Brev till Svenska Akademien

Gör ett avsteg från litteraturisttemat, dagen till ära. Inte för att jag tror det spelar roll, men för min egen skull vill jag i alla fall ha en länk till An Open Letter to the Swedish Academy som inleder med frågan:

Can we please stop the nonsense and give Philip Roth a Nobel Prize for Literature before he dies?

…lyfter följande poäng:

Which brings us to the biggest knocks against Philip Roth, and perhaps the reason you, the members of the Swedish Academy, have not already awarded Roth the honor he so plainly deserves. The charges are, to put the case bluntly, that Roth’s oeuvre is uneven, and that, moreover, he’s a sexist pig.

…och avslutar med:

The case for Roth’s candidacy for a Nobel Prize isn’t that he’s a nice guy; it is that he’s a genius, and in Roth’s case, his genius lies in his audacity. Audacity doesn’t play nice. It isn’t politically correct. The peculiar power of audacity lies in its willingness to break rules, trample taboos, shake us awake – and, yes, sometimes, piss us off mightily. Audacity without intelligence begets mindless spectacle, but Philip Roth is the smartest living writer in America, and his work, good and bad, brilliant and puerile, is among the best this country has ever produced.

If Philip Roth doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, no one does.