A Prize That Shies From Predictability

Description

history — caught more readers than usual off guard (Herta who?) and reinforced the Academys reputation for being defiantly, if predictably, unpredictable. Ms. Müller joins the ranks of Nobel laureates — most recently the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio last year and the Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 — whose work, at the time of their announcements, anyway, was little known and little translated here. Only 5 of Ms. Müllers some 20 books have been ...