John Updike compiled three volumes of short stories about his writerly Jewish alter ego Henry Bech. When Bech is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature — in “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden,” the concluding story of Bech At Bay — Updike posited the headline reporting the news in the New York Daily News: “BECH? WHODAT???”
The thought was at the same time self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. Updike was one of the most prominent of those who deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature in the past 30 years while failing to receive it. After Updike it was Philip Roth, who also died without the recognition.
Today comes news that Maria Corina Machado has won the Nobel Peace Prize. As the Daily News puts it in the Bech story: WHODAT???
All things considered, it’s probably for the best that the committee has overlooked President Trump. The committee awarded it to Barack Obama in 2009 for approximately nada. In the context of the Middle East context, the committee awarded it to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994 for ushering in the era of good feelings with which we are all familiar.
The award to Arafat was one of only three in the history of the prize that prompted the resignation of a committee member. Kåre Kristiansen resigned over the award to Arafat on the ground that the prize should not have been conferred on the “world’s most prominent terrorist.”
Jay Nordlinger tells the unedifying story of the prize in Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World (2012). Someone ought to slip President Trump a copy. It might make him feel better about being overlooked by the committee. It might suggest to him that it is for the best.
In its story on this year’s recognition of Maria Corina Machado, Reuters invokes what “experts” have had to say (link in original): “Ahead of the announcement, experts on the award had said Trump would not win it as he is dismantling the international world order the Nobel committee cherishes.”
As I was saying…
