Herta’s Nobel Lecture Underwhelms
I have now read a couple of novels by this year’s Nobel literature laureate Herta Müller, and I am overwhelmingly underwhelmed. I don’t see any reason why the Swedish Academy selected her except as a political gesture — her stands against Romania’s dictatorship during the Cold War were sufficient for her to be applauded. Herta’s Nobel lecture, delivered this week in Stockholm, concentrates on the dictatorship theme, via a somewhat oblique anecdote about a handkerchief.
