Oz favored for Nobel

The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced next Thursday. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz is a four-to-one favorite to win—with the French-language feminist Assia Djebar, an Algerian Arab expatriate teaching at New York University, and the wholly improbable Joyce Carol Oates running behind at five to one (h/t: Michael Schaub). A contest between a post-colonialist Arab and an Israeli, even one as dovish and anti-settlement as Oz, is no contest. Besides, Oz blamed Hamas for the war in Gaza and initially supported Israeli military action there.

As for Oates. I was astonished recently to find Malcolm Bradbury praising her in his Modern American Novel (new edition, 1992). Locating her in the Gothic tradition and calling her “multitalented,” Bradbury says that Oates has “constructed an enormously varied fictional world, at times highly literary and allusive, but also distinctively hers—marked by her preoccupation with estrangement and horror, with the dynastic contemporary success-driven and violent American present.” Although the quality of her work varies tremendously, and though she is “apt to use sensation for its own sake” (you think?), Bradbury concluded that she is a “writer of great importance.” Color me flabbergasted.

The greatest living American novelist has no better than a seven-to-one chance to win the Nobel, according to oddsmakers. Although an American has not taken home the prize since 1993, when Toni Morrison was named, English-language writers have won four of the last ten. There is little to no chance of an American’s winning in 2009, and an even smaller chance that the winner will be Philip Roth.

Five months ago I predicted that the Peruvian poet Carmen Ollé would be given the nod, and I am standing by that prediction. Although Djebar has the right ethnic and political credentials, she is handicapped by writing in French, the same language as last year’s winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. The last time that the prize went in consecutive years to writers in the same language was also 1993, when Morrison succeeded Derek Walcott, who himself followed Nadine Gordimer. A South American writer has not been honored since 1982, when Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia was singled out. Another possible laureate is Cristina Peri Rossi, an expatriate Uruguayan poet and novelist living in Barcelona, who writes sexually charged stuff from a feminist viewpoint.

Anyone who thinks the Nobel Prize in Literature has anything to do with literature is deluding himself.