Super Booker, superannuated Nobel?

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Nobel literature laureates evoke three basic responses from the reading public. There's the "what took them so long?" response, evoked when a Gunter Grass or a Nadine Gordimer is crowned; there's the "oops, we meant to read him but we hadn't got round to it" response evoked in all but the most pseudo of intellectuals when a Saramago or a Brodsky gets the nod; and there's the "who the hell" response, which is what happens when an Imre Kertesz or a Gao Xingjian is anointed.

At that, Kertesz and Xingjian were household names compared to this year's winner, Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, who is best known for her novel The Piano Teacher, which is a tactful way of saying that she is extremely obscure outside a very small circle of intellectuals. Jelinek's books are published by a small imprint, Serpent's Tail, and the intensely feminist, leftist writer is seen as very controversial even by her admirers.

Some of her works have been dismissed as pornographic by a faction of critics even as others have hailed them as pathbreaking; her own publisher admits that she is not the easiest of writers; and the adjectives that come to mind when you describe her work are "bleak", or "cold" or "uncompromising".

On the other hand, her homepage is worth visiting. In a nod to her most recent play, Bambiland, which is a critique of the US invasion of Iraq, you're greeted by the image of a toy Bambi with its backside bared to the viewer. Call my literary taste into question if you will, but I find myself thawing in the presence of an author who moons her audience through the medium of a Disney figure!

But the award to Jelinek revives the age-old debate over the Nobel Prize for Literature: does it have much point any more? The first three or four decades of the Nobel Literature award are notorious for the names they dragged from obscurity into a fleeting limelight: who reads Sully Prudhomme, Rudolf Eucken, Henrik Pontoppidan, Sigrid Undset or even Pearl S Buck any more?

And by now, the names of authors who never won the Nobel form an equally notorious if far more illustrious roster, beginning with Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka and coming all the way up to recent times, when Mario Vargas Llosa, Philip Roth and Milan Kundera are just three out of a list of many notable omissions.

The Literature Nobel appears to either add another wreath to an already consecrated author's head, or to seek out the richly obscure.

Perhaps what the Nobel Prize needs is a dose of competition, and that's what the new Booker Prize, dubbed the "super Booker", might be able to provide. This is the new international prize, open to authors from all corners of the globe, and expectations from it are running high.

The first, secret meeting of the three-person panel of judges has already been held in Rome, and gossip indicates that writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, and V S Naipaul might be in the running for the first award, to be announced next year.

Prize administrators have indicated that while "literary achievement" over a period of time will be the criterion rather than the consideration of just one book, the prize will be given to writers who have "changed the landscape" of literature, no matter how young they are.

Prize administrator Ion Trewin is clear that he doesn't want the Super Booker to be seen as an award open only to the venerable; writers who have made a mark with, say, three or four novels in their thirties or forties would be equally eligible.

The best way to describe the kind of response the Super Booker's been drawing is to say that the website asks visitors to refrain from sending in suggestions for future winners""they have too many already and they mention, in tones nearing desperation, that the panel of judges will make up their own minds without any outside assistance.

If the Super Booker with its £60,000 award for the winner stays the course, it could pose the first serious challenge to the supremacy of the Nobel. It might be argued that a panel of three individuals could make utterly whimsical choices; but even whimsy might be a useful remedy to the creaking stodginess of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, which now has deserving contenders backed up for decades on its waitlist.

Derrida's legacy: French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who died on Saturday of cancer at the age of 74, drew responses ranging from fanatic devotion to outright suspicion.

He was known as the founding father of "deconstructionism", a philosophy best summed up by The Times obituary notice: "Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida? We know only two things. We do not know. And M Derrida is no longer there to enlighten us."

Some critics expressed deep impatience with the fuzziness of his philosophy; some saw Derrida as the founder of a cult. But his insistence, first that there was nothing beyond the text itself, and then that everything was a text, first that there was no such thing as a supreme author, and then that everyone was in some sense an author, opened up new ways of seeing. Asked to define himself on one occasion, he replied simply, "I am applied Derrida."

He was perhaps the only truly famous philosopher of our times. And deconstructionism, the philosophy that he unleashed upon a world that transmuted it, frequently in ways that Derrida himself would not have recognised, has had a tremendous influence not just on literature and language, but in political theory, in the field of visual arts and in architecture.

Just how influential deconstructionism became can be gauged by the fact that even its critics have been forced to refute Derrida by, well, deconstructing him.

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