Category: Awards

A Han Kang retrospective

11th October 2024 / / 2 Comments

I was really pleased to learn that Han Kang had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday. She has become one of my favourite writers that I’ve discovered during the lifetime of this blog. Indeed, she was the author of my ‘book of the year’ twice in a row. Her writing has a way of getting under my skin like few other authors’.

It also happens that I’ve reviewed all of Han’s books that have appeared in English translation to date, so this seems a good time to look back on what I thought of them. Here, then, are the links to my posts on Han Kang’s work:

  • The Vegetarian (2007, tr. Deborah Smith 2015) – reviewed for Shiny New Books.
  • Human Acts (2014, tr. Deborah Smith 2016) – reviewed on the blog.
  • From 2016, a few thoughts on Han Kang, Lionel Shriver, and a writer’s relationship to their material.
  • The White Book (2016, tr. Deborah Smith 2017) – reviewed on the blog.
  • Greek Lessons (2011, tr. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won 2023) – reviewed for Shiny New Books.

#InternationalBooker2024: and the winner is…

23rd May 2024 / / 0 Comments

Once again, the official International Booker judges and the shadow panel have diverged. We chose Not a River as our shadow winner, but the official winner is:

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Michael Hofmann (Granta Books)

Congratulations to them, and thanks as always to my fellow shadow panellists. I wonder what next year will bring…

Click here to read my other posts on the 2024 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2024: the shadow panel’s winner

21st May 2024 / / 1 Comment

Right then, it’s time… The official winner of the International Booker Prize will be announced tonight, but there’s our shadow panel winner to reveal first. We selected our own shortlist of five, and ranked them individually to award scores of 8 points, 5, 3, 2, and 1.

With a grand total of 56 points, our 2024 shadow winner is…

Not a River by Selva Almada, tr. Annie McDermott (Charco Press)

We also want to give honourable mentions to Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Michael Hofmann (Granta Books), our runner-up with 51 points; and White Nights by Urszula Honek, tr. Kate Webster (MTO Press), which came third with 40 points. We were sorry that White Nights didn’t make the official shortlist, so we’re pleased to give it this recognition.

On to the official winner: will it match our choice, or not?

Click here to read my other posts on the 2024 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2024: the shadow panel’s shortlist

23rd April 2024 / / 1 Comment

Here goes, it’s time to reveal our shadow panel’s shortlist for the International Booker. This year, for the first time, we have a shortlist of only five:

  • Not a River by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press)
  • Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann (Granta Books)
  • The Details by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson (Wildfire Books)
  • White Nights by Urszula Honek, translated from Polish by Kate Webster (MTO Press)
  • The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated from Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa Editions UK)

For more on our decision to shortlist five titles instead of six, see Tony’s post on the shadow shortlist.

We’ll announce our shadow winner before the official winner is revealed on 21 May.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2024 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2024: A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare (tr. John Hodgson)

18th April 2024 / / 0 Comments

At the centre of A Dictator Calls is an examination of a short phone call made on 23 June 1934 by Stalin to Boris Pasternak. The subject of the call was the recent arrest of Pasternak’s fellow poet, Osip Mandelstam. But its precise details are uncertain, because there are multiple accounts of the call, ranging from the official record to second-hand accounts by people of varying proximity to Pasternak. 

Kadare goes through each version of the call, drawing out the differences and varying interpretations. There’s no single definitive account of exactly what Stalin asked Pasternak, or how Pasternak replied, or even why the call took place. Different versions put different slants on these things, and the ultimate impression is one of no stable reality – which, the book suggests, reflects the nature of living and writing in a totalitarian state. 

Alongside his exploration of the Stalin-Pasternak call, Kadare gives an account of his own experiences as an Albanian writer. This puts into context his interest in the Stalin-Pasternak  call, as well as setting up a counterpoint that runs through the tapestry of the novel.

Published by Harvill Secker.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2024 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2024: the official shortlist

10th April 2024 / / 1 Comment

The official shortlist for this year’s International Booker Prize was announced yesterday:

  • Not a River by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press)
  • Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann (Granta Books)
  • The Details by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson (Wildfire Books)
  • Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae (Scribe UK)
  • What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey (Scribe UK)
  • Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz (Verso Fiction)

I am still working through the longlist myself, so I don’t have a final opinion yet. But I am sure that at least three of these (Not a River, Kairos and Crooked Plow) will end up on my own personal shortlist. On the other hand, Mater 2-10 struggles to hold my attention whenever I try to read it. Different books for different readers, I guess.

The Shadow Panel will be revealing our own shortlist in a couple of weeks.

#InternationalBooker2024: Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener (tr. Julia Sanches)

8th April 2024 / / 0 Comments

In Undiscovered, we first meet Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener in Paris, as she visits an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts that were taken to Europe by her Austrian-born great-great-grandfather, Charles Wiener. Her father’s death has spurred Gabriela on to investigate the legacy of that side of the family, and this is perhaps the most difficult part: the white ancestor who plundered her country.

As she tells it in the novel, Gabriela experiences a certain affinity with Charles in terms of his writing:

Isn’t that what writers do anyway? Pillage the real story and deface it until it shines its own singular light on the world? At some point, Charles started shining brighter than the world he swore he’d discovered, casting the world around him in his shadow. Scholars of his work agree that he was a travel writer, even though that’s wasn’t his intention and his work reads like fiction.

Translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches

Undiscovered could be seen as Gabriela-the-narrator’s way of trying to process and reconcile the different parts of her identity – not just her past, but also her present. Gabriela lives in Spain in a polyamorous relationship, but then has a fling on a trip back to Lima. One strand of the novel then follows Gabriela’s search for an equilibrium in her personal life. The intertwining of the personal and historical is, to my mind, what most animates Wiener’s novel.

Published by Pushkin Press.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2024 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2024: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (tr. Michael Hofmann)

1st April 2024 / / 3 Comments

According to Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, Kairos is “the god of fortunate moments”. The chance moment that sets this story in motion occurs in East Berlin in 1986, as two characters meet on a bus: Katharina, a 19-year-old student; and Hans, a married man older than her father. They fall in love and begin an affair, and their thoughts are slightly to one side of each other from the start:

From now on, he thinks, the responsibility for their existence is entirely hers. He has to protect himself from himself. Maybe she’s a monster?

She thinks, he wants to prepare me for difficult times ahead. He wants to protect me. Protect me from myself, and so he gives me the power of decision over us.

He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong.

She thinks, if he leaves everything to me, then he’ll see what love means.

He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later.

And she, he’s putting himself in my hands.

Translated from German by Michael Hofmann

Over time, the couple’s differences and contradictions emerge more sharply, with Hans emerging as abusive and controlling. In the background, life is changing after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Things don’t necessarily turn out as the characters may have expected, with the reunification or their relationship. 

Kairos does not present a straightforward one-on-one allegory between wider society and the protagonists’ affair. But relationship and society echo each other in the ways that they change, and the result is a novel that opens up further as you venture in. 

Published by Granta.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2024 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2024: Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (tr. Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn)

29th March 2024 / / 2 Comments

Ulises Kan bonds with his father-in-law, retired general Martín, over a shared love of dogs:

They’d drive [Martín’s dogs] in the pickup to a park just before Cota Mil and let them run loose. Sometimes Martín would get out with them. At other times, he preferred to watch from his seat in the truck, following their comings and goings, the jumping, the barking, the growling, and the biting, as if they were running at some crazy racecourse. Martín would always come back home happy, as if he had won, or lost, a bet against himself.

Translated from Spanish by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn

Ulises decides to get his own dog on the day his wife Paulina leaves Venezuela. Several months later, Martín dies, and Ulises finds that dogs will become even more prominent in his life: Martín has left his house to a foundation for abandoned dogs, and Ulises has been given four months to put everything in place or he’ll lose the apartment he has within the property. 

This set-up intrigued me, and the situation only grows more complicated for Ulises. For example, Paulina contests Martín’s will, the house is under watch, and the woman Ulises now loves has her own secrets to keep. At the same time, the country is falling apart in the background, all making for an eventful novel. 

Published by Seven Stories Press UK.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2024 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2024: Lost On Me by Veronica Raimo (tr. Leah Janeckzo)

27th March 2024 / / 0 Comments

My journey through this year’s International Booker longlist begins with an Italian novel. Veronica Raimo’s narrator – also Veronica, or Vero, or Verika – starts by introducing her parents: her mother, who’s convinced that, if Vero’s brother doesn’t answer the phone, it means he must be dead. And her late father, who used to put up walls to subdivide the family apartment into even smaller areas, for reasons best known to himself. 

The way Vero describes these qualities, they come across as wryly amusing at first, until you start to think about them more. There’s a dry humour to much of the narration, such as here, where Vero talks about her family’s noisy household:

We lived immersed in the all-absorbing drone of our bodies and electrical impulses. Compressed and crammed into a home, we were a single organism that wagged its tail, banging it against the partition walls. We talked to each other over the noise, through the noise, which always turned out to be useful in later claiming the other person had misunderstood you.

Translation from Italian by Leah Janeckzo

Vero tells of her life in a series of anecdotes, and it becomes clear that not only does she have a ‘flexible’ relationship with the truth, she’s also using that as a kind of shield. So it’s up to the individual reader how much trust to place in Vero’s voice, but it’s an engaging voice in any case. 

Published by Virago.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Archives

Browse posts by author, original language of book, or post category

© 2024 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

%d