The Nobel prize archives are sealed for 50 years and now a Swedish reporter has looked at the 1961 jury’s comments.  Here’s a snippet from the Guardian:

The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality”, wrote jury member Anders Österling. Frost, on the other hand, was dismissed because of his “advanced age” – he was 86 at the time – with the jury deciding the American poet’s years were “a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it necessary to state”. Forster was also ruled out for his age – a consideration that no longer bothers the jury, which awarded the prize to the 87-year-old Doris Lessing in 2007 – with Österling calling the author “a shadow of his former self, with long lost spiritual health”.

Durrell, meanwhile, “gives a dubious aftertaste … because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications”, while Italian novelist Alberto Moravia “suffers from … a general monotony”.

With digital discussion and diminished expectations for future print sales ever more present at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the crystallizing moment came down to this: the Nobel prize was given to a well-known, widely-translated author with a big backlist–but none of those many English editions are available as ebooks. I don’t think that’s a statement you’ll hear again in the future, and it encapsulates many of the dichotomies and conflicts of the current transitional moment. (Since the Carmen Balcells Agency has been reluctant to grant those rights, no English ebook editions are currently expected.) It will be interesting to look in contrast at what happens to ebook sales of the newly-crowned Booker Prize winner next week.

M.A. Orthofer’s Literary Saloon/Complete Review publishes lots of reviews of novels in translation. Therefore, it is not surprising that even the Nobel committee would end up using Complete Reviews as a reference. 

Here is the Herta Müller page at the complete review.  He summarizes the Romanian’ author’s appeal:

Pros:

• Lyric/poetic sense of language, in both poety and prose
• Brutally honest look at life in communist Romania

     Cons:

• Stories often hard to follow
• Tries to convey more through language than action
• The honest depictions can be depressing in their relentlessness

I expect in the future the Swedish Nobel committee will be more careful about their web surfing habits. That said, it is a sign of the importance that literary bloggers play in calling reader’s attention to new and overlooked texts.

To see wikipedia work its magic, check Müller’s page before the Nobel announcement and after the announcement. For the record, I just bought 3 books by Müller for 75 cents from Better World Books.

In the speech, Lessing looks for a short while at the changes the “revolution” of the Internet has wrought.

[...] I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. “You know how it is,” one of the teachers says. “A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.”

[...]

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing [...].

But the bulk of her speech is about the importance of stories and story telling to human beings. She particularly sees hope that the cultures of underdeveloped countries are still about knowledge rather than discourse (my choice of words). I fear the OLPC project’s disruptive technology may change the outcomes of her hopes in ways that few can foresee.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is—we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.

The entire speech can be found here in four languages, and as a video recording of the reading.

See also: Robert Nagle’s introduction to Lessing.