Welcome to the Nobel Prize abyss

I AM off lingonberries for the time being and Volvos and flat white furniture from Ikea. No meatballs, thank you. Once again the humorless Swedes have chosen a writer of migraines for the Nobel Prize in literature, an author of twilight meditations on time and memory and mortality and cold toast by loners looking at bad wallpaper. It's not a prize for literature, it's a prize for nihilism. The Swedes said he's like Jane Austen combined with Kafka with some of Proust, three other writers you'd never invite to a party. Well, at least they didn't give it to Joni Mitchell.

That Swedes give out the Nobel is like the Swiss deciding the Cy Young Award. We're talking tone-deaf, people. The words "Swedish" and "comedy" seldom appear in the same sentence except as a joke.

All the Swedes with a sense of humour came to America and so what the Nobel judges recognise is bleak, cramped, emotionally stunted, enigmatic, pretentious. Millions of people around the world understand the concept of reading books for pleasure but the Swedes think of it as a form of colonoscopy. If they gave a Nobel Prize for food, they'd give it to quinoa.