Nobel Prize for Literature to Tomas Tranströmer

Last week's announcement that Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has won the Nobel Prize stirred up the usual mixed reactions.  On the positive side, the Great Nobel Poetry Bust I wrote about three years ago has been remedied – but by a poet no one outside of Sweden has heard of.  The prize committee seems content to continue its tradition of singling out obscure novelists or poets and ignoring those – like Philip Roth – that have a worldwide reputation.

Georg Dietz, in Der Spiegel, gives vent to his frustration with the Nobel committee by suggesting they just get rid of the prize for literature altogether:

Der Nobelpreis ist deshalb überflüssig, ist lächerlich, ist kindisch, besonders in einer Welt, die von Amanda Knox beherrscht wird. Dieser ganze heilige, trotzige Verkündigungsirrwitz, dieses Warten, auf diesen einen Mann, auf diese eine Frau, auf die Erlösung durch ein Werk oder ein Wort – das ist doch eine kitschige Vorstellung von Literatur und ein bizarres Weltbild, semireligiös, voraufgeklärt, gegenwartsfeindlich.

(The Nobel Prize is therefore superfluous, is ridiculous, is childish, especially in a world where Amanda Knox rules.  The holy nonsense surrounding the announcement, this waiting for a man or for a woman who will bring salvation with a work or a word – that is a kitsch conception of litertature, and a bizarre worldview, semireligious, pre-enlightend, hostile to the present.)

But at least Dietz can't complain that the committee has ignored German or German language authors: the list of laureates includes heavyweights like Thomas Mann (1929), Heinrich Böll (1972) Guenter Grass (1999)  and Gerhard Hauptmann (1912), as well as some inspired picks of more obscure writers like Nelly Sachs (1966) and Herta Müller (2009). 

It's a much bleaker story for American writers: the last prize to an American went to Toni Morrison in 1993.  The critic Hephzibah Anderson sees a poisonous anti-Americanism at work in Stockholm:

At this point, it’s tempting to ignore the antics of a secretive few in Stockholm. Yet the fact remains that the Nobel Prize in Literature captures the global gaze like no other award. In its perverse preference for authors obscure, politically correct or downright unreadable (all three in the case of Elfriede Jelinek), it not only damages its own authority, it marginalizes the art it claims to fete.

But at least one critic doesn't believe American writers to be prize-worthy:

But if we don’t win yet again, we are at fault. America needs an Obama des letters, a writer for the 21st century, not the 20th — or even the 19th. One who is not stuck in the Cold War or the gun-slinging West or the bygone Jewish precincts of Newark — or mired in the claustrophobia of familial dramas. What relevance does our solipsism have to a reader in Bombay? For that matter, what relevance does it have in Brooklyn?

 I couldn't agree more: is Jonathan Franzen the best we can do?