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Well, the author (Milan Kundera) of every nineteen-year-old girl's favorite novel (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) - thousands upon thousands of Facebook matches can't be wrong - was accused this week of having once been a police informant. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes claimed that Kundera tipped off authorities about a spy, who was then imprisoned for fourteen years.

Kundera, an ambivalent native of what is now Czech Republic, is emphatically denying the report. "I object in the strongest manner to these accusations," he said, and went on to declare that the news media is guilty of character assassination. Despite the fact that his anti-newspaper ranting bears an unfortunate resemblance to that of a certain Vice Presidential candidate, I'm inclined to side with Kundera. (Please click on that last link.)

I suppose I don't have any reason to support him beyond a personal hunch. Although I think Western media has probably made me generally suspicious of all forms of Eastern European media, somehow, so that may have something to do with it. All I've read of Kundera's, aside from a few short politiwonk essays in The New Yorker, was Unbearable Lightness, but parts of it were basically like a manifesto deriding totalitarian governments. Maybe he wrote it out of guilt for what he'd done, I don't know...I'm going to stop speculating.

But what's kind of interesting is that it used to be fairly commonplace for novelists to be government informants. In the latest issue of The Paris Review, the American writer Peter Matthiessen talks about his involvement with the CIA in the 1950's:

I wanted to write my first novel. So here was the CIA offering to send me to Paris for its own reasons...the Cold War had hardly started at the time, but Paris was a hot-spot of anti-Americanism, which communists were happy to exploit to benefit the Soviet Union. So there was the appeal to my patriotism, to work for the country against the communist menace. Mainly I was interested in being a writer.

Which brings me to my next point: Matthiessen's latest book, Shadow Country, made the shortlist for this year's National Book Award. Yay!

That's right - October is prize month, apparently, in the lit world. Or, at the very least, shortlist month.

For whatever reason, the National Book Award is the prize that most consistently suits my personal tastes as a reader - I thought last year's winner, Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, was pretty fantastic - and I was pleased to see my favorite book of 2008 is in the running: The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon. Rounding out the list is Marilynne Robinson's Home - the semi-sequel to her Pulitzer-winning Gilead; Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba; and Salvatore Scibona's The End (mad props to local indy press Graywolf for that one. How do they keep doing it? They're amazing, is how.). Nonfiction, poetry, and young adult shortlists can all be found here.

What else? Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday. Fun fact: "Any full-length novel published in Britain and written in English by a resident of a British Commonwealth country, the Republic of Ireland or Zimbabwe is eligible," according to guidelines. I wonder how many Zimbabweans have won?

The announcement of Adiga's award was monitored at the Frankfurt Book Festival on six flat-screen TVs, and got a fairly low-key reaction, according to the NYTimes. If you're looking for intrigue at the FBF, it seems you should check out Orhan Pamuk's keynote speech.

"A century of banning and burning books, of throwing writers into prison or killing them or branding them as traitors and sending them into exile, and continuously denigrating them in the press - none of this has enriched Turkish literature," he said. "It has only made it poorer."

And oh yeah - Abdullah Gul, the President of Turkey, was sitting in the audience.

Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature way back in 2006. For a loose transition, the winner of this year's Nobel was announced last week. It's going to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. He is not, we're to understand, a French writer, but rather, a writer of the world, which was this year's main criteria - God forbid an author should ever resemble his/her host nation.

For lack of any better idea (a typical problem for me), I submitted to the hullabaloo surrounding what's-his-face's comments that American writers are too American to win the Nobel. Maybe the real issue, though, is that the Nobel Prize is sort of redundant, anyway, much like the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars. It doesn't laud a specific book, but rather an author and his/her ouvre, most of whom have had several awards bestowed on them throughout their careers. Are Saul Bellow and Ernest Hemingway remembered as Nobel Prize winners? No. Modern editions of their books don't even mention the Nobel. It's probably good to slap that sticker up on there for a year or so to boost sales, but ultimately the award kind of just says, "Everybody else has discovered how great these writers are...we've decided it's not untrue."

Gawd, I want one.