I know the bright blokes over at the Swedish Academy never make mistakes and that they’re committed to the Cause of Literature, but somehow this brief biography does not make me want to read the works of the newest Nobel Literature Laureate, Elfriede Jelinek. Her website with the anatomically tortured Bambi figure is more entertaining, though.
Bob Corbett has a collection of Jelinek links. And on second thoughts, any author who defines herself as a “baroque avenging angel” can’t be that bad.
And this is the citation: “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power”.
Nobeldameday
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Good for Jelinek. No one has anything to say, since hardly anyone (here in Wider Englishland) has read her.Now the fate will be finding herself on college syllabi. Yuck.I love the Nobel Committee’s choices. They collectively raise the finger to what anyone might say or think about their prize-giving (“Atwood my ass”), and that refreshes me. It’s like the anti-Booker, and that’s great.But, seriously, their citation-writing needs some work. It’s always some grand-sounding, grammatically-suspect and ultimately meaningless oration.Jelinek, I suspect, gets “musical flow” because she writes about Schubert in “Die Klavierspielerin”, and “subjugating” is a wink at the lovely S&M stuff. Come on kiddies, this is tedious.
nilanjana s roy 
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