Congratulations to the great Mario Vargas Llosa, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The folks at the Nobel Prize committee really outdid themselves this year. Not only did they award a literature prize to what appears to be a minor Eastern European writer, they’ve given the Peace prize to President Barack Obama on the grounds that he has remade the international community.
President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” a stunning honor that came less than nine months after he made United States history by becoming the country’s first African-American president.
The award, announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee while much of official
Washington — including the president — was still asleep, cited in particular the
president’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.“He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.
He has? Look, I think he is a drastic improvement over the arrogant fool who sat in the Oval Office for the last eight years, but I can’t help but wonder whether the Nobel committee has allowed the previous administration’s failures to distort its view of the current president.
The fact remains that he has been office a little less than nine months and has accomplished little on the world stage. He may be committed to nuclear abolition, but so far all we have to show for that is some harsh words for Iran, some general goals and some talking.
On a separate but related point, I find it difficult to accept the awarding of a peace prize to a president who is still considering a troop buildup in Afghanistan.
The Nobel Prize for literature has, to put it mildly, a rather awful track record — as this piece in The Record by Marie Arana, the former editor of The Washington Post Book World, makes pretty clear. While I disagree with some of her judgments — I like Steinbeck and think the downgrading of his contribution in recent years is unfortunate — her larger point is well taken.
How could judges who profess to know literature shun Tolstoy, James Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Nabokov or Henry James? If the goal, as the original mandate proclaimed, was to identify those who have “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind,” why extol the muddled pornography of Elfriede Jelinek? Or the unremarkable output of Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, former judges themselves?
Hank Kalet 