JCO: Nobel Prize

How ironic that after all our talk about prolificity, the award should go to Harold Pinter, known for his "pregnant pauses" and ecocnomy of language. 

 

I have no feeling one way or another toward his work, although I have followed his output through the years....As far as I'm concerned, he wrote two or three seminal plays toward the beginning of his career - The Caretaker, his finest endeavor by far; The Birthday Party and Homecoming, two works of questionable merit dependent upon consummate acting and direction to make them work at all.  They are derivative from absurdist drama and actually far less impressive than the work of other absurdists who might have won (Eugene Ionesco, (if he were still alive) and Edward Albee who, if they were giving the prize to a dramatist, should have been a major contender. Nothing in Pinter's theatrical output comes even close to the depth achieved by these writers.  Virtually all of Pinter's later theatrical output has been a rehashing of his original ideas, stolen from Beckett. 

 

His, I believe, "sole novel" is The Dwarfs, which like all of his screenplays hints at greatness but in the end is full of Shakespeare's "sound and fury".

 

I have not read his recent volume of political protest poetry.

 

Actually, I can think of half a dozen British playwrights from David Hare, Peter Shaffer, to Alan Bennett, whose most recent stunning work The History Boys heads for American shores later this year. 

 

In short, not a good choice.  Should I take consolation in the fact that Pinter is one of the few recent winners whom I have actually heard of and been exposed to prior to their winning the prize?  I think not.

 

I would have been far happier with Updike, Roth, or certainly Pahuk, the brilliant Turkish novelist.  Snow is one of the finest novels I've read in recent years.  I take consolation that an American didn't win, which would have made JCO's chances dimmer for the next few years.

 

As with many past selections, I am not happy, but I am surprised.

 

Bob