Once again, the Swedish Academy has selected a virtual unknown as its Nobel laureate in literature, Romanian-born German novelist/poet Herta Müller. Herta who?, you ask. You’re not alone. Müller is a writer who ranked far, far down the list at the bookmakers Ladbrokes (at least until the last few days, when she became a virtual co-favorite with Amos Oz, as Michael Orthofer at the Literary Saloon noted yesterday). Only a handful of her books have been translated into English, and most of those appear to be semi-autobiographical novels about erudite young women of German ancestry who grew up in, and struggled against, the now-fallen Communist regime in late-20th-century Romania.
The books themselves sound, um, daunting. Take The Appointment, a 1997 novel that was published in the U.S. in 2001 (and seems to be the most recent Müller work to appear in English). “The Appointment is more a test of endurance than pleasure,” Peter Filkins wrote in his review in the New York Times, adding that it’s “the kind of novel you might be glad you finished, but sorry that you started, no matter the bleak complexity within it.” Kind of makes you want to click over to Amazon right about now and order a copy for rush delivery, doesn’t it? (Note: Only used copies seem to be available right now.)
I am, admittedly, a myopic American who’s poorly read in non-English-language literature (and only spottily read in English-language classics for that matter). But does the Nobel imprimatur really compel me to pore through the works of Müller — or last year’s comparably unfamiliar laureate, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio? I think not. The Nobel ranks are cluttered with writers who’ve sunk into obscurity and irrelevance, sometimes deservedly so. Do Swedes still read the work of 1916 laureate Verner von Heidenstam? Does anyone think 1938 winner Pearl Buck was one of the top 100 writers of the 20th century?
At its best, the Nobel Prize shines a spotlight on a truly great writer — and sometimes the literature of an entire nation — that’s unfamiliar to readers outside of the writer’s country. It challenges us to think (and read) outside our America-centric comfort zone. Without the Nobel, for instance, I would never have discovered the witty and insightful poetry of Poland’s 1996 laureate Wislawa Szymborska. And the 2006 Nobel for Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk cemented his growing status as a lit phenom (which had been building since the 2004 U.S. publication of his novel Snow).
But what do you think? Do prizes like the Nobel matter when you decide to read a book? Are you tempted to check out Herta Müller? Do works in translation seem too off-putting, like a book-length game of telephone?
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Actually, Pearl Buck is pretty important in the scheme of things. She’s the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (she had previously won a Pulitzer as well). She was also politically active and *at the time* her books were incredibly popular.
Yeah, but where’s the present-day relevance?
You mean to tell me that you expect the Swedish Academy of 1938 to have a time machine handy and see which works would be read and renowned for the next, say, 150 years or so? Their collective psychic powers must have been slightly below par that year.
The present-day relevance is that the political and civil rights issues Pearl Buck brought to light with her writing are still in existance today. Through the success of The Good Earth, she was able to establish the first biracial adoption agency in the United States (Welcome House is still in existance today!) as well as an international child sponsorship program that serves biracial children in Southeast Asia. Pearl Buck’s works may not be as popular today as they were in 1931, but I believe her Nobel Prize was a great impetus for good work, just as President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is seen to be.
“Pearl Buck is pretty important in the scheme of things. She’s the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature…”
Um, did you justify her worthiness by citing the fact that she won? Hmm, do the letters QED mean anything to you? No? Say, there’s a committee in Oslo that’s hiring…
hey, i loved the good earth
See, the lack of education people in the US have is not the problem of the Nobel prize commitee. Thank god theres no need for a writer to have published his/her work in English to receive the Literature Nobel prize. Im surprised as well that Mrs Müller was chosen by the committee this year even though I happen to know her brilliant work – good choice!
I’m with Mario, and I’m sort of puzzled over the Pearl Buck dis too. I always thought the Nobel laureates were reflective of their times — and sometimes it the times a’change. Why not suggest someone who you thought SHOULD have gotten the award???
Hey, JS. I’ll happily suggest some writers who should have received the Nobel: Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Simone de Beauvoir, Roberto Bolano, Chinua Achebe, Virginia Woolf, Lu Xun.
The Euro-centric bias of the Swedish Academy is pretty pronounced. In the last 15 years, there has been only one Nobel winner who did not live in Europe: J.M. Coetzee. I’m happy to concede that there is great literature produced outside the U.S. (and outside of English-speaking countries). But the Nobel doesn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of literature outside of Europe. That seems just as short-sighted and insular.
Um, for starters, Phillip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Murakami, John Updike (… oh, wait, he died before the committee pulled it’s head out of it’s asininity)
Oh, you meant a non-American, anti-commercial minority figure of some sort? My mistake.
Wait, who was that guy who wrote ‘Dreams From My Father” …?
Disappointing. It’s not that I absolutely wanted an American to win, but I would have expected someone with a larger body of work at least. In recent years, and maybe all along, the Nobel in literature has seemed more a political prize than a literature prize. Muller’s bio is compelling. And I’m sure her stories of women triumping over oppressive regimes have great resonance for some, particularly in Europe. But I can’t help but think literature is more than just a good backstory. Will writers seek her out as an influence? I doubt it. I find the choice baffling, no offense to Ms. Muller. She sounds more like a candidate for the Peace prize than one for the literature prize.
Actually, Herta Muller has a pretty large body of work, but very little of it was translated into English. I think a lot of people can can cannect to the situations in her novels. On the other hand, I’m originally from Romania, and partly of German ancestry. So no, I’m not objective (it that possible in literature?), but I certainly can connect to the characters in her books than say… umm, Philip Roth’s (no offence intended for Mr Roth, of course!). But just to point out the world is wider than you think.
One of Herta Muller’s major points seems to be that the communists never went away and they’re still out there, many of them living the good life all over Europe and that this is a horrible fact of life. I think it astounding that somebody won who espouses this political line. Is it the death of anti-anticommunism? I hope so.
Actually, although yes Muller is not very well known, every Swede still reads at least excerpts of Heidenstam in high school, Pearl Buck was very important for her time and Le Clézio is very well known in France.
Thom, there’s a world outside the US you know.
The Nobel used to be given out as a recognition of a literary great’s entire body of work toward the end of his or her life (Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Albert Camus, Boris Pasternak, etc.), but it’s become increasingly political. Many are saying that giving the award to Mueller was planned to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism.
yeah but they didnt know camus was near the end of his life when they awarded him! car accidents tend to sneak up…
also: the prize can be given out for any reason stated. read the little blurbs that accompany the award. knut hamsun was awarded his for “the growth of the soil.” not a body of work.
also: this article makes me sad. i don’t think thom really ‘gets’ literature if he has a difficult time finding resonance and meaning in books that don’t have middle-age white americans as the protagonist. roth 2010! (blech…)
also: camus was YOUNGER than Muller when receiving the prize.
the ripe old age of 47, he was.
It is shameful that such brilliant but somewhat obscure authors such as Hüürfnar Vimmers, Abingoh-Kaaali Attamba Zimba-Zim, Sir Buford Cromwell Gately, and R.R.J.S.D. Hammerschmidt were not considered yet again.
Without a doubt, “A Bridge To If” by Sir Buford Cromwell Gately is one of the most important books of the past 100 years. I don’t think anyone would dispute that!
Or at least it should go to Katarina Hoxton-Wuqry, who writes the same book every five years and then burns the only copy. Furthermore, I am of the belief that next year the prize should go to an American author who has been widely translated to english.
Correction: the review in the NYTs was by Peter Filkins, not Dexter.
I admit I haven’t heard of all the authors listed above, but I definitely agree about Abingoh-Kaaali Attamba Zimba-Zim, his poems in particular are very touching and inspirational.
Great comment: Hüürfnar Vimmers, Abingoh-Kaaali Attamba Zimba-Zim, Sir Buford Cromwell Gately, and R.R.J.S.D. Hammerschmidt were not considered yet again.
It’s a pity, isn’t it.
But, seriously, the Nobel is a mixed blessing. When it goes to a popular author, it tends to throw light on her or his faults, as in Buck and Steinbeck. And we can thank Nobel for shining a light on Nagib Mahfouz. I think they got it right with Jose Saramago (although I don’t like his work) and Toni Morrison, because they have international stature. But lately, the academy has been honoring decidedly one-note authors — Pinter with his pauses, Fo with his untranslatable farces (unless they star Jonathan Pryce), and that Austrian feminist nobody can remember. Aside from Fo, it seems as if writers have to be deadly, deadly serious to win it. And frankly, after 1980, the list of great writers who haven’t won Nobels (and now are ineligible because of death) is greater than the list of those who won. Check out Ted Goia’s alternative-universe Nobel prize list from 2007:
http://www.greatbooksguide.com/NobelPrize.html
“THAT AUSTRIAN FEMINIST NOBODY CAN REMEMBER”?
now that sounds odd and quite arrogant.
It’s not only arrogant. It’s once again narrow-minded. Elfriede Jelinek is very, very well known in German literature. There was not the slightest bit of doubt of anybody over here, that she would deserve it.
With Müller it’s very different. Most people I talked to, don’t know her. What doesn’t make the award wrong.
Imho the article proves once again Engdal’s 2008 aphorism about the “insularity” of modern US literature. It seems insularity is the world for literary criticism in US too.
I am one of the many who hadn’t heard Herta Müller before, as i had never heard J.-M. Gustave Le Clezio in 2008. But, i am not gonna put the blame for my ignorance to the Nobel comittee.
Au contraire, i choose to be glad i have the chance to read the work of an author i didn’t know, since her books will be translated in my language now.
And yes Roth is ok or maybe Atwood is ok too, but have u ever thought people outside US tend to write too???
And how can u ever use an anti-argument as “Only a handful of her books have been translated into English”? What does it prove? It’s not Booker prize or IMPAC prize…it’s Nobel, and it has nothing to do with the english language or the limited translation choises of the american publishing industry.
So let us first read her books ouselves, and then make our criticism based on her books.
What a dopey item. Do you even read??? If it’s not a star-penned memoir or some pop-culture maven like Stephen King UberHack, you guys don’t even review the books. So why is it not a surprise that you don’t agree with the Nobel committee’s choice this year. You wanted James Patterson???
yes, I agree with the bulk of the comments that this is a disappointing, cliched and very predictable piece of ‘coverage’. As the Director of the press that published two of her books in English in the 90s, and also published winner Imre Kertesz, I would just encourage readers to look more widely for their choices and not make such blanket condemnations because one of the huge publishers didn’t pick this up. Nobel is not a beauty contest. It’s intended to reward brilliance and a corpus of work, I know that might be a little hard for EW to grasp but it is true nonetheless. by the way Land Of Green Plums did win the IMPAC prize in the 90s, she really isn’t that obscure.
This award is stupid since it didn’t go to Stephenie Meyer. The Twilight series is the best books and all my friends and I read them and pretty much everyone loves them so that should be what gets the award OBVI!!!!!!!1!!!
At first I didn’t realize this was sarcasm
I discovered Pearl Buck in my college Women’s Lit undergrad course and although it speaks to a different time, the themes of the human condition are relevant. Oppression of people is a relevant theme, Buck was very good with fleshing out her characters and showing the strong ties of family within a very rigid society, not every region in today’s world is a free demoncracy, there is something to be said for a writer to tackle that kind of subject matter. And yes, I think Pearl Buck is up there int he top 100 of the 20th Century…the author should remember we are now in the 21st century so we have a new list to create don’t we?
I work for a publisher that has publishes a Nobel laureate or two, so I don’t think that American writers are any more “insular” than any others. All writers to some extent write about the world they know, the world that shaped them. The same with Ms. Muller, according to the descriptions of her work. That’s why we read these writers from around the world, to get outside our own heads and see what someone else’s life is like.
The last two laureates may have been obscure to Americans, but Doris Lessing, Orhan Pamuk and Harold Pinter certainly weren’t. Naipaul, Grass, Heaney, Morrison…
I actually think that Orhan Pamuk is not that good a writer and is incredibly dense trying to read through.
However I have had enough of the ugly attitude of my fellow Americans towards Le Clezio; when he moved past his cliched French New Novel form of his incredibly dense and dry early novels, (the ones that were fairly popular critically in America), and moved on to discussing more emotional themes such as childhood and culture he achieved his greatness. Onitsha is one of the most beautiful novels I have ever read and I thank the Nobel for awarding such a worthy candidate and reintroducing him to an increasingly stuck up America.
I would be upset if I felt there was a single American author worth the award other than Edward Albee, but there isn’t. Roth bores me, as does Oates; they both write modern melodrama’s of a prosperous country. Pynchon is incomprehensible and a cliched post-modernist, DeLillo is a cliche, and McCarthy is a hack.
That said even if they were going to award it to a European Author I would have preferred an author like Umberto Eco or Peter Handke. I would have liked Murakami or Fuentes to win as well.
I disagree on your take on american authors… I think Vollman is great, Saunders although too “young”, still interesting, Ozick is good, Pynchon worthy (the only reason Pynchon and DeLillo are clichéd is because 150 authors tried to do what they did. When Gravity’s Rainbow or White Noise came out, nobody could say they were cliché… both are unfortunately rather past their prime however with the last great Pynchon novel being Mason & Dixon and DeLillo with Underworld both in 97) and how is McCarthy, who wrote Blood Meridian in any way a hack? David Foster Wallace is no longer eligible of course, but he was still great. The fact remains that the Nobel committee is too Euro-centric, which the Swedish Academy themselves have admitted to. Would have liked Murakami to win as well though
I agree on many of your points, Gigi, and I too would love to see Murakami win. And in no way is McCarthy a hack. All one needs ot do is read “Blood Meridien” and “All the Pretty Horses” to see that.
I have read All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian, both were among the worst written and most droll books I have ever had the misfortune to come across. If I wanted to read “He did this, then got up and did that, then got on his horse and went riding, and then laid down for the evening with a drink of whiskey” I’d read a 9 year old’s writing. I expect more than dry declarative sentences and vast, long streams of an author lazily telling me what his characters are doing without a hint of emotion in the writing. For this critic minimalism is the bane of my existence, post-modernism too, which goes a lot further towards explaining my disdain for Pynchon and DeLillo.
If you find those two are not cliched you have obviously not studied the people they were imitating and complimenting, Barth, Camus, Barthelme, Gaas. I say Don DeLillo is a cliche solely for the purpose that his writing grates me as whiny, Underworld rallies against the frivolity of Walkman’s and it annoys me because one has to have an appreciation and an intoxication with technology and materialism to actually be in a position to make a valid personal criticism of it; he just comes across as having what I term “Crotchety Old Man Syndrome” or COMS, railing against every luxury he is unfamiliar with, and his writing style annoys me in a dry way, and his subject matter is among the living cliches of high brow American writers.
Pynchon…all I can really say is read Gore Vidal’s essay “American Plastic: Matters of Fiction” he stated it much better than I can there, he derails the post-modernism movement, and ends his essay with the statement that, basically, we are emerging into a time period of books written to be taught, and the occasionally silly College Student who actually does enjoy reading, will either not survive or will not maintain that simple emotional joy and appreciation in reading. Indeed it is true, from its origins post-modernism’s utter lack of depth or linguistic beauty pretty much killed literary reading among the greater public for a certain generation, I still talk to people that simply ignore every critically favorable book because when they were going to college and studying English post-modernism was all the rage. Most readers who have any appreciation for inherent beauty, depth, (post modernists are so frivolous, Faulkner messed with the language for real, emotional, brilliant reasons, they mess with it for the sake of incorporating games and to see how clever they can be, to see how much they can kill emotion which is what reading is for, to find emotion and inherent human understanding), and what Vidal called the highly rare ‘beautiful sentences’.
The most telling thing is that he notes most of the post-modernists seem to drink a lot, don’t read much, and like to listen to rock music and socialize more than perform the traditional role of the author as public intellectual and conscious. Indeed he notes many famous books are drenched in alcohol, he notes their obvious lack of creativity or ability to write. He points out an essay where Barth is ranting incomprehensibly about the father and how the father can’t die or you wouldn’t have a story. Then he notes a few years later Barthelme publishes a story called, “The Dead Father”. He notes Barth admits he has no talent for imagination or characters, and attempts to describe the sheer badness of the prose he quotes for the readers sake by discussing them all as men who should not have been writers, who have minds to technical for imagination, but are driven to try to imbue their words into paper. Indeed most of these figures are just as interested in math and science as art, and the goal of many of them seems to be to reconcile science and art, conforming each to sets of rules and specific styles.
American Literature is in many senses still reeling from the Post-Modernism movement, though it is hard to say which is worse, it, or minimalism, both are incredibly annoying to read and both take substantially less talent to write than their proponents declare.
I agree with you on Vollman, great writing, but I would like to see him emerge from his historical epics and really just go for something totally independently and totally on his own.
Frankly Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon are the figures that tie down and establish my own hope for the future of American Literature, (regardless of how awful The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was). Eggers is simply fantastic at whatever he does, even his short story collection, How We Are Hungry, are brilliant.
“I say Don DeLillo is a cliche solely for the purpose that his writing grates me as whiny, Underworld rallies against the frivolity of Walkman’s and it annoys me because one has to have an appreciation and an intoxication with technology and materialism to actually be in a position to make a valid personal criticism of it; he just comes across as having what I term “Crotchety Old Man Syndrome” or COMS, railing against every luxury he is unfamiliar with, and his writing style annoys me in a dry way, and his subject matter is among the living cliches of high brow American writers.”
I’m sorry, I meant to say White Noise.
Jacob: I agree with you on most points… postmodernism in literature as well as art, was in my view a necessary movement that has not only run its course but is also quasi-impossible to follow. What do you do when the likes of Barth, Barthelme and Borges have already taken apart the idea of narrative and exposed all the artificial aspects of the written text? You can’t just then go back and write conventional novels again as if everything post, say, Ulysses never happened. The truly great contemporary authors like Wallace and, I agree, Eggers (and to certain extent Saunders)manage to find some form of sincerity and honest communication within the boundaries of the rubble that was left behind by postmodernism. This, however, should be something the Nobel committee will recognise in the future. I think Pynchon was the first to take the experiments of Barth etc (who were great thinkers but not really great writers apart from Borges) and make it into a coherent literary work, encapsulated a paranoia that is the most lasting testament of cold war mentality. I don’t like him very much, but I do see his literary value, the same way I do Strindberg or Hemingway. Have not read the Vidal essay you mention, but will definitely look it up.
Jacob – I don’t think you know what the word “droll” means. I would never use it to describe McCarthy’s work. And just because you don’t like a particular style (minimalism, for example), doesn’t mean that it has no merit or is bad.
“And the 2006 Nobel for Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk cemented his growing status as a lit phenom (which had been building since the 2004 U.S. publication of his novel Snow).”
Er, actually, “Thom”, Pamuk’s “status as a lit phenom” had been cemented in those few benighted patches of the globe where EW’s writ doesn’t run – like, um, Europe – for a long time before he won the Nobel. He didn’t win it because the US finally woke up.
So Philip Roth was ignored yet again. He joins a long list. Get over it. You’ve got more important things to worry about – Khloe Kardashian’s honeymoon plans are still up in the air, for God’s sake.
You’re quite right that Orhan Pamuk was widely recognized in Europe long before he broke out in the States, which came about mostly after Knopf’s publication of “Snow” in 2004. (We were also lamentably late to the game with our embrace of Roberto Bolano, who died too soon to win Nobel recognition.) I was merely trying to make the point, perhaps poorly I admit, that the Nobel has helped _me_ to pick out writers I feel that I should read for myself. I “discovered” Szymborska because of the Nobel, and I felt emboldened to pick up “Snow” because of it as well. Despite the Nobel imprimatur, I’m afraid that the works of Clézio and Müller still do not call to me. That might be my loss, I admit (though anyone reading the Times review of Müller’s “The Appointment” would probably share my wariness). Life’s short — and there are a bunch of writers, many of whom don’t write in English, that I choose to rank higher on my to-read list.
Does that make me a provincial American? Maybe. But the Nobel is rather provincially Euro-centric, and there are a host of Asian and African and South American writers whose books I’d choose to seek out before some of the recent Nobelists. (BTW, I never made the claim that the Nobel should have gone to an American, or even to a writer in English. Personally, my vote would be for Chinua Achebe, whose classic novel “Things Fall Apart” is now 50 years old – and the most widely read novel in modern African lit. It’s criminal that the Swedish Academy hasn’t recognized him yet.)
I’ve not read Herta Müller but will look forward to reading her in the near future, just as I did when J.M.G. Le Clézio was recognised last year.
I take issue with the title of this post. To label Müller as obscure without clarifying that obscure, in this case, means the writer hasn’t heard of her goes against the fact that she’s a prolific writer, has been awarded so many prizes she probably needs a new cabinet for them, and will be, if not a household name, well received in her home country. Obscurity needs a context.
I always laugh when people say an American hasn’t won it for however many years as if there’s some rota to the Nobel. The truth is it’s not a geographic prize but a prize for an individual, so country is irrelevant. But, on the claim of being Eurocentric – I should say that would have liked to see Ngugi wa Thiong’o recognised today – I think there’s one thing that needs to be remembered: Europe consists of fifty sovereign states, each with their own culture, history, and experiences, many alien from each other, that any claims of being Eurocentric, in my view, are irrelevent.
Plus, if an American hasn’t won it since Toni Morrison in 1983, and supposedly deserves a turn on the imaginary rota, then give a thought to India, who hasn’t had a laureate since Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 or, indeed, all those countries with excellent writers yet to see them recognised internationally in this way.
I’m not surprised that an EW-hack, which the writer of this pitiful fulmination-masquerading-as-essay demonstratedly is, disapproves of the choice of Ms Mueller; what bothers me is that folks who’ve so little an idea, again as shown by the quality of their writing, get to pronounce judgement on issues they haven’t the faintest of ideas!
you are poopy and you eat poop and you smell like poop. and you are poopy. and you smell like poop!!
Please read about the Nobel Prize before you start commenting and complaining. This blog post documents the resistance of the current “America” to allow any education that goes further than “Fox news” or “America’s got talent”.
From the will of Alfred Nobel:
“The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiology or medical works by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.”
And the point of this overlong citation is…? It’s pretty coincidental that 12 out of the last 15 authors that have produced “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” happen to have been European. If Americans have difficulty thinking beyond their borders, this unabashed Euro-centrism shows that it’s not a particularly unique condition.
Poetry is literature and poetry can be sung. Two words – Bob Dylan.
Or, rather, yet another European writer?
I don’t understand this idea that obscurity = unworthiness. I’m excited that the Nobel committee has brought to my attention yet another writer whose name I’d never heard before now – if it’s already publicly accepted that (very famous) people like Roth have come up with achievements on the level of any other prize-winner, what’s the harm of honoring a relative unknown?
The Nobel cabal is hellbent on giving the awards to Europeans because they do not believe that there are writers in Latin America or Asia or Australia or Africa. If a work is written in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, or Farsi, there is no way in hell the idiots in the cabal will award the writer. I wrote an article entitled The Nobel Prize is Overrated in the Lamar Journal of the Humanities. Check it out.
Pamuk is from Turkey, Coetzee is from South Africa but is an Australian citizen, Naipaul is from Trinidad, Gao Xingjian is from China – all won the Nobel for literature in this decade.
But only Coetzee is a nonresident of Europe. (Yes, even Gao is a resident of France.)
Well, I’ll be sure to move to Europe so that I can be considered for the Nobel. But would I still be able to win the Pulitzer?