Two literature prizes were bestowed in this years' Nobel season. One was the deferred prize for last year, 2018: it went to Olga Tokarczuk,for a body of work that includes Flights and Books of Jacob. So far so good. I hadn't heard of her but I' m not well informed about contemporary Polish fiction so that fact isn't suggestive of any limitation in her merits. What was a bit more surprising was the prize that was bestowed for 2019 itself. That one went to Peter Handke, the above pictured author of a variegated body of work including novels, plays, and screenplays. The latter category includes Wings of Desire. What the prize committee may have missed, though, were Handke's politics. He spoke at the funeral of Slobodan Milosovic, in a eulogy often seen as an apologia for far-right Serbian nationalism. Relatedly, back in the 1990s, during the Yugoslavian civil wars, Handke (an Austrian) wrote an essay on the subject that struck many as absurdly naive at ab...
