Literary Laughs

According to the Guardian, the latest Nobel prize for literature is meant to "cut America down to size" and is causing American reactions of "We wuz (sic) robbed".

Or it would do, anyway, if Americans or anyone else outside of the chattering classes gave a toss about the whole travesty. At one time, the Nobel prize was actually about rewarding great writing and the recipients were authors who the general public recognised and whose books they read–or at least felt that they ought to. Look at this list of past winners:

• Rudyard Kipling
• Anatole France
• William Butler Yeats
• George Bernard Shaw
• Thomas Mann
• Sinclair Lewis
• John Galsworthy
• Eugene O'Neill
• Pearl S. Buck
• Hermann Hesse
• T. S. Eliot
• William Faulkner
• Bertrand Russel
• Sir Winston Churchill
• Ernest Hemingway
• John Steinbeck
• John-Paul Sartre
• Samuel Beckett
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Saul Bellow

And today's titan of the printed word?

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.

I have a fairly eclectic taste in reading, but I can honestly state that M Le Clézio is not one who shows up often (okay, not at all) on my Amazon wishlist. Maybe that is because, like 99.999% of the reading public I have never heard of him and odds are never will again, which pretty much sums up the Nobel committee's literary choices of the past thirty odd years. With the notable exception of a Dorthy Sayer, the prize has gone to writers who would need a major media blitz to rise to level of obscurity or darlings of the claret socialists such as Harold Pinter who should be.

Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to peruse some G K Chsterton to cleanse my palate.