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“Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” Saul Bellow
30th July 2008
Man Booker Prize
The Man Booker longlist was announced this week; setting in motion a flurry of activity that will result in the crowning of this year's literary King or Queen.
I have to confess that although I consider myself an avid reader, I have read only two of the forty booker winners: Life of Pi and The Remains of the Day. I thoroughly enjoyed them both, but for some reason I haven't read any more. I may drown in the waves of literary shame washing over me.
The prize is open to anyone (male or female – don't be confused by the ‘Man': it refers to an investment group writing in English from the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland . (Indulge me in a little alternative literary history: what would have happened had the prize been open to American authors from its inception? Would that list of forty winners look markedly different? Would Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, William T Vollmann, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Dave Eggers, Don De Lillo, John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates be polishing their prizes instead of John Berger, Salman Rushdie, Anne Enright, Peter Carey and Pat Barker?)
To take part in the national debate around the longlist, please go here.
If you'd like to read one of the titles, please order it from your local library and see what all the fuss is about. I myself am quite intrigued by Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole. I'll let you know if I get round to it.
David H.
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Comments
1st August 2008
"Waves of shame" seems particularly appropriate given the number of winners that are concerned with the sea; from Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, to John Banville's almost equally imaginatively titled The Sea. What odds are being offered on Sea of Poppies taking this year's prize?!
My own 'count' is a marginally less embarrassing total of eleven winners, out of which I particularly loved James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late. Its victory led to a mildly hysterical reaction from such conservative arbiters of good taste and morality as Simon Jenkins, so it is worth reading for that reason alone. For me, the most obvious name missing from the list of winners is another Scottish writer, Alasdair Gray. I had assumed that Lanark didn't win because it had the misfortune to be published in the same year as Midnight's Children, but it appears that it wasn't even on the shortlist in 1981. Scandalous!
The names of this year's nominees are mostly unfamiliar to me, but I'm interested in reading the novel by John Berger, who previously won in 1972. I 'discovered' him relatively recently through his non-fiction writing and quite wonderful 70's TV series Ways of Seeing, but I'm yet to get round to any of his fiction.
With regard to the question of whether the list would look different if Americans were included, the answer is undoubtedly yes, almost completely! Given the names you've listed I find it curious that you omit Thomas Pynchon; I wonder if the Booker Judges in 1974 would have agreed with their Pulitzer counterparts who called Gravity's Rainbow "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene", and given the prize to Nadine Gordimer regardless. I would like to think not!
Daniel C.
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4th August 2008
Perhaps Life of Pi only won because it had a picture of the ocean on the front cover?
I myself have never read any Pynchon, although Gravity's Rainbow has been haunting my to-be-read pile for years.
David H.
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