By Dwight Garner
The winner of the NobelPrize in Literature isn’t always a bolt-out-of-the-blue surprise, a writer whose work is known only to an elite fraction of American readers. It only seems that way.
Since 2000, after all, Nobel recipients have included V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Doris Lessing, writers of vast audiences and outsize reputations.
But the Swedish Academy’s announcement on Thursday that the 2009 prize had gone to the Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller — she is the 12th woman to win the Nobel in its 109-year history — caught more readers than usual off guard (Herta who?) and reinforced the Academy’s reputation for being defiantly, if predictably, unpredictable.
Ms. Müller joins the ranks of Nobel laureates — most recently the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio last year and the Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 — whose work, at the time of their announcements, anyway, was little known and little translated here.
Only 5 of Ms. Müller’s some 20 books have been translated into English. Those translations are suddenly in great demand and short supply; the Nobel committee has given American readers another unexpected and vaguely exotic homework assignment.
The choice of Ms. Müller, whose dark, closely observed and sometimes violent work often explores exile and the grim quotidian realities of life under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, may feed the suspicions that the Nobel Committee has, not for the first time, put political considerations ahead of writerly ones.
Ms. Müller’s story is undeniably fascinating. She was born in
Ms. Müller was later fired from a job as a translator at a Ukrainian machine factory after refusing to be an informant for the secret police. She left Romania for Germany in 1987, along with her husband, Richard Wagner. She has often spoken out against oppression and was critical of East German writers who did collaborate with state authorities.
The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, made it plain that Ms. Müller’s personal story was appealing, as well as her prose. Announcing the prize, he spoke of her “very, very distinct special language, on the one hand, and on the other hand she has really a story to tell about growing up in a dictatorship.” She also has a story to tell, he said, about “growing up as a stranger in your own family.”
The grit and force of Ms. Müller’s writing may win over skeptics. Her sensibility is often bleak, but the detail in her fiction can whip it alive. In her novel “The Land of the Green Plums,” published in the United States by Metropolitan Books in 1996, she described poor, young Romanian college girls in their dorm room, without Western makeup, trying to make themselves beautiful:
“Under the pillows in the beds were six pots of mascara. Six girls spat into the pots and stirred the soot with toothpicks until the black paste grew sticky. Then they opened their eyes wide. The toothpicks scraped against their eyelids, their lashes grew black and thick. But an hour later gray gaps began to crack open in the eyelashes. The saliva dried up and the soot crumbled onto their cheeks.”
The Nobel Committee cited her as a writer “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”
According to Ladbrokes, Britain’s largest bookmaker, the Nobel Prize this year was supposed to be the Israeli writer Amos Oz’s to lose. He was said to be a 4-to-1 favorite near the end of the voting.
American fiction writers were also thought to have a better shot than usual. Bruised feelings linger over an interview the Nobel secretary, Horace Engdahl, gave before the award was announced last year.
“There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” Mr. Engdahl said, “not the United States.”
“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” he continued. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”
“That ignorance is restraining.”
Not that he didn’t have a point about America and literary translation.
With that statement Mr. Engdahl crushed the hopes of Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Tomas Pynchon,Don DeLillo and perhaps most notably John Updike, who died in January and is now ineligible. The last American writer to win a Nobel was Toni Morrison in 1993.
Should Ms. Oates and Mr. Roth, Mr. Pynchon and Mr. DeLillo never win a Nobel, however, they will be in exalted company. Among those who never won the Nobel Prize: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust. Herta Müller’s selection may seem like another Nobel head-scratcher, but she is an often inspiring one.
About learning to become a writer while under a dictatorship, she has said: “I’ve had to learn to live by writing, not the other way around. I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it’s as simple as that. And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/books/09prize.html?ref=books
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