CAMUS AND SIMENON AND THE NOBEL PRIZE.

CAMUS AND SIMENON AND THE NOBEL PRIZE. Joan Acocella had an article in the New Yorker (October 10) about one of my favorite writers, George Simenon. She points out that Simenon had predicted that he would win the Nobel Prize. This may seem surprising, but if you Google Simenon and Nobel Prize you will find 140,000 results. This Google books excerpt, from a 1970 book by Otis Fellows, gives an indication of how seriously Simenon’s chances for the Nobel Prize were taken: “Perhaps in recent years no other writer’s name has been proposed with such regularity and futility for the Nobel Prize in Literature as Simenon’s. Another perennial and equally unsuccessful nominee has, of course, been the late Robert Frost….” Although Simenon is a favorite of mine, and I have read a lot of his books, I had never thought of Simenon in terms of a Nobel Prize until I read an article a few years ago by Paul Theroux which compared Simenon favorably to Camus in an article entitled “George Simenon, the Existential Hack”. Once I thought about it, I realized that Simenon did serve a Nobel Prize.