Here's the dish:
As the Swedish Academy enters final
deliberations for this year's award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl
said it's no coincidence that most winners are European. "Of
course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't
get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary
world ... not the United States," he told The Associated Press in an
exclusive interview Tuesday. He said the 16-member award jury
has not selected this year's winner, and dropped no hints about who was
on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn't comment on any names. Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S.
writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,"
dragging down the quality of their work. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, doesn't take this one sitting down: "You would think that the permanent
secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically
overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few
non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," said David
Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. "And if he looked harder at
the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the
generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger
writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their
adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged
by the horrors of Coca-Cola. A coworker here at Splice pointed out that Engdahl's judgment best describes Americans as a whole, rather than our writers. We haven't decided which scenario we prefer.
America's Soft Power Slipping in Lit World
Americans are "too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing." Ouch.