The sheer puerility of the stuff is precisely a combination of banality with evil: a preference for dictatorship larded with obscenity and fatuity. .... The Nobel committee allowed Borges and Nabokov to go to their graves unrecognized, while choosing writers who it is difficult to remember without wincing. ... And sinister mediocrity has become Mr. Pinter's stock-in-trade.... Even in his increasingly lame and slovenly literary output, Mr. Pinter always married politicization to illiteracy ... The Nobel judges have again given their approval to a writer of doggerel; a very poor man's Beckett, a man most celebrated for the long silences that punctuated his stage "dialogue," who would have no reputation of any kind if it were not for the slightly unbelievable character of his public statements.

Etc. Christopher Hitchens i Wall Street Journal om Nobelpriset till Harold Pinter. Ej tillgänglig på WSJ:s hemsida, såvitt jag kan se, men läs hela krönikan här. Den är, om inte annat, underhållande polemisk; Jelinek, vars namn Hitchens inte lyckas stava, är till exempel a mediocre Austrian Stalinist. (Det är väl bara en tidsfråga innan Expressen publicerar en översättning?)