As a Swede I used to take pride in the annual arrival of the Nobel Prizes, especially the one for Literature, but lately I have taken a rather dim view of the “Dynamite Money” as August Strindberg called them unintentionally reflecting Aesop’s famous fable. The reason was not that the prize was often given to some obscure author nobody ever heard of for a reason very few understood, but the lurid Nobel scandal, which made the world wonder why anybody should care what a bunch of horny literary-loving goats preferred besides young women.
But this year’s Literary prize surprised me in a positive way. I had never hear of Annie Ernaux, but having read a few NYT articles and reviews, it looks like a very good choice and one that may redeem the Nobel Committee. Here are two articles I found enlightening:
"Change happens so imperceptibly that only big events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall or 9/11 allow us to establish a 'before' and an 'after.' Closer to home, photographs set a time line, as do family holidays, and both are used as markers throughout the book. But because everything, no matter how obscure or distant, is now available on the internet, we inhabit 'the infinite present.'"
Alex Marshall, Alexandra Alter, Laura Cappelle and Aurelien Breeden:
The ‘exceptional and unique writer’ chronicles her life, including an abortion, love and infidelity.
"Ernaux has described her writing as a political act, one meant to reveal entrenched social inequality, and has compared her use of language to 'a knife.' She was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and by the social upheaval of May 1968, when there were weeks of demonstrations, strikes and civil unrest in France. She has described her prose as 'brutally direct, working-class and sometimes obscene.'"
And now to the unworthy…
The New York Review of Books had a razor sharp long review of Jared Kushner’s “memoir”. If you ever hated Jared’s smug impenetrable mug, here is the explanation, and do not worry, it’s a takedown, ever more devastating as it seems fair.
Joshua Cohen: Lucky Guy
“This is the image of Kushner that remains in my head long after finishing his blandly self-aggrandizing memoir: behind the insipid prose and rigorously squeegeed façade, there hides a secret self flaming with resentment and rage, grudges held and scores to settle. Kushner, below the made-man surface, is profoundly unmade, unfinished, stuck forever in his early twenties, which was when his family unraveled. He’s an eternal son, duty-plagued, obsessed with impugned honor; a self-declared underrecognized overachiever who even after vanquishing the Beltway still sweats the minutiae of status and class like a terminal bridge-and-tunneler; a perfect mute spokesperson for his lost generation, which brought Gen X cynicism to Millennial entitlement; and ultimately an outsize baby of ambitious Boomers who will never be content with his vengeance, because the vengeance he’s been seeking was never his own.”
