been translated into English. Many people identify two distinct periods in his writing — a more experimental phase in the 1960s, followed by slipping into writing about more accessible themes.
The anti-American comments of the Nobel Prize Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl have been widely disseminated: “The US is too isolated, too insular.” But consider this. The Swedes have given the award to a prose writer, not a single poet, for the last twelve years. Also, in the last fifteen years, ten European writers have taken the award, and the others have had very strong ties to Europe.
So who exactly is being insular? If anything, this proves that the literary vision and reach of the Nobel prize has shrunk from a international focus to a European one. It’s the prize that has become parochial, not the literature.
One thought on “Jean-Marie Gustav Le Clezio Wins 2008 Nobel Prize”
“It’s the prize that has become parochial, not the literature.”
Exactly.
Although with this choice the Nobel committee can have it both ways, they can claim that Europe is still the center of literary work as well as multicultural since the French writer lives part time in the US and in Central America and grew up Nigeria.
At the same time President Sarkozy claimed that Le Clezio has honored the French Nation and its language.
What a joke, what hypocrisy!
Message to Nobel say it loud, say it proud: ‘ethnocentrism is us.’