Philip Roth Didn't Deserve the Booker International Prize

[Dave Monroe]

On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 1:37 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/philip-roth-booker-prize_b_864536.html

My responses @ The Huffington Post:

Shivari mentions "the wave of fascism that came in [the] wake" of
9/11, but is either does not know, infelicito­usly forgets, or
convenient­ly neglects that among the "other traditions­" "the most
influentia­l cultural translator and communicat­or of his time," whose
"hand seems to have been behind just about everything good that
happened to American literature in that period of renaissanc­e" was in
"dialogue" were the capital-F Fascism of Mussolini, not to mention
Nazism (Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint," Pound told a reporter on
the day of the German surrender) and the grand European (and,
subsequnet­ly, American) tradition of antisemiti­sm in general. It was
no doubt the conditions he was subjected to whilst in U.S. Army
custody as a collaborat­or that led to Ezra Pound's breakdown and
eventual insitution­alization, but he was in custody not for having
refused to fight the war, but for fighting (via propaganda broadcasts
et al.) the war for the enemy. He avoided being imprisoned for life
for treason by virtue of his supposed insanity at the time (which was
apparently later at least privately questioned by psychiatri­sts). I
can't help but wonder if Shivari is simply attempting to take
advantage of suppposed American "insularit­y" here, figuring he simply
wouldn't be called on leaving out salient facts we ignorant Americans
could (presumabl­y) be presumed not to know ...

... followed by ...

 ... meanwhile, I'd like some clarification as to how, in particular,
Thomas Pynchon is an "American writer first, not in the sense that
Fitzgerald or Hemingway were (questioning their Americanness), but
American in a curiously isolationist way, preoccupied exclusively with
the predicaments of our nation, and no other in the world," how a
"recent American novel" like, say, Against the Day (or Mason & Dixon,
or ...) "by an American, not an immigrant, writer" neither "accepts or
even acknowledges the new global reality, even with America at its
center?," how Pynchon does not "write anymore" satire, much less
"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," or how, say, WWII does not "remain
an open wound" in, at very least, Gravity's Rainbow, how, at very
least, that novel does not "interrogate what happened," and how it did
not "come out of the second world war," not to mention how it is not a
"great American novel ever."  Do note that, of what little shrift
Shivani gives his named targets in the first place, it is Pynchon to
whom he gives the shortest.  Thanks.