Gonzalo Barr

Soon after the long list for the 2010 Booker prize was announced, bookmakers in the UK started taking bets on who will win.  William Hill has David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy at 9/2, and Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas at 6/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds, both at 16/1.

Ladbrokes has similar odds — David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue at 4/1, Peter Carey and Tom McCarthy at 5/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds 14/1 and 16/1, respectively.

The odds change daily. And there is nothing remotely scientific about predicting the winner.

Meanwhile, The Paris Review has an interview of David Mitchell –

Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice. To put it a little pretentiously, Cloud Atlas is a novel about whose echoes, eddies, and cross-references even its author possesses only an imperfect knowledge. That’s not unique—many writers can say the same about many books.

Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (about 1594), Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas, uploaded by Hugh Manatee, from the Wikipedia article on gambling; Sources:  William Hill website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), Ladbrokes website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204, interviewed by Adam Begley, The Paris Review Summer 2010 (accessed Aug. 4, 2010)

The judges of the 2010 Man Booker literary prize announced their longlist of 13 books. The longlist is comprised of –

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

Emma Donoghue, Room

Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

Andrea Levy, The Long Song

Tom McCarthy, C

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Lisa Moore, February

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

Rose Tremain, Trespass

Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

Alan Warner, The Stars in the Bright Sky

The short list of 6 books will be announced on September 7 and the winner on October 12, 2010. The winner receives GBP 50,000. The Man Booker is arguably the most prestigious literary prize awarded to authors who are citizens of the Commonwealth countries and Ireland. The judges this year are poet and chairman of the judges, Andrew Motion, journalist Rosie Blau, Creative Director of the Royal Opera House, Deborah Bull, author Tom Sutcliffe, and author Frances Wilson.

Recently, I wrote about David Mitchell and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet here and here. Tom McCarthy, author of C, last week published an essay entitled, “Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard” in The Guardian.

Sources: Man Booker prizes website

The Irish Times reported that UNESCO Director-General, Irina Bokova, today awarded Dublin, Ireland the permanent designation, “City of Literature.”  The campaign to be designated by UNESCO was launched last year by Irish officials as a means of increasing tourism to the capital.  The article quoted Mary Hanafin, Irish Minister of Tourism, Culture, and Sport, as stating –

Being one of only four cities in the world to achieve the status of Unesco city of literature, will enable Dublin to increase its market share of tourists and attract more people to both the city and the island of Ireland.

Mary Cloake, director of the Arts Council, took a higher-minded view.  She said –

Literature has the unique power to distinguish us as a culture and as a people. It helps us understand what it means to be human. In Dublin, the city has been defined by its writers, and continues to be remade and discovered through their words.

The other three cities to have been awarded the designation are Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Iowa City.

Photo:  Title page of the first edition of Dubliners by James Joyce, published in 1914, from the Wikipedia article on Dubliners; Sources:  Steven Carroll, “Dublin named ‘city of literature,’” Irish Times (July 26, 2010); UNESCO website; Irish Arts Council website

Haruki Murakami will receive the Jerusalem Book Fair prize on February 15, the opening day of the fair.  Judges cited his “artistic achievements and love of people.”  The award is given to authors whose works uphold personal freedom.

Source:  “Jerusalem book fair prize announced,” Jerusalem Post (Jan. 21, 2009) via publisherslunchdeluxe blog

The Cervantes Prize is widely considered the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish language. This year, it was awarded to Catalan author, Juan Marsé.

The Guardian reports that –

The award … was announced yesterday by Spain’s culture minister Cesar Antonio Molina in Barcelona. Marsé, 75, was honoured for works including Últimas tardes con Teresa (Last Evenings with Teresa), about the ill-fated love story between a working class man and a rich woman, Si te dicen que caí (If They Tell You I Fell), in which a rag and bone merchant falls in love with a prostitute during the early years of Franco’s reign, and Rabos de lagartija (Lizard Tails), which is narrated by the unborn brother of the hero David as he grows up in post civil war Barcelona.

“The density and intensity of his writing, and the imaginative process, are what mark him out as a novelist,” said the author’s English translator Nick Caistor. “He has created worlds of the imagination set against the often horrible realities of Spain after the civil war. His characters always escape to the world of fiction, when the world outside is grey and depressing, and he’s particularly good at seizing the imaginative world of children.”

“In the UK and US, because he writes so infrequently, he has not built up a head of steam,” Caistor said. “He writes very, very slowly, only one novel every 10 years, and you can see he rewrites everything over and over again. He starts from reality, then as he rewrites his imagination takes over more and more, and in the process his language becomes more and more powerful – layer upon layer of imagery.”

Marsé’s English editor James Gurbutt, at Harvill Secker, said … “He is a fantastic writer – if ever you want to read a novel about post-civil war Spain he’s your man,” he added. “It’s difficult to find an audience for him over here, but he is one of the greats … Literature in translation is very tough, and at times like this it’s even tougher.” [GB Note: Links added]

The prize is worth EUR 125,000 (USD 158,936.01).

Spanish novelist and essayist, Enrique Vila-Matas, wrote a piece on Marsé for El país (in Spanish).

Also available in English translation are Shanghai Nights (translated by Nick Caistor) and The Fallen (translated by Helen Lane).

Source:  Alison Flood, “Catalan novelist Juan Marsé wins the ‘Spanish Nobel prize,’” The Guardian (Nov. 28, 2008)

There must be tens of thousands of literary prizes in English alone.  Every day it seems someone else wins one.  So what if you were to hold a literary contest, get a bunch of books, and conclude that none are good enough to win?

That is exactly what happened with the first Prémio Revelação Agustina Bessa-Luís given or more accurately not given in Portugal today. Sixty-seven manucripts were read by a jury that decided none of them merited winning the prize.

The Portuguese newspaper, Ultima Hora, reports [original Portuguese text followed by my translation to English] –

Instituído em Outubro de 2007, em homenagem à [Agustina Bessa-Luís] autora de “A Sibila”, o prémio inclui a maquia de 25 mil euros e “destina-se a distinguir, anualmente, um romance inédito de autor português sem qualquer obra publicada no género e com idade não superior a 35 anos”, precisou aquela fonte, adiantando que o galardão será relançado no próximo ano.

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Created in October 2007, in honor of [Agustina Bessa-Luís,] author of A Sibila, the prize includes a purse of EU 25,000 “to distinguish, annually, an unpublished novel by a Portuguese author with no other work published in the genre and who is no older than 35 years,” stated the source, adding that the contest will take place again next year.

Sources: “Primeira edição do Prémio Revelação Agustina Bessa-Luís sem vencedor,” Ultima Hora (Oct. 20, 2008), Ler blog

The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the past thirty year was awarded last month to Derek Willan’s Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, a 76 page folio published in 1994 by the Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain.  The prize was awarded to celebrate the thirty-year anniversary of the Diagram prize for oddest book title of the year and was dubbed the Diagram of Diagrams.

The Bookseller reports –

The vote to discover the oddest title of the past 30 years was run in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. The prize was first conceived by The Diagram Group’s Bruce Robertson as a way of avoiding boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In its first year, in 1978, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice picked up the award.

Horace Bent, The Bookseller’s legendary diarist and custodian of the prize, said: “The posties pulled off a real shock here. The pre-tournament favourite was the prize’s first ever recipient - Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. The 1978 winner picked up the 15-year anniversary gong in 1993. But right from the off, it was Gary Leon Hill’s People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead that set the pace. It topped the polls for over three weeks until, at the very last moment, the Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers pipped the People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead at the line.”

If you would like to read more about the folio, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, Wikipedia (who else?) has an in-depth article here.

Source: “Diagram victory for Greek Postmen,” The Bookseller (Sept. 5, 2008), bookseller.com

The 2008 Booker Prize was awarded to Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger.

(Update Oct. 16, 2008): The Times writes –

This remark calls to mind the best that fiction can offer: remaking the world through a vision of actual circumstance was the work of Dickens and Tolstoy, too. In many senses it is impossible to get a sense of a place or a time by reading mere facts: statement without sensibility is nothing. The White Tiger is an exciting novel because it understands how to make reality suit its needs. […]

Aravind Adiga, 33, is the second-youngest novelist to win the literary world’s most important fiction award. […] Educated at the Universities of Oxford and Columbia, he is also the award’s fourth Indian-born winner, alongside Sir Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.

Michael Portillo, the chairman of the judges, described The White Tiger as “in many ways perfect. It knocked my socks off,” he said.

He applauded it for undertaking “an extraordinarily difficult task” - getting the reader’s sympathy for a hero who is nothing less than a thoroughly unpleasant villain, a man who is corrupted financially and sexually.

The article is here.

Source:  manbookerprize.com, Erica Wagner, “Aravind Adiga wins Man Booker Prize with The White Tiger,” The Times (Oct. 15, 2008)

On October 10, 2008, a day after the Nobel prize in literature was awarded, La repubblica published an article that summarized the views of some noted German and Italian critics [my translation from Italian to English follows the original text] –

Pietro Citati non usa mezzi termini: «Quella di Le Clézio è una scelta mediocre, perché non lo era ma è diventato uno scrittore mediocre. Non si capisce come gli Accademici di Stoccolma possano dare dei provinciali agli americani che in questo momento contano figure di grande rilievo. Oltre a Roth, perennemente candidato e mai premiato, penso ad Alice Munro che vale trecento volte Le Clézio. E poi ci sono, anche in Europa, figure come quella di Kundera che meriterebbe largamente un Nobel per quel che ha scritto in passato».

Anche Marcel Reich-Ranicki, uno dei più popolari critici tedeschi, ha stroncato il premio a Le Clézio: «Non ho mai letto un libro dello scrittore francese. Al suo posto l’ Accademia svedese avrebbe fatto meglio a premiare l’ americano Philip Roth». Un’ altra autorevole critica tedesca, Sigrid Loefler, si è detta “sconcertata” per la premiazione di Le Clézio, definita «una scelta alquanto bizzarra». I suoi romanzi «si distinguono per la loro monotonia e noia, il loro autore ha vagabondato da una casa editrice all’ altra», ha aggiunto. Positivo è invece il giudizio di Vincenzo Consolo, amico dello scrittore francese dagli anni Novanta: «È uno scrittore vero che appartiene alla grande tradizione francese, esprimendo benissimo le istanze di quel mondo». Mentre Valerio Magrelli, poeta e francesista, raggiunto proprio a Parigi, confessa: «L’ ho appena visto in televisione. Trovo che sia una scelta sorprendente, anche se Le Clézio è una figura ormai ben definita che ha saputo costruirsi un’ immagine, un ruolo, con le sue ricerche esotiche, il suo essere viaggiatore. Se penso alla letteratura francese debbo dire che avrei preferito Bonnefoy o Modiano. Ma ci sono naturalmente tanti altri scrittori importanti. Gli americani, ovviamente, ma anche gli israeliani».

I critici e i lettori italiani lo conoscono poco: su una bibliografia che si avvicina ai quaranta titoli sono pochissimi quelli tradotti in italiano (vedi il box in questa stessa pagina). Einaudi pubblicò Il verbale , cioè il romanzo d’ esordio di Le Clézio nel 1965, nella collana sperimentale La ricerca letteraria, ma il romanzo, da poco ripreso da un piccolo editore siciliano (Due punti), vendette poco ed Einaudi rinunciò ai diritti. L’ etichetta di scrittore sperimentale, secondo Gaspare Bona della Instar libri di Torino, suo attuale editore italiano, non gli giovò. La produzione anche dal punto di vista delle vendite è diseguale, continua Bona, che ha venduto diecimila copie de L’ Africano ed ora sta ricevendo una piccola valanga di ordini. È fatale che ora se ne impadroniscano i grandi editori. Un giudizio freddo esprime anche Giuseppe Montesano, scrittore e studioso di letteratura francese, oltre che traduttore. «Le Clézio lo considero un autore derivato, non primario, nel senso di un autore che non innova, non inventa. Forse è un ottimo artigiano, un po’ manierista, ma la sua letteratura consiste nel rendere più levigate ed eleganti una serie di sperimentazioni avviate molti decenni fa. D’ altronde a me sembra che nessuno scrittore francese degli ultimi quarant’ anni sia veramente uno scrittore primario». Intanto Le Clézio ha trovato modo, nelle dichiarazioni di ieri sera, di rivolgere un elogio a Claudio Magris, che era tra i candidati favoriti, stando ai si dice della vigilia. «Magris? È una persona straordinaria». Ha poi aggiunto di essere un grande lettore di Beckett ed ha precisato che questa sera andrà a letto presto perché è appena tornato dalla Corea e deve ancora smaltire il jet-leg.

* * *

Pietro Citati does not mince words, “The choice of Le Clézio [for the literature Nobel] is a mediocre one. What else could it be? He is a mediocre writer. It is incomprehensible how the Swedish academy can call the Americans provincial when they presently have several notable figures. Besides Roth, a perennial candidate [for the prize] and a never-winner, I’m thinking of Alice Munro [GB Note: Munro is Canadian], who is worth 300 hundred times Le Clézio. Also, even in Europe, there are figures like that of [Milan] Kundera, who amply deserve a Nobel for what they have written in the past.”  Even Marcel Reich-Rainick, one of the most popular German critics, has blasted the Nobel prize:  “I have never read a book by the French writer.  In his place, the Swedish academy would have done better to award Philip Roth.” Another influential German critic, Sigrid Löffler, is said to be “disconcerted” by the awarding of Le Clézio.  She described the choice as somewhat bizarre. His novels “distinguish themselves by being monotonous and boring, their author for jumping from one publishing house to another,” she added. On the other hand, the judgment of Vincenzo Consolo, a friend of the French author’s during the nineties, is positive. “He is a true writer, who belongs to the great French tradition, expressing wonderfully the questions [and curiosities] of that world.”  While Valerio Magrelli, poet and French specialist, when he was reached in Paris, admitted, “I’ve hardly seen him on TV.  I find that the choice was surprising even if Le Clézio is by now a well-defined figure, who has known how to construct for himself an imagination, a role, with his exotic findings, his traveling persona.  If I think about French literature, I should say that I would have preferred [Yves] Bonnefoy o [Patrick] Modiano.  But naturally, there are so many important writers.  The Americans, obviously, but also the Israelis.”

Italian critics and readers know very little about him. His bibliography lists almost forty titles but few have been translated to Italian [GB Note: The same is true of his books in English. Interest is lukewarm in translating more works or printing new editions of those works already translated, even after news of the prize.] Einaudi published Il verbale (Le proces-verbal), which was Le Clézio’s début novel in 1965, in the experimental series, “La ricerca literaria,” but the novel, with little following at a small Sicilian publisher (Due Punti), sold poorly and Einaudi gave up the rights. Acoording to Gaspar Bona of Instar libri di Torino, his present publisher, the label “experimental writer” did not help him. Production, even from the point of view of sales, is unequal, Bona said, who has sold 10,000 copies of L’africano (L’africain) and is now receiving a small increase in sales orders. It is fatal that the great publishing houses are not patronizing him.

Giuseppe Montesano, writer, translator, as well as a scholar of French literature, also expresses a frigid opinion.  “I consider Le Clézio a secondary writer, not a primary one, in the sense of an author who does not innovate, does not invent.  He may be an optimal artisan, a bit on the mannerist side, but his work consists of rendering more lightly and elegantly a series of experiments that were conducted many decades ago.  On the other hand, it seems to me that no French writer of the last forty years is truly first class.”

Meanwhile Le Clézio, in his declarations yesterday [Oct. 9, 2008], found a way of returning hommage to Claudio Magris, who was among the all-time favorite candidates, “Magris?” he said, “Is an extraordinary person.” Later he added that he was a great reader of Beckett and that last night he would go to bed early because he had just returned from Korea and still had jet lag.

More here.

Sources: “Per Citati è una scelta mediocre,” La repubblica (Oct. 10, 2008), bibliotecadigarlasco blog

Horace Engdalh is the man who announces the Nobel Prize in literature. He gave an exclusive interview and at that interview, he said that –

the United States is too “insular” and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing….”Europe still is the center of the literary world.”

Please stop.  Stop!  You’re killing me!

(Update Oct. 1, 2008):  Once the laughter died down, some reactions –

From David Remnick, The New Yorker –

“You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures. … If he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English.”

From Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation –

”Put him in touch with me, and I’ll send him a reading list. … Such a comment makes me think that Mr. Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age. … In the first place, one way the United States has embraced the concept of world culture is through immigration. Each generation, beginning in the late 19th century, has recreated the idea of American literature.”

From Kwame Appiah, Princeton University professor –

“Is America really a diminished presence in the literary world? That’s not the sense you get looking at European book stores. I’m always amazed how many of the books in German or Italian bookstores are translations from American English.”

From the article that quoted Remnick, Augenbraum, and Appiah –

The [Nobel] academy often picks obscure writers and hardly ever selects best-selling authors. It regularly faces accusations of snobbery, political bias and even poor taste.

(Updated Oct. 2, 2008): More reactions:

From New York Magazine’s “Culture Vulture” column –

All the indignation and offense is justified, but let’s stay calm. Clearly Engdahl is just letting his outsize love of Harry Potter color his perceptions.

(Updated Oct. 9, 2008):  Another reaction:

From Slate –

[T]he real scandal of Engdahl’s comments is not that they revealed a secret bias on the part of the Swedish Academy. It is that Engdahl made official what has long been obvious to anyone paying attention: The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature. America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become.

When Engdahl accuses American writers of being raw and backward, of not being up-to-date on the latest developments in Paris or Berlin, he is repeating a stereotype that goes back practically to the Revolutionary War. It was nearly 200 years ago that Sydney Smith, the English wit, famously wrote in the Edinburgh Review: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Ironically, though, while Engdahl decries American provincialism today, for most of the Nobel’s history, it was exactly its “backwardness” that the Nobel committee most valued in American literature.

Just look at the kind of American writer the committee has chosen to honor. Pearl Buck, who won the prize in 1938, and John Steinbeck, who won in 1962, are almost folk writers, using a naively realist style to dramatize the struggles of the common man. Their most famous books, The Good Earth and The Grapes of Wrath, fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading lists. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Prize, in 1930, wrote broad satires on American provincialism with nothing formally adventurous about them.

Such writers reflected back to Europe just the image of America they wanted to see: earnest, crude, anti-intellectual. There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate (not counting writers from other countries who became American citizens)*, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.

But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater—as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel—it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.

Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl’s claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.

What does distinguish the Nobel Committee’s favorites, however, is a pronounced anti-Americanism. Pinter used the occasion of his Nobel lecture in 2005 to say that “the crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless” and to call for “Bush and Blair [to] be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.” Doris Lessing, who won the prize last year, gave an interview dismissing the Sept. 11 attacks as “neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as [Americans] think,” adding: “They’re a very naive people, or they pretend to be.”

The Slate article is here.

Photo: Horace Engdalh, enslugen blog; Sources: breitbart.com, Malin Rising and Hillel Italie, “Nobel literature head: US too insular to compete,” mercurynews.com (Sept. 30, 2008), Matthew Perpetua, “Are American Writers Too Insular to Win the Nobel Prize?” New York Magazine (Sept. 30, 2008), Adam Kirsch, “Nobel Gas: The Swedes have no clue about American literature,” Slate (Oct. 3, 2008)