Peter Handke

I'm angry, and today it's not just because I didn't win the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, but also because of who did win it: Peter Handke.

In case you don't know who Handke is, let me get you caught up real quick:

He was born in Austria in 1942. In the early 1960's he began to make a name for himself with his long hair and with a play he he wrote which consisted of actors insulting the audience, entitled "Insulting the Audience." That play was followed in very quick succession by other plays, by stories, novels and screenplays. They didn't all directly insult the audience; in fact Handke wrote and continues to write in a wide variety of styles. Most of his works have one thing in common: they're sort of mysterious, you can't really tell what he's getting at. Or maybe those few readers who always intensely disliked him were simply sharper then the rest of us, and could see what he was getting at, right from the start.

Be that as it may: all of a sudden, in 1995, by which time Handke had become extremely popular, he published a book in which what he was getting at was suddenly, horribly clear. This man who until then had strictly avoided politics in his writing, even entitling one of his books I am an Inhabitant of the Ivory Tower, suddenly jumped right into the middle of world politics and worldwide political journalism when he published a book entitled Gerechtigkeit fuer Serbien. That translates to Justice for Serbia. That's right: in 1995, right in the middle of genocidal atrocities of the Milosevic regime, Handke wrote a book complaining that Serbia was being treated unfairly. Serbia, and not the men, women and children Serbia was deporting and massacring.

Naturally, this was such a shock that for a little while, many of Handke readers, myself included, wondered whether we had really understood him. However, since 1995 he has repeatedly made himself ever more clear on the matter: the victims in the 1990's in the former Yugoslavia, Handke assures us, were the Serbians. Milosevic even gave him a medal.

But apparently it's still all just too much for many readers to take in, and so, a very great reading public continues to behave as if Handke had never said such things, or even as if the Serbian atrocities had never occurred, as if they had been made up, as Barry Levinson said in his stupidest film, Wag the Dog.

I understand: it's just awkward to face the fact that your favorite author, who had always seemed like such a far-out Leftist hippie, is actually a racist, fascist and genocide denier. So awkward that many readers, and the Swedish Academy, have simply not faced it. This is a shameful day for the Academy, and a bad day for everyone except mass murderers.