Attack of the Booboise

I'm late to the story, but apparently some Swede in charge of handing out literary prizes just dissed America and its writers.

Horace Engdahl is permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the body which chooses the Nobel Prize for literature. In an interview with an American journalist this week, he dismissed the writing of the US – the land of Melville, Hemingway and Fitzgerald – as "too isolated, too insular". "They don't translate [foreign books] enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," he said. "That ignorance is restraining."

A Swede said that? A Swede?! Has anyone in the history of the world ever heard of a Swedish writer? Can they write? That's one attempting the act in the upper left hand corner; he's not doing so well. Have they done anything notable in the past 1,000 years except rape, pillage and plunder the English Isles and invade Russia, where they discovered the use of booze and took (all of) it back with them? Their cars rust, their music reached no higher than Abba before quickly degenerating back to sing alongs with Laplanders, and their national cuisine is limited to skimpy little pancakes smothered in sour Lingonberries. Nobel himself had to hie off to Miami to be tutored by Thomas Edison and Eli Whitney on the fine art of making dynamite and barely made it back to the frozen tundra without blowing himself and his raft to pieces.

And what's all this about no great American writers? Has this fellow never heard of Zayne Grey? Tom Clancy? Harold Eff'in Robbins? Jerk.

My image of a Swede is a large, blocky lout, sprawled idly in an igloo while his dirty little brood of ragamuffins chews his frozen mukluks into usable form so that he can stumble over to Sven's for a night of debauchery. If he writes at all it's during the annual appeal for pardons from the King, which requires only, I am informed, an X from the miscreant himself and a hoof print signifying assent from the violated reindeer. Picture the aspiring pardonee now, struggling to see by the dim, flickering light of a seal blubber lamp, asking his brutish wife how to draw a picture of the aquavit bottle that caused all the trouble to begin with. How sad.

Look - God love'em, who can resist a s Swede choking down a lump of lye-soaked lutefisk? Who wouldn't find the little square heads adorable in a retarded, goofy kind of way? But a Swede pretending to be a literary critic? Sounds very much like Samuel Johnson's observation so long ago: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Gimme a break.

Update: And who needs the Nobel prize anyway, when ig-Nobel Awards are here?