Another Nobel unknown: The prize shouldn’t be like a Literary Olympics

Before the announcement that our Premier Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize exploded like a stick of Alfred Nobel-invented dynamite and shook the world, the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced.
Herta Mueller was the big winner of the most distinguished literary award in the world.
Ever heard of the Romanian-born German novelist?
That’s what I thought. She’s never had one of her books picked by Oprah for a book club and she hasn’t written a fake memoir. Of her 19 books, only four have been published in the U.S.A.
Leave it to the committee to once again overlook a dazzling roster of American writers to choose an author for the Nobel Prize in Literature who’s virtually unknown outside Europe.
They’ll pick our president for potentially promising potential promise — and for not being His Excellency W. Bush — but not one of our literary giants.
I’m not trying to bully you, Herta Mueller. I’m sure your novels dealing with the brutal Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu are illuminating, it’s just such a narrow subject.
American’s have always thought big, and pointed to the fences in literature, from Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of The White Whale to Holden Caufield’s desperate search for authenticity.
The prize shouldn’t be like a Literary Olympics, but by picking the small and obscure, it diminishes the meaning of the prize, which in turn decreases literature’s place in our lives. Instead of expanding our lives by chartering our collective worldly imagination, diminishing the prize proves true to to what John Updike, who would have been a prime candidate had he not died earlier this year, said about what literature has become in our culture, a “pleasant backwater.”
It’s too late for Updike, but other American writers who should be considered in the future are Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates, all some of my personal favorites.
It used to be that we revered writers who changed the way large swaths of the world felt about and approached life, whether it be politically, socially, morally or emotionally.
That’s something all of our winners have done, from the last American writer to win, Toni Morrison, way back in 1993 to Sinclair Lewis, the first American winner, in 1930. In between were such luminaries as Eugene O’Neill, 1936; Pearl Buck 1938; T.S. Eliot, 1948 (asterick! Though born in St. Louis, Eliot defected to England as soon as he could and became a British citizen); Big Willy Faulkner, 1949; Ernest Hemingway, 1954; John Steinbeck, 1962 and, my personal idol, Saul Bellow, who won in 1976.
And then there are great American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac and Flannery O’Connor who didn’t win. And these are just a few picked at random.
Not that I expect my column to get translated to Swedish and distributed to the committee, for what it’s worth, I think it’s time they get their snooty noses out of Europe and start sniffing out American writers again.
At least one person with some actual pull agrees with me.
Peter Englund, a permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy, told the Associated Press that the Nobel had become too "Eurocentric,"
"In most language areas," Englund said, "there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."
Englund replaced Horace Engdahl as the academy's permanent secretary in June (ah, those crazy Swedes with their same-looking names.)
Last year, Engdahl told the AP that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" and that American authors were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."
As our world culture becomes one culture, that opinion seems a bit narrow, just like their choice.