Bickering and the Nobel

A friend announced that she is observing this as Alice Munro Day. And that seems to be the euphoric and triumphant mood of many.

Meanwhile, thinking of the Nobel Prize for Literature, we looked at an article in The Daily Beast, a U.S. on-line magazine. It listed seventeen writers who coulda been, and perhaps were, contendas.
Most of the expected names, well known in the English-speaking world, were there--Tolstoy, Joyce, Woolf, Borges, Updike, Nabokov--but there were some surprising inclusions (Willa Cather, Edith Wharton--not that they weren't worthy), some surprising omissions (Proust, Graham Greene), and some names perhaps unfamiliar to many readers--Kobo Abe, Chinua Achebe, Lu Xun.

Among current writers whose names seem never to come up on the Nobel short list is Philip Roth. Scott Raab, in an interview with Roth in Esquire, said, "After they've made awards to every possible political constituency across the globe, your day may come."

Roth replied, "After the Trobriand Islanders."

According to Michael Specter, writing in The New Yorker, "Bickering is common [among the six people on the selection committee] and the battles that kept the Nobel from Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess were intense."

But no battles here, for this is Alice Munro Day.