TOP STORY                                                        

The son of a Jewish dressmaker, Harold Pinter wins Nobel literature prize

Photo: Harold Pinter  has won the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- British playwright Harold Pinter, known for his distinctive juxtaposition of the brutal and the banal in such works as The Caretaker and The Room, won the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday.

The Swedish Academy said Pinter was an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."  In its citation, the academy said the 75-year-old playwright was one who restored the art form of writing plays. His works include The Room, The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter and his breakthrough work, The Caretaker. "Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles," the academy said.  Pinter is the first Briton to win the literature award since V.S. Naipaul won it in 2001. The son of a Jewish dressmaker, Pinter was born in London on Oct. 10, 1930. Pinter has said his encounters with anti-Semitism in his youth influenced him in becoming a dramatist. The wartime bombing of London also affected him deeply, the academy said. The academy's announcement came on Yom Kippur, Judaism's most important holiday. Dubbed the most influential British playwright of his generation, in recent years he has turned his acerbic eye on the United States and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

 Most prolific between 1957 and 1965, Pinter relished the juxtaposition of brutality and the banal and turned the conversational pause into an emotional minefield. Dark and peopled with unfortunates, Pinter's idiom was so distinctive that he got his own adjective: "Pinteresque." His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives are set against the neat lives they have constructed in order to survive. Usually enclosed in one room, they organize their lives as a sort of grim game and their actions often contradict their words. Gradually, the layers are peeled back to reveal the characters' nakedness. In addition to plays, he has written for the cinema, penning such screenplays as The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Accident, The Servant and The Go-Between.

Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl said Pinter was overwhelmed when told he had won the prize. "He did not say many words, in fact he was very happy," he said. Last year's winner, Austrian feminist Elfriede Jelinek, drew such ire that a member of the academy publicly blasted his colleagues for picking her. Knut Ahnlund, 82, who has not played an active role in the academy since 1996, resigned Tuesday after he wrote in a signed newspaper article that picking Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage" to the award's reputation. The academy, founded in 1786 by King Gustav III to advance the Swedish language and its literature, has handed out the literature prize since 1901. To date 102 men and women have received the prize, including France's Jean-Paul Sartre, who declined the 1964 prize.

WEAPONS CONTINUE TO FLOW FROM EGYPT

JERUSALEM [MENL] -- Israel has determined that the bolstered Egyptian police presence has not stemmed the flow of weapons and ammunition from the Sinai Peninsula to the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials said the military has detected a steady flow of weapons from the Sinai to the Gaza Strip. They said that nearly every night boxes of weapons and components were smuggled over the 14-kilometer Egypt-Gaza border. "It's no longer a massive flow," an official said. "But it's a steady flow and much greater than what it used to be during our presence along the border." Israel has complained several times both to Egypt and the United States of the continued weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip. The complaints have included reports that the smugglers were also bringing in weapons through the Mediterranean Sea.
 

[IMRA: Retreat supporters embraced the assertion that Egypt wants to stop the flow of weapons to Gaza as it has an interest in stabilizing Gaza. They did this since this assertion was so important for the underlying  logic of retreat as otherwise retreat meant more weapons flowing to Gaza under circumstances that Israel's ability to react would be further limited by the change in the status of Gaza.  There is, of course, an alternative view that coincides with what has transpired over the years - a period during which Egypt has allowed weapons to flow to Gaza as it opted to take billions of dollars of advanced American weapons instead of billions of dollars of American development aid to benefit the Egyptian population: Egypt wants an ongoing war of attrition between the Palestinians and Israel as it develops to the point that it can take what it sees as its rightful place displacing Israel as the strongest nation in the region.  And after that???]