Vargas Llosa Win Nobel Prize

Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize for literature:

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday as the academy honored one of the Spanish-speaking world's most acclaimed authors and an outspoken political activist who once came close to being elected president of his tumultuous homeland.
Vargas Llosa, 74, has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including "Conversation in the Cathedral" and "The Green House." In 1995, he won the Cervantes Prize, the most distinguished literary honor in Spanish.

"I am very surprised, I did not expect this," Vargas Llosa told Spanish National Radio, adding he thought it was a joke when he received the call.

"It had been years since my name was even mentioned," he added. "It has certainly been a total surprise, a very pleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless."

But, of course, there's then the inside baseball:

Vargas Llosa is the first South American winner of the prestigious 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) Nobel Prize in literature since Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez won in 1982.
The two have long been rivals, and after the announcement Garcia Marquez tweeted: "cuentas iguales" — "now we're even" in Spanish.

And, of course, the gossip:

Vargas Llosa has feuded with Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez and often tosses barbs at Cuba's Fidel Castro. He reportedly has not spoken in decades with Garcia Marquez, a former friend who remains close to Castro.

He even irritated his centrist friend Octavio Paz, the late Mexican Nobel literature laureate, by playfully describing Mexico's political system — which was dominated at the time by a single party — as "the perfect dictatorship."

In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched out Garcia Marquez, whom he would later ridicule as "Castro's courtesan." It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute.

American Exceptionalism In Reverse

This would be a laugh if it were fiction. But it's not. It's just moronic.

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Acadamy, which will award the Nobel Prize in literature on October 9, has this to say about US literature:

As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year's literature award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said that writers from the country that produced Philip Roth, John Updike, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work.

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world, not the United States," he said.

"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

Although [the eurocentric, ed.] Mr Engdahl insisted later he had been misunderstood by the Associated Press, with whom he conducted the interview, the chances of the two American authors, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, thought to be on this year's secret five-person shortlist now look slim.

Oy. The responses, of course, were brutal:

Harold Augenbraum, executive director of US National Book Foundation said: "Put him in touch with me, and I'll send him a reading list.

"Such a comment makes me think that Mr Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age."

But David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, said they came as little surprise since the 16-member Nobel award jury had historically overlooked some of the world's best authors.

"You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," he said.

"And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola."

The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison in 1993, before Engdahl got his job.

The list of writers who have won the Nobel is really idiosyncratic. The list omits, in addition to Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, WH Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Frost, Thomas Pynchon, Wallace Stevens, and Rainer Marie Rilke, to begin a very, very long list. Nobody can deduce the algorithm behind the choices, but if Engdahl is taken at his words, it has more to do with the voters than with the books.

Free Aung San Suu Kyi!

Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi

Enough is enough. The NY Times reports that the Myanmar government has yet again extended Aung San Suu Kyi's dentention:

Myanmar's military government has renewed the detention of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

A government official said that Suu Kyi's detention was officially extended Tuesday afternoon. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

It was not immediately clear if the extension was for six months or one year. The extension became official when an official drove to her house to inform her of it, he said.

Suu Kyi has been in detention continuously since May 2003, most of the time under house arrest.

She has been confined without trial for more than 12 of the past 18 years.

This Wiki helps with the background:

Aung San Suu Kyi /snip born 19 June 1945 in Rangoon, is a pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma, and a noted prisoner of conscience and advocate of nonviolent resistance. /snip Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992 she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru peace prize by the Government of India for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a military dictatorship. She is currently under detention, with the Burmese junta repeatedly extending her detention. According to the results of the 1990 general election, Suu Kyi earned the right to be Prime Minister, as leader of the winning National League for Democracy party, but her detention by the military junta prevented her from assuming that role.

Further details Here and Here.

Myanmar showed in the wake of the recent natural disaster that its government and its policies are far beyond the influence of other countries or organizations of countries. And other countries have repeatedly failed either, as individuals or in groups, to speak up for Aung San Suu Kyi:

The Burma Campaign UK today condemned world leaders for failing to speak out about the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi in the run-up to her detention expiring today. It was reported today that her detention had been extended again, with some reports saying the detention is for another six months.

“It is shameful that Ban Ki-Moon went to Burma and failed even to utter her name,” said Mark Farmaner, Director of the Burma Campaign UK. “He is playing into the regime’s hands. The UN is crawling on its knees before the regime, afraid to speak the truth in case it affects aid access deals, which the regime is already breaking in any case.”

The Burma Campaign UK also dismissed suggestions that there is any significance to the regime extending her detention for six months instead of one year. At the start of her current period of house arrest in 2003 her detention was for six months at a time.

The regime is once again breaking its own laws by extending her detention for a total of more than five years. The State Protection Law 1975 under which she is held only allows the regime to detain her for a maximum of five years.

The Burma Campaign UK has a page with links to action steps.

It is unacceptable for Aung San Suu Kyi's detention to continue. She should now be freed. I'm not holding my breath until nations across the globe speak out in her behalf.