Fwd : : Remembering Philip Roth 1933 -2018
Cornelius Hamelberg
Tablet Magazine : Remembering Philip Roth 1933 -2018
And the worst of it is that the Swedsih Academy kept dilly-dallying about awarding him the prize on the grounds that ( according to their then Secretary Horace Engdahl ) that he ( American Litearture ) was “too parochial” etc. etc. May the Good Lord have mercy on all of us
Cornelius Hamelberg
Perhaps, the The New York Times write up “Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85 “ gives grist to Horace Engdahl's summation , “ parochial”, juxtaposed against “ universal” ; that a character ( man) situated in one place ( Newark) no matter his current existential dilemmas which are, admissibly, culture bound in that civilisational crucible, cannot be said to represent “ universal man” or his condition ( Heck, Kant never left his home-track Königsberg, but his outreach did)
With the Swedish Academy still in deep trouble, we are not to expect a Nobel Prize for Literature winner for 2018 , and it's possible that more than potential winner could have kicked the bucket by the first week in October, 2019, the very next time the Prize winner is scheduled to be announced, but even then it should not be too late to grant some prizes posthumously...