Literary blogger M.A. Orthofer successfully predicted this year’s Nobel prize winner after noticing the web domain mail.Svenskaakademien.se in his referrer logs. muller

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.

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