Modiano strengthens France's literature Nobel dominance

France has more literature Nobel laureates than any other country, with 15 names including Thursday's winner Patrick Modiano, who widened the gap with the US, runner-up with 12 awards.

The Swedish Academy rewarded Modiano "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the (Nazi) occupation" of France.

"It's great news for France, for French literature. I think this will definitively shut the mouths of those who wrote a few years ago that French culture was dead," Vincent Monade, president of France's National Book Centre, told AFP at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

"Yes, there is a dominance", but "one gets the impression that the awarded French authors are different than those from other countries," Modiano said at a press conference in Paris.

"Because the French authors were great thinkers, such as (Romain) Rolland, Anatole France... Whereas the Americans were pure novelists... But this is stupid, what I'm saying."

Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund said Modiano was "a Proust of our time".

Even though the author of "Remembrance of Things Past", considered the greatest French novelist of the 20th century, never won the Nobel, the very first laureate in 1901 was French.

Rene Francois Armand, using the pseudonym Sully Prudhomme, won the Nobel prize for his "poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect".

- Sartre's snub -

From the classical verses of this laureate rarely read today to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who won in 2008, the Swedish Academy's choice reflects the diversity of French literature.

The nouveau roman style of Claude Simon (1985), clashing thinkers Albert Camus (1957) and Jean-Paul Sartre (who refused the prize in 1964), the classical forms of Modiano and Francois Mauriac (1952), and even French authors writing in other languages, such as Frederic Mistral (Occitanian, 1904) and Gao Xingjian (Chinese, 2000), have all been rewarded with the prestigious distinction.

After Sartre, French literature was forgotten for 21 years by the Nobel institution, perhaps upset by the existentialist's refusal, the first in the history of the prize.

French literature has great prestige in Sweden and many members of the Swedish Academy are declared francophiles, including former permanent secretary Horace Engdahl (1999-2009).

A Proust and Flaubert specialist, Sara Danius, joined the jury in 2014.

"There's a certain over-representation of authors in French," literature specialist at the Nobel Museum Kristian Freden told AFP.

"Especially when comparing with Spanish or Chinese, much larger languages in the world. However, if we think that in the first part of the 20th century, almost all laureates were European, it seems less unbalanced."

English is still the most awarded language, with 27 distinctions from five continents.

William Faulkner (1949) and Ernest Hemingway (1954) are possibly the best-known authors on the US laureate list.

Many in the US frown at some of the Swedish Academy's choices, like when it rewards an unknown Hungarian novelist instead of someone like Philip Roth, widely regarded as one of the greatest US novelists of his generation.

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http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/141009/modiano-strengthens-frances-literature-nobel-dominance