And the winner is... Photo courtesy of telegraph.co.uk
The first few weeks of October are always an exciting time because of two very important announcements, which are made around this time every year: the laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the winner of the Man Booker Prize. While these two announcements are a big deal in the book world, and generate a lot of critical and journalistic content, there really is little reason for me to get that excited. Every year, I feel increasingly bored by the Booker’s shortlist, and while I’ve read a handful of past winners (sometimes, almost exclusively because they had won), I just don’t feel as compelled as I once did to read them, or even to go out and buy the most recent winner. It seems to me a lot of Booker-winning books end up loosing some resonance after some years. I mean, we still talk about some of the past winners like Margaret Atwood, John Banville, and Yann Martel; but what about Vernon God Little’s 2003-winner DBC Pierre (the shortlist that year included Oryx and Crake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane) or Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995)? Not to mention the winners in the 70s and 80s, almost all of which I’ve never heard of. As for the Nobel, well, ever since I started getting excited for that prize, circa 2007, I’d never heard of the writers who won it before the announcement itself — and only after Doris Lessing’s victory did I go out and buy one of her books (it was The Cleft, I wasn’t disappointed). That says a lot either about the Swedish academy’s knack for picking obscure geniuses, or else my own ignorance of writers outside the popular circuits. Either way, it’s a known fact that there’s a disconnect between what authors people are reading and talking about (at least in the English-speaking world), and what authors the Swedish academy are reading and talking about — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This year, the winner is the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, on the grounds that “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” On the Nobel Prize’s website, they have house poll that asks you if you’ve read him or not. 82% of the people who answered the poll haven’t. Still, I’m quite happy with the win, especially because it’s apparently been expected for a long time. Every year journalists would go to Tranströmer’s apartment building on the morning of the announcement in case he won the Nobel the world’s biggest literary prize. The poet’s wife would bring them tea and biscuits. Every year, they left disappointed; someone else won the Nobel. This year, there efforts — and, more importantly, Tranströmer’s efforts — were rewarded.
But back to the Booker, which is our main subject today. It’s become quite controversial this year, and it’s even spurred the creation of a new (as yet unfunded and unnamed) prize, in order to fill the gap left behind by the Booker’s interest in “readability,” the most loaded term in the book world these days, and the one this year’s panel has decided to put at the forefront of their judging criteria. The debate between literary and commercial fiction is hot stuff these days, but it must be remembered that the Booker Prize has always sought to recompense books somewhere between the high and mid-brow.
In this context, Julian Barnes’ victory for his short novel (more of a novella, really) The Sense of an Ending surprised and pleased many. Barnes — white, male, sixty-something, of the McEwan-Amis-Rushdie generation — represents the establishment in British letters, but also a bit of a black sheep on the grounds of his experimentalism with form and his continental outlook. Moreover, this was his fourth Booker in nomination, and critics seem to agree that his book was by far the best on the shortlist. So the literary seems to have won over readability in the end, whatever that means.
An added bonus: I think The Sense of an Ending also has the most beautiful cover out of all the books on the Booker shortlist.
Although I’ve — shamefully — never read anything by Barnes myself, I must say I’m quite pleased with his victory. I’ve been interested in him from afar for some time, and I think he really is an important and extremely intelligent writer. His short story “Sleeping with John Updike”, published in The Guardian a couple of years ago, is very well done, and his 2000 Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review, which has a lot to do with France and French Literature (Barnes is an inveterate francophile and one of the most popular British writers in France). I was also very much impressed by a masterful review Barnes wrote last year for Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary (a book Barnes admires, and calls “the first great shopping and fucking novel”), in which he shows of his shrewdness as critic, translator, and essayist:
So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better English, perhaps with a little experience of translating in the opposite direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.
Barnes, obviously, is an astute thinker, a skillful writer, and a witty person. His Booker is well-deserved, and The Sense of an Ending will certainly end up with my name on it under the Christmas tree this year. Hopefully by then I’ll have picked up some of his other books.
