Yeah, there sure is a lot of that out there, everywhere you look. Nothing against Herta Müller, I’m sure she does great work, it’s just that practically no one has ever heard of, much less read her. Nope, not even over here in Germany (of course YOU have, sorry, I’m just being ignorant again).

If the Nobel Prize literature circle’s only claim to fame is being predictable in making unpredictable choices, that’s fine. But if that also includes removing entire nations from the selection process (in this case the one that happens to lie between the borders of Canada and Mexico), then it doesn’t really have anything to do with literature anymore. But, then again, maybe this prize never did have anything to do with literature (ignorant, like I said).

“The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature isn’t always a bolt-out-of-the-blue surprise, a writer whose work is known only to an elite fraction of American readers. It only seems that way.”

“There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world, not the United States. The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”