International Booker Prize Longlist 2019

International Booker Prize: That's its new official name from June onwards, but it was always easier to say, so it's nice this is now the proper name too. (This post also uses the old abbreviation MBI.) I'm old enough that it felt jarring to call the awards the Man Booker prize, because I remembered the time before Man Group had anything to do with the literary world - but I'm too young to automatically think of "Booker" as another big company of similar ilk, albeit one dealing in tangible goods. (John Berger protested about Booker's unethical practices when he won in 1972.) Rightly or wrongly, Booker feels like the intrinsic name of the prize, due the word's happy confluence with the subject of literature.

I was too frazzled to make a post about the longlist shortly after the announcement, what with the list being released at midnight Tuesday 12th / Wednesday 13th. (Having slept badly the night before, I was usefully tired enough to sleep c. 6.30-11.45pm) Immediately afterwards, I was doing forum/Goodreads (GR) admin such as starting a series of threads featuring cover pics and blurbs. A couple of days' online conversation has now given time for thoughts to percolate, and to make this post more than another copy+paste of the longlist. (Thanks very much to everyone whose comments I've bounced these thoughts off; quite a lot of this post is rephrased from my own comments elsewhere.)

Image from Man Booker Prize announcement page.

The longlisted books

Jokha Alharthi (Arabic / Omani), tr. Marilyn Booth, Celestial Bodies (Sandstone Press Ltd)

Can Xue (Chinese / Chinese), tr. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Love In The New Millennium (Yale University Press)

Annie Ernaux (French / French), tr. Alison L. Strayer, The Years (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Hwang Sok-yong (Korean / Korean), tr. Sora Kim-Russell, At Dusk (Scribe UK)

Mazen Maarouf (Arabic / Icelandic and Palestinian), tr. Jonathan Wright, Jokes For The Gunmen (Granta, Portobello Books)

Hubert Mingarelli (French / French), tr. Sam Taylor, Four Soldiers (Granta, Portobello Books)

Marion Poschmann (German / German), tr. Jen Calleja, The Pine Islands (Profile Books, Serpent's Tail)

Samanta Schweblin (Spanish / Argentine and Italian), tr. Megan McDowell, Mouthful Of Birds (Oneworld)

Sara Stridsberg (Swedish / Swedish), tr. Deborah Bragan-Turner, The Faculty Of Dreams (Quercus, MacLehose Press)

Olga Tokarczuk (Polish / Polish), tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Spanish / Colombian), tr. Anne McLean, The Shape Of The Ruins (Quercus, MacLehose Press)

Tommy Wieringa (Dutch / Dutch), tr. Sam Garrett, The Death Of Murat Idrissi (Scribe UK)

Alia Trabucco Zeran (Spanish / Chilean), tr. Sophie Hughes, The Remainder (And Other Stories)

(The first set of brackets shows language of original book/author nationality).


My reaction to this longlist

I have a cycle of feelings about book-prize longlists. In the preceding months or weeks, I get excited about the forthcoming list and join conversations about it. Then the list is announced, which *never* contains as many of the books I wanted to read, or have read, as I hoped it would. It's a lot like getting a Christmas present of socks, or bath products you don't usually use. Over the following weeks, there are more discussions, and become acclimatised to the list as I read from it. (The socks are actually quite useful and comfortable, and the bath products can be used or sold for money.) For me, this lit-prize business is at least as much about the social aspect as about the books themselves.

Via compiling the Goodreads list of MBI eligible books, all of the longlisted titles and covers were familiar to me apart from Celestial Bodies. (At some point I'd looked at Sandstone's website, didn't see any translated fiction, assumed they didn't publish it, and failed to check again - although I did with many other similar publishers' sites. Doh!) There are a few titles I hoped not to see - but I'd acclimatised to that by making myself a list a few weeks ago of about 20 books I didn't want to be longlisted and looking at it a few times.

I'm delighted to see The Years on here. I've been slowly reading this over the last couple of weeks (savouring it and looking up references) and it's the only 2019-MBI eligible book I've read that I love *and* which feels like it has the buzz of greatness about it. (I loved Marie Darrieussecq's Our Life in the Forest because I connected with it personally. I loved Vernon Subutex 2; I think that VS as a whole is important, as well as a great fun read - and it's rarer still you find both of those in one package. But volume 2 is really the middle section of a 1000+ page novel - VS was originally meant to be one book - and structurally and rhythmically it doesn't work as a standalone, which I think is important for a prize like this one.) When a couple of other forum members said last week "I don't feel like I've read the winner yet" - I said I did, and The Years was that book. I'll be surprised if any of the other longlisted books top it in my estimation.

Drive Your Plow is the only one of these books I'd read in full before the announcement. Whilst I'm not sure about all aspects of the book, I (unusually) think it's a better work than last year's winner Flights, also by Tokarczuk, and more complex in the way it plays ideas and tropes off one another. A good contender for the shortlist.

I read Hubert Mingarelli's A Meal in Winter when it was shortlisted for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP) - and didn't like it. Four Soldiers has the same premise - a historical novella about a small band of military men, set outside Mingarelli's home country of France. I don't think it makes sense to read a book by an author whose very similar previous work you disliked, especially an author who isn't a stone-cold classic, and normally I'd steer clear - but the Shadow Jury project necessitates an exception to the rule.

The Pine Islands, with blurb about "a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film", and its West European male protagonist's trip to Japan in search of stress relief, suggests a satire on hipsters hitting middle-age, although the tone seems quite serious. It'll be intriguing to see how this works in English, and I'm very grateful to Profile Books for sending out a PDF review copy of this so quickly. Thank you!

The Death of Murat Idrissi makes me apprehensive, although it's the shortest book on the list. When I first noticed it a couple of months ago, I thought it could be controversial, but that it was more likely it wouldn't get much attention in the online world of translated lit, because a white male author was writing about women of colour. The story didn't interest me a great deal, and it was also not something I wanted the responsibility of reviewing, because I don't know anything about the North African disapora in the Netherlands - I'd rather read reviews by people from or close to that community than write my uninformed own. Then, a few days ago, I saw a Twitter thread from an Arabic literature specialist expressing reservations, and hinting that the book might be a big deal. (The latter puzzled me at the time…) As Death of Murat Idrissi is apparently based on a true story, I'd like to find out more about that before reading the novel. By now, I've had a quick look at the first few pages, and the prose, for what it's worth, is superb. (Murat Idrissi, along with At Dusk, The Years, Mouthful of Birds- and brand new additions Celestial Bodies and Drive Your Plow is currently available on the UK version of ebook and audiobook subscription service Scribd, which I use regularly and which is good value if you are okay with reading on a tablet, desktop or smartphone.)

Also intimidating for a different reason is Can Xue's Love In The New Millennium. Can Xue is one of the most notoriously difficult writers in contemporary world literature. Her novel The Last Lover won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award (BTBA), an American prize which often favours experimental literature. I read a small amount of The Last Lover in 2016, and the opening chapters, about Joe, his clothing company and his wife Maria, seemed okay (I gather it gets more complex later) but life got in the way, I put the book aside and still haven't returned to it. In the last six months, I've read Satantango, and Tom Jones (one of the longest novels I've ever finished, and which had been 'on hold' in a similar manner after reading a little bit in 2011) - but Can Xue seems a different order of things altogether.


Favourite cover designs

Of the four books with my favourite cover designs from among the MBI-eligible titles, two were longlisted. If only I'd used them as predictions, that would have been a 50% success rate (unlike my actual predictions).

Longlisted: Jokes for the Gunmen - short stories (Granta). A plastic toy soldier can be an eloquent image in modern art as it is. Here, covered in multicoloured paint, it has a (literally) new layer of fresh, subversive playfulness, offset by the sober grey background.
Very eye-catching.

Longlisted: Mouthful of Birds - short stories (Oneworld Publications). Original design may be from PRH USA imprint Riverhead, which published it slightly earlier. Iridescent butterflies: beautiful, but disconcerting in their thick multitude. (As the story will indicate.) Their wing pattern reminds me of old striped present-ribbon. And making the lettering look as if it's light projected on to the mass of butterflies is another lovely touch.

Balco Atlantico (Maclehose Press). I'm not much of a summer person - but that sea, sky, secluded house and perfectly-chosen sunshine-orange border make me think again. Idyllic lighting and great composition in this photo.

Tokyo Ueno Station (Tilted Axis Press). There's so much going on here, and I really want to know the stories (or maybe metaphors?) behind these scenes.

Predictions and pre-prize reading

As almost everyone posting in the translated fiction blogosphere and GR discussions has said, not many of the widely-predicted titles are on this longlist.

Some of those I'm glad not to see on here - e.g. Javier Marías' 500 pager Berta Isla. 350 pages of him in 2014 IFFP and BTBA longlister The Infatuations was quite enough as far as I'm concerned. Fans say The Infatuations isn't his best work, but when one former Marías aficionado described the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy as 'James Bond with cod philosophy' I concluded I wouldn't like it any better - the cod philosophy was one of the most irritating aspects of The Infatuations. (And the only Bond film I really love is Skyfall.)

There were other touted books I was looking forward to reading: Sjón's CoDex 1962 (I've read all of his other novels translated to English), Tokyo Ueno Station, EU political satire The Capital by Robert Menasse, and two titles from new Latin-American focused small press Charco: Resistance by Julián Fuks - an author who's had some unfortunately timely press coverage because of Bolsonaro's election in Brazil - and The German Room by Carla Maliandi.

I realised last autumn that I was still doing too many "duty reads" - books I didn't expect to like much and which I was reading because they fitted the MBI prize criteria, were available (especially as ARCs or library books), and were short. (I usually have a good idea of what I will and won't like, and only one of said 'duty reads' from among the MBI-eligible titles - Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq - turned out to be an unexpected 5-star.) I still read a few of these duty books in Feb-March, and although I found Last Children of Tokyo very interesting, there were several others I rather wish I hadn't read, instead spending the time on longer eligible books I wanted to read regardless of the prize (such as either of the two new books by Evgeny Vodolazkin, finishing Lala by Jacek Dehnel, or the titles mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Drive Your Plow and The Years are the two on this longlist I'd previosuly read, in part or in whole, and in both instances I wanted to read them regardless of prize eligibility. Maybe I'd be saying something different if The Order of the Day, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants and other books I've read but didn't love *had* appeared on the list. But in general I see less and less good in reading a book because you think you should (assuming this is for leisure reading, unpaid blogging etc and not for study or cash). One blogger @Mondyboy, came up with an excellent metaphor on Twitter for the surprises sprung on well-read translated fiction bloggers by this longlist: "it's like you've done your homework, but for the wrong class". I'd rather not approach it like homework in the first place - over the past five years or so, I've already read enough books I didn't like by doing things that way - would rather read for enjoyment and intrinsic interest rather than to try and anticipate the decisions of a group of 5 other readers who are being paid to read an even larger number of books. And on the subject of reading books only because they are widely talked about - after many years of feeling one should in order to stay in touch - I am coming round to the idea that a polite "it really wouldn't be my sort of thing" is a better response than baffled embitterment about one's own time and media column inches expended on the thing. (I think a really well-written hatchet job - that old Fleet Street tradition - can still be great, but it must be witty, and they are difficult to get right.) Saying all this feels foolish and cognitively-dissonant, as I've just read Four Soldiers, and rated it only 2.5 stars. But I read it because I'd signed up to the MBI bloggers' Shadow Jury, which I've wanted to do for years, and had vacillated about joining before. Very happy to have been accepted once I said I wanted to go ahead with it.

Let the reading begin… (Or rather, it already has).


Soundtrack: Pastoral by Gazelle Twin

Strike Your Heart by Amélie Nothomb, tr. Alison Anderson

[3.5] My first Amélie Nothomb book (and the author's 25th novel). I don't think I've ever read a novella which read so much like a short story. Its economy of style and summary descriptions of time passing are like a paradigm of the short form's approach to long durations. In tone and content it feels like an intermingling of realist fable with case studies from psychology and self-help texts.

The focus is family psychodrama. In 1971, beautiful, egotistical teenager Marie has started secretarial college, and can't wait to launch herself into the era's burgeoning youth culture and put her stamp on life: "Wherever you went, you heard: “Make way for the young.”". But within 6 months she is pregnant and married to the local eligible bachelor (a genuinely nice young chap) in her provincial French home town - and she feels that *her* story is over. Thereafter there are only a handful of references to culture or the news, and the reader is placed into the inner life of Marie's perceptive eldest daughter Diane, trying to come to terms with a mother who is jealous of her. The narrative follows Diane from babyhood through her exemplary school career and the birth two siblings - while she spends more and more time with her loving grandparents - to university as a workaholic postgrad medical student, where, with the magnetic female lecturer she assists, she re-enacts her relationship to her mother.

Much like psychological case studies, there are aspects of Diane, Marie and their relatives which can be achingly relatable, or familiar from people one knows, but the story and pattern is a little too tidy. Real people, if one knows them well enough - not just via brief acquaintance or forum posts - don't often conform this neatly to labels; they have bits and pieces that don't fit, or they seem partly like one type and partly like others.

My reading experience oscillated between emotive identification and finding plot points contrived or plasticky. I loved Diane's realisation from an early age that no matter how much you understand the inner workings of a difficult parent, above-average insight and empathy does nothing to change them; apparently you're good at this thing, they may even say so, but it's irrelevant: the brick wall remains steadfast. I've seen a family where a lovely grandma, apparently inexplicably, had also produced a daughter who was very unpleasant to some of her own children, and tried to make up for it. And Mme Aubusson was different enough from Marie - and in the initial descriptions of her similar to several teachers I liked but most other kids were scared of - that I found it wholly believable that Diane might be drawn to her. The book is spot on about the attitudes of some medics of that older generation:
"You’ll see what it’s like, dealing with heart patients: nine times out of ten, the pathology is caused by excess fat, and the treatment means putting the patient on a diet. When you tell them to stop eating butter, they’ll look at you as if you were a murderer. When they come back three months later and you’re surprised there’s been no change, they will tell you a blatant lie: ‘Doctor, I don’t understand, I followed all your recommendations.’"

But deaths and other big changes in the novel occurred at conveniently deus-ex-machina times; the conversations between child siblings read as if the kids already had grounding in psychology. I could absolutely believe little Diane's inner insight, which was beautifully described as an adult might articulate inchoate understanding many years later, but the utterances often read as if the kids had got the concepts from a self-help book, rather than expressing them as experienced, or as if thinking of them anew.

I had recently read this New Statesman interview with Leïla Slimani in which Slimani says she interviewed psychiatrists to help build the sex-addict protagonist of Adèle; this made it seem even more plausible that Nothomb had used case-studies as a starting point for Strike Your Heart, at least as much as the Alfred de Musset quote referenced in the title and which becomes a touchstone for Diane.

Before the last 18 months or so, I was very interested in novels that provided opportunities for psychological processing - but now, I feel like I have gone over the same ground enough times. These books are no longer as compelling as they were, and I'd rather read something with a more outward focus. Not necessarily a stack of state-of-the-nation novels, but a book in which the action is related to the wider world. At the moment, I'm also reading Annie Ernaux's The Years: a 'collective biography' of Frenchwomen born during the Second World War, replete with folk and pop culture, and life lived against a backdrop of politics and social change. That is my catnip, and almost every paragraph is thrilling. Whereas Nothomb's chamber-piece Strike Your Heart - although in its narrow focus appropriately evocative of Marie's effects on Diane, and likely to connect deeply with readers who are in the right place for it - doesn't press the buttons it would have if I'd read it a few years ago, and I'm more aware of its flaws because I hear beyond the chords striking in my head.

As in the Latvian novella Soviet Milk (English tr. 2018, Peirene Press) also about a difficult mother-daughter relationship of the same era in which one of the pair is a doctor (these two books would make a good dual review), I felt that the author doesn't give enough attention to the social and historical circumstances that lead the mother to being in the position she is. i.e. To being a mother in her early twenties when, had she been that age more recently, she may be more likely to have decided motherhood was not for her at all because of her mental health and dedication to work (Soviet Milk) or to postpone it because she wanted to live 'for herself' more first, as has become entirely normal.

This is a book that could be a 5-star experience for the right reader, although it wasn't for me. It doesn't entirely put me off reading more Nothomb, especially as many of her books are short, but if I tried one more and also found this case-study like aspect to it, I wouldn't be keen to read further volumes.

The review on Goodreads

Goodreads and book blogging

I've been reviewing books on Goodreads since autumn 2011, and the posts on this blog are, so far, pasted from there, sometimes with minor edits. Whilst I've long been in the habit of weaving other topics and tangents into my reviews (inspired by the LRB approach, although I'm not pretending these posts are as polished as an LRB article), a blog provides the opportunity for posts on other subjects, or on groupings of books, in a way that Goodreads does not so readily - and I hope to write a few of those on here.

I have also written reviews of films and music on similar social cataloguing sites, but it has been around books that I've found the most interesting discussion and a place for the sort of writing I wanted to do.

The worlds of Goodreads and of [literary-fiction] book blogging have crossed over increasingly in recent years, with more bloggers participating on GR, but there are still some differing values and trends. One is the aversion in the blogosphere, small literary journals and new media sites to posting negative reviews - often these reviewers aspire to, or already do, mix with authors on social media and/or at literary events, so it can be awkward to criticise their work, and they do not have the permanency and status of newspaper critics or tenured academics, who can be negative with fewer consequences. Meanwhile, there are places on Goodreads (such as the Feedback Group) where it is openly stated that prolific posters have lower trust in others whose average rating for books is too high. As on quite a few topics, my opinions have evolved over the last few years. I grew up reading British broadsheet book sections of the late 1980s onwards, and the music press of the 1990s; the hatchet job was considered an art form and as a teenager I wanted to be a journalist. So it's not surprising that I felt more at home in a setting where negative reviews were welcome - even though I don't write a lot of them in practice. (Life's too short to spend your leisure time reading books you don't think you'll like.) However, the polarisation and increased antagonism of online discourse and wider politics in the last couple of years has meant that I no longer see old-school Christopher Hitchens style polemic and bluster as something to aspire to in online discussion. (His pronouncements on being prepared to change one's mind, however, remain a touchstone and regardless of my disagreement with some of the directions in which he changed his in his last decade.) I've always felt it's important to try to understand other viewpoints without losing oneself, but it feels more important now. It's a complicated - and interesting - time to talk about the way and extent to which opinions are expressed, and I don't have any definite conclusions, which may be for the best. Anyway, I figure that for now, I will not cross-post negative reviews to the blog, apart from one or two of my favourite essay-reviews which are substantially about other topics as well as the book.

I have wanted to write about books for places other than Goodreads for several years now, and a handful of friends have tried to nudge me towards it - but I blocked myself with, among other reasons, but not limited to, a diffidence about the other social media which are the best avenues towards this, and a lack of inspiration and pessimism about pitching from scratch. (Whereas with duller commercial writing, there are listings or ads to respond to, and there's a reasonable sense of what is required).

The bloggers' Man Booker International Shadow Jury (or IFFP Shadow Jury as it then was) is a project I've wanted to participate in since I first became aware of it. I think it was in early 2016 when I first tentatively enquired about getting involved, but I then decided not to do it. Actually going ahead with it - there's never going to be a perfect time, so I may as well get on with it - is a way of giving myself a kick up the arse towards writing about books beyond Goodreads.