'A troubling choice': authors criticise Peter Handke's controversial Nobel win | Books | The Guardian

 

"Handke’s politics have long been derided by former friends and authors. In 2008, novelist Jonathan Littell remarked: “He might be a fantastic artist, but as a human being he is my enemy … he’s an asshole.” Alain Finkielkraut called him “an ideological monster”, while Susan Sontag, who spent several months in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war staging a performance of Waiting for Godot, said Handke’s comments had “finished” him among his former friends in New York.

Dr Helen Finch, associate professor in German at the University of Leeds, praised Handke’s ability to explore “the fringes of human experience in an extraordinary way and for his “early and complex form of ecopoetics”, but said his Nobel win “shows that the prize committee is still infatuated by white European men writing in an elitist poetic tradition, and is cloth-eared to the political complicity of those men”.

read more>> 

'A troubling choice': authors criticise Peter Handke's controversial Nobel win | Books | The Guardian