It would have been a nice symbolic gesture by the Swedish Academy to let 2018 be a year without literature prize, as a sign of crisis consciousness. But when it became one anyway, it is a genius to give it to Olga Tokarczuk, a writer that no one, except the Polish regime, can object to. She is a young writer in this context - 57 years - who has renewed the Polish, yes, European novel art through her intrinsic, multifaceted stories, linguistic works of art on major and important issues.
Her most recent Swedish-translated book , "Jakobsböckerna", is a major work that dates back to an unusually contradictory time in history, in the 1750s when revival movements and mysterious societies sprung up like mushrooms from the earth while the ideal of enlightenment emerged. From that time, Tokarczuk highlights a Jewish revival preacher, a charismatic seducer by the name of Jacob Frank. Time is similar to our own, though people moved more freely across borders than today and the linguistic and ethnic diversity was greater. The similarity between then and now is one of the reasons why Tukarczuk is suspected by Poland's political leadership, but loved by its readers.
On the other hand, the election of Peter Handke as the winner of 2019 is a real scrap. He is an important and great writer in the German post-war generation who undertook to create a new literature after the destruction of Nazism, he has been extremely productive in many genres, and has written screenplays for several of Wim Wender's films. His prose is careful, thoughtful and attentive to the shifts of life, whether he writes about a mother's death or a child's first year. The language does not create the world at Handke, the world is already there for those who have the patience to wait for its revelation.
Handke has not been published in Swedish since 2006, so he belongs to the Nobel laureates who receive the award late, when the publishers and readers have turned elsewhere, but that is not what makes him so controversial in the first place. For the past 20 years, Handke has taken a stand for nationalist right-wing forces in Europe and has denied Serbia's genocide against Muslims. The Swedish Academy looks only at the literary quality, Anders Olsson said at the press conference in the Exchange, but that too is a political position. Sure, you can read writers with undemocratic or otherwise perplexing opinions, but you don't have to give them a price!
Finally, it must also be said that this time, as so many times in recent years, goes to European novelists. For the Nobel Committee, the world outside Europe still consists of dark continents where great literature is difficult to discern. And poetry does not bother.