Brazilian Novelist Jorge Amado (1912-2001)

The following is a repeat of a post I wrote five years ago, in January 2016. I have since read Meek Heritage by Finnish writer Frans Eemil Sillanpää and consider that he deserved his prize.

I don’t have too much good to say about the Swedish Academy, which decides who will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you look at the list of its recipients, it would not take too much effort to produce a list of as great as or even greater literary figures who have not received the laureate. Let me take a stab at it:

• Kobo Abe (Japan), Woman in the Dunes
• Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Things Fall Apart
• Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Japan), Rashomon
• Jorge Amado (Brazil), Gabriela: Clove and Cinnamon
• W. H. Auden (UK), Poetry
• Georges Bernanos (France), Mouchette
• Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Ficciones
• Joseph Conrad (UK/Poland), Nostromo
• Richard Flanagan (Australia), The Narrow Road to the Deep North
• Graham Greene (UK), The Heart of the Matter
• Vassili Grossman (Russia), Life and Fate
• Henry James (US/UK), The Ambassadors
• James Joyce (Ireland), Ulysses
• Yashar Kemal (Turkey), Memed, My Hawk
• Gyula Krúdy (Hungary), The Red Post Coach
• Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Solaris
• Osip Mandelstam (Russia), Poetry
• Vladimir Nabokov (US/Russia), Lolita
• Fernando Pessoa (Portugal), The Book of Disquiet
• Marcel Proust (France), In Search of Lost Time
• Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Russia), Roadside Picnic
• Italo Svevo (Slovenia), Confessions of Zeno
• Leo Tolstoy (Russia), Novels and Stories
• Mark Twain (US), Novels and Stories
• Evelyn Waugh (UK), Brideshead Revisited
• Virginia Woolf (UK), Mrs Dalloway

As you can see, I have not overloaded the list with the names of American authors, in the interests of being fair. If I wanted to, I can add names like Philip Roth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and a few others.

These can replace such figures as the following, whose reputations have not kept up with the times: Bjornsterne Bjornson, José Echegaray, Giosue Carducci, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Paul von Heyse, Verner von Heidenstam, Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontopiddan, Carl Spitteler, Jacinto Benavente, Grazia Deledda, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Pearl S. Buck, Frans Eemil Sillanpaa [SIC], Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Earl Russell, and a few dozen others—mostly Scandinavian nonentities which at one time were highly thought of by a couple dozen mouldy Swedish academics. (Please forgive me for being lax about the diacritical marks in the above names.)