the blog quebecois

The Guardian:

"It's accurate to say she is not cheerful," Peter Ayrton, the English publisher for Elfriede Jelinek, said yesterday. "But reading her is a totally exhilarating experience."

He was rejoicing at the Frankfurt book fair as word spread that the severe, feminist and dissident Austrian writer had unexpectedly won the $1.3m (£750,000) Nobel prize for literature.

So some shrewish scold takes the trophy, eh? Quelle surprise!

I'm not qualified to judge Ms. Jelinek's literary merits, as "severe, feminist" books for me rate in reading enjoyment somewhere between subpoenas and Korean VCR manuals. The Swedish Academy, too, has a long and ignoble (pun intended, haha) history of promoting hacks who nonetheless fit the politics of the age.

Behold, then, from Ms. Jelinek's crappy* website, her impeccable credentials:

Do you know him from before? Have you heard the name Halliburton and the name of Cheney, the holy lord, offspring of I don't know what or who, but certainly of a mother, and since then he has wrestled with the numerous soft feelings. Dick Cheney. But his feelings won't win. Halliburton will win, the company, they can build cages in Cuba, well, even I could build a cage if I had to, but it would only be strong enough for rabbits, if anything, they also built Corpus Christi in Texass, they managed that. And it earned its name. He will rebuild everything, the lord of the energy industry, Mr. Chairman of the Board, lord of the fiddled books , lord of jobs for the boys. But such boys are only found in Arabia. You can bet on it that this company will win irrespective of whoever else wins. Hang on, and what about the British with all these brave guys who so diligently butchered foreign flesh, and of course also the other way round, because nobody wants to owe the other a favour, but sometimes it has to be. They have dragged themselves to the foreign land, illusion of the avenger incarnate, and now several of them are six feet under, in the sand, and now they should get nothing?

Oho! Texass, did'ja catch that? Not exactly a Joycean level of wit -- but then, James Joyce never did win the Nobel, so maybe she's on to something.

That was from one of the few pieces on the site not in German, so maybe it lost something in the translation; but it doesn't strike me as anything a moderately clever poli-sci student couldn't have done, albeit with fewer comma splices.

* (All the links on her website seem to be broken, no doubt due to increased traffic. It's worth taking a look at, though, if only to wonder at its ceramic Bambi centerpiece.)