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No response yet from Dylan on Nobel Prize win

Twenty-four hours after awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said they had still not managed to speak to the reclusive US singer.

Published: 14 October 2016 14:44 CEST
No response yet from Dylan on Nobel Prize win
Swedish Academy Permanent Secretary Sara Danius. Photo: Jonas Ekströmer/TT

Sara Danius, the head of the Swedish Academy which picks the Literature laureates, told The Local just after the announcement on Thursday that when she would later call Dylan to tell him of his win, she would say: “Hello, this is Sara Danius calling from Sweden. Do you have a second?”

But neither she nor anyone else from the Academy have managed to speak directly to Dylan himself yet.

“The Academy has spoken to Dylan's agent and his tour manager,” the Academy's chancellor Odd Zschiedrich told the AFP news agency.

“It's happened several times – even in modern times – that we haven't been able to speak to the laureate immediately,” he added.

Dylan's silence could prove embarrassing for the Academy, which has faced some criticism for its decision to award the prize to a songwriter for the first time – although reactions from the literary world have been mostly positive.

As The Local reported earlier on Friday, the new poet laureate of rock'n'roll played to a packed house in Las Vegas on Thursday night, hours after seeing off favourites including Japan's Haruki Murakami and Britain's Salman Rushdie to become the first American to win the literature Nobel since Toni Morrison in 1993.

But fans hoping for a gushing response to the win were disappointed – true to his usual taciturn form, Dylan uttered not a word between songs, leaving the world to keep guessing what he thought about his elevation to the pantheon of literature.

According to the Washington Post, which contacted people close to the 75-year-old star: “Dylan remained silent throughout the day about the award.”

One of his friends, singer Bob Neuwirth, told the Post: “He may not even acknowledge it.”

Each year, Nobel laureates are invited to Stockholm on December 10th to receive their award from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and give a speech at a banquet.

But for the moment the Academy does not know whether Dylan plans to come or not.

In 1964 the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre refused the literature prize as soon as he was told he had won it, rejecting the 273,000 kronor prize awarded at the time.

In 2016 Dylan stands to claim eight million kronor ($906,000), which to be fair, he probably does not need.

WATCH: the man who discovered Dylan reacts to his Nobel Prize win:

HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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