All I Have to Say About the Nobel

The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced tomorrow and, as usual, a lot of people are getting their panties in a knot about it. And I hear people complain all the time about the Nobel never having been awarded to such greats as Kafka, Joyce, Nabokov and Borges. As if the Nobel Prize matters, as if it means something. As if the list of past winners wasn't full of the forgotten, the unnotable and those whose cultural esteem has long since fallen into disregard. I can't imagine getting all that emotional about who wins and who doesn't. (In fact, there are very few awards I have any kind of strong feelings about.) Or, as Doris Lessing summed up so deftly when she was told she had won, "I couldn't care less."