2009 One of the things that hobbles the Nobel Literature Prize is its founder’s instruction that it should be awarded to the author of ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. There is argument about how idealisk (in the old dynamitard’s original Swedish) should be translated. But the basic instruction is clear – the laureate should be on the side of the angels.
The ‘idealisk’ criterion probably also explains why Philip Roth (many things – but no angel) has never been honoured. It also explains why, lest some bombshell is dropped later, the committee usually aim to get in just ahead of the undertaker (the two of them practically got jammed in the door with poor Harold Pinter, the 2005 honoree).
‘I am very near the end’, said V.S. Naipaul in his winner’s lecture. He wasn’t. But had his nomination come up after, rather than before, Patrick French’s 2008 warts-and-all biography the odd black ball might have been cast.
It must have been painful when, with the laurel leaves still fresh on his brow, Günter Grass disclosed that he had a Waffen-SS uniform in his skeleton’s closet (Grass may, perhaps, have slyly forecast that Stockholm would regret it by giving his lecture on the subject of rats).
Herta Müller, the 2009 laureate (announced to the world on this day), was, by Nobel standards, young – in her mid-fifties. She was also the daughter of a Waffen-SS soldier. Not that it should be held against her any more than the paternity of Nicholas Mosley (son of Oswald, and one of Britain’s most underrated novelists) should affect critical judgement. But it must have been mulled over in Stockholm.
Brought up in a German-ethnic-minority family in Ceauşescu’s horrid Romania, Müller falls into a favourite category with the committee – writers who express human freedoms while suffering under totalitarian regimes (Pinter under Blair, for example). Müller chose to give her winner’s lecture not on the subject of liberty but of snot (beats rats). This is how it opens:
‘Do you have a handkerchief?’ was the question my mother asked me every morning, standing by the gate to our house, before I went out onto the street.
The same maternal query came up the day the Securitate came to haul Herta’s mother off to a Gulag. The whole of Müller’s lecture revolves around the big things that little things mean. It’s very touching, and like no other Nobel lecture on record. Even a hankie can be idealistic.