the Nobel

The writer Annie Ernaux has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I don’t have the taste. Neither of knowing her nor of having read a single line of her magnum opus. Nordic stuff. I have written that the members of the jury for the Nobel Prize for Literature meet in Stockholm once a year with a few drinks too many. Like the Norwegians who award the Nobel Peace Prize, who do it in Oslo in full drunken fun. With few exceptions, the Nobel Prize for Literature is a fairly rigged political prize. I only have references to Annie Ernaux through a synthetic description by Juan Carlos Girauta. Far left, I hate Israel, and little else.

Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who could have been a Nobel Prize for Literature and something else, did not swallow the cheesy and mediocre Don José de Echegaray who, surprisingly, was awarded the Nobel Prize. Don Ramón had very bad grapes. At the Café Guría in San Sebastián, the Valle-Inclán gathering was table neighbors of the gathering of Don Pedro Muñoz-Seca. It pained Don Ramón that the liquidations of Don Pedro’s Society of Authors were much higher than his own. And measuring his voice while he stroked his beard, he tried to dislodge Don Pedro. “Dear Don Ramón, no matter how much you milk your beard, all the bad milk inside you will not come out.” In spite of that little brawl at the social gathering, the greatest praise that Muñoz-Seca’s theater received in his life came from a writing by Valle-Inclán.

Don Ramón had fun attending and kicking the premieres of Echegaray, the Nobel. In one of them, a male character defined the woman he loved in this way: «she is a woman with nerves of steel under a silken skin». Don Ramon, who was lisping, got up from his chair and exclaimed in full representation: “That’s not a woman, that’s an umbrella!” And to him we owe an epigram celebrating Echegaray’s Nobel Prize, in which he took the opportunity to leave a theater critic named Urrecha in a bad place.

Many years later, this epigram inspired the poet José Antonio Medrano to celebrate the admission to the Royal Spanish Academy of Juan Luis Cebrián, director of The countrythat in his novel The Russian repeatedly insisted on writing “clitoris” with an “x” at the end, that is, “clitorix.”

I am afraid that my interest in reading Mrs. or Miss Annie Ernaux is not in a position to grow after being awarded the Nobel Prize. She herself has said that writing is not art, but politics. Her hatred of Israel and the Jews –it is an assumption–, turns Himmler into a mere discordant of Zionism. The curious thing is that the jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature is dedicated to surprising us with a new extravagance. Perhaps the fault is mine, for never having asked in a bookstore for the latest work of Annie Ernaux.

And I accept my fault. I’ll have to read what the literary critic of The country. Or better, I let it be, which is not to bother too much.