Congratulations all on the Booker longlist, and especially to my publisher Salt, for the inclusion of Alison Moore's The Lighthouse, and to the two other small independent publishers on the list, Myrmidon and And Other Stories.
Here's the whole list:
The Yips by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)
Philida by André Brink (Harvill Secker)
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books)
Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber)
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories)
Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (Salt)
Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury)
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (Faber & Faber)
Communion Town by Sam Thompson (Fourth Estate)
See here for Justine Jordan's assessment of the list and here for an article reporting comments by chair of the judges, Peter Stothard. Personally, I'm pretty pleased by Stothard's statement that 'Who published a book, and indeed even the author, is of very little
concern to Man Booker judges. We were considering novels not novelists,
texts not reputations' and that a key criteria for this year's panel was that 'a
text has to reveal more, the more often you read it... We were looking
for books that you can make a sustained critical argument about, and
when you read them again, you can make a different critical argument.'
Showing posts with label International Man Booker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label International Man Booker. Show all posts
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Alice Munro and the Nature of Fiction
No one will be surprised to hear that I am thrilled that yet another short-story writer has won a major award, the wonderful Alice Munro being awarded the International Man Booker. On Sunday the Observer ran a profile, and two of the things she is quoted as saying struck me particularly.
Firstly, she says: "I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up and it always turns up. It's dealing with the material I'm inundated with that poses the problem." Now maybe by this she meant that there is just too much material to cover or to choose from (that word 'inundated' is probably a big clue), but I wonder if she also means this: that it's not finding material that's the problem for writers, but deciding how to process it. In other words, it's not the subject matter that is important so much as the way it's dealt with, the insights you bring to it, the language and forms which it gives rise to in a particular writer's hands. This last is an important point to make, it seems to me. We are in an age when books marketing tends to focus on subject matter alone, while it is the treatment which makes for great writing. It is one way in which a market-led publishing industry can indeed end up suppressing good books and silencing good writers.
Secondly, Munro says: "I have all these disconnected realities in my own life and I see them in other people's lives. That was one of the problems - why I couldn't write novels, I never saw things hanging together any too well." This really stopped me short. It seems to me any great novel nowadays must do exactly that, encompass the disconnected realities which characterize life in the 21st century. Maybe Munro is simply saying that she never wanted to to do this - after all, her short stories taken together do it beautifully - but I wonder if she is subscribing to a view of novels as (inappropriately) holistic, one which again lends itself to marketing and again can lead thus to the suppression of innovation and subtlety.
Firstly, she says: "I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up and it always turns up. It's dealing with the material I'm inundated with that poses the problem." Now maybe by this she meant that there is just too much material to cover or to choose from (that word 'inundated' is probably a big clue), but I wonder if she also means this: that it's not finding material that's the problem for writers, but deciding how to process it. In other words, it's not the subject matter that is important so much as the way it's dealt with, the insights you bring to it, the language and forms which it gives rise to in a particular writer's hands. This last is an important point to make, it seems to me. We are in an age when books marketing tends to focus on subject matter alone, while it is the treatment which makes for great writing. It is one way in which a market-led publishing industry can indeed end up suppressing good books and silencing good writers.
Secondly, Munro says: "I have all these disconnected realities in my own life and I see them in other people's lives. That was one of the problems - why I couldn't write novels, I never saw things hanging together any too well." This really stopped me short. It seems to me any great novel nowadays must do exactly that, encompass the disconnected realities which characterize life in the 21st century. Maybe Munro is simply saying that she never wanted to to do this - after all, her short stories taken together do it beautifully - but I wonder if she is subscribing to a view of novels as (inappropriately) holistic, one which again lends itself to marketing and again can lead thus to the suppression of innovation and subtlety.
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