UPDATE: Rumor around The Swedish Academy is that the nomination of Le Clézio was (gasp!) leaked ahead of Thursday's planned announcement I read the Reuters article twice to try to figure out what the big deal was, but came up with nothing. Perhaps the Academy is trying to build some buzz around the Prize by making it into a scandal (in which case, I say kudos to their marketing team). Get the story here.And the award goes to....JK Rowling. Psych! It's Eckhart Tolle. No, no. How about Candace Bushnell? James Patterson?
I keed, I keed. The 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature does not go to any of those nobodies, it goes instead to the most obvious front-runner, the man whose name has become as household as "Maytag" since the 1960s. That's right, I'm talking about Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, awarded the Prize for authoring "new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy," not to mention for being an "explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Oh, don't act like you didn't see that coming. JMG, or The Cleeze, as we call him around the pub, has obviously been part of our collective consciousness since Gallimard, Inc. published his groundbreaking work Ourania in 2000, which you can purchase used from the Canadian branch of Amazon.com. The author of more than 30 titles (which you know all too well), the Nobel is his second major prize this year, following on the heels of the prestigious Stig Dagermanpriset.
Okay, yes, I'm being a smartass. And, no, I do not endorse any of the authors in the intro for the Nobel Prize, but I do with the judges would pick an author whose work is at least still in circulation (and translated) so I could quickly run to Borders and grab a copy, then pretend I knew about him all along. Now I'm left to simply mock the Prize, as I do to everything I don't understand or can't immediately feign knowledge of.
Has anyone read him? I'm wondering if I should catch up on three decades of Prize-winning Cleeeeze.
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(By the way, nobody really calls him The Cleeze.)
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(My guess: someone who I don't like
I like the way you think. I'm a faux intellectual myself.