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News & ArtsTuesday, September 30, 2008
Books Stupid European: "Blah Blah Blah."
Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 3:29 PM
Nobel literature head: US too insular to compete.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: "Put him in touch with me, and I'll send him a reading list."
As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year's award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it's no coincidence that most winners are European.
"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States," he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday.
Let's see how he likes our literature when we send Randy "The Macho Man" Savage over there to shove some John Grisham novels down his snooty-ass throat. U!S!A! U!S!A!
6
Before you Americans get all worked up, last year's literature Nobel Price winner Elfriede Jelinek thinks it is a joke she got the Nobel Prize and not Thomas Pynchon:
FAZ interview with Elfriede Jelinek
(In German)
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European Literature died about 50 years ago...about the same time their importance to fashion, food and film died as well.
Or to be precise, August 12, 1955 when Thomas Mann died.
16
Dude obviously hasn't read Hunting Mister Heartbreak, and therefore doesn't get why Jonathan Raban chose to move to the States. (To Seattle, even!)
Enough to make me wanna renounce my Scandinavian-via-Ballard ethnic heritage--almost. Instead I think I'll just hurl all over my copy of The Prose Edda.
Sorry, Jerry Lundegaard!
17
Let's see O'Neill, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Morrison, Buck, Eliot, Sinclair Lewis are/were all American. And a good portion of the rest spent a good deal of time in the U.S. sucking up American academic dollars. Nope, no literature here.
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#17 - they good still be smarting that Sinclair Lewis rejected his prize. Probably not though. I bet the truth is closer to what #13 said.
19
Philip Roth does not deserve this award. At all. Stop with that shit. And not Updike, either.
David Foster Wallace, had he lived and published another brick like IJ, would've been my pick for the next American to win.
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To quote a stand-up comic I heard many years ago: "I don't want to brag, but I've been to Europe! Excellent country. We beat them in World War II, y'know?"
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