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The Man Booker Prize 2015 The Winner
And the winner of The Man Booker Prize 2015 is …
Marlon James (Jamaica) – A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications)
Two words dominated the broadcast of the award last night: diversity and voice.
Opening the prize to writers in English from anywhere in the world has resulted in a wider range of authors on the long and short lists. There are women, people of colour, eminent established writers as well as newbies. Just what the best of published fiction should be.
I understand that A Brief History of Seven Killings is told in several voices. Michael Wood (chair of the panel of judges) referred to the diversity of voices in his comments about the short list. Again, fiction at its best shows the reader the world from new and sometimes various perspectives. It's what it does.
All that razzamatazz?
Some folk do not like the hoopla that surrounds the award of the Booker. But I think it's great that attention is brought to great fiction by the award, and that fiction and fiction writers should be given special treatment every now and again. Public acclaim for writers and their craft is rare. And apart from to Marlon James, his agent and publisher, it doesn't really matter who wins. What matters is that fiction matters. Our attention is brought to lots of very good books published in the last year.
Here is the rest of the short list.
Tom McCarthy (UK) – Satin Island (Jonathan Cape)
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) – The Fishermen (ONE, Pushkin Press)
Sunjeev Sahota (UK) – The Year of the Runaways (Picador)
Anne Tyler (US) – A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus)
Hanya Yanagihara (US) – A Little Life (Picador)
And here are the books that were on the longlist, or Man Booker 'Dozen', of 13 novels, announced in July:
Bill Clegg (US) – Did You Ever Have a Family (Jonathan Cape)
Anne Enright (Ireland) – The Green Road (Jonathan Cape)
Laila Lalami (US) – The Moor's Account (Periscope, Garnet Publishing)
Andrew O'Hagan (UK) – The Illuminations (Faber & Faber)
Marilynne Robinson (US) – Lila (Virago)
Anuradha Roy (India) – Sleeping on Jupiter (MacLehose Press, Quercus)
Anna Smaill (New Zealand) – The Chimes (Sceptre)
Not the Booker Prize
And with less hoopla the Man Booker Prize is shadowed every year of the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize, organised by Sam Jordison. More attention for more great fiction, mostly by less well known authors. And in case you didn't read about it here are the results in order of votes received:
Fishnet by Kirstin Innes
Things we have in Common by Tasha Kavanagh
The Good Son by Paul McVeigh
The Artificial Anatomy of Parks by Kat Gordon
A Moment more Sublime by Stephen Grant
Dark Star by Oliver Langmead
So much good reading here. 19 novels, no doubt all brilliant. So far I have read three. So many great books to read.
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Filed under Books, Reading, Reviews
Tagged as A Brief History of Seven Killings, A Moment more Sublime, Dark Star, diversity, Fishnet, Kat Gordon, Kirstin Innes, Man Booker Prize 2015, Marlon James, Not the Booker Prize, Oliver Langmead, Paul McVeigh, Stephen Grant, Tasha Kavanagh, The Artificial Anatomy of Parks, The Good Son, Things we have in Common, voice
Four more Good Reads
Here are four more books I have recently read and enjoyed:
The Meursault Investigation Kamel Daoud
Wrinkles by Paco Roca
The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud
This novel is both homage and challenge to L'Etranger by Albert Camus, through its content and it s prose. It tells the story of the Arab, killed almost in passing by Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus 's novel. It references L'Etranger directly from its opening to its ending, as the victim's brother tells his story in a series of late night meetings with an admirer of Camus's novel in a bar. This framing recalls The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, perhaps intentionally. Both place the reader within the novel.
At one level the novel is about a family's grief, and what it means to define your life against an absent older brother. His disappearance was complete – no body was found and he was not even given a name by Camus. Daoud calls him Musa.
The Meursault Investigation is also a novel about colonial rule (of Algeria by the French) and the disappointment of Algeria since Independence. It is a story of betrayal and loss, of questioning and regrets.
At times the narrator elides Camus and Mersault, reminding us that Camus came from a French background. Other books by Camus are also referenced. He reserves particular bitterness for to the accolades given his brother's murderer and 'his' book.
The Meursault Investigation does not diminish Camus's novel, rather provides a new perspective, and allows the reader/listener to bring Algerian experiences into the present day. (Daoud is a journalist who lives in Oran).
Annecdotalist liked much about this novel as she writes on her blog here.
Winner of several prizes including EnglishPEN award – see EnglishPEN's World Bookshelf.
The Meursault Investigation Kamel Daoud (2014), published by Oneworld 143pp
Translated from the French by John Cullen.
I think this is a seriously good novel, told in a strong voice, and with plenty of tension and tenderness. The story unfolds in Belfast over the long weeks of the summer holidays, following eleven-year old Mickey Donnelly. It is the time of the Troubles. Written in the present tense, in Mickey's voice, we are able to see the world from the perspective of a boy with much to be frightened of: big school, his brother and father, the Prods, the local bullies (girls and boys). He shows us the damaging wash of the Troubles – visits from IRA, fathers being in prison, mysterious visitors, no-go areas of the divided city – and to see the damage wrought by the culture of violence on families, children and communities.
Mickey is intelligent and not keen to be a big tough boy like his older brother. Much of the tension relates to the place he gained at the grammar school and his parents' decision to send him to the tough local school for lack of money. He has the holidays to figure out how to survive despite the fearsome reputation of St Gabriel's. He likes to play with Wee Maggie his younger sister and his dog Killer. He loves his Ma. His Da is a drunk and life is better without him, except that Ma loves him. His elder brother Paddy is involved with the IRA, hiding guns in the dog's sleeping place.
During the summer holidays Mickey takes some family responsibility, learns a thing or two about growing up, and witnesses the worst of life in Belfast in the Troubles. The climax sees him deal with his drunken father and he finds himself ready for senior school.
The Good Son celebrates one boy, a misfit, and the strength of a mother's determination to protect her family and her good son.
The Good Son by Paul McVeigh (2015), published by Salt 234pp
Shortlisted for the Guardian's prize Not the Booker Prize (you can vote 6th October).
Wrinkles is a graphic novel, what the French call bandes dessinees. Following a review in The Guardian I requested a copy from the local library for research for my new book on ageing.
Wrinkles tells the story of Ernest, a retired bank manager who is increasingly disoriented and so is placed in a care home. He is befriended by his lightfingered roommate who shows him the ropes. The place none of them want to go is upstairs, according to Emile:
'the upstairs floor is where you find the helpless. Those who can't manage on their own anymore finish up there. Those who have lost their minds, dementia, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's. Better to die than end up there.' (20)
Ernest is diagnosed with Alzheimer's and in a bid to avoid an eventual move upstairs Emile encourages him to outwit the doctor's tests and eventually Emile and Ernest make a bid for freedom, a Thelma and Louise kind of thing. But it ends badly, and the 'big one' marches on, until Emile is left alone and the story peters out … What endures are the strong emotions and ties between the old people.
The format lends itself to recreating sudden shifts in consciousness; for example showing Ernest's introduction to the home as his first day at school; the interminable game of bingo, where no one can hear the number called and it has to be repeated ten times; and the stories people are telling themselves like being on a train to Istanbul, being afraid of kidnap by Martians.
Wrinkles by Paco Roca (2007), published by Knockabout 100pp.
Translated from the French by Nora Goldberg.
I loved this profoundly moving, engaging and erudite tour of the wild places of Britain. Robert Macfarlane is sometimes on his own, sometimes with friends, and occasionally his experience is enlivened by chance encounters.
Structured round a series of visits to different kinds of places – island, valley, moor, forest and so on – The Wild Places follows a year's journey, as Robert Macfarlane reflects on friendship, humans' relationship to the earth, history, cruelty, what is known about certain animals or birds, grief, and above all a love of the wild places. He learns more about what makes them wild, and what wild means (not the absence of people's influence, as he thought when he set out, like the untouched wildernesses of New Zealand) but a kind of ascendancy of nature's processes: like the work of the sea on the shingle beaches of East Anglia, or the wind shaping the peaks of the mountains.
He introduces us to animals (wild hares), birds (peregrines), and people (his friend Roger Deakin who died while Macfarlane was making his journeys, but had accompanied him on one or two), as well as giving us his descriptions of landscape, presenting researched information about phenomenon, and all in an assured and erudite prose. Writing about the experiences that people have of encounters with the wild places – people brought to sudden states of awe … 'encounters whose power to move us was beyond expression but also beyond denial'. 'It is hard to put language to such experiences,' (236) he explains, but reading this made me see Macfarlane's talent with language as well as wild sleeping.
Also recommended is The Wild Ways by Robert Macfarlane which I mentioned in my very first post Reading in 2012.
And another supreme writer about the natural world appears in this book briefly and drew the map: Helen Macdonald who wrote H is for Hawk.
The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane (2007), published by Granta 321pp
Filed under Books, Libraries, Older women in fiction, Reading, Reviews
Tagged as Albert Camus, Algeria, Alzheimer's, Annecdotalist, Belfast, EnglishPEN World Bookshelf, Granta, graphic novel, H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald, John Cullen, Kaeml Daoud, Knockabout, L'Etranger, Mohsin Hamid, Nora Goldberg, Not the Booker Prize, Oneworld, Oran, Paul McVeigh, Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, Salt, The Good Son, The Meursault Investigation, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Troubles, The Wild Places, The Wild Ways
The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri
Best Books for … the Long Haul
Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Celebrating Margaret Busby
Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street by Virginia Woolf
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey
The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe
Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann
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