Hey, I've been meaning to email you several times over the last year whenever your people committed more crimes on humanity or rather on common sense, but you know how it is...
Anyway, I would be quite surprised if Auster got the Nobel Prize. First of all, he's just too young. I mean, the Nobel Club mostly is a geriatric day care center (I'm thinking of Heaney, Pinter and Grass)!
Also, I don't think he would qualify for that award. I like his works a lot but he's just not original in his approach. All this postmodernism stuff has been brought into the literary world by others, he's just **** good at adopting it for his novels. More appropriate names that come to mind would be Pynchon or Vonnegut (who, alas, will never see the day...).
And by the way, I think Lessing's quite a good choice.
But more to the point - what about Al Bore? Now that was some surprise for me - and also a somewhat inconvenient truth to face.
Sorry msfogg, it was the height of rudeness for me to delay a reply to your kind message for so long! Anyway I suspect that as much as I enjoy ridiculing Mr. Sweater Boy (honestly, what man sits for a portrait in 3/4 profile like that and then turns his head all the way back around, Exorcist-style, and makes with the eyelid-batting??? I mean isn't that the whole point of that tortuous position to highlight the bosom? You wanna pin a pearl neclace on the guy for God's sake! But I digress) -- as I was saying, as much as I enjoy taking the P out of y'all, the truth is that deep down you and I probably have very similar tastes in literature! Both fans of the postmodern experiment in our youth, and then that precision mid-30s gravitation toward novels with heft & meaning. We're not so very different you and I! So why let a little waterboarding get between friends? Art is a stateless endeavor. It knows no nationality or skin color. BTW I'm interested to know which literary rag you subscribe to. Mine's the NYRoB *of course*, and I've got you figured for a LRB man, am I right? I got a letter published in it last year! I'm not proud.
Hi Yawny,
I didn't think I would finally get an answer, which is why I haven't been checking the message board recently. I will need to keep this short since work is piling up on my desk.
The truth is, I'm not subscribing to anything. In this country the 19th century came, brought forward some literary magazines which had some success but at the beginning of the 20th century mostly went out of print. So we never really developed the same kind of literary magazine culture that you English speaking guys have. It has actually never even crossed my mind that could try and get hold of an English language publication but I'll be sure to give some thought.
Since my job is to teach German lit, I HAVE to read all kinds of literature for work. (At the moment we talk about German 19th century stuff which is just boring. We might as well read Jane Austen and fall asleep.)
That's why in my free time during the school year I tend to avoid all the heavy stuff. Which is why I turned to British lit - the Brits managed to combine a certain "deepness" with easy reading. I quite like that... with the Germans its always highly sophisticated OR entertaining.
