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.
There are precious few American authors today who belong on anyone's short list for a literary prize. We just don't value literacy that way -- Dean Koontz being Exhibit A.
ReplyDeleteThere's no shortage of good American writers producing excellent literature. Contrary to what Europeans would like us to think their mass markets are as large and as that segments taste as lowbrow as ours in the US. Quality literature is always going to be a relatively small segment of the market. Nothing new there. My wife and I have spent the past several months reading Denis Johnson. Working back from 'Tree of Smoke' we have discovered a writer of considerable heft combined with great wit.
ReplyDeleteReading Annie Proulx as well and re-read (30 years on) The Sot-weed Factor by John Barth. Fantastic work.
Don't despair! Lots of great work out there. We only need look.
Cheers!
"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,"
ReplyDeleteTo me, that describes anyone worth talking to.
I don't think literature in America is dead at all. The rest of the literate world is more populous than we are in the first place and I don't think the average Hungarian or Latvian is more literate but less likely to elevate the lowest common denominator to the position of cultural leadership some countries like the USA do.
Of course the committee has often been criticized for the banality of their choices, but I'll let that go until I read her.
"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,"
ReplyDeleteTo me, that describes anyone worth talking to.
Hey, that's me, too! ;)
More later (on that whole American vs. European lit, when I have some time. I hope.)