Nobel. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2008 has been awarded to the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."

What a banner year for French culture. Laurent Cantet's The Class wins the Palme d'Or and opens a French-tinged New York Film Festival; the San Francisco Film Society launches its first annual French Cinema Now series; and New French Films will be screening next month at BAM. Meanwhile, Michel Houellebecq has debuted as a feature director (with The Possibility of an Island), Bernard-Henri Lévy carries on his campaign to become the contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville and President Nicolas Sarkozy stows away the bling and grabs the reins of the EU Presidency to actually get stuff done. Bravo.

Updated through 10/10.

Updates: "Though his name will elicit more than a few shrugs, he's fairly well-represented in English translation, and we'll try to help you sort through some of that later in the day." The Literary Saloon has already done some digging, too.

Meantime, anyone following the feuilletons and other culture pages knows that a mild, some might say silly controversy has been brewing over the Prize in the last few days. Scott McLemee for Inside Higher Ed:

Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, recently told the Associated Press that the literary culture of the United States is too mass-media oriented and cut off from the rest of the world. "The US is too isolated," he said, "too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." The last Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to a US writer was given to Toni Morrison 15 years ago. An obvious implication of Engdahl's remarks is that things will remain that way for a while yet.

How valid are Engdahl's criticisms? Are there tendencies in U.S. culture that negate his perspective, or particularly grievous ones that confirm it? What American author seems an obvious candidate for the Nobel?

Those were the questions I posed by e-mail to a range of writers, critics, translators, and scholars.

The Guardian has more in its special section on the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Entries on past Prize-winners: Doris Lessing (2007), Orhan Pamuk (2006), Harold Pinter (2005; more) and Elfriede Jelinek (2004).

TLS opens a special section on Le Clézio.

"Among Mr Le Clézio's most recent works are Ballaciner, published in 2007 and described by the prize committee as 'a deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film in the author's life, from the hand-turned projectors of his childhood, the cult of cinéaste trends in his teens, to his adult forays into the art of film as developed in unfamiliar parts of the world.'" Alan Cowell opens a "Times Topic" for the New York Times.

"The sound of America's literary journalists searching Wikipedia en masse is deafening," notes Lev Grossman in Time. But: "Le Clézio's literary output and his blend of fiction and ethics - he took up environmental causes long before they entered the collective consciousness - have made him one of the most popular writers in France. As far back as 1994, a poll by a French literary magazine found Le Clézio listed as the greatest writer in the French language."

The Literary Saloon has "rounded up quotes from the (English) reviews of a few of his books. Far from comprehensive - he was widely reviewed in the 1960s and 70s - but it's worth noting that the recently translated texts have hardly gotten any review-coverage in US or UK newspapers and non-trade magazines."

Updates, 10/10: Via Granta, a translated interview with Le Clézio conducted by Tirthankar Chanda for Label France.

"[T]he fact that Le Clezio and Elfriede Jelinek of Austria have the prize is not entirely down to geopolitical score-settling," argues Mark Lawson in the Guardian. "The key lines in yesterday's citation were that reference to "departures" and "adventures" in the French writer's work. Winners have, especially in recent years, been those who represent some kind of formal innovation... In contrast, the greatest contemporary Americans operate, though at remarkable levels of poeticism and psychology, in traditional forms. By the definitions of the Nobel committee, which likes its novels to be really novel, the prize that Roth or Updike might win has already been claimed, in 1976, by Saul Bellow."

signandsight translates a few reactions in the German-language press.

Posted by dwhudson at October 9, 2008 5:14 AM