Ngugi wa Thiong' o? Juan Goytisolo? Adonis? Over the past several weeks, some version of this list was muttered, usually to a silent spouse in the middle of the night, by insomniac writers contemplating another Nobel Prize about to go where it shouldn't; i.e. to someone other than themselves. (Not that winning puts out the competitive fires. Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel for literature in 1976, was said to ahve grown wistful every October after that, because you can win it only once.) Nor is the muttering restricted to the papabili who make the short list; pretty much every living writer with a word processor thinks that he or she has a shot at wining. (Edmucd Wilson reports that our own James Thurber longed for it to go, just once, to a humorist; predictably, he never got anywhere near the podium.) When this year's prize was announced, last Thursday, it went to a writer, who, if not a North American (again), is at least familiar to North Americans: the Peruvian novelist ...