The awarding of the Nobel Prize has a special place in the media. They are believed to confer sanctity in life, lasting fame and academic recognition of exceptionality. Since I don’t know anything about science, I can’t say anything about the merits of those who use them, but they are intended to help the world move forward or become less bad. And with the Peace Prize, humanistic as it was, they did something that seemed like a wild joke by awarding it to a man named Henry Kissinger, a strategist and accomplice to so much blood shed in Vietnam and Latin America. And you say I smelled the genitals of this jury who acted in the name of this dirty thing called politics or Dadaism.
I understand that the media gets very nervous because they often have no idea about the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. And it is pathetic, but also strange, to remember some writers who were denied the highest recognition by the supposed court of the wise. They considered Borges, Tolstoy, Kafka, Proust, Pessoa, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Valle-Inclán and other undeniable luminaries unworthy of him.
Perhaps there are great, albeit unknown, writers among whom the jackpot falls, but I am in no hurry to read them. I content myself with re-reading the usual books and taking advice from my friends about others that I haven’t read and that might surprise me. Or follow my instincts. But the Nobel Prize almost never serves as a guide for me. Jon Fosse, the last winner, says: “You can’t get higher than the Nobel Prize, after that it’s all downhill.” Well, enjoy the moment and don’t fall.
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