Tip of the fedora to Maitresse, whom I wandered over to see in a late night tour of blogs I hadn't visited in a while. Her post about the Nobel is here.
An interesting interview with Le Clézio, pre-Nobel, is here, courtesy of France Diplomatie, the online publication of the French Foreign Ministry (what we call the State Department).
Oh, and the Booker Prize just went to Aravind Adiga (sometimes spelled Adigha), whom I'd never heard of. He's an Indian writer; both he and Amitav Ghosh (whom I have heard of and read) were short-listed this year. Adiga is only 34 and The White Tiger is his first novel.
I want to spend three months doing nothing but reading fiction.
1 comment:
I hate to say this because I sound like a total chauvinist, but Philip Roth had the prize coming because he earned it through years of labor and building a consistent body of work. The Nobel has long been a political award (big news), and this is one of the years America is out of favor. Roth is paying for our political and cultural hegemony, for G.W. Bush, and for Iraq. For himself, Roth's body of work is immense and, while not always at the same quality level, at its best it enters the realms of nightmare and the worst aspects of our national dream. Try to reread American Pastoral again and say this man didn't deserve more than the simplicity of royalty checks.
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