The Booker Prize 2024, Longlist

Hello Gentle Reader,

This years Booker Prize has announced their longlist. The judges have gone so far to praise their inductions, with the judging chair stressing that the longlisted novels are not about pressing issues and concerns of today, but are (and I quote):

“They are works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments, their singularity in a world that can be indifferent or hostile.”

Perhaps I’m just in a foul mood, but to me, that sounded an awful lot like a marketing campaigns mission statement, attempting to gloss over the glaringly obvious concern and choices that went into compiling the longlist as one being concerned making a heavy handed statement on the immediate issues and concerns of today, all the while attempting to deny that the novels are in fact about the issues and concerns of today, be they are political, social, or ideological in nature. Much like many of the meetings I attended today, I was left at the end saying: what are you talking about?

The novels included on this year’s longlist are not necessarily all that interesting, as compared to some which have been interestingly omitted. This year’s longlist in no particular order:

            Tommy Orange – United States of America – “Wandering Stars,”
            Anne Michaels – Canada – “Held,”
            Colin Barrett – Ireland – “Wild Horses,”  
            Rachel Kushner – United States of America – “Creation Lake,”
            Richard Powers – United States of America – “Playground,”
            Sarah Perry – United Kingdom – “Enlightenment,”
            Samantha Harvey – United Kingdom – “Orbital,”
            Claire Messud – Canada – “This Strange Eventful History,”
            Percival Everett – United States of America – “James,”
            Yael van der Wouden – The Netherlands – “The Safekeep,”
            Hisham Matar – United States of America/United Kingdom – “My Friends,”
            Charlotte Wood – Australia – “Stone Yard Devotional,”
            Rita Bullwinkel – United States of America – “Headshot,”

Again, to reiterate: perhaps I am in a foul mood, but I found the longlist left a sense of ‘wanting,’ on my end. The list itself is almost glaringly dominated by American writers.

Richard Powers returns to contended for the Booker Prize, after his previous novel “Bewilderment,” was shortlisted in 2021. Returning with his new novel “Playground,” Powers has crafted another novel of dystopian parabolic ideas, writing about the beauty of nature and the desolation of the environment, with a shifting concern to the rise of Artificial Intelligence, Richard Powers as crafted a panoramic portrait of the reality of today. Percival Everett in “James,” uses Mark Twain’s classic novel: “Huckleberry Finn,” and the character Jim as a springboard to trace the racially violent history of United States of America, and the traumatic fissures it has sowed within the African-American identity. In “Wandering Stars,” by Tommy Orange, generational trauma ripples throughout the ages, from the brutality of the American Indian Boarding School, run by an evangelical sadist whose purpose in not only spreading Christian messaging, but also to eradicate Native American culture, language, and traditions, which reverberates to contemporary United States of America, rife with poverty, gun violence, and prescriptive drug addiction. Again, however, none of these novels are a testament to the issues of today, be it climate catastrophe and calamity; or racial injustices and the traumatic history of the United States; or the disparity of wealth, rampant poverty, and ever-present violence of daily life.

Sarah Perry and Anne Michaels strike me as this year’s dark horses. Anne Michael’s is a poet in addition to being a prose writer, and her work maintains a sense of the cerebral. “Held,” showcases Michael’s enjoyment of loose narrative structure and her mastery of language. Sarah Perry’s novel “Enlightenment,” is one that shines in its own eccentricity and delights in both its earthly pleasures and otherworldly intrusions. Harkening back to what has been described as old-fashioned narrative reminiscent of the high postmodernist pastiche of the late Dame A.S. Byatt, transporting the Victorian and Edwardian into the contemporary consciousness.

Its curious, however, to note that neither Rachel Cusk or Sally Rooney made this year’s longlist. Cusk’s most recent disembodiment experiment of the novel “Parade,” was recently released; and Sally Rooney’s newly anticipated novel “Intermezzo,” would have made the deadline for nomination for the prize. I found their exclusion interesting and perhaps telling. Rachel Cusk for example, has always struck me as very privileged middle-class writer, whose cipher oriented novels are not so much an exercise in usurping the novels conventional elements, as they are discombobulating diatribes of no consequence. She can craft an eloquent sentence, but the praised innovation is lost on me. As for Sally Rooney, the oracle of the millennials, perhaps she’s an acquired generational taste.

Its an interesting shortlist, one certainly not concerned with the issues of today, but instead empathetically impactful narratives. Congratulations to the longlisted writers.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

 
M. Mary

Edna O’Brien Dies Aged 93

Hello Gentle Reader,

In 2015, the then Irish President, Michael D Higgins, bestowed on Edna O’Brien the countries highest creative arts honour, the Saoi of Aosdána, referring to Edna O’Brien as a “fearless teller of truth,” high praise from the president and country, which only decades before often had a contested even strained relationship with the writer. At times, O’Brien’s work suffered publication bans and censorship. A few parishes even conducted their own book burnings. Born to a large Catholic family, Edna O’Brien remarked that her early life was marked by the usual Irish condition of the time, austerity coupled Catholic sanctioned poverty. Her father’s family fortune was squandered by his gambling compulsions and alcoholism; while her mothers strength kept the house in order and the wolves at bay. Irish society—much like her childhood home—was marked by an atmosphere of control be it parental, marital, or religious in its incarnation. Its chokehold was ever present subjecting and suffocating. Edna O’Brien gained notoriety with her debut novel “The Country Girls,” detailing the rural oppression and squalor of Irish country life, and realities of girls, their thoughts, their dreams, their desires. The frankness in which sex was discussed and written about scandalized Irish society, and endeared Edna O’Brien to readers abroad. Subsequent novels continued to examine and dissect Irish society and continue to push the Irish experience from a feminine perspective to the forefront of literary discourse, expanding the literary perspective and providing a fuller portrait of the human and Irish condition. Despite this, O’Brien’s relationship with Ireland would be noticeably strained for some years. It would be disingenuous and limiting to think of Edna O’Brien as only limited to the female perspective and view of Irish life. An engaged humanist, O’Brien trained turned her pen to perspectives and stories outside of her own. “The Little Red Chairs,” heralded as a masterpiece by many, recounts the immigration of an imagined Eastern European war criminal to a rural Irish countryside. The once provincial backwater of the Irish countryside is now reimagined as a place of mixed immigration, granting O’Brien the ability to provide commentary on a variety of issues, such as forced emigration and suffrage of women (a perennial theme). “Girl,” her last published novel, departs to a more international level of concern, imagining the experience of the girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram. The novel reaffirms Edna O’Brien as a writer of ideal and humanistic strength, who recounts both the horror and the tenderness of the human experience, and one girl’s unshaken resilience to continue on, even after the abduction and the abandonment of society at large. Edna O’Brien was a fierce and uncompromising writer, whose style was equally matched by her literary perspectives, she is truly one of Ireland’s greatest contemporary writers, who undoubtfully has influenced the direction of Irish literature, but also introduced new areas of discourse and discussions.

Rest in Peace, Edna O’Brien.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

– XXX –

I am concerned when solidarity promotes sterilization and the sanitization of facts. Facilitates censorship. Encourages tribalism and ghettoization. Stimulates falsities and assassinates cultures and historical truths. Solidary has lost its gravitas. An emptiness of cannibalistic skewered ideological principles has taken its place that disregards truth. That is not solidarity.

Greek Lessons

Hello Gentle Reader, 

After winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with “The Vegetarian,” Han Kang, has become a permanent translated fixture in the English language. An appreciated literary star in the company of Bae Suah and Hwang Sok-yong. “The Vegetarian,” took inspiration from the line: “I believe that humans should be plants,” by the avant-garde Korean writer Yi Sang. What follows is the decision of a woman who decides to stop eating meat. This otherwise mundane decision will have dire and violent consequences for herself, husband and family. “The Vegetarian,” refused to be defined as either a surreal or horror novel, but it proved Han Kang was a master of the slow burn discourse and a cartographer of the interior. Subsequent works translated into English were equally engaged in themes of violence, memory, grief, and guilt. “Human Acts,” poignantly recounts the Gwangju Uprising of the 1980’s and the resulting massacre that took place. “Human Acts,” is a symphonic novel. An orchestral arrangement of voices each rising and adding to the cadences and chorus, recounting event, experience, and memory. Rather than focusing on the massacre itself, Han Kang traces the ripple effect of the events from those historical days through both a macro social lens and individual realities, providing a panoramic novel of different cadences blending into a symphonic narrative chorus detailing the legacy of the uprising and massacre on not only individuals or their families, but also, how it is incorporated into the social and political fabric of a society. In turn, “The White Book,” surveyed private tragedy. A vague composition that defies categorization, “The White Book,” is a psychological exploration of the nature of grief and guilt. At once a meditation on the colour white and its associative items, objects, and appearances in nature, such as: breast milk, swaddling bands, or snow; to the interior monologue of an unnamed narrator, a writer (much like Kang) wandering through Warsaw in a snowy evening. A treatise on memory, the unnamed stand in narrator for Han Kang, recounts the abrupt birth of her older sister, who died two hours later in her mothers’ arms. The narrative is an elegy of grief, guilt, and sorrow, which form a trio of shades of white tinting the narrative. In turn the landscape of Warsaw and its own history of ruin and destruction during the Second World War and rebuilding, becomes a metaphor for the death of the authors older sister and her own life made possible by her passing. Through each of her novels, Han Kang has proven herself to be an unflinching documentarian and cartographer of violence in all its incarnations – be it political or personal – in addition to being a writer of emotional resonance and skilled stylist, whose prose is lyrical and graceful as it is technical, eschewing sentimentality and sensationalism in favour of psychological insights and imagistic brilliance.

“Greek Lessons,” can easily be summarized as a simple story about two individuals maneuvering through the process of loss in a variety of forms. For the woman it is the loss of language, brought on by the death of her mother and loosing the custody of her son; for the man, it is the gradual loss of his sight, due to an inherent degenerative eye condition. The novel is interchanged between their two experiences and perspectives. The woman’s narrative presented in the third person. The man’s in first person singular. Their narratives intersect as they both involved in Ancient Greek language classes. Language is the bedrock and basis of “Greek Lessons.” Language is a writer’s bread and butter. Their tool and craft. Language is an ephemeral subject; shapeless and figureless, lacking physical substance and material, but an immediate and intricate component of an individual’s existence. From advertisements to marketing campaigns, traffic signs and street names, to business names, titles, emails, text messages; then the buzz and conversation of daily life. Language is a continual pulse of human achievement and culture. Always beating and flowing around individuals, and in turn evolving. Many writers have used language as the basis of their literary work, such as Nobel Laurate Elfriede Jelinek, whose linguistic vivisections examines how language creates, constructs, and influences reality, becoming a method of control and exerting power over others. Fellow Nobel Laureate Herta Müller in turn, exemplified how language is extorted, utilized and abused by authoritarian regimes to control and propagate ideological messaging, which run contrary to reality and lived experience; but also, how language can be subverted as a form of resistance, offering a precarious sanctuary. Language wielded by Han Kang neither vivisects its power structures or subverts authoritarian control; instead, language is violent intrusion and projection of an individual’s being:

“Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.”

The woman has no driving interest in learning ancient Greek. The language has no utilitarian purpose or value as its extinct. She has no fascination or curiosity with ancient Greek philosophy or literature, which the lecturer often employees to provide context to the dead language’s evolution and exemplifying its complex grammar. No, the woman hopes that by learning ancient Greek she would once again reacquaint herself with her own language. This attempt is a replication of a previous success in its rehabilitative measures, when twenty years prior, the woman found herself exiled from language and verbal communication, only to be reintroduced to it when learning French. Perhaps ancient Greek interests her, because the language itself is considered dead. Its not spoken or utilized beyond niche environments, such as the class. This ritual then of summoning it forth from the river bank of oblivion, awakens the language from its seized silence and brings it back into the world in a hollow state. Parallels of the languages status as being extinct and the woman’s own hollowed out and shapeless existence can easily be deducted. 

Language for the woman has always retained a dizzying and psychological affect. Her therapist simplistically diagnosis’s her muteness in terms of traumatic experience brought on by the loss of her mother and custody of her son. She rejects this assessment. Language is more existential; with her inability to incorporate it and manifest it in verbal structures is a disconnect between physiological failure and neurological lapse. For the woman, language is inaccessible, not psychologically blocked. The woman, however, had an apprehensive relationship with speech. Even when she did speak, the woman’s relationship with act of vocalizing language were less then assured:

            “Even when she could talk, she’d always been soft-spoken.

It wasn’t an issue of vocal cords or lung capacity. She just didn’t like taking up space.  Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self.”

Han Kang’s characters often engage in unorthodox and unique forms of rebellion, be it choosing to no longer to eat meat, or in this case participate in speech or inhabit language as a physical projection of one’s self. Perhaps silence is her way of retreating from society and the world. An attempt at self-imposed metaphysical segregation. There again, this may only satisfy her therapists hurried assessment. Throughout the novel, the woman remains locked in silence, but Kang fills the space with beautiful imagistic writing, both of the woman’s wanderings through Seoul at night, wandering to exhaust herself to sleep, and the few personal details that are laced through an otherwise interior distilled perspective.

If the woman’s narrative is adrift and shrinking from the world’s scrutiny; then the lecturer’s is filled with an attempt to continually appreciate and record the world as its presented before him, while his sight is still intact, as it gradually deteriorates. His chapters are full of memories rendered colourfully with vibrant detail; in addition to loss and pain, as well as the unrequited love for his ophthalmologist’s deaf daughter; the estrangement of his family; and how is own relationship with the written world will inevitably change once his eyesight is gone. Throughout the novel, the lecturer and the woman (one of his students) gradually waltz around each other, engaged in their own spheres of loss both physically and personally. In the lectures chapter, introspection and drifting images and rumination are abandoned in favour of an assured and consciousness first person narrative.

“Greek Lessons,” is a bold novel, one which tackles the notion of language as a daily occurrence; a linguistic digression on the nature of phonemes; the three different voices styles of the ancient Greek language; the syntaxial differences and complexities between ancient Greek, the Hangul alphabet, and the German language (the adopted language of the lecturer); but also, how language becomes both a state of self-realization – for the lecturer Korean becomes a homecoming – while in turn, language contorts and mutilates itself, to the point of self-inflicted estrangement, as in the case of the woman. Throughout it all is Han Kang’s beautifully etched lyrical prose is graceful as it is assured, beautifully captured and translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. “Greek Lessons,” is a slow burn, returning to the themes of everyday violence and unorthodox rebellion for Han Kang, it also presents her as an extremely literary talent, capable of not just psychological insight, but also contemplative regarding linguistics and the nature of language as a defining feature of the human experience.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

Ismail Kadare Dies Aged 88

Hello Gentle Reader,

Ismail Kadare was a singular writer. A towering figure of European literature, Kadare’s reputation was built and fortified on a literary body of work which was as immense as Balzac’s and of unimpeachable quality; uncompromising in its allegory and critique of political injustices and dictatorships; while exploring the existentially horrors such dictatorships force upon its citizens, and their reality warping and corroding effects. Ismail Kadare was a unextinguishable beacon of light, whose pen became a necessary form of resistance against the Soviet endorsed communist regime of Enver Hoxha (before Hoxha broke ties with the communist superpower, while retaining its Stalinist principles), and the infectious paranoia such a society breeds. Ismail Kadare—be it willing or unwillingly—became the palpable hope of Albania, who withered under repressive policies of communism. To quote Ismail Kadare:

“Literature has often produced magnificent works in dark ages as if it was seeking to remedy the misfortune inflicted on people.”

Allegory and irony were Kadare’s greatest literary weapons. The ability to craft a compelling metaphor, provided Kadare enough ability to criticize Hoxha, while seemingly able to avoid punitive political recourse. Where other writers were arrested (and some executed), Kadare avoided the fate, though he was exiled to a remote village for a year. How, Kadare avoided political persecution, had often been a subject of debate and attack on the writer. It turned out, however, that Enver Hoxha considered himself a literary man, and while there have been reports that the former dictator did in fact order Kadare’s arrest and execution, he always spared him in the end, perhaps out of begrudged respect or literary appreciation. I suspect, it was more international renown in addition to literary merit that saved Kadare from imprisonment and execution. If Kadare’s reputation was not as stellar and his literary talents but a fraction, Hoxha would have done away with him. By the end of the 80’s though, Kadare fled Albania for France, and his international stature was now set in stone. For the past thirty to forty years, Ismail Kadare was rumored to be a future Nobel Laureate in Literature and a perennial contender, in addition to Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe, and Philip Roth. In 2005, Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, for a lifetime assessment of his literary work. Further international accolades include: the Princess of Asturias award in 2009, the Jerusalem prize in 2015 and the Neustadt international prize for literature in 2020. The elusiveness of the Nobel Prize in Literature, will be marked down as another missed opportunity for the Swedish Academy.

Today, Ismail Kadare died and Europe has lost not only of its towering figures, an institution of literary resistance and political discourse, but also a writer who is perhaps one of the few writers, who remained unabashedly a national writer. The kind of writer who captured and celebrated a geographical place. In his work, Ismail Kadare, celebrated Albania as an ancient and shackled nation, overlooked or ignored by the its European neighbours. In doing so, Ismail Kadare elevated the south-eastern Balkan nation to new literary heights, as Kadare promoted and encouraged many young Albanian writers, championing their work abroad.

Rest in Peace Ismail Kadare, you were truly one of the greatest writers of the past 20^th Century and early 21^st Century.

Thank you for Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary