As You Were

Devin Coughlin's blog.
Styles: Serious Spare

October 11, 2007

Harold Bloom is an asshole

Via Paul Krugman, I find out that 87 year-old Doris Lessing has won a Nobel prize.

Quoting from the AP article:

However, American literary critic Harold Bloom called the academy's decision "pure political correctness."

"Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable ... fourth-rate science fiction," Bloom told The Associated Press.

Oooh, snap!

Posted by coughlin at 2:41 PM | Comments (2)
Comments

And here I was confusing Harold and Allan Bloom. Whatever, he's fat and teaches at Yale.

Posted by: collin at October 11, 2007 3:07 PM

So sorry, but I happen to agree with Mr Bloom,
As far as SF is concerned she is a not very brilliant anybody.
There is of course the issue: does she actually write general fiction?
Perhaps.
I find her boring and unoriginal at any rate, so she probably got it for the same reason Orhan Pamuk got it the previous year, i.e. it was a fully PC choice.
Pamuk writes exclusively for a Turkish public (to understand this, please read his celebrated -The Black Book- . I did. To non-Istanbul living folks it is entirely unintelligible, exactly as Woody Allen only talks to NY Jews.)
What a difference with Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate, whose breadth of writing and magic skills make you dream...

Posted by: Massimo at February 10, 2008 8:28 AM