[Arts]
Harold Pinter
Sometimes the Nobel folks hit a foul (Dario Fo), and sometimes they hit a homer. Their selection of Harold Pinter as this year's literature laureate is a dinger. I have always loved literature, but in high school an English teacher turned me on to playwrights, and this revolutionized the written word for me. Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Beckett's Godot, and Pinter's Birthday Party pushed the boundaries of art and thought.
I suspect Pinter's politics--anti-Bush--will be cited as one factor in the decision, but this diminishes the selection, which will easily stand on its own as one of the great recent selections.
4 comments:
Amen.
Pinter revolutionized theater everywhere but here, where he is still viewed with suspicion and dumfounded non-comprehension. (I did The Birthday Party some years ago and the top comment from members of the audiences was 'I don't get it.' Maybe that was the fault of the production but I don't think so.)
Of course, there are bound to be complaints from people who think a prize for writing shouldn't go to the man who made silence famous, but that simplifies the art of theater to the level of a game show and shouldn't be taken seriously as criticism. This award ranks with the one given to Faulkner at a time when nobody understood him, either. Good for the committee.
The Nobel committee should give the prize to as many accomplished "difficult" writers as it can--who else will? It is one way they make themselves relevant and do literature actual good. By comparison, the Pulitzer and National Book Awards are now limited to popular authors who never write over-challenging novels.
There's always the Booker.
Which apparently was just awarded, and I somehow missed it. I need to do some remedial work there. The Booker is the gold standard for annual awards, and I try to get my hands on as many short-listed books as I can.
(In this month's Harpers, Ben Marcus complains about the woeful state of literature. Rightly, I think, but with one HUGE caveat: American literature. It seems like we're in a new golden age internationally.)
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