Repetition again, part 2
Today’s Guardian features a “comment” on the Nobel Prize by Bob Corbett. I recognised the name as someone who has written on Thomas Bernhard on his own website. He doesn’t mention Jelinek’s major influence, the greatest Austrian novelist of them all, the one who didn’t win the greatest prize (the greatest prize, that is, next to writing great novels). Corbett’s review of Bernhard greatest novel Extinction does not begin to comprehend its wonder. I try not to care but today Jelinek’s award made me angrier as it sank in and I thought of the flood of translations and reissues that will result while Peter Handke’s will remain out-of-print and struggling to find publishers willing to fund translations.
Why am I angry? Perhaps because the joy that Handke’s work brings is as incomprehensible as the Nobel committee’s decision. Give thanks that Ralph Manheim’s translation of Die Wiederholung exists.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
