Snobs

Via TNR, Nobel literary bigwig Horace Engdahl recently had the following to say about American literature:

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. ... That ignorance is restraining."

The whole post is interesting, and irritating for anyone who admires more than zero American authors presently drawing breath. Commenting with any depth on fiction writers is not something I am able to do, but the fact that Doris Lessing and Harold Pinter have won the Nobel, but writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Javier Marías, and especially Cormac McCarthy (not to mention all the postmodernists mentioned in the TNR post) keep coming up empty, seems to place the Nobel slightly above the Emmys in terms of its relation to reality.