Of
Marie Schmidt
A little joke from Mats Malm, the literature professor and permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, who once again gives a shockingly cool presentation of who will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature this year: Unfortunately, Annie Ernaux could not be reached by phone at the moment, “but we expect that she will get the message soon noticed”. You immediately remember the scene as one she wrote: Die Author at the desk, a warm October day in Cergy, the bourgeois suburb of Paris. The world is on its way to her, but she still has an image in front of her, a piece of the past. She concentrates. The phone rings and rings. At some point she’ll answer, it’s a Swedish news agency. “No! Really?” says Annie Ernaux.