So excited to read 80 Phillip Roth Snubbed Again, the Nobel Doesn’t Even Matter think pieces today.
— Jessa Crispin (@thebookslut) October 9, 2014
The Nobel Prize in Literature was announced today, and the winner is… Patrick Modiano? You probably haven’t read him unless you are French, or took French literature in high school and pretended to understand the symbolism in his sad short novels (one of which is called “In the Cafe of Lost Youth”—ENNUI ALERT). Seriously, for a second I confused him with Georges Simenon, who is like a very classy, Belgian (dead) Raymond Chandler, and was like, finally, excellent genre fiction is getting its due, mortality be damned!
It’s not. But Patrick Modiano is, and that’s a good thing. Still, Twitter is full of its annual post-Nobel announcement cryface sympathy for Haruki Murakami or Philip Roth, who didn’t win, probably including the guy who wrote this at the NY Times:
This year, the top three candidates for the Nobel in literature, if we follow the money at Ladbrokes, the British gambling website, at any rate, are said to be the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the melancholy Japanese surrealist writer Haruki Murakami and Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarussian investigative journalist.
While we’re airing our grievances, I’m firmly Team Joyce Carol Oates, but I can’t help but be pretty heureuse for Patrick Modiano, whose win seems in keeping with last year’s laureate, Alice Munro. Just a couple great writers, prolifically writing amazing short fiction, quietly, under the radar, seemingly forever, until, whoops, Nobel.
This is bullshit. I obviously should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in return for my pioneering work in regards to online interactive textworks.