Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘nobel prize’

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Le Clézio's Nobel Lecture: "In the Forest of Paradoxes"

In his wonderful Nobel lecture, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio argues passionately why the writer, literature, and literacy matter in a global society, responding in particular to Stig Dagerman’s Essäer och texter. I greatly admire how this speech–like the best fiction–is at once intimate and inclusive, intensely personal yet widely relevant. Some choice excerpts: If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection. The writer, the poet, […]


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american writers and the nobel prize

Like many, I bristled at recent remarks by Nobel Prize Committee head Horace Engdahl that American writers are “ignorant,” “isolated,” and “insular,” unworthy of consideration for the prize. Guaridan writer Jean Hannah Edelstein agrees that these remarks were offensive but wonders if particular limitations imposed on American writers might restrict our capacity for literary greatness. In this article, she argues that American writers “need support to reinvent the national literature. This will require a great deal of support and sympathy from US publishers: what the industry must do, in order to give American literati the license to unequivocally scoff at […]



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