JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(No, sweetie that’s Chuck Palahniuk.)

He’s a wonderful writer, and the books (My Name Is Red, White Castle, Snow) are spectacular, but a whiff of politics will follow this particular prize. Pamuk was tried for treason in his homeland for saying that the Turks committed genocide upon the Armenians. On the day that the prize was announced, the French parliament passed a law making it a crime to deny the genocide in Armenia.

But isn’t everything political anyway? Especially prizes.

I think that at 54 he’s a little young. Now that he’s been canonized, everyone will assume he’s on the verge of death.

Oh, and shouldn’t his translators share the prize or at least be acknowledged? I don’t think everyone in the Academy reads Turkish.

I always thought Gregory Rabassa should have a share in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s glory. (What, you all read him in Spanish?)

Interesting story from ex-publisher Jaime. He had a classmate at university named Rodrigo Garcia. One day Rodrigo’s father came to visit, and it was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He took his son’s friends to lunch. “He talked a bit about writing, called it a discipline. Many mornings he forced himself to the table, and he got the same pain in the stomach one gets during final exams in high school. It was not always a labor of love. He could not understand why everyone was always looking for “symbolism”—he just wrote about the way he remembered things, no deeper meaning much of the time.”

Rodrigo Garcia now directs for film and television, including episodes of The Sopranos.

The Sopranos IS the great  literature of our times.