The Man Booker Prize 2011

The winner of the Man Booker Prize is going to be announced today (update: The sense of an ending by Julian Barnes is the winner). Usually I try to read one of the books so that I sound vaguely knowledgable and literary, but this year I have only just graduated to reading books again after a diet of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, so I just couldn’t face dredging my way through some sort of elongated word fest that leaves me feeling depressed and rather sour.

However, this year the Man Booker’s judges chaired by Dame Stella Rimington, thriller writer and former head of MI5 declared that “We want people to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them.”  This is almost tantamount to treason in the Man Booker realm,  and things began to get rather nasty when one reviewer declared, “Dame Stella? We’d have been better off with Dame Edna.”   (Read more in the Guardian)

We need to spare a thought for the judges though who had read all 100 plus books in the long list and then read the short list three times.  I think the Man  Booker could be introduced as an endurance sport!

All this talk of ‘readability’ bodes well for the likes of me, what have you enjoyed from the list, which ones have ‘readability’ and which ones, just as interestingly, have left you cold?

• Snowdrops by A. D Millar
• Jamrach’s menagerie by Carol Birch
• The sisters brothers by Patrick deWitt
• Half blood blues by Esi Edugyan
• The sense of an ending by Julian Barnes
• Pigeon English  by Stephen Kelman

P.S.  How remiss of me.  When I was adding the list of titles to this blog I realised that I have read one!  Snowdrops by A.D Millar.  I picked it up because it looked short.  I really enjoyed it.

 

The Man Booker Prize 2010 goes to … Howard Jacobson

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson has just been announced the winner. Hooray! I even did a wee cheer to see a victory for comedy over tragedy (but also because I picked it in a competition as the winner, he he).

• See our page on Man Booker finalists and winners
• See the Man Booker Prize website

2010 shortlist

• Parrot and Olivier in America Peter Carey
• Room Emma Donoghue
• In a Strange Room Damon Galgut
• The Long Song Andrea Levy
• C Tom McCarthy

 

In A Strange Room

In my blog about two weeks ago: My Pub Quiz Fantasy  – The Man Booker Prize, I hoped that In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut would be this year’s Man Booker winner. Well, I’ve just finished reading it and I no longer care if it is the Booker winner or not. I just want other people to read it. I want to share it. It’s that good.

Three stories make up the book: The Follower, The Lover, and The Guardian. Galgut is the central character throughout. In each story he fails either to follow, to love or to guard. But put that way off to one side because he excels as The Storyteller in prose that is clean, compelling, almost hypnotic.

Arguments against this novel as a work of fiction seem spurious. All memory is fiction. Try comparing your memory of an event with someone else’s. Greg and I can barely agree as to the exact sequence of events on The Night Of  The Earthquake and that was only a month ago. I rest my case. Galgut gets round this by writing mainly in the third person “he” and then unexpectedly switching to the first person “I”. He explains this early on in the novel on page 5:

“He sits on the edge of a raised stone floor and stares out unseeingly into the hills around him and now he is thinking of things that happened in the past. Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching.”

Needless to say book clubs  around the world can expect me to foist this latest Galgut on them. As a tribute to his writing I will finish off in Galgut style:

She knew she would put this latest book into her book club. She could see her lovely friends skirt it warily, see people pick it up and put it down. She could feel that they would rather have had another Jodi Picoult. But I don’t care, I want to share this with them. I want us to remember this book together.

Someone out there, read this book. Share your comments. I am lonely here in my one woman Damon Galgut Fanclub!

 

My Pub Quiz Fantasy – The Man Booker Prize

This will be one of the favourites

I am quite spectacularly useless at pub quizzes.  How can it be that I know nothing at all about Paris Hilton and her ilk, dangerously little about the All Blacks and am so abysmally bad at the recognition of pop stars. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been reduced to banging my glass of Pinot Gris onto the table and demanding: “When will they ask me something that I know?”  To which the Pub Quiz Wunderkind (PQW) from Customer Welcome countered – “What do you know, exactly?”

Well PQW, I know about The Man Booker Prize – the literary event that everybody loves to hate. Writing careers are made or broken on its back and it is about to wreak its annual havoc on the 9th October. I love the Booker prize for the massive interest in contemporary fiction that it inspires, so I took a vow to read every single Booker prizewinning novel from the beginning of time. Here’s what I have to look forward to this year:

• Peter Carey – Parrot and Olivier in America
• Emma Donoghue - Room


But I hope this one wins!

• Damon Galgut - In a Strange Room
• Howard Jacobson – The Finkler Question
• Andrea Levy – The Long Song
• Tom McCarthy – C

You can’t look at this list of loveliness and not be moved to ask: Which book would you choose as the winner? And this being the Booker prize, the follow on question: Which book will actually win?

Fast forward to my fantasy. It’s Pub Quiz night and some poor suckers have been saddled with me as a team mate. A double point question comes up: “What was the third novel written by Booker Prize nominee Damon Galgut?”

This is my fantasy, so only I will know the answer. It is the unforgettable The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs. The crowd will go wild. The PQW will come over all respectful, I’ll be shouted another glass of plonk and my team will win.

Is this too much to ask?

What are your picks for this year’s Man Booker?

 

Odds on favourite wins The Man Booker Prize

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has taken out the big one!

Her book revolves around Thomas Cromwell ‘the blacksmith boy who became Henry VIII’s right-hand man’:

Wolf Hall stands on its own, as a complete story – it is the end of one vital chapter in Thomas Cromwell’s life, and perhaps when we meet him again he will be slightly different. Five years are before him, his rise and rise – the destruction of Anne Boleyn, the battle for the soul of Henry’s daughter Mary, a revolt which is almost a civil war, the shaking and remaking of England…

I love her quote on the enduring fascination of the Tudors: ‘Almost all the stories you might want to tell are lurking behind the arras’.

So congratulations to Hilary, and if you’ve read Wolf Hall do chime in and tell us what you thought. I’m still patiently waiting to get my hands on a copy …

• Bookies favourite wins the 2009 Prize - Man Booker site
• Hilary Mantel on Wolf Hall – A Chapter in Cromwell’s life - Man Booker site
• Our page on the Man Booker Prize (including previous finalists and winners)

 

Man Booker prize longlist is out …

And what do you reckon? Here’s the longlist.

As yet I haven’t read ANY of these, but am intrigued especially by How to paint a dead man by Sarah Hall. I interviewed her at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival in 2008 and she talked about the percolating process of this novel:

… very loosely based around the life of Giorgio Morandi, Italian still life artist, “a very weird character who painted the same series of objects over and over again his whole life. A recluse, very well respected in the field of art but lot of rumours flew around about him and also speculation about the work. He painted bottles over and over again on the table and he never answered anyone’s artistic theories about them. There is a character loosely based on him and four narratives. Art/Death/Existential matters. It’s going to be a hard sell!”

Others on my to-read list are The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt (blogged about Sue earlier this month) and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It’s set in one of the most interesting times in English history – the reign of Henry VIII – and told largely through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. 

Another novel with a historical bent that I want to read is The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds. The description read to me like a Peter Ackroyd-esque blend of historical figures and intense lyricism – a good thing:

After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum’s owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. This intensely lyrical novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness. Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates – the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself – are brought vividly to life. Rapturous yet precise, exquisitely written, rich in character and detail, this is a remarkable and deeply affecting book: a visionary novel which contains a world.

Man Booker longlist press release

Heavyweights clash on Booker longlist – The Guardian

What have you read from the longlist? What might you want to? What glaring omissions are there?

 

Man Booker Prize winner announced

The White Tiger

Our intrepid blogger, ‘tewp’ who picked The White Tiger as a possible Booker winner certainly had his finger on the pulse of the Booker Judges, who have agreed with him and declared it to be this year’s winner. 

If book sales were anything to go by then Linda Grant’s The Clothes on their backs would have been a sure winner with 3,074 copies sold in English bookshops compared to White Tigers that sold 2,588 copies, and Ladbrooks had Sebastian Barrys’ The Secret scripture as a 2/1 winner.  Interestingly word on the ground was that the reason that Linda Grant’s book sold so well because it was considerably thinner than some of the heftier tomes that were nominated this year!

However White Tiger won in the end with the Judges saying that it “shocked and entertained” in equal measure.  Perhaps Tewp should be on the judging panel next year, he obviously has a good take on what makes a great read!

 

Lucky Linda?

Those Women on Air girls can really pick the authors to bring to Christchurch. Earlier this year they hosted the extremely talented Linda Grant, who has just made the Man Booker short-list for The clothes on their backs. I’ve loved all Grant’s books and she writes for Vogue and she has a blog about clothes so I would have gone to see her anyway but the the smug feeling of having heard her read from a book that might just win one of the biggies on the literary award scene and from having a signed copy is an added bonus.

Grant is an Orange Prize winner but she’s not the favourite to win this one. Even the bookies were surprised when Salman Rushdie didn’t make the short-list and seem to think Sebastian Barry might be the winner this year.

The women writers on the Oranges Are Not The Only Prize panel at The Press Christchurch Writers Festival were generally in agreement that prizes can make a difference to sales and in bringing books to the public’s attention and so it has proved for The clothes on their backs. Just making the longlist saw it jump from selling 11 copies in the week before the announcement to 144 the week after. In library land books on long and short lists certainly generate more reserves, just like a review in The Press or the Listener or a mention on a popular blog.

A fascinating piece in the Guardian Online  about Booker deliberations through the 40 years of the prize detailed some of the shenanigans the judges have got up to in picking the winners. The general message seems to be that it’s something of a horse trading exercise so the novels the judges thought should have won but didn’t and their picks as the best of the Bookers are particularly interesting.

More than one judge chose J.G. Farrell’s The seige of Krishnapur as the best winner and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The blue flower as most undeserving loser (‘a grotesque oversight” according to Paul Bailey).

And when The bone people won in 1985 the women’s co-operative who had published it “came up in full island dress to collect it, chanting a Maori praise song”, in Marina Warner’s bemusing phrase.

 

Man Booker Prize Longlist

For those of you who follow such things the Man Booker prize longlist is out.  Some of the authors are completely new to me, and the ones I have read I didn’t like – so it’s not looking good for my reading list this year.  Our trusty fiction buyer has been hot on the case however, so you will be able to order any of these titles from the library network if something takes your fancy.

So here they are:

White Tiger

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
From A to X by John Berger
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

One title that has been getting some attention is A Case of Exploding Mangoes by first novelist Mohammed Hanif.  Apparently written in a similar vein to Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, it is set in the days before the crash that killed General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, president of Pakistan from 1978 to 1988 – one of Pakistan’s enduring mysteries.  Hanif uses satirical humour to build up crazy conspiracy theories, and it could be very good, or it could just be annoyingly clever, hard to tell.

If you wish to test your knowledge about past Booker prizes then have a go at this quiz. You will surely do better than me, I only scored two out of five!

 

Best of the Booker

Hot off the Press:

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction announced today (Thursday 21 February) a one-off award – The Best of the Booker – to celebrate the prestigious literary prize’s 40th anniversary. The Best of the Booker will honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded on 22 April 1969.

…  visit Debate and let us know who you think should make the Best of the Booker shortlist.

What are your picks? Check our list of previous winners.

The ones that stick in my memory are ones that have all been made into rather fine movies: Heat and dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the 1975 winner which later was made into a movie starring the gorgeous Greta Scacchi, the 1989/1990 double whammy of Remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Possession by A.S. Byatt, and 1992 winner The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. 2000 winner  The blind assassin by Margaret Atwood is an astonishing read. But if forced to pick “the best of the Booker” I’m plumping for Possession by A.S. Byatt. It combines the scope and splendour of the best Victorian novels with modern wit. It’s big, juicy and readable.