2014 Booker Prize longlist announced

This year, American writers were eligible for consideration for the first time and four were selected to the 2014 shortlist (Ferris, Fowler, Hustvedt, Powers).  Don't know much about these books yet, but I shall...soon.  The Fowler I read last year and plan on reviewing it later this year and I already had the Mitchell pre-ordered.  Likely will order the Hustvedt first out of these others and then wait and see for the shortlist to be announced.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent's Tail)

The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)

J,  Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape) 

The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Sceptre)

The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)

Us, David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)

The Dog, Joseph O'Neill (Fourth Estate)

Orfeo, Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)

How to be Both, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)

History of the Rain, Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)

List of Booker Prize winners

Since I've been reading the Booker Prize shortlists for the past few years (and largely reviewing the books on those shortlists), I thought I'd post here a list of the previous winners (similar to what I do for the Nobel Prize in Literature) and highlight the books that I've read and/or own.  Due to my age and nationality and literary interests, this should be a fairly bottom-heavy highlighting:

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1969   P.H. Newby, Something to Answer For     

1970   Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member            

1971   V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State           

1972   John Berger, G.         

1973   J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur     

1974   Stanley Middleton, Holiday           

             Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist 

1975   Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust           

1976   David Storey, Saville             

1977   Paul Scott, Staying On     

1978   Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea        

1979   Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore         

1980   William Golding, Rites of Passage         

1981   Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 

1982   Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark          

1983   J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K    

1984   Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac   

1985   Keri Hulme, The Bone People       

1986   Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils           

1987   Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger    

1988   Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda    

1989   Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day       

1990   A.S. Byatt, Possession      

1991   Ben Okri, The Famished Road 

1992   Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger          

             Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient 

1993   Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha        

1994   James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late 

1995   Pat Barker, The Ghost Road         

1996   Graham Swift, Last Orders    

1997   Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things      

1998   Ian McEwan, Amsterdam    

1999   J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace         

2000   Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin    

2001   Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang        

2002   Yann Martel, Life of Pi         

2003   D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little      

2004   Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty    

2005   John Banville, The Sea          

2006   Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss        

2007   Anne Enright, The Gathering           

2008   Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger        

2009   Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall        

2010   Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question            

2011   Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending       

2012   Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies 

So far, only read 9 winners out of 44 years (and 46 winners/co-winners) of the Booker Prize.  Might read more of these in the near future, but part of me is hesitant, considering my negative reactions to other works written by some of the Booker Prize winners that I already have read.

2012 Booker Prize Winner: Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

The forest stretched ahead for days.  Sometimes antique weapons are unearthed:  axes that, wielded with double fist, could cut down horse and rider.  Think of the great limbs of those dead men, stirring under the soil.  War was their nature, and war is always keen to come again.  It's not just the past you think of, as you ride these fields.  It's what's latent in the soil, what's breeding; it's the days to come, the wars unfought, the injuries and deaths that, like seeds, the soil of England is keeping warm.  You would think, to look at Henry laughing, to look at Henry praying, to look at him leading his men through the forest path, that he sits as secure on his throne as he does on his horse.  Looks can deceive.  By night, he lies awake; he stares at the carved roof beams; he numbers his days.  He says, 'Cromwell, Cromwell, what shall I do?'  Cromwell, save me from the Emperor.  Cromwell, save me from the Pope.  Then he calls in his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and demands to know, 'Is my soul damned?'

For nearly five centuries now, the passion play that is the life and times of Henry VIII's court and king has fascinated historians and laypeople alike.  With the exception of relatively minor antecedents such as Wycliffe and the Lollards, England in the 16th century did not seem to be as ripe for rebellion against papal authority/church traditions as were several of the German states; it was more of a top-down phenomenon there than in the Holy Roman Empire.  Yet what caused Henry VIII to first divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and then proceed through that infamous litany of "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived?"  Who were the masterminds, if any such Faustian ministers could be said to be thus, that shepherded the king to divorce England from the Catholic faith?  For centuries, these questions have bedeviled contemporaries and their descendents alike and the literary works that have touched upon this, ranging from Shakespeare to Robert Bolt to hagiographies of St./Sir Thomas More and others such as Thomas Cranmer, have populated bookshops for centuries.

The latest entry into this realm of historical speculative fiction is a planned trilogy by Hilary Mantel that focuses (at first) on the life and career of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from the lower classes to become one of the chief architects of Henry VIII's annulment of his marriage to Catherine and the subsequent declaration of the King of England being head of the Catholic dioceses there.  These events Mantel covered deftly and with aplomb in her 2009 Booker Prize-winning opening volume, Wolf Hall.  While that novel was well-written and added excellent moments of narrative tension, it pales in comparison to the second volume, Bring Up the Bodies, which covers events from after the execution of More in 1534 to the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, in 1536.

Historical novels are very difficult to write convincingly.  Too often, novelists find themselves constricted by the known facts to create interesting characters out of historical people, especially when these characters are famous.  It is often easier to create a fictional character who manages to summarize the chaotic or exciting events of a time while s/he only intersects fittingly with the "real" people.  Or perhaps, as Alexandre Dumas was wont to do with his Musketeer novels, a minor historical person has their role expanded and fictionalized to an extent to create a narrative that is both "real" and exciting.  Mantel in both Wolf Hall and here in Bring Up the Bodies, has chosen a third, more difficult path, that of using major historical figures to reconstruct a tumultuous and sometimes mysterious epoch in English history.  Too easily the characters and situation could have devolved into a shallow mystery/thriller-type novel; one only has to look at Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time to see a historical reconstruction that takes on too many aspects of the murder-mystery for it to be viewed as anything beyond just that.

No, what Mantel's representations of not just Cromwell, but also Boleyn, the ambassador from the court of Emperor Charles V, Cranmer, and the divorced Catherine show is a complex weaving of character and situation to create a narrative tension that slowly builds through the first half of the novel before it explodes in the novel's final chapters.  For centuries, the events leading up to Boleyn being charged with adultery and treason were shrouded with mystery.  The extant evidence is contradictory in places and there are hints that political machinations involving the family of Jane Seymour (Henry VIII's soon-to-be third wife, who later died giving birth to the sickly future King Edward VI) did lie, if not quite at the center of the charges against Boleyn, at least somewhat more than just a peripheral role in the matter.  Mantel judiciously notes this without overplaying this possible angle. 

If anything, what makes Bring Up the Bodies' second half so strong is that Mantel has created several plausible possibilities for the charges against Boleyn that the reader may find herself trying to anticipate which may be the strongest clue to the eventual denouement.  Yet the novel is more than the presentation of evidence regarding a historical political intrigue.  It also excels at being a great character-driven novel.  Whereas Wolf Hall centered around Cromwell to the near-exclusion of other PoVs, here in Bring Up the Bodies the perspectives of other characters adds to the building drama.  The fate of Boleyn feels as foreordained and morbidly fascinating as that of Santiago Nasar's murder as outlined in Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.  This creation of tension within a fictionalization of an event already well-known is impressive and Mantel's opulent descriptions contrasted with the shifts in perspective is nothing short of brilliant.

Bring Up the Bodies certainly is a deserving winner of the 2012 Booker Prize.  Its prose is excellent, the characterizations are top-notch, and the narrative construction not only is ambitious but it also manages to achieve its lofty goals.  In a year filled with excellent contenders, it stands out due to the difficulties (noted above) that it managed to overcome.  Mantel joins the rare company of those authors who have won the Booker Prize twice and she is the first writer to have a sequel win this prestigious award.  Simply put, it is the best out of a group of books that is much stronger than last year's weak shortlist. 

Ranking the 2012 Booker Prize finalists

Due to my slow recovery from an upper respiratory illness and this weekend being tied up with the Southern Festival of Books, I won't be able to write all six planned reviews in advance of Tuesday's announcing of the winner of the 2012 Booker Prize.  I have read all six books now and while most of these differ only a little amount in my estimation, I thought I'd provide a ranking of the books by personal preference for those who like such things without the thought I prefer being given to the individual books themselves.

1.  Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies.  Took me until the second half of the novel for it all to fall into place.  The inherent drama of the mysterious events leading up to Anne Boleyn's arrest and execution is done masterfully here.

2.  Will Self, Umbrella.  At first, I was hesitant about this work, as it consciously riffs on 20th century Modernist writing (in particular, Joyce, although there are traces of other writers such as Woolf present) to present a tale that spans into our own.  It was the most "experimental" of the six and for the most part Self manages to avoid the pitfalls that come with using a stream-of-consciousness style narrative.

3.  Deborah Levy, Swimming Home.  Levy's use of language to tell a short, sharp, poignant tale was near brilliant at times.  Along with the two above and the two below, I could be content with this being a winner.

4.  Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis.  Reviewed this earlier.

5.  Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists.  This story, which is set in both contemporary and World War II Malaysia during the time of the Japanese occupation, is beautiful in its prose, with characterizations that are very well-done.  The garden motif is used very well.

6.  Alison Moore, The Lighthouse.  This work did not appeal to me as much as the other five did.  While the prose is very good, the characterizations felt a bit too hollow to me for me to consider it on the same level as the others.


Compared to last year's shortlist, this one is worlds better.  Again, over the next week or two, I'll try to write fuller reviews, but these are my personal preferences at this time.

2012 Booker Prize finalist: Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

SHE'S RIGHT, Xavier said.  Only the rich can afford surprise and/or irony.  The rich crave meaning.  The first thing they ask when faced with eternity, and in the fact the last thing, is:  excuse me, what does this mean?  The poor don't ask questions, or they don't ask irrelevant questions.  They can't afford to.  All they can afford is laughter and ghosts.  Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender.  An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint.  What is a saint, but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency?  The saint talks to flowers, a daffodil, say, and he sees the yellow of it.  He receives its scent through his eyes.  Yes, he thinks, you are my muse, I take heart from your stubbornness, a drop of water, a dab of sunshine, and there you are with your gorgeous blooms.  He enjoys flowers but he worships trees.  He wants to be the banyan's slave.  He wants to think of time the way a tree does, a decade as nothing more than some slight addition to his girth.  He connives with birds, and gets his daily news from the sound the wind makes in the leaves.  When he's hungry he stands in the forest waiting for the fall of a mango.  His ambition is the opposite of ambition.  Most of all, like all addicts, he wants to obliterate time.  He wants to die, or, at the very least, to not live.

Dimple said, "I need a translator to understand you." (Ch. 3)

Cities are comprised of layers upon layers of people.  For many of us who are native to a particular city, it is all too easy to wander through its labyrinths and think we know it.  Yet there are those places that many of us know to avoid.  What resides there in the metaphorical bowels of the metropolis?  Is it danger?  Or is it something else that disturbs us so?  "The seedy underbelly" we often call such locales.  We presume to understand, usually without giving a voice to our thoughts, just what "it" is that resides there.  To question this would be foolhardy; how could we ever hope to understand?

Yet there is a vibrant life that exists within those layers of city life that so many of us dismiss without a second (or sometimes, a first) thought.  There, one can find perhaps that hooker with a heart of gold, or maybe it is better to say a soul who is in search of a life raft.  Or maybe one can encounter that most unnerving of souls, an addict.  In some regards, an addict is an "other" who exists beyond race, class, gender, or caste:  s/he is viewed frequently with a sort of horrified wonderment.  What makes someone an addict?  What tales can they tale beyond the clichéd story of redemption from the depths of despair?  Does one ever choose to be an addict, knowing what it entails?

These are the existential questions that Indian writer Jeet Thayil explores in his debut novel, Narcopolis.  Set in late 20th century Bombay (before its name changed to Mumbai), Narcopolis revolves around the "dead city" of the denizens of Rashid's opium den.  Over the course of nearly 300 pages, Thayil explores the lives, dreams, and fears of several addicts in order to get closer to the heart of addiction itself.  Narcopolis is neither a tale of survival nor a Bildungsroman.  Its characters may strive to better their lives (one such example being the hijra Dimple), but the main focus is on narrating the possibilities of addiction itself.

It is too easy for a writer, whether or not s/he is writing from personal experience, to slip off the razor's edge into either a maudlin tale or a condemnatory fable.  Addicts are not simple constructions; they are a host of possibilities within a single human body.  Thayil's own past with heroin during his time living in New York and Bombay/Mumbai perhaps helps him avoid the potential pitfalls, but what really stands out is how he utilizes a rapid, almost breathless narrative that switches limited third-person PoVs frequently to create this sense of communal experience.  Whether it is the main narrator, the hijra Dimple, or a couple other of the opium den's regulars, Thayil's narrative feels vital, alive, and fully aware of the contradictions present within its characters.  He rarely strikes a wrong note, whether in character voice or in the prose itself, and much is packed into its 284 e-book pages.

Too easily a reader may find herself trying to focus on the "exotic" qualities of urban life different from what s/he has experienced.  Thayil manages to avoid this through acknowledging the existence of poverty-stricken slums, but without that sort of "poverty porn" that titillates at the expense of a larger human narrative.  Rashid and his customers are not window dressing for others to gawk at:  they are humans whose concerns, while perhaps somewhat foreign to those alien to contemporary Indian urban societies, are real and intriguing because they are valued much higher than the setting around which their lives unfold.  Narcopolis in many regards reminds me favorably of Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's excellent Dirty Havana Trilogy in its unflinching dedication to narrating the lives and experiences of those too often dismissed by their own fellow citizens. 

Thayil's prose is sharp and eloquent without feeling affected.  Perhaps due to his experiences as a poet, Thayil can sum up complexity of emotion in just a few well-placed paragraphs, such as this excerpt from a reflection from a Chinese ex-soldier, Lee, in regards to his mother:

She didn't believe in culture.  She didn't believe in books.  She didn't believe in knowledge that die not benefit society as a whole.  She believed that indiscriminate individual reading was detrimental to progress because it filled the populace with yearnings that were impossible to identify, much less satisfy.  Societies with the highest literacy rates also had the highest suicide rates, she said.  Some kinds of knowledge were not meant to be freely available, she said, because all men and women were not equipped to receive such knowledge in an equal and equally useful way.  She did not believe in art for art's sake; she did not believe in freedom of expression; she did not believe in her husband, whose stature as a novelist she regarded with suspicion mixed with shame.  Despite her lifelong aversion to culture she would go to university because she wanted to be a teacher.  Teaching was the noblest profession in the world, she said.  It was selfless, revolutionary, and critical to the nation's well-being.  It concerned itself not with money, which was irredeemably dirty, but with the future of the mind.  (Book Two, Ch. 2)

Yes, there is contradiction here between the love of learning and the dismissal of knowledge.  Yet we are full of such inconsistencies.  Thayil's characters, whether they are reminiscing under the haze of opium or are lucid dreaming, contain such conflicts within themselves.  We might find ourselves empathizing with them, feeling similar regrets and dreams.  It is here, in that sympathetic bond that the reader may form with these characters, that Thayil's narrative is its most effective.  Few readers may have experienced the pangs of chemical addiction, but most of us have known at some point that tug-of-war between emotional states and our desire to free ourselves from the restraints placed upon us by society.  Some times, it seems the freest people are those who realize this and choose to take a path that may liberate themselves at the expense of their own selves.  Narcopolis is a brilliantly-realized novel because it takes that unsettling concept and plays it out in front of the reader, allowing that reader to make his or her own conclusions about it.  Very few novelists could have written such a tale and to see a debut novelist accomplish this is all the more marvelous.  Certainly a very deserving candidate for this year's Booker Prize.

Review plans for October: More Malazan, Booker Prize finalists, Sapkowski

October seems to have arrived with a vengeance here, as the temperatures have been much colder (and rainier) than normal.  I've always associated this time of year with reading and I have been busy with a few projects in mind.  Since I have this week and next free for the most part of any other demands on my time (at least until the October 12-14 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville), I plan on (re)reading and reviewing the following (* denotes already read):

Malazan Re-Read Project:

* Reaper's Gale
* Return of the Crimson Guard 
* Blood Follows
Toll the Hounds (previous review exists)
Stonewielder
The Lees of Laughter's End
The Healthy Dead
Crack'd Pot Trail
Orb Sceptre Throne
Dust of Dreams (previous review exists)
The Crippled God (previous review exists)
* Forge of Darkness

2012 Booker Prize Shortlist

* Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
* Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
* Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
Tan Twan Eng, Garden of Evening Mists
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse
Will Self, Umbrella

Andrzej Sapkowski Re-read Project:

Geralt Saga (only two books out of the seven (eight in Spanish translation) are available in English)

The Last Wish/El ultimo deseo (previous review exists)
La espada del destino (The Sword of Destiny) (previous review exists)
Blood of Elves/Sangre de los elfos (previous review exists)
Tiempo del odio (Time of Contempt) (previous review exists)
Bautismo de fuego (Baptism by Fire) (previous review exists)
La torre de la golondrina (The Swallow's Tower)
La dama del lago, pts. I & II (The Lady of the Lake) (will be reviewed together)

The Hussite Trilogy (incomplete in Spanish translation; not available in English to date)

Narrenturm
Los guerreros de dios (The Warriors of God)


Yes, most of the month will be devoted to reading these, although a few more doubtless will be slotted in, although most likely without a review this month.

Which of these works/projects appeal to you most and why?