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| her tree hugging was seen as a plus... |
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What none of the newspapers point out (or none that I read) is how much of a joke the Nobel Prize for Literature has become. Round about 1990 the politically correct left leaning Swedes became mightily embarrassed that the vast majority of Nobel Lit Prizes had gone to European and North American white males and an effort has been underway since then to give prizes to Africans, S Americans, Asians and women (or sufficiently PC Europeans (especially Scandinavians) who have paid their dues). Despite its robust literary culture amazingly there hasn't been an American born male winner of the Nobel prize in lit since 1962 when this happened: In 1962, John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper.[42] The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising", adding; "we think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age".[42] Steinbeck himself, when asked if he deserved the Nobel on the day of the announcement, replied: "Frankly, no."[42] In 2012 (50 years later), the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen.[42] The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot,[42]
Many of Alice Munro's short stories have appeared in the New Yorker over the years and as a result I've ended up reading them while waiting to go into the doctor's office or the dentist. Maybe that's why I've never really warmed to her. Her tales, set in rural Ontario, are the kind of stories you overhear when you're queuing up at the Post Office. Minimalist, slight, gossipy. No real point to them which I suppose is the point. There are several things in Munro's favour: she writes about dour Scottishness with approval, she's sympathetic towards working life and she set up one of my favourite bookshops in the world in Victoria, British Columbia (its where I took my selfie twitter photo @adrianmckinty) But still, I think William Trevor writes much better and more interesting short stories than Munro but unfortunately for old Bill Trevor he's a man and an Irishman got the prize only 17 years ago. With this logic Margaret Atwood had the most to lose by Munro's enobeling, but she generously wrote a lovely case for Munro's defence this morning in The Guardian. However Atwood's got to know now that her own chances of a Nobel have gone out the window: they won't give it to another Canadian women for at least twenty to thirty years unless it goes to someone who writes in an Inuit language. Next year it will be an Asian novelist or an African poet or a Finnish librettist or Caryl Churchill but definitely not Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo or Philip Roth or Jonathan Lethem or Tony Kushner etc.
