Bob Dylan is too good for the literary snobs

The American songster is a modern troubadour who speaks for all of us when he sings. He deserves the Nobel, says Bernard-Henri Lévy

OH, the anger of the fusty at the announcement of musician Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The panic of the literary bureaucracy, ensnared in its certainties and steeped in its petty calculations, its half-baked prognostications, its crafty shifts of position, has been palpable.

Was the choice of Dylan political or non-political? Why an American? Why not a woman? Or a voice, any voice, of a visible minority? Or this one, who’s been waiting 20 years? Or that one, who’s given up hope?