Thursday, October 11, 2007

Jong says Amen

Over at the Huffington Post, "Fear of Flying" author Erica Jong praises the Nobel committee for having awarded this year's literature prize to Doris Lessing. Excerpt:

They could have given it to Philip Roth for paeans to his penis. They could have found some previously untranslated shepherd in Transylvania writing haiku in a language spoken by a dozen other shepherds. They could have found some trendy political prisoner, jailed for his writing. But, amazingly, the Nobel committee decided to recognize a woman writer whose work has opened up the female soul to literary scrutiny, chronicled and questioned the war between the sexes, refused to categorize the human species by cliche or received wisdom and allowed her great imagination to engage the universe. This prize gives me hope that one day women writers maybe celebrated for their creativity rather than diminished for their gender.

I think it's great that Lessing got the Novel nod, and everything. But who is Jong sniping at, here?

By "Philip Roth," does she really mean Saul Bellow, who won the prize in 1976? The Transylvanian shepherd, of course, can only be Elfriede Jelinek, of whom nobody (in New York, anyway) had heard before she won in '04. Is the "trendy political prisoner" business a reference to Orhan Pamuk, who won in '06, around the time that criminal charges were being pressed against him, in his native Turkey, because of his outspoken comments on the Armenian Genocide?

Don't mince words, Ms. Jong. Inquiring minds want to know!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:32 PM

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