History Bites

My Century, by Gunter Grass, trans, by Michael Henry Heim (Harcourt, Brace, 320 pp., $25)

IT has been said that there are two kinds of Nobel Laureates in literature: those who don’t need the honor and those who don’t deserve it. In recent years, with a few important exceptions, the Swedish Academy has tended over-whelmingly to favor the latter, with a special fondness, it seems, for herbivorous leftists of the Third World sort. Most British and American novelists, even those of the highest quality, hardly stand a chance. To write well, to hold provocative opinions and spin engaging plots—in short, to produce anything that anyone could possibly want to read—would seem, in itself, to disqualify an author from serious consideration for the supreme honor. This may explain why, over the last three years, the Academy has yanked out of their well- earned obscurity Wislawa Szymborska, a very minor poet, José Saramago, a crashing bore of a novelist, and Dario Fo, who is, quite literally, a clown.

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James Gardner

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My Century, by Gunter Grass, trans, by Michael Henry Heim (Harcourt, Brace, 320 pp., $25)

IT has been said that there are two kinds of Nobel Laureates in literature: those who don’t need the honor and those who don’t deserve it. In recent years, with a few important exceptions, the Swedish Academy has tended over-whelmingly to favor the latter, with a special fondness, it seems, for herbivorous leftists of the Third World sort. Most British and American novelists, even those of the highest quality, hardly stand a chance. To write well, to hold provocative opinions and spin engaging plots—in short, to produce anything that anyone could possibly want to read—would seem, in itself, to disqualify an author from serious consideration for the supreme honor. This may explain why, over the last three years, the Academy has yanked out of their well- earned obscurity Wislawa Szymborska, a very minor poet, José Saramago, a crashing bore of a novelist, and Dario Fo, who is, quite literally, a clown.