[cognito20]

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No offence but your citations of German language literature are a bit out of date in terms of relevance to the most recent Nobel Prize, given that most of them are dead.

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That's because there aren't really any great Austrian fiction writers writing today, at least not of Nobel laureate quality, anyway. Gunter Grass is certainly not Austrian, but he was the last German-language author -before- Jelinek to win the Nobel, so you can't really say that I'm all that far behind there. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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I apologise for assuming that you paid little attention to foreign language or German language Literature,

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Apology accepted. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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but I don't see that a former CompLit student who works in a bookshop is necessarily qualified to deny someone's qualification for the Nobel Prize on the basis of whether or not he's heard of them.

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In general, you're right. In this case, however, this particular one is. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] I also played College Bowl while I was at Cornell and was the literature specialist on a team that finished in the top four at the national championships three years running. So, yes, I think I would have at least some clue about any potential Nobel laureate out there.

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If you pay a great deal of attention to contemporary foreign writing, then maybe, but... I don't think managing a booskshop means you'll automatically have heard of all the best writers worldwide, especially given that the commercial success/popularity required to receive translation is hardly equal to literary merit.

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Sure it would, at least in 97-98% of the cases. Not meaning to overly toot my own horn here, but if the author in question was writing in German or Russian, they wouldn't need to receive translation in order for me to recognize them. I'm fluent in both languages and can read them in the original. When I said that I wrote my thesis on the _Danzig Trilogy_, I was not reading it in English translation. You miss things that way. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I'm the store manager. As much as the corporate suits in Westbury allow me to, I make purchasing and merchandising decisions for a 200,000-volume bookstore. I religiously read the _New York Review of Books_, _Publisher's Weekly_ and _The New York Times Book Review_. Forgive me if I'm being presumptuous if I think that any world-class authors whom I might not have at least -heard- of have just slipped through the cracks, and that I know at least 97-98% of them. Maybe Jelinek was one of the 2-3%. It's possible. I just think it's more possible that there were, say, 20 or 30 better candidates available out there. So she stood up against Jorg Haider. Good for her. So did almost every decent Austrian. You don't see them getting trips to Stockholm.

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("That's because the best candidates this year all happen to be English-language authors.")

This is seriously ridiculous.

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Or so you assert. Counterexamples would help to bolster your case some. Non-English language authors who have not previously won the Nobel Prize whose oeuvre is comparable to that of Roth, Pinter, Oates and/or Atwood. Chinua Achebe I'll give you, perhaps, and what has he really done other than _Things Fall Apart_ and _Anthills of the Savannah_?

I will admit, just for example, that I had never heard of Naguib Mahfouz prior to him winning the Nobel in '89 (granted, I was 17 when he won and my secondary school English classes didn't exactly focus on Arabic literature), and he has since become one of my 5 or 10 favorite authors on the planet. There have been plenty of years when a foreign-language author (or multiple foreign-language authors) has been one of the 4 or 5 most deserving potential recipients of the Lit Nobel. This is not one of those years.

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"Anyone who thinks that Stephen King is a writer of "trash" stopped reading his work after _It_, or just hasn't been playing close attention. I think King is similar to Herman Melville in that, while he's certainly a popular writer while he's alive, he will really begin to be taken -seriously- as the all-time great writer he is only after his death."


So is this. It's a very difficult thing to argue. but I don't understand how you could think there's as much thought or intelligence in King's entire opus as a single Melville short story.

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Give me a break. This is the same sort of assertion I hear from "lit snobs" practically every other day, and the reason they use it is because they know they probably won't be called on it because it's based on opinion, not fact. They SAY that Melville's stories have more "intelligence" in them than King's, but yet they fail to PROVE that to any reasonable person's satisfaction.

It IS a well-known fact that Herman Melville, while he was alive, was never considered to be a great writer and purveyor of "intelligent literature". He was considered a travel writer, along the lines of Captain Frederick Marryat then, and perhaps somewhat comparable to, say, Bill Bryson now, albeit with much less humor. There is nothing whatsoever ridiculous about it. No less an authority than Jorge Luis Borges, who counted Melville among his favorite writers, alluded to it in an interview with William F. Buckley, Jr. on the -Firing Line_ TV program.

--Scott