Books & Bookmen
NOBEL ROT
n DOES Thomas Pynchon, at 88, still have hopes of winning the Nobel prize for literature? His new novel, Shadow Ticket, set in the US and Hungary in the 1930s, is perhaps pointedly scheduled for 7 October, as if to provide a nudge to the judges in Stockholm who last year anointed Han Kang on 10 October.
If the bookies are right, the reclusive author of Gravity’s Rainbow is in the running, but only as part of a chasing pack behind the current joint 6/1 favourites – international superstar Haruki Murakami and obscure Romanian Mircea Cartarescu – with Canadian poet Anne Carson, China’s Can Xue and Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai (notoriously unreadable, yet – or hence? – a perennial contender) just behind them.