The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Fair play, etc. What caught my attention was the statement from the Swedish Academy:
As a young writer in the aftermath of existentialism and the nouveau roman, he was a conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality
As a fan of the ‘degenerate state of everyday speech’ which so enlivened the twentieth century novel (particularly in the works of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Raymond Queneau) my initial reaction to this statement was a terse: ‘fuck you’.
See NY Times here.
