|
COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The host of a dinner party on Fifth Avenue, not long ago, greeted guests with a question: "Can you tell me how cliches subjugate people?" The occasion for this puzzler was that afternoon's announcement of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to a little-known Austrian writer named Elfriede Jelinek. Jelinek, according to the Nobel citation, had won "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power." Pardon?
Rumors began circulating that even Morgan Entrekin, the head of Grove/Atlantic, which has published Jelinek, didn't know who she was when people stopped to congratulate him at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Not true: "I'd heard of Jelinek," Entrekin said last week. "But...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
