Nobel Time

The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced tomorrow, which has produced a flurry of articles about who might win and about the award itself. Salon has an interesting take on the bad deeds of past winners, including Knut Hamsen, who was a Nazi sympathizer, and Gunter Grass, who was, if briefly, an actual Nazi. Susan Salter Reynolds wrote a great piece in the Los Angeles Times about the Award and how the winner is determined.

Is it art or politics or a little of both? Oddsmakers have Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk as the frontrunner, but does it ever turn out to be who they think will win? Other supposed contenders are the Syrian poet Adonis, Philip Roth (overdue?), Ryszard Kapuscinski, Milan Kundera, Joyce Carol Oates (huh?), Margaret Atwood, and so on. They've given it to a lot of Europeans lately, so chances are they won't do that again, especially to an Eastern European (since Imre Kertesz and Elfriede Jelinek are recent winners). So that leaves Asia, Africa, South America, or North America.

Who do I predict? Well, predicting this award is a fool's game. I don't think the award should be political; I think it should be based solely on artistic merit--on a brilliant body of work. But so many other factors are in play, including geographical and genre considerations. A poet hasn't won in a few years, so maybe it's time. Since Pinter won last year, you can rest assured that a playwright won't win this year.

Who would I like to see win? Well, Roth has a shot, and I think he deserves it on purely artistic grounds. If you want an African--a black African--then how about Chinua Achebe? Isn't he more deserving, artistically, than Wole Soyinka was? Of course, I really wish Ireland's William Trevor would win. Or, even more, Canada's Alice Munro (a far more deserving choice, in my mind, than Margaret Atwood). They are both unlikely to win, however, because their work isn't overtly political. And that's a shame, because they are two of the masters of the short story, whose work will surely last. Unlike, say, Jelinek's novels or the plays of Dario Fo.

As Reynolds points out in her article, a lot of biggies did not win the award, including Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. And a lot of head-scratchers won (anyone ever heard of Romain Rolland, who won in 1915, or Frans Eemil Sillanpää, who won in 1934??). But the award has also gone to some amazing writers, like Faulkner, Hemingway, Camus, Coetzee, Marquez, Eliot, and, yes, even Toni Morrison.

So, tomorrow, the award will be announced and then criticized or praised. But in all likelihood, it will get people talking about literature and maybe even get them to explore a new (or not so new) writer's work. That can't be a bad thing, right?

I'm still hoping for a Munro or Trevor upset!