Booker Prize: Classic or Dud?

has anyone read the luminaries? i've been reading reviews of it and am intrigued... i'm so backed up with books i've bought but haven't read yet.

So, has anyone read it?

No, it sounds awful!

Haha I know! Boring "literary" historical fiction, Booker fodder defined. Bt I live in NZ and a lot of ppl're currently creaming themselves over her/the fact she gave a lecture in which she (MY GOD) claimed to like genre fiction and to prefer Diana Wynne Jones to Harold Bloom. This is, apptly, radical stuff in my country

Sorry NZ that ws bitchy, just y'know

lot of ppl

Anyone beyond D4vid L4rsen?

A few ppl on Twitter but yeah, mostly him. I should've waited a while to say anything, given I don't rly mind now, and after all I basically agree w her. Have you read TL?

That 4/5 fawning w/out even mentioning the ostensible subject of the piece rly is embarrassingly unworthy of publication tho

Feeling like he had to make nice after the Guy S0merset brouhaha, IDK. Wld be unfortunate if the fallout of Sport getting axed was more VUP ppl on Twitter eh. Haven't read TL (disliked The Rehearsal); curious to see how many patriotic Xmas copies of TL end up in opshops cf The Vintner's Luck.

"To say she went all-in and gave this occasion everything she had is not to say nearly enough" is entertainingly awful cf that "New Zealand to mount defense of the Booker Prize" arts-as-sports sub-Onion thing.

Haha. Yeah tbh my first thought when TL won ws "Cool now I'll be able to find it for a few $ at an opshop p soon", and I guess I'll give it a go then

Joshua Ferris (American), "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour"
Richard Flanagan (Australian), "The Narrow Road to the Deep North"
Karen Joy Fowler (American), "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves"
Siri Hustvedt (American), "The Blazing World"
Howard Jacobson (British), "J"
Paul Kingsnorth (British), "The Wake"
David Mitchell (British), "The Bone Clocks"
Neel Mukherjee (British), "The Lives of Others"
David Nicholls (British), "Us"
Joseph O'Neill (Irish American), "The Dog"
Richard Powers (American), "Orfeo"
Ali Smith (British), "How to be Both"
Niall Williams (Irish), "History of the Rain"

anyone read the Marlon James? I'm still mystified to the point of fear that t mccarthy's satin island made it anywhere near the long list let alone the shortlist, despite trying to reassure myself that the Booker is totally meaningless.

Tempted to give it a go even though last year's was rubbish, and despite its 700 pages, write shorter books please.

Chock full of sex and violence and swearing apparently.

I enjoyed The Narrow Road... but I'm still pretty dubious about any prize that could be awarded to Howard Jacobson with a straight face. This one sounds great though.

Also I found myself disproportionately annoyed that Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World failed to make the shortlist last year, supposedly putting her at the same level as crap like Us and The Bone Clocks. Actually I ended up reading a surprising amount of the shortlist last year and the Joshua Ferris one in particular was dire. Don't think I'll ever understand the appeal of Ali Smith either.

The sdtrack for this: http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/oct/06/the-playlist-reggae-wayne-smith-super-cat-and-shabba-ranks?CMP=share_btn_tw

I might give it a go as well, though the 700 pages is daunting, and what Matt DC said about Howard Jacobson in spades with a cherry on top.

Got it as a present, am about half way through but haven't touched it for days, I think I've given up. Basically a problem of style. Each chapter has a different narrator from a large and rotating cast, and they're quite short so it's hard to get a sense of immersion when the viewpoint keeps on shifting. Almost all the characters are self-obsessed and carrying giant chips on their shoulders, and they all talk to themselves in extremely self aware prose - "Jesus Christ breathe, Kim Clarke. Breathe in, out, in out, in, out. That's the third time I called myself Kim Clarke without thinking [...]" - so aside from patois to distinguish between Jamaicans and Americans, there's a sameness to them all. Dialogue is rendered verbatim with only a new line/dash to indicate a change of speaker so after half a dozen exchanges I'm pretty much lost as to who is saying what.

Plot wise it seems on the surface to be complex, with local politicians and gang leaders and CIA and regular citizens, all with their own schemes and all tangling with each other, but it doesn't go very deep. It feels like all the different threads are very short, just added for effect, there's no grand narrative waiting to be revealed, no sense of tension. Which kinda would be ok, I wasn't expecting or hoping for a Clancy style thriller, but since I'm not enjoying the style I have no other reason to carry on, no burning desire to find out what's going to happen.

b-b-but Michiko Kakutani said it was "epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex."

Her dad was much more precise in his language.

Irvine Welsh called it the most original book he'd read in years. Doesn't read so much I guess.

I called myself Kim Clarke
The bass player?

> Got it as a present, am about half way through but haven't touched it for days

i'm still reading The Famished Road.

So anyway here's the clear highlight - at one point the gang go on a cocaine fuelled killing spree and finally their uptight internal monologues loosen up a bit, then they get double crossed and executed, this is one character as he is being buried alive:

Rock! Rock side to side no side only dirt turn over turn over 'bout turn over
sad crouch like baby crouch and so you have air I should have fuck the
woman I live with no not her some other girl the girl two door down some
other girl white girl charlie's angel pussy pink pussy is pink me see me in daddy
secret book under the bed which he take out when be think me sleep and
go off by himself and make man sound jesus me hard could fuck the ground
must fuck the ground fuck fuck fuck want pussy no don't want pussy fuck
fuck fuck bend her over and rub the cunt and hoist up the battyhole and
sink down the cock and it tight feel like piece of liver wrap 'round you
cocky big big like daddy cocky when he fuck me whore mother her back to
him she didn't care who sleep and who wake and when she raise up herself
daddy cocky like flagpole she raise and raise and couldn't come off but she
don't want to come off she slide back down and yelp like puppy pussy cocky
balls balls and me never see me father naked and me never see him fuck me
mother maybe some other man maybe Funnyboy no he is battyman etc etc

I am enjoying this book so far.

Woody Harrelson in with a shot this year

http://blog.katjakuhl.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RobertSeethaler-PhotoKatjaKuhl06.jpg

Whither my img tags

http://blog.katjakuhl.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RobertSeethaler-PhotoKatjaKuhl06.jpg

Double the woody, double the fun.

Who is that?

The Luminaries has yet to show up in any New Zealand op shops, v odd.

Xp one of this lot:

The Nobel prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, Chinese dissident Yan Lianke, Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, Austrian Robert Seethaler and South Korean Han Kang

(the url suggests it's Robert Seethaler)

USA! USA! USA!

http://www.clipartkid.com/images/138/soldier-in-iraq-a-poem-of-life-and-loss-by-jevonte-lockhart-dW4CmJ-clipart.jpg

http://images.buycostumes.com/mgen/merchandiser/uncle-sam-top-hat-bc-32426.jpg

A critique of the 'about novel' and its laurels:

https://this-space.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-end-of-literature-part-3.html

Remember when John Carey said the modernists wrote works to exclude the masses and that was only a bad thing? Why is this any less of a travesty?

John Carey is an idiot and that book is trash.

Funnily enough I am reading some of Woolf's diaries and thinking about her snobbery, in that she acknowledges it, it's a trait that she thinks about quite a bit instead of just being this monstrous reflex she displays.

Oh, there are definitely important discussions about modernism and elitism, it's just none of them come from Carey (source: a huge portion of my academic career).

What is happening when book prizes and the coverage of them has much less concern for the books in themselves than for the identity of the authors and their extra-literary agendas?

i am falling asleep reading this is mostly what's happening

"What is happening when book prizes and the coverage of them has much less concern for the books in themselves than for the identity of the authors and their extra-literary agendas?" - we seriously suggesting this was ever not the case?

lol xpost

I stopped reading at "barbarism" on the assumption it was going to be a pile-up of clichéd handwringing.

i mean the Booker has always been for lamebrow shit, just because they've had the temerity to put a more diverse range of writers in the longlist doesn't mean they're squeezing out a load of avant garde novels that would otherwise have placed

Defeatist, but yes, exactly.

Would tend to agree but I have to say I did really love Milkman by Anna Burns. A good winner imo.

Don’t get the sense that tokarczuk or kraznahorkai are pandering to the mass market either but what do I know

i accept that there are noble exceptions i was just making a bad rhetorical point, which is still true in general imo

also the International Prize feels like a different thing

Anyhow, I do think it's fair to argue that easily summarizable novels written by readily assignable authorial identities are likelier to garner the kind of praise that yields household names. Insofar as this has always been the case (including and especially when otherwise claimed), greater nominee diversity is a step forward, but the underlying concern – the triumph of subjects (in every sense of the term) over the work itself – remains. Then again, this myopia is likely embedded into the business of literary awards, and there is no escaping it short of abolishing them altogether (and even then...).

How many of the books have you read? How many has the blogger read?

Ime in Quebec visible minorities (Canada’s BAME/POC) are more receptive to the anglophone dynamic at play itt when the topic arises, but it’s way less pronounced. In France, you almost never hear the arguments put forth here, regardless of where your ancestors come from, and when they do come up they’re couched in endless caveats. In Romania, well, you can guess.

In France, you almost never hear the arguments put forth here, regardless of where your ancestors come from, and when they do come up they’re couched in endless caveats.

Huh, that is very much not my experience! My wife's family and friend group might be seen as outliers there, but even in the magazines she reads it's becoming more and more prevalent.

And surely "endless caveats" means you're still walking on eggshells, just from a different perspective?

Jtbc I'm not saying that the contemporary French literary scene is oblivious to the problem of diversity. The key difference, to my mind, is that writers who come from non-white backgrounds (or women or LGBTQ+ authors) are generally keener to present themselves as predicateless writers, first and foremost, which is in keeping with the Republic's universalist, colourblind ideals, for better or for worse. Anglophone-style identity politics are often viewed as excessive and/or needlessly divisive when imported into a French context, and France's visible minorities are far likelier to agree with this reading than their British or American or Canadian counterparts. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, and challenges to this doxa have become more common in recent years, but it's still a far cry from the anglosphere.

And yeah, the eggshell-walking is definitely a matter of context. Fwiw I tend to feel like an oddity on both sides of the divide, and for opposite reasons.

Mantel has missed out on the shortlist, and people are angry.

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/15/most-diverse-booker-prize-shortlist-is-also-almost-all-american-hilary-mantel?

Giving the same prize to the same author for the same series of books 3 times in a row would be a bit crap.

Yes, except it's now going to be about a white author missing out because 'diversity'.

True. The weird thing here is having four American authors on the shortlist. The sole Brit (Scot, actually) has lived in New York for 25 years. Tsitsi Dangarembga is from Zimbabwe.

I don't think the panel should overthink who wins it.

I suppose they (or any prize) should give it to Mantel if they, a contingent set of readers, think it's the best novel they've read this year. If they don't, don't. And they didn't.

Many people have always been opposed to opening this prize to US authors, and I'm inclined to agree with them.

I'd be surprised if Mantel herself is especially bothered, she's done just fine out of this particular prize.

I wasn't sure about nominating US authors either but Lincoln In The Bardo is one of the two or three best books to have won it in the last decade (the other being A Brief History Of Seven Killings).

Mantel seems gracious and supportive of new writers so I agree.