Pale Fire

Adam Kirsch, my favorite book critic at the now-defunct New York Sun, has landed at Slate. It doesn’t say if he’s going to have a regular spot there, but I hope that’s the case. I also hope he’s given as much range in his assignments as he was at the Sun.

Kirsch’s first post-Sun item is on the idiocy of Horace Engdahl, that Nobel literary judge who recently remarked that American writers are too insular to measure up on the world stage. Sez Kirsch:

As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater—as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel—it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.

Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl’s claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.

Read the whole thing.

Dyn-o-mite!

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and the lead judge for the Nobel Prize for literature, believes American writers are small-minded boobs:

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

Or waitasecond: he is a small-minded boob. My bad.

“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.”

Not that I give much of a crap about contemporary literature, American or furrin.