Two new members of the Swedish Academy were announced today: Jesper Svenbro and Kristina Lugn. Two good choices, I think. The comments in the press are so far quite enthousiastic.

Jesper Svenbro is an excellent poet and a classics scholar in Paris. His book Phrasikleia, on reading in ancient Greece, is translated into English, I believe.

Kristina Lugn is a playwright and a poet. Irony and drastic humour are typical qualities of her work. She is widely read and liked in Sweden. Thus a popular choice, but not populist.

On Thursday (12th October) the winner of this year's literary Nobel Prize will be announced. I haven't heard any interesting gossip and the speculations are about the same as last year (when all of them was wrong, of course).

Sorry for never updating this blog! The Literary Saloon complains about lack of Nobel buzz this year, so I'll do my best. An article in the Norwegian press seems to claim that dramatist Jon Fosse, according to "sources close to the academy", "is seriously considered" for the prize. I've mentioned him before on this blog, but wouldn't give much credence to that kind of source. I've also had an open discussion on my Swedish blog, which lead to no consensus, as would be expected. Personally I've placed my bets on Philip Roth, but lots of other usual suspects are mentioned. Perhaps it's time for a poet? Then probably Adonis, Gennadij Ajgi, Adam Zagajewski, Inger Christensen, or Tomas Tranströmer. Among novelists Amos Oz, Orhan Pamuk, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Herta Müller, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cees Nooteboom, Hugo Claus, Nuruddin Farah, as well as others, are frequently mentioned.

So, what's a nice blog like this doing in this part of the internet, never getting updated? Maybe its writer is busy writing a new novel? – Alas, not at all. That slob is probably in bed reading Thomas Mann, if he's not blogging in Swedish or playing on-line Scrabble. He claims to be studying Greek, too, but I happen to know that he hasn't opened the textbook in the last week or two.

My favourite living poet, Thomas Kling, is no longer a living poet. Very sad. I translated his brilliant cycle Der erste Weltkrieg (The First World War) into Swedish a year ago. English translations of his poetry do exist; but are probably hard to find. A collection of links to texts in German are to be found here and there's also a good interview here, as well as links to several obituaries from Perlentaucher.

An essay in English on Swedish books published during 2004 can be found here (pdf). Not that I personally remember reading any Swedish book worthy of international attention last year (though I suppose whatever crime fiction was written will do for competing with Dan Brown in German airports). Anyway, at least my book is mentioned.

Yes! The first Paris Review interviews (those from the fifties) are finally available on-line. Unfortunately, the interview with Faulkner isn't available for copyright reasons. I especially wanted to read that one, but I guess I'll have to find it on paper. Interviews from the sixties and so on will be added to the site during 2005. Happy new year, by the way!

The Liffey Project is

a site devoted to contemporary writing from five countries: Ireland, the UK, Austria, Germany and Denmark. The Liffey Project is supported by the Culture 2000 programme of the European Commission and [...] presents a selection of writing from each of the participating countries in the original and two translated versions. All of the writing on the site is available in English, Danish and German. Material is also translated into these languages from Welsh, Irish and Slovenian.

I have only had a first look (and am not right now in the mood for reading anything that isn't printed on paper) but several interesting writers seem to be included. I don't know if the site is still updated. Apparently they haven't bothered to tell anyone of its existence. (Thanks to Bengt in Austria for sending me the link.)

The Darwinian poetry site seems very neglected nowadays, which is a shame, but at least the poems are a lot better than they were at the start. Not that I'd ever expected any great poetry to come out of it, but the concept is an interesting one. At least the early history of poetry, with orally transfered and manually copied texts, commonplaces and imitation, may very well be regarded as an evolutionary process. What if humanity is merely the medium for literature, for myth, and the medium, in this case, isn't the message? Sounds like another philosophical SF-novel I'll never write... (I'll leave it to those monkeys with the typewriters, where ever they are.)

So, what is it that Elfriede Jelinek is going to miss out on today? Probably great food and very boring conversation with the king of Sweden (or someone like that). As for me, I'm escaping from more Nobel coverage and going to Helsinki over the weekend.

No Nobel news of real interest today, I think... That Elfriede Jelinek isn't exactly fond of Austria is of course no new information either. Austrian writers seldom are. Thomas Bernhard (whose last novel Extinction [amazon.com] definitely would have been worthy of a Nobel prize) never tired of denouncing its "nazi catholicism", as he liked to call it.

However, the interesting thing is that I have always thought all of this to be an exaggeration. Which it maybe is. But recently I have had the opportunity to speak to a few rather prominent German writers, one of which lived in Austria, and they claimed that the Jelinek/Bernhard-picture of the country as horribly conservative and utterly unwilling to challenge its Nazi past is more or less literally true.

Having never been to Austria I can't have an own opinion. But I know that I have at least two readers in Austria, so feel free to add yours.

Elfriede Jelinek's Nobel lecture is now available (the actual prize isn't awarded until Friday), in several languages and video, and will be commented on by people more competent than me. Let me just note the hair-do metaphor in the beginning: possibly typical for a writer whose alleged greatest interest is fashion, and who gives the following scene instruction for her Jackie Onassis-monologue in Der Tod und das Mädchen IV:

Jackie sollte in einem Chanel-Kostüm auftreten, denke ich (da müssen Sie aber schon sehr gute Gründe haben, wenn Sie das anders machen!). Man könnte auch als Vorbild dieses letzte Foto im Central Park (mit Maurice Tempelsman), das auf der Bank nehmen, Trenchcoat, Perücke (da Haare durch Chemo ausgegangen), Sonnenbrille und Hermès-Kopftuch.

Her scene instructions is in fact often not the least entertaining part of her plays...

And, oh, I almost forgot: Did she deserve to get the prize? I don't know. But I think it may be more constructive to give it to someone like Jelinek, who regardless of greatness surely is worthy of more international attention, than to someone like Coetzee, who is already internationally famous.

Sometimes the Academy's choices are just weird, like most things in the world, but one thing I am sure of is that the Nobel Prize for literature is NOT politically awarded, despite predictable claims to the contrary. I mean, it wasn't long ago that the choice of the excellent Naipaul was called a populist right-wing anti-arab gesture, etc, etc. And now those despicable left-wing Swedes have given it to a mad feminist communist, probably only to annoy American commentators... (Yeah, sure. I wish they would have.)

In the Swedish newspaper Expressen there's a short text today by Elfriede Jelinek, where she writes about the speech that she's not going to read, because of her now well-known social phobia. (As for me, I think literary prizes are exactly what it would take to cure my social phobia...) Anyway, it seems silly to try to translate into English from a Swedish translation, but the gist of it is that she can't travel with the speed of her speech; and even though it was she who taught the speech to speak, it is very ungrateful and causes her a lot of pain. Yet she is grateful, and must "imagine that she is at home where she at present is not, because her speech in some way has traveled before her and without authorisation entered the hall with her entry ticket" etc. Nice.

UPDATE: Lots of grammatical and other errors corrected. Sorry. Thanks to Gunnar P.

- A multilingual page with links and quotations of all things literary is El Hombre Que Comía Diccionarios (the man who ate dictionaries, that is). Inspiring and with an avantgarde edge.
- Read and share dreams at Onirique. Only French dreams, but that's the best kind, anyway...
- Mutate your own alien alphabets at Art21 and save them as TrueType. Weird.

Anyone interested in contemporary French literature and the myriad literary prizes the French award it, should take a look at the blog La république de livres, written by Pierre Assouline and hosted by Le Monde. I hardly ever have heard of the books he comments on, but a while ago I was quite intrigued by this comparison between Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Tintin's creator Hergé.