For those Americans -- and there may not be many -- seeking great foreign authors who have yet to be discovered in English, the Nobel Prize judges present a fresh candidate: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, this year's winner of the literature prize.
Le Clezio, 68, was cited by the Swedish academy Thursday as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization." His works include Terra Amata, The Book of Flights and Desert, a 1980 novel the academy said "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."
Speaking to reporters in Paris, Le Clezio said that he was very honored and that the news had left him feeling "some kind of incredulity, and then some kind of awe, and then some kind of joy and mirth."
Asked if he deserved the prize, he replied, "Why not?"
Le Clezio had been considered a strong contender, and Thursday's announcement continued a decade-long trend of European and European-oriented authors receiving the Nobel. Recent winners have included Britain's Doris Lessing and Harold Pinter, Austria's Elfriede Jelinek and Imre Kertesz of Hungary.
No American has won since Toni Morrison in 1993, and no American was expected to win, though Le Clezio did put in a plug Thursday for Philip Roth.
Last week, Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl told The Associated Press that the United States was too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world; Le Clezio may serve as Exhibit A.
A world traveler, especially of deserts, who has been ranked among France's greatest living writers, he is unknown to the U.S. public and to much of the U.S. literary community, though he has a home in Albuquerque, N.M. Most of his books are unavailable in English and virtually all of those that have been translated are out of print, a common fate for writers from overseas.
"Unless the person being translated is extremely well known, the translation doesn't sell very well," said Judith Doyle, executive director of Curbstone Press, a Willmantic, Conn.-based publisher that in 2004 released the English version of Le Clezio's Wandering Star, a novel about a French Jewish woman and a Palestinian woman.
Doyle said Wandering Star sold only about 1,500 copies. But she said that with the author "all of a sudden becoming known, we are going to print more."
According to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than 1 percent of non-English books end up being translated in the United States, a much smaller percentage than in European countries, said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. He lists two reasons, one good and one bad.
"The good reason is that America is so large and so diverse that it is a full-time job to understand the ever-changing complexity of American cultural life," said Gioia, a poet who has translated 1975 Italian Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale into English. "The bad reason is that even most American intellectuals are monolingual."
Besides the $1.4 million check, Le Clezio will also receive a gold medal and will be invited to give a lecture at the academy's headquarters in Stockholm's Old Town.
The Nobel Prize in literature is handed out in Stockholm on Dec. 10, along with the awards in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics. The Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Oslo, Norway.
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