The Man Booker Award - they got it right this time!
January 21st 2008 21:09
As an author myself, I nurture a little flicker of hope in my heart that someday, a book I’ve written will qualify for consideration by a panel with a fancy name for a prize. A-personality type aside, I am sure this is also a hang-over from my goody-goody school days where I won lots of prizes for things like ‘outstanding award for achievement in handwriting,’ and ‘most avid library-user.’ I felt my one and only chance of ever being able to say I’d been nominated for a literary award slipping away, when the publisher of my first novel The Dreamcloth ‘missed the deadline’ for submission because the person who was supposed to send out the forms ‘left the organization unexpectedly.’ They were very sorry. Sigh.
So I follow with interest the nominees and recipients of awards like the Man Booker Award. When you’ve read too many books, formulated your opinions about what you like and don’t like, have your little cache of favourite authors whose new books you rush out and buy with indecent haste and have strict and probably unreasonable opinions about what counts as ‘good’ writing and crap, you realize that an award is, to quote my favourite movie character Jeff Lebowski, ‘like, just their opinion, man.’ In the end, I think literary prizes, like most things in life, boil down to a question of taste.
With great respect to Ian McEwan, who was nominated for the Man Booker for his On Chesil Beach, that book alternated between making me yawn and skip pages. I have to say I was moved by the very last page, which left me wondering why he felt the need to fill so many previous pages with such agonizing detail about two people trying to have sex on their wedding night. Seriously, maybe I’m just too old.
But then came Anne. Anne Enright’s book The Gathering was considered the ‘outsider,’ surprising critics when it stole the prize. Enright is an Irish author, who writes about Veronica, whose brother Liam has just died, and for whose funeral she must now prepare. The story takes us down the barrel of their shared history, with encounters that are mottled in memory and simultaneously lost in pain. I can say nothing more about this book other than that from the very first sentence, the writing, the telling of it is simply astonishing. I found myself slowing my reading down to a chapter at a time, because I dreaded finishing it. Books like that are over all too soon and who knows when one will stumble across a literary achievement such as this again.
Unlike so many books you cannot wait to see the back of, The Gathering is a book you wish would go on and on. This book is no romp in the park, I would venture that all good books tell hard stories. This one tells it with the most subtle of humour, and the freshest use of language I’ve had the joy to read in a long long time. By all accounts, sales of this book are not doing as well as say, McEwans, so if you’re into supporting authors earn their well-deserved royalties, pick up a copy of The Gathering next time you’re in a bookshop.
As a teaser, here’s the opening paragraph:
I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me – this thing that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones.’
www.joannefedler.com
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Keep striving, the one heart and mind that you touch will be the one through which the gods will reward you Joanne.
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Keep striving, the one heart and mind that you touch will be the one through which the gods will reward you Joanne.
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Keep striving, the one heart and mind that you touch will be the one through which the gods will reward you Joanne.
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Keep striving, the one heart and mind that you touch will be the one through which the gods will reward you Joanne.
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