The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Boring Now

But do men really lose? Take a look at the smears of Dubai chocolate and you'll notice that the men have scored some serious victories over the past 11 months. They handed the presidency to Donald Trump. They made Paul Thomas Anderson One battle after another number one movie in the world. They have produced literally millions of hours of podcasts—more hours of podcasts than the total number of wooden nails and screws their ancestors made. And now, finally, they have their own Nobel laureate: the Hungarian writer, screenwriter and all-around dark wizard of boredom Laszlo Krasznahorkai, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. That's right: for the first time in history, a person received the Nobel Prize. Is this the sound you hear? This is a graduate student crying with joy. Loud, manly sobs.

Krasnagorskaya's victory should hardly come as a shock. By the modest standards of modern fiction, he is a global superstar. Serious young men seem to be everywhere, and while their total student debt varies from country to country, it's pretty much the same (glasses, Letterboxd account, almost mind-boggling inability to talk to women) whether you're in New York, Budapest or Seoul. This is surprising, but only because there was a general expectation that the Academy would first award Peter Nádas, another Hungarian author of sophisticated, exportable fiction, because he was older. But it turns out that every copy Parallel stories in Sweden it is used to stabilize wobbly Ikea tables. And Krasnagorskaya’s final victory was considered almost guaranteed for many years. Why wait?

After all, Krasznagorkai is a consummate laureate, the author of novels that people rightly call complex, difficult, elusive—and other words that might also describe the possibility of social democracy in the United States. Krasznahorkai is known to have collaborated with the complex, difficult and elusive director Béla Tarr and probably has an excellent collection of György Kurtág records. As the Swedish Academy puts it, it is “a compelling and visionary work that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” Fair. Krasznahorkai described it better when he said that his work is “reality described to the point of madness.”

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