5/4/2023 0 Comments Mia reading sebastian her poemRecently, following the horrific attack on Salman Rushdie, David Remnick and Bernard-Henri Lévy both published columns arguing that the novelist deserves the Nobel in recognition of his work on behalf of free expression-and also because he was brutally stabbed (and also-implicitly-because he had to endure the indignity of convalescing in Western New York). ![]() The Nobel is not immune to these conversations. Reporting-which is to say, stray conversations with drunk Europeans-indicates that compared to the other issues of international importance (the war in Ukraine, the rapid acceleration of climate change–related natural disasters, energy shortages in Germany, the continued existence of Imagine Dragons, Paramount’s burial of the new Fletch movie, which features Jon Hamm’s first great comic performance), intellectual life on the Continent has been focused on the backlash to what France-a country that literally invented overreacting to things-has declared “le Wokisme.” (Earlier this year, even Vladimir Putin took issue with cancel culture, not not blaming it for his decision to invade Ukraine.) It would have been soul-stirring to see The Sun ’s headline: “DEPRAVED QUEEN HATER WINS FOREIGN AWARD.”īut who will lose the Nobel? Probably cancel culture. Sadly, it won’t be Hilary Mantel, who passed away shortly after Marías, therefore robbing us of the opportunity to observe the notoriously even-keeled English media try to square her acerbic anti-monarchism with its own deranged deification of Queen Elizabeth II. ![]() Not Javier Marías, who died in September, therefore making his novels about how being really into having sex with hot women is actually a form of philosophical inquiry- as long as you also have a nebulous job as a spy-ineligible. Who will win in 2022? Not Haruki Murakami. ![]() The result has been a series of winners who raise questions about the nature of the prize itself: Does oral history constitute literature? Do Bob Dylan’s songs about being horny for Alicia Keys constitute literature? Does Abdulrazak Gurnah even exist, or is he, like JMG Le Clézio before him, an elaborate troll by the Academy designed to determine how many people would pretend to have read an author they had obviously never heard of? And there is the most important question of all: Is New Haven, Connecticut, the center of the literary universe? For every Winston Churchill, a … Rudyard Kipling? OK, wait, never mind.īeset by controversy, ever-changing taste, and the rise of competing mediums like “prestige television” and “trampoline accident TikToks,” the Nobel Prize has, in recent years, faced an identity crisis. ![]() For every Sully Prudhomme, a Toni Morrison. In the battle between the Swedish Academy and its most fearsome opponents, annoying people on Twitter (as well as Twitter antecedents, such as the newspaper column, the radio dispatch, and probably something involving a telegraph and/or a horse), neither party has scored a decisive victory. For 121 years, the Nobel Prize for literature has sought to honor the best writing in the world, and for 121 years everyone has argued that it has managed to do no such thing.
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