PINTER

David T and Tim aren't thrilled by the news of the Nobel. But compared with many recent winners - who seemed to have been read by all of twelve people - there's no question that Pinter's work adds up to what they call an oeuvre. (We're talking about the plays, right? Not the doggerel.) Still, on top of El Baradei's Peace Prize, you don't need to be an award-winning playwright to understand the message the Nobel people are sending out. I wonder how much longer we'll really care who they give the baubles to?

UPDATE: David T says I misunderstood [see comments]. Apologies, David.

Alicublog is exasperated by some of the responses from on-line critics. (via Terry Teachout)

As for Pinter's grasp of politics, there's a delicious snippet in Geoffrey Wheatcroft's The Strange Death of Tory England. The subject, of course, is that notorious Bollinger Bolshevik coterie, the 20 June Group:

It's perhaps a relief that these martyrs did not call themselves the 20 July Group after the men who had tried to kill Hitler in 1944....Pinter scented persecution everywhere..."We have a precise agenda and we are going to meet again and again until they break down the windows and drag us out."

Comments

[David T]

No, no. I'm an enormous fan of Pinter, and genuinely delighted by the Nobel Prize: the political idiocy of the recent conduct of the man notwithstanding.

Remember, I've also been fanatical about Morrissey for 20 years. You can make a distinction between the artist and the individual.

[Clive]

Sorry, David. I obviously misread the pauses...

[Martin Adamson]

Actually I'm thinking that the reason the "soft" Nobel prizes like peace and literature go so often to anti-american bampots is that 80% of the hard scientific prizes go to either Americans or people based in America, so the Committees reckon they need to do something to balance it out.

[Jorg]

I am also surprised that most prizes went to politically left leaning authors. Is Martin Adamson (above comment) correct or are there no politically right leaning authors of note out there?
I can't name anyone out of my head, but I don't now much about literature. Please name some names!

[John Thacker]

V.S. Naipaul seems to be regarded as quite right-leaning to have won the prize in Literature, and that was recent.

[Clive Davis]

For a second, I thought Mario Vargas Llosa had already been awarded it. Seems not.
Czeslaw Milosz won in 1980. And there was Bellow in '76.
A list of winners here: http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/index.html