Philip Roth Didn't Deserve the Booker International Prize

[Dave Monroe]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/philip-roth-booker-prize_b_864536.html
>
> "We opened up in the 1920s and 1930s, for a brief moment of true
> engagement with the world's other literary traditions. Here Pound, the
> most influential cultural translator and communicator of his time, is
> the exemplar. His hand seems to have been behind just about everything
> good that happened to American literature in that period of
> renaissance. Engaged not only with the traditions of American and
> world literature but cosmopolite of the highest order, he didn't just
> steal from other traditions--as is convenient under present publishing
> industry standards--but was in dialogue with them, as Engdahl would
> surely appreciate. Pound translating Sextus Propertius or Confucius
> somehow Americanizes without debasing. We locked up Pound in a mental
> asylum, of course, for refusing to go to war...."
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/philip-roth-booker-prize_b_864536.html
>
> Uh ...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound#Turn_to_fascism.2C_Second_World_War

"Even the disruption of 9/11 and the wave of fascism that came in its wake ..."

Uh (see above) ...

Also ...

"What recent American novel--by an American, not an immigrant,
writer--accepts or even acknowledges the new global reality, even with
America at its center? There is none."

"... satire--which Americans don't write anymore--universal satire, at
that, in dialogue with so many forerunners of the genre that it is
difficult to pin down the narrative at any point, and reduce it to a
simple meaning."

"For the major European authors and filmmakers, the second world war
remains an open wound, much of the cultural production of the last
sixty years interrogating what happened. No great American novel ever
came out of the second world war either."