JENNIFER SZALAI I can’t say I’ll miss it much. Would I have ever read Elias Canetti if it weren’t for the Nobel? Maybe, maybe not; for those non-Anglo writers who won it decades ago, it’s hard to know whether the Nobel alone was responsible for their renown here.

The most recent winner whom I hadn’t heard of and then made an effort to read was Imre Kertesz, who won in 2002. His work was hard to get in English translation at the time, and so I sent my father Hungarian-language editions purchased from a bookseller on the Upper East Side, thinking he could read them and we would talk. My father became too sick to want to read an autobiographical novel about the Holocaust, and so it didn’t happen. (And as much as a part of me wanted to read Tim Wilkinson’s reportedly lucid translations that were published in the years that followed, Kertesz became too closely connected to that time in my life, and so that didn’t happen either.)

Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the prize should go to “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” The Academy later took that to mean works of “a lofty and sound idealism.” Let’s not even open the keg of worms that is “sound idealism.” I’ll just ask: Do the prize’s explicitly stated political connotations help or hurt in understanding its choices? And do its political considerations make the prize more or less worthy as a literary project?

SZALAI When I read about the background of the prize, my first thought was: Whose “ideal direction” are we talking about? A committee that awards the Nobel to Rudyard Kipling, as it did in 1907 (praising him for his “virility of ideas,” which I suppose is one way of characterizing his work), clearly defines idealism in a way that’s different from a committee that awards the prize to, say, Jean-Paul Sartre, who declined the prize when it was offered to him in 1964.

The political connotations might help us understand the choices in certain years, especially when the committee has been explicit about ethical or moral considerations (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Czeslaw Milosz), but then what about a laureate like Alice Munro, who won in 2013, cited for being “master of the contemporary short story”? (Also, for what it’s worth, the Academy itself insists that politics is no longer as central to decisions as people like to presume.)

Image Rudyard Kipling Credit... R. Haines/Culture Club, via Getty Images

I do think that politics can be a better guide to figuring out why some writers didn’t get the prize. Ezra Pound, for instance — who I was surprised to learn was nominated 10 times! It apparently wasn’t anything in his poetry that knocked him from the list. The committee deemed him unacceptable because of his enthusiastic fascism and vicious anti-Semitism — what one of the members called his “ ‘subhuman’ reaction” to the Holocaust.