The big mystery of the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize for Literature for 2014 has gone to French novelist Patrick Modiano, and good for him - $1.4 million is a handy sum, besides of course the honour. Let me make my position clear. I have nothing against the Swedish Academy choosing writers that most people in the world haven't heard of. After all, the world would have been very puzzled when a white-bearded Indian wearing gowns and pyjamas, was handed the medal in 1913 for a slim book of poetry in, well, not the best English one has had the good fortune to read. (Before 220 million Bengalis issue a fatwa on me, let me hastily explain that all I mean is that the English translations of the poems nowhere achieve the beauty, depth and, yes, sheer genius, of the Bengali originals. In fact, I shall go further. I think it's a complete injustice that Mahasweta Devi has not won the Prize yet, given that people like Yo Man, sorry, Mo Yan, a cuddly Chinese Communist Party puppet, has won (2012), a decision that 2009 winner, the German author Herta Muller, called "a slap in the face for all those working for democracy and human rights." )

Issue

But what I found really thought-provoking was the reason the Swedish Academy gave for awarding Modiano. Read this carefully: "For the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation." Did you understand any of that? What occupation? Carpentry? Neurosurgery? Ventriloquism? However, I researched and figured out that the Academy has found the use of upper case and lower case slightly "ungraspable". It is not "occupation"; it's "Occupation"- the German occupation of Paris during World War II. Most of Modiano's works deal with this period. In fact, though he has written more than 20 novels, Modiano has said that he feels he is "always writing the same book". Poor Robert Ludlum. He wrote the same book- one man saving the world from powerful (often Nazi-related) organisations- and did anyone ever consider him for any prize? He never even made it to Oprah's Book of the Month. All right, this is really unfair, since I have not read a word of Modiano, and never even heard of him till Thursday evening. And I'd never heard of four of the six winners before him - Mo Yan, 2012, "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary"; Tomas Transtromer, 2011, "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality", Herta Muller, 2009, "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed", Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, 2008, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization". Yes, but those citations are really cool. "Beyond and below the reigning civilization"? I want to smoke what those guys on the Academy are smoking.

Intellectual

Many years ago, William Golding (1983, "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today"), whose The Lord of the Flies is required reading in schools across the world, visited the Kolkata Book Fair. An intellectual Bengali stood up asked the great man: "Do you think it is fair that you've got the Nobel whilethere are three other living authors whose surnames begin with G, like yours, haven't, and they're all better than you - Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass and Graham Greene?" This was an unfair question, and Golding was understandably miffed. However, as every intellectual Bengali knows, the Nobel Committee took note of this, and Gordimer got the Prize in 1991 and Grass in 1999. But the citations indicate that the Academy's heart wasn't in it. Gordimer was called a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity".

Cop-out

That sounds like a cop-out to me. And Grass received the shortest citation in history: "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history". Greene never made it. There are two theories about this. One, political reasons: the US had a big influence on the Nobel Committee at that time, and Greene was persona non grata in the US (he was on the US visa black list, like the man who's currently the big boss of India). Two, he slept with the wife of a member of the Academy, and this was something the Academy could never forgive. Both reasons are entirely believable. To cut a long story short, the Nobel Prize for Literature (not to mention the one for Peace: winners include Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama) has never been a very credible award. The first four Nobels, beginning 1901, went to Sully Prudhomme, Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen, Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjornson, and Jose Echegaray y Eizaguirre. I am sure Wikipedia will have entries on them. And this when, (to name but four writers) Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov, Henrik Ibsen and Mark Twain were around. As long as John Updike was alive, Americans were disappointed every year with the Prize announcement (and in my opinion, rightly so). Now, the burden of US disappointment (turning slowly into suspicion and conspiracy theories) has fallen on Philip Roth. Rudyard Kipling has won the Nobel, but James Joyce didn't. Winston Churchill won, but George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov did not. It remains a mystery to me as to why Milan Kundera hasn't got a Nobel yet, while Haruki Hurakami, most of whose novels are, well, indecipherable (if anyone can explain to me what his magnum opus 1Q84 was about, I shall go buy a hat and eat it), is rumoured to be always on the list and missing it by a whisker every year. As for me, I have always believed that Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull deserve the Prize for their lyrics. But I suppose, if they ever get around to music, the Academy will give it Bob Dylan, because no one can understand what exactly he's saying.