Byline: Chris Sinacola

COLUMN: Sina-cism

In case you were too busy reading John Grisham's latest novel and missed it, the head honcho of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, opined the other day that Americans are too ignorant to compete with Europeans for the Nobel Prize in

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl told Sweden's leading daily paper, Svenska Dagbladet. "That ignorance is restraining."

Well, I guess you can bet Americans are out of the running again this year. The last American to win was Toni Morrison in 1993, and while a dozen or so Americans are mentioned each year as contenders, they consistently lose to such household names as Elfriede Jelinek, Dario Fo and Wislawa Szymborska.

The Stockholm News offered this online gem for its English readers:

"Every automn the Swedish academy reveals who will be granted the nobel price in litterature, the perhaps most prestigious nobel price of them all. During the last thirty year, only three Americans have be awarded."

Ja, and every automn I wait with baited breathing to see what the price of litter will be this year, and to which obscure Europan litter maker or poetess the price will go.

It's not that I have anything against the obscure, mostly left-wing European writers who win the prize year after year, sparking a small flurry of sales among Americans such as myself desperate to be cool and accepted in Parisian cafes, should such a cafe ever open in Central Massachusetts. It's just that I can't stand to see American literature get dissed.

We Americans have a Hall of Fame lineup, including Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Faulkner, Cather, Hemingway and Frost, to mention only a few scribblers from our past. You'll notice that first names are unnecessary in that list, whereas a sample of last century's European Nobel winners - Heyse, Eucken, Mommsen, von Heidenstam, Spitteler, Benavente and Karlfeldt - doesn't exactly ring a bell.

Nor is America all that isolated from the world's cultures. Washington Irving gained fame spinning tales of Dutch settlement in New York's Hudson River Valley. Willa Cather and Ole Rolvagg wrote of the lives of Scandinavian settlers in the Midwest. Our nation is blessed with many literatures. We have Jewish-American writers such as Joseph Epstein, Philip Roth and the late Saul Bellow, who did win the Nobel Prize. There are Italian-Americans such as Don DeLillo, Gay Talese, and Mario Puzo, whose "Godfather" novels are far more widely read than anything by writers such as Kenzaburo Oe or Gao Xingjian, two Nobel winners you have probably never read, and perhaps never heard of.

America offers a rich African-American literature, from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and August Wilson. We have master prose stylists who penned the Declaration, Federalist Papers, and dozens of pamphlets that ignited the flames of freedom. Our literary heritage boasts great historians, such as Francis Parkman, Henry Adams, William H. Prescott, and even Lewis and Clark, whose journals are a treasure trove for historians. We have Asian writers, French-Canadian writers, Armenian writers, and Hispanic writers. America has produced master essayists such as E.B. White, accomplished novelists such as the late William Maxwell, and beloved children's authors such as Dr. Seuss. Do you want Westerns? Science fiction? Post-modern fiction? Crime noir? Beat poets? Welcome to America.

Moreover, we Americans have no need to denigrate European writers. Personally, I think very highly of quite a few European Nobel laureates, including Thomas Mann, Francois Mauriac, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Winston Churchill and recent winner Orhan Pamuk of Turkey. All were or are superb and important writers. Another laureate, Irish poet Seamus Heaney, deserves eternal thanks for having rescued Beowulf from the shackles of bad translations and reintroduced its glory to American readers.

Perhaps our American literary tradition doesn't come with enough Left Bank cafes. I'll just have to console myself at the local bookstore cafe as I reread Fitzgerald, raft down the Mississippi with Huck Finn, or go globetrotting with Mark Twain.

Oh the insularity!

Contact Chris Sinacola by e-mail at csinacola@telegram.com.