This is a quick post to honor Herta Mueller, who just won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature announced today. She is a member of Romania's ethnic German minority who was persecuted by the Ceausescu regime for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain. Peter Englund, spokesperson for the Swedish Academy, said this about her work:
"At the same time she has something to tell, partly from her own background as a persecuted dissident in Romania, but also her own background as a stranger in her own country, a stranger to the political regime, a stranger to the majority language, and a stranger to her own family," he added.
What especially caught my attention was this back story swirling around Horace Engdahl, Englund’s predecessor, who told the AP last year that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" and the quality of U.S. writing was dragged down because authors were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."
A curious statement indeed, one I would NOT dismiss casually. My only reservation surrounding Engdahl’s remark is: Why mass culture? It seems Vladimir Nabokov profited from our adolescent reveries in his finest tribute to America, Lolita. These days, maybe what holds us back is the anti-arts, anti-science, and anti-intellectual rabble who have turned our fair land into a cultural wilderness. Maybe Mr. Engdahl has the right idea but merely misses the mark.
