The Nobel Prize for Literature was announced today, and the winner is French Author Patrick Modiano. I’ve never heard of him, and judging by some of the social media reactions, neither have most Americans.
And that’s great! Really, I’m being serious—the fact that the Prize tends to go to writers that American readers have never heard of is a good thing. Yes, we may gripe about anti-American bias in the Nobel committee, and these complaints may be accurate. We may wish every year for the Nobel to go to someone we’ve heard of, like Thomas Pynchon or Philip Roth. We may even pretend to be worldly by opining that it should really be awarded to one of the few translated authors we’ve read, like Murakami.
But then, inevitably, the name will be announced, and—last year’s Alice Munro award notwithstanding—it will most likely be someone we’ve never heard of.
Why is this a good thing? Simple: Because it is a reminder of just how big the world is—and specifically, how big the world of books is.
Americans have this tendency to think that we’re the center of everything—and that holds true for books as well. Unconsciously, we think that what we admire must be universally admired, that those writers with whom we’re familiar must, by virtue of reflecting our preferences as consumers, somehow be the best in the world. But it simply isn’t so. And the Nobel is a yearly reminder of that uncomfortable but important fact.
The press release announcing Modiano’s win states simply that he won for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” Here is another reason that the literature of other nations should be prized—the stories told in other languages bring us the unique historical perspectives of other nations. Modiano is haunted by his nation’s memory of the Nazi occupation. Mo Yan, the 2012 winner, combines Chinese folk tales with the contemporary concerns of his nation. Herta Muller, the 2009 winner, writes tales of dispossession and oppression that are colored by the Soviet rule of her native Romania. Each reflects a national identity and life experience that is totally unfamiliar to me. May it always be thus.
I don’t know much about Modiano, but his most well-known novel seems to be Missing Person, a story of a detective searching for his missing identity in the distant past of the Paris occupation. One of my favorite genres, used to explore an historical trauma I have little knowledge of? Sounds great. I might read it, and learn something.
What else are books for?
