Of the Booker fiction prize 2022, that is. I feel like I’ve been neglectful of all the other works that made it to the last or the last but one round. So here is the so-called long list and the short listed finalists. I have read but one – Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!
I should say that the Booker website is an absolute treasure trove, including reading guides for the shortlisted books, quizzes that may (or may not) help one decide on what to read (or read not), information on the judges (Neil MacGregor was Chair this year), extracts, interviews and videos. And a featured list of works from Hilary Mantel as a tribute to her place in Booker history, in British writing – of their own history but not only.
The Booker prize for fiction 2022 was announced on a special edition of Front Row on BBC Radio 4 last night (The Guardian report here) and presented by the Duchess of Dings Bums … I mean the Queen Consort … (forgive me Camilla, for you are famously a real reader!) to the Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I neither know the author nor his work, but I am secretly – well obviously not so secretly – pleased that it was not awarded (again) to a US publication. As I have said before, the US have enough of their own gongs and the anglophile book world deserves a space beyond those shores and the reach of a few powerful media conglomerates. On the later, it is also striking that Karunatilaka’s book is published by a small UK independent press – Sort of Books.
Everything you need to know about the winning book: what it's about, why it won, how the author wrote it and what the judges and critics said 📚🏆
Exploring the violent insurrections of 1980s Sri Lanka, The Guardian review from the summer suggests a work written in a magic realism tradition that blends the spiritual with the profane, sardonic humor with brutal reality, and which brings immediately Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to my mind. It is 1990 and the Maali of the title is a photographer – and he is dead. But he is a soul that has not found peace, and with now one mission: to expose the crimes of the decade gone with the evidence that he amassed during his professional (and earthly) life.
From his Front Row appearance, Karunatilaka comes across as a humourful and very interesting man indeed, and his website informs on a really spectacularly successful life – and I mean that to mean a life well-lived. And besides, he loves cricket. And, I will be reading this book.
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022 is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux,
“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
Press Release 6 October 2022
A very short formal announcement I must say – and not as punctual as one is use to (presumably their winner could not be contacted; follows, she wasn’t sitting by the phone! is that a diss? hope so!). Here is the biobibliography (that’s a mouthful!) on the Nobel website (and as pdf). How delighted I am I need not say; for, on Ernaux, I have said enough in the past.
Hilary Mantel was for many years a contributing editor of the London Review of Books and for this weekend (only, one should say, and it is now almost gone) her many essays, reviews, stories, etc. are freely available. For those without a subscription, a collection of her work in the LRB titled Mantel Pieces: ‘Royal Bodies’ and Other Writing for the London Review of Books was published in 2020 – and mentioned by me here.
A statement from her publisher is here. And from her friend to whom she dedicated her Wolf Hall series, Mary Robertson, at The Huntington Library here.
Many sincere tributes written for The Guardian can be accessed here. The New York Times (subscription mostly required) obituary is here, also “What to Read by (and About) Hilary Mantel” . And today, an opinion piece from Kamila Shamsie in which she relates an anecdote of a meeting with Mantel at a dinner party (they share agents) not long before the publication of Wolf Hall; encapsulating some of my own thoughts on the extraordinary narrative voice that Mantel created:
[…] It was as though she’d been present and was relating, full of delight, a piece of slightly scurrilous gossip that she overheard while pouring wine, unseen, into Wolsey’s cup.
I told Hilary someone needed to record an audio guide to Tudor London, narrated by her, that visitors could listen to while walking past locations of significance. It was a mark of her graciousness that she looked amused though I’d reduced her to the role of tour guide instead of recognizing that she had a different way of entering King Henry VIII’s England than anyone else who’d ever written about it. When I started to read “Wolf Hall”a few months later I recognized instantly the narrative voice though I had never before seen it on the page: It peers over Cromwell’s shoulder, unseen, before entering his mind.
Shamsie goes on to say: ” […Hilary Mantel] embodies both the magician and the spell, and part of the particular wonder of reading her is the knowledge that no one else has ever written like that before nor will again. She seemed to see so clearly the things — the past, the spirit world, the intricate relationship between the self and power — the rest of us saw through gauze or not at all”. I love that: ‘both the magician and the spell’! Interestingly, Shamsie says that upon hearing of Mantel’s death she returned to the memoir piece “Someone to Disturb”, read by me just a short time ago as “Sorry to Disturb”, marveling again at the strange disquiet, inconsistencies – internal and external to herself – that Mantel could identify and render so wonderfully in her writing.
Again, I say: A great, great loss.
Wednesday 28th September 2022: A tribute from Hilary Mantel’s friend to whom she dedicated her Wolf Hall series, Mary Robertson, from The Huntington Library in California where Mantel’s papers are being collected.
Saturday 1st October 2022: Just how great a loss can be most realized only in reading Mantel’s work but she was unafraid to enter the public fray, and the depth of her intellect and humanity is apparent in her wonderful Reith Lectures series for the BBC in 2017 – available here.
Now for me, Bennett is only the Bennett of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown; that essay from a certain Mrs. Woolf that is the wryly imagined culmination of the legendary dispute between herself and the aforesaid, and is a proxy – so to speak – for that greater reckoning between proponents of realism and modernism in the early 2oth century novel.
More than a little snarky when it comes to Mrs. Woolf, in my opinion, is the Mr. Wilson. Nor quite accurate either. Bennett and Woolf were contemporaries only up to a point, more precisely their careers briefly overlapped; most of Bennett’s works (including the “Clayhanger” series) were published in the first two decades of the century, and Mr. Bennett’s criticism of Mrs. Woolf’s third novel Jacob’s Room came in 1922 and before her real rise to literary fame with Mrs. Dalloway. And Wilson’s claim that she (and others) had it in for Bennett because he was too “middle-brow” is rather specious. On the contrary, one could contend; it was Mrs. Woolf’s “Mrs Brown” who displayed various degrees of the too easily maligned “middle-brow” – Mrs. Woolf is rooting for the “middle-brow” with all their peculiarities and inconsistencies and against easy assumptions made of them. Her point is: if it were to be a “Mr. Bennett” who was to imagine and describe his “Mrs Brown”, he would have her been imbued in his own image, reflecting the world as he saw it.
I do understand Mr. Wilson’s loyalties towards Mr. Bennett – the links between the two men: Stoke-on-Trent, potteries, Wedgwood are clear. And Clayhanger and The Potter’s Hand stand only a century apart in the setting and a (different) century in the writing of; neither of which I have read, but am inclined to.
Read in the last days, two of my most favored French writers. Two novels with significant differences and some intrinsic similarities. Both modest in length and profound in content.
I remember repeating – to only then deny – the oft heard criticism that one Modiano is some how not much different to the one that came before, and it would not surprise if the same arguments are not still to be heard in respect of Chevreuse. I even admit to brief moments of déjà vu, during which I did wonder whether I hadn’t strayed into familiar territory, situation. But why should I not, for that uncertainty is essential to memory. So one reads on, and is again seduced by that particular atmospheric that Modiano effortlessly conjures; imbued with images of the past; of person and place; haunting and defining each future until they too bow to the dictates of time.
Out of the city, westward beyond the 16th arrondissement with its bourgeoisie enclave of Auteuil on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne and into the idyllic country side of the Chevreuse via the Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne in Jouy-en-Josas. These are the main places of the journey that our writing protagonist Jean Bosmans takes us on as he excavates his childhood, his more youthful years and some intermittent; in search of the past and in the interest of his literary form – and that of Modiano; the third person, if you will, in command of the narrative. (A choice of perspective that perhaps allows for some distance – whether reliable is another matter.)
Typically (for Modiano), this narrative exists in multiple time frames – the elderly writer Bosmans in approximately the here and now, his younger self during the mid-1960s, and the child of fifteen years previously. Whereby it is those middle years that drive the particulars of the story; those youthful years of first experiences and great expectations. And, it is no wonder, for they are his formative years as a writer, and he is beginning to understand that one of the greatest tools for his craft lay in the fusion of memory – that is, lived experience and emotion as it roots itself in the subconscious and takes on its on life over time – and the creative processes of imagination.
Chance meetings that aren’t (for instance, with the lovely Camille, incongruously called “tête de mort”, about which I note an English translation predicament: “dead head” is very literal but perhaps too much “Grateful Dead” for my tastes!), a sinister cast of characters with changing names, too many coincidences, too many echoes from blurred childhood memories, all stimulate the young writer’s imagination, and all the time Modiano, with his wonderful gift for blending the stations of his own life with those of his fictive, half-fictive characters, is creating a new reality – for the page, the reader and maybe even himself.
For the last days, sleep has come at intervals, and when it arrives then never lasting very long. Too warm nights interrupted by god knows what, and accompanied by mentionable – and not – bodily needs, including the cerebral. Unable to return to sleep, this latter (the head bit) is satisfied only by reading until the eye lids become heavy and then drop. At times such as these, it is not usually to the book(s) I am presently in the midst of that I turn, rather I reach to short stories or essays that I can read through in one fell swoop.
So it was, during one disturbed night last week, that I picked up Hilary Mantel’s 2014 short story collection “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”.
I remember at the time of publication, there was a right royal hoo-ha at the title – lent from the final story of the collection. (Printed somewhere pre-publication, and read by me back then.) This was, after all, not very long after Thatcher’s death and the bells (in our heads) still rung with the sounds of: Ding dong! The Witch is dead. That, a rather distasteful appropriation I thought, and those chanting said ditty (not as the Munchkins do in the Land of Oz; rather, substituting a word that rhymes with ‘witch’ I seem to recall) too young and too privileged to have been affected by Thatcherism and the social coldness it brought. The title Hilary Mantel gives to her story, which very much describes the substance of it – not a metaphor, not a dream – doesn’t particularly concern me; I am confident that the author’s disaffection of Thatcher would be well informed and well felt, and could hardly surprise. Margaret Thatcher, after all, may have been a lot of things, but boring was she not, and offers a perfect template for a fictional character. And, a writer of the Mantel magnitude can well afford the well earned luxury of artistic risk and transgression. In my opinion. And, one could surmise she knew she would be asking for trouble; perhaps she was looking for it!
The collection (eleven stories) is framed by its opener andthe said Assassination, and while the latter gets the title and ISBN, most of the attention and the tut-tuts, it is the first, “Sorry to Disturb”, that paves the way (one is tempted to again return to Oz and trip along a yellow brick road) that leads to the grisly end, via a series of various degrees of grotesque interludes. I say framed, because both stories evolve from male strangers intruding into the constricted domestic space of a woman; their motivations may be other but both are accompanied by an aura of deceit and the suspicion of a ‘not good’ agenda. In the first story, that agenda is based on opportunism, cultural expectations and misunderstandings and is, in the end, warded off and ultimately harmless, in the last, both the intent and the outcome are clear – and deadly.
“Sorry to Disturb” is written in the first person and is a memoir piece (first published as“Someone to Disturb“ in the LRB in 2009 and referencing diary notations) set in Saudi Arabia where Mantel lived with her husband during the 1980s. An excellent read, in my opinion, that illustrates well, and gives perspective to, the daily dilemmas Westerners living for a time in countries with vastly different social and cultural norms are confronted with – the atmospherics (in an extended sense), the solitude, and just the sheer strangeness of the whole adventure.
After reading the Assassination story again, I was struck, not just by how extraordinarily similar the narrative voice was, but the odd sameness of the structure. Almost like the same story spun on its axis and transplanted from the suffocating heat of Jeddah to the leafy green of the English home counties. In both stories the narrator is not just complicit in the chain of events that follow, but makes herself almost into a co-conspirator, even as she – or is it another entity – stands outside the plot considering the action. Do I recognize the magnificent style of the Cromwell trilogy here?
In-between are, of course, ten other stories. Maybe some are better than others but, to my mind, all have a peculiar slant and psychological depth. They are short and succinct, and with the fine composition one would expect from Hilary Mantel. Mostly in the first person, but not all. Some are grotesque, some tragic. There is often humor where good taste says it shouldn’t be – which just shows how overrated good taste is. They are very idiosyncratic.
In the end, Mantel’s stories may well have worked magic – but not upon my eyelids; in fact, I devoured the entire volume. However unsettling the subject matter, my conscious self was not over stimulated. Rather, my intellect nourished, sleep became my reward.
[22nd June 2022] Well, who would have thunk it! Some things have a longer life on the internet than others – at The Guardian (where it was that I probably first read it) – is, still, the fictional demise of Mrs. Thatcher, titled:Hilary Mantel: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983.
Elif Batuman is another of those writers – and there are enough – known to me through various long forms of journalism but whose books I haven’t read. But, having just listened to her and been reminded, I am encouraged to remedy this omission in the near future. Batuman’s recently released novel, Either/Or, has been very well received, and I have always had a penchant for the bildungsroman (as do some whose bildung only ever got so tend to have), or as which it was so described somewhere. This new work is, in fact, a sequel to her 2017 – also highly praised – book, The Idiot, and so I may have to read that first – if only to find out what Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard have in common, and what they both have in common with Batuman and her protagonist (be they not somehow the same!). Anyway, below is a Kindle preview that entices, and there is more information on the publisher’s website.
And, here, Alex Clarke’s review at The Guardian a couple of months ago that further whets the appetite.
