Le Clezio

Le Clezio — who’s he? This year’s Nobel laureate for literature is little-known in the States. Perhaps this is evidence of our bias. Or maybe it’s a product of the Swedish Academy’s willful dismissal of U.S. writers.

If the selection of French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio as the 2008 Nobel literature laureate has anything to tell us, it’s that Horace Engdahl means what he says.

Last week, Engdahl, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, called American literary culture “too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” — comments widely seen in the United States as evidence of the insularity of the Nobel itself and proof that American writers would be shut out again.

The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993; since then, recipients have included Poland’s Wislawa Szymborska, Italy’s Dario Fo, Chinese-born Gao Xingjian and Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek. That such authors are not household names has led to charges that the Nobel committee is willfully obscure, or worse, motivated by political considerations.