tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/booker-prize-1686/articlesBooker Prize – The Conversation2024-02-01T19:03:35Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2197052024-02-01T19:03:35Z2024-02-01T19:03:35ZKiley Reid invites us to judge her college girls, as money, status and desire lead them into murky ethical territory<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573657/original/file-20240206-29-56el8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C41%2C3967%2C2978&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Goddard/Bloomsbury</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>At the beginning of <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/come-and-get-it-9781526632555/">Come and Get It</a>, the second novel from the Booker longlisted author of <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/such-a-fun-age-9781526612151/">Such a Fun Age</a>, college student Tyler presses $20 on Millie, her resident assistant. Millie, whose job it is to look after the students in the dorm, has helped Tyler sort out an awkward interpersonal situation. </p>
<p>Tyler’s roommate, Kennedy, has filled her side of their dorm room with an immense amount of stuff. Tyler doesn’t know how to talk to her about it, so Millie deftly assists with a roommate switch.</p>
<p>Millie doesn’t exactly accept the money. Indeed, she tries to refuse it several times. But it ends up in her possession anyway. This becomes, in many ways, the beginning of an internal schism – between who she thinks she is and how she is read by the people around her. When taking this $20 bill comes back to haunt her, this schism will become eminently clear.</p>
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<p><em>Review: Come and Get It – Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury)</em></p>
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<p>On the surface, Come and Get It is a book about money. It has three perspective characters, each with a different, multilayered relationship to money. </p>
<p>Millie, the resident assistant who accepted the fateful $20, is one of the few Black students in her dorm at the University of Arkansas. She’s working as hard as possible (and at as many jobs as possible) to achieve her goal of home ownership, “after becoming mildly addicted to TV shows featuring tiny houses and youngish owners”.</p>
<p>Kennedy is one of Millie’s residents, a perpetually lonely undergraduate who uses trips to Target – a place which feels like “home” to her – as a way of coping with the lack of connection with her peers (hence the overstuffed dorm room). </p>
<p>Agatha is a visiting professor to the university who becomes fascinated with students’ relationships to money while conducting a research focus group about weddings with students in Millie’s dorm. She starts paying Millie – meaningfully, in $20 bills – to listen in to the dorm residents’ talk every Thursday night, which becomes the basis of several pieces she publishes (without telling Millie or any of the students she’s eavesdropping on) in Teen Vogue.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C17%2C3955%2C3395&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Smiling Black woman in profile with black turtleneck and ponytail" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C17%2C3955%2C3395&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=656&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=656&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=656&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">On the surface, Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It is a book about money.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Goddard/Bloomsbury</span></span>
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<h2>Questions of identity</h2>
<p>The Teen Vogue pieces are a neat illustration of some of the broader questions the book grapples with – questions about money, yes, but also questions about identity. </p>
<p>Agatha renders these pieces as if they were interviews; however, they are in fact caricatures, cobbled together from out-of-context, cherry-picked quotes from both the initial focus group Agatha conducted and from things she overheard while eavesdropping from Millie’s room. </p>
<p>Agatha is aware what she’s doing is wrong: </p>
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<p>It did feel unfair to paint the young women with a two-dimensional sheen [… She] knew firsthand that Tyler, Casey, and Jenna were not composed solely of pull quotes.</p>
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<p>She even vaguely intends to correct it: “the <em>book</em> book, that was where she would right her current wrongs. That was where she’d interview college women the right way, under the umbrella of a signed release.”</p>
<p>But as the interviews become more and more popular, the lure of their success – and the accompanying social media followers and royalties bump for her older books – proves too great, and she starts to push the ethical boundaries even further.</p>
<p>Yet despite her actions, Agatha’s image of herself does not change. Even when she starts sleeping with Millie – an undergraduate student 14 years younger than her – she continues to justify it to herself, so as to maintain her self-image as an ethical scholar. </p>
<p>Yes, she’s sleeping with <em>a</em> student, but not <em>her</em> student. Yes, Millie is younger than her, but she’s not <em>that</em> young. Yes, there’s a power differential, but honestly, it’s not as bad as you think (which, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/kiley-reid-come-and-get-it-review-b2481591.html">as another reviewer has aptly noted</a>, is a common preoccupation of professors sleeping with students in campus novels, though those professors are usually men). </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/beyond-oxbridge-and-yale-popular-stories-bring-universities-to-life-we-need-more-of-them-in-australia-168943">Beyond Oxbridge and Yale: popular stories bring universities to life — we need more of them in Australia</a>
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<h2>Judging the characters</h2>
<p>“Show, don’t tell” is an incredibly common piece of storytelling advice (a blunt instrument, yes, but certainly one I’ve used in my creative writing classroom and will probably use again). Come and Get It digs into the gap between the two concepts. The novel is fascinated by versions of the self – the narrative of the self we tell to ourselves, versus the version of ourselves others read from what we show them through our actions.</p>
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<p>It would be tempting to read this slippage as an invitation to pass judgement on the characters. Indeed, at many points, it is impossible not to – we are, after all, readers, and these characters are there to be read. </p>
<p>For example, I, a female academic of approximately Agatha’s age who uses many similar research methods, had some extremely strong opinions about her ethics (and lack thereof). When she is confronted about her unethical behaviour towards the end of the book, I found it immensely satisfying. </p>
<p>Likewise, it is very difficult not to feel sympathy for Millie – to believe in the version of herself she has in her mind, rather than the image a dispassionate list of her actions would create. This is particularly true when the whiteness of the people around her is cast in sharp relief: there are facets to her identity that her white friends, however well-meaning, simply cannot parse.</p>
<p>And there is perhaps no greater invitation for the reader to pass judgement than with Kennedy. For the first half of the book, she is easily the least interesting of the three perspective characters – a lonely college student worried about making friends, unsure how to reach out to the three students Agatha is busy turning into caricatures in Teen Vogue.</p>
<p>At about the midpoint, though, the horrifying reason Kennedy transferred from her old university is made clear. Despite Kennedy’s mother emphatically telling her that she is “not a bad person”, we as readers are inevitably provoked to form our own opinion.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/girlhood-misery-bullying-and-beauty-combine-for-laura-elizabeth-woolletts-unlikeable-west-coast-girls-211427">Girlhood misery, bullying and beauty combine for Laura Elizabeth Woollett's 'unlikeable' west-coast girls</a>
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<h2>People are complicated</h2>
<p>But the point here is not deciding whether characters are good or bad, moral or immoral, their actions justified or unjustified. The point is – perversely – a simple one: <em>it’s complicated</em>.</p>
<p>One of the things Agatha notes about Millie is that she is gifted at impressions. For instance, when Agatha asks her what the students she’s eavesdropping on mean when they talk about “believers”, Millie does the following impression of “a cool, nature-y Christian person who is … probably white”:</p>
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<p>So, Agatha. Listen. Can I talk to you for a second? God’s really putting Hannah on my heart this week … The other day? […] And keep this between you and me – but the other day she did blah blah blah? And yeah, it just wasn’t the sweet Hannah that we know. And I need to figure out a way to hold her accountable while I do my best to shower her with grace. But I also want to start asking important questions, like, is this a godly friendship? Is she going through a rough season? And maybe she is! And that’s okay. But if that’s the case, is my birthday weekend at Hilton Head the best place for her to do that?</p>
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<p>Millie’s ability to do comedic impersonations is one of the things Agatha finds most appealing about her – perhaps unsurprising, given she’s essentially in the business of comedic impersonations herself, with her Teen Vogue pieces. </p>
<p>But it’s also symptomatic of the broader theme running through the book: the tension between who people are (complex, three-dimensional) and who we interpret them to be (frequently stereotypes or caricatures, because we lack key pieces of context). </p>
<p>This is a book liberally peppered with similes and comparisons. “She looked like the kind of person who slept eight hours every night”, “she looked like any of the redheaded celebrities when their names were put into search engines with <em>grocery store</em> or <em>no makeup</em>”, “he had the complexion of a person who loves ‘being out on the lake’”. These approximations are a sentence-level demonstration of the impossibility of capturing the complexity of a whole human being. </p>
<p>Tellingly, the first time Agatha meets Millie, she interprets her as a caricature of her job: “she looked like an adult poking fun at campus life, someone dressing like an RA for Halloween”.</p>
<h2>Life under capitalism</h2>
<p>There is no denying Come and Get It is a book about money. The crisply folded $20 bill is hardly the only financial motif. However, in many ways, the characters’ relationships to money are some of their most legible attributes. </p>
<p>Millie is painstakingly saving it, in order to buy a house. Kennedy spends it in order to make herself feel better. Agatha is financially secure, but not so secure she cannot be capable of irritation at her ex-partner’s financial cavalierness, and profoundly tempted by the money Teen Vogue offers her.</p>
<p>This is interesting, but perhaps not particularly revelatory, especially when it comes to the murky ethical territory money leads the characters into. Life under capitalism is complicated. We know this.</p>
<p>The ways this book considers the gulf between the version of ourselves in our own minds and the one read by other people, though, are fascinating – making it a worthy follow-up to Such a Fun Age. </p>
<p>People are fundamentally, and perhaps ungraspably, complicated – something Reid does a substantially better job of capturing in this book than Agatha does in her Teen Vogue pieces.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219705/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jodi McAlister does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Kiley Reid’s follow-up to her Booker longlisted debut is a novel about money. But it’s most interesting when it explores the gap between our imagined selves and what our actions reveal.Jodi McAlister, Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2192372023-12-25T08:58:53Z2023-12-25T08:58:53Z4 must-read books from east Africa: from Tanzanian masters to Ugandan queens<p>East African literature continues to grow and reshape itself in exciting new ways. The world really did take notice of the region when Tanzanian-British author Abdulrazak Gurnah won the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/gurnah/facts/">Nobel Prize</a> for Literature in 2021. Interest in Gurnah’s work continued last year when he made a homecoming to east Africa. </p>
<p>But it is in Tanzania that Gurnah made a proper homecoming in 2023 – through the first ever Kiswahili translation of <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review-of-earthly-delights-paradise-abdulrazak-gurnah-hamish-hamilton-14-99-1428925.html">Paradise</a>, now out as <a href="https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/peponi">Peponi</a>.</p>
<p>I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a research focus that cuts across journalism, creative writing, African literature and postcolonial studies. I’m also a big reader of books from the region. My highlights include a range from the masterful Gurnah to stunning newcomers, a bold biography to a pacy memoir.</p>
<h2>1. Abdulrazak Gurnah in Kiswahili</h2>
<p>Now aged 74, Gurnah has recently headlined a <a href="https://www.macondolitfest.org/abdulrazak-gurnah">literary festival</a> in Kenya which seeks to foster conversations between and among Anglophone (English-speaking) and Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) Africa. Just the other day in Uganda, his life and work was celebrated by the creative collective <a href="https://femrite.org/2023/11/18/femrite-pawa-and-kyambogo-university-to-host-an-international-conference-in-honour-of-the-life-works-of-nobel-prize-laureate-abdurazak-gurnah/">Femrite</a>.</p>
<p>But it is in Tanzania that Gurnah made a proper splash through the first ever Swahili translation of his Booker Prize-nominated historical fiction, Paradise, now out as <a href="https://mkukinanyota.com/product/peponi/">Peponi</a>. </p>
<p>Indeed, Gurnah’s literary interests have always hovered around east Africa, from his seminal <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/Memory_of_Departure/On1SEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Memory+of+Departure&printsec=frontcover">Memory of Departure</a>, which chronicles the sojourns of a young immigrant in search of education abroad. Haunted by the life left behind, and roiled by the uncertainties of the new lands, he seeks meaning to his life.</p>
<p>This echoes the author’s own pursuit, after his dislocation from Zanzibar. In his many interviews, Gurnah has maintained that immigrants do not arrive on European shores, or any others, <a href="https://newafricanmagazine.com/27089/">empty handed</a>: they have their unique tales and histories and ways of seeing the world that should enrich their adopted lands.</p>
<p>But it is Paradise, first published in 1994, that propelled Gurnah to international fame, following its nomination for the Booker Prize in the same year. A coming-of-age tale of Yusuf, a lad who is pawned to a merchant to offset his father’s debt, it’s a story that’s at once heart-breaking and spellbinding.</p>
<p>Some critics read the novel as a retake of the Biblical saga of Joseph (Yusuf in Swahili) who is sold into captivity by his envious siblings, while others read it as a parody of Polish-British novelist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Conrad">Joseph Conrad</a>’s Heart of Darkness. Whatever the case, Swahili readers who have not encountered the text in other languages are in for a great treat, and Peponi is a good place to start in their exploration of Gurnah’s work.</p>
<h2>2. Kenya’s rising star</h2>
<p>In Kenya, it was the emergence of a new author, <a href="https://www.theafricareport.com/327239/nairobi-takes-centre-role-in-linda-musitas-stories/">Linda Musita</a>, that caused excitement.</p>
<p>Her debut book of short stories called <a href="https://downriverroad.org/2023/02/12/mtama-road-stories-linda-musita/">Mtama Road</a> has been <a href="https://www.theafricareport.com/327239/nairobi-takes-centre-role-in-linda-musitas-stories/">well received</a> locally. </p>
<p>The seven short stories (although perhaps short-shorts is more appropriate – the book comes in at under 100 pages) are all set on one road in Nairobi’s Parklands.</p>
<p>The protagonists of Musita’s stories all find themselves having to navigate different elements of adulting.</p>
<h2>3. Rebirth of the biography</h2>
<p>After nearly 30 years of obscurity, the Kenyan biography appeared to enjoy a rebirth this year, with the publication of <a href="https://msomi.africa/en/home/4320-for-the-record-the-inside-story-of-power-politics-lawmaking-leadership-in-kenya-aden-duale.html">For The Record</a>: The Inside Story of Power, Politics, Lawmaking & Leadership in Kenya, ghostwritten for Kenya’s defence minister, Aden Duale.</p>
<p>A foreword is authored by the Kenyan president, William Ruto, and it prologues the crux of the story: a peep into the machinations that define Kenyan politics, with a particularly penetrating gaze into the fallout between former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta and his successor.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the book found immediate traction with readers soon after its release in the middle of 2023, following its serialisation in the local press, precipitating five reprints in six months.</p>
<p>Still, the Kenyan biography represents a literary oddity: it’s often staid and formulaic, parroting a predictable trajectory to explain successes, never failures, of politicians and technocrats, as they look back on their lives.</p>
<p>In Duale’s For The Record, we come close to approximating the truth of his political motivations and his quest for power, even though we cannot infer what he intends to do with the power, now that he’s among the most powerful men in the land.</p>
<p>The sprightly diction deployed in the narrative could help buffer readers from the obvious flaws in a story that’s peppered as a rags-to-riches fable, even though his trading parents were people of reasonable means, within their context.</p>
<h2>4. Uganda’s action-packed memoir</h2>
<p>If the new memoir by the Buganda queen is anything to go by, Uganda took literary candour a notch higher in 2023. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=adE1elPgR98">The Nnnabagereka</a>, Queen Sylvia Nagginda Luswata, the journalist-turned-monarch, recalls her eventful journey from New York, where she lived through most of her childhood, to her unconventional dating of <a href="https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/magazines/life/kabaka-30-years-of-roses-and-thorns-4320302">Prince Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II</a> of Uganda. The tale includes a proposal via email.</p>
<p>“Dear Sylvia, I think I am ready if you are,” Mutebi is reported to have written to his future wife. Another elliptical line in the memoir records another milestone, thus: “On December 6, 2010, I was blessed with two more girls Jade Nakato and Jasmine Babirye born in Kampala… They’re two amazing kids.”</p>
<p>The phraseology does not indicate if they belong to the Kabaka (or king). A statement from the Buganda king’s office clarified the twins did not receive the special drum sounded to herald the Kabaka’s biological children, which fanned online speculation about their paternity. The royal family is blended as the Kabaka has three other children from three different women.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219237/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Kimani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Swahili readers who have not encountered Abdulrazak Gurnah’s work in other languages are in for a great treat.Peter Kimani, Professor of Practice, Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications (GSMC)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2186622023-11-27T16:58:51Z2023-11-27T16:58:51ZProphet Song by Paul Lynch: Booker prize-winning novel is a distinctly Irish tale of civic and ideological collapse<p>The philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannah-Arendt">Hannah Arendt’s</a> much-quoted description of the “banality of evil” could be applied to the disquieting story told in <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Prophet-Song/Paul-Lynch/9780861545902">Prophet Song by Paul Lynch</a>. The Booker prize-winning novel is a perfect study of the banality of totalitarianism. </p>
<p>It’s a rigorous imagining of how a society can be gripped by the slow-building mechanisms of an authoritarian regime – the arrests, conspiracies and disappearances – yet continue its mundane daily rituals of creche drop offs and bin collections. </p>
<p>In this fable of a Dublin family whose life is ruptured by the imposition of a vicious new state order and its brutal secret police, the slide from ordinary to extraordinary is captured in the smallest domestic details. A child wetting its bed in a bad dream becomes a portent of disorder, of “the world slewing into a dark and foreign sea”.</p>
<p>Lynch creates in the reader what his protagonist Eilish senses as the constant “night-haunted feeling” of her home city. His skill with finding omens in random images – “a lone magpie tricked into a tree” – is matched by his ability to capture the small visual tics of a disordered reality, like the graffiti that appears overnight, misspelled as “TRAITER”, on the side of the family car. </p>
<p>The atmosphere is unremittingly chilling, the winter light “a November smear” on the window. Even the shape of the words on the page – structured in long, paragraph-less sections – creates a kind of oppressive, monotonous tension.</p>
<h2>Dystopian Dublin</h2>
<p>What makes this novel so vivid for Irish readers is the transformation of the very recognisable urban landscape of Dublin into a bureaucratic, militarised dystopia. Eilish walks through the reassuring greenways of Phoenix Park and there are references to Kildare Street, Kevin Street and Stephen’s Green. But then in an almost imperceptible shift, the familiar Dublin map slips into an altered, terrible version of itself. </p>
<p>A sniper is posted on the tower block at Dolphin’s Barn. Helicopters swam over Kilmainham, “a plague of insects, glutted and dark”. The city is rendered uncanny, changed utterly once again.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-lynch-wins-booker-prize-2023-why-were-in-a-golden-age-of-irish-writing-217740">Paul Lynch wins Booker prize 2023: why we're in a 'golden age' of Irish writing</a>
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<p>For some readers, these visions may hint at a troubled Irish past as much as a dystopian future. The imagining of Dublin refugees escaping to freedom north across the border replays, in ironic reversal, a history of northern Catholics fleeing south in the 1970s. Many elements that feature in Lynch’s construction of an authoritarian repertoire (from internment to conspiracy, to the enforcement of emergency powers) will echo, for some, the conditions imposed during the Troubles. </p>
<p>Sadly too, in the wake of last week’s riots in Dublin, the novel confirms unsettling truths about the nature of right-wing terror and the speed with which liberty and democracy can be torched.</p>
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<h2>Irish speculative fiction</h2>
<p>Comparisons will be drawn between Prophet Song and other dystopian fables, such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nineteen-Eighty-four">Nineteen Eighty-four</a> by George Orwell or <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Handmaids-Tale-by-Atwood">The Handmaid’s Tale</a> by Margaret Atwood. But it also joins a distinct Irish lineage of speculative fiction. </p>
<p>Lynch is not the first Irish novelist to have translated his own country into the nightmarish shapes of a futurist dystopia. Back in 1990, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Bray_House/mWshAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=The+Bray+House%C2%A0%C3%89il%C3%ADs+n%C3%AD+Dhuibhne&dq=The+Bray+House%C2%A0%C3%89il%C3%ADs+n%C3%AD+Dhuibhne&printsec=frontcover">The Bray House</a> by Éilís ní Dhuibhne depicted Ireland in post-nuclear catastrophe, an anti-Eden buried beneath permanently damaged soil and rock. </p>
<p>More recently the award-winning 2011 novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/14/city-bohane-kevin-barry-review">City of Bohane</a> by Kevin Barry presented a mid-21st century outpost on the west coast of Ireland blasted by ecological calamity and fast disintegrating into subhuman squalor and aggression.</p>
<p>The distinction of Prophet Song is the directness of its fundamental ethical question: what would you do if this happened here? It crafts an Irish tale of civic and ideological collapse that asks us to think about the many similar crises happening right now, across an unstable world. </p>
<p>Lynch’s novel plays on the thin boundary between counterfactual and bitter fact – it’s an uncanny allegory for what is already happening, in too many elsewheres.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eve Patten does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The novel imagines how a society can be gripped by a slow-building authoritarian regime yet continue its mundane daily rituals.Eve Patten, Professor of English, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2119402023-11-27T13:48:37Z2023-11-27T13:48:37ZBooker prize: rediscovering the first female winner, the often-forgotten Bernice Rubens<p>One of the most captivating and enigmatic novelists of the 20th century, Bernice Rubens remains largely unknown despite her remarkable literary achievements. She was the <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-elected-member">second recipient</a> of the Booker prize in 1970 for her novel <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Elected_Member/V1vODwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">The Elected Member</a> and its first female winner. </p>
<p>She remains the only Welsh winner in the history of the prize – a fact that perhaps speaks volumes for the way Welsh writing in the English language is perceived and recognised outside of Wales. </p>
<p>Rubens was born in the working class area of Adamsdown in Cardiff in 1923, to Polish and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. She attended the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff (now Cardiff University), where she received a BA in English in 1947. Having taught English and worked on documentary films early on in her career, she only started writing at the age of 30. </p>
<p>Rubens went on to publish more than 20 novels and one work of non-fiction before her death in 2004, but still <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/oct/14/guardianobituaries.books">referred</a> to her own writing as merely “better than most, not as good as some”. </p>
<p>This wry view underplays just how versatile her style and subject matter was, however. And while Rubens was well known and applauded during her lifetime, her work, like so many other Welsh women, is often unknown outside of Welsh university circles, some English literature degrees and more adventurous book clubs. </p>
<p>Some of this relates, perhaps, to the fact that she never really fitted into the Cardiff literary scene and was often overshadowed by some of her contemporaries, especially Welsh poet, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dannie-abse">Dannie Abse</a>. </p>
<p>But as a working class Welsh-Jewish writer, her ability to unflinchingly explore the traumas and legacies of her own cultural heritage makes her writing especially memorable and haunting. </p>
<h2>Cultural background</h2>
<p>In The Elected Member, Rubens looks at how the façade of a respectable Jewish family crumbles when their beloved son plunges into the depths of drug addiction.</p>
<p>Her 1983 novel, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Brothers/eM_fD3_TOuAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Brothers+Bernice+Rubens&dq=Brothers+Bernice+Rubens&printsec=frontcover">Brothers</a>, explores the experiences of four generations of a family as they face the Tsarist army in Russia in the 1830s, the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20101343">1871 Odessa pogrom</a> in Ukraine, emigration (to both Wales and Germany) and concentration camps. </p>
<p>The novel exemplifies the worst of human behaviour in relation to marginalised and persecuted people. But it also underlines the need for human connection and, ultimately, hope. No one who reads Brothers could walk away from the experience unchanged. </p>
<p>From a Welsh perspective, her 1975 novel, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/I_Sent_a_Letter_to_My_Love/tBP9DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=I+Sent+A+Letter+to+My+Love+Bernice+Rubens&printsec=frontcover">I Sent A Letter to My Love</a>, is one of Rubens’ most disturbing and strangely poignant works. Set in the “one-eyed” seaside town of Porthcawl, the novel follows the struggles of unmarried, middle-aged Amy and her disabled brother, Stan, and their close friend, Gwyneth, as they live out their tedious existences. </p>
<p>Much of the novel’s action revolves around the drama that ensues from Amy placing an advert in the personal column of the local newspaper under the pseudonym “Blodwyn Pugh”. Instead of receiving an overwhelming postbag of suitors, Amy receives a single reply –- from her brother, Stan.</p>
<p>Their letter writing becomes increasingly sexual, until Stan starts to develop feelings for Gwyneth. This willingness to confront the quasi-incestuous nature of the siblings’ relationship (albeit unknowing, at least on Stan’s side), is one of the reasons Rubens’ work is so discomfiting. It refuses to be easily labelled or contained in a genre or style. </p>
<p>The novel was later made into a French film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082182/">Chère Inconnue</a>, in 1982, starring Simone Signoret and Jean Rochefort, which also plays on the novel’s disturbing central plot. </p>
<h2>Defying genre</h2>
<p>Overall, Rubens’ fictions are hybrid and sit between different cultural identities. They are impossible to neatly pigeonhole. Indeed, critics like <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/rubens-bernice-ruth">Hana Sambrook</a> have referred to the “maddening” refusal of her writing to fit neatly into a single category. </p>
<p>However, this refusal to fit is exactly why Rubens is so important. Why should she fit neatly into any category? Why do we put so much value on genre and style being so precisely categorised? </p>
<p>Readers today will find much of Rubens’ back catalogue available second hand. But only a single novel, I Sent A Letter to My Love, has been incorporated into the <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales">Library of Wales</a> series from publisher Parthian Books, which aims to republish significant works of classic Welsh literature in English.</p>
<p>Rubens sits alongside a small handful of other women writers in the collection, including <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/in-and-out-of-the-goldfish">Rachel Trezise</a>, <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/rhapsody">Dorothy Edwards</a>, <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/the-battle-to-the-weak">Hilda Vaughan</a> and <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/turf-or-stone">Margiad Evans</a>. </p>
<p>Perhaps the way we immortalise our own cultural history in Wales is part of the reason why working-class women writers such as Rubens are yet to reach a wider audience, beyond the popularity of their day. </p>
<p>However, even more importantly in my view, it lies with the failure of prominent prizes to fully recognise Welsh women’s contribution to literary history. Sadly, it’s a failure that seems unlikely to be overturned any time soon.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211940/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Deininger is a member of the Green Party. </span></em></p>Bernice Rubens won the 1970 Booker prize for her novel, The Elected Member, and is the only Welsh person to have ever won the prize.Michelle Deininger, Senior Co-ordinating Lecturer in Humanities, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2177402023-11-23T12:55:14Z2023-11-23T12:55:14ZPaul Lynch wins Booker prize 2023: why we’re in a ‘golden age’ of Irish writing<p>Irish author Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker prize for dystopian novel <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-prophet-song-by-paul-lynch">Prophet Song</a>. But he wasn’t the only writer from Ireland nominated. <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/paul-murray">Paul Murray</a> was also the shortlist and, on the long list of 13 novels, Elaine Feeney’s <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/448213/how-to-build-a-boat-by-feeney-elaine/9781787303454">How to Build a Boat</a> and Sebastian Barry’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/27/old-gods-time-book-review-sebastian-barry">Old God’s Time</a> made the cut. </p>
<p>While Barry and Murray have previously been listed for the Booker prize, Lynch and Feeney are new additions to the catalogue of Irish Booker prize nominees which includes <a href="https://www.faber.co.uk/author/claire-keegan/">Claire Keegan</a>, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/168034/anne-enright">Anne Enright</a> and <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Colm-Toibin/1760537">Colm Tóibín</a>. </p>
<p>Both Murray and Lynch are part of what Barry, as <a href="https://www.artscouncil.ie/laureate/">Irish Laureate for Fiction</a>, calls a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/08/sebastian-barry-named-irish-fiction-laureate-golden-age#:%7E:text=Sebastian%20Barry-,Sebastian%20Barry%20named%20Irish%20fiction%20laureate%2C%20hailing,golden%20age%20of%20Irish%20prose'&text=The%20award%2Dwinning%20author%20Sebastian,new%20laureate%20for%20Irish%20fiction.">golden age</a>” of Irish writing.</p>
<p>Irish writers have benefited from structural factors in recent years, including: a strong Arts Council, legislation which since 1969 has exempted artists from income tax, an artist’s three-year basic wage <a href="https://news.artnet.com/news/ireland-artists-basic-income-results-2278099">pilot</a> and the sheer proliferation of excellent <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-41091904.html">literary journals</a> at the moment. </p>
<p>Irish writers have been over-represented on other prize lists, too, with three Irish writers winning the <a href="https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Sunday-Times-Audible-Short-Story-Award-2021-Podcast/B098RCB6L4">Sunday Times Audible short story award</a> in the last few years.</p>
<p>However, ask them in person and Irish writers are more likely to highlight impediments to producing work. The housing crisis has been taken up by former Booker prize long-listee <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/2023/03/18/sally-rooney-renters-are-being-exploited-and-evictions-must-be-stopped/">Sally Rooney</a>, for example. The <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/video/video/2022/06/14/dublin-has-become-blander-artists-protest-studio-closures/">closure</a> of arts spaces in Dublin given over to short-time lets is also a common cause for concern.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-win-the-booker-prize-is-there-a-formula-for-the-finest-in-fiction-191528">How to win the Booker prize: is there a formula for ‘the finest in fiction’?</a>
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<h2>The nominated novels</h2>
<p>Murray’s The Bee Sting is a tragicomedy of epic proportions. Clocking in at 656 pages, it follows the Barneses – mother, father, 17-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son – as the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis places unbearable strain on an already tense family dynamic. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Murray talks about his Booker-nominated novel.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Lynch’s slimmer offering, Prophet Song, takes place in a dystopian Ireland hurtling towards authoritarianism. It is both recognisable and unknown – Ireland, but “under some foreign sky”. Its main character is a stalwart of Irish literature: a mother and wife named Eilish. Her attempts to protect her family in a world not of her making is resonant back through the canon, while taking on a new and eerie prescience in Lynch’s portrait of an Irish police state.</p>
<p>The Bee Sting and Prophet Song deal with one of the abiding themes of Irish literature – the trickiness of memory, both personal and collective. This literary preoccupation with the past has sometimes come under fire.</p>
<p>In 2001, Irish Times journalist <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/writing-the-boom-1.273557">Fintan O’Toole</a> alleged that Irish writers were struggling to analyse the times in which they were living, instead reverting to old tropes and themes and depicting an Ireland that “most competent writers can do […] with their eyes closed”.</p>
<p>Both Murray and Lynch seem to speak directly to O’Toole’s concern. In one instance in Prophet Song, Eilish muses: “All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.” </p>
<p>Indeed, both novels deal with wake-up calls. Murray revisits the financial crash – a moment in recent Irish history whose trauma remains, it could be argued, partially suppressed. Meanwhile Lynch takes aim at Irish political “<a href="https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/research/spotlight-research/are-far-right-threat-irish-democracy">stability</a>” and complacency.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Lynch talks about his Booker-nominated novel.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In Murray’s depictions of personal, buried histories and in Lynch’s concern with the vulnerability of consensus and humanity, these novels reflect how we can simultaneously know so much and so little of the people and places closest to us. </p>
<p>Both writers masterfully reveal the strangeness of familiarity, and the familiarity of strangeness. They both question the extent to which we know the depths of our own capabilities, for good and for bad, and sketch the intersection of existential crises with normal, individual lives.</p>
<p>Writing in The Stinging Fly magazine, <a href="https://stingingfly.org/review/the-bee-sting/">Stephen Cox</a> wryly notes that Murray’s back catalogue could be summarised as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/20/we-dont-know-ourselves-by-fintan-otoole-review-sweeping-account-of-irelands-evolutions">We Don’t Know Ourselves</a>” à la Fintan O’Toole’s 2021 memoir of the same title. </p>
<p>It has historically been the job of Irish writers to reflect the worst elements of their society back at itself. In Prophet Song and The Bee Sting, Lynch and Murray are continuing this tradition. Ireland should pay attention.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to reflect the outcome of the Booker prize.</em></p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Orlaith Darling receives funding from the Irish Research Council.</span></em></p>Irish writers have benefited from structural factors in recent years. However, ask them in person and Irish writers are more likely to highlight impediments to producing work.Orlaith Darling, PhD Candidate, Contemporary English Literature and Critical Theory, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2121932023-09-21T03:38:42Z2023-09-21T03:38:42ZAnne Enright’s bold new novel The Wren, The Wren is the work of a writer at the height of her power<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548242/original/file-20230914-23-b7q2cq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C6%2C4510%2C3009&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">bieszczady_wildlife/shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In her essay <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63022">Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown</a>, published in 1924, Virginia Woolf famously proposed that the novel’s primary function is the expression of character. She presented the maxim: “it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving.” </p>
<p>But in her discussion of what constitutes “real character”, she went on to ask a strikingly contemporary question: “what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?” </p>
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<p><em>Review: The Wren, The Wren – Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)</em></p>
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<p>The question of how different characters judge, navigate and offset one another’s shared reality is at the centre of Anne Enright’s eighth novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-wren-the-wren-9781787334618">The Wren, The Wren</a>. This technically experimental work trails a relationship between a young and spirited 20-something Trinity College student named Nell and her soberingly pragmatic mother Carmel. </p>
<p>Both women’s sense of self and perception of reality are irrevocably altered by two key events that ripple through the novel. </p>
<p>The first is Nell’s desperate bid for independence. In the opening pages, she has moved to a “little bubble of sorrow” in the Dublin suburb of Ballybough. This dreaded but necessary ascension to adulthood breaks her mother’s heart and her own. </p>
<p>Carmel’s sudden and reluctant empty-nester freedom prompts her to nostalgically revisit a series of painful memories from early adolescence and her years of single motherhood. </p>
<p>As with Enright’s earlier novels and her nonfiction work <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/making-babies-9781409017288">Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood</a> (2004), The Wren, The Wren interrogates the politics of care and motherhood. It also offers an incisive meditation on the nature of filial relationships. And like her Man Booker Prize winner <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-gathering-9780099501633">The Gathering</a> (2007), it offers little consolation. </p>
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<p>The second event that towers over the narrative is inflicted by the tweed-wearing, self-interested, philandering Irish poet Phil McDaragh. A quintessential Art Monster, Phil is Carmel’s father and Nell’s grandfather. Early in the novel, Carmel recounts how “daddo” left her and her mother, who was suffering from breast cancer, lured away by the prospect of literary stardom in America and a young, ripe, wealthy “American Wife”. </p>
<p>It was not only that he left when her mother was recovering from her mastectomy, Carmel recalls, “it was the way he came back and ransacked the place”. In a harrowing scene, the blindly self-righteous Phil harangues his bed-ridden wife and recently abandoned children about the whereabouts of his watch. </p>
<p>Much of the novel’s power is accrued in Enright’s crisp and restrained handling of its heavier moments. The concision of her prose imbues these scenes with a ruthless severity that raises questions about what we should do with the art of monstrous men.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-cancellation-or-conflicted-joy-grappling-with-the-work-of-our-art-monsters-202748">Friday essay: cancellation or conflicted joy – grappling with the work of our 'art monsters'</a>
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<h2>Abandonment</h2>
<p>Phil’s abandonment of the family home alters Carmel’s direction in life. The novel charts the emotional aftershocks of his absence. As with the rest of Enright’s oeuvre, The Wren, The Wren offers an acute exploration of the relational complexities of family dysfunction and the way sinister acts can have ongoing legacies. We see this in Enright’s depiction of Carmel’s anguish as something inherited by Nell. </p>
<p>In the wake of her father’s departure, Carmel’s protective shell hardens. She keeps a safe emotional distance between herself and everyone else, moving through the world like a survivor, relying on an unhealthy amount of mistrust and suspicion. She raises Nell alone. She takes boxing classes. She doesn’t do reassurance. </p>
<p>When Carmel entertains the idea of a new romantic partner, Ronan, she discards him the minute he becomes emotionally demanding. As Nell reflects, her mother is the kind of person who is “strongly of the opinion that, if you don’t think about yourself then you won’t have any problems”. </p>
<p>Nell is the one exception to Carmel’s careful avoidance of emotional vulnerability. Motherhood is a balm for Carmel, a safe emotional portal back to reality. When she gives birth to Nell, she finds comfort in knowing “this baby was hers, and hers alone”. When Carmel holds her daughter, the frozen sea within is axed. She senses that “the baby knew how vast her mother’s loneliness had been”. </p>
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<p>In one of the many parallels that emerge throughout the novel, Nell is trying to transcend the same emotional gulf we see modelled by Carmel. She is a character of the contemporary moment: bold, sexually adventurous and digitally savvy. She is not so much “worried about the end of the world”, but she is concerned about small things like the extinction of the Irish nightjar and the “unbearable fate of the bees”. Her voice has a wry and precocious tone reminiscent of Ali Smith’s adolescent narrator George in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/how-to-be-both-9780141025209">How to be both</a> (2014). </p>
<p>Nell is addicted to the internet in a way that functions as a proxy for a connection to the real world. She is surrounded by college friends disappearing into Instagram. She works for a travel blog, writing about places she hasn’t been to. She also writes drunken poetry on paper because she thinks this makes them real poems. </p>
<p>As Nell struggles with her new distance from Carmel and her lifetime in the shadow of her celebrity-poet grandfather, she buries herself in her relationship with Felim, a muscly Louth-born Dublin resident. She meets him one night in a club, where he is showing off his ability to lift people by the head: the first red flag missed. Their romance starts off on a comically bland note: him thumbing car magazines at the newsagent on the quays; her thinking, “<em>Car Magazines. Really?</em>” </p>
<p>In the beginning, it is the kind of intimate relationship you would expect between the young and inexperienced, where everything is new and mistakes are understandably made. But things deteriorate quickly. Esoteric pillow talk and surprise choking escalate to more elaborate forms of sexual violence that leave Nell wondering how it became “hard to tell the difference between sex and getting hurt in other ways”. </p>
<p>As the relationship disintegrates, Nell finds herself caught between reality and delusion about the men in her world. She thinks she is in love with Felim, despite knowing on at least a subconscious level that he is toxic. At one point, she reflects that “[w]aiting for this man was better than being with him”, as the act of waiting meant that “longing kept eating itself and giving birth to more longing.” </p>
<p>In the same way, watching her late grandfather’s interviews on YouTube and reading his poetry magnifies the strange intensity of her fantasy of love for this unavailable male figure. She tucks herself into bed at night with his poems to “curl up with Phil and sweeten the hurt”.</p>
<p>Enright cleverly shows how the subconscious and conscious mind compete in Nell’s narration. The deeply suppressed voice of reason occasionally surfaces in italicised font. For example, Nell has a moment of striking clarity when she is thinking about Felim: “<em>if I believed all this was working, would it work?</em>” </p>
<p>As parallels emerge between the delusional love Nell projects onto Felim and Phil, Carmel is struggling with a similar conflict between perception and reality. Throughout the novel, she is trying to reconcile the public image of her late father as a sensitive and revered poet with the private reality of the man he was. </p>
<hr>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/love-violence-and-class-wounds-in-thatcher-era-glasgow-what-booker-winner-douglas-stuart-did-next-179095">Love, violence and 'class wounds' in Thatcher-era Glasgow: what Booker winner Douglas Stuart did next</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<h2>Levels of reality</h2>
<p>One of the great achievements of The Wren, The Wren is its formal inventiveness. Enright successfully renders the three separate but interconnected points of view of Nell, Carmel and Phil. These voices are staggered through the novel in a non-linear fashion. </p>
<p>As James Wood highlighted in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/how-fiction-works-9781845950934">How Fiction Works</a> (2008), it is a novel’s job to teach us “how to adapt to its conventions” or its own “reality level.” In The Wren, The Wren, the levels are complexly intertwined. The overlapping of each character’s vantage point charts the effect of Phil’s absence on Nell and Carmel’s realities. Enright braids these perspectives in a way that illuminates grief’s ability to reverberate through time. </p>
<p>She also incorporates Phil’s poetry and his letters addressed to Carmel. The latter are signed off with a contrived closeness – “love eternal / Daddo” – that exacerbates the estranging distance between them. Like the trail of pain Phil leaves behind him, the poems and letters surface at uncanny intervals between chapters and imbue each scene with meaning. They also function as intrusive reminders of his narcissism. </p>
<p>Phil’s desperate grasps at being remembered serve as a reminder that his sensitivity was an aesthetic performance reserved for his writing and not his family. The juxtaposition of poetry, letters and prose also shows how delusion sits alongside folly in the narrative. </p>
<p>For example, the poem titled “The Wren, The Wren” makes a mockery of his influence over the daughter he deserted. Phil renders Carmel as “a panic / of feathered air” giving her a wounded-bird-like vulnerability that is misaligned with her presentation in the novel as, in the words of Nell, a “fighter” and a “lioness”. </p>
<p>There is something perverse about the logic behind Phil’s method of trying to connect with Carmel by sending her the very thing he walked out on them all to produce. But this perversity is very true to the “reality” of his character. Or, as Carmel reflects, if Phil had stopped writing poetry, the “veil of reality would be ripped away”. </p>
<p>The formally daring nature of The Wren, The Wren, its nimble prose, and the deft rendering of character and complex levels of reality make it easy to see how Enright has earned her place as one of Ireland’s most revered novelists. She was the country’s first Laureate for Fiction (2015-2018). In 2018, she received the PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature. And in 2022, she was the recipient of the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. </p>
<p>The Wren, The Wren is another bold contribution to contemporary literature by a novelist at the height of her power.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212193/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Georgia Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Perception and reality collide when a mother and daughter are compelled to live in the shadow of a monstrous artist.Georgia Phillips, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2058952023-05-24T17:01:45Z2023-05-24T17:01:45ZTime Shelter: International Booker’s first Bulgarian winner is a rich experiment in style, structure and ideas<p>A philosophical exploration of memory and nostalgia, about forgetting and trying to hold on to our past and make sense of our present and future, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/23/international-booker-prize-first-bulgarian-winner-georgi-gospodinov-time-shelter-angela-rodel">Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter</a> is a worthy winner of this year’s <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/international/2023">International Booker prize</a>.</p>
<p>If ours is an age of privation, this expansive novel symbolises opulence: of ideas, meanings, utopian aspirations and the bizarre brilliance of the human mind. The author convenes memory, nostalgia and history together with the individual and the nation, to chart a narrative arc over the territories of remembrance and oblivion. Above all, it is a book about time, in its fragments and in its perpetuity.</p>
<p>As with so many prize-winning novels, Time Shelter conjures up episodes of human history to make us ponder what we have gone through and what we are living with. It is a book that forces the reader to go slow, given the sheer amount of stimulation for the senses and ideas that it has to offer. </p>
<p>The author’s use of history is masterful and central to the narrative. The novel is a great experiment in terms of narrative style, structure and ideas, and can only come from a <a href="https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/06/an-introduction-to-bulgarian-literature.html">literary culture</a> that is not bogged down by canons and rules. </p>
<p>Gospodinov is an acclaimed poet, playwright and writer both in Bulgaria and in Europe, and is the recipient of several national and international literary prizes. The work is beautifully translated by Angela Rodel, who shares in the prize.</p>
<p>Judges’ chair <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/judges/leila-slimani">Leila Slimani</a> called Time Shelter – the first Bulgarian work to win the prize – a “brilliant novel” describing it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A profound work that deals with a very contemporary question: what happens to us when our memories disappear? … Time Shelter is a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The land of Time Shelter is inhabited by just two main characters: the unnamed narrator and their friend Gaustine, a geriatric time-travelling psychiatrist who darts in and out of the narrative, at times claiming his space with profound quotes and observations.</p>
<p>In an interview, Gospodinov said that he, the narrator and Gaustine flow into one another, making him feel like he is being invented by his character Gaustine. With such unstable narrative entities, what readers are left with are voices that merge and lapse, but endure.</p>
<p>The structure of the novel itself gives the feeling of slowly losing one’s grip over time and narrative as the story becomes increasingly fragmented. The author clarifies that since it is a novel about Alzheimer’s, the collapsing narrative gives the idea of the characters and the narrator losing their memory, and the fading effect is transmitted to the reader. </p>
<h2>The past is contagious</h2>
<p>The narrator and Gaustine create what they call a “clinic for the past” that offers a hopeful treatment for people with Alzheimer’s. Each floor carefully recreates a period from the patient’s past, transporting them back to a more comforting time when life was good. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526895/original/file-20230517-22717-7w0x3f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A cover of a book called Time Shelter showing five different rooms in different colours." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526895/original/file-20230517-22717-7w0x3f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526895/original/file-20230517-22717-7w0x3f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526895/original/file-20230517-22717-7w0x3f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526895/original/file-20230517-22717-7w0x3f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526895/original/file-20230517-22717-7w0x3f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526895/original/file-20230517-22717-7w0x3f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526895/original/file-20230517-22717-7w0x3f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1148&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk/titles/georgi-gospodinov/time-shelter/9781474623070/">Weidenfeld & Nicholson / Orion</a></span>
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<p>The “discreet monster of the past” is brought back with a “therapeutic aim” in these rooms. The nostalgia rooms become more and more important and effective in providing the patients with a slice of familiarity and memory. </p>
<p>Gospodinov explores the different aspects of remembering. While preserved memories can bring solace for some, there are characters like Mrs Sh., whose shower phobia is traced back to her experiences of the Auschwitz concentration camp. </p>
<p>Memories that she has forcefully repressed surface overwhelmingly in the phase of dementia and become a part of her “inescapable reality”. Some memories of inhumanity simply do not fade away but lurk in a corner ready to pounce in a moment of weakness.</p>
<p>In this onslaught of memories, nostalgia is inescapable. And it is in nostalgia that the personal and the historical, the individual and the nation, find refuge. </p>
<p>What starts with Alzheimer’s patients recreating their “happy times”, re-enacting their histories and escaping into the past begins to gain momentum. As the solace provided by these rooms becomes apparent, healthy people without memory loss are increasingly drawn to the clinic as a way of escaping the troubled present.</p>
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<h2>The unsustainability of nostalgia</h2>
<p>In Time Shelter’s world, each European country holds a referendum about recreating history and slipping back into better times, transforming themselves into nostalgia nations with temporal borders. With tongue-in-cheek humour, the UK does not take part due to Brexit. </p>
<p>This is a modern-day utopia and dystopia rolled into one. Anarchy creeps in even amid the contentment of collective nostalgia, and “the world has become a chaotic open-air clinic of the past, as if the walls had fallen away”.</p>
<p>Gospodinov reveals the unsustainability of nostalgia, even though it can be a source of comfort, and the danger of dwelling on our histories. What starts off as therapeutic ultimately brings chaos and fragmentation.</p>
<p>The art of good storytelling demands fresh perspectives, reinvention, and yet a close tie to one’s narrative heritage. Time Shelter is all of that and much more.
Gospodinov’s deft brewing of European history, utopian ideals and the devastating reality of neurological disorders will continue the conversation on human fragility well beyond the pages of this book.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205895/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sukla Chatterjee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Judges called it a profound novel that asks the contemporary question: what happens to us when our memories disappear?Sukla Chatterjee, Lecturer in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, University of AberdeenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2045782023-05-19T09:27:08Z2023-05-19T09:27:08ZInternational Booker Prize 2023: our experts review the six shortlisted books<p>From a <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/media-centre/press-releases/the-international-booker-prize-2023-longlist-is-announced">longlist of 12</a>, <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/six-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-international-booker-prize-2023-shortlist">six novels have been shortlisted</a> for the 2023 International Booker Prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on May 23. </p>
<h2><a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-gospel-according-to-the-new-world">The Gospel According to the New World</a> by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox</h2>
<p>The Gospel According to the New World starts with the birth of a boy in an “overseas department”, “surrounded by water on all sides”. Pascal, a child of mixed heritage, is born and subsequently abandoned on Easter Sunday. Rumours immediately start spreading that he might be the son of God. </p>
<p>What follows is Pascal’s journey to himself. He travels the earth looking for his biological father and grapples with questions about his own purpose – a journey that closely mirrors that of Jesus in the New Testament.</p>
<p>The novel, translated from French to English by Condé’s husband Richard Philcox, is full of wit, humour and allusion. </p>
<p>It engages with questions of belief, philosophy and politics, and brings together a range of captivating characters from across the New World as Pascal grapples with his reputation as a new Messiah. I was unsure of what to expect, but I found Condé’s novel charming and full of heart.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Leighan Renaud</em></p>
<h2><a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/whale">Whale</a> by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim</h2>
<p>Set largely in the remote village of Pyeongdae, the dreamlike story of Whale is punctuated by satirical references to historical events that mark the seismic social shifts that transformed South Korea into a modern state in the 20th century. </p>
<p>Rather than focus explicitly on these episodes – the Korean War, US occupation and military dictatorships, for instance – Whale tells its grand national narrative on a smaller human scale.</p>
<p>The rags to riches journey of protagonist Geumbok is reminiscent of a Dickensian epic. Her ambition and gradual acquisition of material luxury are indicative of Korea’s shift towards capitalism. Her daughter meanwhile, the mute Chunhui, has a deep spiritual connection with the natural environment and this is used to fondly recall the traditions of the past. </p>
<p>Whale provides an unflinching look at two contrasting portraits of national identity in the era of Korean modernisation – equally valid, yet highly oppositional. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Gemma Ballard</em></p>
<h2><a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/boulder">Boulder</a> by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches</h2>
<p>Boulder is a gripping, discomfiting novel of potent language and uncompromising moral certitude. With a poetic intensity that oscillates between the fiercely carnal and a stark abstraction, Eva Baltasar immerses the reader in the consciousness of her protagonist, “Boulder”. She’s nicknamed, by her girlfriend, after “those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element”.</p>
<p>This is a rich and surprising novel about desire, freedom and domesticity, which follows the merchant ship cook Boulder as she struggles to navigate the new terrain of a settled life with a partner intent on having a child.</p>
<p>In densely metaphorical prose, Baltasar handles romance with an unsentimental boldness. This is a love “that grows like brambles, strangles the furniture, and girds the walls”. Boulder picks apart the piety of motherhood and delivers a heroine whose wildness leaves her always giddily yearning for escape. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Kaye Mitchell</em></p>
<h2><a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/standing-heavy">Standing Heavy</a> by GauZ’, translated by Frank Wynne</h2>
<p>GauZ’ has penned a razor-like examination of consumerism from the standpoint of a security guard in the Champs-Elysées branch of a famous chain of perfume retailers.</p>
<p>Standing Heavy offers a refreshing and often caustic take on the cultural and economic consequences of an encounter between western consumerism and capitalism and the acute African sense of observation and derision. Using the story and observations of an undocumented Ivorian migrant in Paris, it digs into the rich, complex and often fraught relationship between France and its former African colonies.</p>
<p>With the sharpness of an Ivorian <a href="https://elpais.com/planeta-futuro/africa-no-es-un-pais/2022-08-30/coupe-decale-la-musica-que-nacio-para-aliviar-la-tension-de-la-guerra-civil-en-costa-de-marfil.html">coupé-décalé</a> song, GauZ’ offers evocative glimpses into the life of African migrants in France, from the first generation who could set up their own businesses to the later wave, most of whom have been denied legal immigrant status. </p>
<p>This second generation has to make ends meet through low paid, tedious and racially profiled jobs – such as security guards in shops or emptied factories like the <a href="https://www.grandsmoulinsdeparis.com/">Grand Moulins de Paris</a> in the novel.</p>
<p>Standing Heavy delivers a powerful invitation to reflect upon the multiple meanings of “postcolonial France” and the Franco-African relationship, 60 years after the “end of Empire”.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Berny Sèbe</em></p>
<h2>Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel</h2>
<p>Gospodinov’s <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/time-shelter/georgi-gospodinov/angela-rodel/9781474623070">Time Shelter</a> has the power to take our mind to times and places, uncertain that we will find our way back.</p>
<p>It is a philosophical exploration about memory and nostalgia, about forgetting and trying to hold on to our pasts while making sense of our present and future. Above all, it is about time – in its fragments and in its perpetuity. The narrative is so unembellished and laced with scathing humour that it has a jarring effect, further facilitated by uneven segments and breaks – much like our thoughts, some fleeting, some resilient.</p>
<p>The novel has just two characters, the unnamed narrator and their time travelling friend Gustine. This sparsity reflects the aridity of a demented mind. Together, they create rooms for Alzheimer’s patients. Rooms in which a chunk of their familiar time and memory is preserved to provide them with shelter in a rapidly erasing memory world.</p>
<p>Eventually, nostalgia grips Europe and nations hold referendums to return to the comfort of the past. Gospodinov’s deft brewing of European history, utopian ideals and the reality of neurological disorders will continue the conversation on human fragility beyond the pages of the book. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Sukla Chatterjee</em></p>
<h2>Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey</h2>
<p>Part way through <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/still-born">Still Born</a> there’s a scene in which a character has a panic attack in a medical scanner: “I think I’m going to explode in here.”</p>
<p>This same sensation animates Rosalind Harvey’s delicate but enthrallingly tense translation of Guadalupe Nettel’s fourth novel: an exploration of maternity, loss and refusal. </p>
<p>Alina and Laura are old friends whose relationship is based on eschewing procreation as the be all and end all. It’s a perspective that gets increasingly complicated through pregnancy, birth, loss, a growing intimacy with the troubled son of a neighbour, unexpected resilience, the “birthing” process of writing a thesis and gradual drifting apart with a mother.</p>
<p>The novel asks challenging questions about care for terminally ill children and substitute motherhood. Laura and Alina’s bond is a constant core. At one point the prospect of the death of a child is described as “so unacceptable that we have chosen not to name it”.</p>
<p>Still Born explores those aspects of motherhood that have often gone untold in uncompromising writing that feels throughout as though it’s being narrated in confidence to a close friend.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Colin Herd</em></p>
<p><em>The winner of the <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com">International Booker Prize 2023</a> will be announced May 23 2023.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204578/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Reflecting on themes as diverse as motherhood, war, religion and memory, our experts were impressed by the 2023 shortlist.Leighan M Renaud, Lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, Department of English, University of BristolBerny Sèbe, Associate Professor in colonial and post-colonial studies, University of BirminghamColin Herd, Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of GlasgowGemma Ballard, Lecturer in East Asian Studies, School of East Asian Studies, University of SheffieldKaye Mitchell, Senior Lecturer, English and American Studies, & Director of the Centre for New Writing, University of ManchesterSukla Chatterjee, Lecturer in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, University of AberdeenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1937212023-01-04T19:19:56Z2023-01-04T19:19:56ZWhen Nobel met Booker: Dario Fo, Barry Unsworth, and one shambolic Italian summer<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500897/original/file-20221214-26-pn2xmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C21%2C3578%2C2432&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dario Fo at the Venice Film Festival, 1985.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gorupdebesanez/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The summer of 1985 is oppressive around the medieval Italian town of Gubbio. Thick heat is held captive in the wooded ravines and the windless slopes that climb and crawl across Umbria and on to the foothills of the Apennines. A short winding drive into the hills behind the town is the Libera Università di Alcatraz, a secluded retreat that is in the process of establishing itself as a gathering place for artists, writers and thinkers – a place where they can escape to nature and create. </p>
<p>In the Italian fashion, not everything is up and operating. Buildings stand half-finished. The swimming pool has been drained so a mural of a dragon can be painted on the bottom. But somehow the place works. Guests commune with their muses during the day, then congregate for meals on the terrace in the still, warm evenings to enjoy rustic fare prepared from local ingredients, washed down with red wine and tales from the assembled creatives. </p>
<p>The enterprise is run by Jacopo Fo, 30 years old and turning his hand to every aspect of the business, including the swimming-pool dragon. Until the artwork is finished, the pool can’t be filled to give the guests some respite from the relentless summer heat.</p>
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<p>Amid the dust haze and the fireflies that swarm the air, an unlikely gathering is taking place. Jacopo’s parents are in town: Dario Fo and Franca Rame. They are setting up camp at Jacopo’s enclave to rehearse a new play. </p>
<p>Fo and Rame are Italian cultural royalty. It is still 12 years until actor and playwright Fo will be recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he is already well-established as a national treasure. His groundbreaking work in commedia dell’arte flipped the nature of theatre. His plays present characters as grotesques who directly address the audience. Their anarchic asides are an assault on classical theatre’s embrace of the heroic lead. </p>
<p>Fo’s new play – Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman – will be performed by a drama company from Finland. It is due to premiere at the prestigious Tampere Theatre Festival in a matter of weeks. </p>
<p>The play is incomplete.</p>
<p>Fo speaks no Finnish.</p>
<p>The Finns speak no Italian.</p>
<p>An interpreter is hired to make sense of Fo’s instructions for the actors and the many rewrites that are taking place on a daily basis. Her name is Aira Pohjanvaara-Buffa. And since she is going to be camped out in the Umbrian woods for a month or so, she invites along her new partner. He is a respected but still mostly unknown British novelist by the name of Barry Unsworth.</p>
<p>At this point in his career, Unsworth had attracted a small but enthusiastic readership for his historical fiction. Seven years later, he will win the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, his novel set amid the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.</p>
<p>So, from late June to mid-July of 1985, a future Nobel laureate and a future Booker Prize winner co-exist in the peace and bucolic calm of the Umbrian woods. </p>
<p>The rehearsals are a fiasco. </p>
<p>On the first day, the actors arrive drunk from the airport. The rehearsal stage is still to be built. Fo changes his script daily, hourly – often in the wings as the actors wait for fresh lines to be written for them. There are clashes between the traditional approach of the Finns and the anarchic methods of Fo and Rame. The lead actor is laid low with sunstroke. The director has brought his youthful boyfriend with him, and the young man starts to take an interest in some of the young women of the theatre company. Tempers run short in the unrelenting heat.</p>
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<p>All the while, Unsworth keeps a meticulous diary, documenting the artistic approach of the enigmatic Fo, as well as the behind-the-scenes shambles of a production that seems destined for disaster. </p>
<p>For decades, the journal was forgotten. Bundled among the author’s papers and correspondence, it eventually found a home in the archives of the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin. The diary is in Box 12, Folder 6 of the Unsworth papers. Its observations are written in clear cursive in what appears to be blue biro, with occasional red annotations.</p>
<p>It makes for sometimes brutal reading.</p>
<p>The journal provides a first person account of the creative process of one of the 20th century’s lions of theatre, in all its chaotic glory. Though it is a simple linear account of events, Unsworth manages to pen a compelling narrative and create fully realised characters.</p>
<h2>Great promise</h2>
<p>As with all such creative ventures, it starts with great promise.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>June 20th – Drove from Rome to the Liberia Università di Alcatraz which is situated some few kilometres from Gubbio, and not far from Perugia. Gentle green hills of Umbria with the darker, higher slopes of Apennines behind. Walled hilltop towns. Scale of nearer hills small enough to be manageable but dramatically steep gorges, often thickly wooded. Alcatraz itself (near to hamlet of Santa Cristina) set in green hilly country 6000 metres above sea level. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But very quickly Unsworth senses some fragility in the foundations of the enterprise that lies ahead.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of the Finnish company met at Rome one was very drunk already – another slightly. They had been drinking on the plane […] They both continued to drink steadily but the tight-featured one remained just short of being staggering drunk while the fair haired – more sensitive one I think – became helplessly drunk by evening, hardly able to talk. </p>
<p>This caused and still causes worry to Willi, who is the director of the Company (They are from Tampere, about 200 miles from Helsinki.) If they are not dealt with severely they could well fall into a pattern of drinking which could make them unfit for work and seriously prejudice progress of the play. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even in his diary, it seems, Unsworth is not averse to a bit of dramatic foreshadowing. The future Booker winner is curious about the legend of Fo and whether the myth of the man measures up against the actuality. His descriptions, both of physique and psyche, are forensic.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Fo himself is not taking over the direction of the play, as his doctor has told him to go very easy. He will do an hour a day, or so he says now – later enthusiasms and involvements remain to be seen. </p>
<p>He is tall – at least six feet I should think – and portly, very carelessly dressed but despite this an imposing figure rather, with natural dignity and ease of manner. He is at first impression almost gubernatorial – almost Roman senatorial – in feature, big-faced, fleshy, with large slightly beaky nose, but this impression soon lost. If his face could be stilled and the smile removed monumental – 2 conditions never fulfilled. There is nothing monumental about the face, it has a refined seriousness and an alternation almost constant of vague abstraction and gentle shrewdness and alertness. </p>
<p>Under the good humour great reserve of firmness and a total dedication to the work. His eyes very bright blue, face florid I think through his recent illness. In contrast to the amazing repertoire and fluidity of movement pose and gesture when on stage, in conversation he is still, not very demonstrative at all (given he is Italian).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unsworth revisits this perplexing nature of Fo’s character many times in the course of the journal. It is fair to say that the author is at first curious, then grows to admiration, and ultimately to great disappointment that the man is not the equal of the art that he produces. Fo’s veneer is as thin as any stage setting, with much the same remit: to paint an image that reminds the audience of something majestic in real life, but which is itself a simulacrum, a construction.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I visit the stage that Fo has had built in the bare hillside, on the crest of the slope, below the dust road that leads to the tower, stairs on the left leading up to a door – Elizabeth’s room. In the background an arched balustrade – I think with a narrow round platform below it. Six identical arches forming an arcaded effect […] not a means of exit or entry but to give the illusion of a palace interior. Right centre a curtained room. A life size horse on wheels. (This is to be improvised here – but needed for commercial production.) </p>
<p>This set does not change throughout the play. They are still working on it as I stand there. Fo moving planks, sweeping dust and debris from the stage area. The workmen with ladders, wheelbarrows, trestles, buckets. </p>
<p>The work is to be finished tomorrow or the day after – ready for rehearsals with the Finns. Not finished but it is an interior already – an enclosure (plank walls delimit it from the rock and scrub all round), something where things that are significant, that have causation or consequences, can be made to happen, presented.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When one artist views another whose work is in a different medium, it is often through the lens of their own craft. In Unsworth’s case, he is fascinated by Fo’s artistry on stage.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>June 21st – The day begins with a talk by Dario on his attitude to theatre in general and then his intentions in this particular play. He speaks about the “classical theatre” so-called, which was an instrument of power because it took no account of day-to-day life and also denied independence to the actors. </p>
<p>Contrasts this with commedia dell’arte from which he draws his models: fixed characters which can represent different aspects of society, different foras in conflict etc. Speaks about the improvised quality in this popular theatre which enabled characters such as the donnazza and fool to comment on the action, to support grotesquely or to undermine values or show true nature of hypocritical positions of “heroic characters”, and also allowed these same characters to address asides or speak to the audience directly thus involving them more closely. </p>
<p>Fo stresses dignity of the individual within, stresses of power and manipulation and the purposes of the state. Explains that in this play “Elizabeth” he is trying to observe the rules and essential form of Italian dramatist of 15th century – unities of place, time, use of traditional characters etc. in order to illuminate the truth underlying platitudes and pieties of what is received as history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The play is set in the court of Elizabeth I, where the Virgin Queen fumes about Shakespeare’s dramas satirising her reign and laments that her love, the Earl of Essex, is conspiring against her. As with much of Fo’s work, it is a treatise on the misapplication of power. His career was founded on his scathing satire of authoritarian regimes, with works such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! (1974), which earned him widespread regard as a champion of the working poor. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dario Fo and Franca Rame with their son Jacopo in 1962.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-samuel-becketts-waiting-for-godot-a-tragicomedy-for-our-times-157962">Guide to the Classics: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a tragicomedy for our times</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>God motif</h2>
<p>That night at dinner, the two actors who had been excessively drunk apologise to Fo, and he warns them of the consequences if they transgress again. The play’s director, Arturo Corso, arrives: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a lean restless sort of man with a thin, curiously bird-like face, bird-like or mammal-like? Prominent nose, big eyes, retreating chin. Clever eyes, ready smile, used to delivering himself, I think. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Also newly arrived is Corso’s youthful boyfriend, Alfredo: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>very beautiful – with features bold and well shaped and those eyes of Italian youth, fathomless and shallow at the same time. At dinner Franca asked him (Corso) where Alfredo was sleeping. He said, “With me of course”. He uses the feminine pronoun when referring to Alfredo.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unsworth’s observations of Fo and his methods begin to adjust almost immediately. His diary entry for June 22 notes that the Finns face a tough taskmaster when rehearsals start: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is cold on the terrace in the mornings, out of the sun, but Dario has made up his mind that he will rehearse there. He is autocratic and heedless in matters of this kind. </p>
<p>Now I see in his face, a sort of epicene quality, a potential for collapse […] in contrast with the magisterial quality also there. It is as though in these two casts of his face is symbolised the recurrent theme of his plays, the conflict of power, the holding up and simultaneous undermining of authority. </p>
<p>He has amazing control over voice and face, so that in illustration he can roar with laughter, scream with outrage, without the eyes changing from the seriousness of their intent – and he returns to the normal tone of rehearsal immediately, without pause.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Very quickly, Unsworth settles on a God motif in his observations of Fo at work and at play. He notes the characters in the performance are, through their actions and thoughts, questioning the words of God. Fo’s constant editing and rewriting of his script, even during the course of the readings, is summarised as: “God changing the rules?” </p>
<p>It is at this point in the project that Alfredo reveals himself to be 16 years old. This prompts the journal observation from Unsworth that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>(While the Finns drink, the Italians attempt seductions.) The author/actor is like God because he sets actual physical bodies in motion. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The following day, in a portent of things to come, a hot water bottle is fetched for Franca Rame who has collapsed after the morning’s strenuous rehearsal. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Fo moves through all this, portly, avuncular, curiously heedless in old T-shirt and trousers. God relaxing with his creatures, but still not of them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the midst of rehearsals stretching through long days without a break, Unsworth occasionally separates from the company and enjoys walks through the surrounding hills, heavy with flowering gorse, wild sweet pea, poppies and cornflowers. It is on these sojourns that he starts jotting notes for a possible novel, about an internationally famous playwright and actor, who buys up a sizeable piece of land and builds a theatre in the wilderness: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A long terrace (conservatory), rooms for recalling, rehearsing a big dining room. Swimming pool. He converts old buildings, barns, towers – medieval buildings – into accommodation. The area is beautiful – this is the Garden of Eden and he is God. (God with a flaw?) As consort he has his actress wife. </p>
<p>The assistant director is Christ figure. A troupe of actors arrive to be rehearsed in a new play. Is this a medieval morality, an Elizabethan period play, a foreign play? Is it written or adapted by Playwright? It should be a) a comment on the nature of the Playwright; authority (This could be achieved though directional comment.), on the nature of political power with reference to the England of today, and the relationships within it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ten years later, Unsworth’s novel Morality Play, about a troupe of travelling players in 14th century England, is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dario Fo at Gubbio, 1988.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Growing tensions</h2>
<p>By June 24, the growing tensions in the company are becoming obvious. Fo’s constant script revisions and his reluctance to let Corso take on the full directorial role are causing stress among the players. Fo and Rame decide to decamp for a few days and leave Corso in charge.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The big ego reacts to exhaustion by seeking to simplify for itself, with consequent chaos. </p>
<p>Dario is out of this for the most part, though an occasional hovering presence. He shows unwillingness to sunbathe with the others. When he takes off his shirt – which he does at some distance – shows a good deal of sag and distinctly formed, even quite plump breasts, confirming that sense of him as physically feminine. (Though he has a strong male image too.) </p>
<p>Can it be that his unwillingness to sunbathe derives from this? Is our God vain? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>For all of Unsworth’s reservations about Fo’s temperament and his substance, he is an unabashed admirer of his stagecraft. He describes Fo showing the actor playing the role of the Donnazza how to move: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>His demonstration of the Donnazza’s slip – the backward glance, the flounce with the back skirts, the backward bending body, then the skip and slither, the discovery of the piss – the acceptance that there is a wooden horse that pisses – are all absolutely masterly – just as funny every time he does it (everyone laughs every time). For a heavy man he moves about the stage with astonishing lightness and grace – like a dancer, his movements timed and precise. (It is obvious that the space of the stage and the subjects in it are as negotiable for him as a familiar sitting room might be.) </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In God’s kingdom, a word from on high carries a good deal of weight. On June 25, Unsworth records: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dario tells me I have an “intelligent face” – una facia intelligente. In the peculiar circumstances of this place all compliments and comments from him have a binding force somehow, setting the seal on things – even creating the fact that he elects to comment on.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unsworth, however, is not easily guiled with words of praise. His works abound with thematic critiques of the neo-liberalism of the Thatcher years and the devastating impact her government’s policies had on his native north of England. He has a northerner’s disdain of bombast and pretension, and it is with this mindset that Unsworth regards Fo’s everyday manner as being as performative as anything he does on stage: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>One grows oppressed by the performance element. Because Dario is so much at the centre of things, jovial host, object of pilgrimage, author and exemplar and metteur en scene, it sometimes seems he is mediating life for us. Last night we were all called out to admire the sunset, this in the midst of dinner. I resisted the collective invitation for some time but was more or less pulled out by A. It was indeed a beautiful sunset – radiant and roseate, the low western clouds edged with bright gold, the higher ones curled and flung across the sky in great radiant swathes. “Raphaelesque” as Dario describes it. He is proud and rightly of the place, the thing he has created, and this includes the sunset and perhaps the whole of Umbria too. But none the less this sense (on my part) of oppression remains.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the same time, the actors are growing weary of this difficult Zeus-like figure in their ranks. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dario is hovering presence, rather dreaded by the Finns now because of his inevitable habit of changing text (because he sometimes imperfectly remembers it and also because he does not have patience to understand Finns’ difficulties with the style). He grows impatient if they do not immediately get what he means. I think everyone will be relived now when he and Franca leave (tomorrow?)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But even when Fo and Rame depart for a few days, the rehearsals are dogged with troubles. Payments due from Finland do not appear. The performers start drinking again. The actor playing the Donnazza is struck down with sunstroke, and one of the Finns must return home to attend their father’s funeral. Director Corso accidently slashes his eyelid with a sharp thumbnail during an expressive flick of his hand and must conduct rehearsals with a broad bandage wrapped across his face. It is into this domain of instability that Fo and Rame return, only to ratchet up the workload. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Rehearsals begin in the morning now. However warm-hearted these people are their priorities take little account of the feelings of others. If they start once again making textual changes, the driven Finns may finally revolt. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The creative force behind Fo and Rame seems to be one of unending dissatisfaction with the status quo. There is constant tweaking, continual change.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As was to be expected Franca began immediately to amend the text of the monologue, to the silent rage of the Finns. It seems to be an involuntary process this, as natural as breathing to both of them – Dario and Franca. The trouble is that they have each his or her preferred version and depending on which of them is present at the time it is this or that which is preferred. A comedy would be played out it they were both present at the same time and proceeded to quarrel over the text. </p>
<p>Arturo now, after 2 weeks of directing, has to take a back seat again now, which can’t be much of a pleasure to him. I saw him and Dario engaged in what looked like a pretty furious argument, even by Italian standards of vehemence and demonstration. </p>
<p>To watch Franca rehearsing the Finns is a pretty amazing sight anyway. She is acting all the time, from the moment she sets foot on the stage. She acts being a director. Every movement is studied, the walk, the set of the body and head, the languor of waiting for her remarks to be translated, the elaborate patience, the sudden flow into illustrative movement, an almost numbing authoritative lowering of the voice, an unrelenting dominant grip on the proceedings. </p>
<p>Dario’s style is different. He is about the stage all the time, moving in his light but portly manner, breaking occasionally into an amazingly accomplished burst of mime, grammelot or stage business of some kind. Arturo sits and watches, rises and advances to explain and illustrate with his extraordinary virtuosity of gesture (il maesto dilgesto) then returning to his seat again to watch. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Over the weeks, the rehearsals drag on. But there is progress as the date of the festival draws near: Actors begin to fully inhabit their roles; the script is finalised. The show is almost ready, and it is time for Unsworth to make his exit.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the author is left torn between Fo the artist and Fo the man. After a month in the master’s presence, Unsworth leaves Umbria with the inklings of a new novel, an extensive first-hand account of the creative process of one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished playwrights, and a bitter postscript in his journal, written on August 16 1985, five days after the show’s premiere in Tampere: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…imbroglio after I left – the teacher of mime (a Sicilian girl) from the Little Theatre of Milan, in love with Arturo, who in addition to Alfredo has taken up with a Canadian girl – one of the students. (Alfredo himself gets interested in the girls, source of quarrel with Arturo). A party, at which everyone gets drunk and at which Sicilian girl stages dramatic scene, weeping, cursing, smashing things. It seems she gave him up after learning of Arturo’s numerous involvements with boys (Alfredo one among many) then relented – too late, because Arturo now had acquired Canadian girl.</p>
<p>Also disillusioning behaviour of God Dario, after Franca left he had a young girl – various young girls – on his knee, kissing and fondling in public, using position again – I mean his power. Very bad taste. He really doesn’t care much about people, not as individuals at least. Becomes gracious in presence of journalists. Then A. discovered that Sara (one of the girls working there) was actually afraid to tell him about mix up in laundry – he was wearing a tee-shirt with “Memphis” written on it, property of M. So those who work for him are frightened of him – a bad sign. And he is conscious of this and uses it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The demarcation between artist and art will always be disputed territory. Does the strength of the work ever offset the weakness of the creator? Unsworth’s final journal entry seems rooted in disappointment that a man with as much natural talent as Fo could also be capable of such base abuses of power, all the more unfortunate given his career was built on lacerating those who deny freedom to others.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A recent Turkish production of Dario Fo’s play Elizabeth (2020).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><em>Fiasko av Dario Fo</em></h2>
<p>As far as can be determined, Unsworth wrote only once for public consumption about his summer in the Umbrian hillside: a piece for the Guardian in December 1985. The article, a preview of a documentary about Fo that was screening on Channel 4 that evening, is a broadly anodyne account of the Italian master’s behaviour that month. It describes the shambles of the rehearsals, but masks Unsworth’s contemporaneously recorded opinion of Fo’s multiple shortcomings. He concludes the Guardian piece with: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It seemed to me that I had witnessed, in the Free University of Alcatraz, an exercise of power and control as unremitting as anything Elizabeth got up to. But some essential human business had been transacted there, under Fo’s benign, impatient patronage, among those hillsides. And I was glad and grateful to have seen it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And the performance itself in Tampere? If Fo’s directing technique was confusing for the Finnish cast, the result on stage was no less confounding for Finnish theatregoers. The review in <em>Hufvudstadsbladet</em>, Finland’s highest circulating Swedish-language newspaper, carried the bold headline: <em>Fiasko av Dario Fo</em> – “Failure of Dario Fo”.</p>
<p>Reviewer Marten Kihlman wrote that despite high expectations for the show, the audience reception was “lukewarm”: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>for my part I have to admit that none of the ten Fo plays I have seen have been nearly as cryptic and so long-winded. </p>
<p>Much has been written (and speculated) about Elizabeth I of England: she has been described as moody, jealous, greedy and much more. However, Fo’s portrayal of the poor Virgin Queen is unlike anything else: in the first Act she is a pathetic hysteric who regularly pees; in the second a kind of cross between Mrs Thatcher and Lady Macbeth. </p>
<p>Now Fo is not interested in the human Elizabeth – she simply represents Power, the given factor in an equation whose outcome is also given: power corrupts, power leads to abuse, power combined with stupidity is an abomination. All this Fo has said before, with greater concentration and sharpness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reviewer does dispense some praise – to the set designer. </p>
<p>And while he is scathing about the acting (“too loud”, “without charm”), he assigns blame in one direction only: “the ensemble should not be blamed for having a fatal theatrical ordeal: they follow Dario Fo’s directive. And even masters sometimes miss.”</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193721/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Newsome does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Stifling heat, drunk actors, an unfinished script – in 1985, novelist Barry Unsworth observed the chaotic creative process of playwright Dario Fo.Richard Newsome, Director, postgraduate Writing, Editing and Publishing program, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1857742022-12-25T20:41:17Z2022-12-25T20:41:17ZMy favourite fictional character: the crazed, compelling voice of William Trevor’s 40something photographer Ivy Eckdorf<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475568/original/file-20220722-11-1x8b2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Image by Karolina Kaboompics for rawpixel com image from rawpixel id jpeg</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Although I have been a long-time fan of the Irish writer William Trevor, it was only in 2016 – amid the flood of tributes following his death – that I first heard of what has become one of my favourite novels, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/mrs-eckdorf-in-oneills-hotel-9780241969328">Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel</a>. </p>
<p>In honouring Trevor, fellow Irishman John Banville <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/william-trevor-irish-writers-pay-tribute-1.2876898">described</a> Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, first published in 1969, as “an inexplicably neglected 20th-century masterpiece”. His recommendation sent me scurrying to source a copy.</p>
<p>From the first page, it is evident that Mrs Eckdorf is someone with no sense of private boundaries, either her own or other people’s. Just how disconcerting this can be becomes clear when she introduces herself to a stranger, a fellow traveller on a flight to Dublin.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I’m Ivy Eckdorf,” said Mrs Eckdorf as the aeroplane rose from the ground. “How d’you do?”</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475571/original/file-20220722-11-fe6mgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="book cover: a woman at the base of a staircase, looking up" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475571/original/file-20220722-11-fe6mgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475571/original/file-20220722-11-fe6mgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475571/original/file-20220722-11-fe6mgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475571/original/file-20220722-11-fe6mgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475571/original/file-20220722-11-fe6mgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475571/original/file-20220722-11-fe6mgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475571/original/file-20220722-11-fe6mgk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Beside her, an Englishman reading a newspaper lowers it to acknowledge her greeting. He sees a woman in her late 40s, blonde hair hanging from beneath a cream-coloured hat. Her eyes are so pale a shade of brown, they are almost yellow, and her reddened lips are parted in a smile. There is a gap between her front teeth that an ice-cream wafer might just pass through. </p>
<p>Mrs Eckdorf takes the newspaper from the man’s hands and folds it away in the rack in front of him. Meanwhile, she calmly informs him that her mother was given to hysteria and lovers, and her father went out one night to post a letter and never returned. At St Monica’s School for Girls, she says, she’d had an unfortunate encounter with a teacher, Miss Tample. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“… two panting eyes behind spectacles – my God, you should have seen Miss Tample!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mrs Eckdorf is a photographer interested in “human stories of quality”. Her books of photographs have won coveted awards, they grace the coffee tables of the well-to-do. Her discomfited companion learns that she lives in a cinder-grey apartment in the Lipowskystrasse, in Munich, that she has twice married German businessmen, and been divorced. </p>
<p>And now she has heard, from a barman on a ship, an intriguing tale about a Dublin hotel. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/barbara-trapidos-undeniably-sexy-novel-of-academic-bohemia-still-dazzles-at-40-182335">Barbara Trapido's 'undeniably sexy' novel of academic bohemia still dazzles at 40</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Advancing with her camera</h2>
<p>Mrs Eckdorf describes for her fellow traveller the dingy yellow bulk of O’Neill’s Hotel on Thaddeus Street. The barman, who had wandered through that city in the rain “seeking solace and finding it hard to come by”, had hinted that its decline was due to something that had happened there, “something greater than just a skeleton in a cupboard”. </p>
<p>The hotel is owned by 91-year-old Mrs Sinnott, a woman who cannot hear or speak, and who converses with people by writing in exercise books. Mrs Sinnott is famous for her love of orphans. A few of her orphans still linger in the vicinity of Thaddeus Street: grown men and women now in various stages of disintegration. </p>
<p>They include convent-raised Agnes Quinn, a woman of the streets who dreams of swapping places with the actress Olivia de Havilland; and Morrissey, a pimp who guides men seeking solace to women like Agnes, appropriating rooms in O’Neill’s Hotel for that purpose. O’Shea, another orphan, is the hotel’s solitary porter, and devoted carer of Mrs Sinnott. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I am advancing upon the lives of these people,” said Mrs Eckdorf loudly, “so that others may benefit.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ivy Eckdorf advances relentlessly on them with her camera, “an instrument of Japanese manufacture, a Mamiya”, and chaos ensues from the moment she enters O’Neill’s Hotel. Hilariously embroiled in it all is one Mr Smedley, a salesman of cardboard sheeting and self-proclaimed “man of vigour” who has, like the ship’s barman, wandered the streets of Dublin in search of solace until fortuitously bumping into Morrissey. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-uncanny-melancholy-of-empty-photographs-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-133615">Friday essay: the uncanny melancholy of empty photographs in the time of coronavirus</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘I do not love Ivy Eckdorf’</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475575/original/file-20220722-19-1l3gc7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475575/original/file-20220722-19-1l3gc7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475575/original/file-20220722-19-1l3gc7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475575/original/file-20220722-19-1l3gc7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475575/original/file-20220722-19-1l3gc7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475575/original/file-20220722-19-1l3gc7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475575/original/file-20220722-19-1l3gc7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475575/original/file-20220722-19-1l3gc7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of the hotel’s orphans, Agnes Quinn, dreams of swapping places with Olivia de Havilland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stockvault</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Flecked throughout with dark humour, there is genuine pathos, too: William Trevor had a compassionate (if unsentimental) eye for the lost and the wounded. Mrs Eckdorf herself is one of them, sustained only by her creativity and a sense of herself as an artist. </p>
<p>This, perhaps, is where her character sinks its teeth into me deepest, because I do not love Ivy Eckdorf, I dread <em>becoming</em> her. For Mrs Eckdorf’s quest to make art refuses to acknowledge her subjects’ resistance, or even their distress. She inserts herself unwanted into their private spaces, stooping at times to voyeurism, manipulative untruths, and even criminal trespass.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It’s an unpleasant contemporary thing,” cried the man with sudden passion, “this poking into people’s privacy with cameras in the cause of truth […] I can well imagine your shiny books.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For those of us with shiny books, Mrs Eckdorf’s behaviour is cause for reflection around questions of <a href="https://theconversation.com/lionel-shriver-and-the-responsibilities-of-fiction-writers-65538">ethics</a> and the crossing of boundaries; of artistic arrogance, <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-literatures-legacies-of-cultural-appropriation-103672">appropriation</a>, and the telling of other people’s stories – even if those stories are closely entwined with our own. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-wonder-of-joyces-ulysses-79417">Friday essay: the wonder of Joyce's Ulysses</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Without doubt’, a masterpiece</h2>
<p>Is the book a masterpiece? It is, without doubt, and it seems to have been a kind of creative breakthrough for William Trevor. Until then, he had written novels set in urban England, but afterwards there flowed stories and further novels set in provincial Ireland. Trevor, who by then was living in rural Devon (where he would remain for the rest of his life) began to insist on his identity as an Irish writer. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475586/original/file-20220722-16-x5op7b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475586/original/file-20220722-16-x5op7b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475586/original/file-20220722-16-x5op7b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475586/original/file-20220722-16-x5op7b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475586/original/file-20220722-16-x5op7b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475586/original/file-20220722-16-x5op7b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1102&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475586/original/file-20220722-16-x5op7b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1102&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475586/original/file-20220722-16-x5op7b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1102&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Trevor.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Penguin Random House</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>William Trevor was <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/william-trevor">nominated five times</a> for the Booker Prize, including in 1970 for Mrs Eckdorf In O'Neill’s Hotel. But although he <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/william-trevor-dead-obituary-triple-whitbread-prizewinning-irish-novelist-playwright-and-short-story-writer-a7429376.html">won the Whitbread Prize</a> three times and his name was often <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/04/william-trevor-nobel-prize-literature">mentioned</a> in relation to the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was destined to always be a Booker bridesmaid. </p>
<p>While Mrs Eckdorf often occupies centre stage in the novel, it is not only she who rises luminously from its pages but silent Mrs Sinnott, her son Eugene (who cares only for drink and horse-racing), poor tortured Morrissey and Agnes Quinn, and stoic O’Shea in his faded porter’s uniform.</p>
<p>I often imagine O’Shea, shadowed by his greyhound, making his way to the hotel’s bare and cavernous kitchen. There, under the paper chain he has hung in preparation for Mrs Sinnott’s birthday, he lovingly fries for her – in a pan with butter – the nicest of the five herrings he has bought, and “makes tea in the small tin teapot that is offered only to her”. </p>
<p>One cannot help but adore O’Shea, his dogged devotion and his optimism. Indeed, O’Neill’s Hotel itself lingers beyond the pages of the novel, with its dusty, down-at-heel appearance overlaying its past – of commercial success, restrained elegance, even glamour. </p>
<p>But in the end, it is Ivy Eckdorf who refuses to let go of the reader. Ivy by name and ivy by nature: once you have encountered Mrs Eckdorf, she will always be with you. At odd moments you will feel her hand grasp your sleeve and hear her crazed, yet compelling, voice in your ear.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We are all part of one another, my dear, and we must all know one another better.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/185774/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carol Lefevre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>John Banville calls Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill’s Hotel, ‘an inexplicably neglected 20th-century masterpiece’. Carol Lefevre shares her fascination with William Trevor’s ‘crazed’ photographer Ivy Eckdorf.Carol Lefevre, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1927222022-10-18T05:51:48Z2022-10-18T05:51:48ZShehan Karunatilaka wins Booker prize for Sri Lankan political satire, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490241/original/file-20221017-12084-svn2ht.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C0%2C6000%2C3934&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alberto Pezzali/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.</p>
<p>The win couldn’t come at a better time for Sri Lanka, a country once more engaged in <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/06/sri-lanka-economic-crisis-protests-imf/">political and economic instability</a>, as it suffers through one of the world’s worst economic crises, with soaring inflation, food and fuel shortages, and low supplies of foreign reserves. And of course, the government was overthrown in July, after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled following mass protests.</p>
<p>Karunatilaka said in his acceptance speech: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>My hope for Seven Moons is this; that in the not-too-distant future, 10 years, as long as it takes, Sri Lanka […] has understood that these ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism have not worked and will never work.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Political black comedy</h2>
<p>Karunatilaka’s novel is extraordinary – and hard to pin down. It is at once a black comedy about the afterlife, a murder mystery whodunit, and a political satire set against the violent backdrop of the late-1980s Sri Lankan civil war. It is also a story of love and redemption. </p>
<p>Malinda “Maali” Kabalana, a closeted war photographer, wakes up dead in what seems to be a celestial waiting room. The setting will be familiar to many who’ve spent time in Colombo (as I have – it’s where my husband’s family is from). We open in a busy, bureaucratic office, filled with confusion, noise, a propensity against queuing – and a healthy dose of “gallows” humour. In other words, Maali is in some sort of purgatory.</p>
<p>Maali soon discovers he has seven days – seven moons – to solve his own murder. This isn’t easy – he is interrupted by sardonic ghosts (often with grudges, questionable motives, and a tendency towards extreme chattiness), the violent reality of war-torn Colombo, and piecing together his memories of who he was. </p>
<p>He also has seven moons to lead his official girlfriend and his secret boyfriend to a cache of photographs, taken over time, which document the horror of the war – and incriminate local and foreign governments. </p>
<p>Karunatilaka’s subject matter and plot highlight, question and explore Sri Lanka’s legacy – and its continued, difficult relationship with its civil war, which spanned 1983 to 2009, though the reverberations continue. And his novel’s provocative, intimate, second-person style implicates us – the readers. </p>
<p>Karunatilaka has mastered his craft as a novelist. He never once wavers from a second-person perspective that might be unwieldy (perhaps even gimmicky) in a lesser writer’s hands. The novel tells us, “Don’t try and look for the good guys, ‘cause there ain’t none”.</p>
<p>It realises a combined responsibility for the tragedy of that 25-year civil war, in which the country’s colonial history is also implicated. British colonialists brought Tamil workers from South India to Sri Lanka, to work as indentured labourers on their coffee, tea and rubber plantations. Their descendants’ fight for an independent Tamil state was a strong component of the civil war.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/swimming-in-the-presidents-pool-palaces-and-power-in-times-of-crisis-186833">Swimming in the president’s pool – palaces and power in times of crisis</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Diffusing violence with humour</h2>
<p>As a novelist and lover of second-person narration and a long-time follower of Karuntailaka’s accomplished work, I couldn’t be more delighted by this Booker win. </p>
<p>I first came across Karunatilaka through his debut novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/chinaman-9780099555681">Chinaman</a>, which was handed to me by my sister-in-law several years ago on a family visit to Colombo. That book taught me about cricket, but it also taught me the sardonic brilliance of Sri Lankan humour. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490292/original/file-20221018-24-9cu7ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490292/original/file-20221018-24-9cu7ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490292/original/file-20221018-24-9cu7ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490292/original/file-20221018-24-9cu7ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490292/original/file-20221018-24-9cu7ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490292/original/file-20221018-24-9cu7ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490292/original/file-20221018-24-9cu7ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490292/original/file-20221018-24-9cu7ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Karunatilaka once again uses humour to great effect in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – to diffuse confronting moments of violence, to engage his reader, and for pure enjoyment. This novel follows a murder victim through a bloody civil war – and it’s laugh-out-loud funny. </p>
<p>It’s also a tighter, more focused book than Chinaman: here is an author in control of his craft and what he wants to say with it. The Booker judges, too, praised the “scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and hilarity” of the book. </p>
<p>Karunatilaka’s winning novel took time to write. Ten years have passed since Chinaman. His skilful use of craft to tell this complicated story is testament to the idea that good books take the time they need: something that all authors know but publishers are not always willing to accept. However, Karunatilaka has been busy in that ten years, not just writing literary fiction, but writing for children – and having a family. The 47-year-old is now married with two kids.</p>
<p>Karunatilaka is only the second Sri Lankan novelist to have won the Booker Prize. (The first was Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient.) But last year, his countryman Anuk Arudpragasam was also <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/anuk-arudpragasam">shortlisted</a>, for <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Anuk-Arudpragasam-Passage-North-9781783786961">A Passage North</a>, another accomplished novel set in the aftermath of the civil war. </p>
<p>I’m excited by what this means for Sri Lankan authors and the Sri Lankan publishing scene. Here is a country with stories to tell and enormous skill to tell them with: let’s hope this leads to more Sri Lankan novels achieving wide readership, success and deserved acclaim.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192722/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucy Christopher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Shehan Karunatilaka’s Booker winning novel is a black comedy about the afterlife, a murder mystery, and a political satire set against the violent backdrop of the late-1980s Sri Lankan civil war.Lucy Christopher, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1844592022-08-02T20:13:02Z2022-08-02T20:13:02Z‘Skin and sinew and breath and longing’: reimagining the lives of queer artists and activists, from Sappho to Virginia Woolf<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476642/original/file-20220729-17-4dwcee.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C5%2C3988%2C1988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Pictured, clockwise from left: Gertrude Stein, Lina Poletti, Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf, Sappho.</span> </figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/after-sappho">After Sappho</a>, Selby Wynn Schwartz’s reimagining of the lives of 19th and 20th century women artists, activists and sapphists is a book I’ve always wanted to read. (And it’s <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-prize">just been longlisted</a> for the 2022 Booker Prize.)</p>
<p>Sappho, an Ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, was often called “the Poetess”. Plato called her the tenth Muse. Her writing is intimate, lyrical and sensual. It is unapologetically erotic, and mostly directed towards women. She’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-sappho-a-poet-in-fragments-90823">been called</a> history’s first lesbian. </p>
<p>Who among us lesbians hasn’t wanted to be loved by Sappho, be loved in the Sapphic way? To be Sappho — as in, as Wynn Schwartz writes in the prologue, “inside ourselves”, “sky pouring over”, “leaves of trees shivering”, “everything trembling”, “move when nothing touches”; as in the Sapphic fragment “the opposite/ … daring”? </p>
<p>I remember the first time I became Sappho too.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz (Text Publishing)</em></p>
<hr>
<h2>A novel in fragments</h2>
<p>After Sappho is a novel in fragments or cascading vignettes. It rolls like water, like waves, introducing the reader to numerous feminists, writers, sapphists, activists and artists from the late 19th and 20th centuries. It is through their work and how they determine to live their own lives that they carve out a way to take control, become themselves, and inspire others to do the same. </p>
<p>The narrative of the book adopts the plural first-person “we” or collective voice, binding us as a community of readers to the pioneering poetry of Sappho and these brilliant women who followed, showing us how to live. We become part of the chorus line, the voices that will never be silenced.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476005/original/file-20220726-16-hvxmgq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476005/original/file-20220726-16-hvxmgq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476005/original/file-20220726-16-hvxmgq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476005/original/file-20220726-16-hvxmgq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476005/original/file-20220726-16-hvxmgq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476005/original/file-20220726-16-hvxmgq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476005/original/file-20220726-16-hvxmgq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476005/original/file-20220726-16-hvxmgq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sappho has been called history’s first lesbian – and the word itself derives from her home, the island of Lesbos. (Art by Julius Johann Ferdinand Kronberg)</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At first read, I was a little shy; I thought I needed to know everyone and everything before meeting them: a bit like coming out, I needed to demonstrate a solid sense of the self. Bite by bite, Wynn Schwartz introduces us to her characters, folding them together and into us: she lets their voices “wing their way through”; rise on our tongues.</p>
<p>In this work there are the sapphistories of herstorical figures we know well. There’s Radclyffe Hall, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Bernhardt">Sarah Bernhardt</a>, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf – along with lesser-knowns such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%22Bricktop%22_Smith">Ada Bricktop Smith</a>, who in 1924 learned what it was like to black up her face (when she was already a black girl) in order to earn a living, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Gray">Eileen Gray</a>, who in the 1920s as an avant garde artist, writer and architect, opened a gallery of her own, full of light and lacquer and glass.</p>
<p>Difficult-to-read counternarrative moments intersect these herstories. Such as the story of Italian poet, playwright and feminist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Poletti">Lina Poletti</a> (said to be one of Italy’s first openly declared lesbians) giving the poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke">Rainer Maria Rilke</a> an unfinished draft of a play she had written. She wrote Arianna at a time when she and her lover, the great actress Eleonora Duse, were “almost winged”. (Poletti and Duse lived with each other for a time; Rilke was obsessed with Duse.) Rilke declared “she wanted too much, her <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ariadne-Greek-mythology">Ariadne</a> was too many things at once”. Poletti suspected Rilke was “lying through his teeth”.</p>
<p>And <a href="https://spartacus-educational.com/FWWblackbook.htm">Noel Pemberton Billing’s Black Book</a> (compiled by the British Secret Service, by reports from German agents), listing every lesbian in Britain (although by law they didn’t exist), and denouncing “lesbian ecstasy” and the Cult of the Clitoris – is it “an unsteadiness in the hand”, is it a “trembling in the mouth”? Moments like this plunge any “careful becoming” back centuries, “into history we had barely survived”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-sappho-a-poet-in-fragments-90823">Guide to the classics: Sappho, a poet in fragments</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A prescient book, for our times</h2>
<p>This book is prescient, written for our times. It’s not just an important re-writing/righting of herstory, or a new view on queer feminists in turn-of-the-century Europe. It’s a warning and a light shone forward, posing an old question we are still asking, especially with the recent Supreme Court overturning of <a href="https://theconversation.com/us-supreme-court-overturns-roe-v-wade-but-for-abortion-opponents-this-is-just-the-beginning-185768">Roe v. Wade</a> in the US. </p>
<p>As Italian suffragist and businesswoman <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenia_Rasponi">Eugenia Rasponi</a> argues hotly in 1914, more than 100 years ago: “We are still denying to women the right to their own bodies? It is as if the new century has changed nothing.” Fellow Italian feminist (and writer) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibilla_Aleramo">Sibilla Aleramo</a> explains: it’s not democracy, but tyranny. </p>
<p>Dotted throughout this novel is the everywoman <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra">Cassandra</a>, who was famously fated to tell the truth but never be believed. She appears in different time periods in this novel, a lantern-bearer and prophetess, modelled by Wynn Schwartz on the Trojan priestess and the poet Anne Carson and her poem “Cassandra Float Can” (from her collection, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/float-9781910702574">Float</a>). Cassandra is also a figure in Virginia Woolf’s writing; she invented a “Cassandra for 1914” to counter the madness of war; Cassandra lights the way to a different kind of future. </p>
<p>We need a modern-day Cassandra, a Cassandra for our time who can scream outside of language, “gash the fabric of normal life, to rend it into strange tatters”. The point and impulse of language is everywhere. A Cassandra who lives in her own future. It is time for women to take language for themselves, as Gertrude Stein argues: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-ZOd2nDVk84?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Anne Carson performs ‘Cassandra Float Can’ – one of many references in this rich novel of reimagination.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Each short section of After Sappho, each next fragment, juxtaposes a new day. A further revelation, “scattershot relief against a landscape”. Wynn Schwartz gives us a grammar of becoming that touches all surfaces “like flash powder”; a kaleidoscope of pleasure; a seeking of verb and tense, shifts and changes. </p>
<p>She brings together her purposefully arranged fragments of herstory of this time and these fierce women to give us hope “of becoming in all our forms and genres”. She tells us, “The future of Sappho shall be us.”</p>
<p>And there we are, among these wonderful foremothers, in first-person plural around the table – you know that game, of wishing guests to a slow degustation. The same table that brings Vita and Virginia together for the first time when Vita breaks in, to get Virginia’s attention: “I think you are Sappho of our time.” We will never be silenced.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/painting-in-circles-and-loving-in-triangles-the-bloomsbury-groups-queer-ways-of-seeing-75438">Painting in circles and loving in triangles: the Bloomsbury Group's queer ways of seeing</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Speak desires aloud and inspire’</h2>
<p>This is a book in verb and body, a novel of many parts – it’s fun thinking of its genre (fun writing a review in fragments) – a hybrid of “imaginaries and intimate nonfictions”, “a composition as explanation”, “an alchemical experiment”. In this novel, characters are tracked across pages and different years: some come to the page as more of a sketch (like a first draft) and build up as they return; others appear fully formed from when we first meet them.</p>
<p>Writing this review happened in the pages and margins of the book itself: a jot here, underlinings, arrows, transcription, <em>X X X</em> against passages for extra emphasis. There was so much to remark upon, absorb; my imaginaries interlocking with those on the page. </p>
<p>After Sappho is an unstructured community where everyone is equal and where this community imbues a spirit of its own: a heady fountain of what can happen in a space of togetherness itself, in which the “blush of our inner parts” turn “out towards each other”. Where, as inverts and delinquents, lesbians and viragos, we want to be “everything at once” and believe “this is possible”. Wynn Schwartz invites us to this Sapphic community: right here, right now. “Life itself”, present tense. Where we congregate, speak desires aloud and inspire. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolfs-feminist-call-to-arms-145398">Guide to the classics: A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's feminist call to arms</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>After Sappho is an ecstatic read, a sapphistory writing ourselves into existence into the lives we want to live – not the lives others want us to live. It is a provocation to become who we want to become. The women in this wondrous novel, a <em>tour de Sappho</em>, are our foremothers, our foresapphists. Birds fly out of its pages. </p>
<p>Selby Wynn Schwartz gives us a dark herstory; one that is hysterically funny, poetic and maddeningly tender. It is skin and sinew and breath and longing. And becoming. Remember to tongue it slowly.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184459/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Francesca Rendle-Short does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Selby Wynn Schwartz’s inventive, poetic reimagining of lives like those of Virginia Woolf and Sarah Bernhardt – against a backdrop of Sappho – has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize.Francesca Rendle-Short, Professor, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1712432021-11-08T15:06:47Z2021-11-08T15:06:47ZDamon Galgut’s Booker-winning novel probes white South Africa and the land issue<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430220/original/file-20211104-13-fa1nfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Damon Galgut at a photocall for this year's Booker Prize in London.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>South African writer Damon Galgut has <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2021">won</a> the UK’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, for his work <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/promise/9781415210581">The Promise</a>. It was Galgut’s third shortlisting for the career-defining award, which has evaded him until now. In 2003 he was shortlisted for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview17">The Good Doctor</a> and in 2010 for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/25/in-a-strange-room-review">In a Strange Room</a>. So what is it that makes his latest novel The Promise so special? We asked Galgut expert Sofia Kostelac to fill us in about the writer and his tale of a white South African family’s reckoning with a racist past – and why the book is important, especially in South Africa where it is set.</em></p>
<p><em>Warning: This article contains spoilers.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Who is Damon Galgut?</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/damon-galgut">Damon Galgut</a> is a South African writer born in Pretoria in 1963. He now lives and works in Cape Town. He made his literary debut at the age of 18, with the publication of his first novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1270771.A_Sinless_Season"><em>A Sinless Season</em></a>, in 1982. <em>The Promise</em> is his ninth novel, and the third to be shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Although best known for his novels, Galgut has also authored several plays, screenplays and short stories. </p>
<p>Like many readers, I was first made aware of Galgut’s writing when <em>The Good Doctor</em> was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003. That novel encompasses many of the themes that Galgut has become best known for, including his searching meditations on the devastating legacies of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> and white-minority rule in South Africa. Yet his literary range also extends well beyond forms of politically engaged realism. It includes experiments with fictionalised memoir or ‘autrebiography’ (<em>In a Strange Room</em>), biographical fiction (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/28/arctic-summer-damon-galgut-review"><em>Arctic Summer</em></a>) and metaphysical crime writing (<a href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-quarry/"><em>The Quarry</em></a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/22/fiction.reviews"><em>The Impostor</em></a>). </p>
<p><strong>What is <em>The Promise</em> all about?</strong></p>
<p><em>The Promise</em> is a carefully layered novel that spans just over three decades in the lives of the Swarts, a white South African family living on a farm just outside of Pretoria. The promise of the novel’s title refers to the commitment that Manie makes to fulfil his wife Rachel’s dying wish: to give their domestic worker Salome, who has worked for the family for decades, the house on the Swart farm in which she lives. The promise remains unfulfilled for the next 31 years as successive inheritors of the land refuse to cede the property to Salome.</p>
<p>The novel is divided into four parts, each focused on the death and funeral of a member of the Swart family. The deaths occur roughly a decade apart from each other. This is a structuring device that allows Galgut to hold three decades of South African history – from the violent state of emergency in the mid-1980s to the tumult of contemporary times – in view. While the dramatic socio-political changes of these years are apparent in every aspect of the Swart family’s lives, little changes for Salome, whose wait for the dignity and safety represented by land and property endures.</p>
<p><strong>Why does the book matter?</strong></p>
<p>At the heart of the novel – and the unfulfilled promise to Salome – lies the question of what sort of restitution is possible in the context of South Africa’s brutally iniquitous history? The bitter irony on which the story rests is that Salome’s house is entirely undesirable, consisting of “three rooms and a broken roof. On a tough piece of land.” It holds almost no material value for the Swarts, yet the family is torn asunder by their disagreements over its fate. </p>
<p>What would it take, the novel implicitly asks, for a family like the Swarts to give up a modicum of their privilege to nudge us towards a more equitable society? <em>The Promise</em> attends, with meticulous detail and insight, to the pathologies of racism, pride and fear that make such acts unlikely. </p>
<p>Galgut has rightly been praised by reviewers and the Booker judges for the formal skill with which he handles these vexing themes. The narrative voice is a remarkably inventive one that ranges between diverse characters with apparent ease, and delivers a rare combination of irony and empathy that wryly critiques the novel’s deeply flawed and afflicted characters without dehumanising them. </p>
<p><strong>Does the Booker Prize matter and what will it do for Galgut’s career?</strong></p>
<p>The Booker Prize is almost unparalleled in the attention and esteem it affords its winners. The prize has played a significant role in shaping the South African literary canon, and Galgut is now likely to take up a well-earned place alongside pantheons like <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2003/coetzee/biographical/">J.M Coetzee</a> and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/biographical/">Nadine Gordimer</a> as among the most recognised, studied and anthologised of the country’s writers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171243/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sofia Kostelac does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Will white South Africa ever give up part of its privilege? This is the contentious issue at the heart Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel.Sofia Kostelac, Lecturer, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1712552021-11-06T09:46:12Z2021-11-06T09:46:12ZBooker Prize: Damon Galgut’s The Promise is a reminder of South Africa’s continued and difficult journey to a better future<p><em>This article may contain spoilers.</em></p>
<p>Damon Galgut, a white South African playwright and novelist, has won the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/112/1120336/the-promise/9781784744069.html">The Promise</a>, a satirical portrait of a white family living in Pretoria in post-apartheid South Africa. The story is a very personal one for Galgut, who grew up in Pretoria and witnessed late apartheid and its demise.</p>
<p>The novel follows the decline of four generations of the Swart family over 40 years and starts at the end of apartheid. It focuses on the pledge made by a dying family member to bequeath the family’s property to their black domestic worker. This promise goes ignored by future generations of the family. And it becomes an allegory for the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149262">broken promises</a> made to black South Africans at the dawn of the country’s non-racial democracy in 1994. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1455993213102305280"}"></div></p>
<p>As an academic who has focused on <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719083204/">South African society and history</a>, I first came across a photo of Galgut when I was researching the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/end-conscription-campaign-ecc">End Conscription Campaign</a> – a <a href="https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/9y94y/shades-of-white-complicity-the-end-conscription-campaign-and-the-politics-of-white-liberal-ignorance-in-south-africe">white anti-apartheid movement</a> formed in 1983 that aimed to abolish compulsory military service. </p>
<p>Like all white men at the time, Galgut was legally obliged to serve for two years in the South African army enforcing apartheid rule. Galgut was featured as “National Serviceman of the Month” in a 1983 edition of the apartheid military’s propaganda magazine, Paratus. This is a broader subject he has explored in his 1991 novel, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/beautiful-screaming-pigs/9781415209875">The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs</a>.</p>
<h2>A troubled history</h2>
<p>The majority of white South Africans are descended from Dutch settlers and <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-an-oppressors-language-reclaiming-the-hidden-history-of-afrikaans-71838#:%7E:text=Afrikaans%20is%20a%20creole%20language,indigenous%20Khoekhoe%20and%20San%20languages.">speak Afrikaans</a>. During apartheid, racial separation was legally enforced and many white people saw themselves as a superior race. Whites were given the best jobs and education – creating a <a href="https://theconversation.com/white-people-in-south-africa-still-hold-the-lions-share-of-all-forms-of-capital-75510">wealthy white elite</a>. After a lengthy Liberation Struggle with widespread protests and leading to a violent State of Emergency in the 1980s, Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and negotiations began. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.anc1912.org.za/">African National Congress</a> has been in power in South Africa ever since the election of <a href="https://theconversation.com/mandela-in-south-africa-death-and-politics-are-bedfellows-21301">Nelson Mandela</a> in 1994. But under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma (2009-2018), the party badly let down the country – with a decade of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-57758641">endemic corruption</a>. </p>
<p>Today, more than 25 years since the first democratic elections, white South Africans continue to <a href="https://theconversation.com/white-people-in-south-africa-still-hold-the-lions-share-of-all-forms-of-capital-75510">dominate the economy</a>, higher education and much of the media. And white South Africans continue to wield <a href="https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-mmusi-maimane-africa-south-africa-political-parties-6b76823b072aa940cef28249aec66928">significant political power</a>.</p>
<p>At the same time, many in the country’s white community <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/lens/examining-identity-race-and-responsibility-among-white-south-africans.html">have ignored</a> their role in ongoing racial inequality and are resistant to meaningful social, economic and political change. Large numbers of white families have emigrated or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/24/an-indictment-of-south-africa-whites-only-town-orania-is-booming">retreated</a> to <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1175370/johannesburgs-gated-communities-echo-apartheid-era-segregation-in-south-africa/">fortified luxury compounds</a> within the country – and continue to profit from systems of structural racism. It is maybe no surprise, then, that <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/transnational-white-supremacist-militancy-thriving-south-africa">white supremacist movements</a> in South Africa are thriving.</p>
<h2>White resistance</h2>
<p>As I discovered in my <a href="https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/9y94y/shades-of-white-complicity-the-end-conscription-campaign-and-the-politics-of-white-liberal-ignorance-in-south-africa">research</a>, many white liberals who once opposed apartheid have become reactionary critics in the new South Africa.</p>
<p>Politician and former journalist, <a href="https://twitter.com/helenzille?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Helen Zille</a>, for example, who served as the national leader (2007–2015) of the Democratic Alliance – South Africa’s official opposition party – has gone from being a liberal anti-apartheid and anti-conscription campaigner in the 1980s, to controversially describing South Africa as <a href="https://www.capetalk.co.za/articles/421599/zille-slammed-for-insulting-opinion-piece-on-zuma-democracy-and-african-cultures">‘a modern constitutional democracy’, imposed, ‘on what is largely a traditional, African feudal society’</a> and reproducing culture war discourses for a South African audience in her latest book <a href="https://mg.co.za/friday/2021-05-22-pope-zille-speaks-her-truth-go-woke-stay-broke/">#Stay Woke: Go Broke</a>.</p>
<p>Despite Zille, who is also the former mayor of Cape Town and premier of the Western Cape, being <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/29/south-africa-racism-row-twitter">publicly called out</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-40143710">suspended</a> and investigated by her own party for numerous <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/news/helen-zille-defends-colonialism-tweets-again-20784079">tweets</a> that defended colonialism, claiming it was “not all bad”, she remains the party’s Federal Chairperson and played a leading role in the recent provincial and municipal elections. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Farm land and a sunset." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430284/original/file-20211104-19-17q57as.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aerial view of farmland east of Pretoria, South Africa, where the novel is set.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/aerial-view-farm-land-east-pretoria-1592212840">Salt Rock Digital/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1070289X.2012.672840">Research</a> has also found that many white people who lived through apartheid <a href="http://www.brandonhamber.com/publications/Journal%20A%20State%20of%20Denial.pdf">minimise</a> the suffering and racism of the time. It has even been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba3E-Ha5Efc">claimed by some</a> that white “<a href="https://www.accord.org.za/ajcr-issues/farm-attacks-or-white-genocide-interrogating-the-unresolved-land-question-in-south-africa/">suffering</a>” post-apartheid could be <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/myth-white-genocide">worse than</a> the experiences of black people during apartheid. </p>
<p>But while racism is still deeply embedded, with South Africa’s simmering social and class divisions <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211024072">continuing to play out</a>, there are some signs of <a href="https://theworld.org/stories/2020-06-11/what-south-africa-can-teach-us-racial-justice-and-reconciliation">racial reconciliation</a>. Just as during the traumatic years of apartheid, intelligent and humane cultural critics, artists, academics and activists, continue to be deeply committed to achieving meaningful change. </p>
<p>Indeed, with the success of The Promise, Damon Galgut joins a distinguished line of South African authors. Those such as <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/author/herman-charles-bosman/2821961">Herman Charles Bosman</a>, <a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/andre-brink">Andre Brink</a>, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/facts/">Nadine Gordimer</a> and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2003/coetzee/biographical/">JM Coetzee</a>, all of whom grappled with the complex dynamics of the country’s white community in their writing. And in this way, Galgut’s Booker win serves a crucial purpose in illuminating, questioning and exploring the country’s continued difficult journey to a better future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171255/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Conway has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy. </span></em></p>Damon Galgut joins a distinguished line of South African authors, who are grappling with the complex dynamics of the country’s white community in their writing.Daniel Conway, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies, University of WestminsterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1694912021-10-07T14:38:39Z2021-10-07T14:38:39ZNobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah: an introduction to the man and his writing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/425286/original/file-20211007-18946-f6zeiv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Abdulrazak Gurnah during the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2017.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Nobel Prize in Literature, considered the pinnacle of achievement for creative writers, has been awarded <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature/">114 times to 118</a> Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2021. This year it <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/gurnah/facts/">went to</a> novelist <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/7/tanzanias-abdulrazak-gurnah-wins-2021-nobel-prize-in-literature">Abdulrazak Gurnah</a>, who was born in Zanzibar, the first Tanzanian writer to win. The last black African writer to win the prize was <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/ceremony-speech/">Wole Soyinka in 1986</a>. Gurnah is the first black writer to win since <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/">Toni Morrison in 1993</a>. Charl Blignaut asked Lizzy Attree to describe the winner and share her views on his literary career.</em></p>
<h2>Who is Gurnah and what is his place in East African literature?</h2>
<p>Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian writer who writes in English and lives and works in the UK. He was born in Zanzibar, the semi-autonomous island off the east African coast, and studied at Christchurch College Canterbury in 1968.</p>
<p>Zanzibar underwent a revolution in 1964 in which citizens of Arab origin were persecuted. Gurnah was forced to flee the country when he was 18. He began to write in English as a 21-year-old refugee in England, although Kiswahili is his first language. His first novel, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Departure-Abdulrazak-Gurnah/dp/0802110185">Memory of Departure</a>, was published in 1987.</p>
<p>He has written numerous works that pose questions around ideas of belonging, colonialism, displacement, memory and migration. His novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/765618.Paradise">Paradise</a>, set in colonial east Africa during the first world war, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.</p>
<p>Comparable to <a href="http://www.mgvassanji.com/">Moyez G. Vassanji</a>, a Canadian author raised in Tanzania, whose attention focuses on the east African Indian community and their interaction with the “others”, Gurnah’s novel Paradise deploys multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism on the shores of the Indian Ocean from the perspective of the Swahili elite.</p>
<p>A distinguished academic and critic, he recently sat on the board of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-kiswahili-science-fiction-award-charts-a-path-for-african-languages-163876">Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African literature</a> and has served as a contributing editor for the literary magazine <a href="https://www.wasafiri.org/">Wasafiri</a> for many years.</p>
<p>He is currently Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, having retired in 2017.</p>
<h2>Why is Gurnah’s work being celebrated - what is powerful about it?</h2>
<p>He was <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/gurnah/facts/">awarded</a> the Nobel </p>
<blockquote>
<p>for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He is one of the most important contemporary postcolonial novelists writing in Britain today and is the first black African writer to win the prize since Wole Soyinka in 1986. Gurnah is also the first Tanzanian writer to win.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/425279/original/file-20211007-18619-132ptr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/425279/original/file-20211007-18619-132ptr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/425279/original/file-20211007-18619-132ptr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/425279/original/file-20211007-18619-132ptr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/425279/original/file-20211007-18619-132ptr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/425279/original/file-20211007-18619-132ptr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/425279/original/file-20211007-18619-132ptr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/425279/original/file-20211007-18619-132ptr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Copies of Afterlives by Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His most recent novel, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/afterlives-9781526615855/">Afterlives</a>, is about Ilyas, who was taken from his parents by German colonial troops as a boy and returns to his village after years of fighting against his own people. The power in Gurnah’s writing lies in this ability to complicate the Manichean divisions of enemies and friends, and excavate hidden histories, revealing the shifting nature of identity and experience.</p>
<h2>What Gurnah work stands out for you and why?</h2>
<p>The novel Paradise stands out for me because in it Gurnah re-maps Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad’s 19th century journey to the “heart of darkness” from an east African position going westwards. As South African scholar Johan Jacobs <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00138390903444164">has said</a>, he </p>
<blockquote>
<p>reconfigures the darkness at its heart … In his fictional transaction with Heart of Darkness, Gurnah shows in Paradise that the corruption of trade into subjection and enslavement pre-dates European colonisation, and that in East Africa servitude and slavery have always been woven into the social fabric. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The tale is narrated so gently by 12-year-old Yusuf, lovingly describing gardens and assorted notions of paradise and their corruption as he is pawned between masters and travels to different parts of the interior from the coast. Yusuf concludes that the brutality of German colonialism is still preferable to the ruthless exploitation by the Arabs. </p>
<p>Like Achebe in Things Fall Apart (1958), Gurnah illustrates east African society on the verge of huge change, showing that colonialism accelerated this process but did not initiate it.</p>
<h2>Is the Nobel literature prize still relevant?</h2>
<p>It’s still relevant because it is still the biggest single prize purse for literature around. But the method of selecting a winner is fairly secretive and depends on nominations from within the academy, meaning doctors and professors of literature and former laureates. This means that although the potential nominees are often discussed in advance by pundits, no-one actually knows who is in the running until the prize winner is announced. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for example, is a Kenyan writer <a href="https://theconversation.com/tipped-to-win-nobel-literature-prize-kenyas-ngugi-misses-out-again-67009">whom many believe should have won by now</a>, along with a number of others like Ivan Vladislavic from South Africa. </p>
<p>Winning puts a global spotlight on a writer who has often not been given full recognition by other prizes, or whose work has been neglected in translation, thus breathing new life into works that many have not read before and deserve to be read more widely.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169491/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lizzy Attree does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The power in Gurnah’s writing lies in his ability to complicate the Manichean divisions of enemies and friends.Lizzy Attree, Adjunct Professor, Richmond American International UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1629632021-06-18T08:01:30Z2021-06-18T08:01:30ZDavid Diop: son récit obsédant d’un soldat sénégalais, couronné par le Booker Prize<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407037/original/file-20210617-21-89dysr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait de l'écrivain franco-sénégalais David Diop dont le roman a remporté le
prix international Booker 2021.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Né d'une mère française et d'un père sénégalais, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Diop">David Diop</a> a <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/international-booker/news/2021-international-booker-prize-winner-announcement">remporté</a> le prestigieux <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/international-booker/2021">International Booker prize</a> décerné tous les ans, pour sa fiction traduite. Il partage ce prix avec sa traductrice, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anna-moschovakis">Anna
Moschovakis</a> pour le roman, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374266974">“At Night All Blood is Black”</a> – ce qui
pourrait se traduire par “La nuit le sang est toujours noir”. L’ouvrage raconte l'histoire d'un soldat sénégalais qui sombre dans la folie, alors qu'il se bat pour la France pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. Best-seller en France, ce livre a remporté plusieurs grands prix littéraires. Caroline D. Laurent, spécialiste des études postcoloniales francophones et de la représentation de l'histoire dans l'art, explique la raison pour laquelle ce roman est important.</em></p>
<h2>Qui est David Diop ?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/02/david-diop-wins-international-booker-for-frightening-at-night-all-blood-is-black">Diop</a> est un écrivain et universitaire franco-sénégalais, né à Paris en 1966. Il a grandi à Dakar, au Sénégal. Son père est sénégalais et sa mère française, et ce double héritage culturel se retrouve dans ses œuvres littéraires. Il a étudié en France, où il <a href="https://alter.univ-pau.fr/fr/organisation/membres/cv_-ddiop-fr.html">enseigne</a> présentement la littérature du 18e siècle.</p>
<p>“At Night All Blood is Black” est son deuxième roman ; <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42409032-1889-l-attraction-universelle">le premier</a> – “1889, l’Attraction universelle” (2012) décrit une délégation sénégalaise à l'exposition universelle de 1889 à Paris. Son prochain livre, portant sur le voyage d’un Européen en Afrique, devrait sortir cet été.</p>
<h2>De quoi parle <em>At Night All Blood is Black/Frère d'âme</em> ?</h2>
<p>Ce livre raconte l'histoire d'Alfa Ndiaye, un tirailleur sénégalais, qui est le narrateur principal du roman (il utilise le pronom personnel « je » dans la plus grande partie du texte). Il se bat <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-time-has-come-for-france-to-own-up-to-the-massacre-of-its-own-troops-in-senegal-35131">aux côtés de la France</a> – et sur le sol français – pendant la Première Guerre mondiale.</p>
<p>Le roman commence par la narration d'un événement traumatisant dont le soldat africain a été témoin : l’agonie longue et douloureuse de son meilleur ami, Mademba Diop. Ce traumatisme dirige la vengeance d'Alfa, qui pourrait également être perçue comme une punition. Il tue des soldats allemands de la même manière, reproduisant et répétant ainsi la scène traumatisante. Après quoi, il coupe une de leurs mains qu’il conserve.</p>
<p>Alfa est alors envoyé dans un hôpital psychiatrique où les médecins tentent de le soigner. Le livre traite des concepts de névrose de guerre et <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-shell-shock-to-ptsd-a-century-of-invisible-war-trauma-74911">du choc des obus</a> apparus à cette époque (ce que nous appelons actuellement <a href="https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/">le syndrome de stress post-traumatique</a>).</p>
<p>Dans sa forme, cet ouvrage associe des éléments d'un monologue intérieur et d'un témoignage. Cela permet au lecteur de découvrir, à travers les yeux d'un sujet colonial, les horreurs de la guerre.</p>
<p>En ce sens, le texte écrit par Diop est nuancé : il décrit la violence perpétrée et vécue par toutes les parties. Alfa Ndiaye devient un symbole de l'ambivalence de la guerre et de son pouvoir destructeur.</p>
<h2>Pourquoi ce livre est-il important ?</h2>
<p>Il revêt une certaine importance parce qu'il aborde ce que j'appellerais une histoire passée sous silence : celle des troupes coloniales françaises. Bien que ces dernières, et surtout les <a href="https://www.historynet.com/senegalese-tirailleurs-the-forgotten-infantrymen-of-world-war-2.htm">tirailleurs sénégalais</a>, un corps d'infanterie coloniale de l'armée française, aient été constituées au 19e siècle, elles sont devenues « visibles » pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, lorsqu'elles ont pris part aux combats menés sur le sol européen.</p>
<p>Malgré cela, la participation des soldats africains aux deux guerres mondiales n’est guère enseignée dans les écoles françaises ni débattue dans la sphère publique. La violence exercée lors du recrutement en Afrique-Occidentale française et en Afrique-Equatoriale française, leur mise à l'écart des autres troupes et de la population française, notamment par le biais d'une langue spécifique (le <em><a href="https://benjamins.com/catalog/le.18009.par">français tirailleur</a></em>) – créée pour empêcher toute communication réelle – et le traitement qui leur a été infligé après les guerres vont à l'encontre d'un récit spécifiquement français mettant en exergue les aspects positifs du colonialisme français et de sa mission civilisatrice.</p>
<p>Le manque de visibilité des tirailleurs sénégalais et de leur histoire est également lié à la contestation permanente d’événements précis. L'un d'eux en particulier est le <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-time-has-come-for-france-to-own-up-to-the-massacre-of-its-own-troops-in-senegal-35131">massacre de Thiaroye</a>. En décembre 1944, entre 70 et 300 (ces chiffres sont contestés) tirailleurs sénégalais ont été tués dans un camp de démobilisation à Thiaroye, après avoir demandé leur dû pour leur service militaire.</p>
<p>Diop parvient également à mettre fin aux stéréotypes liés aux tirailleurs sénégalais. Dans les représentations historiques et littéraires françaises, ils sont considérés à la fois comme des enfants naïfs ayant besoin d'être guidés et comme des guerriers barbares. Les tirailleurs sénégalais ont participé, contre leur gré, à la propagande guerrière : cette représentation devait susciter la peur du côté français comme du côté allemand (<em>Die Schwarze Schande</em> – La honte noire – présentait les soldats africains comme des violeurs et des bêtes).</p>
<p>Diop s'approprie cette représentation pour la rendre plus complexe : alors que la violence exprimée par Alfa en tuant ses ennemis suit cette logique, on se rend compte qu’elle provoque une grande détresse et en est le résultat. De plus, Diop inverse également cette vision quand il se demande qui est humain et qui est inhumain : Alfa affirme que son capitaine, Armand, est plus barbare que lui.</p>
<p>Diop parvient ainsi à remettre en question les représentations des soldats noirs, dictées par les stéréotypes coloniaux – pour mieux les démolir.</p>
<h2>Pourquoi cette distinction Booker importe-t-elle ?</h2>
<p>Le fait que Diop reçoive l’International Booker Prize est particulièrement important, car “At Night All Blood is Black” dépeint une histoire typiquement française, liée aux entreprises coloniales de ce pays. Et même si le roman se concentre sur la France, il met en relation d'autres histoires, car il souligne indirectement le fait que d'autres puissances coloniales européennes ont également eu recours à des troupes coloniales pendant les guerres et ont effacé le rôle qu’elles ont joué dans leurs commémorations ultérieures.</p>
<p>Ce roman montre également l'importance et le pouvoir de la traduction, car Anna Moschovakis a réussi à traduire toute la beauté et l'horreur de la prose de Diop. De la même manière que Diop parvient à combiner son double héritage dans son texte, Moschovakis a permis aux lecteurs anglais de découvrir une histoire spécifique à la France, et pourtant similaire à d'autres histoires.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/162963/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caroline D. Laurent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Le roman de l'auteur franco-sénégalais, intitulé Frère d’âme (traduit en anglais par At Night All Blood is Black) est l'histoire poignante et marquante, sur le plan politique, d'un soldat sénégalais.Caroline D. Laurent, Postdoctoral fellow, Harvard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1505072020-11-20T11:36:26Z2020-11-20T11:36:26ZBooker Prize – masterful Scottish working-class story Shuggie Bain wins in most diverse year yet<p>Douglas Stuart’s debut novel <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54976523">Shuggie Bain has won the 52nd Booker Prize</a>. The ceremony, normally a glitzy affair with long speeches, readings from shortlisted books and a lavish dinner, was held in a relatively empty Roundhouse Theatre. </p>
<p>The few in attendance included BBC Front Row’s John Wilson, the 2020 Booker Prize Chair of Judges Margaret Busby, last year’s winner <a href="https://theconversation.com/booker-prize-with-two-winners-its-a-double-edged-victory-perhaps-bernardine-evaristo-needed-the-recognition-more-125328">Bernadine Evaristo</a> and the <a href="https://www.chineke.org/">Chineke! Chamber Ensemble</a>. The shortlisted authors and guest speakers joined virtually, beamed into the ceremony from their homes. </p>
<p>Whether deliberately or not, this was one of the most politically charged Booker Prize shortlists and winner we’ve ever had. Not only did the ceremony include a video from former President Barack Obama, who wished the shortlisted authors luck and expounded on the importance of reading, but the shortlist and eventual winner also echo the most significant and complex challenges we have faced throughout 2020. </p>
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<p>The entire shortlist speaks to our current cultural moment – covering themes such as climate change, existential anxiety, the challenges of familial care, racial micro-aggressions and class prejudice. The <a href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/shuggie-bain/">winner</a> explores issues of childhood poverty, parental alcoholism and emotional neglect in 1980s Glasgow, issues which remain alarmingly relevant in 2020. The pandemic has highlighted social inequalities throughout the UK, particularly the vulnerability of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/26/uk-faces-child-poverty-crisis-charities-warn">4.2 million children living in relative poverty</a>. </p>
<p>It seems that Shuggie Bain’s relevance in 2020 was clear to the prize judges <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54976523">who reportedly</a> took only an hour to come to the unanimous decision to select the winner. Busby said that Shuggie Bain was “<a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-awards-booker/shuggie-bain-wins-booker-prize-for-scottish-author-douglas-stuart-idUKKBN27Z31K">destined to become a classic</a>”.</p>
<h2>A diverse longlist</h2>
<p>There is no doubt that prize shortlists – whether for literature, film or art – reflect the cultural and political moment in which they exist. This may seem an obvious point since all forms of art are influenced by the context within which they’re created. But it is nonetheless important to remember that prizes are not only celebrations of artistic endeavour; but are a kind of time capsule, capturing the cultural moment in which they were chosen. </p>
<p>This year we’ve sought out art and literature that helps us make sense of the systemic political and social inequities embedded within society. This was seen by the rise of sales of books such as Reni Eddo-Lodge’s <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race-9781408870587/">Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race </a> in response to the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer. This surge in sales led to Eddo-Lodge <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/16/reni-eddo-lodge-first-black-british-author-top-uk-book-charts-why-i-m-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race">becoming the first black British author to top UK book charts</a>. </p>
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<p>The 2020 Booker Prize has contributed to this moment too. This year’s longlist was <a href="https://theconversation.com/booker-prize-refreshingly-diverse-longlist-with-plenty-of-new-writers-but-lets-see-if-hilary-mantel-wins-her-third-143559">one of the most diverse in the prize’s history</a>. On the shortlist, four of the six books were debut novels and four of the six shortlisted authors are writers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. It was also the most diverse judging panel ever. </p>
<p>During the ceremony, Busby was reluctant to suggest that the diverse selection of books was deliberate. She did, however, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/l002p7sk/booker-prize-ceremony-2020-a-front-row-special">acknowledge</a> that publishing still had some way to go “in terms of including people from a different demographic […] people from different classes, different ethnicities, different regions of the country”. </p>
<h2>More work to be done</h2>
<p>The Booker Prize <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-man-booker-prize-still-has-a-long-way-to-go-before-it-is-truly-inclusive-49157">itself has historically replicated inequities</a>. It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t until 2015 that the judging panel <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/news/2014/12/11/2015-man-booker-prize-fiction-judges-announced">included a black judge</a>, and Bernadine Evaristo was <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/news/bernardine-evaristo-being-first-black-woman-to-win-booker-is-bittersweet-38595669.html">the first black woman to win the prize in 2019</a> (even then she had to <a href="https://gal-dem.com/as-the-first-black-woman-to-win-the-booker-prize-bernardine-evaristo-deserved-to-win-alone/">share it with Margaret Atwood</a>).</p>
<p>While the diversity of the authors and stories on the shortlist might suggest that publishing has made demonstrable progress in recent years, the <a href="https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/projects/rethinking-diversity/">Rethinking Diversity in Publishing report</a> published earlier this year reminds us otherwise. The industry is far from implementing significant changes. Publishers continue to make broad assumptions about their core (white, middle-class) audiences, fail to reach diverse audiences, and undervalue writers and readers from BAME and working-class backgrounds.</p>
<p>Stuart is only the second Scottish author to ever win the award. He follows <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/galleries/1994">James Kelman’s 1994 win</a> for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/14/booker-club-james-kelman-how-late">How Late It Was, How Late</a>, a novel which also explored poor, working-class life in Glasgow. </p>
<p>So, while we should celebrate the 2020 Booker Prize for its diversity in voice, representation and themes, it has been borne of a specific moment in which we have been forced to examine societal inequities and structural inequalities. And we cannot become complacent about the enduring need to continue this work.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150507/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stevie Marsden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The story of child poverty in 1980s Glasgow speaks to current concerns across the UK.Stevie Marsden, Tutor in Publishing, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1481332020-10-23T10:52:16Z2020-10-23T10:52:16ZLiterary prizes and the problem with the UK publishing industry<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363976/original/file-20201016-17-1lec88q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-beige-coat-standing-near-white-wooden-book-shelf-4855385/">Pexels</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year’s Booker prize shortlist offers the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/15/most-diverse-booker-prize-shortlist-is-also-almost-all-american-hilary-mantel">most diverse</a> lineup ever with four female and two male writers, four of who are people of colour. But while the diversity of the 2020 shortlist for the best original novel is to be commended, the majority of the publishers of Booker-winning novels are still based in London.</p>
<p>This reflects that the concentration of power in UK publishing is still in the English capital. As such, non-English British writers published outside London are perennially disadvantaged by the Booker’s selection criteria.</p>
<p>And as it stands, of the 30 times the prize has been awarded to UK-based authors, it has only once gone to a Scottish author: James Kelman’s <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/books/how-late-it-was-how-late-by">How Late it Was How Late</a>, in 1994. It went once to a Welsh author – Bernice Rubens for <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/books/elected-member-by">The Elected Member</a> in 1970 – while Anna Burns became the <a href="https://theconversation.com/booker-prize-2018-anna-burns-wins-but-the-big-publishers-are-the-real-victors-105065">first winner</a> from Northern Ireland in 2018 for <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/books/milkman-by">Milkman</a>. Three non-English, but UK-based winners, all of which were published by London presses.</p>
<p>The Booker is steeped in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/oct/18/booker-prize-history-controversy-criticism">Britain’s colonial history</a>, having originally been set up as an award for British and Commonwealth writers writing in the English language and published in the UK and Ireland.</p>
<p>The literary prize <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24126882">opened up its entry criteria</a> in 2013 to allow submissions from writers born outside of Britain, its Commonwealth and its former colonies. This is a move that continues to rankle some <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24126882">prominent British authors</a> with concerns <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booker-prize/11771096/American-dominance-of-Man-Booker-Prize-longlist-confirms-worst-fears.html">US writers are dominating</a> the line-up. All but one of the writers on the 2020 shortlist, are from the US or hold joint US citizenship.</p>
<p>Prior to this, the makeup of Booker winners was overwhelmingly male (67%), privately-educated (62%), and one-third of winners had <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/datablog/gallery/2012/oct/16/how-win-booker-prize-charts">attended Oxford or Cambridge</a> University. No wonder, then, that Julian Barnes, former judge and winner of the prize, described it as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/18/booker-prize-julian-barnes-wins">posh bingo</a>”.</p>
<h2>A publishers’ prize?</h2>
<p>As with any literary prize, the Booker’s submission criteria has always influenced the kind of novels that are shortlisted. Its submission guidelines, which don’t allow entries from publishers who don’t publish at least two <a href="https://www.novel-writing-help.com/literary-fiction.html">literary fiction</a> titles a year, have created an unbalanced system. </p>
<p>And since a rule change in 2013, the prize is now weighted even more towards publishers with a history of having books longlisted for the prize – who are <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/submissions">able to submit</a> <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/news/submissions-guidelines-man-booker-prize-fiction">up to four entries</a>. This change was said to be in the <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/small-publishers-concerned-over-man-booker-changes">interest of fairness</a> and to better “represent the levels of publishing the different sized houses do”. But many feel the changes work in favour of the bigger publishers.</p>
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<img alt="Anna Burns on stage after she was awarded the Booker prize for Fiction." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363957/original/file-20201016-23-1jh660c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363957/original/file-20201016-23-1jh660c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363957/original/file-20201016-23-1jh660c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363957/original/file-20201016-23-1jh660c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363957/original/file-20201016-23-1jh660c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363957/original/file-20201016-23-1jh660c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363957/original/file-20201016-23-1jh660c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Anna Burns on stage at the Guildhall in London after she was awarded the Booker prize for Fiction for her novel Milkman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.paimages.co.uk/image-details/2.39160646">Frank Augstein/PA Archive/PA Images</a></span>
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<p>In a country where publishing is so concentrated in the hands of just a few conglomerates who have acquired some of Britain’s most successful small presses, the chances of British novelists who are neither English, nor published by major London publishers, winning seems to be getting smaller. And for non-English UK novelists published by small presses (self-published works are ineligible for the Booker), the Booker is simply not a plausible option. </p>
<p>As Leigh Wilson, professor of English literature, <a href="https://theconversation.com/booker-prize-2018-anna-burns-wins-but-the-big-publishers-are-the-real-victors-105065">has argued on this site</a>: “Booker rules make submissions from small publishers very tricky because of the size of the print run required and the amount of money that involves.” This is compounded by the fact that: “The rules of eligibility are almost entirely now about the publisher, rather than the novel or novelist”. </p>
<h2>Absence of small presses</h2>
<p>The prize also often illustrates a disconnect between the publishing industry and the reading public. This gulf could be behind the surging popularity of the Guardian’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/not-the-booker-prize">Not the Booker prize</a>, a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/aug/24/not-the-booker-shortlist-emma-donoghue-abi-dare-shahnaz-ahsan">reader-nominated</a>, deliberately tongue-in-cheek, rejoinder to the Booker’s perceived pomposity.</p>
<p>Indeed, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/cymrufyw/54631738">Welsh writer</a> <a href="http://richardowainroberts.com/">Richard Owain Roberts’</a> debut, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/oct/05/not-the-booker-hello-friend-we-missed-you-by-richard-owain-roberts-review">Hello Friend We Missed You</a> – touted as the favourite for this year’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/oct/19/not-the-booker-prize-vote-now-for-the-2020-winner">Not the Booker</a> – would simply never have been considered for entry to the Booker. This is because the submission criteria makes it near impossible for small presses – like <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/vendors?q=Richard%20Owain%20Roberts">Parthian</a>, Roberts’ Cardigan-based publisher – to even afford to enter.</p>
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<p>This absence or marginalisation of writers in Wales, Scotland and Ireland seems not to relate to sales successes. Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s phenomenally successful <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-coming-of-age-novels-where-class-and-love-collide-137334">Normal People</a>, for example, didn’t make the step from longlist to shortlist for the Booker. This is despite it having a <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-dublin-on-screen-a-place-of-freedom-and-choice-146372">cult following</a>, achieving substantial sales and being touted <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/sales-and-acclaim-make-sally-rooney-s-normal-people-man-booker-prize-favourite-1.3634401">as the favourite</a> when the longlist was announced. </p>
<p>But the Booker is far from alone in not reflecting bestseller lists. In his <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674030435">analysis</a> of the Pulitzer prize for fiction (broadly the US equivalent of the Booker), author and academic, James F. English notes the number of shortlisted novels that also appear on that year’s top ten bestseller lists have been in steady decline – from a high point in the 1960s of 60% to under 5% in the 1990s. </p>
<p>That said, winning might not be all it’s cracked up to be, given a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/21/literary-prizes-make-books-less-popular-booker">2014 study</a> found that literary prizes make books less popular.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148133/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jamie Harris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Only three non-English UK-based authors have ever won the Booker prize. And all three of them were published by London presses.Jamie Harris, Lecturer in Literature and Place, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1467402020-10-20T13:21:24Z2020-10-20T13:21:24ZGraphic novels are overlooked by book prizes, but that’s starting to change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363280/original/file-20201013-23-v88pwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C22%2C1911%2C1054&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Teresa Wong’s ‘Dear Scarlet,’ Jeff Lemire’s ‘Essex County,’ and recently nominated for a 2020 Canadian literary prize, Seth’s ‘Clyde Fans.’ </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Arsenal Pulp Press/Penguin Random House/Drawn&Quarterly)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the midst of a global pandemic, almost nothing is proceeding as normal. And yet, on a dim October morning, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIRXztO7YKk&t=8s">the Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist announcement</a> went brightly, briefly and virtually streaming into homes and revealing the five books that had moved one step further towards winning <a href="https://www.straight.com/arts/1326886/ubc-creative-writing-prof-ian-williams-wins-scotiabank-giller-prize-reproduction">Canada’s largest</a> and arguably most prestigious literary award. </p>
<p>In some ways, however, this business as usual was a disappointment. After all, the Giller recently <a href="https://scotiabankgillerprize.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2020-Scotiabank-Giller-Prize-Submission-Guidelines-1.pdf">changed its submission guidelines</a> to allow graphic novels to be submitted to the prize, and even more recently <a href="https://quillandquire.com/omni/14-titles-announced-for-giller-longlist-including-first-graphic-novel/">announced that a graphic novel was, indeed, included on the longlist</a> — <a href="https://drawnandquarterly.com/clyde-fans"><em>Clyde Fans</em></a>, by highly acclaimed <a href="https://drawnandquarterly.com/author/seth">Canadian author and cartoonist Seth</a>. </p>
<p>But after raking in <a href="https://sequentialpulp.ca/2020/09/08/seths-clyde-fans-nominated-for-giller-prize/">praise</a> and <a href="http://www.multiversitycomics.com/news/the-rundown-090920/">aplomb</a> for featuring a graphic novel on its longlist for the first time, the Giller — like so many other book prizes — just couldn’t bring itself to put <em>Clyde Fans</em> on the shortlist. Business as usual, indeed. </p>
<p>And are we really surprised?</p>
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<h2>Prizes reflect readership</h2>
<p>Book prizes have long overlooked and excluded graphic novels from their submissions: if not officially barred from entry (as with the Giller, which <a href="https://scotiabankgillerprize.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2019-Scotiabank-Giller-Prize-Submission-Details-1.pdf">excluded graphic novels in its submission guidelines</a> for a quarter of a century), then unofficially (as with Canada Reads, which does not specifically bar graphic novels from consideration but hasn’t shortlisted one <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/books/essex-county-1.3986163">since 2011</a>). As a result, graphic novels are a kind of literary elephant in the room: a format of literary fiction which many, including book prizes, refuse to recognize as “literary” fiction.</p>
<p>This is, however, beginning to change. Increasingly, book prizes are beginning to reflect a reality many readers, professors, librarians and publishers have known for years: that <a href="https://theconversation.com/graphic-novels-are-novels-why-the-booker-prize-judges-were-right-to-choose-one-for-its-longlist-100562">graphic novels do, in fact, have serious literary value</a>. Graphic novels <a href="https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/6930/1/YALS-2005-GraphicNovelsSurvey.pdf">span a wide variety of content</a>, and they’re visual narratives with the same complexity and depth as purely textual novels. It’s taken decades, but public perception has changed. And now, too, so are prizes. </p>
<p>After all, “good literature” is not — and never has been — a static category, but rather an ever-shifting, nebulous definition built collaboratively by anyone who’s ever picked up a book. After decades of marginalization, graphic novels are now inarguably coming to be included in this mainstream definition of what is “literary.” </p>
<p>Furthermore, this process of acceptance is helped in no small part by book prizes’ increasing support of graphic novels; <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674030435">the connections between canonization and prizes are well studied</a>. When literary institutions hold up a graphic novel as one of “<a href="https://scotiabankgillerprize.ca/the-scotiabank-giller-prize-presents-its-2020-longlist/">the most powerful pieces of fiction published this year</a>,” as the Giller did when it announced its longlist in September, the reading public begins to rethink their own biases against what they think is or isn’t literary — whether they know they hold those biases or not.</p>
<h2>A troubling trend</h2>
<p>When we start to look at the history of graphic novels and book prizes, however, a more troubling trend seems to spring up: that despite their increasing presence on book prize long- and shortlists, graphic novels don’t ever seem to win book prizes. </p>
<p>For instance, <em>Sabrina</em>, a graphic novel by Nick Drnaso about <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/books/sabrina-by">“the story of what happens when an intimate, ‘everyday’ tragedy collides with the appetites of the 24-hour news cycle,”</a> was longlisted by The Booker Prize in 2018 — the first time a graphic novel had ever been longlisted by the Booker. </p>
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<p>Like <em>Clyde Fans</em>, it too, failed to make the prize shortlist. Earlier this year, Canada Reads similarly <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/here-is-the-canada-reads-2020-longlist-1.5411178">longlisted — but didn’t shortlist — graphic memoir <em>Dear Scarlet</em> by Teresa Wong</a>, which deals with post-partum depression. </p>
<p>Ironically, graphic novels seem to have had better chances in the book prize world the further back we look: <em>Essex County</em>, a graphic novel by Jeff Lemire about a rural community in Southwestern Ontario, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/past-canada-reads-contenders-and-winners-1.4034451#2011">made the Canada Reads shortlist in 2011</a> — making it further in the process than <em>Clyde Fans</em>, <em>Sabrina</em> and <em>Dear Scarlet</em> only to get <a href="https://nationalpost.com/afterword/jeff-lemires-essex-county-first-book-voted-off-canada-reads">knocked out on the first day of competition</a>. </p>
<p>Going back even further, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/171058/maus-i-a-survivors-tale-by-art-spiegelman/">the highly-acclaimed <em>Maus</em></a> by American author and artist <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/29291/art-spiegelman">Art Speigelman</a> won a Pulitzer in 1992. The book (full title: <em>Maus: A Survivor’s Tale</em>) shows Spiegelman interviewing his father, a Polish Jew, about his memories of surviving the Holocaust during the Second World War. </p>
<p>Even so, <em>Maus</em> didn’t win a Pulitzer for literature, but rather a <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/art-spiegelman">Pulitzer Special Citation</a> — which basically equates to a Pulitzer given by a jury when they’re not quite sure what category to put it in. Is it literature? Is it art? Is it memoir? Is it history? The answer: it’s a special citation. </p>
<h2>Literary evolution remains slow</h2>
<p>If these kinds of approaches to recognizing graphic novels seems like gatekeeping what we consider “serious literature,” that’s because it is.</p>
<p>These prizes have been slow to shift away from a European high-culture approach, demonstrating <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3634644.html">how infuriatingly slowly the western literary canon evolves</a>, especially in any direction away from the exclusionary principles it was and is founded on.</p>
<p>It is, frustratingly, a sluggish and non-linear progression — both in the public perception of what is and is not “literary,” and the ways in which literary institutions such as prizes reflect those perceptions. </p>
<p>This is only underscored by the fact that a graphic novel won’t win the Giller this year, and a graphic novel probably won’t win it next year, either. But eventually, one day, it’ll happen — and if this new trend of graphic novels hitting prize longlists is any indication, it’s a future we’re moving closer to all the time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146740/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dessa Bayrock has previously received funding from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. </span></em></p>Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize didn’t shortlist a graphic novel, but are we surprised? The slow but increasing acceptance of graphic novels suggests the glacial pace at which literary canons grow.Dessa Bayrock, PhD Candidate, Department of English, Carleton UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1455692020-09-03T13:13:15Z2020-09-03T13:13:15ZJG Farrell’s The Singapore Grip: new TV adaptation brings to life the final book by one of the UK’s finest novelists<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356311/original/file-20200903-24-1g5z6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=130%2C147%2C4896%2C2918&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">SIngapore Grip: the final book in JG Farrell's Empire Trilogy.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ITV Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In March 2020, when it became clear that my university campus was about to close due to the coronavirus pandemic, I hastily grabbed from my office shelves my well-thumbed copies of <a href="https://www.nyrb.com/collections/j-g-farrell">JG Farrell’s Empire Trilogy</a>: Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), and The Singapore Grip (1978). This was no sentimental choice on my part. I believed that Farrell could help me deal with my queasy feelings that everyday life as I knew it was dissolving frighteningly into incertitude.</p>
<p>As a writer, Farrell was concerned with those suddenly tipped into uncertainty, no doubt because of his own life being irreversibly turned upside down due to the sudden advent of sickness. Aged 21, he had become seriously ill after playing rugby at Oxford University in December 1956 and was diagnosed with polio. A spell in an iron lung was followed by a long and painful recovery. Farrell’s upper body was permanently affected by the disease. He never recovered full mobility. </p>
<p>Almost overnight, a young, healthy and ambitious undergraduate had become physically fragile and equipped with a keen sense of how quickly and unexpectedly all we take for granted is lost. Cruelly, his illness would play a part in his untimely <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/last-gaze-of-jg-farrell-as-ocean-took-him-kdql22lqfd0">death by drowning in August 1979</a>, aged 44. While fishing near his new home in Ireland’s Bantry Bay, he was swept into the rough sea. Unable to swim strongly, he was soon lost to the water.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Middle-aged man in evening dresss photographed in profile." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356318/original/file-20200903-20-18rjcod.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356318/original/file-20200903-20-18rjcod.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356318/original/file-20200903-20-18rjcod.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356318/original/file-20200903-20-18rjcod.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356318/original/file-20200903-20-18rjcod.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356318/original/file-20200903-20-18rjcod.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356318/original/file-20200903-20-18rjcod.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Taken too young: JG Farrell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Farrell’s early novels had often dwelt gloomily on the frailty of life. His second novel, The Lung (1965), in particular, sought to explore the dispiriting emotional and existential upset of his sudden illness. Yet, along with A Man From Elsewhere (1963) and A Girl in The Head (1967), it drew little attention – today, all three remain out of print. </p>
<h2>Making it as a writer</h2>
<p>His fortunes changed with the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/may/21/jg-farrell-troubles-lost-booker">publication of Troubles</a>, where he deployed more purposefully his consciousness of life’s latent fragility when depicting British colonial societies falling apart. </p>
<p>This turn to matters of Empire was not fanciful. Born to an Irish mother in Liverpool, Farrell had lived a modestly affluent childhood between England and Ireland before going up to Oxford. He knew the privileged social circles that were home to British colonialist attitudes but took a postcolonial position regarding the unhappy treatment of colonial subjects, such as the Irish. </p>
<p>Troubles imagines the lives of the <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095413526">Anglo-Irish Ascendency</a> as the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) develops. Its often comical depiction of the Ascendency’s decline pokes fun at their arrogance and short-sightedness. </p>
<p>But Farrell’s sensitivity to the bewilderment and anxiety felt by all undergoing history also brings to the novel a measured sense of compassion for those whose worlds were at last evaporating. Indeed, the Empire Trilogy would uniquely combine the compassionate and condemnatory, the sensitive and the satirical, in its indulgent if unforgiving presentation of the colonial establishment. The novel established his critical reputation: it received the 1971 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, while in 2010 it was awarded the “<a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/lostmanbooker/2010">Lost Booker Prize</a>” after a public vote.</p>
<h2>End of Empire</h2>
<p>Farrell’s next novel, the <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/books/siege-krishnapur-by">Booker prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur</a>, depicted the ready collapse of British civility during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Buoyed by its success, Farrell used part of his prize money to travel to south-east Asia to research his next – and, sadly, last – full-length novel, The Singapore Grip, which has just been adapted for television by Christopher Hampton.</p>
<p>Punctuated in turn by scenes of high comedy and historical solemnity, the novel portrays Singapore prior to its humiliating surrender to the Japanese in February 1942. At its heart is one of Farrell’s least likeable befuddled expatriates, the rubber magnate Walter Blackett, whose business empire exemplifies the unholy grip of capitalism and colonialism over the region’s impoverished workers.</p>
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<img alt="Mustachioed man in linen suit on varandah." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356324/original/file-20200903-16-2bvzs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356324/original/file-20200903-16-2bvzs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356324/original/file-20200903-16-2bvzs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356324/original/file-20200903-16-2bvzs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356324/original/file-20200903-16-2bvzs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356324/original/file-20200903-16-2bvzs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356324/original/file-20200903-16-2bvzs2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Unpleasant and manipulative: David Morrissey as Walter Blackett in The Singapore Grip.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ITV Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Keen to secure his firm’s future, Walter plots to marry his daughter Joan to Matthew Webb, the son of his geriatric business partner – a scheme all the more bizarre in an increasingly besieged and dangerous city. </p>
<p>An idealist at heart, Matthew’s progressive vision of a world where wealth and wisdom are equitably enjoyed soon becomes as battered as the bombed-out city. Events in Singapore appear instead to prove the “Second Law” often quoted by his American friend, James Ehrendorf: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In human affairs, things tend inevitably to go wrong. Things are slightly worse at any given moment than at any preceding moment.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet The Singapore Grip never loses faith in the capacity for survival and endurance. It mixes its unforgiving vision of colonialism’s absurdity and collapse with an unyielding and often warmly humorous embrace of human fellowship. And, while Matthew fails to flee in time, one important figure significantly escapes: an abandoned, diseased and distressed King Charles spaniel, sardonically named “The Human Condition” by one of Matthew’s friends, who is last seen bolting up the gangplank to safety on a soon-to-depart ship.</p>
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<img alt="Young man with glasses, dirty uniform." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356326/original/file-20200903-20-1620dyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356326/original/file-20200903-20-1620dyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356326/original/file-20200903-20-1620dyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356326/original/file-20200903-20-1620dyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356326/original/file-20200903-20-1620dyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356326/original/file-20200903-20-1620dyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356326/original/file-20200903-20-1620dyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Captured: Luke Treadaway as Matthew Webb in The Singapore Grip.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ITV Pictures</span></span>
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<p>Highly amusing and deeply penetrating by turns, Farrell’s fiction often renders the human condition as precarious and insubstantial as the ailing dog in The Singapore Grip. But it crucially recognises that people are as complicated as the changing historical circumstances into which they are mercilessly thrust. Farrell’s firm condemnation of Empire never stopped him trying to understand humanely those undergoing its decline.</p>
<p>In reaching for Farrell when lockdown commenced, I had hoped to deal less fearfully with the experience of sudden change. But he soon reminded me, too, of the humane resources we also need at life-changing moments: steadfast hope, a saving sense of humour, and – for those lucky to escape or recover from illness – the wisdom of survival.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/145569/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John McLeod does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The writer was drowned at the age of 44, but he left three novels which have come to represent the decline of the British Empire.John McLeod, Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1435592020-07-29T11:45:46Z2020-07-29T11:45:46ZBooker Prize: refreshingly diverse longlist with plenty of new writers – but let’s see if Hilary Mantel wins her third<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350146/original/file-20200729-29-46ijys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=91%2C93%2C1458%2C766&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Top selection: the 2020 Booker Prize longlist.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Booker Prize</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When she announced the 2020 Booker Prize longlist recently, the chair of the judging panel, Margaret Busby, <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/booker-prize/news/2020-booker-prize-longlist-announced">noted that the selected books</a> “represent a moment of cultural change”. And while one could be tempted to see her words as the sort of hyperbole that often accompanies these announcements, the selection of 13 novels (the “Booker dozen”) for 2020 is – in some ways – one of the more interesting and diverse we’ve seen in a long time.</p>
<p>Two key aspects of the list made for the most discussion for literary commentators and social media. First, the inclusion of Hilary Mantel’s latest book, and the final in her Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light. Both the two previous books in the trilogy – Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – won the Booker Prize, in 2009 and 2012 respectively. If Mantel was to win the 2020 Booker Prize for The Mirror & the Light she would be the first author to ever win three Bookers. </p>
<p>Second, nearly half of the longlist is made up of debut novels, which even the <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/booker-prize/news/2020-booker-prize-longlist-announced">literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gaby Wood</a>, has admitted is an “unusually high proportion”. This is certainly something the Booker Prize and its judging panel should be commended for. </p>
<p>Like all other creative industries, publishing has been hit hard by the worldwide pandemic. From the cancellation of major events, including <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51735208">the London Book Fair in March</a>, and the <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/insight/book-shops-close-coronavirus-advice-comes-1195864">closing of bookshops</a>, to the <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/live-publishers-postpone-major-titles-until-pandemic-over-1199511">postponement of major releases</a>, including <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/launch-ruth-jones-second-novel-postponed-until-september-1195813">Ruth Jones’ second novel Us Three</a>, the 2020 publishing calendar has been turned upside down. </p>
<p>The celebration of debut novels in the Booker Prize longlist, then, is particularly fortuitous, since many debut writers have lost the opportunity to go through the usual new book tours, literary event circuits and bookshop signings.</p>
<h2>Spreading the love?</h2>
<p>Independent publishers in particular have been hit hard in 2020. A survey conducted in May by <a href="https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/small-presses-at-risk-results-of-the-bookseller-and-spread-the-word-survey/">the Bookseller and Spread the Word</a> found that 85% of the publishers surveyed saw their sales drop by over a half since the UK’s national lockdown in March. So the 2020 Booker Prize longlist might also be applauded for its celebration of titles from indie presses. </p>
<p>Six of the 13 longlisted books come from four (admittedly well-known and larger) independent presses: Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (Oneworld Publications), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s, This Mournable Body (Faber & Faber), Colum McCann’s Apeirogon and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury), Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (Canongate) and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (Daunt Books Publishing).</p>
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<p>The seven other books are from Pan Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Hachette. I’ve written before about how the Booker’s terms of submission <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-man-booker-prize-still-has-a-long-way-to-go-before-it-is-truly-inclusive-49157">may sway the prize in favour of big publishers</a>, but this year there is at least some semblance of balance.</p>
<p>I’ve also written before about how the Booker Prize <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-man-booker-fiction-prize-became-stacked-in-favour-of-the-big-publishers-45344">has historically failed to award writers of colour</a> – an issue which was highlighted once again in 2019 when Bernardine Evaristo became <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/news/bernardine-evaristo-being-first-black-woman-to-win-booker-is-bittersweet-38595669.html">the first black British woman to win the award</a>.</p>
<p>Evaristo’s win was considered by many to be a long overdue recognition for a widely acclaimed writer, but the fact that Evaristo had to share the award with Margaret Atwood, a white, former Booker Prize winner, <a href="https://gal-dem.com/as-the-first-black-woman-to-win-the-booker-prize-bernardine-evaristo-deserved-to-win-alone/">did not go unnoticed</a>. It is perhaps promising, then, that nine of the new 13-strong Booker longlist are women – and more than half are writers of colour. </p>
<p>The overwhelming majority are US-based or born. This is significant since American writers have only been eligible for the prize since 2014 – and the change in rules that led to the inclusion of American writers was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/02/publishers-call-on-man-booker-prize-to-drop-american-authors">criticised by a number of authors and publishers at the time</a>. Since the rule change, only two American authors have won the award: Paul Beatty in 2016 and George Saunders in 2017. The prize is also now sponsored by the <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/crankstart-revealed-new-booker-prize-funder-five-year-deal-964761">American-based charitable foundation Crankstart</a>, founded by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Moritz.</p>
<h2>Important themes</h2>
<p>Finally, it is worth highlighting the kinds of themes and issues dealt with in the longlisted books. The books examine race, homosexuality, gender and gender identity, poverty, class (and in some cases, intersections of them all), homelessness and climate change. </p>
<p>The subjects foregrounded by many of the longlisted books, therefore, not only speak to current socio-political movements and conflict – most notably Black Lives Matter and the call for active anti-racism. But they also foreshadow the kinds of issues we will undoubtedly come up against (and, in some circumstances, already are) in a post-coronavirus world. In other words, more so than ever before, this longlist feels both born from, and representative of, the very particular moment in history in which we are in.</p>
<p>But only time will tell if this will be reflected in the final shortlist which will be announced on September 15, with the winner being announced in November. If Mantel were to be crowned the winner – receiving her third Booker Prize in just over a decade – it would arguably prove that yet again the Booker Prize acts only to reinforce, as opposed to disrupt as hoped, the systemic inequalities and imbalances of contemporary publishing culture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143559/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stevie Marsden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Booker Prize has always struggled with inclusivity.Stevie Marsden, Research Associate, CAMEo Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, University of LeicesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1330912020-03-09T15:01:28Z2020-03-09T15:01:28ZThe Mirror and the Light: Hilary Mantel gets as close to the real Thomas Cromwell as any historian<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/319257/original/file-20200309-58017-1y2x6sb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=16%2C310%2C2747%2C2569&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Frick Collection</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Thomas Cromwell has had a remarkable and lasting impact on English history. The role that Henry VIII’s chief minister played in the country’s break with Rome and Catholicism and the focusing of power in the hands of the king’s government continues to have repercussions today as modern states debate their place in the world. </p>
<p>The question of Cromwell’s influence on the king and his role as backroom mastermind continues to fascinate modern audiences, holding up a mirror to more recent discussions over the role in today’s political sphere of special advisers such as Dominic Cummings or Alastair Campbell and their influence on modern-day leaders.</p>
<p>Cromwell’s life was lived largely in the shadows, so what can we make of his character and what is the truth of his existence? Historical evidence is limited and we catch only glimpses of Cromwell’s inner life in his own letters and the words that others said and wrote about him. </p>
<p>The basic skeleton of the historical record gives us a remarkable life, and yet it is a life that has – until relatively recently – been little discussed beyond the historical arena. Historians never anticipated that they would be able to capture a richer sense of Cromwell as a human being, so the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/02/wolf-hall-hilary-mantel">publication of Hilary Mantel’s Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall</a> in 2009 came as something of a shock to the world of Tudor history. </p>
<p>To suddenly encounter a fully realised individual, reliving the experiences of his childhood and violent father and grieving the shocking and sudden loss of his wife and daughters, formed a remarkable intervention in our understanding of a man who was described by Geoffrey Elton, the historian who admired him most, as being “<a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/wolf-hall-author-hilary-mantel-talks-tudors-and-thomas-cromwell/">unbiographical</a>”. </p>
<p>The subsequent publication by Bring up the Bodies, which <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/resources/media/pressreleases/2012/10/16/bring-bodies-wins-2012-man-booker-prize-second-triumph">won Mantel a second Booker prize</a>, and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/22/thomas-cromwell-life-diarmaid-maccolloch-review">2018 biography</a> completed Cromwell’s rehabilitation as someone we can make sense of when placed within his time and the events in which he took such a central role. But it has taken until now – more than seven years after volume two – for Mantel to tell the final phase of the story that she has transformed.</p>
<p>Mantel has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/hilary-mantel-why-i-became-a-historical-novelist">firmly stated</a> that it was not her aim to write a history. Yet her Cromwell is so real, so compellingly lifelike, that it has become very difficult to think about him without her interpretation coming into mind. For historians it is an important reminder that the figures we study were real people who lived and died – often in painful, even horrific, circumstances. </p>
<h2>Mantel’s small world</h2>
<p>It is easy, of course, for historians to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/31/students-take-hilary-mantels-tudor-novels-as-fact-hay-festival">find problems with Mantel’s account</a>. Mantel telescopes some events and adds to others for dramatic effect, providing Cromwell with motivations and a rich emotional inner life, all of which remains within the fictional realm.</p>
<p>What she really gives us is a version of what may have been possible. Just as historians disagree over the reading of a particular letter or incident, so we are free to engage with Mantel’s version of Cromwell. Her books are – and will continue to be – vital to the teaching of the subject and to the development of our understanding of Cromwell and his world. </p>
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<p>Historians have been increasingly drawn to thinking of the past not only in terms of the textual, material and visual records that survive, but also in terms of the architectural and geographical worlds in which people operated. The Tudor court was a small world of confined spaces and intimate relationships – an intense environment in which remarkable events took place. We can now add an imaginative reconstruction of that world, grounded in careful detail accrued from the years of research carried out by Mantel. </p>
<p>It is about as realistic a depiction as we could hope for and it provides a valuable frame for understanding how a whispered exchange might carry vital information or how Henry VIII’s sudden anger might terrify his subjects into compliance. While we can never be certain of the precise nature of Cromwell’s relationship with the king, we can now offer a range of possible interpretations, from shared memories of early military campaigns to a monarch requiring effective service of his subject, finding him wanting and therefore disposable.</p>
<h2>Decline and fall</h2>
<p>The question of Cromwell’s fall is one that has troubled historians. How did a man so immersed in the Tudor court, who had witnessed the destructions of Thomas Wolsey and of Anne Boleyn, miscalculate badly enough to end up on the scaffold? </p>
<p>Mantel offers us some possible routes into making sense of Cromwell’s miscalculation. The courtly world that Mantel depicts is acutely dangerous. From the start of The Mirror and the Light we see Cromwell surrounded by rumours of his fate in the aftermath of the fall of Boleyn – someone to whom he had been so close. Later on he squabbles with her uncle the Duke of Norfolk and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer – ignoring the latter’s warning not to get too deeply involved in the matter of the king’s marriage after the death of Jane Seymour. </p>
<p>Cromwell’s trust in Henry, and his belief that the king will stand by his assertions of loyalty and the signs of warmth that Henry gives, prove to be his downfall. In the face of the warnings from those around him, Cromwell follows his role to its natural end. Elevated to become Earl of Essex, Cromwell holds “the shining bowl of possibility … all is mended” – a final cruel miscalculation. </p>
<p>When it comes, Cromwell’s enemies physically closing in on him to strip him of rank and title, this provides a fundamental truth about power and about the reality of being a king’s councillor or special advisor: in the end, everyone falls.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/133091/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janet Dickinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mantel’s prize-winning novels put imaginary flesh on the skeletal historical record and gives us the complete picture of the Tudor courtier.Janet Dickinson, Senior Associate Tutor in History, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1253282019-10-15T15:14:19Z2019-10-15T15:14:19ZBooker Prize: with two winners it’s a double-edged victory – perhaps Bernardine Evaristo needed the recognition more<p>For the first time since 1992 – and only the third time in the illustrious history of the Booker – the prize has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/14/booker-prize-judges-break-the-rules-and-insist-on-joint-winners">awarded to two novels</a>: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo.</p>
<p>In accepting the shared prize, both women were gracious. Atwood, at 79, felt that she was “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-15/margaret-atwood-and-bernardine-evaristo-win-the-booker-prize/11602904">too elderly</a>”, and was happy to share; and Evaristo was honoured to share with the feminist literary legend. The £50,000 prize is to be divided and Atwood has announced that her £25,000 will be donated to the <a href="https://indspire.ca/">charity Indspire</a>, which aims to enrich Canada through Indigenous education. </p>
<p>The value of winning the Booker is not just the honour, of course. For most authors, the value is the cash prize and the huge increase in sales <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/10/booker-prize-2012-winners-sales-data">which follows from the win</a>. Last year’s winning title, Milkman by Anna Burns, has sold <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/booker-prize-shortlist-2019-a4227566.html">more than 500,000 copies</a> and has changed Burns’s life immeasurably, as she made clear in a moving speech at last night’s black-tie awards dinner in London’s Guildhall. </p>
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<p>As the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Testaments is already a conspicuous and assured commercial success. Live launched in 130 cinemas worldwide on September 10, the hardback edition has sold more than <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/atwoods-testaments-sells-more-250000-copies-uk-says-vintage-1096476">179,000 copies in the UK</a> and has performed well in terms of downloads as well. Meanwhile, the other winning title – Girl, Woman, Other – has sold only 4,000 copies in the UK to date, according to <a href="https://nielsenbook.co.uk/">Nielsen Bookscan</a>.</p>
<h2>Judging gridlock</h2>
<p>The Booker Prize process takes novels of a very different kind and places them on the same list. A panel of five judges is appointed each year and they spend most of that year reading submissions. This year, the panel, <a href="https://www.man.com/man-booker-prize-2019-judges-announced">chaired by Peter Florence</a>, got through 180 novels in 11 months. Having produced a longlist of 13 novels in July and a shortlist of six in early September, the jury’s task was to choose one winner in accordance with <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/faqs">the published rules</a> which explicitly state that: “The Prize may not be divided or withheld.”</p>
<p>This rule was established in 1992, because a committee chaired by Victoria Glendinning insisted on two winners: Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Even a year later, this palled with the well-known literary agent Giles Gordon, who thought that the Booker is about “<a href="https://wordery.com/booker-prize-novels-1969-2005-merritt-moseley-9780787681449?currency=GBP&gtrck=RldRYjZhWGNQdjkwMUptTVdJT3FNTjNTSElidjF2WjF5TExuWWQ5ZlB5Y0liQ0dPY0ltajROMTVmaHFNbk5jaGZpNHNENGRDeURrQmRBUW1nenhmblE9PQ&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIk-7k3b6e5QIVGLLtCh35MA_cEAQYASABEgJvV_D_BwE">winning not sharing</a>”. </p>
<p>That a panel of five could not reach a consensus after hours of discussion elicited gasps of frustration and indignation from those who were at the Guildhall. It suggests that at least one panel member was exercising some sort of veto, and brings to mind the story of Philip Larkin, chair of the judges in 1977, who threatened to <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/booker-prize/posh-bingo-history-booker-prize-bust-ups/">jump out the window</a> if the title he preferred did not win (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/dec/19/booker-india">it did</a>).</p>
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<p>But Florence preferred consensus to coercion – and the panel wanted to signal that both winners are of particular note. That’s the official line, anyway. </p>
<h2>Very different books</h2>
<p>The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other are very different kinds of books, by very different kinds of author and will appeal to different kinds of readers. For Florence, it may be a case of “double the joy” and “double the reading pleasure”, but others will wish to choose.</p>
<p>The Testaments is assured, compelling, carefully plotted, slickly written and worthy of the hype. The structure of <a href="https://theconversation.com/review-the-testaments-margaret-atwoods-sequel-to-the-handmaids-tale-123465">three different types of “testimony”</a> – that of Aunt Lydia and two Gilead witnesses – is especially appealing and works well. It is a book which reads quickly and its appearance now, so many years after The Handmaid’s Tale, is testament to Atwood’s vision – and creative resilience. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297130/original/file-20191015-98632-y9rokq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297130/original/file-20191015-98632-y9rokq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297130/original/file-20191015-98632-y9rokq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297130/original/file-20191015-98632-y9rokq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297130/original/file-20191015-98632-y9rokq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297130/original/file-20191015-98632-y9rokq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297130/original/file-20191015-98632-y9rokq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">And the winners are…</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Clare Hutton</span></span>
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<p>Resilience has clearly been a huge issue for Evaristo, who is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of people of colour in the arts. Born in London in 1959 to a white English mother and Nigerian father, Evaristo was educated at Rose Bruford Drama School and Goldsmith’s College. She founded the <a href="http://www.blackplaysarchive.org.uk/explore/companies/theatre-black-women">Theatre of Black Women</a> in 1982, and has written seven novels to date.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/bernardine-evaristo-girl-woman-other-story-modern-britain-review">Girl, Woman, Other</a> is a multi-stranded narrative which gives voice to the experience of being a black British woman through 12 interwoven stories ranging from Newcastle in 1905, through London 1980, Oxford in 2008 and Northumberland in 2017. The work abandons the conventions of standard paragraphing and punctuation, a technique which has lead some readers to describe the form as “free verse”. </p>
<p>But Evaristo’s prose lacks the compression, lyricism and intensity of verse and this book often plays to very predictable cliché. This, arguably, is the point: cliché enables us to see beyond – and to think through – the issues of diversity and representation which are so central to individual racial experience. </p>
<p>Speaking last night, Atwood herself said: “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50014906">I kind of don’t need the attention</a>.” When she won the Booker in 2000 with The Blind Assassin, she had already been nominated on three other occasions, including in 1986 when The Handmaid’s Tale <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2014/10/15/the-booker-prize-the-modern-classics-that-should-have-won-but-didnt-4907180/">lost out to The Old Devils</a> by Kingsley Amis. </p>
<p>Perhaps the judges should have weighed these losses and gains in the balance. If Evaristo’s work is worth honouring then surely it was worth the honour which would have come from being the sole recipient of the Booker Prize 2019.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125328/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Hutton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Two brilliant novels, two deserving writers. Sometimes you need to have two prizes.Clare Hutton, Senior Lecturer in English, Loughborough UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1241282019-09-27T10:09:49Z2019-09-27T10:09:49ZJane Eyre translated: 57 languages show how different cultures interpret Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel<p>Translators are the unsung heroes of literature. Or, to be fair, largely unsung – they have a share in the International Booker Prize which <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/international">recognises author and translator</a>, who divide the £50,000 prize money and there is <a href="https://www.un.org/en/events/translationday/">International Translation Day</a> on September 30. It’s a chance to celebrate the small presses which publish translated novels and poems, as well as the amazing advances in online translation and, above all, the human translators whose skills matter now more than ever. </p>
<p>But let’s also remember that translation has always been an engine of culture. Literary classics – as well as modern bestsellers – reach more readers through translation than the language they were written in. Take Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: it has been translated into <a href="https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/maps/global-map/">at least 57 languages, at least 593 times</a>. </p>
<p>This changes how we think about Jane Eyre. What was a thoroughly English book – anchored to Yorkshire and published in 1847 – becomes a <a href="https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/blog/exploring-multilingualism/research-update-prismatic-jane-eyre-and-scriptworlds">multilingual, ever-changing global text</a>, continually putting down roots in different cultures. In Iran there have been 29 translations of Jane Eyre since 1980. When Korean is taught in a school in Vietnam, a translation of Jane Eyre is on the syllabus, as an example of Korean literature. </p>
<p>It also changes how we have to study the novel. I couldn’t hope to grasp Jane Eyre as a global phenomenon by myself, so everything I have found out has been thanks to a group of 43 co-researchers in many different countries, as part of the <a href="https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/">Prismatic Translation project </a></p>
<h2>Translation is creative</h2>
<p>People often think that translations are meant to reproduce their source texts, like a photocopier. But this is a long way wide of the mark, because of course every language is different. In fact, the process is much more complicated – and interesting. Because you can never say exactly the same thing in another language, translators use their imaginations to write the book again, only with different materials, for readers with different expectations. It is more like making a sculpture than taking a photo. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294503/original/file-20190927-185375-1osii2m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Jane Eyre (Korean edition).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
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<p>You can see this right away from how the title gets re-moulded into different shapes. In Japanese in 1896 it became <em>Riso Kaijin</em> (An Ideal Lady – translated by Futo Mizutani), in Portuguese in 1941 it was <em>A Paixão de Jane Eyre</em> (The Passion of Jane Eyre – translated by “Mécia”). In Italian in 1958 it became <em>La porta chiusa</em> (The Shut Door – translator unknown) and in Turkish in 2010 it was rendered as <em>Yıllar Sonra Gelen Mutluluk</em> (Happiness Comes After Many Years – translated by Ceren Taştan). </p>
<p>My favourite of these metamorphic titles is the Chinese one invented by Fang Li in 1954 and copied by almost every Chinese translator since: two of the characters that can make a sound like “Jane Eyre” can also mean “simple love” – so the title says both those things together: <em>Jianai</em>. </p>
<p>Even small linguistic details can go through fascinating transformations. Take pronouns. In English, we only have one way of saying “you” in the singular. But even languages that are very close to English, such as French, German or Italian, do something different. They have a distinction between a formal “you” (<em>vous</em> in French) and a more intimate kind of “you” (<em>tu</em>). So in those languages there is the potential for a really important moment in the novel which simply can’t happen in English. Do Jane and Rochester ever call each other “tu”? </p>
<p>As it turns out, in French they don’t (or at least not in any of the translations we have studied). But in German they do. One of my co-researchers, <a href="https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/people/">Mary Frank</a>, has looked at translations from 1887 by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/934235.Marie_von_Borch">Marie von Borch</a> and 1979 by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/780039.Helmut_Kossodo">Helmut Kossodo</a>. She has found that, in both, Rochester only switches into the intimate form of you, “du”, when he first proposes. But Jane does not reciprocate. It is only in the amazing telepathic moment near the end of the book, when she hears Rochester’s voice calling to her across the moors, that she uses the “du” form of the verb to cry out the equivalent of “Wait for me!” Rochester’s tenderness is answered at last. </p>
<p>Should we think of this as a nuance added by the translators? Or as something that was all along somehow present in the English text, though invisible? What would Charlotte Brontë have done if she had been using German – or French (in which she did write essays and letters) with its different resources? These questions are probably impossible to answer – and if you turn to Korean, for example, which has many <a href="http://lbms03.cityu.edu.hk/oaps/ctl2011-4235-wky201.pdf">pronouns for different levels of formality</a>as I have learned from <a href="https://www.english.ucsb.edu/people/park-sowon-0">Sowon Park</a>, the picture gets even more complicated.</p>
<h2>Feminist passion</h2>
<p>Jane is “passionate” in all sorts of ways. When she is a child she resists bullying by her cousins and stands up for her rights at school; as an adult she feels passionate love for Rochester. “Passion” in the novel can suggest anger, stubbornness, suffering, generosity, desire and love. </p>
<p>By using the word in all these ways, Charlotte Brontë was making a feminist argument. She was saying that, for a woman in the early Victorian period, love did not have to be something passive, a matter of being admired. Instead, it was connected to anger and justice. It could be a means of self-assertion.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294504/original/file-20190927-185383-1pywzck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Farsi edition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This feminist charge in the novel is part of what has made it so popular across the globe. Throughout Europe in the mid-to-late 19th century, and throughout East Asia in the mid-to-late 20th, some translators and readers have been thrilled – others shocked. And of course, because the cultures and languages are different, the novel’s energies have had to be channelled in different ways.</p>
<p>Most languages have no single word that can cover the same range as Brontë’s “passion”, so they slice up its meanings differently. Interestingly, this often divides the angry (passionate) young Jane from her mature self, and connects her to <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/videos/jane-eyre-bertha-mason">Bertha Mason</a>, Rochester’s brutalised first wife who is locked up in the attic of his mansion. </p>
<p>In Persian – as <a href="https://bham.academia.edu/KayvanTahmasebian">Kayvan Tahmasebian</a> has found out – “passion” is translated by a wide range of words that separate the elements of love, desire, anger and excitement. You might view this as loss (the range of “passion” has disappeared!) but it is also a kind of gain (look at all these different nuances!)</p>
<p>The most famous sentence in the novel: “Reader, I married him”, is also one of the most provocative, as translations can help us see. In Slovenian – as researcher <a href="https://isllv.zrc-sazu.si/en/sodelavci/jernej-habjan-en">Jernej Habjan</a> tells me – it becomes the equivalent of “Reader, we got married”. Meanwhile, all the Persian translations we have seen so far have squashed Jane’s self-assertion – they give the equivalent of: “Reader, he married me”. Even today, Jane Eyre has a radical power. It will generate ever more translations.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124128/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Reynolds receives funding from the AHRC for 'Prismatic Translation', a strand within the Open World Research Initiative programme in Creative Multilingualism.</span></em></p>What was a thoroughly English book has become a multilingual, ever-changing global text continually putting down roots in different cultures.Matthew Reynolds, Professor of English and Comparative Criticism; Tutorial Fellow, St Anne's College, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1179152019-05-28T11:34:42Z2019-05-28T11:34:42ZCelestial Bodies: Booker International Prize highlights rich literary tradition among Arab women<p>It says something that the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/21/man-booker-international-prize-jokha-alharthi-wins-celestial-bodies-oman">winner of the 2019 Man Booker International prize for Literature</a>, Jokha Alharthi, is the first woman from her country to have a novel translated into English. Alharthi – from the Arabian Gulf state of Oman – who won for her novel Celestial Bodies, shares the £50,000 prize with her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/06/its-a-silent-conversation-authors-and-translators-on-their-unique-relationship">translator</a> Marilyn Booth. The book has the distinction of also being the first novel translated from Arabic to win the award.</p>
<p>“I am thrilled that a window has been opened to the rich Arabic culture,” Alharthi <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48363022">told journalists</a> after the ceremony in London in May. “Oman inspired me but I think international readers can relate to the human values in the book – freedom and love.”</p>
<p>Celestial Bodies revolves around three sisters from a middle-class background in the small Omani village of al-Awafi. The novel is a fragmented collection of past and present events in Oman as they pertain to particular characters in this small village. These intricate storylines come together to shape the broader narrative of the novel, of a village going through remarkable change.</p>
<p>Celestial Bodies gives the reader a glimpse into a society that isn’t often spoken about in terms of its literature, culture and traditions. And a woman’s perspective is particularly rare – Arab Gulf women <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15m7j94">only really began publishing</a> their writings in the second half of the 20th century. It’s a trend that is intimately connected to the introduction of girls’ education – spanning half a century between 1928 and 1970 in different Gulf states.</p>
<p>But this doesn’t mean that Arab Gulf women weren’t producing literature before then – they were particularly well known for the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15m7j94">tradition of oral storytelling</a> and were especially esteemed for their poetry – the works of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suad-al-Sabah">Kuwaiti poet Suad al-Sabah</a> and <a href="http://thepoeticheart.com/poets/mrs-hamda-khamis-ahmad/">Bahraini poet Hamda Khamis</a> are particularly worth checking out.</p>
<p>But it was the explosion of oil wealth, which forced the Arabian Gulf out of isolation and into the international arena – leading to the establishment of schools and newspapers and media outlets that allowed for literary creativity. Since the 1970s, <a href="https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/7200227">Arab Gulf women’s writing has evolved</a> – now Arab Gulf women write in a whole range of genres that reflect different themes and issues through their storylines, especially those issues which pertain to the specific experience of women in Arab Gulf society. But the novel is still something of a recent genre for Gulf women.</p>
<h2>Modernity and nostalgia</h2>
<p>One common theme in Arab Gulf writings is nostalgia for a simpler past, which is often used in contrast to the remarkably fast growth these countries have undergone with the discovery of oil. The narrative of Celestial Bodies draws a connection between the slave trade in Oman – the backdrop of the story – with the way Omani society started to change with the introduction of oil wealth into the region. </p>
<p>Although Alharthi positions her story within this narrative of tradition versus social change, she does so in a way that offers an objective outlook to the practices and history portrayed in the novel. She does this by portraying neither a romanticising of the past nor an overly optimistic focus on the positive aspects of oil revenue in the present. Instead, Celestial Bodies presents an honest portrayal of change and how it has affected different members of the village she is writing about.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276774/original/file-20190528-42600-4ke2ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276774/original/file-20190528-42600-4ke2ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276774/original/file-20190528-42600-4ke2ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276774/original/file-20190528-42600-4ke2ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276774/original/file-20190528-42600-4ke2ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276774/original/file-20190528-42600-4ke2ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276774/original/file-20190528-42600-4ke2ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276774/original/file-20190528-42600-4ke2ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The first novel by an Omani woman to be translated into English.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sandstone Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A defining feature of Omani literature is that Oman, in particular out of the Arab Gulf, has remained a traditional society in many aspects, which is oftentimes reflected in the <a href="https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/7200227">writings produced in the region</a>. The novel makes use of specific cultural and religious features of Oman and the Arab Gulf region, such as references to supernatural spirits – or <em>jinn</em> – as well as the all-important date harvest – as well as allusions to classical Middle Eastern literature and poetry such as Iraqi poets <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/al-Mutanabbi">al-Mutanabbi</a> (915-965AD) and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ibn-al-Rumi">Ibn al-Rumi</a> (836-396AD).</p>
<p>You don’t need to be intimately familiar with Arab Gulf customs, literature and traditions to appreciate Celestial Bodies – but to fully grasp the impact of these references and the beauty they add to the text, it’s worth doing some background reading. This literary technique invites the reader to become immersed into Omani culture – and, in turn, play a role in the interpretation of the text itself.</p>
<h2>Rich literary tradition</h2>
<p>Celestial Bodies is emblematic of the fact that Arab Gulf women are actively producing remarkable works of literature that are very much worth exploring. Worthwhile, not only to offer a glimpse into this society, but also in order to discover a rich literary tradition that has not been accessible to a wider audience beforehand. </p>
<p>In an interview published on the <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/international/news/celestial-bodies-interview">Man Booker International Prize website</a> Alharthi says this about her book:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I hope this helps international readers discover that Oman has an active and talented writing community who live and work for their art … They take on sacrifices and struggles and find joy in writing, or in art, much the same way as anywhere else. This is something the whole world has in common.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alharthi’s novel offers a glimpse of the world being experienced by women in the Arabian Gulf. I hope that Celestial Bodies will encourage more translations of works from the region, encouraging readers to experience for themselves the cultural riches on offer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/117915/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shadya Radhi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Jokha Alharthi is the first woman from Oman to have a book translated into English.Shadya Radhi, PhD Researcher, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.