No Nobel for Haruki Murakami
After the Physics and Chemistry Nobel prize victories, some in the Japanese and international media were speculating that novelist Haruki Murakami could win this year’s literature prize. However, it ended up going to a French author, much to the disappointment of Haruki Murakami fans.
Neojaponisme has an interesting post today about the push to get Murakami a Nobel:
For the past three years, Murakami has been near the top of the odds list for the prize at many bookmakers. Murakami’s coming out party happened in 2006. Ladbrokes in London did not offer odds for Murakami to win the prize in 2005, but in 2006 he opened at 33/1 and closed at 9/1. In 2007, he opened at 10/1, closing at 5/1. The odds aren’t always accurate — Ladbrokes was giving odds of 50/1 on Doris Lessing when she won in 2007, and even popular favorite and eventual winner Orhan Pamuk’s odds were 7/1 in 2006 — but they are an interesting way of examining how Murakami is perceived. This year, his odds opened at 10/1 and closed at 7/1.
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Its no secret that the Nobel literature committee is a bunch of snobs who feel as though Europe is the rightful center of literature on the planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if next year’s winner was, yet again, another European.
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What about Oe Kenzaburo?
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He won it almost 15 years ago. What about him? Every single winner since him has either been a European or a naturalized citizen of a European country. Coetzee is one of the few that aren’t from Europe. Pamuk is kind of the odd man out, but Turkey is still considered Europe so..
Here’s a little article about some of the panel’s prejudices:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/30/nobel-literature-chief-ba_n_130619.html
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Considering that Nobel Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl, in the course of slagging off American writers, said, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” it’s not surprising that a Frenchman won (not to detract from his work, which I’ve never read.)
On the other hand, although I’m a huge fan of Murakami, I’m not sure I’d put his oeuvre as a whole on the same level as Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, or Thomas Pynchon (to name a few oft-mentioned great living American writers for whom a Nobel would not be undeserved.) Over the past 15 years or so, Murakami has written engrossing urban fantasies (for lack of a better term), but his work has lacked the probing, illuminating quality that his early work had. He’s said he’s at work on “a big book, the biggest book I’ve ever written,” though. Here’s hoping it’s a tour de force. . .
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I like Murakami in general and love The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in particular, but he’s been writing the same novel for the last ten years.
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I agree… Murakami is good light fiction, but I’ve never considered it “literature” in the sense that Oe is. I would be pretty suprised if Murakami won a nobel.
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LOL! Murakami does not regularly write “light fiction’ and this left me wondering which of his works you read. Yes, Norwegian Wood might be described as “lighter” or the “lightest” of his works, at least the most accessible to a larger pop culture type of audience. But The Wind Up Bird, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Kafka could never be described as “light fiction” by any stretch.
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Why all the fuss about the second-most meaningless Nobel?
[Peace Prize is first]
All other Nobels reward efforts that have changed the world.
Science, medicine, economics.
What’s the point of giving a million dollars to a writer who 99.9999% of the people in the world will never read? [That's a serious question, if someone could explain it, please do. I know some writers have affected the world via politics, Locke, Rousseau, and unfortunately Marx, but that isn't really "Literature" anyway, is it?]
The only useful purpose of this (and the Peace Prize) is to show just how looney and pompous the Euro-centric asses who control it can be.
Can we expect an American to “win” in 2009 if Obama wins, as a “reward”? Maybe.
If McCain wins, I think we can guarantee no Lit Prizes for the USA for 4 more years. No tears will be shed.
We can be happy taking the ones that MEAN something.
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Dismissing art, literature, and other aspects of civilization that don’t directly improve human life is a typically conservative attitude. If it were up to you, our world would consist only of businessmen, stockbrokers and industrialists. Unfortunately, they’re the ones who got the world into the present pickle, aren’t they?
Though I do agree that there seems to be a European bias in the awards committee.
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“If it were up to you, our world would consist only of businessmen, stockbrokers and industrialists.”
No. Doctors, scientists, and academics. There’s no Nobel Prize for making the best-selling computer, or selling the most stocks.
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