Nobility in the Nobel.(Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to V.S. Naipaul)(Brief Article)(Editorial)

Nothing much happens in Sweden during the long and dark winter season, except the award of the Nobel prizes. This puts the country on the map, and the Swedes rightly revel in the occasion. They do it in the grandest style. This year was the centenary of the prizes, and all previous laureates were invited to celebrate in Stockholm.

The winners of the prize for literature, it is notorious, are a mixed bag. The Swedish Academy makes the choices, and in recent years it has often seemed stuck in a Sixties timewarp, rewarding writers for whom the West and its civilization are the source of everything wrong with the world. There are magnificent exceptions, of course, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Saul Bellow, and Czeslaw Milosz, but for whatever reason these were three among others who stayed away. Through the barrage of television programs and interviews, or just overhearing conversation in the crush bar, we guests could catch a groundswell of monotonous opinion that the United States in its arrogance was really to blame for the terrorism it suffered, and in any case those who had attacked the World Trade Center weren't terrorists, but a righteous entity called "the poor." How busy and self-important some of the previous winners looked: Gunter Grass with a pipe stuck in his mouth and a blue beret flat on his head, Dario Fo, Nadine Gordimer in a coat to the ground like a Soviet commissar's, Jose Saramago-the spent volcanoes of the radical-chic Left.

This year's prize-winner for literature is V. S. Naipaul. In his ...