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Harold Pinter Wins Nobel Prize for Literature
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" British playwright Harold Pinter has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

British playwright Harold Pinter, whose sparse style and use of silences has given rise to the adjective "Pinteresque", was the surprise winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005 on Thursday.

The 75-year-old Londoner, son of a Jewish dressmaker, is one of Britain's best-known writers for works such as "The Birthday Party" and "The Caretaker". But critics said he was an unexpected pick for the 10 million crown prize.

Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms", said the Swedish Academy. Its head Horace Engdahl called him "the towering figure" in English drama in the second half of the 20th century. An accomplished actor and director, Pinter is also known for screenplays for film and television, such as the 1981 movie "The French Lieutenant's Woman", based on John Fowles' novel.

An outspoken voice on politics and human rights, Pinter was described by one biographer as "a permanent public nuisance, a questioner of accepted truths, both in life and art".

"Saddam is toast." Vice President Dick Cheney, trying to sell the Saudi ambassador on the invasion of Iraq, used the phrase, according to Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack." Millions of Americans turn to the "toast" metaphor in their daily lives to describe someone, or something, that is, to use another vogue phrase, "so over." Like a Barry Manilow tune, it has crept into the mass brain and taken up permanent residence.

"Toast" has lots of company, as Leslie Savan amply documents in "Slam Dunks and No-Brainers," her sharp, if wayward, analysis of the phenomenon she calls pop language. Pop is not slang, exactly, although it includes slang words like glitterati and fashionista. It's not argot or in-group terminology either, because everyone recognizes it, understands it and uses it constantly. Words and phrases like "Don't go there," "Get over it," "You da man," "Duh" and the sneering "I don't think so" constitute a new subdivision of the English language, an attitude-projecting, allusive vocabulary derived from television and advertising and used by ordinary people to sell themselves as hip in the mildest, least offensive way possible.

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Pop language is a bargain. Average Americans, instead of having to venture underground and master the slang of a subculture, can simply pick up the current put-downs and glib ripostes from television commercials or David Letterman. It allows them to channel, with no effort, up-to-the-minute dialects like Valley Girl ("whatever"), surfer ("bogus"), hip-hop ("bling") or drag queen ("please").

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Ms. Savan does not really approve of pop language. She worries that it clicks into place too easily and displaces complex thoughts. She is, too often, a scold, the sort of person who turns the lights on at a party and reminds everyone to drink in moderation. Again and again, she feels called upon to interrupt her narrative with a public service announcement, warning the reader that the easy pleasures of pop language come at a price, turning thinking citizens into shiny corporate pawns. There is an elitist fallacy at work here. Ms. Savan sees straight through the machinations of advertisers and understands the malevolent forces at work behind pop speech, the "subtle social and political trade-offs." Everyone else, apparently, is not quite smart enough to do the same.

Banville, 60, was a 7-1 outsider to win Britain's ?50,000 premier literary award for his novel The Sea when the shortlist was announced.

[Kazuo] Ishiguro, who yesterday won the People's Man Booker - in which members of the public picked their own favourites from the shortlist - had been strongly tipped to be the first Briton to win the Man Booker a second time. And Julian Barnes's Arthur and George in which Arthur Conan Doyle investigates the real-life miscarriage of justice - had been the bookies' favourite from the start.

Banville was modest as he collected his award. He said: "This is a great surprise and a great pleasure. Any one of these books could have won. To my colleagues I say just hang around and it will come. I have hung around for many years." And he thanked his agent and publishers "who stuck with me through many unsaleable books over the years". He added: "I must mention my children to whom my book is dedicated, Douglas and Alice."

Working the workhouse system of less-than-merry Old England, Harwood harbors no grandiose illusions that he is Dickens' new partner in crime-writing: I would never be so presumptuous!" proclaims the much-lauded screenwriter and playwright whose "The Dresser" dressed up the Broadway season 25 years ago. But, he adds, "I also wasn't intimidated" to cut it.

Nor did he have any fear and loathing of the loaded question bound to come up: What about the Jewish issue? The character of Fagin has been portrayed as so patently offensive a Jewish stereotype so often in the past - witness Alec Guinness' unpalatable portrayal of the character in the 1948 David Lean film version - that he's become somewhat of a synonym for anti-Semitism. But in this adaptation (opening Friday, Sept. 30), while still padding actor Ben Kingsley's proboscis for the part, Polanski and the screenwriter nosed the character away from such stereotypes.

Says Harwood, "Polanski and I are both Jews," and we actually never discussed" the stereotypical renditions of Fagin's past. Certainly, Dickens "had to be true to the period in which he wrote the novel, and it was an anti-Semitic period."

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"I'm drawn to outsiders," says Harwood of "Twist" and the twist of fate that made the Polish-born Polanski - who lost his parents to Mauthausen and Auschwitz during the Holocaust - one himself. Harwood, whose roots are firmly planted in the iconography of Judaism, is a wordsmith who feels the lure and lull of language - and loathes its misreadings. "I've never been a victim of anti-Semitism, but I feel the anti-Israeli language I hear today is anti-Semitism in disguise."