I am focusing hard on the corporate work these days—doing the projects that arrive, finding the projects that don't even know they need me yet. Beth the Marketeer. Beth (yes, some of them call me this) the Machine.
We do what we must.
There'll be little time for my own literary work during these days, and so I look forward to easing my mind away from work pressures with books I bought or acquired long ago and never had the time to read. Books like Rachel Kushner's
The Flamethrowers, Kevin Powers'
The Yellow Birds, Ruth Ozeki's
A Tale for the Time Being, Louis Greenstein's
Mr. Boardwalk, Jayne Anne Phillips'
Quiet Dell, Katherine Boo's
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Violet Kupersmith's
The Frangipani Hotel, Jess Walter's
Beautiful Ruins, Tea Obreht's
The Tiger's Wife.
I owe these writers my time. I feel like less than me because it has taken so long. If it still takes me a terrible (not beautiful) forever to report back on these books, know that I am doing all I can.
So far, I can tell you this: 50 pages into Kushner and I'm in awe.
By Robert Eaglestone
So here’s the first thing about the books on the Booker Prize lists, both short and long: until the end of August, it was hard-to-impossible to get hold of most of them. Only one was in paperback in July (well done, Canongate). And while some were in very pricey hardback, several hadn’t even been published. This begs the question: who is the Booker Prize for? If it’s supposed to encourage wider reading, debate and book sales, that’s hard for us and for bookshops if the books just aren’t available. If people outside the world of media reviewers and publishers can’t read the books – I couldn’t and I teach and write about contemporary fiction – then isn’t this all just a little bit strange? It makes the whole thing seem like a game played by an enclosed elite or (hardback prices being what there are) a publishers trick.
Still, eventually I was able to buy some, including four on the outstanding shortlist. I was sorry Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart didn’t make the cut. A multi-voiced, pitch-perfect account of post-Crash Irish life, I thought this was a wonderful novel, deep things carved small and accurate.
The author Jim Crace, who has been shortlisted for ‘Harvest’
The press is very keen to see
Jim Crace win: he is a much underrated novelist and
Harvest has a trick the Booker likes – a sinister and unreliable first person narrator. I teach his excellent novel
Being Dead, although when I discovered that all the lovely ecological and scientific details in that book were simply made up, somehow the book lost its sheen. Of course, novelists are supposed to invent stuff, but, well, details are details and they make you trust a book.
Harvest has the same flaw. It’s a historical novel set… when? Somewhere between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth century? You can’t tell from the language or plot. There’s a threat of witch burning and people in big hats (sixteenth century) but there are also things that are clearly late eighteenth century. The thing is, people do live in a time and their time colours and shapes them. Historical details wouldn’t escape the book’s sharp-eyed narrator. But this blurriness of focus makes one worry about small things: is that how you make vellum, as the narrator does? (no, it’s not, according to Wikipedia); do horses sleep kneeling down (I don’t know, but it’s a crucial clue)? Was it ever actually illegal just to walk across parish boundaries? And then one worries about larger ones: if you can’t trust the book with minor things, can you believe in the motivations, characters, plot? The book somehow floats free of the world and of history, just the things it wants to be about.
In contrast to Crace’s unreliable storyteller, Mary, the mother of Jesus, the narrator of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, is trying to separate what actually happened from what she wished happened and from what other people – rather sinister Evangelists – want to say happened. It’s an odd accompaniment to J. M. Coetzees’s The Childhood of Jesus, also published this year, which focusses on a Joseph-like figure, transposed to an unnamed country. This very short novel – also a historical novel of sorts – is incredibly intense and really rather beautiful, and less controversial than the press presents it, I think.
NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names is also narrated in the first person: a child growing up in Zimbabwe. Children’s voices are hard to do, but this novel gets the tone and level of detail just right. In 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a savage satirical piece called ‘How to Write about Africa’, attacking stereotypical representations in fiction and the first half of this novel does rather fall foul of this: however, as the book goes on and especially after the narrator emigrates, it turns into something more challenging, reminding me of work by the great Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta.
At the core of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for Time Being is another first person narrator: Nao, a Tokyo teenager, dealing with a range of problems. Her sections are brilliantly written (and when the novel turns to the other narrator, the authorial Ruth, it sags a little). The core of this very contemporary novel is the interconnectedness of things, and in it, stories uncover stories, trauma uncovers trauma, discussions of zen lead to discussions of physics, of philosophy and of the heart. It could have done with more Ruth-less editing – it’s too long, as if the author was desperate to cram in more and more – but apart from that it really grows on one.
I’ve not read the much praised and just published The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (832 pages long…) but the start – again, a historical novel – looks promising. Similarly, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, again, just published, seems to be getting good reviews.
Overall, then, three historical novels (even if one is a bit unfixed in time), three and a half (Nao is the half!) first person narrators, and, as everyone has said, a very culturally and geographically diverse field. Interestingly, religion features significantly in the four of them I’ve read (Mary, obviously; Crace’s narrator makes much of the village’s unbuilt church; Bulawayo’s narrator is involved with Christian fundamentalists and a lot of Ozeki’s book concerns Zen Buddhism). Perhaps there’s something in the water.
Robert Macfarlane is an outstanding literary critic (and writer) and his committee has produced one of the most interesting lists for years, one which brilliantly shows off the aesthetic and intellectual vibrancy of contemporary Anglophone writing. Still having two to read, I’m not going to predict anything, but any of the novels I’ve mentioned above would be great winners. They, and most of the long list (especially Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, Richard House’s The Kill, and Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English), would spark fascinating reading group conversations and are well worth picking up.
It would have been even better (for the general reader, for the bookshops) if we could have read them all first, though.
Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Deputy Director (and formerly Director) of the Holocaust Research Centre. His research interests are in contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy, and on Holocaust and genocide studies. He is the author of Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013) and Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students (third revised edition) (Routledge, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter: @BobEaglestone.
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Image credit: Jim Crace at the 2009 Texas Book Festival, 2009. Larry D. Moore [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
The post On the Man Booker Prize 2013 shortlist appeared first on OUPblog.
a novel by 10 authors
What a book. What a beautiful, thought-provoking book.
I will say that I didn't like the last two stories of the book, which was frustrating. All of the stories use metaphor and symbolism to varying degrees (some intentionally, some not) and I didn't care for the taste of the final two. I don't want that to discourage you from reading the book - the rest of the stories are wonderful, and perhaps you'll even enjoy them all.
It is a remarkable little book. On the surface, it contains ten stories; but there are stories within stories. It gives you this feel of depth and magnitude. Each story made me feel differently, and they all made me think. One even made me ache a little, it was so good.
This would be a great pick for a book club. There's loads of discussions in here waiting to happen. Oh - and it made me want to take up photography. Perhaps I will.
This entry is completely biased, because I am a HUGE fan of David McPhail. So of course I can't imagine how a book as imaginative as Pig Pig and the Magic Photo Album could possibly go out of print. But it has! It seems strange, since David McPhail is such an active and respected author. Which just goes to show that there are no guarantees in publishing. Pig Pig has his own series of books and was already a well-appreciated--if not beloved--character by the time this entry came along. (It has always proven a winner in story time.) The story is deceptively simple: Pig Pig is waiting to have his photo taken. While the photographer fiddles about with his camera, Pig Pig is idly flipping through a photo album, practicing saying, "Cheese!" He looks at a picture of a church, says "Cheese!" to himself, and Voila! Pig Pig is hanging by his suspender strap from the very church steeple in the picture! Pig Pig proceeds to "Cheese!" himself from picture to picture, in and out of trouble, until he finds himself back in his very own living room, covered in chocolate, but safe. Characters hoping in and out of pictures has been covered in James Mayhew's "Katie" series, and the outstanding The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau (Agee, Jon.) And the "Zoom" series (Banyai, Istvan) turns the process in on itself by revealing each page to be a smaller detail from the following page, to the extent that the reader has the feeling of jumping into the pictures by pulling back from them. (It's very clever.) As in Mole Music and Drawing Lessons from a Bear, McPhail studies the transforming nature of art--in Pig Pig's case, quite literally! Plus, Pig Pig's picture hoping gives McPhail the opportunity to draw a number of humorous scenarios which would otherwise be completely random and unrelated. Now doesn't that sound like just the sort of book that should be reissued?
Do you think it would be kind of like "Red"? Or not..
"Red" is nonfiction. This isn't. So no, I don't think they're probably at all alike.
I've always seen this in the bookstore, but never picked it up because I thought it looked too overwhelming (I mean, one book by ten authors!). But I'm glad you liked it, maybe I'll check it out.
Can you tell us what you didn't like about the last two stories?
I read another review of this by Nymeth and am really interested in reading it. I think it has something for everyone with the mixture of different authors.
I looooved this book...except for the last two stories. I sympathize with you!
I just picked this one up yesterday -- I am planning a 'reading holiday' in a couple of weeks, and this near the top of my list. (Got an annotated Charlotte's Web as a gift today that's also looking very good.)