Say what you like about Martin Amis's novels--and most critics did when Yellow Dog was released last year--but his occasional journalism, the commissioned "colour" pieces usually contain a clutch of phrasings that reveal an aesthetic sensibility absent in most others' hack work. In today's Guardian, he finds an accommodating subject for his style in the autobiography of Maradona, a figure that would make Money's John Self cluck his tongue in disapproval.

Take this paragraph, for example, as a primer in the use of comic understatement:

Maradona's anarchistic streak also reveals itself in his contempt - no, his disgust - for the law. On the occasions when he attracts the attention of the police he can barely bring himself to say why. "I was arrested, arrested!" he says, and briefly describes the ensuing "farce"; meanwhile, with a polite cough, a footnote steps in to divulge the charge (possession of cocaine).

The "with a polite cough" clinches it....

The biggest gong in writing, the Nobel Prize for Literature, is due to be announced tomorrow. The winners seem to oscillate between some Great Name whose major work is behind them (V.S Naipul, for example) and a figure few in the Anglophone world has ever heard off.

(When Saul Bellow was awarded the prize in 1976, some waggish colleague congratulated him on joining Halldór Laxness in the pantheon.)

Come on, while you tut-tut the lamentable cultural incuriosity of the English-speaking world, were you really familiar with, say, Imre Kertész or Gao Xingjian before they won? (And after ploughing through two-thirds of the latter's fairly turgid Soul Mountain, I was initially mystified why the Swedish Academy chose this particular Chinese writer to pluck from obscurity. Politics may have played a role--Xingjian was persona non grata with the Chinese authorities--and the fact that the person who translated his work into Swedish is also a member of the Swedish Academy.)

I found the last snippet of information from an article in the International Herald Tribune, which also speculates on the possible winners tomorrow. The Danish poet Inger Christensen is being tipped (again, I shamefacedly admit that I had no previous knowledge of this person), perhaps because it may be politic to have a female laureate who doesn't write in English. (The Complete Review awards a B+ to one of her poems, alphabet.)

Among the better-known writers (at least to me), Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Philip Roth are being mentioned as contenders.

Of course, it would be standard operating procedure if none of the above got the nod. Details should be available from midday (Irish time) onwards from http://nobelprize.org/index.html

Just for a lark, I'm going to say that Harry Mulisch will win. He's got as much chance as anyone else, and deserves it simply for producing that barmy masterpiece, The Discovery of Heaven.

...that household name, Elfriede Jelinek! Well, at least I was half-right in my predictions, when I said that it was not unlikely that nobody among those mentioned as possibilities would actually win. After a perusal of Jelinek's bio on the Nobel site, however, I was surprised to discover that I had a glancing, if indirect, familiarity with her work. Michael Haneke's film "The Piano Teacher" was based on Jelinek's novel, Die Klavierspielerin (1983). I remember it being a compelling, if gruelling, piece of work. Another encouraging sign is that, according to the Swedish Academy:

"Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl Kraus, Ödön von Horváth, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the Wiener Group."

On the evidence of The Piano Teacher (at least its filmic version) and the quote above, anyone who thinks Thomas Bernhard is one of the major writers of the second half of the previous century, might consider familiarising themselves with the newest Nobel laureate’s oeuvre.

The New York Times calls Jelinek a "Fiery Austrian Writer" (reg required). Is the adjective "fiery" exclusively reserved for "difficult" females?

I was struck more forcibly than I expected when I came across the headline in the New York Times: "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74". The adjective bestowed on the deceased suggests a certain contempt that Derrida was held in by sections of the Anglophone academy. I remember seeing Derrida lecture to a packed auditorium in UCD perhaps six years ago. I have little recollection of his subject, but I remember finding his argument contemporaneously comprehensible and reasonable but then its substance floated entirely free from my mind the moment I began walking back through the campus's concrete arcades. I did, however, admire Derrida's refusal ever to do anything as mundane as providing a definition of Deconstruction. Nothing is more lethal to a intellectual movement than its easy comprehensibility.

One of the few nuggets of Derrida's thinking that stayed with me is the term "Différance." The unorthodox spelling suggested, I think, that any definitive meaning of a text was constantly being differed. There was no God, so don't expect any ultimate truths. To me, this slice of academic jargon is like a verbal madeleine cake, conjuring up my years of university in the early 1990s when I was supposed to be grappling earnestly with such concepts--years during which, somewhat in the spirit of Derrida, I postponed such arduous tasks.

From the interviews on Derrida's thinking taken by The Guardian, however, it seems that such facile understanding is far from atypical.

In yesterday's New York Times, Mark C. Taylor mounts a robust defense of Derrida, going as far to claim that:

"Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines."

The article also provides one of the more lucid accounts of the process of deconstruction to have appeared in the wake of the thinker's death.

I'm within 80 pages of the end of AL Kennedy's Paradise, a novel narrated by Hannah Luckraft (a name that mingles hope with a presentiment of shipwreck), an alcoholic Scottish woman involved in a self-destructive relationship with a "dissolute dentist" (the fly-leaf's description) Robert Gardener.

It's certainly not an easy read--as opposed to Consul's lubricated, erudite ruminations in that great masterpiece of alcoholism, "Under the Volcano", in which the reader is made complicit in Geoffrey's sodden aloofness to the world's tragedies and foibles, Hannah's narrative makes the reader profoundly uneasy as she pitilessly checklists the degradations and humiliations she embraces as part of the drinker's lot. It's also a story soaked in shame--a shame that stems from the distance she has travelled from her middle-class family and reinforced by society's traditional contempt of the drunken woman. While reading Hannah's mosaic of partial memories--her recollection of the "sepulchral" baggage collection hall in Dublin airport is spot on, however--you're inclined to hide your face in your hands.

The jocular, first-person voice only ratchets up the apprehension, as it's transparently a device to ignore the chasm yawning beneath. (For example, there's a particularly gruelling, black-comic scene when an indifferent GP forces open Hannah's jaws, which have been partially fused shut through alcoholic swelling.)

Some times, however, the manic humour jars with a scrupulosity in choosing adjectives that has a whiff of writing-workshop craft. Moreover, I have a problem with the use of italics to indicate Hannah's innermost self. This may seem pedantic, but to me using such typographical devices is lazy. Joyce didn't need to use italics to suggest a stream of consciousness. The reasons are similar to those behind Nabokov's well-known abhorrence of the exclamation mark--there's no case for its proper usage. Either it's simply tautological or trying to make up for the sentence's failure--the words alone should bear the weight of meaning.

I've just received Gerard Woodword's "I'll Go to Bed at Noon" in the post. Just what I need after AL Kennedy's Paradise: another book about dysfunctional boozehounds. I look forward to sharing my opinions on the novel even if the words in the title above come to mind when I consider its likely fate at the hands of the Booker judges tonight. The announcement of the winner will be made on BBC 2 tonight. I still think it's a two-horse race between Colm Tóibín's The Master and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Then again, my hunches about this year's Nobel Prize give an idea of my powers of augury.

Well, once again my blithe predictions return to haunt me. Alan Hollinghurst has in fact won this year's Booker prize--actually the only novel on the list that I've read so far. To bluntly rehash my previous reservations about this book, it's not bad, but it's been ludicrously overrated. If you want to read a novel about an uptight middle-class boy won over by the glamour of his social betters, why not go back to "Brideshead Revisited"? And as a satire of the 1980s, the politics are borderline adolescent. The message boils down to something like: Tory grandees are bad but amusing, black people are essentially good, and your timid bourgeois parents are boring.

It's also been described as the first gay novel to win the prize, which, when you come to think about it, is a very odd label.

It's been a while since my last post--small matters such as the birth of my son and being the best man at a friend's wedding have distracted me from the urgent task of broadcasting my views across the blogosphere.

On Tuesday, while my wife was focusing on her breathing and trying to survive her contractions, I excused myself and went out "for some air" (there are few things more useless than a husband in a Delivery Suite). As I walked out of the Coombe Hospital and sauntered down Cork Street, I was taken aback by the amount of construction going on--there must have been at least ten major developments being put up along a stretch of road about a kilometre long. What all the projects had in common was that they were all virtually devoid of aesthetic merit. A CAD system on autopilot could have generated their designs.

Apart from their blandness, even their utility is questionable. Is Dublin really crying out for more office space (the vacancy rate in the city is one of the highest in Europe)? Presumably the apartments will be occupied by the next wave of Gastarbeiter-the near-invisible immigrants charged with serving our meals and cleaning up after our revels.

Then a story that appeared in the Irish news a few days previously popped into my head. In response to a query from a TD (a member of the Irish parliament), it was revealed that 240 people who earned between a hundred thousand and a million pounds in 2001 paid no tax. These individuals had avoided tax by availing of various tax breaks, including so-called Section 23 investments earmarked for the urban regeneration of areas such as the Liberties (the working-class area of Dublin to the south of Christchurch Cathedral).

So, on reflection, it's not surprising that all the developments on Cork Street (and countless others across the city) are without style or much economic purpose. Their architectural and fiscal hollowness is merely an apt manifestation of their origins--they exist only to give money a safe passage, diverting it away from the Exchequer's maw. They also exist, to use a quote from Milan Kundera, to contribute to the "uglification of the world."

I share these thoughts partly as a service to anxious fathers-to-be. It seems, for me at least, a serious bout of misanthropic introspection is a good distraction from the anxiety and sense of powerlessness that is likely to gnaw at you while watching the mother of your children writhe in pain beside you. However, three hours after I walked back into the hospital, my son, Hugh, arrived in the world. And concerns about the uglification of the world became mercifully abstract and distant. After all, fatherhood opens the door to a whole mansion haunted by far more pressing and all-consuming fears.

The brouhaha over the failure of designate Commission president José Manuel Barroso to form an administration because of objections of MEPs to the appointment of Rocco Buttiglione as European Commissioner for justice and home affairs appears to confirm three trends:

1. The growing culture gap between Europe and the US. Buttiglione's position was considered untenable because of his homophobic and anti-feminist remarks, which were apparently the product of his ultra-Catholic beliefs. In the US, leading politicians, particularly Republican ones, rarely lose their positions over their off-the-cuff remarks about homosexuals deserving hellfire. As for expressing their religious convictions or lack of, US politicians would consider it career suicide to express any doubts about the existence of God. Despite his strong performances in the debates, it was still a little disheartening to hear Senator Kerry forced to trot out his altar-boy shtick as a sort of pre-emptive defence before standing up for the separation of the Church and State in the United States.

Meanwhile, this story from the Onion perfectly captures President Bush's browbeating approach to sharing his faith.

2. The increasing clout of the European Parliament. However, the benchmark by which we measure MEPs' performance is really very low. Most of us remain very much in the dark about what exactly they do to earn their seats on the gravy train. (Question: How many MEPs are there in total and how many represent Ireland? Answer at the bottom of the page.)

3. The steady apathy of the EU electorate. Despite the fact that the de facto European government is facing ongoing paralysis, I haven't encountered a single person concerned about the fate of the Commission. And why should they? Europe appears to be muddling along regardless.

Of course, everybody is distracted by events across the Atlantic. Encouragingly, the Economist has reluctantly endorsed Kerry. This merely confirms the growing suspicion that old-style conservatives with libertarian leanings (in other words, the government should stay out of my pocket and my bedroom) are quietly appalled at a Bush administration that appears to hope that divine intervention will vanquish the budget deficit.

The New Yorker, less surprisingly, also endorses Kerry. However, much of the passion is reserved for lambasting the incumbent. The tone is summed up by the following extract:

“I guess you’d say I’m a good steward of the land,” Bush mused dreamily during debate No. 2. Or maybe you’d say nothing of the kind.

Fingers crossed, everyone...

Answer: 732, 13