All right, so I took a couple of years of French at university. I didn't master the language and I don't read French. That's my excuse for never having read a single book by this year's Nobel prize winner.
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio takes home the million euro prize, and you can bet that all of France is rather smug about the whole thing. Their boy is the brilliant one this year, the best writer. The best writer who fits the political bill, that is.
His break-out novel (sure and we've all read Desert over and over, haven't we) was all about a lost world in the North African desert, not unlike Algiers or Morocco where the French were once colonial overlords, and he contrasted those "magnificent images" with dreadful images of Europe as it doesn't welcome immigrants. Barbaric, cruel, so like America, and give that man a Nobel.
You've only to read his page-turner of a novel, The Mexican Dream, to realize how tragic the whole discovery of America was, for if only the Mayans could have been left alone they'd have created a brilliant philosophy. Or at least that's the premise.
The Academy loves Monsieur Le Clezio because of his ecologic engagement, which you can take to mean that he's written of the horrors of global warming and we're doomed. You'll not see them give a prize to the writers of the Farmer's Almanac, especially when they're predicting a long spell of extreme cold due to diminished sunspot activity.
No Yanks were in line for the literature prize, but then again, they're fond of questioning authority and not toeing the line. If they'd like a shot at the big money, they'll have to learn how to be more European---start accepting that the misery of the world is all their fault, and then put it down on paper. In other words, write more science fiction.
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