doris lessing is this year's nobel laureate. ho-hum. i'm happy to say i've never read one of her 39 books, or even peeked inside. it's very pleasing. you know, i may just inscribe that achievement on my curriculum vitae: "no lessing here".
the nobel prize for literature is a queer thing. in 1970 the prize went to alexandr solzhenitsyn for detailing the horrors of communism. the very next year they gave the prize to pablo neruda who did his utmost to establish the very communism solzhenitsyn had previously described. strange, don't you think?
the prize itself is generally supposed to recognise literary excellence. but that's a misapprehension. the actual remit for the award specifies someone "who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency". there's the troub. under that criteria t. s. eliot—the outstanding literary talent of the 20th century—is ineligible. but he got it anyway. in 1948. he was too good to ignore.
anyway, why lessing? for perseverance, perhaps? or, more likely, because there's no real brilliance around anymore.
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And now, of course, I'll have to run out and read Lessing just to see what there is to see. :) Who would you have picked for the award?
i'd put the award on hiatus (they have previously withheld the award during barren years). it's been ever so long since a genuine work of literature was produced. literature, like the other human arts, simply isn't being produced anymore. books come and go, but literature remains in abeyance. the west has put its energies into technological innovation instead.
on second thoughts. do you know how the academy of motion picture arts and sciences sometimes gives out a "lifetime achievement award" for some extraordinary talent who has, for whatever reason, been previously overlooked? cary grant springs to mind. well, perhaps the nobel committee could go back and honour some of the writers it has previously failed to distinguish (whether they satisfy the "idealistic" criteria or not). raymond aron, for instance (france's one honourable intellectual of the last century).
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