Nobel Prize’s ignoble past imagined
Today, more than a century into their reign of the intellectual awards circuit, it’s easy to look at the Nobel Prizes and think of them as authoritative.
They’re global awards, for one thing, not beholden to the politics of any one nation. For another, they’re extremely lucrative, to the tune of more than $ 1 million, so they aren’t handed out lightly. Even though these prizes bear the name of a single man, how biased can the institution be, really?
Ask that question, and you can all but hear Harry Karlinsky laugh. Over the course of his second novel, the Vancouver- based writer and professor of psychiatry unravels the supposed neutrality of the Nobel Prizes and the man who created them.
At first, he does this by quietly pulling at some real- life threads, among them that the occasionally flighty Nobel added a peace prize to the menu only after falling in love with a beautiful Austrian pacifist. Before long, however, Karlinsky starts inserting theories of his own, imagining that Nobel also used his munitions fortune to set up a secret prize, on top of the five official ones. This temporary, clandestine award was open only to current Nobel laureates. And that’s only the start of the intrigue: It gave about $ 10,000 to whoever could solve the mystery of Stonehenge.
Like Karlinsky’s first book, 2010s The Evolution of Inanimate Objects, this new novel tries its damnedest to convince readers that maybe, deep down, it just might be non- fiction after all. The Stonehenge Letters takes the form of an official report about this secret prize, including reproduced correspondence, archival photographs, drawings, footnotes, appendices, bibliographies and other apparatuses designed to give off an air of measured objectivity.
By locating, and then shamelessly exploiting, a few quirks in Nobel’s biography, Karlinsky is daring us to call his bluff — to point out exactly where truth ends and fiction begins.
But this proves more difficult than you might think. Several of the parts that read most obviously like narrative connective tissue turn out to be real: a flourish in Esperanto here, an amateur Stonehenge acolyte there. Karlinsky has, of course, knowingly planted these details to throw us off the scent.
On top of that is the frame of an unreliable narrator, who adds cryptic footnotes — e. g., “Is any recollection really fortuitous?” — and insists on viewing the entire story through a heavily Freudian lens. With so many provocations and feints, Karlinsky may have readers merrily by the nose for long stretches of the book.
At scarcely 200 pages, however, the book is too short to even halfway exhaust its topic — what are official reports, after all, if not unending? And even after combing through the darkly autobiographical appendices, the narrator’s obsession with Freud never fully gels with the larger story about Nobel and Stonehenge.
My biggest complaint, though, is the same one I had about Karlinsky’s first book: After doing a superb job pulling the rug out from under me as a reader, he goes to great lengths to lay that same rug right back down again. In most novels, acknowledgments and author’s notes are to be expected. In a book like this, where Karlinsky uses his to drop the facade and only too eagerly reveal exactly which parts of the story he’s made up, they ought to be banned altogether.
With that in mind, my recommendation is to enjoy the meat of Karlinsky’s puzzle- box novel for the nutty, star- studded historical- thriller- masqueradingas- bureaucracy that it is. While you’re at it, hunt around the Internet and double- check whichever stray details catch your eye, too.
But once you finish Appendix II, immediately close the book, and walk away. To venture any farther is to risk having its spell undone in a matter of seconds.