ABSTRACT
The news of the new Nobel Prize-winner for literature came through on the Thursday morning and, as these things happen, the author had just been informing the editor of Encounter that his essay on Czeslaw Milosz, which had been promised for this number, could well be postponed for a while. The local literary journalists, usually among the best-informed cosmopolitan spirits in Europe, were not exactly faced with an embarrassment of riches. On the basis of a slim book of political essays and an even thinner book of verse they had to fill columns in the ambitious literary supplements which every October flood the kiosks of the Frankfurt Book Fair. What was really in no doubt was the embarrassment of having some quar-ter-of-a-million books exhibited at the Fair, and none by the “obscure” poet who takes the Nobel Prize. The English were prepared with shelves of Greene and Naipaul, and Italians were even hedging their Moravia bets with Leonardo Sciascia.
