The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Boring Now

But are men actually losing? Look past the smears of Dubai chocolate, and you’ll notice that men have spent the past 11 months notching some serious wins. They delivered the presidency to Donald Trump. They made Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another the number one movie in the world. They have produced literally millions of hours of podcasts—more hours of podcasts than the total number of wooden nails and screws produced by their ancestors. And now, at long last, they have their own Nobel laureate: Hungarian novelist, screenwriter, and all-around dark wizard of ennui, László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. That’s right—for the first time in history, a man has won the Nobel Prize. That sound you hear? It’s a graduate student sobbing with joy. Big, manly sobs.

Krasznahorkai’s victory should hardly come as a shock. He is, by the meager standards of contemporary literary fiction, a global superstar. Serious young men, it seems, are everywhere, and, while their cumulative student debt varies from country to country, they are pretty much the same (glasses, a Letterboxd account, an almost staggering inability to talk to women) whether you’re in New York, Budapest, or Seoul. To the extent that it’s surprising, it’s only because there was a general expectation that the Academy would first reward Péter Nádas, Hungary’s other author of challenging, exportable fiction, because he is older. But it turns out that every copy of Parallel Stories in Sweden is being used to stabilize wobbly Ikea tables. And Krasznahorkai’s eventual victory has been treated as all but assured for years. Why wait?

Krasznahorkai is, after all, a consummate laureate, a writer of novels people not unreasonably like to describe as challenging, difficult, elusive—and other words that could also describe the possibility of social democracy in the United States. Krasznahorkai has famously collaborated with the challenging, difficult, elusive filmmaker Béla Tarr and probably has a superlative collection of György Kurtág records. In the Swedish Academy’s phrasing, his is a “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” Fair enough. Krasznahorkai described it better when he said his work was “reality described to the point of madness.”