SIGN ON TO Ladbrokes.com, Britain's premier gaming/betting site. Below horses, greyhounds, hurling, snooker and even ladies football -- click on "Nobel Literature Prize."
There they are in all their glory, this year's contenders for the world's most coveted writing award: Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (3-1 odds), Syrian poet Adonis (4-1), Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (5-1), Joyce Carol Oates (6-1), followed (ouch) by Philip Roth (10-1) and down into the nether regions of Nobel hopefuls, a list that veers closer to the sublime -- South Korean poet Ko Un, Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer, novelists Milan Kundera and Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Julian Barnes, Paul Auster and, last but not least, Bob Dylan at 500-1 -- than the ridiculous.
The winner will be named on an unspecified date not long after all the other Nobel categories are announced beginning this week. And of this you can be sure: There will be grousing. The general consensus over the last few years seems to be that the Nobel Prize in literature has become, as Roger Straus, co-founder of Farrar, Straus and Giroux once claimed, a "joke," or as Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, has said more diplomatically, a "great mystery." It's been a difficult decade for the prize-to-end-all-prizes (though the charm of the 10 million Swedish kronor -- or close to $1.4 million -- remains indisputable).
Last year, London literary critic Robert McCrum bemoaned the Nobel's loss of innocence. The 1997 selection of Italian communist anarchist playwright Dario Fo, he wrote, caused "near universal dismay," and the 2000 award to Chinese novelist, playwright and poet Gao Xingjian mere "bafflement." The 2004 choice of Elfriede Jelinek, the belligerently unreadable Austrian feminist, was even more controversial, and caused Knut Ahnlund, one of the 18 members of the Swedish Academy (whose members serve for life) to walk. "Degradation, humiliation, desecration and self-disgust, sadism and masochism are the main themes of Elfriede Jelinek's work," he wrote in the conservative paper Svenska Dagblat. "All other aspects of human life are left out."
Ahnlund accused Horace Engdahl, who has been permanent secretary of the committee since 1999, of "destroying the moral nerve of the nation." The New Criterion magazine chimed in with a conservative attack, calling the selection of Jelinek "a new low" and, while it was at it, saying Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel Prize served, sniff, only to "cheapen" the prize.
