It’s that time again when literary folk dust off their shattered predictions from years past and wager (money, prestige, honor) on who will win the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Most likely, you will be wrong. Most likely, virtually everyone will be wrong. Even people who do nothing other than read, study, and talk about world literature will be wrong. At least when betting on horses, you have a chance because one of the horses in the race will actually win. No such guarantee here.
The best discussion so far occurs at the office pool of Words Without Borders, where a commenter explains why Americans are unlikely to receive it this year. It won’t be Pynchon, it won’t be Roth, it might be Delillo. I heartily disagree with the noms of Paul Auster, David Grossman and Joyce Carol Oates — but I always disagree with anyone who thinks Joyce Carol Oates has a chance.
World Literature Forum has some excellent kibitzing (Could John Banville win? Who really knows?)
Of course, the last two years there have been leaks. Someone’s been talking. So watch out for news articles where some member of the academy’s found dead of a “heart attack” in a hotel room, and rumors suggest he/she was the mole. I kid. Kind of.
Seriously, wait to enter your office pool or actually risk real money until just before the announcement. Maybe the leaker/mole will score a hat trick — third year running.
Also, the New Yorker book blog The Book Bench has all the odds from the British bookies, including the 100/1 William Gass (No. Not him. That is all).
Of course, if you’re a real professional, you skip everything I’ve listed above and you go straight to M.A. Orthofer’s The Literary Saloon, which provides the most in-depth analysis of possible contenders.
If you’d like to discuss more, post your predictions in the comments section or join the Facebook group page discussion.
5 comments
Philip Roth will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Roth has been at the peak of his powers for so long that it hurts every other writer just to contemplate such a run. Roth could probably write a book about a diseased hair follicle and get the reader turning the page — on sheer stylistic brilliance and unexpected insight, along with summaries of old, perhaps dead knowledge that are nonetheless pegged so lucidly that we feel as if final justice has been meted out, at long last. And Roth will win precisely because he is American. The world will react in a hundred variations of shock, yet sage heads will be nodding, saying, ‘It is right. The Nobel Committee has done the impossible, and we can once again believe that their criteria have been cleansed of asinine, short-sighted politics. Yes, they’ve gone back to acknowledging dazzling literary genius strung across the lie-resistant loom of time.
This is a well written case for Roth, and I believe Roth to be a forerunner among the Americans. Unlike Updike, whose books vacillated between the brilliant and the terrible (Terrorist?), Roth has been consistently good.
However, simply because he’s good doesn’t mean he will win the Nobel. Politics — yes, sometimes, asinine, short-sighted politics — tend to govern the discussion. The laureate needs to have married literary talent with political activism (or at least address the political in their works). Roth is certainly ahead of Pynchon and McCarthy on this note, but I also would doubt that he’s the head of the pack internationally.
I agree with your description of the shock that it will cause for the committee to pick an American. I’d like to see that.
Could it be an Indian? Probably Vikram Seth or p.r.o.b.a.b.l.y. Rushdie? Their stylistic sensibilities and international moorings may well downsize all the ‘Satanic Verses’! Anyway, Llosa, Adonis or Pynchon should win it this time if the Swedes are up for some fair, literary game-plans.
If Rushdie won it, there would be an international furor and riots.
I’d still be happy they chose him, though.
It will be South Korea’s Ko Un.