Adventures in reading
There was never any chance that the International Booker Prize judges would choose the same winner as the shadow panel this year, because we went for Minor Detail, which didn’t make it to the official shortlist (though it should have, if you ask me).
However, I’m pleased because the jury chose my favourite book from the official shortlist, which is…
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop (tr. Anna Moschovakis)
Congratulations to the winners!
The official winner of this year’s International Booker Prize will be announced later today. Before then, it’s time to announce the shadow panel’s winner. We choose a winner from our own shadow shortlist, so sometimes it matches the official result, and sometimes… Well, read on.
This was our tenth year of shadowing the International Booker (and its predecessor, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), but it was also a year of some firsts. We were able to meet virtually via Zoom for the first time – no mean feat when we have members in the UK, Australia, India and USA. We also introduced a ‘Eurovision-style’ scoring system for the shadow shortlist, where each panel member ranked the titles and gave them 10 points, 7, 5, 3, 2 and 1. After adding up the scores, we can now reveal the results:
In 6th place, with 25 points… Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý (tr. Nichola Smalley).
In 5th place, with 31 points… At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop (tr. Anna Moschovakis).
In 4th place, with 37 points… The Employees by Olga Ravn (tr. Martin Aitken).
In 3rd place, with 39 points… When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (tr. Adrian Nathan West).
In 2nd place, with 52 points… In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (tr. Sasha Dugdale).
Which means our shadow winner, with a grand total of 68 points, is…
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (tr. Elisabeth Jaquette)
This is only the second time in shadow panel history that our winner hasn’t appeared on the official shortlist. It’s also another strong showing for Fitzcarraldo Editions, who have published four of our five shadow winners since 2017, and took the top two slots this year.
Congratulations to the shadow winners, and thanks to my fellow shadow panellists: Tony, Stu, Bellezza, Vivek, Frances, Areeb, Barbara and Oisin. It’s been another fun year – I wonder what the official jury will have chosen?
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
After the official International Booker Prize shortlist last month, we on the shadow panel are ready to reveal our shortlist. We’ve scored our reading, crunched the numbers, and this is what rose to the top for us:
For the first time, our group shortlist matches my personal top six – so, as you can imagine, I’m especially happy with this selection. The International Booker winner will be announced on Wednesday 2 June, and we’ll have our shadow winner by then as well.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
This is Mariana Enríquez’ second story collection to appear in English translation by Megan McDowell (though it was her first to be published in the original Spanish). I would have loved Things We Lost in the Fire to be longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (as it was then), so I was pleased to see that this collection had made it.
Enríquez tells tales of urban horror, with vivid unsettling images such as the dead baby that returns as a ghost in ‘Angelita Unearthed’, though not necessarily as the kind of spirit that the protagonist anticipates. Then there’s ‘The Well’, in which a woman tries to excise the fears that have blighted her life by returning to a witch she visited as a child. There’s a real sense of nightmare about it.
My favourite piece in the book is the novella ‘Kids Who Come Back’. This is the story of Mechi, who works at the archive for lost children in Buenos Aires. Mechi’s life (and other people’s) is turned upside down when missing children start to reappear – though all is not as it seems. After reading this, I’m really looking forward to Enríquez’ novel Our Share of Night, which is being published in McDowell’s translation next year.
Published by Granta Books.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
I was looking forward to this, my first time reading Ngũgĩ, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a version of the Gĩkũyũ people’s myth of origin: the story of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi and their ten daughters (the tenth, Warigia, makes them a Perfect Nine).
In Ngũgĩ’s telling (translated from Gĩkũyũ by the author) , 99 suitors arrive seeking the hand of one of the Perfect Nine. Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi set them a quest: to go up the mountain in search of a hair from an ogre’s tongue, which will give Warigia the ability to walk. Not all of the men will return, but the Perfect Nine (minus Warigia) go with them, and are at least as capable, if not more so.
The Perfect Nine is written in verse, with rhythms of oral storytelling, and plenty of wonder and adventure. I enjoyed reading it very much.
Published by Harvill Secker.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
The shortlist for this year’s International Booker Prize was announced on Thursday:
This is one of those occasions where the shortlist comes from a slightly different parallel reading universe as far as I’m concerned. At the time of writing this post, I have read (though not reviewed) all of the shortlisted books except When We Cease to Understand the World. I’ve heard great things about that book and expect to rate it highly… Most of the others would make by own personal shortlist… But I don’t rate The War of the Poor so highly. Just that one book makes such a difference.
Anyway, this is part of what makes reading along with the prize so enjoyable. The shadow panel will be announcing our own shortlist later. In the meantime, I’ll continue to post reviews and read the last couple of books I have left.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
With some books, the voice is key, and here’s one of them. The narrator of Wretchedness is a cellist living in Malmö. As the novel begins, he’s waiting by the canal for a couple of friends and colleagues, a guitarist and composer. He is approached by a homeless man who wants a smoke. As the cellist speaks to this man, he is reminded of his own past, the poverty he escaped. He realises that, if life had turned out differently, he could have been this guy.
The book then switches back and forth between the cellist’s past and present, contrasting the hard realities of his earlier life with his more abstract thoughts on music, in a torrent of language. Here he is, for example, discovering the freeing power of the radio:
…I listened and thought and listened and soon learnt to recognise the sounds I liked, the ones that sounded different to the ones I was used to, but also words and sounds that in different ways related to the life I recognised, the pain and the rage and the shame and the hate and the madness, like when I, at Eleonora’s place, got to hear Godflesh and Slayer for the first time, and at that point, as I listened, it was like my life got better, like it really, properly, got noticeably better just cos some guy had stood there yelling in a studio…
translation from swedish by nichola smalley
The dense, chapter-long paragraphs of Wretchedness suggest that maybe this man can’t outrun his past after all, because it’s so inextricably mixed up with his present thoughts. Whatever the case, this book is a vivid and powerful journey for the reader.
Published by And Other Stories.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
This slim volume (under 100 pages) introduced me to an unfamiliar name from history: Thomas Müntzer, a preacher who became a leading figure in the German Peasants’ War of 1525. He opposed both the Roman Catholic Church and Martin Luther, and he went from questioning the prevailing theology to encouraging more general revolt against the ruling authorities.
There’s a real sense in Vuillard’s prose of dynamic and open-ended societal change. For example, I loved this passage describing the effects of the printing press:
Fifty years earlier, a molten substance had flowed from Mainz over the rest of Europe, flowed between the hills of every town, between the letters of every name, in the gutters, between every twist and turn of thought; and every letter, every fragment of an idea, every punctuation mark had found itself cast in a bit of metal.
Translation from french by mark polizzotti
Vuillard places Müntzer in a line of popular rebels and preachers, including Wat Tyler and Jan Hus. The restlessness of rebellion is reflected in the way Vuillard writes and structures his book (and, of course, Polizzotti’s translation). Ultimately, The War of the Poor may be a little too slight to really shine for me, but it certainly has powerful moments.
Published by Picador.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
I enjoyed Jaap Robben’s earlier novel, You Have Me to Love. Like that book, Summer Brother (translated from Dutch by David Doherty) is narrated by a boy who has to adapt to a new family situation. In this case it’s 13-year-old Brian Chevalier, who lives in a caravan with his divorced father Maurice. Life isn’t easy: Maurice will do what it takes to get by, which leads to frequent absences, a certain reputation, and pressure from the landlords to settle his debts.
Brian has a severely disabled brother, Lucien, who lives in an institution. At the start of the novel, Maurice is asked if he’ll take Lucien home for the summer while the institution is being renovated. He’s not keen at first, but soon changes his mind on learning that he’ll be paid for the trouble.
Brian then has to learn to live with and care for his brother, who’s unable to speak. There’s always a risk that a character like Lucien will exist for the edification of others, rather than being allowed their own dignity. I think Robben largely avoids this, though Summer Brother is definitely Brian’s story rather than Lucien’s.
Something I particularly like is the way that Brian can’t process or articulate the emotional changes he’s going through. We see him become more compassionate towards Lucien as he spends more time with him, and Brian even starts to have a crush on Selma, a girl living at the institution. But Brian doesn’t explain the changes it his feelings, if he even notices them all. In that way, Robben puts Brian in a position analogous to Lucien’s, of not being able to express his innermost thoughts. It’s quite touching to see Brian grow so close to Lucien.
Published by World Editions.
Read my other posts on the 2021 International Booker Prize here.
Last week saw the announcement of the 2021 International Booker Prize longlist, and after a particularly long wait this year, it was both a relief and a pleasure to finally see the list unveiled. It’s important to start off this response to that announcement, then, by acknowledging the hard work of this year’s judges. Thanks to them, we have a manageable overview of the best translated fiction published in the UK over the past year, and we look forward to getting to know more about these writers and books over the coming months.
If we examine the make-up of the list, we see that the geographical and gender split is fairly par for the course. Seven of the featured writers are women, while five of the longlisted authors hail from outside Europe. Many would prefer to see fewer European books chosen, but this ratio is unsurprising when you look at how many of the books published in the UK originally appeared in Europe. It’s perhaps more suprising that only one title from Asia was selected, with nothing from Japan or the South Asia region, but there is a book from Africa on the longlist, which is a fairly rare occurrence for the prize.
In terms of the publishers, the longlist, as seems to be the case most years now, reflects the efforts of a host of wonderful small presses to broaden the UK’s literary horizons. Fitzcarraldo Editions and Pushkin Press lead the way with two inclusions each, and stalwarts of translated fiction prize lists such as And Other Stories, Granta Books, MacLehose Press and Peirene Press also made the cut. It’s particularly pleasing to see newcomers Lolli Editions and World Editions rewarded for their efforts over the past year.
Of course, with a limited number of spots available, it’s inevitable that some publishers will miss out. The big surprise here is the absence of Charco Press, with several potential longlisters going unrewarded. Unfortunately, other independent presses, including Istros Books, Tilted Axis Press, Honford Star and Europa Editions, also failed to make the list. We remain hopeful that future years will see their turn in the spotlight arrive.
Looking at the books selected, one fairly striking feature emerges. The Booker Prizes pride themselves for championing the finest in fiction, yet this year’s panel seems almost to have gone out of its way to question what fiction is. As was the case in 2019, one of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ white-covered titles has made the cut, and several other inclusions appear to be pushing the boundaries of the Booker guidelines. We observe this move with interest, but also with caution, lest the prize begin to drift away from its core premise – fiction.
As a result, perhaps, of this focus, the make-up of the longlist is rather different to what many readers would have expected. When discussing possible longlisters before the announcement, books such as Andrés Neuman’s Fracture, Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults, Jon Fosse’s I is Another and Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering were frequently mentioned, with Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs thought most likely to appear on the list. While we did consider calling in one or more of these books, it was felt that given the judges’ deliberate shift away from the higher-profile works, we would respect their decision and focus instead on their selections. We trust this decision will be justified.
In any case, with the longlist now public, there’s a simple task ahead of us. It’s time to read the world, or at least that part of it the official judges have chosen to explore. We’ll be taking our time, though, so don’t expect the shadow judges to reveal their shortlist when the official panel does; it’s likely that we’ll give ourselves a few extra weeks to ensure we cover as much as possible. And, of course, there’s one more way in which our path may diverge from theirs. While we’re following in the official judges’ footsteps for the first stage of the journey, once we get to crafting a shortlist, we’ll be setting out on our own, regardless of what they may decide. Let’s see whether this year’s voyage of discovery will be smooth sailing or entail some rather bumpy roads. As always, the joy will lie in the journey, not the destination…
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