2012 Man Booker Prize Announced

Today, Hilary Mantel was awarded the 2012 Man Booker Prize for her book Bring Up the Bodies, a sequel to the 2009 Booker-winning Wolf Hall. She was the favourite to win the award at 6/4 odds; it is "the third time in eight years that the favorite has won the award (Wolf Hall was one of the others)." The win marks two other milestones: "Not only does Hilary Mantel become the first British novelist and the first woman to win the prize twice, she is also the first writer to win double glory with a sequel."

This year's Booker contest sparked a debate about readability and popular fiction winning the award; the chair of the prize, Sir Peter Stothard, previously ruffled feathers with his stodgy opinion on bloggers and literary criticism, while simultaneously stating that the Man Booker should not be defined by "readability." It is interesting, then, that the prohibitive favourite and previous winner should win the award. For all its talk of challenging readers and selecting lasting titles, the Prize committee chooses the most obvious novel. The Guardian has a similar opinion:

"The other novels on the shortlist could never be so popular. Deborah Levy's Freudian tale of madness among the middle classes, Jeet Thayil's brilliantly rambling stories of druggy Bombay, Tan Twan Eng's exploration of atrocity and artistry, Alison Moore's slow-burning portrait of a man in flight from his past: Mantel's is, literally and metaphorically, a weightier book than these. 

"But Mantel's real challenger on the shortlist, and the novel that has missed out to her double coronation, must have been Will Self's Umbrella. An undeniably daunting slab of high modernist prose, without such concessions as speech marks or paragraph breaks, it's also a brilliantly absorbing and audacious meditation on madness, consciousness, technology, war and the mess of the 20th century.

"As a highbrow panel dropped the previous year's demands for "readability" in favour of complexity and the sheer pleasures of innovative prose, it looked for a while as though it could have been Self's year. As it is, perhaps Umbrella would have been too radical a choice for a prize that, as the country's biggest, cannot help but be a little conservative."

For another year, the Booker Prize offers lively debate about literature, literary critics, and readers. Whether you agree with the selection or not, you can't argue about keeping great literature in the spotlight. Now the watch begins for next year!

Bloggers vs. Critics

Every once in a while, the debate comes up that blogging is going to be the death of literary criticism. With the incredible dearth of book-type blogs in existence, it is an inevitable comparison. As a book blogger myself, I have no delusions of grandeur regarding my reviews. They are for me, and for those who have decided that we enjoy similar books. I am the same: I follow bloggers who have proven to me that his or her tastes are in line with my own. If not, well, it doesn't really matter what the opinion is, does it?

Now, if I seek out information about a specific book, say, Telegraph Road, I will read review sites that I feel will give me objective, thoughtful information regarding the title. I may not base my decision on a casual reviewer with a blog, but I might on what Jennifer Egan thinks.

That is my decision to make. I take it seriously, and if a reviewer (or blogger) is wrong, well, it's a difference of opinion. Books are seldom the same thing to everybody (if ever). Anyone who thinks they can quantify a book's quality clearly has a high opinion of himself/herself.

For instance, I recently read a review of Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, a book I enjoyed and read very quickly. Now, the author of the review did not enjoy it as much as I did, if at all:

So Beautiful Ruins is a bunch of stereotypes on top of a pile of clichés. While reading, I kept a running count of all the original thoughts and authentic feelings that are contained in Beautiful Ruins. The final count was zero.

It's true, the novel contained several characters that were either underdeveloped or unnecessary to the plot. Even the main characters acted in a cliched fashion. I admit that - despite this, I enjoyed it. Walter's prose is excellent, the story moves quickly and is engaging, and the settings are picturesque. What's not to like?

Now, however, Sir Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement and the chair of this year's Man Booker Prize judges, decides that book bloggers are going to ruin "good" literature with amateur reviews:

It will be bad for readers; as much as one would like to think that many bloggers opinions are as good as others. It just ain't so. People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we'll be worse off. There are some important issues here. 

Apparently, book bloggers are such persuasive writers that their opinions will determine the buying habits of the masses - pretty good for amateur critics, right? Not only does his argument make very little sense, it is presuming that readers of "good" literature need to be told what to read. If the readers of "good" literature are that gullible, they would not be able to understand what they were reading (have you heard of Will Self yet?).

But why does he bother at all? He argues for good literature but, as a publisher and author himself, he must realize that book sales drive the book industry; without an annual Fifty Shades of Grey there would be no Zadie Smith. He should be thanking those millions of book buyers around the globe who invest in the printed word so that he can read those pieces of fiction he deems excellent. I suppose I agree with Amanda Nelson at Book Riot, who writes,

Sir Peter’s myopic elitism is so tired and recycled that it’s easy to dismiss. You can feel his fingers grasping for the state of literature as he knows it, desperate to keep it out of the hands of the unwashed masses (you know, those folks who actually read the books).

Her opinion is very funny and much angrier than my own, as Sir Peter's claims for proper critics has an implied gender element, as he is "Of The Greying Hair and Smug Expression." However, our opinions arrive at the same conclusion: why bother?

The Man Booker Prize Shortlist Announced

photo from cbc.ca

The second shortlist to be announced within a week is for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. The list is as follows:

Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse
Will Self, Umbrella
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

No Canadians on this list, unfortunately. As with the longlist announcement, Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies is the prohibitive favourite. Last year’s winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, came with a bit of controversy, as the “jury was accused of dumbing down after the chair of the panel said finalists had been chosen for ‘readability’’’ (CBC Books). This year’s list is “more adventurous” with a debut novel from Thayil, a stream of consciousness novel from Self, and two novels, from Levy and Eng, that were previously rejected from British publishers.

It is an interesting list and I will do my best to get through it before the October 16th announcement. However, having not yet read Wolf Hall (gasp), I won’t be able to read Bring Up the Bodies - it is a proper sequel.

Below is a list of other sites reporting on the announcement:

The Man Booker Prize
CBC Books
The Guardian
Page Views
The Millions
The Mookse and the Gripes

July's Pick: The Ghost Writer

This July, I am traveling at the end of the month, but that doesn't mean that I can't read a book! I've decided to honour 2011 Man Booker International Prize winner Philip Roth by selecting 1979's The Ghost Writer. First volume of a trilogy, The Ghost Writer focuses on Nathan Zuckerman, "a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books". Roth explores "the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency". Can't wait!

Lost Booker Prize Winner Announced

With the series finale of Lost a couple of days away, it is fitting that the "Lost" Booker Prize for 1970 was announced this week. J.G. Farrell's Troubles took home the prize, beating out The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden,The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard, Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault and The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark. There are two things about this novel that intrigue me. One, it won by a popular vote - getting 38% of the votes - rather than by jury selection. Two, it's the first novel in Farrell's Empire Trilogy, which includes The Siege of Krishnapur, a title very familiar to DTABC readers. It was our second selection way back in 2008. While no one actually finished the novel, it has always intrigued me as a counter to the traditional depictions of India, filling the gap between the colonial literature of Kipling and Forrester and the post-colonial works of Rushdie, Ondaatje, and, more recently, Aravind Adiga. At any rate, it seems that the British public feels that I should give Farrell another chance, perhaps including Troubles along the way. The third book in the trilogy is The Singapore Grip, about Singapore just prior to the Japanese occupation in WW2. This one may be a counter to the traumatic experience that another J.G., Ballard, provided with his Empire of the Sun. Perhaps Farrell's Empire Trilogy will be the summer's reading pick. It is a worthy candidate.

On another note, reading the coverage of the award announcement, I realized that the CBC Books editors don't read books themselves, or they don't think that their readers read books, evidenced by the closing line of the article: "Salman Rushdie, Yann Martel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje are among the writers who have won the Booker since its debut in 1969." My question is, what is the purpose of this line? I have to think that a) if you're reading this article, you know what the Booker prize is, and b) if you've read, or even heard of, authors like Rushdie, Coetzee or Ishiguro, you've probably read other Booker winners and nominees over the years. There are no "casual" readers of any of these authors, nor are any of them, save for Atwood and perhaps Martel, going to be known to people who are not avid readers as it is. CBC, did you just need 30 extra words to meet a quota?

Margaret Atwood wins $1M Prize

Margaret Atwood has been named one of this year's recipients of the Dan David Prize, an annual award that "recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. It aims to foster universal values of excellence, creativity, justice, democracy and progress and to promote the scientific, technological and humanistic achievements that advance and improve our world." And yes, it is worth 1 million dollars. I am not surprised that she had won this award, but I am surprised at the reason why: "Her work enabled, for the first time, the emergence of a defined Canadian identity, while exploring both national and transnational issues, such as colonization, feminism, structures of political power and oppression, and the violation and exploitation of nature." I can't disagree with this synopsis of her career, but I am shocked that another country has recognized the fact that defining "Canadian identity" is a whole lot of work and has only just happened in our lifetime. We all know it's true - look at the Nobel Prize winners for literature, for example. Not a single Canadian. While the Man Booker and Orange Prizes have recognized Canadians a little more frequently, we are still relatively unknown on the world literature stage. So, for Ms. Atwood to be honoured for her work in conveying messages of feminism, ecology, and "political power and oppression," is perfectly understandable. But to be also honoured for her role in constructing a Canadian identity through literature, that is a welcome surprise.

Man Booker Prize does it again!

It was announced today that a Man Booker Prize will be awarded for the year 1970 - when a whole year of books were lost in a changed format. The prize went from celebrating books published in the previous year to books published in the current year. Therefore, the 1970 Booker Prize celebrated books published in 1969, and the 1971 prize celebrated books published in 1971, leaving 1970 in the cold. It only took 40 years to figure that one out.

But I think they're on to something here. The longlist consists of books that were published in that year and are still in print today. This is a key component. There are two factors to consider: first, does the fact that these books are still in print have to do with the author or the book? Is David Lodge's Out of the Shelter still in print because it's a classic read or because David Lodge has worked his way into the canon of modern British literature? On the other hand, how many books published in 1970 may have been kept in print if it had been nominated or won the prize in that year? How many people are going to remember Adam Foulds in 40 years? Will his book still be in print? Will it remain in print because he was nominated? Will he have a multi-book lease on life because of his nomination? How many authors in 1970 did not get that chance?

So my proposal is this: that we only give awards to books 40 years after they are published. Only then will the power of the novel itself will be truly revealed. The author will fight and scratch his or her way through a career based purely on merit, regardless of how many Oprah appearances he or she makes. Then, after 40 years, a panel of people too young to remember the author outside of the novel, will make a decision based on the merits of the individual novel. Of course, if a novel is no longer in print, well, that's an indication that it shouldn't win the prize anyway, right?

Incidentally, my vote for the 1970 Man Booker Prize is The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence. 

Man Booker longlist announced

The Man Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday, starting the much-anticipated awards season of 2009. The list is generating a ton of buzz, as many of the authors are first time nominees, and three of them are major authors with either a previous Booker win (Byatt, Coetzee) or multiple nominations (Toibin). I haven't read any of the books yet, and the Coetzee title hasn't been released yet, but the award isn't announced until October 8, so we have some time to catch up. Here's the list (from The Millions):

• The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
• Summertime by J.M Coetzee (excerpt)
• The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
• How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
• The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (excerpt)
• Me Cheeta by James Lever ("I'm the real Cheeta")
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (excerpt)
• The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (excerpt pdf)
• Not Untrue and Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin
• Heliopolis by James Scudamore (excerpt)
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin (excerpt)
• Love and Summer by William Trevor (excerpt)
• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (excerpt pdf)

Perhaps the biggest buzz is for James Lever's book Me Cheeta, which is a faux memoir of a movie star chimpanzee. Well, they all look interesting anyhow.

June's pick and Alice Munro

The month is closing fast, and even though I haven't posted in a while (nor have I read the Ballard selection), I would like to embark upon picking the next book. I'll do some figurin' in the next few days, but please make any suggestions you wish. I'm really at a loss, though with summer around the corner perhaps we should do some summer reading. I don't know.

Yesterday Alice Munro has won the Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded every two years to "a living fiction author writing in English, or whose work is widely translated into English." This is only the third time this award has been given (previous winners are Chinua Achebe and Ismail Kildare). It's another major honour for Munro, who is widely acknowledged as one of the world's best writers. Perhaps a Munro pick for our June selection?

Read the CBC article here.

Man Booker Prize Announces Shortlist

The Man Booker Prize Shortlist was announced today, cutting the field from 13 to 6. The winner will be announced on October 14th. Though some of these books are not yet released and I've only heard of one of the authors, the Booker prize is nonetheless a prestigious award that launches careers. The 2008 shortlist is as follows:

Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger (Atlantic)
Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber)
Amitav Ghosh - Sea of Poppies (John Murray)
Linda Grant - The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)
Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate)
Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton)

Perhaps we have a candidate for a future DTABC pick? For the complete long list and other Man Booker facts, see the website here.