Ideal Nobel
Our friends over at The Literary Saloon bring out the Nobel Prize for Literature for its annual baffle-athon. As usual, a politically-correct, minimally-translated writer appears ahead of the pack of popular choices with their fingernails still clinging to the life outside writing. Not one of them appeals to me.
So let’s remind ourselves of what Alfred Nobel actually specified. In his will, he asked that it “be given to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
What does he mean by “ideal”? Well, certainly not, in my opinion, the kind of thing you get in many of the winners of the prize. Since Maurice Blanchot - my ideal choice - died in February (and who else did more for literature in an ideal direction?) I’d go for Austria’s Peter Handke.
PS, I seem to say this each October. How embarrassing.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
