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About ArmaVirumque ( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh) In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age. Recent posts
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Oct 06, 2008 11:27 AM
The last time I made my way throught the vast ergonomic jungle of an Ikea warehouse, I noticed that all the books on the shelves of the affordable and funky bookcases were copies of Philip Roth's I Married a Communist -- in Swedish translation. I thought it curious and amusing then that a proud Nordic furniture manufacturer would think a satire on McCarthyism written by the ranking Jewish-American satyr should be a place-holder in every recent college graduate's fantasy living room. But now I'm not so sure Ikea wasn't onto something. Writing at Slate, Adam Kirsch suggests that that Roth is the best rejoinder to Nobel academy's permanent secretary Horace Engdahl, who issued the instantly infamous comment last week that Americans are the also-rans of world literature, thereby also removing one country from the running this year:
That's a good point, but it ignores the real scandal of Engdahl's cheap and philistine remark; i.e., that a cosmopolitan interest in literature, rather than the writing of cosmopolitan literature itself, is the sufficient precondition for nabbing the million dollar bauble endowed by the inventor of dynamite. If ownership of a polyglot library is what does it for the Stockholm judges these days, then hell, I'm entitled to the prize, and a distinction that's already something of a cliche for bad taste and political tendentiousness is even more of a joke than we thought. A shame, too, because there is an American whom I can envision receiving the Nobel for Literature... Assuming, that is, we piss off Europe and fail to elect him president next month.
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