Posted by: Mary Ellen
There was talk (perhaps wishful) around the Booklist office that this year’s Nobel Prize might go to Margaret Atwood or Philip Roth. Instead it went to a French writer that none of us has read, or even heard of. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, 68, was cited by the Swedish academy as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” Few of Le Clézio’s books are available in English (an English-language version of Wandering Star was released 2004 by Curbstone Press), but this will certainly change.
No American (not to mention Canadian) has won the Nobel literature prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and in fact the permanent secretary of the Nobel academy said recently that the U.S. is too ignorant and insular to ever topple Europe’s literary dominance.
