Next Year at Stockholm?

This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux, is by all accounts deserving. Nevertheless, prize watchers will no doubt wonder whether this should have been the year for Sir Salman Rushdie. Sir Salman is still recovering from a stabbing that ripped through his neck and torso. That attack was sustained during an August talk that appears as if it were inspired by the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. That decree has claimed the lives of several persons close to Mr. Rushdie over the years, and necessitated a decade of hiding. Mr. Rushdie has certainly paid the price for fiction, but his case for its ultimate prize goes beyond the wounds to his body. His “Midnight’s Children” won both the Booker and James Tait prizes in 1981, and was subsequently awarded the Best of the Booker award, twice. Another book, “Shame,” was long listed for the Booker and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, a French prize for best foreign book. As the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, notes, it took the Swedish Academy 27 years to condemn the fatwa. In that span, Mr. Rushdie became a spokesman for the freedom to write clear of death sentences and less lethal modes of coercion. Of writers whose commitment to that freedom buckled, he said “I hope nobody ever comes after them.” Partisans of Mr. Rushdie can take cold comfort that in the years since the Literature Nobel was first awarded in 1901, among the scribes not deemed worthy by the Stockholm based committee have been such luminaries as Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, George Orwell, and Philip Roth. Another headliner, Jean-Paul Sartre, the French guru of Existentialism, declined the prize in 1964 out of a fear of being “institutionalized.” Six years earlier, the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, whose “Dr. Zhivago” enraged Communist Party officials, was forced to decline the honor. This year’s winner, Ms. Ernaux, was last year’s betting favorite and a strong contender again this year. Hailing from Normandy, she has written 23 books, which have been translated into 36 languages. Her books weave together memoir and fiction, a genre known as “autofiction” that has become a staple on both sides of the Atlantic. Reached by a throng of journalists outside her home at Cergy, a town west of Paris, Ms. Ernaux said “I am very happy, I am proud. Voilà, that’s all.” She added that she was “not bowled over” at the news. The honor carries with it an award of 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $900,000. President Macron, who himself yearned to be a novelist, tweeted that Ms. Ernaux “has been writing, for 50 years, the novel of our country’s collective and intimate memory.” In granting her the award, the committee notes the “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”Ms. Ernaux is committed to what she calls “écriture plate,” or “flat writing,” a technique that she used to great effect in her most well known work, “Les années” (“The Years”). That autobiographical account was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2019. Her “L’Événement” (“Happening”) features an account of an illegal abortion she underwent in 1963. Another book, “Le jeune homme” (“The Young Man”), details her affair with a diplomat 30 years her junior. For her penchant of including intimate details in her work and forgoing the plausible deniability affected by many writers of fiction, Ms. Ernaux has been labeled by some in the press as “Madame Ovary,” an allusion to Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece, which was seen as scandalous upon its 1856 publication. It is not just the committee’s choices that have come in for scrutiny. Scandal has scarred the Swedish Academy, which dines every Thursday at its Stockholm redoubt and calls itself “the Eighteen.” The husband of one of the members was accused of serial sexual assault, and he and his wife were blamed for misusing funds. In the ensuing chaos, no prize was awarded in 2018.After Roth died in 2016, the one time prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, tweeted “He did not receive the Nobel Literature Prize but he will remain forever as one of the greatest writers of our time.” While none will begrudge Ms. Ernaux her award, there is hope that a similar tweet will not be necessary in respect of Mr. Rushdie.

Next Year at Stockholm?

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