slaggin' pynchon pre-Nobel

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

And now the routine Nobel report from your routing Nordic correspondent:


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The literary spotlight is on Stockholm with Nobel Prize winner to be named
Thursday
Tue Oct 8,11:50 AM ET
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The Swedish Academy will reveal this year's winner of
the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, with writers worldwide — both
obscure and well-known — hoping it might finally be their turn.

The 18 lifetime members of the 216-year-old academy make the selection in
deep secrecy at one of their weekly meetings, not even releasing the date
of the announcement until two days beforehand. They said Tuesday the
winner would be named at 1 p.m. (1100 GMT) on Thursday.

Nominees are not publicly revealed for 50 years, leaving the literary
world with only speculation about who was in the running. However, many of
the same critically acclaimed authors are believed to be on the short list
every year.

Last year the award went to perennial favorite V.S. Naipaul, a British
novelist and essayist born in Trinidad to parents of Indian descent.

"I think a lot of people are thinking that it might be an American this
time," said Felicitas von Lovenberg, a literary critic for the German
newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Von Lovenberg cited Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon and poet John
Ashbery as possibilities, although she stressed her personal view was that
it would not be an American because of political implications.

Pietro Citati, a literary critic for Italian newspaper La Repubblica, said
his pick would be Czech-born writer Milan Kundera, the author of "The
Unbearable Lightness of Being."

Giulio Ferroni, a professor of Italian literature in Rome, suggested
Spanish writer Javier Marias. He also singled out Jewish authors David
Grossman and Abraham B. Yehoshua, "because their writing reflects the
conflicts their country is involved in."

The Swedish news agency TT, meanwhile, said it might be time for a female
writer to get the nod, pointing to American Joyce Carol Oates, Latvian
Vizma Belsevica, Dane Inger Christensen, British writer Doris Lessing and
Canadians Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.

The last woman to win was American novelist Toni Morrison in 1993.

The annual guessing game also often focuses on whether the academy might
aim at a geographical region or genre, and many this year speculated that
it might go for poetry.

Possibilities included Syrian-born poet known only as Adonis, South Korea
(news - web sites)'s Ko Un, Chinese exile Bei Dao and Swedish favorite
Tomas Transtroemer.

Other names circulating in literary circles were Salman Rushdie, Somalian
Nuruddin Farah, Hungarian Imre Kertesz, Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom,
Belgian Hugo Claus, South Africa's J.M. Coetzee, Peruvian Mario Vargas
Llosa, Israel's Amos Oz, Nigerians Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri, American
writers Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, Indian novelist Raja Rao and
Ireland's William Trevor.

Meanwhile, 82-year-old Estonian writer Jaan Kross, best known for "The
Czar's Madman," has been mentioned as a possible winner for several years
but said he was pessimistic about his chances.

"It would be great for Estonian literature if I received the Nobel," he
told The Associated Press on Sunday. "But I don't take the speculation too
seriously anymore."

George Plimpton, the editor of literary magazine The Paris Review, based
in New York, said whoever wins the prize will enjoy more than the 10
million kronor (US$1 million) prize money.

"There's no award quite like the Nobel Prize," he said. "It establishes
you on an international stage and that's what's tremendously important."

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, offered
only vague guidance about the prizes in his will, saying only that the
award should go to those who "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on
mankind" and "who shall have produced in the field of literature the most
outstanding work in an ideal direction."

The prizes in literature, economics, chemistry, physics and medicine are
presented in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in
1896. The Nobel Peace Prize is presented the same day in Oslo, Norway.

story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021008/ap_wo_en_po/nobel_literature_3
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Now, it is quite possible that

1) TRP doesn't want the prize and
2) even if he did, will never get it and
3) it's really no big deal for me as long as
4) they don't give it to DeLillo.


Heikki